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With her back toward the viewer and her right arm outstretched, a woman wearing a wheat-colored ballerina dress cups a billowy cloud edged with a crimson ribbon. Facing a desert landscape bordered with mountains, she gazes in the direction of three women, each connected to individual clouds via similar, scarlet-hued ribbons and positioned across the terrain.

This acrylic on canvas work, “Circus Series: The Cloud Walkers” (2011), is one of at least 10 in her Circus Series, including “Circus Series: Vivian and Her Synchronized Sea Plants” (2011) and “Circus Series: Cloud Walkers Rest Area” (2011), that reflects the magical realm in which surrealist painter and mixed-media artist Cynthia Tom’s imagination dwells.

She will exhibit 25 larger paintings, 30 smaller works and prints, re-envisioned secondhand shoes and more in her studio during the Mission Artists United “Spring Open Studios in the Mission” this weekend.

“It all starts with a quirky, slightly sick sense of humor that runs in my family,” says Tom of the beginnings of the Circus Series. “My dad is the impetus. One of the things that tied us together was watching ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ as a family way back when.”

Born in San Francisco in the early 1960s, Tom still lives in the city. Her paintings depict powerful Chinese women in vibrantly hued, dreamy environs. Tom is also board president for the Asian American Women Artists Association. However, she didn’t grow up learning about her ancestry. Her father, Richard Tom, left Chinatown in the 1950s with his wife and child and moved to the Portola neighborhood.

“We were the only Asians out there at the time. My neighborhood was Greek, Italian, Anglo, Latin and African American,” she says. “I didn’t identify race. Everyone looked different because that was what people with different names and different families looked like, but not because of any myth their racial stereotype may have suggested. We were definitely all working-class kids and were always outside playing.”

Tom didn’t befriend any Asian American children until age 13, when she met Linda Leong and began working at a day camp at the Salvation Army in Chinatown.

“There are much more underlying reasons why my grandmother and parents didn’t teach too much about heritage; but the main one, I believe, is that they were all victims of trafficking one way or another. My father was sold (in China) to Chinese Americans and brought here at age 1,” she says. “My mother was traded by my grandfather for opium from 9 to 12 years of age. My maternal grandmother was sold as a second wife to my grandfather and treated more like a servant. When he died – leaving his family without any funds – his family, with funds, shunned my grandmother. She had to raise seven children on her own in Chinatown.”

Her artistic endeavors provoked Tom to research her family history. Maintaining a studio in Hunters Point Shipyard between 1990 and 2005, she initially based her paintings on found images from daily life and runway fashions, but her work lacked focus.

“JoeSam was a neighboring artist at Hunters Point Shipyard, an African American artist of great note. He became a mentor for my ethnic artistic path,” Tom says. “JoeSam told me that I would never be at my best if I didn’t explore my identity with my work; and he, of course, was right. It has led to the creation of art around my grandmother, mother and father, learning their history and in the process gaining a deep understanding of my motivations and emotional sludge, which I have since overcome.”

This spurred her designs of custom fabrics utilizing photographic images, including those of slave girls in Chinatown’s Bagnio District taken by Arnold Genthe in the early 1900s and of her infant father, then sewing them into pillows.

These evolved into “Discard & Variances,” a visual arts series about her family and the larger issue of human trafficking. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts displayed the first installment in 2011. The second installment, “Discards & Variances: A Look at Human Trafficking,” is part of a group exhibition “Remnants: Artists Respond to the Chinese American Experience” at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum.

“I understood Chinese New Year, but not much else. I’ve since learned some things, but I’m third generation,” she says. “Yet it is the exploration of my grandmother’s journey in the creation of my art that conjured forth my staunch feminism and advocacy for women and social justice.”

Cynthia Tom: “Spring Open Studios in the Mission.” Noon-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun. 1890 Bryant Street Studios, Suite 302, S.F. www.cynthiatom.com, www.1890Bryant.com, www.missionartistsunited.org. “Remnants: Artists Respond to the Chinese American Experience”: Opening Thurs. Chinese Historical Society of America Museum, 965 Clay St., S.F. www.chsa.org.

Stephanie Wright Hession is a freelance writer. datebookletters@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page F – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

MEXICO CITY — Elizabeth Catlett died April 2 at age 96 in Cuernavaca, 80 miles south of this capital city.

Most accounts of the U.S.-born artist simply referred to her as an African-American who became a Mexican citizen. A few typecast her as an “important African-American” artist to typify her work in sculpture and printmaking.

She was much more than that.

Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts has described Catlett as an artist who always demonstrated in her art a profound interest “in social justice and the rights of black people and Mexican women.”

An obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted the U.S. government had labeled her an “undesirable alien” in 1959. It mentioned she was briefly held in a roundup of ex-patriots living in Mexico who were suspected of Communist activity. She was denied a U.S. visa throughout the 1960s.

The same obituary quoted her as once telling a St. Petersburg Times journalist that “there’s a different attitude toward art in Mexico. As an artist, you’re greatly admired rather than looked at as something strange.”

Catlett’s best-known prints include “Sharecropper” (1952) and “Malcolm X Speaks for Us” (1969), expressing her lifelong commitment to art as a tool for social change, often incorporating the slogan “Black is beautiful.” Her better-known lithographs include posters of Angela Davis.

Catlett had said she wanted to show the history and strength of women: urban, country, working and great women of history.

Her sculptures include “Dancing Figure” (1961), “The Black Woman Speaks” and “Target” (1970). “Black Unity” (1968) shows a mahogany fist on one side and two African visages on the other. The sculptures “Homage to Black Women Poets” and “Homage to My Young Black Sisters” (both 1968) are red-cedar abstracts of a woman with raised head and fist.

Her biography reveals how, in a sense, that one’s life and work fuse the same way nationality, ethnicity, identity, life mission and talents do.

Elizabeth Catlett was born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., the granddaughter of freed slaves, a math-professor father and truant-officer mother. In the 1930s, she earned her undergraduate degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.

She was exposed to the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias, both of whom had worked extensively in the United States.

Covarrubias, as an illustrator for The New Yorker and other national magazines in the 1920s and ’30s, had introduced to millions the image of sophisticated jazz-age Negroes and Harlem.

Catlett preferred doing semiabstract sculptures after studying the form as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, earning a master’s in fine art in 1940. She sculpted “Negro Mother and Child” for her graduate thesis and won first prize in the 1940 Columbia Exposition in Chicago.

That same year, she chaired the art department of New Orleans’ Dillard University. Later in the 1940s, she moved to Mexico City to study ceramics. She added struggles of Mexican workers to her commitment to African-American causes. She referred to “my two people,” even blending their physical features in her art.

She found like-minded spirits in the Taller de Grafica Popular, a collective known for mass-producing posters supporting populist causes. She met renowned artist Francisco Mora here and married him. He died in 2002.

In Mexico, Catlett gained an acceptance she had not known at home, the same as other U.S. artists, writers and musicians such as composer Aaron Copland have experienced. She continued championing black causes even after becoming a Mexican citizen in 1962.

Perhaps this has to do with artists having a responsibility, like that of writers, to show the quest for justice, catch individual temperament and mood, and expose their color and shape.

Jose de la Isla is a columnist for Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.

Reading , Pennsylvania — 10 April 2012

(ArtfixDaily.com) Two works by noted African-American sculptor, Selma Burke, are on display in the Reading Public Museum’s newly renovated and expanded Cohen Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. The pieces — a marble bust of a young girl and a wooden mother and child — are on a two-year loan to The Museum courtesy of Anselene Morris and Frederick Toone Bacon.
Born in 1900 in Mooresville, North Carolina, Selma Burke’s work was never fully acknowledged. As a child, she liked to whittle and model in clay but her mother insisted she get an education for a “career.” She was educated at Slater Industrial and State Normal School, now Winston-Salem State University; St. Agnes School of Nursing, Raleigh; and Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia.

In 1924, she moved to New York where she worked as a nurse. But art was her calling, and she continued to work as an artist. Her accomplishments were so great that in 1935, she earned a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship, and in 1936, a Boehler Foundation Fellowship. Both awards allowed her to travel to Europe where she studied ceramics with Povoleny in Vienna and sculpture with Maillol in Paris.

In 1941, Burke completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University. At the age of 70, she completed a Doctorate in Arts and Letters at Livingstone College, Salisbury, North Carolina. Selma was influenced by, among others, Henri Matisse, painter, and Frank Lloyd Wright, architect.

In 1944, President Roosevelt posed for the artist and her completed bronze plaque was unveiled by President Harry S. Truman in 1945. It can be seen at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C.; the image was also used on the American ten cent piece (dime). Since the coin bears the initials of the engraver, John Sinnock, Selma Burke has never received proper credit for the portrait.

In 1949, she married Herman Kobbe and moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania where she continued to work on her sculpture and tutor artists. Selma was a great lover and supporter of the arts. In 1968, she was the founder of the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh, and remained an administrator there until 1981, when she returned to her home and studio in New Hope.

Burke was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, a non-profit Greek-lettered sorority of college-educated women who perform public service and place emphasis on the African American community. She received many other awards and honors. Other examples of her work can be viewed in the Metropolitan and Whitney museums.

At the age of 80, in 1980, Burke produced her last monumental work, a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., that graces Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. She died in 1995 in Newton, Pennsylvania. She had been working to complete a sculpture of civil rights activist Rosa  Parks.
The Reading Public Museum is located at 500 Museum Road, Reading, PA. Admission per day is: $8* adults (18-64), $5 children/seniors/college students (w/ID) and free to members and children three years old and under. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Web: www.readingpublicmuseum.org

*Special exhibition surcharge may apply.

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