Arts Preview:
Feminism and funk mix
in artist's crocheted pieces
Thursday, August 08, 2002
By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic
'TO BE AN ARTIST and to be able to create things -- it's like fireworks every time you think about something!" exclaims Harlem-based Xenobia Bailey, whose large-scale, explosively vibrant crocheted artworks form a "Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk" at the Society for Contemporary Craft in the Strip District.
Xenobia Bailey not only designed the clothing and accessories -- such as a "herb gathering apron" -- for her "Sister Paradise," but also created the story of the goddess's passage to the Americas to help her enslaved people. (Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette)
Concentric rings of color and pattern -- Op Art mandalas to stir a new cosmic sensibility -- play off against one another and against a vivid chartreuse background the artist selected, creating, as Bailey puts it, "an installation of textile vibration whose primary function is the evocation of a patch of Paradise."
Bailey is also the society's first artist-in-residence, an appointment that includes a slide- and video-illustrated public talk that she'll give tomorrow, a crochet workshop -- "a needle tea party," Bailey says -- for beginning to experienced participants starting Saturday, the creation of a new body of work and a project with young people from the Neighborhood Centers Association at the Limbaugh Community Center on the North Side. She'll stay in Pittsburgh through Aug. 30.
Her medium is cotton, but the way Bailey handles it makes her a prime candidate for inclusion in the society's biennial "Bridge" exhibition series, which was begun in 1988 to show contemporary artwork that breaks down traditional barriers between the fields of craft and fine art. ("Bridge 7" also includes solo exhibitions by metalsmith Lin Stanionis and glass artist Dana Zamecnikova.)
While at the University of Washington, where she studied ethnomusicology, she'd taken classes in costume design and found the non-European component lacking. After completing a degree in industrial design at the Pratt Institute in 1977, she learned to crochet from an Italian-Swiss teacher she met while working as an artist-in-community in the Brooklyn school system. Later, she sought out "Sister Joseph," who taught her to tat while regaling the young artist with tales of "lords and ladies of the needle" from a time when "work from the needle was more valuable than any [gem]stone."
With a growing awareness of feminist and civil rights issues, Bailey began to create a wardrobe that radiated a new kind of power by fusing the celebratory colors of African art, the finery of ritual attire and the materials and methods of domestic craft to challenge the low status previously granted "women's work." Tiered hats that are part sculpture, part architecture have titles such as "Water, 1997 (Medicine Hat)." The piece that's in the collection of the American Craft Museum in New York is a coat, Bailey says.
In recent years, she's cranked her expression up a notch, from functional -- albeit unique -- ware to abstract compositions that swirl across the wall in the manner of Frank Stella.
Bright celestial bodies born of her ideology swirl in overlapping energy fields rather than orbits, prodding boundaries of perception, exploring the "possibility of conducting emotional energies into the atmosphere through light and color." She uses the circle because it's "the most primal thing I could thing of."
Concrete limbo
The notion of a universal whole permeates Bailey's expression, underlying her definition of funk: "the constructive energy of the decomposing elements of nature." As in, she explains, cow dung being used to fertilize gardens or grapes fermenting into wine.
The antithesis of this would be littering in the city. "Once you've thrown something onto concrete, you've thrown something out of the cycle of life. On the land, french fries will return to the earth. Newspapers, cups, food thrown onto New York City streets turn into surface garbage because they're in this concrete limbo."
Bailey, who was born in Seattle in 1958, marched to her own drummer from the beginning. (As an adult, she took the name Xenobia, meaning "jewel of my father," after a warrior queen of ancient Palmyra, she says.)
While her family of six was not wealthy -- her parents owned a janitorial business, and she helped to clean three restaurants before school every day -- her childhood held idyllic experiences such as picking wild blackberries and raspberries, sleeping on the back porch and building a tree house in a cherry tree. As a Bluebird, she learned respect for nature, along with survival skills.
She made her first go-cart by wrecking her doll buggy so she could get the wheels. "I made the best car," she says. "The buggy wasn't doing anything for me. The doll gets a buggy; I needed a go-cart."
Bailey grew up near Chinatown and attended a Buddhist nursery school begun by restaurateur Ruby Chow, whom she holds in high regard. When local women wanted to work but couldn't afford day care, Chow started the nursery school. "All her power came from her being a woman," Bailey says.
Neighborhood
The clothing she created for her "Sister Paradise" is "based on the Chinese girls' drill team of Seattle," something else Chow began, Bailey says, breaking into a description of their "red and turquoise uniforms, ballet slippers, gongs -- so magnificent" as though she'd seen them yesterday. The story she created for "Sister Paradise" -- of a goddess searching for her disappearing people, joining them in slavery in America and using her magic to spirit them back to Africa -- is her own.
And she is a compilation of the Pacific-facing West Coast, a local American Indian presence, a European national heritage, African-American roots, immersion in a diversity of philosophical processes and religions, and the open-mindedness to embrace them all.
Describing a "really beautiful" spirits-of-the-harvest ceremony conducted by Haitians in Harlem, Bailey said, "It's all about ancestors and the earth and the creative and respect of life and rejuvenating that. And the different religions are just different styles of that."
Thinking of her childhood, Bailey says, "Every day was almost like summer because it was a neighborhood. It was a magical time, but I didn't get a portrait of that."
That's one reason she wants to incorporate portraiture into her project with the children, to document the "everyday people that add to the fiber of a community. These children add joy every time you see them."
To that end, she's completing a mandala today, its center subdued in evening greens and blues, to represent the New Moon that rises tonight. The children's portraits will be taken in front of the New Moon, placing them in the cosmos, "coming into being."
"If you want to be included in a script, you gotta write it yourself," Bailey says. "I want them to see jubilation."
