What am I doing?
When I figure it out it'll probably be over.
Recently I’ve applied to four artist residencies and one leaders fellowship program. I’ve been rejected by the leaders fellowship program so far but stay tuned there are more rejections to follow. This statement isn’t defeatist or pessimistic particularly. I think it’s a realistic assessment of what’s ahead. I’ve been making art for most of my life and for most of that time I’ve been told that my work is brilliant and provocative and important. I’ve also been told that my work is difficult and triggering and hard to show. Much of my work deals with subjects that people don’t like to think about. Some of the subject matter I’ve dealt with so far includes the holocaust, HIV and sexual violence.
Last summer I saw a call for art issued by a quilt museum in the midwest. The call specifically asked for quilts that didn’t conform to traditional ideas of quilting. It asked that artists submit “art quilts.” I sent an image of a quilt that I finished a few months prior to my having seen the call. It’s entitled “No!” The quilt I submitted refers to my experience of being bullied and sexually harassed by a boy with whom I went to school. He bullied me from the time I was in sixth grade until I was expelled from high school during the first month of my junior year when I finally could take no more and fought back. The gay boy, meaning me, was expelled for fighting; the seemingly straight boy faced no consequences for fighting or for bullying me or for forcing me to perform oral sex on him in front of his friends. The quilt is twin sized and would have fit the bed that I slept on while I was being bullied. I had thought about calling the piece, “The Quilt I Should Have Slept Under In High School.” The figures on the quilt are life sized. The standing figure is a little over six feet in height which is approximately the size of the bully. The kneeling figure represents me and I am five feet and five inches. I don’t think I had reached my full height yet when I was expelled from high school. I’ve digressed. Several weeks after I sent in my application to the quilt museum show I received an email congratulating me and inviting me to send my quilt to be exhibited. I was thrilled. I hadn’t expected the piece to be accepted so the news came as a wonderful surprise. Two days later I received a second email from the quilt museum stating that unfortunately they would be unable to show my quilt. I’ll admit that I was hurt by the switch from acceptance to rejection. I was a bit angry that the folks at the museum hadn’t figured out whether or not they could show the piece before they sent me the congratulatory email. That appears to be the way things go though. Juries select work and sometimes museum boards censor their selections. Over the years my work has been referred to as, triggering, upsetting, inappropriate for children, not family friendly and obscene. I don’t think it is a bad thing for art to trigger viewers. Art ought to cause some sort of reaction and the I find it disturbing that people seem to feel entitled to protect themselves from things that they find upsetting. If artists aren’t allowed to upset people with their art then art will lose the power it has to help people to see things though the eyes of others.
