Drowning People - Touchstone Batiks

 I'm at  Touchstone Center for Crafts freezing my ass of in Western Pennsylvania taking African Batik class with Gasali Adeyemo.  I got a scholarship for this workshop that covered tuition but not room and board.  I'm in a wooden structure without heat. It's charming but again I'm a SoCal girl and I'm freezing.

 I was awarded a 1 month residency at Kala today.  I'm really proud of myself.  Maybe I'm a good artist.

I made these swirls for waves in Key West and they ended up linking up all my work around the Henrietta Marie.

At Touchstone yesterday, I thought I'd Batik some of them.  You can see my control is not that great but maybe there's some charm to being out of control.  Who knows.  The idea was to make the fabric to use in the quilt later.

I had made this digital collage from scanned images in Key West.  It's the crew of the Henrietta Marie drowning.

All the images are hand painted and them assembled in photoshop.  These are pictures from my work I made in Key West.

These are the batiks I've made so far with the same concept as the work from Key West yesterday at Touchstone.  I might embroider on top of it.  Maybe not.

This one I think is good as is. It would be great to have some good pieces to enter in that San Ramon call for a one person show.

I started to work on one with the boat at the top and drowning black people in the sea to represent Middle Passage. I got

Fort Taylor (built by enslaved africans (but noone wants to talk about it) - Key West

It was built by enslaved people of African descent but there was no mentioned of that on the 75 minute tour I took.

"It is not uncommon for Key West to deny past racism by reciting the claim that Key West was part of the Union during the Civil War. While it is true that Union forces took control of Fort Zachary Taylor and Fort Jefferson, the allegiance of Key West’s citizens at the time is debatable.

The fact that slaves, owned by prominent citizens of Key West who leased them to engineers of the U.S. Government for personal profit, built Fort Zachary Taylor and Fort Jefferson is not debatable." 

https://keysweekly.com/42/slavery-at-fort-taylor-fort-jefferson/ 

Key West’s slavery and emancipation story is quite different from those of other parts of Florida or the U.S. From the first American settlement in 1822, slavery was a part of Florida Keys culture, and by 1860, of 2,913 people at Key West, 451 of them were enslaved.[1] But, as the islands were too small to support large-scale agriculture, the Florida Keys never developed a plantation economy. Instead, the enslaved were often forced to work as domestic servants or as workers in the salt manufacturing business. But surprisingly, the largest single employer of slave labor in the Keys was the U.S. government, which utilized forced labor in the construction of Fort Taylor on Key West and Fort Jefferson at the Dry Tortugas.[2] For many years, Key West slaveowners rented their people to the Army Corps of Engineers to help build the large masonry structures.

https://www.keyslibraries.org/post/island-chronicles-vol-8 

Sankofa Designs - Key West

 

Henrietta Marie - Bell - Studios of Key West

Working on a design from the bell from the ship used in the transatlantic slave trade named the Henrietta Marie that sunk off of Key West. 

Michael Cottman wrote, "This bell would be the clue that would lead researchers to a horrible past of pain and unconscionable acts inflicted on men, women, and children in unprecedented numbers. These crimes were so brutal that strong men, their chests tight from fear, would prefer to jump over the sides of slave ships to a certain death rather than endure another day on board."

 

Work Clothes Quilt

 I was really inspired to make a piece based on the Work Clothes Quilt I saw at the Indigo Exhibit in San Diego.

Indigo Exhibit Explanation Card

Indigo Exhibit Quilt

Yesterday I painted a bunch of watercolor swatches and used salt, bleach, rubbing alcohol and spattering to make different textures.

Here they are hanging in my studio in Key West.

Here's the quilt design assembled on Photoshop