Glenna Stearman Park, All the News That’s Fit to Paint

Glenna Stearman Park

Living in South Texas in the 1980’s, I became very interested in US politics and our relationship with Latin America and eventually with Africa. I collected Mexican Folk Art and often created still life paintings using cut flowers, plants, Mexican folk art sculptures, children’s toys and newspapers. Often the newspapers were seemingly secondary. The most fun aspect of the painting was to rewrite the news with stories that I wanted to read.  Consequently, I rewrote all the news in the paintings.  This project got off the ground with the New York Times “all the news that’s fit to print” changed to all the news that’s fit to paint, and I was busy for several years.  I used art as the sign language for what I wanted to say.

In 1986 I had a travel grant to go to a painters’ five-week workshop at the University of New Hampshire. We were supposed to go to the southwestern coast of France on some big estate and paint together.  Someone bombed the French site a few weeks ahead, and we were suddenly redirected to live in a dorm on a campus in New Hampshire and paint in the campus art studios. Minimal summer school was in session, but we assumed the control over a small dorm and the painting studios. The abrupt change was acceptable, once I got over missing a nice trip to France.  Janet Fish, a highly skilled realist painter, was one of the artists leading the studio seminars. Jack Beale was the artist in charge of the program.

I focused on realist painting after having a lot of art history and extended study in modernism. I decided that making art in the folk art aesthetic of painting gave me more room for the language games I liked to play. 

The “David Antin” painting (above) is a tribute to David who was my poetry teacher and seminar teacher in graduate school. He was significant in encouraging me to write in my own voice and probably was among the most important influences in my art. The painting is acrylic and about six feet tall.

 Most of the time I had a snarky attitude about the newspapers in Texas where I lived for 20 years. They were too conservative for me! I started writing responses to the news and presenting it as the newspaper copy I wanted to read. So as not to let everyone around me know that I was “talking back,” I used the news imagery as part of a still life. Usually, I had a plant, a vase of flowers, a cup of coffee, and Mexican folk art or African art on top of the papers—dismissing my text to the fast read. Only once my dealer sold a painting to a woman who brought it back to the gallery the next day saying that her husband “wasn’t going to stand for  that political statement on his walls!” Although I lost the sale, I continued to make these paintings. The times were changing and women artists were talking. I had no intentions of apologizing for my ideas and did not feel a bold need to talk about the politics of feminism. 

 “A Place to Call Home” was painted with a map of Texas and Mexico because there was always a scrappy attitude around the border. Mexicans wanted jobs and a safer lifestyle and Texans were split between the ones who whined about Mexicans taking their jobs and letting Spanish infiltrate the English language, or those who were willing to be a nation of immigrants. The old warning about the Russians coming to get us was wearing out, and changed to the Chinese are going to get us.  And later “foreigners” played in the background and created a screed of political fear in all border issues.

While teaching in Texas, I had students who came from the border. In one case the family put out water and food to help the starving migrants, and in others the parents supported the political measures to curb the migration.  A lot of my paintings reminded me that my parents understood poverty and that many people went through the Great Depression and grew up to learn that poverty, starvation and abuse are common experiences. We might want something pretty to see, but I believe we have to remember the past. The Texas border is where the battle was most focused for me. In painting I always face the conflict of whether my work will be documentary observation or a personal political statement in art language. 

Gourmet Magazine peeking out from under a table with a bowl of fruit used a decorative display, in front of an African woman, seemed really clueless in the political implications on those items. With a light on the subject, I objected to the implied contrast of the reality those objects symbolized. The irony of cultural blindness seems everywhere, even in the gold framing.

Being an artist does not have clearly defined boundaries. Installation Art is a medium that has an ill-defined edge and can sneak up on the observer. During a period of Somali famine, I asked my art students to watch news and make a notebook of observations of the famine in the news. At the same time, they were making clay human bone studies from the biology department’s skeleton. I fired various hands, arms, skulls, and random body parts. Then we placed the bones under bushes and trees in the school’s central garden.  At the same time, I made simple red-brown clay bowls and did not fire them. The dry clay bowls were placed just out-of-reach from bony fingers. They were empty. The installation was another visual art form about the starvation in Africa. It was a startling realization of a political truth. 

Besides addressing the process of making an image in paint or any other media, I have spent most of my career thinking about WHAT to paint or make in art.  Switching back and forth between painting and installation art is a lesson in making the strongest statement. (The Somali garden was video-taped for San Antonio PBS Arts programming.) The collection of bones and bowls was a “collaboration” with my students, and consequently we all were the artists and I was the director and conceptualist.

In still another art medium, I wrote and directed a Performance Art piece as one of the events for performance art night at the San Antonio Museum of Art. I hired two Hispanic actors to wear border patrol uniforms and greet White museum attendees who were asked to show some form of ID and to go around and use the side door to the museum. They were also advised not to be loud or disruptive to other museum guests. The Black and Hispanic museum guests were greeted warmly and invited in to have an enjoyable evening at the museum. Throughout the evening, the Border Patrol broke up large groups of White museum patrons and urged them not to intrude on the Black and Hispanic guests. Twenty years later, I still hear complaining about how insulting my performance art was. It delighted me to know that I was able to use art to drive home a point. 

Below are additional paintings from Glenna’s “News” series. The news articles she wrote for these paintings represent her responses to news of the day, from hilarious to furious and many stages in between. You can use your fingers to enlarge the paintings, so that you can read the excerpts of her version of the news.