Healer's Manifesto

 

The Healer’s Manifesto

Breathe

Hold the Space

Ask Deep, Precise Questions

Listen and Reflect

Keep the Silence

Have Clarity in Your Vision

Have Wisdom in Your Words

See the Success

Breathe

Smile

Repeat

Just I.C.E or Justice for Renee Nicole Good

 

In honor of Renee Nicole Good

Dream Box Joins the MAH’s New Permanent Exhibition: HERstory

I am thrilled to announce that my art piece, Dream Box, has been inaugurated in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History's new permanent display, HERstory, A Celebration of the Important Women of Santa Cruz County—Past, Present, and Future, which highlights the important contributions that women and female-identifying individuals have made globally and locally. From Yaquenonsat to Angela Davis, Santa Cruz has long been a stronghold of women’s activism, creativity, and courage.

Inspired by the MAH’s beloved annual HERstory event, this addition to the MAH’s History Gallery features significant moments in women’s history through the lens of important Santa Cruz women and events. This interactive exhibition will include features on important women, such as:

• Yaquenonsat, a Native woman who in 1812 led the local indigenous resilience to colonization
• Heather Edney, who founded one of the earliest harm reduction programs in the United States in 1990
• Dr. Rebecca Hernandez (Mescalero/Warm Spring Apache and Mexican American), the first nominee and recipient of the annual HERstory Award in 2024, for her work as a Community Archivist and previous Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz.
• Bettina Aptheker, founder of UCSC’s Feminist Studies Program
• Madeline Aliah, a local trans femme teen poet. 

See all honorees and learn more about HERstory here!

I first started making shadow boxes after picking up some old spice racks at the flea market in the early nineties and wondering what to do with what I like to call my spiritual smegma - pebbles, crystals, special buttons, miniatures, all the collected minutiae of friends and relationships past. 

These curiosities became the foundation for my 2005 art show Sacred Spaces in Small Places: Shadow Boxes, Spirit Shelves, and Altar-Egos, which spoke to the need to incorporate the spiritual in both our daily lives and in the mundane world by transforming everyday items into altars for meditation, reflection, and rejuvenation. Throughout history and across various religious beliefs, altars have served as a means to focus intentions, honor ancestors, affirm values, and reaffirm our connection to the divine.

I made a dozen or so over the years, some with themes such as the story of Amateratsu and Uzume, some were specific for Love Magic, and the Dream Box was mostly comprised of the eclectic snippets, tokens, and ephemera that once decorated the register on at Herland. Most of them I gifted away, notably to Melissa Bernstein, who later gifted it to the MAH, where it was first a part of the Infinite Other exhibit in 2018-2019, and in Then & Now: LGBTQ+ Gathering Spaces in 2023.

What do I love most about the Dream Box? The incredible amount of detail and how salient it is for the time. Inluding:

• Political buttons ("My Goddess Can beat Up Your God") 
• Magazine cutouts ("Americans are ALTARING Their Lives" is my favorite)
• Fortune cookie fortunes - ("Your Mind is Your Greatest Asset") Herland was neighbors with the Mongolian Barbeque, and every day I would sweep up fortunes
• Objet-trouve: lost marbles, single earrings, orphaned keys, a lucky wooden nickel from Lovedog Tattoo

Inside this 3-D collage live Asian drag kings and radiant black queens, butches and femmes, Aztec goddesses and Feng Shui cures, Zen tarot cards, babes on unicyles, and an abundance of body positivism. Condom references in a time when safer sex was being fully embraced during the AIDS crisis. Stickers promoting same-sex marriage.

And the symbols! Pink triangles, labryses, Venus and double Venus, cowrie shells, salamanders, butterflies, hearts, cats, marijuana leaves, and rainbows aplenty. All of the tarot - chalice, blade, pentagram, flame, plus the wheel... A chorus of affirmations: "Double happiness"  and my personal favorite from G9 - "I will never underestimate my body's capacity for pleasure." Michelle Tea even sneaks in a cameo.

And at the heart of it all, nestled quietly among the glitter and the grit: a single pet rock, painted with one word—Hope.

Caretaker

 I am

Taking care now

I am

Taken cared for

I am

The Caretaker

May I

Write what is true

For me 

This moment

Clear mind

Open heart

Enter the circle

Loving the kindness

"Sing to me, Muse, 

and I will tell my story"

Honor every voice

Bold intention

Celebrate the magic

Accept the mundane

Welcome the muse

Reveal and heal

Come to the page

Begin.

The Red Still Life

I posted a recipe for Four of Quiche recently, with a photograph of, as one one would expect, four beautifully baked quiches. There’s also four knobs on the stove, beautifully aligned. The quiches are subtle shades of ocher curry, yellow turmeric, burnt paprika and dusted cumin, atop a bland cook top with a speckled black counter top. On one side you can see part of an enamel green kettle, which I know longer have, but was part of a set with a turquoise kettle, Two of Kettles, that’s another story. There is also a rather sad looking pot holder, not sure just yet if it needs washing or replacing.

Dominating the scene is a still life. A red still life The infamous Red Still Life in Mr. Bartman's senior year art class at Walt Whitman High School, Bethesda, Maryland, 1985. We started the first semester with a white still life. I remember a candlestick, a set of goggles not much else. We played with shadows and light, complements and contrasts, created psychedelic paintings fit for a tea part with Alice from Wonderland. The year went on, and right after Christmas break we discovered just how devious Mr. B was in his set up.

There were bright red, rooster red, cast iron camping red. Shiny objects, cherry. A proud water jug, crowing coffee pot, vermilion soup bowl, crimson funnel, versatile lid - all with a gleaming white enamel interior and a severe black rim. Two mottled apples and a purple onion. Along with highly polished steel, both the pestle and mortar and the meat grinder, which reflected in more ways than one our thoughts as high-schoolers in the eighties. We had two months to complete this painting before the annual student art fair, let alone graduation. Day after day, tube after tube of Liqitex’s Naphthol Crimson acrylic paint splooged onto a random magazine page that will be ripped off for tomorrow's palette, we learn how to make a layer upon layer upon layer. How to contrast the saturated red with a soft, complementary background made of soothing dark greens, and what happened to apples as they turned to mush over two months, as well as the fact that the onion sprouted and then grew every day.

I found this painting in my parents house when they decided to move from Seaside to Santa Barbara, about five years ago. It was with a bunch of other paintings from my high school. Purple Tony, a sad looking merry-go-round, the back of a VW bug. I gave away all the paintings to Project Purr figuring someone would just paint over the canvases and use it for their own art. This one I kept because it was a good reminder of how many layers it takes sometimes to complete a particular vision.