Search

Search Icon

Suggestions: video, installation art, audio

Search Icon

Search

Browse Icon

Browse Collection

About Icon

More about this

Item description
A mixed-media woodcut and vellum marker collage. The background is a woodcut of a thistle plant with spiky round flowers and sharp leaves. Drawn overtop of it are two blue cancer molecules and two red and gray COVID germ molecules. Collaged overtop throughout the piece are the dictionary definitions for the words thistle, disease, cancer, panic, and racism.
Image 1970

Retablos of Resistance 2

Pamela Harris Lawton

Eight artist friends and I collaborated on an artist's book project to capture our thoughts and experiences with the year 2020--which included our responses to multiple crises that year from COVID-19, to racial unrest and the presidential election. All of the images here were created as part of that project. The book I created, "Retablos of Resistance" (Lawton-cover and Lawton-8) was inspired by Mexican retablos and ex-votos, small devotional altars and paintings commemorating saints and/or stories of traumatic events. Retablos are small altar-like forms typically found in churches and homes. Ex-votos are small paintings on tin that depict a tragedy or someone with a grave illness/injury; a saint or martyr that intervened to 'save the day'; an inscription describing the tragic event and giving thanks for the divine intervention. In thinking about the year 2020 and similar events from the past--a continuous cycle of injustice, hardship, disease, and devastation--resistance has been the key to surviving and thriving. The concept of retablos and ex-votos fit well with visualizing the events of 2020. "Be the Coffee" is a self-portrait I created during the pandemic centered around a fable about a mother's advice to her daughter using coffee as a metaphor. This fable spoke to how I felt I needed to think and behave to survive the multiple crises that comprised the year 2020.