lucia & the images

a note to visitors, Tricia Grame and Adriana Marchione, curators of the CIIS dark mother exhibit March 1-31, 2002, thought to honor the artists in my book dark mother: african origins and godmothers by creating a CIIS art exhibit around their work. We then thought to enlarge the exhibit by opening it to artists who sent in images, in any media, to a juried competition. The upshot was an extraordinary exhibit which confirms for me that there are many ways her memory is transmitted (stories, rituals, foods, spontaneous exclamations, bodily movement, et al.) but art may be our most dramatic way of knowing her. The exhibit features paintings, banners, jewelry, prayer flags, photographs, and sculpture, all tapping deep memories of our oldest mother and her values of justice with compassion, equality, and transformation. For more images like these in our gallery, see the books of other scholars like Marija Gimbutas, as well as my Liberazione della donna and the U. S. and Italian editions of Black Madonnas. lucia