I worked this Spring on a calligraphy project illuminating a poem written by a friend of ours who lived on the Island for many years until his death in 2011. It is the first time I’ve made such a piece using only digital drawing techniques.
See how the exhibit featured him: http://vashonpride.com/960-2/
It was requested to become part of an exhibit my partner Stephen Silha & his co-curator, Ellen Kritzman, had been working to mount for several years at our Vashon Heritage Museum called IN & OUT, Being LGBTQ on Vashon. https s://vashonheritagemuseum.org/exhibition/lgbtq-vashon/ > Or for more color: http://vashonpride.com/
The image welcomes visitors with Don’s wonderings toward the current progress of queer presence inside his history when those seemed impossible. “Who would think” such improbable changes as we have witnessed. in the short time since he wrote it, would come true?
But… In current times… on Vashon Island, Washington State in the US of A… this exhibit becomes a landmark celebration of what is actually already truth in many “corners” of our country. We are quietly everywhere. Here we are so well integrated inside “the” culture that the largest difficulty of this exhibit was attempting to find much if any prejudice against folk who are not nominally “straight”… nor even terribly colorful.
So, noting that early-on the museum recieved a letter from “members of the museum” resigning into a defensive corner with the stance that there is nothing of gay history on the Island….
Here arrives the color I was looking to share!
More than 650 souls showed up for the opening!
Multiples of any previous count or estimation …
So… what actually is history ?
I am pleased to be one small part of this story of wealth unfolding. being discovered,…
Becoming indeed a RIVER OF GOLD… inviting true value.
I find joy practicing to become a unique amanuensis !