UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Richard Wilson, Laura Waller, M. Annenberg, Marjorie Arnett

Richard Wilson

The first time I realized I was living in a polarized environment was in 1968. The assassinations, riots, and war made it impossible not to have a point of view. It seems that some things weren’t done for the good of the country. Information became a matter of opinion. I made choices then that have stayed with me until now. 

We are living in another polarized time, when there are choices to be made about what we believe, and these paintings are observations about the world we live in. 

1. The Evening News. The news seems to be about someone throwing a rock at someone else. This has always been the case, but seems particularly bad now.
2. After the Storm. The relief of getting through a bad situation disappears after the realization that another problem has to be solved.
3. A Great View. There is an expression that the Eastern Promenade in Portland has a million-dollar view. I was at the Prom and someone said, “in today’s money, it’s probably a billion-dollar view.” I thought, if you put a price on it, it could get sold.
4. Incoming. Nearly everyone that saw this image said it was a description of how bad the cruise ships are for the city. My idea, however, was observing that every ship that comes into the harbor is greeted by a cannon. I enjoyed the misreading of this painting.

 

Laura Waller

Guernica, the title of Picasso’s iconic 1937 anti-war painting, is the name of the town in northern Spain, and the seat of the Basque Parliament which was bombed by the Nazis in 1937 during the Spanish Revolution. The sixth of January, 2021, the day rioters stormed the building housing our nation’s seat of government, will forever be remembered as a day of infamy—the day of the attack on our precious and fragile democracy. Could this attack on America’s seat of government be a warning of things to come, just as Spain’s events in Guernica might have foretold future atrocities and dictatorships?

America’s Guernica? painting series are a response to my fervent plea for peace and hope, despite the visceral hate and racism. I feel the influence of artists Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden guiding me.

Painted in vermillion and embedded in each painting is the word “Shalom” written in Hebrew letters. “Peace,” an English word, is “Shalom” in Hebrew and “Salaam” in Arabic. I chose the color vermillion, the color of blood which gives life and bleeds life away, as a tribute to artist Dahlov Ipcar who said, “May I die before I run out of vermillion.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first painting in the series is a pixelated Rudy Giuliani, the image shown on my Delta screen as I landed in Tampa and began thinking of the series. Pixelated might well symbolize the status of our democracy today. But unlike Picasso’s stark black and white painting, these canvases are vividly painted with bright colors, symbolizing my hope for the future.

I painted these directly from videos shown on the television as an answer to the gaslighting that occurs.

 

M. Annenberg

The recent capture of the American government by a small cabal of technocrats has heralded a new chapter in American democracy. 

A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is a fragile aspiration. In the absence of mass protest, a strange passivity has allowed for the destruction of our federal agencies and the oversight functions of government.

The influence of the super rich on elections was codified in the 2010 Citizens United legal case which allows unlimited campaign contributions, such as the $288 billion given by Elon Musk to the Trump campaign. In addition, the desecration of our first amendment rights on cable channels due to the lack of regulation, allowed Murdoch to let his anchors lie about the 2020 election. He said “it wasn’t a matter of red or blue but of green,” which he admitted under oath, during the Dominion v. Fox voting machine case. In other words, as long as he was profiting by catering to his audience, it was okay to present lies to that audience.

King George’s Revenge reveals the influence of the oil and gas industry on the federal government in the firing of the photographer Simon Edelman, who worked for the Department of Energy headed by Rick Perry. He was fired for releasing a photo of the Energy Secretary hugging coal CEO Bob Murray. Murray’s wish list to save the coal industry became administration policy. Simon’s photo equipment was confiscated.

The American colonists overthrew a tyrant—King George lll. We now have an oligarchy, in which oil, gas, data and media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Mercer, pictured in the artwork, try to slow our transition to a clean energy economy in an age of climate crisis. The use of Toile fabric signifies opulence and excess from that time to today.

The sculpture Yurtmobile addresses the landmark 1.5 degrees of warming this year, with its attendant floods and droughts. We must question the idea of safety. How does a community like Asheville, North Carolina, 2,000 feet above sea level, flood? Simply, rivers burst their banks with 15 inches of rain over three days. A warming atmosphere holds more water. Yurtmobile is a mobile tent with its own solar panel—a metaphor for the inevitable migration of thousands, fueled by unmitigated global warming. We are all vulnerable.

My mixed-media artwork, Hush My Kush, compares the reporting of the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment by the New York Times and the lack of reporting by seven other leading national newspapers. This report states that over a billion people in Asia could face catastrophic consequences due to the loss of water by retreating Himalayan glaciers as water sources for agriculture, industry and consumption dry up. 

The quilt entitled It’s the Agenda, Stupid takes the covers of three urban newspapers as evidence of the suppression of science in our time. New York Newsday created a front cover from the newly released National Climate Assessment. The New York Post and The Daily News ignored the study.

According to agenda setting theory outlined by McCombs and Shaw in 1968, if a news item is covered frequently, then the American people will regard it as important. The absence of climate related news, documented in Public Citizen’s “A Storm of Silence”* stated that because so little is reported, we are at a loss to understand the gravity of global warming.” Further, Media Matters for America research indicated that in 2023, only one percent of news on NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX covered climate. We are being propagandized by the absence of information regarding the most serious crisis in human history.

* “A Storm of Silence: Media Coverage of Climate Change and Hurricane Harvey.” Public Citizen 8 September 2017.

 

Marjorie Arnett

The impact of the pandemic continues to have an effect on my studio work. Now I document my painting process closely, noting the smallest change, possibly because of the time alone during the COVID-19 years. The scope of my work, how I lean into the significance of line, color, and composition is now more pronounced, more significant as I place brushstrokes on the canvas. I enjoy images that are whimsical, and sometimes in sunless backgrounds. I fight against myself as flower images appear again and again on my canvases. Yet, I can trace my steps into that arena from my grandmother’s artistry within her garden. I can easily recount the fondness, the countless summer evenings spent with my grandparents working in their flower gardens. I was gifted through those years with the familiar scent, the brush of petals against my skin, walking between rows of tended beauty.