Home is Art

During the pandemic my bestie and I read Chani Nicolas’ You Were Born for This and held a two-person book group to discuss our findings. If you’re not familiar with the book, Chani, the beloved feminist astrologer to us all, breaks down how to read your natal chart, focusing on the importance of the sun sign, rising sign, your moon sign and your planets’ points and interactions. In my breakdown she writes the following in relation to my Venus placement which is true for me “…if Venus rules your 1st House and it’s in your 9th House, do you study or teach gender studies, women’s studies, queer history, or anything related?” So yeah, if you don’t believe, perhaps you might want to reconsider. In that reading I also learned so much about my moon placement in my fourth house of home and family and what that means for me - basically that all my paths lead toward trying to figure out this thing we call home. How we make it, tend it, cultivate it, find safety in it.

Earlier this month I spent ten glorious days in the vast open yet loving embrace of the Kansas Flint Hills. My story in this plane at this time emerges from the Flint Hills. I’ll leave some mystery related to my birth time for the deep divers out there, but if you know my birthday you’ll also now know the place of my birth - Manhattan, Kansas. It was always fun to use that party trick for two truths and a lie, “I was born in Manhattan is both a truth and a lie depending on your knowledge of the Kansas town sharing its name with its more famous New York cousin. Anyways, while I was at the Tallgrass Artist Residency in the Kansas Flint Hills I decided to go up to Manhattan to see what I could feel of that place. It’s one thing to know the stories of a place. It’s another (and a true privilege) to return to that place and actually get to know it. Hermanita went to and graduated from Kansas State University which plays prominently in my origin story through way of our Dad and Mama who met there in very different capacities. And so, in the last ten years or so I have found myself in Manhattan to celebrate her graduations (undergrad and masters), and for other family get-togethers. Kansas State is a collegiate rival of my undergrad institution (Rock Chalk!) And so I’m not certain, but I’ve never been that into Manhattan because obviously, all the fun is in Lawrence. But, at the same time, it is a homeland of mine, this city in the Flint Hills of Kansas, and so on a certain level I also have wanted to know it, to become more friendly to it. To make home there.

Maybe the challenge with home for me is that part of me believes home to mean something so certain and finite. Home isn’t just anyplace because if home were everywhere it would also be nowhere. On the other hand, Gloria Anzaldúa’s brilliant line from Borderlands/La Frontera reminds us that it is possible to make home everywhere, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry "home" on my back.” But what if that too is not quite fully it? Yes Turtle has a shell, but that shell isn’t something it can ever leave, Turtle still makes home in the pond, or the swamp. The Flint Hills have never felt like home even though they are a deep part of my story which is probably why I am so obsessed with this notion of making home mean something, of wanting to belong and feel safe in my home spaces in ways that continue to elude me.

Some people are born to a place and then never leave that place. And I have always marveled at this experience, I wonder if I would have been so open to making new homes in new places if not for the experience that my parents left their hometowns for different places and have not (yet) returned to them to live again. I surmise moving away to college felt easier for me in many ways because I had models of what it was like to maintain family connections while living geographically away from family. My abuela moved to another country to make a new home, a reminder that I could too one day (Finland, Vaimo?). Even for a bit, I'm pretty sure I could make anywhere home.

Art is home because it contains those fuzzy feelings about pinpointing exactly what it is. That intangibility that you feel in your soul but might not be able to name in words, touches art like it shapes our notions of home spaces. What is art? A favorite intro level discussion question for art students, is nature art? Some say, no, not until someone makes art of it - a photo of a sunset for instance, or a painting of a landscape. Is a cave a home? No longer to most people, but certainly to other creatures. What do these two things have in common when we frame it like this? That art and home often get drilled down to the essence of it must be human made, that the interaction between humans and the thing make it the thing. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the results of a fictional Family Feud one hundred people were surveyed situation where art would be up there on the list when asked what are the most superfluous things to have in your home. Art is seen as a luxury. But what if your home is art? HGTV at least believes your home should be artfully arranged, decorated, within the confines of taste and budget. This aesthetic agreement of middle-class rights of passage is what you use your “expendable” income on things for your home. An economy demands it of us really, to make a home in the US, you ought to be furnishing it “properly” including its walls and shelves. Instagram and Pinterest are full of ideas on how to arrange your objects so that they are pleasing to the eye. Is this not an art? It’s clear some of us have this ability to do this, and others maybe don’t care? Or cannot afford to care. Regardless, we know an artful home when we come upon one, don’t we? Inside and out!

And I am finding new ways that art is my home. My daily sketchbook practice is a deep homecoming for me. Through sketching and journaling I return to a sense of self that is safe, that I control and make space for, that I enjoy cultivating. I am at home in my body and with myself when I paint because the rest of the world slips away when I’m in the zone, simply moving paints on a surface brings me home. And what’s so magical about that process is that like Anzaldúa’s turtle I truly can do that anywhere. This summer alone I have sketched in the air, at hotels, while visiting family, and recently, quickly from my car in the parking lot at Vista Hamburgers in Manhattan, Kansas. Under a parking sign hanging from a light pole that read “customer parking only, violators will be towed at owner’s expense” I drew the contours of the exterior of this glorified hamburger stand on one end of town and the cool vintage sign. I had tried to retrace the instructions my mama had given me to locate the home that my parents lived in when I was young. “The Little Yellow House” that features in the stories I hear about my origins. But I couldn’t find it so instead I drew the home my parents made through dates at the Vista. This Spanish word, modifying an “American” food originally from Germany, “Texas Combo $8.75” the changeable letter sign reads to the empty lot. What a wild set of circumstances that brought this all together in Manhattan, KS. Just like me I guess. I didn’t find home in Manhattan, but it turned out I didn’t need to look there anyway, I had it with me all along.

What I’m Reading

The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz 

Artist Offerings

• What’s this, and where can I, a non-California resident see this?
• ​The artist Cate White, recommended I check out the work of Luis A Sahagun and I think you should too
• Really dreamy work I wish I could see in person by Tammy Nguyen

Creative Ritual

Y’all. This last month has been the definition of a whirlwind. I traveled to Kansas for the fourth (and not the last) time of 2021. After a couple of days home (still have not fully unpacked my residency suitcases) I started this Advanced Painting Masterclass where I was working directly with incredible artists including the one and only Cate White (!) And Elizabeth Huey alongside 11 other amazing painters. We were expected to paint for ten hours a day and my oh my did I paint. I completed two 24”x30” paintings on some wood panels I had been gifted by my painting prof from the community college. Then I started on what I’m calling a “loose diptych” of two five feet by four feet canvases which stand alone but are also connected. That’s eight feet of painting in one direction (what a challenge, an exhilarating one, but one none the less). Anyways, this is all to say, July was an incredible month for my painting and I am so excited about how I will continue to marry form and content in my paintings to express what cannot be said when one looks upon a painting! I’ll let you know about the exhibition these works will be at in October. Which, wow, will be here before we know it.

Questions to Ponder

How are you making home these days?
What is art?
What art makes you feel at home?
How does home makes you feel art?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

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