Ceramic Sculpture - Maple Tree Series

Maple Tree Series
Dartmouth College/Winter, 2007

WOMAN SPEAK

Susan Taylor
Editorial director, Essence magazine

My husband smiles knowingly when, after getting him to agree to a moratorium on purchasing more art, I come home with a new piece, and the only explanation I can offer is that it spoke to me. Sana Musasama’s work speaks to me. It speaks as well to my husband. Sana's workspeaks to people throughout the world. Miles Davis once said there are two questions to be asked about any artist: Does he have ideas and can he project? Miles would have appreciated Sana’s artistry. Whatever the medium an artist works through, the challenge is to find her own voice. When the artist is a woman, it is doubly hard to project her ideas. For Black women artists, the difficulty trebles.

Sana Musasama, whose ceramics are bold, provocative and fearless, is one of the few African American women artists whose work is respected in an art world that is both racist and sexist. Her work is worldly wise and earthy; earthy like the places she is drawn to in her travels: the Kenyan bush, the hills of Cambodia, places that are in the outer reaches of the earth. But that voice is also full of light and laughter.

Sana is a wonderful storyteller. Poignant, funny, absurd and sometimes horrifying stories find their way into her work. And when you don’t see them at first, you hear in her pieces traces of the accents of women of diverse and divergent cultures.

In our age of sophistication, when much that was magical has been exposed and explained, art still holds epiphanies for us, can still leave us awestruck and transformed. But women have been speaking in this way from time immemorial, transforming earth and water into mud, and mud and fire into something seemingly incorruptible. In every culture, women were the first potters. Clay was believed to have a woman’s soul, and men were proscribed from working with it.Women made vessels in the shapes of their bodies and in the likeness of their womb to hold water and seed. Women made houses out of mud and dung and baked them in the sun of the savanna. In all of the world’s most ancient myths, God is a potter and a Goddess.

In all of these beautifully wrought works of art are the allusions to women’s bodies and the issues surrounding our bodies: the bright, fragrant flower of our sexual allure, the garden seeded, the fruit borne, the womb. And nowhere are the allusions more powerful than in Sana’s ceramic commentary on ritual initiations, like female circumcision, as the terrible price women sometimes pay for admission into societies that may be civilized in a literal sense but are yet brutally misogynist. These isolated vaginal forms stare back at us in stunning silence. But they are not mute.They speak volumes. There is also an awful beauty in their power to transform our ignorance and apathy into knowledge, responsibility, compassion and motivation to make change. Sana has literally shined a light on a tragic condition of millions of women around the world. Sana, we are awakening. We hear you.

CUSTOM MADE: VULVIC TRANSFORMATIONS

Suzanne Ramljak
Writer, curator and art historian

Clay has always been more than just material for Sana Musasama. It has served as a guide and entrée into various cultures, leading her to distant lands, including India, Japan, Vietnam and Mexico. Musasama’s involvement with ceramics also brought her to Africa, where she discovered a sense of community and creative sustenance. “Africa became my wellspring, engendering in me a fearlessness,” Musasama says. She even replaced her given surname, “Wallace,” with one derived from the West African chiefs Musa and Sama. The artist found something else on the continent that she didn’t expect, something that crept into view like a shadowy specter. Across the region girls were being maimed, their genitals cut, sewn and scarred as part of a centuries-old custom of femalecircumcision. The culture that provided her with such strength now came with the taint of blood.

For twenty years after this realization, Musasama silently carried the painful truth, unable to discuss or express it. When she finally dared ask an African man about circumcision and childbearing, she was bluntly told that women were “chickens,” and that no custom would ever prevent them from breeding. This crude view of females as hens surfaced in her work in the form of hundreds of hand-sized clay eggs, or ovaries. These reproductive organs inevitably led her to sculpt the geography of the vulva, with its labial folds and hooded clitoris. Musasama was soon in the heated terrain of genital mutilation.

In formal terms, Musasama’s pod-like sculptures are variations on a closed structure, with assorted folds, sutures and bindings. Engaging and often lovely, the pods bespeak a dreadful violence. Through the supple medium of clay she recounts transgressions against the body; physical mutilation becomes sculptural mutation, agony turns into art.

Musasama’s chosen material and techniques underscore her subjects’ torment. Stoneware is preferred due to its total vitrification during firing, which captures the emotional hardening of girls after circumcision. Her methods of closure also echo the process of genital alteration. In actual practice, materials like animal gut, twine and thorns are used to fasten the gaping vagina after the labia are severed. Musasama also enlists organic matter such as bamboo, straw, horn and quills, along with rubber, wire and even safety pins. Keloids and scarification—common by-products of the operation—appear in her work as lumps or raised patterns. Musasama further invests certain pieces with tufts of her own pubic hair. Red rose petals are introduced within and around the forms to suggest the flow of blood.

The reality of female genital mutilation is staggering. Dating back thousands of years, the procedure is still performed on some 2 million girls annually. The ritual surgery may be conducted anytime between birth and adulthood, but most commonly between the ages of 7 and 10. While prevalent in Islamic countries within Africa and the Middle East, the practice is cross-cultural. The process is typically done without anesthesia and every conceivable tool is used to cut the vulva and clitoris. In spite of its brutality and risks—from infection to shock to death—the ritual is defended on many fronts: to preserve virginity, increase marriage prospects, prevent promiscuity and protect against rape. Regardless of rationale, the tradition is ultimately a means of controlling female bodies; like fashioning a chastity belt out of flesh.

It is a testament to Musasama’s broad understanding that she can commune within a culture that abuses women in this way. Although deeply troubled by the bloody custom, she still respects the value of its larger ritual context. The specific circumcision rite that she encountered in Sierra Leone involved 13- to 16-year olds and lasted three months. During the initiation ceremony, girls are celebrated, given gifts, taught lessons and welcomed into a community of sisterhood. Genital cutting was just the finale of a generous retreat designed to equip young women for the future. Likemuch of culture, the ritual both endows and extracts a price from its participants. Nonetheless,Musasama’s personal wish would be to maintain the rite of passage, but without the cutting, a blood-free alternative adopted in countries like Ghana and Kenya.

On a broader level, Musasama’s work speaks to the dual nature of all rituals that serve to strengthen a society while curbing the power of an individual. Women’s bodies remain subject to greater cultural domination and Musasama has explored other forms of sanctioned coercion, including foot binding, neck rings, prostitution and honor killing. These traditional practices take their place in the continuum of offenses, enacted in the name of custom or community. Musasama acknowledges that “we are all in some form of bondage” and her work exposes the painful mores that we’ve become entangled in.

Never a practitioner of art for art’s sake, Musasama enlists her considerable skills in the interest of humanity. With her circumcision series, the consciousness-raising process extends beyond the gallery encounter. When a piece is sold, the artist gives part of the proceeds to a clinic that helps reconstruct the genitalia of circumcised women. Owners of these vulvic pods are obligated to share the cultural story with others.

From her series on the 19th-century movement to harvest maple syrup as an alternative to the slave-driven sugar trade to her current work on the unnamed multitudes slaughtered throughout history, Musasama unfolds epic human tales. Such sagas are made palpable through compelling form, and we are seduced into pondering painful scenarios. Musasama’s art reveals the astounding malleability of both clay and flesh, as they’re shaped under the pressure of custom and desire.

A SEASON OF ABUNDANCE

David Revere McFadden
Chief curator, Museum of Arts & Design

When I asked Sana Musasama what it was that attracted her to clay in the early days of her career, she said “It is the material that talked to me and the one through which I can speak most effectively.”This directness is typical of both Musasama and her work, but it belies the tangible, visual and intellectual complexities of her art. Musasama’s work, as well as her lifestyle, reflects this complexity. For anyone fortunate enough to be invited to her home, Musasama’s life and art are virtually impossible to separate. Her house is filled with her works
in clay, not unexpectedly, but the setting for the works is lush with mementoes, collections and souvenirs through which the artist’s life and vision is celebrated and remembered.

Musasama’s intimate knowledge of and love for the medium of clay has been shaped by many events in her life. Of special importance was her time studying at Alfred in upstate New York, where she came in contact with such noteworthy artists and teachers as Tony Hepburn, Wayne Higby, Robert Turner, Andrea and John Gill, and Val Cushing. The work of these artists encompasses a wide range of approaches to the medium, from independent sculpture to functional pottery. All, however, share a keen appreciation for the seductive tacticity of clay, love of rich glaze effects and interest in pushing the medium beyond its traditional craft associations. These lessons about the potential of the medium were quickly absorbed by the artist, whose own career was launched by an important solo exhibition at June Kelly Gallery in New York in 1995.

International travel also contributed to the artist’s dedication to her medium, beginning with trips to West Africa, Japan, India, Vietnam, Thailand, China and Korea, as well as France and the Netherlands. Here the artist established friendships with a wide range of individuals, some of whom were artists working in clay. From each she drew inspiration for her own work, and it confirmed her belief that clay is truly one of the most global mediums. The artist has commented “Every culture that I encountered had deep and profound links to clay. Clay is everywhere, and it is this ubiquity that makes it such a powerful communicator of cultural values.” Clay is universal and abundant, and it is this accessibility that makes it such a potent means of communication.

Abundance in both spirit and form is a hallmark of Musasama’s approach to clay. For her, clay is a metaphor for abundance, for fecundity and growth, and the most intimate of human concerns, strivings and visions. She uses clay with abandon; her shapes are muscular, energetic and animated, and her surfaces rich with intricate
textures. Abundance is also underscored in Musasama’s monumental installations.
In her work, tumescent forms appear to writhe and stretch heavenward. They
comprise stacked elements resembling bursting seed pods, entwined roots and vines
and, in some instances, raw earth that surrounds the vegetal forms. Their surfaces
are painted with bold splashes of earth tones—ochre, rust, moss green, humus
brown—mottled or scumbled or carried out in intentionally crude dots or concentric rings. These works suggest the cycles of emergence, growth and decay that permeate nature in all of its manifestations.

The works in this exhibition were part of a Maple Tree series that explored variations
on the theme over several years. The colorful exuberance of these trees can be appreciated on a purely visual level, but they are significant on a much more personal level for the artist. The series is revelatory of Musasama’s profound
engagement with social, political and historical issues that have informed her life and art. As with clay itself, trees were seen by the artist as universal symbols that function as cultural communicators of myth, knowledge and belief. For Musasama, trees are metaphors for seasonality; sliced through their inner structures they serve as calendars that record time and change. For most people, trees also connote
characteristics such as strength and flexibility in the face of changing environmental
conditions, and this association further attracted the artist. While the Maple Tree
series is a logical extension of Musasama’s focus on the abundant and fecund forms of nature, there is another story to be told.

The series was created in response to a magazine article that the artist read while traveling via Amtrak through Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. The article was about the history of maple sugaring in America, beginning with the earliest known use of the sap from maple trees to produce sugar by Native Americans. The knowledge of this hidden resource in the vast forests of North America was shared with newly arrived settlers from Europe. By the late 18th century, maple sugar was being produced in sufficient quantities that it could be used
as a trade commodity.

It was the potential social implications of maple sugaring that adds another layer to the story. Cane sugar, the competitive sweetener to maple sugar, was a commodity made possible because of the enslavement of thousands of Africans, who labored in the cane fields. For early American abolitionists, domestically produced maple sugar could serve the goals of freedom from slavery.

It is the maple tree as a symbol of liberation that propelled Musasama’s work. As in all of her work, Musasama enriches the surface of the clay with lush color applied in bold gestural strokes. The historical context of her work—the story behind the image—is made visible in shapes that connote emergence into life.

For Sana Musasama, the abundance of nature, the global language of clay, and trees as a symbol of history and of spiritual and cultural liberation are seamlessly merged in a body of work that celebrates a season of abundance and a lifetime of remembrance.

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