WHEN THEY SEE US 6/1/19

Actors that play Central Park Five in series

I recommend the powerful four part mini-series on Netflix WHEN THEY SEE US directed by Ava DuVernay about the injustice done in 1989 to 5 young teenage boys (4 were African American and 1 was Hispanic) accused of rape, assault, robbery and inciting to riot by NYC's District Attorney's office led by Prosecutor Linda Fairstein and the nefarious detectives working on the case. Wrongly accused of raping and beating a jogger in Central Park, the juveniles confessed on tape, after being subjected to hours of extreme duress without parental supervision. They were convicted in 1990, maintaining their innocence throughout the years of their incarceration.

Four of the boys under 16 served for 5-7 years. The 16-year-old who was tried as an adult got a 15 -year sentence and suffered extreme brutality at the hands of the guards and fellow prisoners while locked up. The media was also complicit in stirring up anger and racial hatred; one of the most despicable people revving up the media was Donald Trump who took out an ad in the NY Times advocating for the death sentence - a factor in molding public opinion.

Mug shot Korey Wise - the 16 year old

How people are stripped of their humanity, how justice is perverted, how racial bias becomes a primary factor in our judicial system and how politics and "yellow journalism" warp the truth is stunningly revealed in this heartbreaking series. DuVernay sticks to the facts but also gives us a glimpse into the boys' families as we come to feel a deep affection for their lives and their individual struggles to survive even after the conviction was "vacated" (overturned) in 2002.

The ”Central Park Five” sued the city in 2003 and eventually won a $41 million dollars compensation - but it was not until 2014 when Mayor De Blasio came into power that the award money was approved and distributed. Lives were totally uprooted; families were uprooted and the corruption infused into the judicial system though eventually exposed at the expense of the youth's "lost years". This is a case that will make you weep with anger, frustration, and sorrow at man's inhumanity to man.

The "real" Central Park Five at Premiere of series

SOLO ONLINE EXHIBITION AT VASA - A WALK THROUGH HISTORY OF ART DONE WITH THE BODY 5/27/19

Grace Graupe Pillard solo online exhibition curated by Carla Della Beffa .

Images from my GRACE DELVING INTO ART series gives us a "titillating" journey through art history. 

http://www.vasa-project.com/gallery/graupe-pillard/index.php

My Abortion 5/15/19

In the early 1960s, I was young, and innocent but not too innocent to get pregnant due to (I believe) a faulty diaphragm. At the time living at home in the Bronx, I was a student in history and political science at CCNY with a sweet boyfriend who was Co-Captain of the Basketball team. Life was rushing at me in fits and starts - as I began to examine my own sexuality and the world around me, inquisitively comprehending the damnable fact that the globe I inhabited was larger than the moon and its satellites revolving around my tiny insular orbit.

Realpolitiks slowly invaded my consciousness.

The obscuring veil that had shielded me through my boy-crazy teen years was ultimately penetrated by enrolling in college classes in Economics, Nationalism, Southeast Asia, Russian Area Studies and reading some of the world’s great literature (taking courses in Greek and Shakespearean tragedies)  lifting a fog of ignorance that had enshrouded me. My “beloved country” was not what I had been taught to believe it to be; untainted and pure - the savior of democracy worldwide. Yet, my entire childhood had shown this to be true for my German Jewish refugee family, granted asylum in this country, saving my parents, and maternal grandparents (but not my paternal grandparents who died in Theresienstadt) from the horrors of a monstrous dictator’s genocide by allowing us entry through the ports of NYC. The world was more complex than my inexperienced self had yet apprehended.

The dawning awareness of life’s complexities had now invaded my body with the possibilities of motherhood. I did not realize that I was pregnant until my 10th week. There were no easy color-coded pregnancy tests to directly give me the news - instead, I would have to make an appointment for confirmation with a local Doctor which I was reluctant to do - not wanting my parents to know what was happening. I kept procrastinating with the hope that this was a false alarm. I knew that I needed to maintain control over my body and wanted an abortion, which was illegal and punitive - participating “shadow” doctors were criminalized. I realized that I was unable and unwilling to support a child both financially and psychologically.

My boyfriend concurred with getting this procedure. He knew a doctor in New Jersey who performed abortions charging  $500 in cash - the going rate in the 1960s for those of us who could scrounge up the money. He drove me to a small town in NJ and waited in a car a block away. I remember walking up the porch of a suburban house, greeted by a sloppy looking woman who met me at the door. She was the nurse. I was given no anesthesia, no antiseptic preparations that I recall. My legs were strapped into the stirrups with a middle-aged man peering into my vagina, tools in hand. There was no conversation. There was only the silence of anticipation. 

Having your uterus probed and cut without any numbing agents to relieve the wrenching pain which radiated throughout my body was unforgettable, but I remained silent with eyes tightly closed to the instruments of “purging” and the colors of clotting blood. I did not cry out, nor did I scream. I was mute. Instead, I maintained my secret quietude comforted by a memory that my father told me when I was 5 years old - “anytime I feel sad I should think of a birthday party with hot dogs, balloons and an ice cream cake.” That is what this teenager did for the hours it took to complete the “operation.” My mind participated in the parties while my body was in distress; I was at a birthday celebration - ironic of course - but those dreamlike flashbacks carried me through this experience. Though bruised and battered, I walked out the door alone and up the hill to where the car was waiting for me. I was exhausted, relieved, saddened and ready to move on.

To this very day, I am a strong advocate of a woman’s right to choose. I never want any woman to endure medically an unsanitary, unsupervised, non-hospital abortion. I was one of the lucky ones who did not get an infection or die. In 1973 Roe v Wade was passed and a vital right for woman and choice was codified into law.

In 2019 Georgia and Alabama legislators are reversing years of legislation. Women are under attack again...

CAPERNAUM 2/12/19

Extreme poverty is pervasive around the globe and CAPERNAUM (CHAOS in Lebanese) directed by Nadine Labaki gives us a searing portrait of one 12 -year-old boy who is struggling to survive the circumstances in which he was born into. His family can barely feed their many children, who dash out and play on sewer run-off streets in the slums of Beirut along with starving dogs. The games are those of any child on any street anywhere in the world - boys wielding swords and make-shift guns experiencing the authority and violence of the powerful through imitation and play.

The film moves along at a slow, mesmerizing pace, the depiction of how one endures along with the sacrifices families make to subsist are brutal. There is not much dialogue - images alone often give us a sense of place - but our focus is riveted on the young, sensitive boy Zain (a beautiful performance by Zain Al Rafeea) who is wily, angry and inventive in the methods he devises to cope. Despite the horrific conditions of life, his humanity and sense of justice is unbroken.

Zain’s loving sister who is 11 years old, is sold off to marry an older, lecherous man in exchange for a brood of cackling, fluttering hens. He tries to save her, but the family slings the fragile young girl - her thin limbs flailing in frustration - into a vehicle and drives away leaving him deprived of his life-long companion. At this point, Zain boards a bus and leaves home traveling into a world of impoverishment and the enigmatic unknown.

The film moves back and forth in time; the present is a courtroom where Zain is suing his parents for the “crime” of giving him life”, while weaving back into the past where facts are seen in the context of a young boy,  attempting to subsist by finding food to eat, a place to sleep and  a crime committed avenging a loved one. Relationships are formed and through them, we become even more aware of the bureaucratic nature of displaced people, the necessity of having “papers,” and becoming a refugee in a land where scarcity is often equal to the home from which you have fled. 

There is a touching link formed between Zain and an Ethiopian mother and her baby whose care he is responsible for when she is out working. Zain builds a makeshift wagon to tow this beautiful baby around; two children moving through the crowded dust-filled streets of a city avoiding the oncoming traffic of trucks and the scores of duplicitous people devising schemes to take whatever little there is left of their few coins, thereby diminishing their resolve and courage. CAPERNAUM would be heartbreaking to watch if not for the strength of Zain, his fierce single-minded willpower conferring  buoyancy to what would seem like a hopeless situation into glimmers of possibilities.. He is lovely and so is this raw and delicate film.

THE NAKED TRUTHS FRIEZE - WORK IN PROGRESS 12/31/18

WORK IN PROGRESS - THE NAKED TRUTHS FRIEZE

Click on image to enlarge

The Naked Truths Frieze, 44 x90 inches, charcoal/rives paper, 2018-2019

ROMA 12/27/18

Saw the much-acclaimed film ROMA and was seduced by the B&W digital photography and all the gray values that the camera was able to discern. It felt like a technologically enhanced version of films that I would see at the Heights Movie Theater (the local Washington Heights Art House} that only showed "foreign films". It was a delicious place because the movies they presented were more explicit about everything and that included sex - which made it a frequent destination point in the late 1950s.

ROMA is a personal film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron dedicated to the woman LIBO who raised him - In the film, she is called Cleo and is the live-in maid in the family home in the Roma upper-middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City. The movie is shot against the 1970s backdrop of violent political and student unrest. Is this just another nostalgic tale told by a now successful man who is very aware of the large class divide in his home country? I had mixed feelings but am still sorting them out.

There is a review by Richard Brody which is quite worth reading: https://www.newyorker.com/…/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfon…https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfonso-cuarons-roma?irgwc=1&source=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_adgoal%20GmbH&mbid=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_adgoal%20GmbH

I agree with much of what Brody wrote but have some caveats. I thought ROMA was beautifully filmed in B&W - in homage to 50's Italian Neorealist film-makers. There are moments when the slow movement of the camera pans on and caresses not only the daily activities of a servant's duties but focuses on the essentials of life itself such as flowing water, rooftop sunlight creating transparent shadows on sheets drifting in the wind, revealing a cover of comfort and reminding us that they are also a consequence of drudgery, and a dog's excrement, squished from being stepped on, as if to tell us not to forget that shit is everywhere and unavoidable.

When a Master/Guru addresses a group of martial arts students and asks them to attempt to stand like a heron on one foot, arms up and eyes tightly - no one can perform this seemingly simple exercise - except for Cleo who is balancing on one foot without tottering. This act acknowledging her endurance and stoicism and the ability to with-stand (no pun intended) the world around her - that of extreme poverty and class disparity, a world where she sustains her role in silence acquiring the love of the children who adore her.

Yes, it is sentimentalized; yes it is patronizing, but it is a reality - in many many cultures. The loving maid/servant/slave surrogate mother who nurses a generation of children who are not her own.

GRACE CRASHING INTO TRUMP WORLD: THE NAKED TRUTHS CONFRONT TRUMP 12/23/18

Grace Crashing Into Trump World: The Naked Truths Confront Trump, photo print, 2018

The Ignominious Trump Administration is confronted by the naked truths en masse - #thenakedtruth and #hazmatgrace.
We witness a President who increasingly has become more and more insidious and autocratic - a frightening first for this country.  In the Constitution - One cannot rule by Executive Order. One cannot rule by Fiat; we have 3 Branches of Government NOT one.