I Read The News Today—Oh, Boy!

Art and the news are far apart and in separate sections of the newspaper. They appeal to different people or to different parts of the same person. Analytical writing and art work are (maybe) from a different part of the brain. While art and news are separated in many ways, Ronna Leon, poet laureate of Benicia, hatched the idea of bringing them together in a unique way. Pairing 14 pairs of visual artists with poets, she asked each pair to choose a news article and respond to it in a creative way.

While participating artists come from throughout the Bay Area and beyond—one is from Rome and one from Tehran—many are from Benicia. Local teams include Joel Fallon and Nikki Basch-Davis; Joseph Martino and Mike Kendall; Sandra Lee Stillwell and Katya Madrid; and Donna Rudolph and Carol Dalton. I’m also in the show along with Thomas Stanton and Freddy Camargo.

“I feel as though I’m following something that John Lennon started, 40-plus years ago by making an artistic comment about something in the paper,” Martino said.

When I was notified of my inclusion in this show, I wondered why I had submitted an application. I felt inadequate to the task. (Contradictory, I know. I pondered this over coffee.) My experience with the League of Women Voters was one of the reasons I’d been selected, but that work is more analytical. I can’t really separate the parts of myself neatly. Issues that reach me at the gut level are the ones I’ve worked on the most for the League—women’s issues, the military industrial complex, and campaign financing because I think the amount of spending on political campaigns is, well, morbidly obese.

I was teamed with a print maker from San Francisco who is an environmentalist with a particular interest in birds. She visits a nature preserve regularly. We met
several times. I sent her early “scratchings” of ideas, some of which she responded to. Eventually we came up with our artistic responses to a specific article, though the work really responds to the impact of the military-industrial complex on everything else. An auxiliary folder refers to additional sources artists used. I wish everyone would read “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.” in the January/February 2011 issue of The Atlantic magazine: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342.

The show opens today and runs through July 29. Some special events take place during the exhibit: the opening reception June 30 from 7-9 p.m., a symposium from 2-4 p.m. July 16, and a poetry reading July 28 from 7-9 p.m.