Two miles north of Paradise
Ascona, Switzerland, is located on the shore of Lake Maggiore, 74 miles from Milan and 126 miles from Zurich. Today it is a quiet resort town, but a hundred years ago it was an artists’ colony, considered by some to be the beginning of the counterculture movement. Ascona’s remoteness and beauty, along with a shared enthusiasm for vegetarianism and spiritualist enterprises, aspirations towards a matriarchal society, and an eagerness for intellectual and embodied discourse, brought together a diverse group of creative spirits. Monte Verità, the location of the group’s settlement, reinforced their desire to embrace nature, as city life became more daunting. Inventors of modern dance, including Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan, and Rudolf von Laban spent time there. Writers Herman Hesse and D.H. Lawrence were in residence. Carl Jung, Paul Klee and Rudolf Steiner passed through. While the colony’s most vibrant period was little more than a decade long, its impact on western culture was enormous.
Black Mountain, North Carolina, is 14 miles from Asheville, and 782 miles from New York City. Between 1933 and 1957 it was home to Black Mountain College, an experimental school based on educational principles developed by John Dewey. Its first director was Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers, recruited to run the schools as a recent exile from Nazi Germany. He and his wife Anni assembled a group of avant garde artists, some as faculty and others as students, who transposed Bauhaus traditions into a new American context. Students and teachers created new forms of art, collectively and in reaction to each others’ work. Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Cy Twombley, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine deKooning were among the artists who studied and taught at Black Mountain College. The school closed in the late 1950s, but that fertile period, in which these artists and many others convened in the mountains of western North Carolina, shifted the course of the arts in the 20th century.
Muscle Shoals, Alabama is 123 miles from Nashville and 1,131 miles from New York City. Home to the FAME recording studio, and later the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, musicians from around the world came to record in this small town on the Tennessee River. Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, Rod Stewart, and Paul Simon were among the artists who recorded there, initially drawn by producer Rick Hall. As The New Yorker wrote, following Hall’s 2018 death, "Muscle Shoals remains remarkable not just for the music made there but for its unlikeliness as an epicenter of anything; that a tiny town in a quiet corner of Alabama became a hotbed of progressive, integrated rhythm and blues still feels inexplicable. Whatever Hall conjured there—whatever he dreamt, and made real—is essential to any recounting of American ingenuity. It is a testament to a certain kind of hope."[i]
I have always been drawn to the kind of creativity that emerges on the periphery. In these remote locations, friends have gathered to make their own entertainment, dream their own and each others’ dreams--undistracted by the buzz of publicity and the busyness of city life. These are places where people can hear their own voices, and develop unique, sometimes shared, creative signals. I seek these vibrant peripheral communities when I travel, and I choose to live in such a place.
Gainesville, Florida is 340 miles from Miami and 1,151 miles to New York.
My studio, though, is not even in Gainesville. It is two miles north of Paradise, and Paradise is five miles north of Gainesville.
As I learned from one of my guests at my recent pop-up art exhibit, Paradise is more than a long-abandoned, evocative name on a map. It was an active Black settlement in the 19th century, located near another Black settlement, called Freedom.
My friend offered to ask her grandfather, a respected elder in Gainesville’s Black community, if he would give us a tour. As I anticipate visiting the remnants of these 100 + year old settlements, near a then-important railroad but a good distance from today’s Gainesville, I try to imagine their inhabitants’ lives. Who were they? How did they choose these locations? What was the texture of their lives—children raised, elders revered and helped to their passing, seasons come and gone? What forms did their creativity take? Who lived in Paradise? Who lived in Freedom? Where are their descendants, now that the settlements have seemingly evaporated? Did Paradise and Freedom live up to their names?
One reason I hosted a pop-up exhibition, and invited friends to my opening was, of course, to show my work, and to receive feedback. Another reason, though, was to plant a seed. The people I invited, including long time friends, fellow activists, and local artists and curators, are my own creative community. It was a delight to bring them together. I learned that people I assumed knew each other did not, and some, unexpectedly, were old friends. Whether my effort, two miles north of Paradise, might contribute to the kindling of a collective spark remains to be seen.
I have fretted that my studio is far from the center of Gainesville--it is not even that close to Paradise. But I’ve always been attracted to places on the periphery. The borderland, the verge, the boundary is the place where things emerge. I am convinced, though, that the value of any particular geography has always been a state of mind.
See Emergent Forms: a pop-up exhibit April 29, May 21, 2021.