Open Studios
Katharen Wiese
Eli Whitney barn at the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop
Hamden
Oct. 11-12
Around 2003, elementary schooler Katharen Wiese visited Kearney, Nebraska, where she saw flocks of sandhill cranes pausing on their cross-country journey, an annual phenomenon some scientists call The Great Migration.
Thirty-four years earlier, Wiese’s mother participated in the second wave of what more people know as The Great Migration, a mass exodus of millions of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to northern states. Along with her parents and siblings, Wiese’s mother took a long car ride from Vernon, Alabama, to Lincoln, Nebraska, marking a new home for the next generation.
At the time, The Green Book, a guide helping Black travelers navigate food and lodging across state lines, had sparse listings for the state of Nebraska. All in all, the state’s safe accommodations spanned less than one page.
I saw pages of that book among collaged layers of prints by Wiese, now a professional artist, Sunday afternoon at the Eli Whitney barn’s Open Studios weekend. Wiese is in her first year of a two-year studio residency at the barn, part of the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop‘s offerings to the local creative community.
In another part of the barn were quilts, ceramics, carved wooden sculptures, and more paintings. Visitors who braved a few seconds of rain outside were rewarded heartily with atol from Guatemalan food truck La Cocina de Sandra and fries from the Fryborg truck.
As Wiese talked to visitors about her experience looking through The Green Book, she drew an important fact from the depths of violence and danger contextualizing why a book like this had to be made. The book was for road trips, she noted. People used it for leisure.
“The most radical thing you can do as a Black person is prioritize your joy,” Wiese quoted, sharing wisdom from Imagine Uhlenbrock, a talented nail artist from Omaha, Nebraska, who has made intricate works on Wiese’s nails for special events. Visitors to the barn quickly became acquainted with Uhlenbrock’s wide hat, radiant smile, and relaxed pose; a wood-carved portrait Wiese made of her served as the starting point for several works on display.
These included the prints with the Green Book layers, as well as a six-foot-tall piece at the center of the barn. Uhlenbrock gazed out at onlookers with a joyful expression, dandelions poking up from the ground to join her reverie, while a comet-like blaze tore through the space behind her.
The colors were not painted directly on the piece but torn, cut, and arranged from a collection of painted scraps. The small chunks of solid shades softened boundaries and opened the scene into a mosaic of shimmering planes, making the impending disaster feel almost like a natural part of the sky. Wiese called this how to smile at the end of the world.
When Wiese thinks about her grandmother, the woman who left behind a life in rural Alabama, she thinks of gloves and pearls. Wiese’s piece Going North, which depicts her mother’s family traveling to Nebraska, is gridded with real and faux pearls, examples of the kind of embellishments important to her grandmother’s style.
Telling stories to satisfy attendees’ curiosity, Wiese was able to flesh out concepts that had been floating around in her head: the pearls were more than just exhibits of beauty. They made up an armor of respectability in a society set up to deny Black women safety, comfort, and joy.
“I think about material histories a lot,” Wiese said. She touched a peeled-off top layer of cardboard in how to smile at the end of the world, admiring how much glue the factory must have used for its corrugations. In the cardboard’s deconstructed state, the thickness of glue has no longer plays a role in its function. Still, its vestige remains.
To Wiese, the way a piece of cardboard arrives in the world is not so different from how we arrive. There’s “all this context, all this baggage, that we have to find meaning from.”
That includes the harms we are encouraged to perpetuate toward ourselves and others. “It’s in us,” she said of internalized structures like racism and misogyny. “You can’t win if it’s in you.” Understanding our positions in a bigger context is part of a lifelong journey to, in Wiese’s words, “dismantle the paradigms of violence that are in your own mind and heart.”
At 15 years old, Wiese discovered the existence of Black-centered beauty magazines. She remembers the Essence issue in her hands and how she marveled at the women in the photographs.
She was still marveling a decade and a half later when she collaged together images of Black women from magazines for a new piece tentatively titled “do it yourself snare:“, a self-portrait of an era from years ago when she shaved her head. In the piece, she snaps a selfie in the mirror, appraising the changing view in front of her.
“This one’s more like an affirmation board,” she told me. Selecting and pasting the pictures made her feel 15 again, filled with awe and adolescent glee.
Recently, Wiese was hanging up her prints of Uhlenbrock when she got an unexpected hand. Well, hands.
It’s not ideal to hang a print directly with binder clips, Wiese explained. The pressure they exert is too harsh. Some printmakers cushion the grip with scrap paper, as Wiese has done elsewhere in the studio. For these prints, Wiese realized she could use leftover hand-shaped pieces from her previous sculptural installation at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, titled A Great Migration.
To me, the hands looked like gloves displaying the artwork, playful and proud.
At the other end of the barn, a pair of sandhill cranes soared through a sky of cyanotyped kraft paper, indigo-dyed fabric, cardboard, denim, and cotton. They joined the wing feathers of fellow cranes for Wiese’s piece Flying Birds. The patterns in the background were quilt-like, evoking histories of Black women artists using the textile form to record memories for generations to come.
When sandhill cranes stop in Nebraska during their annual migrations, they dip their beaks in the iron-rich mud of the region and preen their feathers, painting their feathers in rusty hues. It might be a way of fitting in with their surroundings. It could also be a form of play or beauty-making.
Wiese hasn’t seen the cranes at their annual Nebraska rest stop in over twenty years, but she hopes to visit them again soon. She has a lot to share with them, it seems.
