Last Week for We Are Pilgrims

There are just three more days left to see Annie Bissett's woodblock print series, We Are Pilgrims.  Stop by Cullom Gallery (603 S Main Street, Seattle map) next Tuesday or Wednesday, Nov. 23 & 24, or the show's final day, Saturday, Nov. 27, and see this strong suite of Japanese woodblock prints that dig much, much deeper than the grade school myths of black hats and buckle shoes.  Bissett's series explores the real hopes, anxieties, mistakes, irrevocable impact, and real life personages of the American Pilgrims from many different angles.

John Alden, 1621 & Priscilla Mullins, 1621.

Annie recently shared with me a lay-sermon she delivered earlier this year at her own Congregational Church, an old Pilgrim church, close to her home in Northampton.  Here is a passage that I think gets at some of her kernel thoughts. (bold is mine, not Annie's).

They Looked Behind.

 for two years I studied everything I could find about the first Europeans who settled here in New England, especially in those first 50 years, when nothing was certain. I read about them, I thought about them, I tried to imagine this land as they encountered it, and I made these 15 woodblock prints about the stories that most intrigued me.  I discovered many surprising things in my research. Did you know that of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, only 37 were members of the separatist congregation coming from Holland? They called themselves not "Pilgrims," but "Saints" and they called the other 65 "Strangers." Did you know that the first brick building on the Harvard campus was a school for native American students? Or that the first Bible printed in North America was an Algonquin Indian translation? Or that two homosexual men were tried in court in Plymouth colony way back in 1637? Some of the stories amazed me, but what was even more amazing to me was that many of the things we're grappling with today were there right at the beginning: the role of religion in government, the question of who belongs in society and who doesn't, the role and rules of family life and marriage, and always a spirit of seeking, a pilgrimage to find home.

Honey, I'm Worried About the Kids.

 

Caleb & Joel Wend to Harvard.

As a child of the Pacific Northwest, the story of the Mayflower was a distant, self-contained, and contrived tale that resonated little with me. It was covered as a requisite part of third grade then pushed to the back of my mind with the rest of the lore of early America.  The complicated, rich, proud, and later tragic history of Northwest coastal and Great Northern Plains tribes, their great pre-contact societies, and their violent snuffing-out at the hands of European Americans, this was the real, dirty story or my ancestors' interaction with the native people of North America.  Growing up in Puyallup, WA, I also witnessed the abject poverty and the effects of ghetto/reservation life on the original Puyallup people.  In my mind it was arrogant at best and worse, dangerously retro-revisionist to accept the notion of shivering Pilgrims taken into the warm embrace of the wise Indian, never mind what we Europeans did to them once we got our strength back.  That is all to say that through my own engagement with Bissett's prints and her words of discovery, I have made a slow but profound turn-around in my understanding of the relevance the Pilgrims' experience as an American creation story, a story that we are it seems inexorably tied to.  As Annie points out the same hopes, tragic misunderstandings, and steadfast (some would say intractable) beliefs first manifested by the Pilgrims are the same issues we wrestle with today.  Sometime this summer Annie mentioned that Nathaniel Philbrick's book, Mayflower: a Story of Courage Community and War, had been a valuable resource for her while researching her series.  I wish I had started this book earlier, but finally did only this week.  Here is a passage from the preface: The Two Voyages.

Vast Unpeopled Lands.

...the Pilgrims (I thought) were the stuff of holiday parades and bad Victorian poetry.  Nothing could be more removed from the ambiguities of modern-day America, I thought, than the Pilgrims and the Mayflower.

But, as I have since discovered, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving.  When we look to how the Pilgrims and their children maintained more than fifty years of peace with the Wampanoags and how that peace suddenly erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil, the history of Plymouth Colony becomes something altogether new, rich, troubling, and complex.  Instead of the story we already know, it becomes the story we need to know.

I certainly needed to know.  I see now that I must spend some time engaged with this story of the origin of our country, and I am guessing that it's especially those magical 50 years -- before the fighting and division tore our country apart for the first time -- that have a lot to teach us about how to be American today. 

 

In the News - We Are Pilgrims

Thanks to Jen Graves at The Stranger for the shout out about Annie's Bissett's show.  The Curtis Erlinger photographs she also mentions are on view just down the street at Punch Gallery in the Tashiro Kaplan Building.  Stop by and have a look here and there, then have a cup of tea at the Panama Teahouse next door. Antidote for the wind and the rain.

Annie Bissett at Cullom Gallery

I was so pleased to have Annie Bissett and her partner Lynn in Seattle for the opening of the show of her new series of woodblock prints, We Are Pilgrims.  Here are a few photos of the opening reception on October 15th, and Annie's talk and demonstration the next afternoon.  My thanks to everyone who came by.  I especially enjoyed listening to Annie's thoughts on Saturday and hearing about the historical discoveries she made over the course of the 2+ years it took to complete the suite of prints.  The complete show is up on line at cullomgallery.com along with Annie's commentary about the underlying facts behind each design.  We also have copies of Annie's very fine illustrated catalog, We Are Pilgrims.  Contact the gallery if you would like to order a copy. 

 

Getting Ready for Annie Bissett

We are putting the finishing touches on Cullom Gallery's next exhibit - a new suite of woodblock prints by Northampton, Massachusetts artist Annie Bissett.  Come meet the artist and celebrate the opening of this beautiful and insightful show on Friday night, October 15, from 6 to 8 pm.  (Cullom Gallery, 603 S Main Street, Seattle map).  The Gallery will also host a talk and printmaking demonstration with Annie Bissett on Saturday afternoon, October 16, at 1 pm.  Both events are open to the public.  Come and bring a friend!

Here is some information about Bissett's series, taken from our press release, and a sneak peek at a number of the prints.  We look forward to seeing many of you at the gallery next Friday night!

We Are Pilgrims is a suite of fifteen Japanese-style woodblock prints that centers on the lives of the earliest settlers of New England.  The suite is both a personal exploration of Bissett's legacy as a Mayflower descendant and a critical look at the contemporary impact of the pilgrims' arrival in America almost 400 years ago.

Annie Bissett employs the Japanese woodblock printmaking method known today as moku hanga, which is characterized by Japanese papers, water-based inks, self-carved blocks, and hand-printing, to complete the series. All prints were realized over a two year period in 2008 to 2010; the artist has also recently published a full-color 72-page catalog that illustrates all 15 prints and in an essay by Bissett, weaves historic facts that she uncovered with her thoughts on the  farther-reaching implications of the pilgrims' actions, beliefs, and institutions.

In her essay for the catalog, Bissett notes that the Mayflower was a small ship, estimated to be only 113 feet long.  Traveling at a rate of 2 miles per hour across 3000 miles of the Atlantic it reached the eastern shore of America in 66 days.  Several prints in the series consider both the hope and desperate anxiety felt by the pilgrims aboard the first ship, as recorded by Plymouth governor William Bradford.

Dorothy Bradford Comes to America.

With a Prosperous Wind.

In the catalog's cover image, "They Looked Behind", Bissett has carved a quotation from Bradford's ship diary in which he recalls, "If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world."  Just two months earlier on the morning of their departure, Bradford had noted that they left under "A Prosperous Wind," the title chosen by Bissett for her twin views of the Mayflower under a starlit sky.
In one of the most dramatic prints in the series, "Dorothy Bradford Comes to America", Bissett has imagined the  accidental or suicidal drowning of William Bradford's wife, Dorothy May, as the ship sat anchored in Provincetown Harbor and Bradford was ashore on a scouting mission.

Honey I'm Worried About the Kids. 

Themes of corruption also weigh heavily throughout Bissett's series.  In another pair of prints, the artist uses the same carved block for a group of pilgrim men, women and children, overlaying it across two different backdrops.  In "No Friends to Greet Them" the group walks cautiously though a moonlit night; in "Honey, I'm Worried About the Kids" bare branches and shadows are swapped for a concrete wall covered with the balloon letters of graffiti tags.  Moral corruption trades places with the physical ravishes of disease in "10 Little 9 Little Indians."  In a nod to the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a central Indian figure stands with an arrow pointed down in a symbol of peace as the words, "Come over and help us" float overhead.

Bissett's version however replaces the seal's circular outline with the rosette of a smallpox virus, a disease that had been spread by even earlier European immigrants, and by the time the pilgrims arrived in 1620, had killed an estimated 90% of the local Wampanoag tribe, as she notes in her catalog essay.

God Blesses John Alexander and Thomas Roberts.

Still other prints in We Are Pilgrims look at the impact of institutions - educational institutions, and the institution of Christian marriage and its presumed heterosexuality.  Bissett's print, "Caleb and Joel Went to Harvard, 1665", imagines a portrait of the first two native graduates of Harvard Indian College.  Their bare chests show through gossamer versions of the pilgrim black frock and white collar and cuffs, behind them, a naive rendering of the college's original buildings.  Another print considers the historic and contemporary legacy of sexual bigotry as revealed through court records of the trial of John Alexander and Thomas Roberts, lovers who in 1637 were found guilty of homosexual acts with each other and each variously sentenced.  As Bissett notes, Alexander was whipped, branded, and banished from the colony;


Roberts was whipped and, as an indentured servant, returned to his master, and barred from ever owning land.  Bissett's gentle and familiar portrait of the two men posed with hands touching and one's arm over the other's shoulder, as well as the title of the print, "God Blesses John Alexander and Thomas Roberts, 1637" defies the image's red hot S-for-sodomy iron that reaches from the sky and the bigoted comments carved like wall paper behind the men, text the artist gathered from letters and emails sent to the Episcopal Church Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003 when the openly gay priest, Gene Robinson, was elected bishop.

As the current national debate struggles with questions of what it means to be American and who gets to be American, We Are Pilgrims, explores the American creation story from many angles, imagining what the lives of these early immigrants might really have been like, and what their lives mean to us now, almost 400 years later. 

Born in Springfield Massachusettes, Annie Bissett spent two decades as a professional illustrator, working for the Washington Post, National Geographic Society, and TimeLife Publications, before turning her attention to Japanese woodblock printmaking in 2005.  She is an active member of Zea Mays Printmaking Studio in Florence, MA.  Her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions and biennials including the International Print Center of New York's New Prints 2009/Autumn, the 2009 Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Annual Exhibition, New York; the 2009 Los Angeles Printmaking Workshop Annual Exhibition; the Hunt's Prize at the Boston Printmakers 2009 N. American Print Biennial; the exhibition Violence at the Jundt Art Museum, Gongaza University, Spokane, WA; and Printed Matter at Giant Robot Gallery, San Francisco, CA.  Annie Bissett has been represented by the Seattle gallery, Cullom Gallery since 2007, where her first solo exhibition, Far Away Up Close, was mounted in 2008.  Annie Bissett is also a leading voice in the growing American moku hanga printmaking movement; Bissett's blog, Woodblock Dreams, which she began in 2005, counts over 9000 views and hundreds of regular readers.  Her prints are part of the permanent collections of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS; and the Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga Univeristy, Spokane WA.