Chimp Obsessions
Please excuse my unusual placement of this upcoming event front and center for your viewing pleasure before I dive into this newsletter’s essay. Over the next few newsletters I will be offering you opportunities to join The Art of KCF Collector’s Circle tailored specifically to those who have, and those who desire to, collect my original works. I will be placing these reminders at the top of the scroll, so that it doesn’t get lost amongst all the words! Don’t worry, nothing will be changing with this newsletter, it is with the intention of preserving this as a creative space, and my Collector’s Circle as a sales/marketing space. The following event is the official launching of the Art of KCF Collector’s Circle. If you’d like to be on that list, please click on the image to fill out the registration for the talk and opt in to my Collector’s Circle. Even if you can’t attend live, I’ll send a recording your way following the event.
Obsessions (with) Chimps
*Spoiler alert - the following essay describes events that are portrayed in the HBO Max documentary Series Chimp Crazy, readers beware if you don’t want spoilers don’t read on!
Sometime in the early 80s, my Great Aunt Barbara June brought over a baby chimpanzee to Grandma and Grandpa Creel’s house on Cromwell Drive in Wichita, Kansas. Barbara June and her sister Marilyn (my grandma) were very close, but they also fought a lot. I can imagine BJ was annoyed by being bossed around by Marilyn. Being asked to come over to show the chimp to us, but also happy to be the someone who could bring a chimp over to her sister’s house. The Reynolds Sisters deeply loved one another but were also intensely competitive. Great Aunt Barbara June was the Education Coordinator at the Sedwick County Zoo. Her position meant we were frequent visitors to the zoo. This time though, the zoo came to us. The chimp in question - Binti had been born to Harriet, a mother who was “wild born and…believed to have been exported from Sierra Leone”.* In a 1992 article where a physical anthropology class analyzed behaviors of the troop at the Sedwick County Zoo, they note Binti, “a female, was hand-raised because Harriet did not take care of her.” In other words, Binti’s mom rejected her, staff intervened, and my Great Aunt BJ ended up taking her in and raising her with my Great Uncle Bob.
When I tuned in to watch Chimp Crazy on HBO Max, the memory of meeting Binti came flooding back. At the time I think I knew this was a unique experience for a four-year-old. But, little did I know how unique until after viewing the entirety of the 4-part streaming documentary series. Nearby in Missouri, in the same 1980s decade, Connie Casey was hosting ChimParties for a pretty penny, and renting out young chimpanzees to play with children as a party experience. Like a clown showing up to twist balloon animals, a ChimParty would provide a chimp who looked cute and could be held and snuggled to entertain a birthday boy or girl.
Most of us know that chimpanzees, one of the four great apes, are our close animal relatives. Yet, what some of us forget, particularly those who like to collect exotic animals, is that they are also wild creatures. Chimpanzees are meant to live out in mountainous forest ecologies in social groups, certainly not solitary, in cages, or for our human entertainment. And as the documentary filmmakers of Chimp Crazy demonstrate across four episodes, time and time again predominately white women have been involved in the eventual violent death of an adult chimpanzee who outgrows his cute era.
Having experienced the shared glee, awe, and shock of Tiger King during the lockdown era of the pandemic, I eagerly awaited the release of Chimp Crazy when it hit the streamer mid-August. I was so into it I binged the first two episodes and then rewatched them again when Vaimo got back from a conference because I needed her to be a part of this world. After all I told her, I am basically one step removed from being Chimp Crazy myself. At least in the case of my Aunt BJ she had the excuse of being connected to a zoo, and essentially saving a young chimp from a disinterested (potentially dangerous) neglectful mother. Tonia Haddix, the main woman profiled of Chimp Crazy, just fell in love with them as she monologues in the first three minutes of episode 1:
“There is nothing like holding, loving, being around a chimp. It’s the best thing since peanut butter. I can’t explain it, ‘cause it’s like just something that you just don’t ever feel.”
“This is our heritage!” I explained to my Hermanitas while insisting that they needed to watch the series. It was them who had gotten me sucked into Tiger King, back in the day when we were deep in pandemic lockdowns. Then, a streaming tool allowed us to sync up our viewing and maintain a running chat with each other as we watched the mess of Joe Exotic’s erratic behavior unfold. Made by the same documentarian - Eric Goode - this documentary’s premise of Chimp Crazy focuses on great apes instead of big cats. It is a fascinating entry point to explore the desire some have for taking chimps into their homes. But, what also happens in this upside down world of home captivity is that at a certain age (around 10) the cute, cuddly chimp that used to be the size of a four year old human becomes a large, difficult to control wild animal. Similar to other “exotic” pets, the documentary poses the question what happens when one can no longer provide the environment to support them that is safe for both humans and chimps? And as we see in the documentary’s answer to that question, the large, adult chimps become confined to small cages in basements, or locked away until tragedy strikes creating the compelling argument that this is no way for chimp, nor human, to live.
Tonia is wildly eccentric. And I don’t think anyone could deny she truly loves chimpanzees. But her love and desire to be connected to the chimps cannot save them from the intervention of PETA’s legal team who while working in the chimps’ best interests by getting them out of people’s small basement cages and into large acreage sanctuaries. Instead of feasting on happy meals bought in bulk by Tonia, Tonka, her fave, does eventually make it to the Project Chimp sanctuary where he’s fed a proper chimp diet of veggies and um processed proteins. Tonka was confined to her basement in the Missouri Ozarks, after she stole him away and lied about it for a year while still choosing to allow the documentary crew to capture evidence of Tonka’s state after having told the world that he was dead! The saga! Interspersed with Tonka’s story the audience learns of other chimpanzee tragedies. These are mostly cases when chimps are driven to the brink of their own sanity after being confined to small areas within a home and they reach a breaking point that usually involves ripping someone’s face off.
Some might say that Tonia is being made fun of through the documentary crew’s insistence on showing her getting her femme drag procedures; like her eyelash extensions, pedicures and lip fillers. I like to read those long looks from the camera’s gaze as a means of trying to understand this human who is so willing to put her financial freedom and risk jail time for a chimp. Like Joe Exotic of Tiger King, the folks who live in the world of exotic animal keeping are exotic in their own eccentricities. And perhaps one way we can read the effect of the documentarian’s approach is that he exoticize these human characters in effort to expose the similar forces that operate in their psyches that normalize the capture and containment of other living beings for their own desires. By turning the camera on those who seem immune to the shame of their own exoticization the filmmakers ask us to consider our own complicity in the ways that these animals get caught up in small town zoos, or become sites for our entertainment either through Chimp meet and greets or Hollywood’s film exploitation (no longer allowed).
“Binti is basically our cousin,” I explained to my sisters during our bi-weekly sisters chat we’ve maintained since the pandemic began. That session I also shared with them that I had reached out to Uncle via text and asked him if I found where Binti ended up if he’d go with me to visit her. He said “sure” and I was on the hunt. I put my PhD research skills to the test. I started by trying to see if there were any databases that existed to trace the sale/trade of chimpanzees in the United States. I wasn’t able to locate any from my corner of the internet not plugged into official library sites, but I did stumble upon this aforementioned research cited above. I started googling Binti the chimp and sadly located a news segment about a chimp named Binti who had recently passed away. According to this news story Binti, a 38 year old chimp ended up at the Zoo Knoxville after coming from Cleveland in 2008 with a few other chimps. Knowing that it might be possible that it was her given her age, I reached out to the Sedwick County Zoo to ask if they knew if it was her. “Wow,” Hermana said, “you’ve been on an investigative journalism deep dive!” after I got through the whole tale. Being born 10 and 11 years after me, they had definitely missed out on Binti in the family lore, and this was the first they’d heard anything about her they marveled.
As I continued my search, I returned to my personal archival documents. The photos taken by my Grandma Creel that documented my meeting of Binti. I looked in Binti’s eyes through the pictures I had of us, and wondered if she’d remember me if we would have had the chance to meet. I thought about how I was no where near obsessed with chimps, even though I had had this early formative experience with one. I had one in my arms, I felt her hairy, warm body and witnessed her playful spirit. Maybe because I was four at the time it spared me from obsession? Who knows? I do know I am easily obsessed and do not usually shy away from my obsessions, it’s the birthright of a Scorpio after all. I’m much more obsessed with humpback whales (still) than I ever was with chimps. Recently I’ve become obsessed with these smoked sunflower seeds I happened upon in Whapaton, ND a couple of road-trips ago. I think I’m obsessed more with the way information travels about chimps after this investigative deep dive than the chimps themselves. Sorry Tonia, but I think I’d pick peanut butter over holding a chimp if I really had to choose between one or the other for the rest of my days.
Shortly after sending my inquiry to the Sedwick County Zoo Jennica from Marketing reached out to confirm it was Binti who had recently passed. She provided the archival documentation I sought, with the receipts noting she moved to Cleveland one year after her 1984 birth. In 2008, “she moved to Knoxville and passed away at age 38 in June of last year, though my database doesn’t specify the cause of death” she wrote. Binti was gone. No trip for me and Uncle to plan, I had a moment of sadness upon learning it was her through the email communication. I hope Binti had a better life than a chimp locked in a basement somewhere, I’m sure she did. But still, her life in captivity was a far cry from the possible different timeline where her mom Harriet wasn’t stolen from the wild, snatched from her mother’s arms as a small babe to somehow be sold to a zoo in Wichita, Kansas. Now Binti and my Great Aunt Barbara June only remain in our memories and the archives of our making. I guess that’s another obsession showing itself to me, the way I am saddened by the my relatives’ illegibility in the archives. The hauntings of their presences through passive voice constructions like “hand raised” with no mention of the woman who did so in academic literature. The haunting of Binti, 38, my cousin, now across the veil, without my chance to look into her eyes to see her look back at me and marvel about how far we’ve both come.
* Works Cited
Hascall, Susan, Johnson, Carolyn, and Becky Cooper. (1992). An analysis of the chimpanzees of the Sedgwick County Zoo. -- In Lambda Alpha Journal, v.23, p.25-43.
From the Archive:
Four years ago October 15, 2020 Ritual Memory
Three years ago October 15, 2021 Hobby or Art?
Two years ago October 14, 2022 Late Adopter
One year ago October 15, 2023 Sucker for Love
Artist Offerings
Sending out ILLs for The Five Most Essential Books about US Latinx Art by Rose Salseda
My friend/frequent academic co-conspirator SLP maintains a blog about her running journey and after just completing the Twin Cities Marathon (Way to go, Friend!) I have been enjoying her alphabetical list of reflections.
From my friend EGA who will co-host my event with me on Saturday - sharing her connection to this Latinx artist/scholar living in Minnesota with me
For those needing a good read to ponder may I suggest Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Tbakhi
And follow it up with this writing from Raechel Anne Jolie’s substack “Radical Love Letters” one of my favorite newsletters to read: I think our hearts would explode which perfectly resonates on the individual and collective griefs we find ourselves wading through in these times.
Creative Ritual
So much is happening, and so much of it is filling my cup. Since my last correspondence I attended the opening of the LatinxArte Biennial in Omaha, NE. I had a studio visit with Ilaamen Pelshaw who is working on pieces with me for a Duo Show that will open in the winter of 2025 at the Kaddatz Galleries. I squeezed in a spontaneous trip to San Diego to see one of my favorite bands from Young KCF’s tween-teen era and omg don’t fret I’m sure there will be a newsletter coming about that experience before the year is out. I was interviewed by an MPR reporter for a segment that aired live on NPR [LINK]! And my Artist Residency officially launched with my first in the library painting session and cross-stitch class I facilitated with young cross-stitchers! Looking at this list and the one below, fills me with so much joy that I get to live this artist life.
Upcoming and Ongoing opportunities with me and/or my art:
Through October 18, 2024 see my painting “Take a Look Around” juried for the ArteLatinx 2024 Biennial hosted by the University of Nebraska Omaha Office of Latino/Latin American Studies
October 10th through November 23 See my goats painting/billboard as part of a group show Exhale: Reflections on Guaranteed Income curated by the Emerging Curators Institute and up at the Minneapolis Central Library Cargill Gallery.
Ongoing opportunities to connect with me for my Artist Residency at the Fergus Falls Public Library Through 2024)
Upcoming Live Painting Public Sessions 2) Wed Oct 16 6-8pm, 3) Mon Nov 4 2-4pm, 4)Sat Nov 9 12-2pm
Mixed-Media Junk Book Workshop (For adults, registration required, Sat Oct 19 10am)
Quilted Upcycling (for 7th-12th graders, registration required, Sat Nov 2 1pm)
Through December 8, 2024 See my painting “When Two Became Three” as part of the Latina Latinx MN: Re/claiming Space in Times of Change Group Show at Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN
Questions to ponder
What animal are you finding joy in learning more about these days?
What family archival treasure trove can help you tell a story about your 4-year-old self?
Are you maintaining any current obsessions?
How is the change of season hitting your spirit?
Thanks for journeying with me (and making it here!). I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time.
-KCF
PS: I started working on the special, original, one of a kind Art of KCF hand-made print to be sent to my Ko-Fi Members - if you want one (fourth year running!) sign up today. Anyone who commits to at least two months will receive one, my goal is to send them in honor of my birthday (ideal) but by the end of scorpio season (serious absolute due date) so stay tuned!