#1ppu

Sunday August 14th 1-4PM

Sunset Blvd & McDuff St.

Peace & Harmony Celebration, Visitacion Valley Greenway

Saturday August 17th, 11:00am-3:00pm

Monday July 29, 12noon-4pm

1 painting pop-up

UCSF Parnassus

Thirty-four years ago I was born here, atop this hill in the middle of a small city jutting into the bay. We didn’t live here, though. My mother knew she wanted a midwife. She had driven six months pregnant all the way from Hollywood, Florida to nest in Napa, California. I am not sure whether there were midwives in Napa. But there certainly were not any available to a mother on MediCal. So she went to UCSF. They were not thrilled to admit a mother so far into her term. But they made the right choice in the end. I was quite healthy. And my mother had a dreamy eight-hour labor—almost as swift as a Hollywood movie. Five years later we lived in Concord, where midwives had been banned altogether. That year, we drove to Alta Bates in Berkeley to have my sister, who arrived in less than six hours.

 The UCSF birthing center is not at Parnassus now, though. It has been moved to Mission Bay. I buy a terrible hot chocolate from the cafeteria because it is so very cold up here. And also because I want to be inside the cafeteria where I sat as a 3-year-old, looking up at the main hospital across the street where I was about to undergo minor ear surgery. The food is different. And there are more students. But the overall feeling is the same. And the pop-out glass wall is optimistic.

 It’s nearly noon and I tie my painting Brianna to a telephone pole in front of the library. The library has a small, lovely courtyard in front with tall planting beds full of native plants and trees and short, wide concrete borders for lounging on. This time, I try hiding some of my postcards in between the back of the stretchers for passerby to find. I feel giddy knowing a large, mildly obscene painting does not belong here. I try to anticipate being thrown out.

 I try sitting in different locations, at varying degrees of proximity. There’s not much threat to anyone stealing or defacing it here, so I even take a bathroom break. When I step into the library briefly for the toilet, I am reminded of the last time I was came in roughly eight years ago. I pulled books off the shelf with rich photos of internal organs. That was the beginning of my artistic journey into the body.

 The painting wins glances and smiles, but most passerby avoid it. Construction is happening to the building directly west of the main hospital. Construction workers lunch nearby. The morning is full of student chatter below the thunders of drills, mallets, dragging metal and shouts of caution.

 Directly across the sidewalk from Brianna, sitting atop a planter bed is a stone sculpture of a mother bear and two nursing cubs. It is stylized and the cubs seem to be nursing from breasts on her… chest? I thought bears have breasts on their bellies? Bear and Cubs (1984) was made by Beniamino Bufano, and Italian-American. At first I liked the sculpture, but now I begin to think about the romanticization of the maternal woman. I mean I love being a mother. But why must I be expected to be beautiful also? Why can’t we evade objectification once we become mothers? I think it would be a much better sculpture if the mama bear were fiercely snarling at some unseen threat—whilst nursing. Nursing from teats on her belly (as opposed to some humanized woman’s boobies.) A white woman photographs her 6-year-old son posing next to the bear. They ignore Brianna.

 After I move closer to the painting, I notice how the flow of foot traffic subtly redirects behind me. As though pedestrians want to catch a look without being seen.

 I nursed my daughter. It was fabulous. But very difficult in the beginning. I tried not to show any body parts at first. But within a few months I gave up all efforts to remain demure. Sabrina and I would just plop down anywhere we could get cozy, and I’d scoop her up. She refused to be hidden while nursing. And I didn’t object. Sustaining life trumped modesty, which I secretly reveled in. My mother nursed me also with some initial difficulty. In the 80s in the North Bay women bottle-fed or they nursed in the confines of their home. So she tolerated a good deal of shaming. Shame on breast-feeding-shamers. In contrast, in 2017 San Francisco, I enjoyed a great deal of encouragement, especially from elderly women. One beautiful 78-year-old credited her excellent health and longevity to having been breastfed.

 A group of young college students circle around the painting. Four of them are young men and one a young woman, who stands a little further away from Brianna. They gesture, discuss and laugh for nearly ten minutes. I wait for them to realize I am staring at them. So that I can grin and wave—maybe even wink.

 A construction worker walks past within inches of Brianna’s surface, spitting directly in front of her. I consider asking him to pose, spitting, for a photo. But he’s talking on his phone.

 A couple of weeks ago someone I love very much got a breast reduction. She is a dancer. She became a woman at age 13, in spite of her clinging to a tomboy identity. She became a woman because she was beautiful and because men liked her changing body—not because she was ready to become a woman, nor because she knew much about womanhood biologically or culturally. But I guess that’s what womanhood means in this culture: being desired, being violated, losing your personal space, being robbed of your perceived agency. “Catcalling,” “stalking” and “objectifying” sound misleadingly passive. That kind of sexual violence traumatizes women. It is also the only universal way American girls are initiated into adulthood.

 Some children, a middle-aged mom and more med students take pictures.

 Staring at the big, juicy persimmons atop Brianna, I try not to think about the plastic surgeon slicing off her nipple, trimming her ampleness, conforming her body to be “more proportionate,” sewing her up and sauntering home with a generous paycheck.

 This painting in invisible to so many people. Is the woman’s experience invisible too? I think so. Even to women.

 I had Sabrina at home because I am terrified of hospitals. Soon as I step inside, anxiety pales my face and dizzies my steps. It’s frightening enough to be a woman. But a half-naked woman in an institution with a deep history of harming bodies through exploitation or sloppiness is pure terror. It’s not so scary outside though. My homebirth was marvelous.

 A middle-aged woman wearing all black and a black down jacket circles my painting many times. Slowly and quickly, at varying distances. She has beautiful black curly hair flowing down to her waist. She dances with Brianna, and quietly walks on.

 It’s so damn cold here.

 A 10-year-old girl with puffy headphones paces back and forth in front of the painting. She bobs up and down, her short black hair bouncing. I guess she may be on the spectrum. She sometimes closes her eyes, and sometimes looks at the painting. She wears a continuous clever smile. Fifteen minutes later, her mother appears and scolds her for wandering.

 It’s time to go.

 "Don't let it fly away" I look up from my handful of tangled tie-downs. I have bad hearing and ask him to repeat. "Oh! Absolutely not!" I reply in exaggerated Judy Garland fashion. I return to disentangling.

 He lingers, "What is it?" he points down into the bed of my 2004 wine red Tacoma.

"A painting," I smugly grin.

 "Yeah, I know," he huffs, apparently offended or irritated at my implying he doesn't know how to look at a painting. "... I mean aren't those persimmons?"

Saturday June 22, 12noon-4pm

1 painting pop-up

766 Valencia, Falling From Glory, Exhibition June 11 - July 12

The site at which the painting sits directly shapes the viewer’s encounter: how long they look, how close they get, their perception of its inherent or ascribed value, and the extent to which they express their perception/experience.

I sit the Chicken Legs painting directly next to the door leading to our pop-up gallery at 766 Valencia. I carry a tall stump outside that had belonged to Sean. I move it to various locations throughout the session to sit and enjoy different vantage points of the passerby experience. Sometimes I sit near the painting, and sometimes I hide in full view so that I appear to be another passerby or loiterer.

For the first 15 minutes, no one enters the gallery. I wonder if my sitting out front on a log, eating a large homemade salad is the deterrent, or if it's the ugliness (and beauty) of the painting.

I move into hiding.

A youngish straight white couple pass by. The woman seems startled by the painting. “Eeeeeuuuu!” she exclaims gritting her teeth in a frown, as though the painting has assaulted her. “Someone should graffiti it.”

A white tween amongst her family shudders and says, “That scares me!”

Slowly at first, and then quickly, plenty of passerby sight the painting and follow right in. At times, the painting becomes an advertisement, a billboard, an awning announcing the content of the show even better than our hand-made sandwich sign could do.

The music is loud inside. My poor hearing can’t reach their comments inside. I consider turning the music down, but realized they may talk less or less audibly.

The father strolls about, pointing out “colors” in various paintings, to his family.

It becomes more difficult for me to staff both the inside and outside of the exhibition as more passerby flow in and around.

Outside I enjoy a full spectrum of responses:

Furrowed brows… eyes popped wide open… cameras snapping… cooing… pointed questions…

A couple of mixed friends:

“THAT is weird.”

“What is it?”

THAT is REALLY weird."

I’m still trying to understand how the Instagram phenomena changes experiences with artworks. Lots of viewers try to snap photos and videos. They post on social media like a 17th century European explorer, “Look what I found!” I start directing “photographers” to our Instagram names. Some are delighted to direct their own followers to the original artists, others do so begrudgingly or mumble they’re not posting.

A white straight couple in their 40s, mid-discussion, holding hands enter the gallery. The woman breaks hands and turns away immediately, “Oh no! This is too weird!”

The sidewalk is a corridor, so this location does not allow long encounters with the painting itself, even if it does lure passerby to approach the paintings inside.

Because of the particular circumstances of this site, today’s pop-up is probably the most difficult for me. The abundance of negative responses is exciting, but they still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

But there are some gems too.

A white trio that appear to have come from a fraternity/sorority stop and joyfully gaze together:

One dude, “What is going on here?!”

Another dude, “Chicken legs.”

Dudette, “That’s not chicken.”

Other dude, “But just the bottom half of them.”

First dude, “Exploding sausages!!!”

They all laugh. Dudette, “Ok we have to keep moving…"

A young woman in an elbow-to-floor burgundy flowing dress with wild pink and powder blue lines all over formed like butterflies marches up to my painting, nearly falls into it and saunters inside the gallery. She pops out again to motion a friend to follow. I am curious and follow as well. After circling and enthusiastically gesticulating, they introduce themselves as Emily and Forest, hosts of the wildly funny podcast Radio Free Multiverse. She brings a beautiful passionate empathy to my work. The work speaks and she can hear it—or it feel it. She is very young and vivacious and I am glad that feelings the that overwhelm my being and spill into the palette resonate so strongly with someone else. She buys a few stickers and I find a way to give her an extra and we promise to keep in touch.