Margaret, Are You Grieving: An Exhibition About Grief and the Artist

By Angela M. Brommel

Artwork featured from left to right: Nancy Good, Requiem, Acrylic on Canvas; Lance Smith, 44 (Foty Fo’), Oil on Canvas

Spring and Fall
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

More than 20 years ago I met a retired Dean of Humanities through a course I was taking as a study of religion major. His name was Dee. Within moments of opening his door, he impatiently asked who I was and why I was qualified to be there. Before I had a chance to answer, he told me to sit as he started to tell me about his life’s work. As part of that story, Dee told me that each year he required students in his Introduction to Humanities course to memorize and recite Spring and Fall: to a young child by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wept as he recited it to me, and at that time I didn’t understand the poem or how it moved him. 

For the rest of the semester, we met weekly, and one week turned into five years. Dee read poetry by Hopkins and Bishop to me, and he often pulled images of art and quizzed me. The most beautiful sculpture in the world? David. His favorite painting? The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet.  

It wasn't until he passed that I found myself weeping at times while reading Hopkins to my students. I have lived with this poem long enough to understand it in my body and in my own grief.

Images clockwise from top left: Myranda Bair, Batty's Toys, Watercolor on torn paper; Nancy Good, Requiem, acrylic on canvas; Antonio Gomez, Mi Corazon Espinado, photograph.

It’s hard at times to have conversations about where we are in our hearts. Sometimes an artist creates something that allows us to experience empathy and catharsis that we could not unlock otherwise. I invited artists and writers to share work representative of the many kinds of grief that exist, how grief appears within their work, and in some cases how a loss or anticipatory grief transforms the content and form of their art. In my own work, after the loss of my grandmother, grief had given me a new appreciation for beautiful stand-alone sentences. I’m sure there’s a meditation in that. 

What the artists created in response to this call was tender and extraordinary. Their work is vibrant and whole-heartedly honest about the complexity of loss ranging from the death of loved ones, chronic illness, postpartum depression, to the destruction of our planet, and more. Thank you, writers and artists for sharing your stories of grief and love so that we might feel less alone in our own. 

I’m grateful to these artists and writers, as well as Nevada Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and their supporters who provide funding and opportunities for us to explore the human experience through the arts and meaningful conversations. 

Angela M. Brommel is a Nevada writer with Iowa roots. Mojave in July is her debut full-length poetry collection (Tolsun Books, 2019). In 2018, her chapbook, Plutonium & Platinum Blonde, was published by Serving House Books. Her poetry has been published in The Best American Poetry blog, the North American Review, The Literary Review’s (TLR) Share, and many other journals and anthologies. A 2018 Red Rock Canyon Artist in Residence, Angela served as the inaugural poet of the program. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and an MA in Theatre from the University of Northern Iowa. Angela is the Executive Director of the Office of Arts & Culture, as well as affiliate faculty in humanities at Nevada State College. You can also find her at The Citron Review as Editor-in-Chief. Learn more about Angela and her work on her website: https://www.angelambrommel.com/

Margaret, Are You Grieving is on display until March 25, 2020 at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery at 1017 S. First Street #190 in Las Vegas. It is open Monday-Friday from 1-5 pm. Featured in Margaret, Are You Grieving are writers: Gayle Brandeis, Angela M. Brommel, Nathan R. Elliott, Shaun T. Griffin, Heather Lang-Cassera, Claire McCully, Paul Michelsen, Vogue M. Robinson, and Erica Vital-Lazare. Featured visual artists include: Montana Black, Myranda Bair, Sapira Cheuk, Fawn Douglas, Nancy Good, Antonio Gomez, Bobbie Ann Howell, Gemma Marmalade, Melissa Russell, Lance L. Smith, and United Catalysts, an artistic team consisting of Kim Garrison Means and Steve Radosevich.

Image/Angela M. Brommel

Image/Art Square Las Vegas