Margaret, Are You Grieving
This exhibition is available for viewing below.
Margaret, Are You Grieving
Curated by Angela M. Brommel
Exhibition open online on February 6, 2020
Inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall: To A Young Child, this exhibition, curated by Angela M. Brommel, invites artists and poets 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.
Featured in Margaret, Are You Grieving are writers: Gayle Brandeis, Angela M. Brommel, Nathan 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 Smith, and United Catalysts, an artistic team consisting of Kim Garrison Means and Steve Radosevich.
Margaret, Are You Grieving: An Exhibition About Grief and the Artist
By Angela M. Brommel
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.
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.
Gemma Marmalade
Silent Lecture
Video
Taking inspiration from John Cage’s 4’33’, and as a response to the phenomena of speechlessness when encumbered by grief, ‘3 minutes and 30 seconds’ is a performance of a ‘silent lecture’ within a British University on December 12, 2019, the day of the UK government General Election; an event with lifelong consequences and global political ramifications.
The duration represents a minute of silence for each year since the June 2016 European referendum on Brexit, where the UK commenced what has become an unresolved and traumatic separation from the European Union. The election was set to attempt to address this painful deadlock in a country beset with social divisions and discriminations echoing the recent Western lurch towards fascism. This silence references the act of contemplation in a gesture of national mourning, the compromise in vocalising educational integrity in this context, as well as an acknowledgement to the many students in attendance whose voices were not heard on account of their ineligibility to vote in this pivotal referendum. The United Kingdom left the European Union on January 31, 2020.
Some of these pieces are for sale. If you’re interested in purchasing any of these works, please contact the artist directly.