About the expression " I was part of ... "

Our courtyard now has a special reading area that was designed and created by Greeley students and staff in 2004. Ms. Mirtes Zwierzynski, Greeley's special artist and friend, helped to create a colorful bench and background showing scenes from favorite stories. Students, teachers, and parents will enjoy reading to each other in this beautiful storybook world

Artist Mirtes Zwierzynski has been working with Greeley students, staff, parents and community members to create colorful murals for our school. Each year, after a theme was selected, students helped to develop ideas for a project and created drawings showing their ideas. Ms. Mirtes then combined these drawings into a large outline. The next step was to divide the outline into smaller, workable sections so we could select colored tiles, cut them, and place them into the outline. Our artists used paint instead of tiles for the library murals. The finished sections were then put together for everyone to enjoy.

Experiences

Finally, on the subject of success, she stated emphatically: "I don't want it. It's a false idea you have--an American idea--that artists must be famous. That's an idea of today....Between me and painting there is nothing."

I sense that the fourth artist in this exhibition, Mirtes Zwierzynski, would agree with this statement. For her, freedom as an artist--both in experimenting with forms and in the choice of subjects--lies outside the marketplace.
Looking at her two major works shown here--Interruption/Innocence and the series "El diario de la guerra" ("The War Diary")--I feel that Zwierzynski's both impassioned by forms and the language of painting while still being stirred by her subjects. Zwierzynski's large installation Interruption/Innocence deals with incest, and the subject of her series of monoprints, "El diario de la guerra," is the gulf war. At first juxtapositions of scale strike the viewer. The subject of incest, the private transgression hidden within the family, is enlarged to room size, whereas the most public, media-hyped war in history inspires a series of miniature images stacked on two small stands so that the viewer must handle the pictures in order to view them. The private world is made public, and the public world of politics becomes as intimate as a whispered secret. This apparent reversal of reality reveals some truths about our TV-dominated, confessional society. No personal secret, not even incest, is exempt from public display. The gulf war, on the other hand, has disappeared from the national consciousness as if it had never happened. Endless confession of personal pain makes everyone a victim and therefore absolves us all of responsibility, even for a war that was fought in our name.

Interruption/Innocence is made up of six hanging panels painted in a thick black and white impasto with children's drawings scratched into the paint. On the floor are 12 black boxes with photographs of children whose faces are blotted out with splashes of brown. In a gap between the panels hang four strips filled with an incomprehensible script, a language of the unconscious that resembles the wandering broken lines made by crawling insects. Constructed from domestic materials, this work, installed in a corner room, combines orderliness with the meandering of a child's imagination. The panels are doors, the photograph boxes are covered with felt insulation, and the stains on the photos are made by a combination of paint and coffee grounds.

At no point does the work explain itself. Its form isn't descriptive, and therefore doesn't convey its content explicitly. But it provides many clues. Any viewer who spends time with this piece will experience not the cliches of contemporary media discourse but the contradictions and complexities of violating an ancient prohibition separating human societies from the animal kingdom. This "story" is suggested, like a game of hide-and-seek, from the child's perspective of sweetness and fear.

It's the natural progression of the soul to descend from the innocence and faith of childhood to the corruption and melancholy of adulthood, and to come to participate in the evil it's powerless to change. It could be said the gulf war exemplified the way in which individuals can't escape participating in the ways of a fallen culture. Every day for a few months at the beginning of 1991, we were offered a surreal spectacle on TV, seeming less a real war than a simulation, a war game. In May 1991, Greenpeace estimated total casualties of the gulf war at more than 150,000, among whom were 266 Americans. The Bush administration realized its dream--a short war with few casualties. British journalist Judith Williamson captured the mood in the U.S. during the first weeks of the war: "It is the unreality of anywhere outside the U.S., in the eyes of its citizens, which must frighten any foreigner. Like an infant who has yet to learn there are other centres of self, this culture sees others merely as fodder for its dreams and nightmares....For most Americans, other lands and people cannot be imagined as real." For Zwierzynski the experience of the gulf war and its accompanying xenophobia must have been particularly painful to live through--she came to the U.S. after being forced into exile by the military dictatorship in Brazil, her native country, and spending the 1970s in Paris.

Part of the article from Chicago Reader, Galleries & Museums, Art Review, Aug 3, 1995 Latin Americans, by Bertha Husband.

Some about me...

IDEA:
AQUI PUEDE IR UN RESUME ARTISTICO Y UN POCO SOBRE DATOS ACADEMICOS.

Art education projects

IDEA:
LISTADO DE PROJECTOS O BIEN ESCOGER LOS MAS IMPORTANTES (SE PUEDE INCLUIR FOTOGRAFIAS DE CADA PROJECTO CON SU DESCRIPCION.
HACIENDO ENFASIS EN EL PROCESO Y EJECUCION.

Art public Chicago

IDEA:
SE PUEDEN INCLUIR LOS DIFERENTES PROJECTOS PERSONALES DONDE HAS PARTICIPADO EN LOS DIFERENTES EDIFICIOS O BIEN AREAS PUBLICAS DE CHICAGO.
SE PUEDE PONER FOTOGRAFIAS Y DESCRIPCION.

Some online publications:

57th Underpass Mini-Murals in Hyde Park (click to see...)

(Ejemplo: Puedes poner algun video o presentacion donde se explique los proyectos)

Are you interested?

IDEA:
DATOS DE CONTACTO
DIRECCION
APARTADO POSTAL
TELEFONO
CELULAR
NOMBRE
CORREO ELECTRONICO