New Legacy Project Part 4: Artist in the Schools
“June is bustin’ out all over,” sang Nettie Fowler in Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical, Carousel. Lots has happened since June 1: two exhibits of my work opened in Ashland, and I finished an “artist-in-the-schools” project with a class of 30 developmental biology students at Southern Oregon University, which brings me full circle to what I was doing fifty years ago as an Artist in the Schools through Ruth Asawa’s groundbreaking Alvarado Arts Workshop. At that time, I worked with San Francisco public school students painting murals, making masks, sewing banners, and creating elaborate scarecrows for community gardens.
History of California Mural, on canvas panels, 10’ high by 30’ long, created by students at Bessie Carmichael Elementary School, San Francisco, 1976. installed in the employee cafeteria of the Crocker Bank Data Processing Center’s employees cafeteria. Co-artist Aiko Cuneo.
Protective Garden Deity (AKA scarecrow) made by students at Galileo High School for their new community garden in 1975. Made with scrap materials: remnants of commercial quilts, stuffed cloth beads, copper breastplate, ceramic head and hands. NOTE: This public figure was never vandalized.
Today, I am writing from San Francisco —my hometown from 1955 to 2004. Yesterday I visited Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa’s daughter and fine artist in her own right who continues to do art in the schools. Together we went through my collection of photographs, sketches, newspaper clippings and journal entries about the art projects and artists in the Alvarado Arts Workshop (1972-4) and then later in the C.E.T.A. (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) program (1975-1976) funded by the US Depart of Labor and administered through the San Francisco Art Commission. My intention in making this trip to San Francisco was to hand over to Aiko my collection for the Ruth Asawa Archive housed at Stanford University. It is just 7 months ago that I traveled to Rome and Cuneo in Italy to donate my drawings and costume sketches from two Italian films to the two archives that wanted them. Shall I make the obvious explicit? This time of my life is one of letting go of my stuff, of giving it away to those who may benefit from it in the future.
Detail of the Mexican Ceremonial Masks exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences, 1976. The C.E.T.A. program expanded the field for artists to work in. Public institutions, like museums, public housing projects and community centers, were all places where artists, musicians, actors, poets and gardeners could bring their gifts and be paid an extremely modest income.
Shoshanah and Ruth at the opening of the Mexican Ceremonial Masks exhibition.
Ruth was my role model for how to be an artist. She excelled in her craft, had a highly refined aesthetic, and was a visionary with a social conscience. It was Ruth who advocated for providing everyone with the valuable experience of creating art. She worked to create the social infrastructure that actually PAID San Francisco’s creative artists to go into the public schools and create WITH the children. At that time, Ruth was a fairly well-known artist and beloved art educator and activist. The fame that her name enjoys today did not arrive until 2006, when she was 80 years old [!] and the De Young museum presented the first complete retrospective of her work. It took a long time for curators and scholars to begin recognizing her contribution to post-modern American art.
Her son Paul described Ruth perhaps best when he said to me after her death, “My mother was a goddess.” Well, if not an actual goddess, she was certainly a Bodhisattva. In April of 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will give her a huge lifetime retrospective, and I plan to travel back to SF to be present at the opening.