Blogging Mary Bowser

Years ago, a guy I met in an elevator asked me What determines the value of art?

I should mention that the elevator was in a building full of Chelsea art galleries, the guy was wearing a uniform from a delivery service, and my guess is he'd just happened by some piece of art that was selling for more than he made in a year.

Let's face it: art can seem intimidating to a lot of people.

So when I was asked to do a talk at Portland Art Museum, I picked a piece I really love. I thought about how to connect it to my writing. And then I set out to get the audience as excited as I was about it.


How would you describe what you see? I asked, as we stood before Marie Watt's mixed media sculpture. Here's what they told me.

We talked about blankets. How they hold memories. How they carry the impression of our bodies. How the "living blankets" (as someone dubbed the actual woolen blankets in the piece) contrast with the the bronzed blankets: soft versus hard, warm versus cold, malleable versus fixed metal. Blankets are what hold babies, or dead bodies. They give us security (hello, Linus Van Pelt) and warmth. They connote the inside of a home--or they are what we see outside, when we pass the place where someone homeless sleeps.

We talked about what it meant to see blankets, woolen or bronze, arranged this way. It's whimsical one person said. It's menacing to have a tower like that, when it feels like those blankets in the middle could slip or get yanked and send the whole thing tumbling down someone else said. Apparently, beauty is not the only thing that's in the eye of the beholder. One person commented that the stack of blankets reminded them of the World War II concentration camps, because of photographs of the piles of shoes of camp prisoners. I think some people thought the comparison was a little shocking and far-fetched, but afterwards someone sent me an article about how Marie Watt actually made a sculpture that included a blanket from a World War II concentration camp.

The blankets in this piece are from very different sources. One of them is a family hand-me-down from someone Marie knows; the family wanted it commemorated in one of her pieces. The others are from a thrift store. When the piece was first put up in the art museum, one of the docents stopped in front of it and announced That's my blanket! I gave it to Goodwill because it had that stain on it! (like the article, that anecdote is something someone shared with me after the talk).

Marie titled the piece Almanac (Glacier Park, Granny Beebe, Satin Ledger), so we talked about almanacs and ledgers and how the future is predicted and the past recorded. We talked about the reclaimed cedar in the base--why the curatorial tag specified the type of wood and that it was reclaimed and how that shaped the way we thought about the sculpture. Marie is part Native American, and that also shaped what people thought about the piece, conjuring up everything from ceremonial blankets to smallpox blankets.

I was pretty pleased that the audience's reflections touched on what first attracted me to this sculpture, and what always makes me stop and spend time with it when I'm in the museum. It combines the cast off and the commemorated, and it recasts the familiar/domestic of the blankets in a new way. The found blankets and wood have their own stories, but the artist brings them together in a way that creates something new, something that has a different meaning and gets the audience to see the seemingly familiar in new ways.

The museum advertises these talks as a "discussion about works of art and how they reveal something about each presenter’s artistic practice." So after the audience and I shared this splendid close reading of the sculpture, I read a scene from my novel. In the same way that Marie uses found objects in her art, I use found facts in my writing. The big found fact is that Mary Bowser was born a slave, was freed and educated in the North, and chose to become a spy for the Union by pretending to be a slave in the Confederate White House. But all through the book, scenes and dialogue and characters are spun around other found facts.

For example, Richmond, Virginia, was an industrialized urban center, where many adult male slaves worked as skilled laborers in factories, foundries, and other businesses. Often, those slaves would live separate from their owners, and they might be given a certain sum of money to pay their rent and board. These slaves had opportunities to move around the city when they weren't laboring. But they were still slaves--with the same lack of legal control over their lives and their families as slaves on a plantation. This fact stretches our ideas about slavery and freedom. And so as a writer, it's incredibly compelling to me.

It's one thing to write about this fact in a historical article. But when it came to the novel, I used the fact very differently.

In the fictional world I create, Mary's father is an enslaved blacksmith. He saves small amounts from the money his owner gives him for room and board so that he can buy Mary little presents, which they call "just-because." One of those just-because gifts is an orange ribbon, and when Mary gets it, it sets off a series of events in which she learns to sew, learns the cost of vanity, and ultimately learns just what the difference is between slave and free (let's just say getting your own oragne ribbon doesn't mean much when someone else owns you). After I read the scene, the audience got a chance to talk about similarities in weaving found objects into a sculpture and found facts into fiction. We discussed how the ribbon, like the "living blankets," becomes an emotional as well as a physical touch-point in the piece. How appealing to visual and tactile senses draws the reader into the sculpture and into the scene.

Then we went downstairs for some happy hour refreshments. And we talked more, about art and literature. One of the people who came to the talk showed a small sculpture of Marie Watt's that she owns; she was a little sheepish about sneaking art *into* the museum, but apparently the staff doesn't object to that nearly as much as they would if you try to sneak art *out* of the museum.

I kind of wish the guy from the elevator could have been there. We didn't talk about how much it costs to buy a sculpture, but just about every comment someone made about how they responded to Marie's work, and to mine, helped answer the question about the value of art.

(You can see more pictures of *Almanac* and the talk on Facebook)