Art doesn’t just hang on the walls at our house. It’s woven into the fabric of a home where we can immerse ourselves in others’ perspectives.
The immersion starts each day when I get up and head down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee that I drink amid the mural that Dustin Young painted on the doors of our kitchen cabinets.
Dustin's work is subtle, magical, full of memory and longing. The kitchen mural, which he executed in his studio and later assembled in our home, is in one of his favorite media: graphite dust applied with pencil and brush. He's put a clear coat of automobile-grade sealant over it so we don't have to be afraid to touch it.
Dustin said he was inspired by the site. Our home just northeast of downtown Denver was created out of what had been the coal-fired boiler house of an Army medical depot. Dustin’s graphite dust and the shapes he sketches evoke the industrial age – and the dark clouds that once poured from our smoke stack. The smoke stack is now inoperable, and we have solar panels on our garage.
Dustin references lightness as well. He also was thinking of the way the wind plays over the prairie. He intends, he told us, for viewers to "feel like you're going up into space." Like Dorothy.
Dustin completed a residency at RedLine Contemporary Art Center shortly before we commissioned his mural. RedLine is a gallery as well as an educational and community development institution that has helped us feel at home in Denver.
Another RedLine alum, Laura Shill, turned our powder room into an art installation.
For one memorable RedLine exhibition, Laura had handed out dismembered fingers. Actually, they were plaster casts of her own perfectly well attached fingers, with a coat of paint to make them look like tiny bronzes.
Those fingers were among the reasons we asked Laura to cover the walls of our powder room with one of her paintings she’d turned into custom wallpaper. The painting is based on a body part – legs, in this case – and we found it beautiful and slightly sinister, especially when repeated over and over on wallpaper.
Once she had covered the power room walls, Laura was inspired to add a few more touches. They include a pair of hands holding gold lame curtains back from the toilet, and some serpentine sculptures under the sink. Laura, who is a friend and frequent visitor to our home, has threatened to keep adding to the installation, slipping in elements without telling us. As a consequence, we pay close attention to that powder room, which may have been the wily artist’s intention.
Laura’s colors and motifs are often delicately pretty, but presented in ways that make viewers question their own assumptions. Laura finds the creative in the uncomfortable. You might, as well. Or maybe you'll just be sure not to linger when others are waiting for the bathroom.
While Jonathan Saiz was also a RedLine resident, I treasure a connection to him through the Denver Art Museum. His #WhatIsUtopia at the museum was composed of 10,000 of his two-by-two-inch drawings, paintings, and sculptures, each encased in a plastic box. The boxes were arranged on a curving panel that was as tall as a man and 33-feet wide, making a shimmering sculpture. When #WhatIsUtopia was dismantled in November, 2019 at the end of the exhibition, Jonathan invited anyone who wanted one of the tiny boxes to come to the museum and take one as his gift.
My child and I lined up to each get a box and to chat with Jonathan, who sat at a table at the museum to distribute the boxes. We did not imagine then that we'd someday have our own version of #WhatIsUtopia,
We later got to know Jonathan as a friend. During a visit with us, he was inspired by our home’s industrial history and by art we had bought around the world for nearly three decades. This past summer, he arrived at our home with nearly 1,000 boxes, some of which had been part of #WhatIsUtopia – he had not found 10,000 takers for his gifts. He used double-sided tape to affix the boxes, each containing a painting or sculpture he had created, to one of the 14.5-feet tall steel columns on which our second floor rests. The result flows like a river. Or rises like the sun. From some angles, it's a tapestry. From others, each box looks like it holds a letter in an ancient alphabet, the tools of storytelling.
We have two pieces you don’t have to enter our home to see, murals by Megan Gafford and Sarah Fukami.
A physicist had helped Megan irradiate daisy seeds so that the flowers that grew would be mutated, like the deformed flowers found near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in northern Japan after a 2011 meltdown. Megan preserved her flowers in resin to create sculptures, and also sketched them.
Megan enlarged one of her sketches of a daisy, its disc distorted by the radiation so that it appears to have a fold or scar across the center, to create a mural on our garage door in shades of gray. She usually works much smaller, but was intrigued at the opportunity to work on a grand scale. Artists inspire me with their willingness to break habits and confront their own assumptions.
Megan says, "The beautiful flowers were meant to attract; the knowledge of what I had done to them was meant to unsettle."
Megan, who also is an essayist, has written that "perhaps in exploring themes of mad scientists and Promethean figures, I became one myself. I have never cared that some of my peers consider me a Dr. Frankenstein, though. Why let something as pedestrian as reputation sully the search for the sublime? But I have grown bored with my approach, because it risks becoming formulaic: Disquieting Science + Beauty = Art."
We look forward to seeing the fruits of Megan's next explorations, even as her Frankenstein daisy stage is preserved on our garage.
Sarah has explored the idea of welcome by interrogating exclusion. So we asked her to create something for our home’s entrance.
Sarah’s work has included layering prints of Ansel Adams’s photos of Japanese-Americans interned in the United States during World War II with images such as patterns reminiscent of Japanese woodblock print. The resulting collages refer to the stories Sarah grew up hearing from her Japanese-American relatives about having been taken from their homes in Washington state, stripped of their property and rights, and interned. Years after, Sarah’s grandfather fought in the Korean War for the US, a country that had once treated him as an enemy.
“The Japanese way is to continue with pride and to persevere and believe and honor that justice will win out,” Sarah said. “That’s American – seeing the situation for what it is and wanting to make it better.”
Perseverance can be read in the set of the shoulders of the human figures Sarah included in her mural on two walls near our front door. The figures are on steel panels cut to Sarah’s design by the company that built some of our home’s infrastructure. Sarah painted the figures and the walls to which they are affixed in a palette of golds, greens and reds and with floral motifs drawn from the kind of wallpaper her grandparents might have had in their homes.
One part of Sarah’s piece is not visible from outside. As you come through our front door, you step on a welcome mat Sarah designed featuring flowers, leaves and origami cranes – the cranes, which also figure in her mural, symbolize honor, good fortune, loyalty, longevity and, since World War II, the longing for peace. As you stand on her mat, Sarah’s mural can be viewed through a window.
My husband and I are Americans who met in South Africa and for two decades lived in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. We continue to travel the world and have art from all the places we've found a welcome. Our collection now has a home for and of art.