On the Road Again... Part 2

Petronio Bendito, with his three-panel rendering of New Orleans' Katrina disaster; and (below) the artist with his response to Haitian earthquake. (Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Turning darkness into light:
Responding to tragedy through art

LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Petronio Bendito renders scenes of horror into art. Images of the aftermath from tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes are analyzed to create color palettes, and from this digital tray of paint strips the Brazilian-born artist creates powerful abstract imagery.

The shaking of buildings in 2005 in Pakistan becomes shimmering bands of ribbon in dark and light shades of collapsing concrete. The various-color  uniforms of an international group of rescuers surround the brown of the skin of a child being pulled from rubble of a Haitian earthquake in 2010. A man  carrying a child through floodwaters in China, 2007, becomes a powerful cocoon of red. A ribboned wave, the heavily blue swirl of water, curls over the coast of Thailand. There’s the raging orange/red of flames of the Colorado Springs forest conflagration. A seeming teardrop symbolizies the rush of water over New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Our  friend Petronio, who teaches art here at Purdue University, is why we have come to Lafayette. Bonnie met him through the International Visual Literacy Association, a largely professorial group she joined while working on her doctorate in communications design a decade ago at the University of Baltimore. He participated in her “Defining Ourselves” project with an answer so simple yet profound (“I am all that I love.”) that we drove here a few years ago for her to take his related portrait photo. We’ve kept in touch through Facebook, and spent a day with him in Baltimore this year when he was presenting a program on color and algorithms at a mathematics conference. He’s brilliant, to say the least.

W had talked about his natural disasters project – using photographs of disaster scenes as the basis for creating art – and wanted to see the entire display, hanging through early September in the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette.  (It moves  later next month to the Central Features art gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico.)

Petronio received an Indiana Arts Commission grant for the project, but early on found the work emotionally troubling – three months into the project unable to continue because it was overwhelming. But with the encouragement of friends, some of them psychologists, he managed to keep going. He developed an understanding that what matters is how one responds to disaster and tragedy – because life goes on, even though changed.

There is a glass case of the source photos next to the corresponding color palettes. And there are quotes on the walls, like this from Carl Jung: “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”

And from author-motivator Leo F. Buscalgia: “There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to these disasters?”

Buscalgia also is quoted: “Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time.... It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.”

                                                                                                                   

And from an anonymous writer, the likes of whom are on seeming eternal proliferation through cyberspace: “You never know how strong you are, until being strong is the only choice you have.”

Petronio’s strength grew as he explored the world of tragedy, and says the lesson he took from it all was how he must respond – trying to improve the world in the aftermath, to heal.

One of Petronio’s observations: “Perhaps one of the greatest virtues is the alchemy of turning darkness into light, pain into lucid moments of reflections, loss into new findings and meanings.”

Also among the wall quotes, the artist adds: “The kaleidoscope of life gives us many color combinations, but we must pause to see them.”

Looked at closely, the art pieces are a journalistic distillation spun out in powerful arrays of color and motion instead of words.  Within his art lies great truth.

After our tour of the museum show, we split up for two hours – Petronio to deal with some matters of art and academia, while we explored Lafayette’s Main Street and found Jan Wright’s little shop of curiosities – First Class Clutter. Reminiscent of the eclectically surprising shops of used stuff and antiques in Baltimore’s Hampden and Fells Point neighborhoods, Clutter was almost as entertaining as Jan herself. She shared some of her collection of funeral photos – one of them showing a laid-out Al Capone – and, from her love of aviation, a few photos of the ill-fated Amelia Earhart taken at Purdue University.

                                                   Jan Wright, in her store First Class Clutter

Planes hang suspended from the shop’s ceiling, sort of flying over the bric-a-brac of American civilization that’s piled on shelves or hanging throughout the establishment. Old dish sets, boxed silverplate cutlery, sheet music, vintage clothing, photos of mostly anonymous people once stowed in boxes or mounted in treasured family albums – faces out of time, yet timeless.  I could have stayed there for hours, but our time was more limited – dinner and conversation were waiting, with Petronio and his partner Bryan Bell back at their home.

Lafayette is a lovely place, but the best part of travel for us remains the people we encounter and get to know as friends. They enrich our lives.

Road Trip Report, Part 6 (Healing after Horror)

A semicircle of 'Hokie Stones' is heart of memorial at Virginia Tech. Other image shows Barbara Lockee (left) of VT and Rhonda Robinson of Northern Illinois University. (photos by Bonnie Schupp)

Project in healing, hope

unites schools hit by shootings

You can’t visit Virginia Tech without noting what happened here on the leafy Blacksburg, Va., campus some 18 months ago.

Virginia Tech was host school to this weekend’s annual conference of the International Visual Literacy Association, which included an exhibit Saturday on a project in its early stages of development aimed at bringing together VT and Northern Illinois University in their common bond of grief and recovery from mass killings.

On April 16, 2007, a deranged student killed 32 people and wounded a reported 17 others on the Blacksburg campus in two separate attacks before taking his own life. It was the deadliest mass murder in United States history.

It was followed on Feb. 14 of this year by a mass shooting by a former student at Northern Illinois University who killed five and wounded 18 others in a large lecture hall on the DeKalb campus and then committed suicide.

I guess you can’t define two such incidents, coming 10 months apart, as a pattern. Yet they are part of a troubling history in a nation where violence is a daily reality, and multiple killings are not uncommon. We are inundated with violence, in both the news and what is termed entertainment.

How to cope, how to assuage the grief, to embark on a path toward healing are at the root of the project shown in a formative stage Saturday by faculty members Rhonda Robinson of Northern Illinois and Barbara Lockee of Virginia Tech. They titled the presentation – photos of the grieving, memorial displays and expressions of caring – “Symbols of Hope: Huskie and Hokie Visions of Recovery.”

With photographs taken on both campuses in the days and weeks after the killings, the effort builds a bridge of empathy between schools 700 miles apart but drawn close in spirit by the horrors they suffered.

Robinson and Lockee said they plan to seek contributions of images from their university communities that will enlarge the scope of the project, whose final form is yet undetermined.

Lockee led a walking tour from the conference center to Virginia Tech’s eloquent April 16 Memorial – a semicircle of 32 “Hokie Stones” (the type of stone incorporated in buildings across the sprawling campus), each engraved with the name of a victim of the massacre. It is modeled on an impromptu memorial of stones assembled by a student volunteer group hours after the shootings.

As we arrived, other visitors were placing fresh flowers across the name on each stone.

There’s a brochure explaining the memorial, with photos and short biographies of the 32 victims in the same order they appear, from left to right, in the procession of stones.

Walking along the path, you inevitably take a deep breath at the stunning reality: “There’s so many of them.”

But there were 33 dead, and one remains missing: The killer.

Perhaps that’s because he may be the hardest to forget.

Nearby, tucked around the corner of the administration building, is Norris Hall, where the bulk of the killings occurred in second-floor classrooms. While there was some thought to demolishing it, Lockee said much work would have been lost because of equipment installed in first-floor laboratories that could not be moved.

Instead, walls are coming down on the second floor to create space for a new Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies. It is to be directed, Lockee said, by Jerzy Nowak, the horticulture professor and department chair whose wife, French professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, was killed in Room 211 along with 11 of her students.

Stitches across time

The ‘Visions of Recovery’ exhibit was paired with a display by Lucinda Willis of “healing quilts” – family heirlooms and her own, each laced with deep meaning.

In a summary of her exhibit, “Healing Quilts: A Visual Display of Emotions and Strength,” Willis explained: “Healing quilts have, for generations, been a way for women to express themselves when recovering from a devastating episode in life. Various forms of healing quilts have been created over the centuries, and even today, quilts are made which gently show strength and determination in the face of adversity.”

Many have seen quilts memorializing victims of disease, war or violence. The display of five quilts brought to the conference by Willis, of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, included one that, according to the story handed down with it across generations, was hastily made with available scrap fabric by a mother to keep her son safe and warm as he went off to war as a Confederate soldier. It and he survived.

Of the designs that emerge, Willis wrote on a display card, “Healing quilts don’t get planned, they evolve, and with each stitch, some comfort is gained.”