June
On Motherhood and Creativity
by Nicole Martinez
This month’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
The feminist author Sallie Bingham wrote that “A life without children is, I feel, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes demands that consume energy as well as imagination and time.” There is no question that, once a woman has borne a child, her mind and body at once split in two: There is her body and the piece of her body that now walks autonomously in the world, in need of devotion and attention. For artist-mothers, that sensation is one that brings endless creative fodder and a heightened awareness of their own limitations.
Making time and space for artist-mothers, then, becomes a necessary antidote to help unleash such potential; at Fountainhead’s Time for You residency, artist-mothers Natalie Ball, Angela Davis Johnson, and Shizu Saldamando were brought to Miami to make, process, or simply reflect, and be in communion with others who uniquely understand their position.
The painter Angela Davis Johnson is ‘hotfooted,’ a term rooted in Black vernacular to describe the persistent call to move. Like the ancestors of her diaspora—who migrated from place to place, by force and also in search of a better life—Davis Johnson sojourns throughout the country, making surrealist work that grapples with what it means to belong. Migration and care fuel her artistic practice. Led by intuition and freedom dreams, she connects geographies, histories, and experiences to her embodied work.
She listens deeply and carefully throughout each encounter with land and people, recording those memories and creating paintings, textile, sound, and performance-based works. Her work is both an act of self-care and ancestral regeneration, as she uplifts the archival and anecdotal histories she researches and gathers throughout her journey. Davis Johnson is concerned with liberation, fugitivity, and trauma release practices embedded in Black communities, as a portal through which we can rebuild and reimagine.
Recognizing her work as an opportunity for healing, her process involves studying family and historical archives as well as Black feminist literature to learn more about the impact of migration patterns, challenges, pitfalls, and victories. As she creates figures, she determines which objects might surround them as a representation of their spirit; these decisions are collaborative and always involve her subject. Completed paintings and tapestries make their way into her performances, which usually find her having a spiritual reckoning before them. Davis Johnson’s work centers the experience of mothering by honoring those who came before her.
Like Davis Johnson, Natalie Ball examines her ancestral tradition and describes her work as an exercise in self-determination. As an Afro-Indigenous woman, artist, and mother of the Klamath nation, Ball’s work considers ideas of belonging, grounded within the sordid history of the United States. From her home in Indian country in Oregon, Ball uses materials like animal skulls, blankets, quilts, clothing, hair, and grills to create assemblage sculptures. She’s interested in assigning new meanings to the materials she works with by fusing them together and creating a nuanced dialogue. The resulting works are designed to implicate viewers in the colonization of the United States, employing a sense of humor and wit within the work. She views her role as an artist as one of both resistance and community building, holding space for her tribe members and anyone who wants to get to know their history on a more intimate level, no matter how fraught.
Ball’s practice is research-based and autobiographical, grounded in anthropological and ethnic studies; she will usually draw out stories, parables, and archives that point to her ancestors and imagine their re-telling through her material gaze.
While Ball and Davis Johnson explore ancestry through research, Shizu Saldamando honors her history by drawing on the people and rituals that fill her daily life. Saldamando’s painting, video, and sculpture practice honors family history and explores the way art can be transformative in illustrating and releasing generational trauma. Fueled by her own history as a Japanese American–whose people were incarcerated in camps following the Second World War–Shizu’s work borrows craft traditions like paper flower-making to transform traumatic experiences into monuments of collective resilience.
Her portraits, once people she met in underground clubs or scenester gatherings, are now based on artists and friends whose work and practice she admires. She specifically chooses subjects who connect with and relate to their own familial and subcultural histories and uses portraiture embedded with craft as a way to honor and recognize them.
Saldamando also engages in communal paper flower-making, creating wreaths and floral sculptures on chain-link fences that are born of a collective practice of mourning and meditating on historical systems of incarceration and the violence therein. The flowers are generally made from different materials depending on the context, from organic plant life, traditional Japanese Chiyogami paper, or newspaper and historical documents, a radical attempt to transform incendiary media and racist legislation into beautiful, healing wreaths.
It takes a marked sense of determination to persist with one’s creative practice as your children need you more and more. Yet, the fruits of the experience of mothering are clearly apparent in the work of these women, who center care and community in their visual storytelling. In this way, Ball, Saldamando, and Davis Johnson aren’t just rearing their children; they’re nurturing a generation of artist-mothers who need such reassurance.
Natalie
Ball
Natalie Ball grew up in Portland’s historic Black neighborhood within an active Native community. Her work holds space for the intersectionality of Native and Black to exist, and move “Indian” outside of governing discourses to offer a visual genealogy that refuses to line up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. Through autoethnography, she examines internal and external discourses that shape Indigenous identities including Blood Politics and blood quantum. Her studio practice maps personal and historical landscapes and allows them to hold space for new complex narratives to exist. Humor, form, gesture, and materiality through assemblage are the tools she uses to disrupt mainstream definitions of “Indian”.
Ball believes that to have personal, community, and collective histories that reflect the complexity of Native American lives is to better understand ourselves, the nation, and necessarily our shared experiences and histories. The past is not past.
Her work invites participation in new narratives, new history, and a new manifestation for a critical way to understand America. Ball’s work can be found in collections like the Rubell Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship (2021), the Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Foundation Fellowship (2020), the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2020), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019). Ball was born in Portland, OR. She currently lives and works in Chiloquin, OR.
Clockwise from left: Ball in her studio, sewing quilt and fur into a work in progress by Celia D. Luna; A portrait of Ball by Luna; Sheriff’s Star, 2022. Neon glass, textiles, Billy Jack hats, ribbon, paint, and deer hide, courtesy of Guang Xu for Bortolami Gallery; Sling Shot, 2022. Textiles, cowhide, wood, deer hide, paint, and ribbon, courtesy of Guang Xu for Bortolami Gallery.
Angela Davis Johnson
Angela Davis Johnson creates works to reflect life from a Black femme experience. She descends from a line of healers, fighters, migrants, domestic workers, and creators who existed and labored in the South. Along with family stories, Davis Johnson explores dreaming and ancestral memory through body movement in tandem with her vibrant narrative paintings. Her portraits are formed with paint, scrap paper, hollering, humming, light, and fabric.
She is co-creator with muthi reed of Hollerin Space, an ongoing interactive collaboration. Her performances have taken place in various settings, from front porches to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her works can be found in both private and public collections. Davis Johnson, a lifelong sojourner, was born in Orlando, FL. She has roots in the Arkansas Delta and maintains her practice in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.
Clockwise from left: A hotfooted portrait of Johnson by Luna; Johnson at work in her studio at Fountainhead Residency, photographed by Celia D. Luna; Ceremonies Don’t End with the Blues, 2020. Bluing, acrylic, and paper inclusion; some of the materials that Johnson incorporates into her work.
Shizu Saldamando is interested in the way subculture functions and manifests itself through fashion and music. Visual codes are re-interpreted and remixed with new generations by re-contextualizing seemingly outdated fashion, music, and language. She views portraiture as a means to reclaim self-image and subjectivity, not only in response to the mainstream media’s flattening and one-dimensional gaze but also as a pro-active process that enables and gives agency. Utilizing wood, bed sheets, colored pencil, washi paper, and ballpoint pen in her work gives a nod to the varying contexts and situations she depicts.
Saldamando’s work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and at Charlie James Gallery, among others. She was included in “We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles,” an official collateral exhibition of the 56th annual Venice Biennale. Saldamando was born in San Francisco, CA. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Shizu Saldamando
Left: Salo with Zarape, 2022. Oil paint, glitter, washi paper, metal leaf, and decals on wood panel; Saldamando with a work in progress in her studio at Fountainhead Residency, shot by Celia D. Luna. Right: La Mercy in Palm Springs, 2022. Oil paint, metal leaf, decals, and spray paint on wood panel; Saldamando poses with Ernesto, 2022. Shot by Luna.
Ball, Deer Woman’s new Certificate-of- Indian-Blood-skin, 2021.
Ball, You Usually Bury the Head in the Woods. Trophy Head, 2021.
Ball, I almost made a Treaty Quilt, 2021. Photo credit Daniel Terna.
Davis Johnson, Canebrake songs. We didn’t want to see but it is in our bones, 2020. Oil, acrylic, paper, and fabric on unstretched canvas.
Davis Johnson, Can’t pour from an empty cup blues, 2020. Bluing, acrylic, paper, and photo copies on paper.
Davis Johnson, Somethings we keep to ourselves. Coyote song, 2020. Acrylic on unstretched canvas.
Saldamando, Maria with Palms, 2022. Ballpoint pen, thread, and sequins on cotton. Photo credit Celia D. Luna.
Saldamando, Emilia with Leaves, 2022. Oil, glitter, washi paper collage, and metal leaf on wood panel. Photo credit Yubo Dong.
Saldamando, Yosi with Palms, 2022. Oil, glitter, washi paper collage, and metal leaf on wood panel. Photo credit Yubo Dong.