Saaba Buddenhagen Lutzeler
It was early covid, and I had recently returned home from a month long trip to the foot of Pico De Orizaba, where my brothers and I had ferried our father across the death threshold. Listless and gutted, I began hand-stitching large portraits of my family onto stretched canvas.
Long before that, before marriage and kids and true adulting, I had been a commissioned portrait painter (working in pastel) and a community-based public artist (working in mosaic). Even if that combination didn’t feed my coffers, it fed my soul, and because I was in my 20s, that was enough. Then, when my kids were born, I took a long pause, only occasionally accepting commissions while mainly raising kids and eventually getting a masters degree and becoming a teacher.
Now almost an empty-nester, these “thread portraits” represent a return to earnest art-making, but from the point of view of a 50-something woman who can finally acknowledge her identity: I’m a half Black, half white; half first-generation, half American woman from the Midwest. My new work uses that lens to trace my maternal lineage from Ethiopia to the US. It asks questions about the events in time that propelled identity-change. It’s about Black people, white people, American people, Immigrants, opportunity, lack of opportunity, and what it felt/feels like to be in between any or all of these identities while living in the US. There are many more “Others” here today than there were when I was growing up. This work is firstly (but not only) for them. It offers something I never had—an acknowledgement of the diverse, vibrant, complex, beautiful, painful, bewildering experiences of intersectionality.
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