February 15 – March 30
Award-winning artist, Muffy Clark Gill, creates paintings in the process known as batik. Batik is a technique that uses a wax and dye resist media on cloth. Gill appreciates the use of simple figures and vibrant colors that are often associated with the artwork of indigenous cultures and she creates images that weave this love of color and design with Native American history. Her Seminole series explores a modern insight with a historical perspective of the Native American Indians who live in South Florida; particularly those of Seminole and Miccosukee Indians.
Exhibit sponsored by:
Anne & Charles Reynolds
Rita Youngman
Also Featuring:
Seminole Doll Making
Members of the Seminole tribe have created Seminole dolls since the early 1940’s. Various designs are sewn using brightly colored cotton fabric pieces in a patchwork style, typically worn by Native American women. The intricate designs are inspired by animals and elements of the natural environment and often include accessories reflecting the culture of a particular tribe. The Seminole tribe makes many of their dolls from the palmetto leaves found in swampy marsh areas. These dolls have been often used to teach children important lessons about life and are considered highly prized today by collectors of Seminole Indian artifacts.
Text and Textures: Erasure Poetry by Melanie Hubbard
Melanie Hubbard’s book-in-progress, Auto-Suggestion for Mothers, text from a 1924 book of the same name and transforms it, via painting or erasing out words, into poetry. The original book offers fascinating and appalling domestic psychological ‘how-to’ advice; urging mothers to mold their children’s behavior, well-being, and sexuality by subliminally suggesting (by chanting in twilight, at the bedside) affirmations to their subconscious. Hubbard’s choice to erase each page is itself an exercise of power, a subversion or defacement, exposing the text’s assumptions and repressions. It is also an invitation to play. For each erasure-piece, she scans a book page onto watercolor paper. Hubbard paints with watercolor gouache over any text that she wants to obscure, leaving the found poem to stand out against the paint or the partially paint-obscured text. Since the paint can be laid on transparently or thickly, there may be many voices in the text.
