patricia turner art
This past summer I lived for more than a month in the city of Cuenca which is a gorgeous UNESCO World Heritage site in southern Ecuador, a country roughly the same geographical and population size as Florida. Nearly a million and a half Venezuelan refugees have traveled through Ecuador since 2015; hundreds of thousands have remained, a third of them in Cuenca. They are housed in the many churches, they are fed by the government and by local NGO’s, and they are generally very well accepted by the Cuencanos. Even the taxi drivers with whom I often spoke (taxi drivers being notorious for complaining) accepted the reality that these refugees were not there to threaten, to frighten, or to rob; nor to take anything other than what they needed from the government and from the kindness of strangers in order to minimally survive. They were not there by choice; they were fleeing impossible circumstances that threatened themselves and their families. In exchange for their permission to photograph, I purchased their worthless Bolivars (currency), their candy and trinkets, and paid to listen to their wonderful street music.
I cannot help but compare the open arms attitude of Ecuador to those asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador who wish to escape the horrors of their countries to come to our vastly resource-rich, geographically huge, and historically migrant United States of America.
"Wounds the Size of Oranges"
has been awarded
FIRST PLACE
by Juror Nathan Beard at Art Center Sarasota.
"This work contains all the elements of art, put together quite powerfully. The composition comes out at you ; it is at first deceptively soft and passive and then becomes a powerful statement that is confrontational and active without being violent. Two children look at each other .....but what is obviously missing is an adult."
We, the viewers, are the adults.
"Primary Suffragists, Secondary Recognition"
Grand Central Library, Manhatten, New York City
GRAND VISIONS: WE ARE HERE
Exhibit: March 1 to May 29
Reception March 14, 2020
REECE MUSEUM
Johnson City, Tennessee
"FL3TCH3R Exhibit:
Social and Politically Engaged Art"
Juror Sue Coe
Social justice artist and illustrator
The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone,
The Progressive, The Nation, Art News
Lifetime Achievement Award, Women's Caucus for Art
"ALL GOOD ART IS POLITICAL"
62 artists chosen from around the world
82 pieces (I have two in the exhibit)
Exhibit dates
September 30 - December 13, 2019
Juror 's Artist Talk 5-6 pm Reece Museum November 7, 2019
Reception and Awards 6-8 pm Reece Museum November 7, 2019
"FLORIDA'S FLOODED FUTURE: REDUX"
TURF WARS Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center
until November 26, 2019
featured in November 2019 SW FL
Happenings Magazine
“Their exit wounds were the size of oranges”.
The size of oranges.
Emergency room doctors describe their horror and helplessness when addressing the immense damage done to our children by the bullets from an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon, damage that is impossible to treat successfully. First responders are unable to stem the rivers of blood, doctors are unable to repair the massive tissue and organ disintegration. The shooter does not even have to make the effort to aim, once his target is hit it is a virtual death sentence. An ER physician says “They had no fighting chance at life”.
How does an artist convey her visceral reaction to this horrific imagery? And how does she plead with responsible gun owners to end this nightmare of private ownership of weapons designed for war, to end the death grip of the NRA?
I wish I knew.
#NEVERAGAIN
Recipient of the
AWARD OF EXCELLENCE from juror Sue Coe
(secondary to Best of Show)
Reece Museum, Johnson City, Tennessee
FL3TCH3R Exhibit: Socially and Politically Engaged Art
"STOP THE BLEED: Kit Recommended"
Reece Museum, Johnson City TN
"Healthcare And the Arts " Award
November, 2018
" Wounds the Size of Oranges"
Foosaner Museum, Melbourne, FL
March 27 - May 23
Reception March 27, 6 - 8 Awards Dinner March 28 Florida Artists Group (FLAG) 70th Annual Symposium and Exhibit
Patricia Anderson Turner has been juried into the women artists' association based in New York City,
The National Association of Women's Artists, Inc. NAWA has been continuously active for 130 years.
Turner's piece, "STOP THE BLEED KIT (recommended)" will be exhibited at the NAWA Gallery in New York City for the month of November.
"The National Association of Women Artists (NAWA), the oldest women’s fine art organization in the country, is a vibrant community of professional women artists that strives to support its members and women artists at large through exhibitions, programs and education."
www.thenawa.org
The New Member Induction Ceremony will be held at The Rubin Museum, also in NYC, on November 14.
https://rubinmuseum.org
"ASYLUM SEEKERS: Ecuador vs USA" 50 x 40 x 6" deep: silks, reworked plastic vegetable fencing
Webber Gallery in Ocala, Florida, for the mixed media Florida Artists Group exhibit
"Laura Got Lynched From the Bridge"
52 x 28 x 12
Laura Nelson, along with her son, L.D., were arrested after an incident involving a stolen cow, an incident that escalated. After their arrest, an enraged mob of over forty white men broke them out of jail and lynched them from a bridge over the North Carolina River near Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911. Both were repeatedly raped prior to the lynching. The son was photographed lynched from the bridge with his pants hanging around his feet. Laura’s son was 12 years old.
Laura’s and her son’s photographs are the only ones we have today of a lynched woman and child although nearly all lynchings of the estimated 4,000 black men and over 200 women and children were photographed and printed as postcards. These postcards were sent around our fair country .....to the friends and relatives of the rapists and murderers and from the townspeople, ….as was customary after a lynching. One mob member and Klansman was named Charley Guthrie. Charley is the father of Woody Guthrie and the grandfather of Arlo Guthrie. (Ironically, Woody’s “This Land is your Land” and Arlo’s “City of New Orleans” are two of my all time favorite patriotic folk songs.)
In the one remaining black and white photo of this travesty of a woman and her child being lynched I could make out the difference in hues of the polka dots on the fabric she used to make her dress. As a textile artist, I recreated them individually in her honor. She also, as I could discern from the photo, made slippers or shoe tops to match her dress.
I think that was the final spear piercing my already broken heart.