Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book, was completed this year, eight years after it was started. We did not know if it was possible, but in March we pushed to get a few copies ready for an April PHOTO+CRAFT presentation. Entitled “Making and Meaning: Photobooks and the Social Fabric”, this Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center panel with Alejandro Cartagena, was one of thirteen events organized by Warren Wilson College here in Asheville.
The “Transforming Hate” book was published recently. The working title was “The Proposal” almost right up until it went on the press. The work on the book evolved over an eight-year period. I want to share some of the steps that I took in order to make the book. I’m hoping that in the process I can see more clearly why a price of $50 for the book does not begin to cover the cost of producing it.
The Transforming Hate project evolved from a project created at the invitation by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana.
It had not been my intent to make a “grand” project, but to simply create an artist’s book that explored the struggle to make an artwork that might transform the white supremacist books that had been provided to me to work from.
Today’s snow, ice, and cold brought to mind similar weather in January of 1984 – 30 years ago when artists in New York began a series of political actions and protests to call attention to the ways in which the U.S. Government intervened in internal governing affairs and propped up oppressive military dictatorships in Central and South America.
I’m so excited that I can now move into and organize my newly renovated studio space. We’ve been working on that space since we moved into the house in January 2011. At that time, frigid air just blew right through the old windows and doors. So I taped sheets of clear plastic over them. However, the strong winds blew the plastic sheets off the windows so I re-taped the plastic onto the cinder block walls every few days.
During most of 2013, I wrote letters and emails asking people to help me complete my Transforming Hate Project installation and The Proposal artist book publication with tax-deductible donations of money through Artspire.
I have had to shift my focus from fundraising for the Transforming Hate Project to compiling sets of images for my new website-in-progress. This process has required that I go through my external drives and CDs over and over again. Why did I ever believe that my images were organized? And of course some pictures have never been digitized.
I know that when The Proposal is finally published it will be different from the book that I originally made. I have seen that happen with the work of other book artists. I can live with that because for me to be able to make something that is really meaningful to me is an incredible gift. Here’s hoping that the published book will convey the spirit of that experience.
A key element in the Transforming Hate Project will be my current artist’s book, The Proposal. It is a new “bookwork-as-art” piece. The image and text narrative gives a sense of what it was like for me, an African American artist, to make art from white supremacist hate material. My reflections are juxtaposed within the historical frame of events I witnessed in America from the 1940s through the 1970s, thus allowing me to explore my process of turning the repulsive material into an inspirational object.
This blog will be about my work, fundraising for my Transforming Hate Project, building and settling into a new studio workspace, the garden, notes about other artist projects.