RADICAL ACTION:
Tracing Dorothy Day
Manhattan College, The Bronx
O’Malley Library Gallery
Sept 18 - July 31, 2024
RADICAL ACTION: Tracing Dorothy Day is an installation of suspended fabric columns, marble mosaics, and mixed media work that explores the duality of Day’s radical actions and her spiritual self. The mosaic’s concrete strength contrasts with translucent columns that contain patterned tracings of fragmented drawings.
A large scale painted scroll presents Dorothy Day as a modern-day caryatid leading a procession of activism.
Dorothy Day Mosaics:
Iconography of an Activist
This series of mosaics combines symbolic images associated with Dorothy Day , and fuses them with motifs that are part of the inherited pictorial vocabulary of mosaic design. The mosaics interlace patterned shapes with quiet undulating areas of tile. They explore Day’s duality of what is “seen” - her lifetime of radical actions, with what is '“unseen” - her spiritual self.
BRAID, glass smalti and marble mosaic, 14' x 14'', 2022
MEDITATION, glass smalti and marble mosaic, 14' x 14'', 2022
LADLES, colored glass mosaic, 12' x 30'', 2022
PROTEST, glass smalti and marble mosaic, 12" x 30", 2022
HANDS, black and white marble mosaic, 14' x 14", 2022
DESIRES, marble, glass smalti, seaglass with china marker, 12" diameter, 2010
BIRTH, black and white marble mosaic, 12" diameter, 2000
TIDES, glass smalti and marble mosaic, 2022, 14" x 26''
COLUMNS, marble mosaic, 14" x 14", 2022
FISHES, marble mosaic, 14" x 14", 2022
Dorothy Day and Caryatids
I was introduced to Dorothy Day, iconic social justice activist, when I painted her in the form of a protest poster for the 2005 Artmakers’ mural, “When Women Pursue Justice”, located on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Since then, I have come to think of Day as a modern caryatid.
Caryatids are sculpted columns in the form of draped female figures. Notable are the six carved into the south porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens. These caryatids are part of a procession, and convey honor to their goddess, Athena. They are stoic, powerful, balanced and not burdened by the weight above them. Instead they bear up, and boldly proceed through space together. Caryatids, in their dynamic physicality, represent collective strength and the sacred as ritual.
Dorothy Day fuses the sacred with social justice. She is a modern-day caryatid leading a procession of activism.
When Women Pursue Justice mural, Brooklyn, NY, 2005
When Women Pursue Justice mural, Brooklyn, NY, 2005
Dorothy Day in progress, When Women Pursue Justice mural, Brooklyn, NY, 2005
Detail: Portrait of Shirley Chisholm, When Women Pursue Justice, 2005
Dorothy Day Column, 2022, china marker on monofilament fabric, 48' x 12'' diameter
Installation view: Dorothy Day as Caryatid Scroll, 12' x 8', 2018
Installation View: Dorothy Day as Caryatid Scroll
Detail, Dorothy Day as Caryatid Scroll, 2018
Column Drum - Dorothy Day as Caryatid, 8" diameter x 6" depth, 2018
Column Drum - Dorothy Day Waterside, 8" diameter by 6" depth, 2018
Column Drum - Two Caryatids on Column, 8" diameter by 6" depth, 2018
Study: Blue Caryatid Frieze, Linoleum relief print on acetate, 6' x 7", 2020
Study: Blue Caryatid Frieze, Linoleum relief prints on acetate, 5' x 28", 2020