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Some earlier thoughts on Deaf Space

#381, from October, 2015. 29×32. Acrylic on Canvas.  I called this: “Self Portrait.” It seems to be moving from hearing,  to a visual deaf space, with hands raised and ready to begin to sign… I began to learn ASL in 2016.
#381

In the ten years or so since I began to notice the change in my hearing, I’ve found that whatever inconveniences I’ve experienced, what I’ve learned about Deaf history– beginning ASL, it’s place in the Deaf community–that whatever inconveniences I’ve experienced have been far outweighed by what I’ve gained.

Following the several deaf/Deaf hoh pages on FB, I see this fabricated wall created between sign, and Hearing language. The social and political and medical effects of which have been so damaging, historically, and hardly less now. The discussions and fights on the advantages of techno-props to bring people into the Hearing world, versus learning sign (especially those around surgical procedures to infants to give them cochlear implants), go on as though these were mutually exclusive options.

The assumptions of the advantages of Hearing, as one might expect from a privileged class, become masks to stigma and stereotyping. Language has always been more than vocalization. “Gestures” are as grammatical as speech. Sign languages are not subsidiaries, or alternative of speech, but a natural unfolding out of the larger set that constitutes language.

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

BOOMERS….

Image result for Photo Birmingham civil rights memorial

rest in peace ..

Some by birth, were born before 1946–but all died as martyrs and warriors of Justice in that generation… and many, many more…
—
Jimme Lee Stephen JacksonRev James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo Jonathan Daniels (1965). Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmitt Till, John Earl Reece (1955) , Wilie Edwards Jr (1951), Mack Charles Parker (1959, Herbert Lee (1961), col. Roman Duckworth Jr, Paul Guihard (1962), Wiliam Lewis Moore, Medgar Evers, Addie May Collins, Carol Robertson, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley , Virgil Lamar Ware (1963) Louis allen, JohnnieMae Chappel, Rev Bruce Klunder Henry Hezekia Dee, Charles Eddie Moore, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Henry Schwerner, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn (1964), Oncal Moore, Willie Brewster,Jonathan Myrick Daniesl (1965), Samuel Leamar Younge Jr, VernonFerdinand Dahmer, Ben Chester White, Clarence TGriggs, James Meredith, (1966), Wharlest Jockson, Benjamin Brown (1967), Mary Ann Vecchio,
Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr, Delano Herman Middleton, Henry Ezekiel Smith, Martin Luther King (1968), Yvonne Oakes, Jeffry Green Miller (1970), Allison B. Krouse, Wiliam Knox Schroeder, Sandra Lee Scheuer, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, James Earl Green.
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And let us not forget the thousands of ACT UP warriors who died fighting, and fought while dying…
—–
Mumia abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier –and the thousands of Political prisoners still in cages FREE THEM ALL!

Tell me, who deserves to be remembered, as the true representatives of a generation?

#1101

24×30″ Oil on canvas.
“Here again the prisoner must use the very language, the words, the syntax, of his enemy, whereas he craves a separate language, belonging only to his people.” Jean Genet, to george Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Prison Letters.
[Painted over now 1210]
#1101.JPG
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

Overstory. Richard Powers

Image result for public doman photos Redwoods

A novel, where a character dies and revives — listening to voices no one else can hear. Where another is a parpalegic who spends his life coding and living in a cyber dream world, and yet another is married to silence at the death of his family. There is one on the autistic spectrum, who spends his life studying why people do what they do, and a scientist who is almost deaf, who goes years before anyone hears what she has learned. Yet another, felled by a stroke, who can manage only a slngle word at a time–and those, mostly unintelligible.

Whether fiction, or philosophy–or work of art–the one question that links auther, thinker, artist– to their work, the question that hovers over the work, informs everything else one might ask about it:

why did they do this?

What was the unspeakable, imageless, aporia of thought that formed the need and provocation to make this thing?

 

On p. 383, Ray–the character who has been stroked speechless–is thinking –while his wife reads to him from Anna Karenina:

<To be human is to confiuse a satifying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale,  and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compleeing as the struggles between a few lost people. >

Try again. Fail again. Fail better