Living & Arts

Richardson mixes media to unite past and future

Richardson-mixes-media-to-unite-past-and-future

Tasha Lewis | Phoenix Staff

Crystal Richardson’s senior art show uses mixed media to tell a story about her heritage.

In print | April 2, 2009

Correction Appended

This past Thursday, the Senior Art Major exhibits began with a bang with Crystal Richardson’s (’09) mixed media presentation. Her colorful, personal and simple creations filled the Kitao Gallery with various Swarthmorean art-enthusiasts. Lining the clean white walls, each image, sewed to a frame of fabric, had a story to tell, be it a portrait, a flower, or dead fish.

In her artist’s statement, Richardson explores her earliest memories and the people and events which touched her. “I remember tootsie rolls,” she writes. “Dad would buy me penny candies (back when they actually cost a penny). He’d reach his hand into the plastic bucket as I watched expectantly from behind the confines of the turquoise stroller straps that kept me from floating away with excitement.” She muses about her mother’s conception of traditional, and remembers her Uncle Henry’s “beautiful, wonderful, spectacular, shiny, shiny beads.” Richardson’s art, it seems, centers around bringing the past to the present to the future, and intensely valuing the personal and intimate.

It is appropriate, then, that many of her family members were there at the event. Genevieve Woodhead ’12, a member of the Kitao Gallery who helped set up the event, said, “We didn’t really have to help much, Crystal’s family helped her display her art.” Richardson’s family members’ deication to her art was nearly as moving as the works themselves. “It was right to have [my family] here to see my work. I couldn’t have imagined it any other way,” said Richardson.

“Her art is very simple, and yet every piece seems to have much more depth behind it,” potential art major Emily Leach ’12 commented. Other exhibit-attenders expressed a certain amount of dismay at not being able to access Richardson’s art immediately. Despite the palpable sense of intimacy in each piece, it felt unreachable to some. “The images were really moving, but the connections between them weren’t clear,” Avery Davis ’12 said. “I wish there had been some more explication of the motives behind them, so the exhibit seemed to be a more cohesive whole.” This certainly speaks to the nature of Richardson’s art. In the last paragraph of her artist’s statement, Richardson says: “If you want to know where my art comes from, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about where my art is coming from; it’s about where it’s going. Every picture, every piece of regalia, every prayer chanted into clay, every weaving, every carving, every plaster cast piece of my heart is a letter home.”

Inspired by her grandmother’s quilts, these “letters home” are mixed media comprised of photographs, some of which had been edited, sewn onto large fabric backgrounds. Of her process, Richardson said that she “reverted to [her] five year-old self in the cart as [her] mother and grandmother roamed through the Joann’s in the big city 30 minutes away from where [she] grew up.” She chose patterns she found to be “cute and pretty” and that represented important people in her life. “The intuitive part involved looking at a basket full of colors and knowing what ones to put back. Sometimes an artist just knows things instinctively, at a gut level — and I believe that is what style is,” said Richardson.

Speaking of her overall experience with art and existence at Swarthmore, said Richardson, “This show was the first time my happy, playful, love of my work was simply allowed to exist. Over the last five years at Swarthmore I’ve found myself representing my People, and the tragedy of our realities over the last five generations… Swarthmore as an ideal, and an institution that doesn’t address Native American realities, issues, or genocide has impacted my art in ways I never would have wanted my art to be impacted. I guess in the spur of the moment, right before my art show, I decided not to create from Swarthmore, but to create from the place in my heart that always takes me back to where I belong. Seeing as how I’d invited so many friends to my party, I thought it would be good for them to be able to recognize the Crystal they know in the work on the walls. All in all, this was a highly edited show that was the most cohesively presented body of work I have ever installed.”

It is fitting, then, that Richardson’s work was seen as simultaneously ambiguous and moving. The mystery behind the pieces lies in their intensely personal nature, but it is impossible to ignore the spirit from which they came.

The other senior art major exhibits will all be displayed in the List Gallery beginning late April and running through early May.

Disclosure note: Crystal Richardson is an op-artist for the Phoenix, but had no part in the production of this article.

Correction: April 6, 2009

Correction: This article incorrectly stated that the other senior art shows will be displayed in the Kiato Gallery throughout the rest of April and May. The other senior art shows will actually be displayed in the List Gallery beginning late April and running through early May.