Printing History in my Heart

Every other Thursday we have a lunch meeting between my, my co-teacher, one of our atelierista, Lauren, and our pedigogista, Susan. We coordinate our work with the children, which at the moment is focused on using their family histories to learn about the past. They have been printing with our atelierista in her studio, so we decided that this week's meeting should be a time for her to teach us the printing techniques the children were learning to use. Best. Meeting. EVER.

While I was working to print pictures that told of my own family history, I began to wonder what impact working with these images would have on the children's minds. I fantasized about them as adults trying to access some bit of historical knowledge and pulling up these striking images. In my opinion images are like smells-- they have more power in the memory than just words do. At least I think they do.

I also felt so light and relaxed after my time in the studio. There was a new bounce in my step on the way back to class. My hand tracing over the pictures had been like a great meditation. I'm almost certain my blood pressure was lowered as I sat there. But it had been a social meditation because we were each so proud of our prints. As we peeled them off we would gasp and squeal and share it all around stopping to notice each other's color choice or compositional decisions. We felt happy for each other when someone made a part they really liked. And then, by the end, I also felt differently about the pictures I had printed, like they had filtered through me. I owned them now in my heart. I loved them a thousand times more because I had gotten to make them.

I had watched the children make the prints for weeks, but until I made one myself I had no idea what it did to one's insides and one's mind.

This one represents the story of my great-great-great-great grandmother who was a blue-eyed Cherokee who could not marry her lover because it was an inter-racial relationship. As a single mother she went off to work and left their child with a family to babysit him. One day, without warning, that family decided to move out west and took the child with them. My grandmother returned from work to find her son and the family gone. She never saw him again but he is my grandfather. 

I got partway through making this whole picture very colorful. (I've really enjoyed seeing this old pictures that are always in black and white or sepia tone in bright , wild and surprising colors as the children brought them back to class). Then I had an idea. I erased what I had and retraced it being more selective about my color choices because over the years as we have studied immigration in third grade I've often wondered if it wasn't harder for the parents that it had been back home but that they did it because they dreamed of  the colors of the future.