I’ve been privileged in visiting the region of East Africa several times. I plan to return several more times. It got under my skin. Africa is not unique to me, but how it has shaped and molded my art and my life is unique to me. Mandela was still in jail and apartheid was the rule in South Africa while I attended an affluent public high school in the Midwest. For the first time in my life, I felt injustice in my bones. I started following the news with the help of Amnesty International and my favorite bands. I was making art then, but the still lifes, portraits, and landscapes couldn’t have been further from this truth I was beginning to sense in my bones.
I went to Uganda and Kenya with Habitat for Humanity at the end of my undergraduate years. I was too overwhelmed to sketch, so I took hundreds of photos. Just now, ten years after my first trip to this part of the world, the vibration and energy of Africa is emerging in my work. Sure I took stabs at it, making Romare Bearden-esque collaged paintings, Xeroxing the faces of orphaned children and remaking them as gods and saints. But the rhythm, the seeming life force, the color and pattern…this is where my new work begins. I am attempting to blend the rhythm of my global experience with the pattern and structure of my homeland, the craft of quilting. I don’t have the patience to sew like my Mother and Grandmother, but I do my own cutting and piecing and building. I am stunned by the power of family, the depth of relationships, the beauty of traditional African cloth, the resourcefulness of the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, and the massively innovative fallen paintings of Polly Apfelbaum.
Josie Mai
July 2004
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