Uncle Paulie's World to Be Replaced by Tombolo Art Media

Uncle Paulie's World and
Tombolo Art Media Founder
Paul Niemi

A colleague of mine and I recently made the joke that "Tombolo" sounds likes someone's hot, Italian boyfriend. In actuality, a tombolo is a piece of land that connects a sandbar with the mainland. 

There are millions of sites on the Internet.  Many provide the latest in entertainment news that everyone is covering.  Some do art and design. Some do theatre. Many do books. Only a handful blend them all, but they forget to cover the underdog with the assumption there is no audience for them. I'm not certain how most people feel about flipping the TV channel, turning the magazine page, and scrolling to the next post on Facebook only to find unoriginal content that everyone has already shared.  I find it boring and it leaves me wanting to read something more meaningful.

As a highly creative person,  I'm interested in offering up stories that are thoughtful, informative and focus on subjects that you might not find in top media outlets because commerce dictates their content. That means if I don't write them, no one will.  My goal is to build awareness of that emerging Native American fine artist, that well-known regional contemporary mixed media artist, that street muralist from Brooklyn, that new author, or that fabulous performer who is someone everyone needs to meet.

That's why I created TomboloArt Media. Tombolo Art Media will connect people with art, design, music, theatre and literature in a way that's not intimidating.  My audience will be my favorite person--the average one!  Tombolo Art Media is a place for you to enrich your life by learning something you didn't know and hopefully, you'll pass it on.  This is a site for people to come closer to the arts and to explore who we all are, together.  (PLEASE NOTE:  Tombolo Art Media is available at www.TomboloArtMedia.com as well as at http://TomboloArtMedia.Wordpress.com.)

So, here's a big shout out to all those people around the world who have helped give Uncle Paulie's World arts and culture blog life.  When it started in 2008, I had no idea what it would become. My life was so blessed when I found my voice, art and the audience that believed in me.  Well, nearly 6 years later, my niece (who inspired the name) is all grown up.  I have grown up, too, in my own way.  It's time to change the name, get a true URL, and move forward keeping the same Uncle Paulie's World heart, but adding a sharp new look on a cleaner, more user-friendly platform.   Tombolo Art Media will be launching this month, and I'm hopeful that you will stay strapped in with me and embark on this new but familiar journey. There is still so much bridge-building to do in the arts, so let's 'Tombolo!'

Vincent Valdez's 'The Strangest Fruit' Takes on a Century of Latino Lynching in the U.S.

Vincent Valdez, Untitled

From The Strangest Fruit, 2013

Oil on canvas, 55" x 92"

In the United States, for most of us, the concept of lynching seems so far removed from our day- to-day experiences. After all, we have come so far from the barbaric days of the past, right? Wrong. That racism is merely transmitted in other ways through subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, aspects of our modern-day lifestyles. For certain, we are not a country made up of thoughtful people who like to remember the past as it was and learn from our mistakes.

Historically, we know all too well the atrocities that African-Americans have tragically endured as a matter of course in this country. And who could forget the 1915 abduction and hanging of  New York Jewish-American Leo Frank by anti-Semites in Georgia? This happened even after he was found not guilty of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, one of the young factory girls who worked for him. Jason Robert Brown based the stirring Broadway musical Parade on his story that brought his experience to the mainstream consciousness years after the fact.  

Did you know that Latinos were hanged in the United States, more specifically Texas, up until the Mid-20th Century? This is one of our country's dirtiest secrets.  As a result of the media and mainstream American society remaining tight lipped about the lynchings that began in the mid-1800s, few people know about them. While buried, these acts became part of written Latino history by way of community leaflets as well as traditional ballads called "corridos."

Vincent Valdez, Untitled

From The Strangest Fruit, 2013

Oil on canvas, 55" x 92"

The victims of these hangings may not have a musical telling their story coming to town anytime soon,  but they are getting an art exhibition that pays somber homage to the horrors they suffered. "The Strangest Fruit," opening on October 19 at Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery at the List Art Center is the brainchild of San Antonio-born and Rhode Island School of Design-educated painter and muralist Vincent Valdez.  Known for his metaphorical realism, Valdez has created an installation that metaphorically equates the unwritten deadly treatment of Latinos in the past with the oppression and persecution their descendants feel today in modern-day America. All of the exhibition paintings feature images of people with whom Valdez has a personal relationship. And while the ropes aren't there, he has strategically depicted his subjects in positions that hint at the throes and aftermath of a death by hanging. "Slightly larger than life-size, the figures float, decontextualized on a white background," says Valdez. "The compositions become an ambiguous scene between hanging and ascension."

According to curators at the David Winton Bell Art Gallery, Valdez, at the far end of the gallery "presents an adapted version of the poem 'Strange Fruit' by Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allan) written and performed in the mid-to-late 1930s as a protest song that exposed racism and the lynching of African Americans in the United States, capturing popular imagination through recordings by singers such as Billie Holiday. The text stands as an transcribed 'corrido'....inscribing the history of Latino lynching onto the wall of the gallery. The last line '…here is a strange and bitter crop' echoes amongst the pained and contorted figures, presenting them as subjective evidence of ongoing social and cultural oppression."

"The Strangest Fruit" runs through December 8.  The Gallery will present a symposium on Friday, October 18 from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the List Art Center Auditorium, followed by an opening reception at 6:30 p.m.  For more information, visit http://www.brown.edu/bellgallery.

 

 

 

 

 

'War Baby/Love Child' Exploring the Mixed-Race Asian American Experience Opens at DePaul University Art Museum

 

Art is "messy and complicated, just like life and issues of race," says visual artist and art professor Laura Kina.  Kina has teamed up with San Francisco State Asian American Studies professor Wei Ming Dariotis for the literary/art combo War Baby/ Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.  While the book, published by the University of Washington, came out back in December, an exciting new exhibit opens today at Chicago's DePaul University that extends the publication's discourse into something tangible, yet not a total mirrored image of its literary counterpart.

 

War Baby/Love Child can be a difficult book to fully understand since cultural dynamics and history are very complex, especially if you know nothing about the mixed-heritage Asian experience in the United States.  Nonetheless, it is an opportunity to open your eyes to a whole new world. My multiculturalism lexicon includes Latinos and Native Americans.  I willingly admit I knew very little about the subject until I made contact with artist and activist Louie Gong, who is of Native American (Nooksack), Chinese, and Anglo descent.  Both he and Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez and Korean), an artist who's part of my New Mexico circle of friends, piqued my interest in the subject of mixed race by their involvement in the project.

 

Live Long and Prosper (Spock was a Half-Breed)
by Debra Yepa-Pappan (Korean/Jemez Pueblo)

The book is a perfect example of the chicken coming before the egg.  In 2008, its two editors met at a multiracial movement retreat in San Francisco.  The timing was perfect.  President Obama had been elected and the "post-racial rhetoric was also at a peek," as Laura Kina says.

 

"The mainstream media and even many voices within academia were saying we were supposed to be beyond race but of course that didn’t match up with many of our lived realities. We knew race still mattered."

 

What resulted from the meeting was a collaboration that yielded a proposal for an art exhibition broaching the subject of the mixed-race Asian American experience from the perspective of  the artist.  Kina is of  Okinawan (Hawaii) and Spanish-Basque/French, English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch, while Dariotis' family is from the south, Tennessee and Texas, and California.

 

Some of the book was inspired by Kina's curiosity about how other mixed race Asians Americans across the U.S. were navigating issues of identity in a contemporary art world that had been dominated by a post-racial discourse.  She knew what was happening in her studio, but was interested to know what others' work looked like.   It was meant as a vehicle to become knowledgeable about the "mixed experience and history beyond the Asian/white discourse and beyond an 'exceptional' identity politics. What is our history?"

 

What makes the book engaging is the fact that it is split up into a series of Q & A's with 19 emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists.  Kina and Dariotis intersperse artwork that supports the narrative.  In addition to the interviews, the editors have included wonderful scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai‘i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures. Ultimately, the goal of the project was to map and contextualize the artists' individual narratives against larger transnational histories. After all, "it’s not just some accident that all of our parents happened to meet," says Kina.

 

"WarBaby/Love Child" the art exhibition opens tonight at the DePaul University Art Museum.  Why an art exhibit?  "Art is a great tool for telling stories," Kina says. 
 

"Sometimes we just see a fractured scene or glimpse into a larger world or we might see multiple times and spaces collapsed into a single image. Art can transcend language, speak to the spirit, the soul, affect…the possibilities are really endless."

 

Kina hopes that all people leave the exhibition understanding that they own this history as well.    
 

"I think too often we want to put histories in neat boxes… maybe we are lazy or just not so interested in things that we think don’t pertain to ourselves. So, if there is one take-away, I hope the 'average person' can walk away with a more complicated understanding that all this border crossing and mixing it up we are talking about is not a peripheral history, but rather an important lens through which to view U.S. history, contemporary art...,"  Kina notes.  She is hopeful it lends itself to expanding what is "Asian-American history."

 

"War Baby/Love Child" the art exhibition opens tonight at the DePaul University Art Museum with a reception and members preview from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. with a public opening from 6 p.m. to  8 p.m.  The show will be on exhibition through June 30, 2013 before traveling to Seattle's Wing Luke Museum of the Asian PacificAmerican Experience from August 9th through January 19, 2014.

In Bellingham, Washington, the book is available at Village Books in Fairhaven.

You can also get it on Amazon.com.

Cheech Marin Brings a Bit of the Barrio to Bellingham with "Chicanitas {Size Doesn't Matter}"

It's seldom that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities come your way, especially in a wonderfully small town like Bellingham, Washington.  Last Friday evening, I was invited to attend the member preview of Chicanitas: Small Paintings from the Cheech Marin Collection {Size Doesn't Matter} at the Whatcom Museum's Lightcatcher building. Cheech Marin is, of course, the star of the now legendary film Born in East L.A. and an accomplished actor, director and performer.

After an incredible evening of Mexican food, libations, music, and fabulous art, I had the opportunity to do a brief one-on-one interview with the guest of honor himself for KGMI News Talk 790 AM for which I am also a news writer and reporter. 

Chicanitas features some 65 paintings by 26 Mexican-American artists from Los Angeles, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and beyond.  The show is making its rounds across the United States with Bellingham its first stop of four engagements it will make in 2013.  The pieces in this show are part of a larger collection that has been seen at the Smithsonian and museums around the country.  Since nearly 17% of the U.S. population was Latino in 2011, Marin is hopeful that the exhibit will open the general public's eyes to the Chicano experience and help it embrace the huge cultural shift our country has seen in the last three decades.

As a Spanish speaker and a lover of Chicano and Latino music, literature and art, the evening was like having the Universe align and give you everything you wish for...in addition to some humor that made me laugh my arse off!

Listen to my interview, get the background on Chicanitas directly from Cheech and see images from the preview party HERE:

For more information on the show, visit http://www.whatcommuseum.org/galleries/upcoming/410-chicanitas-small-paintings-from-the-cheech-marin-collection.