Should Women Artists Be Social Workers?

Kenya Mon 07-05-2007

Should Women Artists Be Social Workers?
By Aarti wa Njoroge

Humaira Abid was insistent. Where were the social and women’s issues in the other women’s art? Directly or indirectly, she was asking if they were indifferent or whether they deliberately avoided them and, if so, why? Indeed creating art that would be sellable seemed to be a pre-occupation in the conversation that was taking place over lunch at the Elsamere Field Study Centre at Kenya’s Lake Naivasha.

But, as Danda Jaroljmek director of the Kuona Trust, felt in a separate interview about the international workshop that the women were attending at Elsamere, “It can be nerve-racking, certainly, to be outside your environment and have to make art.

The pressure is to start producing, producing and producing and one of the things we didn’t want was for that to happen. It was about sharing and learning new things and not producing a body of work at the end of two weeks that maybe someone might buy at the end of the opening day.”

Yet even the work created in this remote location appeared to be safe. So was the fear of commercial failure a thin layer of veneer over the situation of women artists in the southern hemisphere? Normally, Trinidadian Tessa Alexander is a social commentator.

“My paintings are usually about human existence, human conditions.” She seeks out “situations that are taken for granted or seen as ugly or backward and I usually portray [them] in a beautiful way so it becomes kind of disturbing.” Her statement reminds me of my husband’s photographs of imprisoned Rwandese génocidaires holding one another in their arms, bulging muscles (that many affluent urbanites pay for at the modern version of the blacksmith’s anvil, the gym), staring at their invisible audience, defying African homophobia.

Tessa brought a blank slate, an open mind to Elsamere. “Here, I didn’t generally indulge much into that, but what I did do, I looked into the kanga as the inspiration and I worked on the patterns of the kanga and used that all in my paintings. I created very flat people, so there is no texture, no features.

The kanga becomes more important than the people. So that is kind of a social situation.” For Kenyan Maggie Otieno, Elsamere “is a place where women can forget about taking care of everyone else and just think about themselves. So I guess that’s why we are here, to concentrate on our work and see what we can come up with.”

Danda takes it a step further. “We believe that a workshop in an isolated situation, which can take people away from their everyday lives and situations they normally find themselves in, is really valuable for all artists, but I think especially for women, to give women a chance to address issues that are very specific to them and for them to meet women from different countries and share their experience as well as their skills and different media.

What are the issues that are so particular to female artists? For Danda, “it goes right down the way society views the visual arts, the way families view art as career, the way the press publicises art events, the fact that audiences are, I think, increasing for the visual arts certainly for the last few years, but there is still a long way to go and until that happens, I think the women will always be made to feel that it’s not necessary a proper career and be forced to other careers.

” Has isolating them in a place of natural beauty and being able to focus only on their art also made the artists forget the humdrum of their daily routine? Like Maggie, her compatriot Beatrice Njoroge (whose recent portraits of women are a disquieting social statement) has chosen to experiment:

“I actually prefer when I go for a workshop to do something that I normally don’t do in the studio. I’m a creative artist so [woodcut printing] is not new to me, but you need patience when working with prints - so sometimes you make mistakes, you cut in the wrong places and the print kind of comes out looking really fine.

Beatrice has incorporated her observations of the workshop in her art. “If it is a flower, the place is green, maybe I would then paint a flower; if all the time we have, like, ten o’clock tea, four o’clock tea, like tea all the time, I may paint a cake. So it more of a diary of the things that we are doing here at the workshop.

It is more like trying to play around with pattern rather than subject matter. So, for example, just like the way we have a draughts board and chess board, it has like black white patterns, but within the spaces I’m going to draw something like an element of everything we have been doing in the workshop.”

As another Kenyan, Maryanne Muthoni, remarked, “The scenery here improves my creativity, working and you’re looking at the lake. It is quite fabulous and watching the hippos coming out at night after the presentations is quite interesting.” Humaira, an assistant professor of fine arts in Lahore in Pakistan, agrees.

“I think it is really beautiful; especially this area is so close to nature.I come from the second biggest city with six and half million people, so coming here is like really relaxed and not many cars, no pollution and more of nature, birds and the lake, water.” As for learning from each other, Danda believes “We might not actually see collaboration in the work, but certainly there has been communication between the artists.

” For Maryanne, “interacting with other artist from other countries and the local artists from Kenya is real fun.” Humaira says, “We have been talking about things that we face in different societies, but somehow they are common and we have common grounds; typical attitudes and emotions and how women are treated it is like everywhere it is the same. That is interesting to find connections.

We were interacting and having a dialogue about art and what is the art scene here, what are the cultural and social issues and how they are dealing with it. It was interesting to see that here a lot of women are not working on women’s issues and social issues though they are many.” Maybe symbolism will make it easier to depict issues that directly affect women such as female genital mutilation. Humaira again:

“If I talk about the future for women here, then I think there is a big space. They can work more on social and women issues and that is something which is more related to your sensitive feelings and women are really sensitive to issues and things. They are learning and they have been interested in talking and learning new techniques and asking us a lot of questions, but they should get more exposure.”

The influence on Ugandan Consoline Musabu has been profound. “What I have leant especially from all the women artists, mostly the Kenyans, they paint in abstract and that is one thing I never took time to understand. When you sit down and talk to them and realize what is coming from deep within, the issues the different women from different countries have to deal with, social, political issues, economic issues, and then the way they bring them out in art, it changed my perspective of painting realism into painting abstract or symbolism.

It doesn’t have to be completely abstract, but you can use a symbol to say something, especially with the subject that I feel strongly about, which is conservation and preservation of our environment. It doesn’t have to be a lion roaring for us to know that it is a lion. It can be represented in a different way.”

As for continuing to give women more exposure, the Kuona Trust is funded partly by the Ford Foundation and partly by Hivos, a Dutch organisation. According to Danda, “they’re very keen on women issues and interestingly enough it’s often easier to raise funds for women’s events than it is for general arts in events. When they stop funding us? Well, we are beginning to prepare ourselves for that. We have a fundraiser and we are hoping to start pushing the large companies to start supporting projects and partner on particular activities.

I again suspect women’s activities will attract more support because companies are supposed to be seen supporting things like that.” Mark Lawson (A portrait of prejudice, Guardian Weekly, 6-12 April 2007) has reservations about the new Elizabeth A Sackler Centre for Feminist Art and the Tate Gallery announcing a “female preference in future purchasing”. Equality must start with opportunities; otherwise any efforts further down the line will only be trying to repair the damage already done.

Then we have to use words like tolerance and respect, which in Mahatma Gandhi’s views, were like acknowledging that others were less worthy than you, or that they were wrong, because only you could be right. By presenting women’s art “in a special place away from the buildings for famous men”, is this, Mark questions, “a victory or a defeat in the sex wars”?

Patrick Mukabi, an artist who visited during the open day also had concerns about separating out women during his visit to the open day at the end of the workshop. Artists are supposed to be the thorn in society’s side. They should eat spaghetti (maize meal) and drink cheap wine (chew khat) in draughty garrets (or their southern hemisphere equivalent) on the outside of conventional society.

It is ironic that we are going out of our way to recognise women artists on the basis of their gender, as if they need us to make it more comfortable or acceptable for them, when it is the discomfort caused by what they see around them that should be the reason they should be creative in the first place.

And finally, what is a “woman’s” – or, more broadly, “social” – issue anyway? Isn’t the environment the social issue of our times? For Consoline, coming to Elsamere is “like you had put me into my own paradise.” She has “spent a lot of time exploring the flowers, the landscape, rare animals and birds that I haven’t seen [before and that are here in abundance.

Two of my paintings are [of species of birds] we don’t have in Uganda, so that of course has made my trip more rich. I found out that they are planting flowers that are really rare and are trying to preserve them so that future generations can learn about them.”

Like American Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), whose paintings were overlooked till quite recently “because her subject matter – children and domesticity – was seen as trivial” (GW, 6-12 April 2007), Consoline is a diarist of our times. The only painting I have ever seen on the so-called woman’s issue par excellence, FGM, was by a Togolese man.

Yet FGM only continues because both women and men condone it. Ultimately, the day when male artists provoke society because they depict domestic violence, female infanticide, unequal opportunities in education and careers, anything that may be considered “women’s issues”… that is when we will have come full circle.

Posted By: African Colours

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