By Sarah Fuller
The idea of this essay is to present some of the “good news” that shows, like a little candle, in a dark time. It’s hard to do even this as the pandemic still rages, the conditions of racial inequality that provoked mass protests in the past months are still in place, California temperatures soared to record heights as the climate emergency becomes more tangible and irreversible, and, relatedly, unprecedented fires burned in Oregon, Washington and California. The assignment is to look for the “good news,” and my thought was to look at that through art. Images on canvas and paper can seem foolish in a world on fire, and yet I will undertake the assignment.
It is truly not the best of times. And, as a friend reminded me recently as she handed out face masks and hand sanitizer to homeless people in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, times are worse for some than others.
I worked at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen on Skid Row, the Hippie Kitchen, for five years. I’ve been thinking about an artist who dined regularly at the Hippie Kitchen before Covid-19. He tried to sleep at night on an out-of-the-way patch of sidewalk and he carried all of his belongings around with him during the day in a wire laundry cart. He had a plastic envelope full of beautiful colored pencil drawings that he would show if asked. His most recent project that I know about was a depiction of the Annunciation, with a young Virgin Mary being visited by the angel Gabriel– shown in the illustration in wild, Biblical fashion, in the style of Ezekiel’s vision. He described his work process, which involved carting all of his possessions to the Central Public Library, setting out his art materials at a desk, and laboriously packing everything up every time he needed to use the restroom or do something else, so that none of his belongings would get stolen. The Central Library has been closed throughout the pandemic due to Covid-19 safety concerns, as has been the soup kitchen’s dine-in area. I didn’t see this artist for many months and wondered how he was doing, what conditions for life and survival he faced, let alone for producing art.
In Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s 2020 book, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. In the Sixties, the authors devote a chapter to artist Corita Kent, her art, her community, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and their struggle to engage positively and politically in the world in the face of conservative backlash from the local church hierarchy. Corita Kent was “L.A.’s most famous artist in the 1960’s,” say the authors. Corita’s work became increasingly political as she committed to engaging with the tumultuous events of the sixties– the Watts Rebellion, the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Eventually, her order’s commitment to implementing Vatican II reforms led to a break with the religious hierarchy under Cardinal McIntyre and the formation of a new community, the Immaculate Heart Community. Corita Kent left the order in 1968, and continued her work as an artist.
The Los Angeles Catholic Worker has been gifted with art over the years, and is in its own way rich in art. The soup kitchen is something of a jewel-box, with bright murals and colorful ceramic mosaics and tiles. The beauty of this art can be enjoyed by the hundreds of folks who come by to dine (during non-Covid times) on the premises. In the Catholic Worker’s community house, there is a print made by Corita Kent in 1959. It is a serigraph printed in two colors: a black dynamic shape, reminiscent of a powerful rush of water, interacts with red-printed text. The text reads “who cleft the red sea asunder for his mercy is everlasting.” The text is a quote from Psalm 136, in which the psalmist remembers all of the ways in which God has rescued God’s people from their enemies, and has created and taken care of the world. The refrain in the psalm is, “His love/mercy endures forever.”
Sarah Fuller
Art seems like a feeble ally in a world of such suffering, and a moment of crisis– something found in the thinner section of Maslow’s famous pyramid. And yet, when so many of our current problems– compounded by our multifarious reactions to them– arise from human ideological troubles, art’s unique pastoral qualities are not without merit. The poetry, insight and honesty of the Psalms are a comfort, a promise and a warning. The beautiful, sincere, socially and spiritually conscious works of John August Swanson are also to be found at the Catholic Worker house, portals and reminders of the stories and values that undergird the work—his image of St. Francis on the community house’s wall, among others. Ade Bethune, one of the original artists of the Catholic Worker movement, though characterized as a person of “extreme shyness” (in John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s biography, “Dorothy Day”), found a way to communicate her spiritual and social sensibility to readers of the New York newspaper through her dignified woodcuts of saints and workers (and, often, saints as workers). And in the protests of 2020, statues symbolizing hatred and control are covered in exuberant graffiti denouncing their origins and assumptions.
New York in the 1930’s, Los Angeles in the 1960’s and in the current moment, all are sites of great trouble and upheaval. Polarization, violence, fear, hatred of the poor, resentment of the downtrodden and discriminated against working honestly and openly to address injustice, malicious lies, powerful people looking after their own interests—these are ancient problems, and yet ever new and urgent. A beauty of art as honesty is that it can slip past defenses– assumptions people have about each other, an invitation to consider an officially-held but unofficially-ignored value (religious, personal) in a new way, a reminder of the world of meaning, myth and history that creates our concrete actions, a reminder of the shared humanity of people we are manipulated to fear. In a world built on alienating polemics, and concomitant defenses, art comes at you sideways.
I hope that the artist I met at the soup kitchen is doing all right, in the face of the heat, the fires, the smoke, the pandemic, the lack of affordable housing and increase in homelessness in L.A., and the callousness and violence of many housed Angelinos towards the unhoused. I hope that God, who cleft the Red Sea asunder to deliver his people in trouble, delivers those in trouble soon. I hope I remember St. Joseph as an essential worker, in construction, and St. Francis looking to be a good sibling towards, and not to dominate, creation. I hope for a time when we will accept each other’s humanity and right to live and flourish at face value all the time, and won’t need to create reminders of our values and our shared humanity and stories, but will do so anyways, in celebration.
Sarah Fuller is an artist and Catholic Worker living in California.
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