Tucson Weekly: On Her Mind (May 20

A Group Show Of Arizona Women Artists Re-Examines 'Women's Work' In All Its Guises.
By Margaret Regan
GLORY TACHEENIE-CAMPOY'S mother once had a coffee pot, so rusted and chipped the gleam of its white enamel had become a distant memory. But the pot served. It made the coffee that woke people up, got them moving in the morning, lubricated their conversations.
This sturdy utensil has now retired from the stove and undergone a metamorphosis into art, courtesy of the daughter. Part of a sculptural installation called "Matriarch," it's in the group show Diversity in Expression: Arizona Women Artists, now on the floor at the Tucson/Pima Arts Council Community Gallery.
Review The pot stands on a pristine white platform, surrounded by a constellation of objects that lovingly evokes the domestic life of a Navajo woman. Seeds sorted into piles by species and color get equal play with manufactured goods imported onto the res, an ear of dried corn sharing space with a painted china cup, and dried flowers with a metal jug.
Tacheenie-Campoy pays homage to female space and women's work by creating a kitchen sanctified by art. The battered coffee pot stands on a ceremonial grill woven from colored wires, astride a circle of polished stones. It's more like an altar than an oven. The teacup sits on a piece of art, too: cut-out white horses glued onto painted paper. Seeds are also glued onto the paper, in between Diné words in black marker.
If the artist is reconciling domesticity and art, she's also stitching up the rent between Navajo arts and the Western academic tradition. Using an old metal chair as combination loom and easel, she's paired a Navajo-style weaving with an intaglio print. The daughter may be a trained artist, but she learned weaving from her mother.
Still, she's changed the tradition around a bit, using non-Navajo dyes of purple, red, yellow and blue in her yarns. Likewise, the intaglio, a sign of the artist's academic training, dips into the Navajo world. Its inks reprise colors of the thread, and the print pictures objects prized by the Navajos: a horse, mountains, sky. The art forms of both mother and daughter have merged.
Many women artists, Miriam Schapiro among them (see "Daughter of the Revolution," Tucson Weekly, January 21, 1999), have rediscovered and honored traditional female arts. What makes Tacheenie-Campoy's piece so interesting is that not only does it put low art on equal footing with high, but it addresses the cultural divide between the Anglo and Navajo worlds. The artist even provides a Diné-English dictionary in an effort to bridge the language gap as well. All by itself, the piece addresses the theme of the show, which is "diversity in expression."
The group show offers works by 13 women of widely divergent backgrounds--Mexican, Chicana, Anglo, African-American, Korean-American, Tohono O'odham and Navajo. Generally, their art celebrates the female experience. "Matriarch" may be the most interesting piece, but it's not the only one to use unconventional media. Local poet Karen Falkenstrom presents lyrical visual accompaniments to her poems via found objects arranged in boxes on the wall. N. Skreko Martin's sculpture "United We Stand" is made entirely of palm fronds. Its not-too-startling message is that women must stick together like the standing, bundled palm fronds joined with twine; divided, they'll tumble apart like the helpless fronds strewn in isolation on the floor. Christine Winter Dawdy has sculpted two satisfying bag ladies out of, well, bags that she's crumpled and glued and painted.
To-Rée-Née Wolf Keiser, a Tucson artist who's won a number of community art commissions, applauds women's strengths. Her exultant "Mother of Mathematics," an acrylic and mixed media, is an Egyptian-style goddess complete with bird head. She has a halo of golden numbers and she's painted in the jewel tones of stained glass. The black outlines reinforce the impression of a church window. Here Keiser heretically defies the patriarchy--posing a female as founder of math--while just as heretically hinting that this goddess ought to be lionized in a church.
But not all is joy here. Several of the artists illuminate the dark side of female space. Dora Hernandez works in the medium of foam print, making subtly colored small works that draw on Mexican imagery. But her "Suburban Prisoner" is all-American. It's a backyard scene, full of horizontal fences and vertical gates that close in menacingly on a suburban patio. This place of isolation, meant to be the locus of domestic bliss, has become an inescapable trap.
More disturbing still is Rosemary Lonewolf's cautionary tale about domestic violence, the multimedia "Intermittent Thunderstorm." This one uses a real door and frame as an organizing principle. On one side of the door are ceramic re-creations of sunny skies, all blue stripes and cheerful rays. At the other are black storm clouds, shot through with white streaks of lightning.
Pasted to the door is a record of a romance, love letters, mushy cards and wedding pictures set among cutout flowers and cupids. But when you open the door you see how love can change. News clips about wife beating are glued all over the inside of the door. And there's a mirror with an urgent message scrawled in red lipstick:
"Who are the faces of domestic abuse?" it reads. "They are your daughters, mothers, wives." At the bottom are names, and among them Lonewolf has written her own.
"Intermittent Thunderstorm" is worlds away from "Matriarch" and its serene coffee pot. Violence has seeped into this female space, and poisoned it.
Diversity in Expression: Arizona Women Artists continues through Friday, June 4, at the Tucson/Pima Art Council Community Gallery, 240 N. Stone Ave. Gallery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call 624-0595.

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