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.
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I know that when The Proposal is finally published it will be different from the book that I originally made.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.
The Transforming Hate Project has evolved from my previous work transforming white supremacist books into a metaphor for non-violence and tolerance done at the invitation of the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena.
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.