Stories of Love and Delight - An artistic collaboration in Brattleboro, VT
Stories of Love and Delight
An artistic collaboration in Brattleboro, VT
VFC Education staffer Mary Wesley reflects on the VFC’s latest educational partnership.
While attending a recent special reception at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC), I witnessed the Folklife Center’s mission come alive in a stirring collaboration between the VFC’s Vermont Voices project, Windham Regional Career Center students, and Mexican-American artist Yvette Molina.
Molina’s exhibit, Big Bang Votive—now open at BMAC through June 12, 2022—is an ongoing collaborative story-sharing project and art installation. Molina records interviews with people about what sparks delight or inspires love in their lives as a way to recognize that love and connection can provide a pathway through life’s myriad challenges. Each participant chooses a symbol to represent their story, which Molina renders in egg tempera paint, set against a star-scattered dark blue field.
As plans were unfolding to bring Big Bang Votive to Brattleboro, BMAC educators and Folklife Center staff saw an opportunity to work together. Last fall, VFC began working with students in the Windham Regional Career Center (WRCC) digital media program as part of our Vermont Voices project. Vermont Voices creates opportunities for students to produce and present media projects on issues and topics that matter to them and their communities. This program, to be carried out over two academic years, will pilot how to integrate humanities-centered training and skills practice at two Vermont career and technical education (CTE) centers.
With serendipitous timing, Yvette Molina and BMAC agreed to let WRCC students conduct interviews in their school and community on the theme of love and delight. Students received training in oral-history-style interviewing from VFC staff and Molina then used the students’ interviews as the source material to create 18 new paintings included in the current Big Bang Votive installation.
At the March 13th reception, WRCC students were led into the gallery, accompanied by Molina, where several hundred of her paintings were displayed across four walls. A soundscape playing over speakers shared excerpts from the interviews conducted by the students. Soon, like seeking out constellations in a night sky, students were looking around; pointing out symbols from the stories they’d recorded. A campfire, a bouncy house, a blue dress…one WRCC teacher noted how Molina had captured the worn edge of his sneakers, the symbol chosen to represent his love of running as described to one of the student interviewers.
Watching the students surrounded by the work they had helped create, I knew that this collaboration directly connected to VFC’s purpose. This moment of witnessing students seeing their school work elevated to the walls of a local gallery and seeing an artist connect more deeply with the community surrounding that gallery, brought that vision to life.
Following the reception, I took a few moments to speak with Yvette Molina about her work. Below are excerpts from our conversation (the text has been shortened for clarity and brevity.)
A conversation with artist Yvette Molina
Would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?
Yes, my name is Yvette Molina, and I'm a multidisciplinary artist which means I work in a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and installation. More and more my projects also include a participatory element. I currently live in Oakland, California, but I split my time between Oakland and Brooklyn, New York. I'm really excited to be showing at the Brattleboro Museum here in Vermont in collaboration with the Vermont Folklife Center and the Windham Regional Career Center.
At the Vermont Folklife Center, we believe that there's a really deep power in listening to and learning from the lived experience of individuals. This is what we focus on in a lot of our educational and public programming. When we learned about Big Bang Votive, we saw there was great potential for collaboration. Can you say a little bit about how you learned of this connection?
My project is one where I gather stories from volunteers, often people I don't know. In the beginning, it was friends and family, but it very quickly evolved into me asking complete strangers - someone I'd meet at the grocery store or someone I was being introduced to for the first time. I would ask them what sparks love or delight in their life. Once they shared a story, I would ask them to help identify a symbol to represent their story. What object, if they saw it depicted as a painting, would trigger that memory or experience of love or delight?
I've always been the one who's the interviewer and it's never occurred to me to hand that over to someone else. But when Kirsten Martsi, [BMAC Manager of Education & Community Engagement Programs] suggested this collaboration, it struck me as a really interesting way to expand the reach of who I could speak to, who I could possibly involve in this ever growing installation.
How did you land on that theme of love and delight?
I had been making large, image dense paintings about the refugee crises. As an art exercise, I began removing elements from these larger paintings, isolating them, and considering them as symbols unto themselves. For example, a boat can represent anything from a vehicle for fleeing a war torn country, to a fishing vessel or a holiday pleasure craft. This exercise of looking and considering a single object from many different angles was both interesting and surprising. I began considering objects that might evoke care or love for me personally. Painting these “happy” symbols shifted my mood and provided a counterbalance to my more political work.
A wonderful side effect of sharing a story of something that you love around a dinner table or hanging out with friends, is that they respond with their own stories of what they love and the energy level rises. When someone retells a story, they relive it, and the potency of that reliving is made present both to the person telling the story and the person listening. There's a literal growing of love and delight in the moment. If that story took five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, that's an additional 15 minutes of love in the world that had not existed before that person as the teller–and myself as the listener–created. So I really do believe that this project is expanding the experience of love and delight in the world just by reliving it in the telling.
How does the work of Big Bang Votive intertwine with your other projects that deal with more challenging subject matter? Do you find a balance between the two?
I work in many different modes and mediums, but I consider all of my work to be connected. I think the overarching theme or through line to all of my work is this idea of “let's do it together, because together we are really powerful.” Especially as artists, our collective voices are changing culture and so I continue to do work that deals with harder issues surrounding race and gender equity, but this project [Big Bang Votive] is equally important. It’s a counterbalance. It keeps me grounded in why we're fighting to change the world—why we push and continue to strive to share the beliefs we have around making the world a better place.
Why do you paint these symbols on a background of the cosmos?
It has to do with this idea of the universe being limitless. Right now, it's between 300 and 350 paintings and growing and most of them are actually just the starry night sky. People will often ask, “Do you plan to paint a symbol in every single one of these?” And for me, it's so important that there is all this open space. The reason that I leave so many empty panels is that they conceptually represent the idea that there is room for all of our stories in this universe. There's room for all of us and all of the different ways that we find love and all of the different ways that we experience life. It's infinite.
I think my last question is to hear a little bit more about what it was like to work with the Windham Regional Career Center students. How was it to work with this source material that you've been used to gathering yourself? Did it change your process at all?
This is something I'm going to carry forward and try to incorporate into future projects, this collaboration with the local communities that I go into. What was amazing about the students is that they really did learn what you taught them! I heard it in all of the interviews—they would ask maybe one of their friends at school (you could hear a little bit of the background noise) and their friend would give a short answer. And the students, you could see the training. It was so wonderful. They would say, “Tell me more about that” and then the response might be a little bit longer and then they'd ask another question, trying to learn more. I was so impressed with how they really continued to delve gently, not in an aggressive way, but just in a very curious way, until the person got more comfortable and went further with the story. I was so impressed. I have a feeling that right now they don't fully understand or appreciate what they've learned in this process. But I think this is something that maybe 10 years from now, they will look back and still be learning from in different ways and at different times in their life. In listening to the interviews, I could hear that they were really present to the interviewee in a way that was very sweet.
Big Bang Votive is on display at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center March 12 - June 12, 2022. The galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 10-4 and select Monday holidays. Admission is on a “pay-as-you-wish” basis.
VFC staff are leading a free workshop at BMAC on April 14, 2022 inspired by the exhibit: The Delight of Listening: Interviewing for Oral History and Deeper Understanding. Register here!
