Transcript

Art and empathy: Andrea Packard at TEDxArcadiaUniversity

good morning uh today's conference centers on the theme of creativity and passion and leadership all good qualities right and yet i think we would agree that in and of themselves they're not enough to sustain us for we've all seen passion be skewed by anger and fear we've seen our political leaders uh become skewed period and we've we've seen uh how quickly creativity can become stale and devolve into something more like advertising or propaganda when it's not coming from a place of human connection of authenticity i think we would agree that we don't want to just be led anywhere but to reach forward for a better place we need to come from a place of empathy my earliest memory is of the power of art and empathy i remember being just five years old in montessori school where you could choose your own work a good method and i often chose to draw maps and draw draw anything and i remember working at the easel when what seemed to be just beautiful swirling shapes of color suddenly began to look like continents and the continents began to look like a map of the world and along one side of the picture some swirls of color started to look like a figure a smiling giant who seemed to stand and look out over all creation and i felt good and i wanted to take this picture home to my parents so i went home and my parents had been fighting and in fact a few years later they got divorced but in that moment when i shared my art with them their faces lit up and we were all three of us transported to another place and for the first time in my life i felt that i had something to give them that they didn't already have i felt it wasn't just about me it was about a transformative experience seeing the world in a new way seeing each other in a new way i was lucky that my parents were very supportive my father gave me an easel and this is my first studio next to the furnace it looks cramped but there was lots of space in the picture back then in the late 60s and early 70s we just had a little black and white tv but in art it was in color and uh the channels were limitless uh i painted uh for pleasure for the love of it the passion but as i grew up i never thought of going into the arts as a career because i began to absorb some debilitating notions about art as it turned out uh it seemed that many of the artists were white male europeans or of recent european descent and uh not only that it seemed that all the stories i heard about artists were that they were narcissistic heavy drinking chain smoking womanizers not role models for me not only that when i got to college the textbooks were still full of white men many of them great artists of course but where could a person of color or a woman or person of any personality fit into that rubric yet somehow after going down other avenues i persisted in art and it was partly because of my passion but it was also because i began to meet real people not myths but real teachers and artists who worked not from that narcissistic place but from a a core of empathy which allowed them to be open to new ideas and possibilities so in the next few minutes i want to share with you um some some art by people who um are for me a different kind of model of creativity and passion and leadership a model that can lead us to a place of greater communion with each other and with the environment the first artist i want to share with you is alice lock kahana i had the opportunity to curate an exhibit of many of her works about 15 years ago and to meet this extraordinary artist and person she is a survivor of the holocaust and in fact was interned not only at goobin but at auschwitz and bergen belton concentration camps incredibly she survived and later went on to make works that commemorate her experience and memorialize those who did not survive and this work no names obviously shows those tracks leading not to shelter but to a place of darkness where nazis systematically stripped people of their identities and gave them numbers taking humanity turning it to numbers and then to ashes and it was so moving to work with her and to see her incredible art which must be appreciated in person so i will show share with you a story she told me which is incredibly her first artwork ever was made in goobin uh where as a teenager she had been brought separated from her family in hungary she'd seen her mother and brother taken away and murdered and there she is with other children barracks of children and the guards incredibly challenged each barracks to compete against each other for who would make the best christmas decorations imagine and of course they didn't have enough to eat let alone crayons or or paper but instead of despairing which may have been the guard's intent to create despair she responded with art she went to the one thing in the room which was a broom and she took strands of straw and she gave each child a strand of straw to hold like the wick of a candle and she organized the children into a human candelabra so when the guards returned full of that darkest darkness the hatred only it's only none of us can imagine that kind of place they must have been but they were confronted and the children embraced an image of light and of transcendence of hope that image of everlasting communion with each other and with higher powers that is at the center of so many world religions and that was her gift in that moment to her community and it's just one example of the many gifts she brought to others and to her artwork subsequently another artist i want to share with you who confronts both the darkness that's in the world our capacity for destruction but also our capacity to create and discover light within ourselves and within each other this artist is emmett gowan an esteemed american photographer and i've had the wonderful opportunity to exhibit his work as well and this image nancy danville virginia is just one of many pictures he took of his family his extended family and their portraits that when he made them in the 70s and he gained a claim for them they they they're from the everyday and yet they capture something timeless and universal i love the way uh this girl is wrapped in a moment of complete reverie of oneness with herself and with nature her arms intertwine in a way that seems to form a symbol of infinity and those eggs in her hands seem to contain multitudes they seem to hold the promise of all future creation within them to capture such work uh is seems easy pop out a camera but no it it requires in a kind of intensiveness to the moment that takes years decades to develop and he's attentive to images that expand his own perspective and horizon this is another image by gowan of hanford nuclear reservation that site where in 1943 the u.s began producing plutonium for the first nuclear bombs uh the bomb that was dropped on nagasaki and many m others that were stockpiled and this is where he discovered we had once a city of 30 000 workers laboring to create plutonium 53 million gallons of radioactive waste were stored there many of it leaking into the ground and contaminating 200 square acres of underground water right there by our river and seeing such things and trying to fathom their meaning amid the beauty of the surrounding vista made him want to explore other areas where we have altered the world forever we've created and sculpted the land in ways that signal both our ingenuity and our capacity for annihilation this is sedan crater number 10 another number uh in the nevada proving ground which is the site where we've conducted in this site alone on yuca flat over 700 nuclear tests above and below ground and he shows in this image which is really you see it on the screen but it's it's small you could hold it in your hand and reflect on its beauty the raking light the patterns of circles the tracery of off-road vehicles looking like a brush stroke or a drawing stroke yet it shows how we have the capacity to turn the earth into a moonscape and yet after gaining a claim for this body of work he moves on and he's looking not at the expansive view from above but up close at the myriad wonders of creation and in this series the mariposas nocturna series which he's involved in now he's creating index sheets of images of moths that are visible only for fleeting moments uh at night and different times of year they appear and if you're attentive you may see them if you work hard you may collect and study and name them there's a kind of scientific quality to his uh gathering and naming and arranging of these images but he reminds us in this and other works that we never understand the world except through our own particular lens and that lens is an aesthetic lens it's a lens any anything we use to understand the world is informed by our sense of beauty and he's returned uh in this portrait each edith and moth flight to the family and integrating what he's learned about moths and the study of them with his knowledge of what he loves most and in this image where the moth flight is captured through a slow shutter speed you see these arcing halos of light surrounding edith like emanations of thought like the embodiment of spirit these remind me of the arcing halos of light that i've always admired in the work of charles birchfield i've always loved his work grew up looking at it and this painting missed phantoms at dawn may seem fantastical hallucinatory wholly invented but to me it's very true to the experience of nature not just its appearance but how we feel in nature how the sounds of the crickets or the peeper frogs are in the woods sometimes teeming with sound my experience of the connecticut woods where i grew up profoundly affected my sense of both art and community and way of being in the world and birchfield's ideas and the reality of the complexity of nature formed a kind of aesthetic and appreciation for complexity and i love the way i took this as a teenager not to make an artwork but to pay attention to what had just happened the snow revealed branches and traceries of complexity that i hadn't seen before and it also concealed so much so art was showing me helping me see how to look more deeply and be attentive in each moment and these woods were a refuge for me and still are they're the the landscape of my memory and these woods have since been ruined through development but as i work in my own studio and this is one of my works it is a six foot tall carved and inked wood panel triptych called midnight glory i often work at midnight when the kids are asleep and as i delve into the wood carving into it i'm responding to the wood grain right there from my materials and i'm also thinking about what i treasure in nature some of it is lost to development but so much of it is there to be treasured and preserved and reflected upon the textures of nature are very real to me and the cacophony and uh complexity are things that we can't capture in an advertising logo it's a journey and i never look at nature without thinking about community um and the complexity of this crazy quilt made my by my great grandmother comes from the fact that it was made by many hands and i've had the opportunity to be part of a quilting group for many years where wisdom and experience have been imparted to me by my dear friends along with scraps of fabric and gradually naturally scraps of fabric have begun finding their way into my own artwork this is another image and like emmett i like so many artists i don't try to make every work look like the others and make it a product this is called cornucopia it's a mixed media image of the fullness i see in nature and in it are scraps of fabric from friends and this is called uprooted this is a picture i made when my family was uprooted my mother had suffered a brain aneurysm several years ago and although she survived we quickly realized we needed to move her from her home of 45 years uh and where those beautiful woods had had been we needed to move from that place and bring her to a place where she could have more support and in letting go of things of of furniture of art all kinds of things we also had to decide what could be preserved and i think about how nature is built upon the mulch and litter of what's died and what's what's been lost and how art too takes what's fallen apart and reassembles it in new ways making it fresh hopefully for ourselves and for others so this piece uprooted takes its imagery from the landscape that i grew up in but it incorporates fragments of my mother's dress and elements from friends thinking about how uprooting is not just a place of loss but also perhaps a new beginning and this piece is called inheritance because as we were moving my mother there was a play rug she had nodded for her grandchildren and the grandchildren had all grown up and no one wanted this rug but it had been made with so much love and creativity and such an investment of time so i thought well why not me why don't i play with it so i cut it up which is my way of play and uh i used the back side of it i used the front side i combined it with uh collage elements with pastel and i thought of the aerial views of em mcgowan and i thought about how the the the terrain the landscape is like the terrain of our imagination and uh we we don't go there alone we go there together uh and as we look at the landscape we have to think you know what will it look like how will we all reinvent it in the future thank you