Music Credits:

 “El Ra’sa” (The Dance) composed and performed by Anas Maghrebi, from the film The Story Won’t Die

“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

David Henry Gerson: What I find most inspiring by Anas and by many of the other artists in the film is how no matter the circumstance, they are always finding ways to turn these very dark, awful circumstances coming out of Syria into creativity and not looking away, but looking into it and using it. I just feel very inspired by their ability to always rise.

Jo Read: That’s David Henry Gerson—he’s the director of the documentary called The Story Won’t Die which was an official selection of AFI Docs and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

The Syrian refugee crisis is a humanitarian emergency. The civil war began over ten years ago. Since then, about 13.5 million Syrians in total have been forcibly displaced, that’s more than half of the country’s population. Of these, 6.8 million are refugees and asylum-seekers who have fled the country.

David Henry Gerson set out to make a film about it, but he trained his focus on the exiled artists of Syria…or more precisely, eight Syrian artists—visual artists, musicians, dancers who were active in the uprising against Assad in 2010 and have since fled the country. In his new documentary The Story Won’t Die, Gerson interweaves their stories, giving pride of place to the art that they create.

The life of an artist is never easy—but to create art first, under a violent and oppressive dictatorship and then as a refugee struggling to survive in a strange land is something else again. What meaning does free expression have to someone in exile? Who is there to see or to listen? Who can understand? These are some of the questions that the film explores with the artists as it follows them from the refugee camps to European cities where they do create art that speaks to the experiences of war and the burden of exile. I spoke with director David Henry Gerson about The Story Won’t Die and asked him why he was compelled to make this particular film.

David Henry Gerson: Sure, and thank you very much. Well, my father, who recently passed away, named Allan Gerson, was born as a refugee in Samarkand, Uzbekistan after World War II, and I grew up in Washington, D.C. and, to be very honest, didn’t really know what it was like to be a refugee or to live a life in exile. He was also a photographer and in growing up, seeing his photography, trying to understand, I think, the pain that he was born out of was always fascinating to me. I made a thesis film from the American Film Institute that won the Student Academy Award in 2016, and there was also a film called 4.1 Miles that was nominated that same year that was about refugees landing on the island of Lesvos in Greece. And it really brought my attention to the fact that we were living through the largest displacement of people since World War II. And it brought my attention both to what was happening in Lesvos and also to what was happening in Syria. Now, I mentioned my father only because, growing up, his parents told him to etch in stone a memorial to those who died in World War II of his family, never forget. And here I’m seeing this is the worst displacement since World War II and I think something in my DNA just said, I need to pay attention to this. So as we got into making the film, we started finding news stories about the refugee crisis and, of course, they are amazing documentaries about what’s happening in Syria. My angle and what was personally of interest to me was, Who were the sort of Primo Levis, the Goyas, the Picasso Guernicas coming out of Syria. Who are the people who are the first ones to really try to process the chaos that they had fled from through art? And how is art being used to process the war, as well as part of the uprising against Assad that is now ten years since the uprising began?

Jo Read: How did you find the eight artists that you focus on in your documentary?

David Henry Gerson: We started with just kind of a broad search. I teamed up with a wonderful producer named Odessa Rae, and we found I think online or through maybe a podcast or radio interviews, a man named Anas Maghrebi, who had a band and the sort of apocryphal story that he had of landing on the beaches of Lesvos with his band, and when they got off on the shores of Lesvos, not like the images we’re used to seeing on the news, they started handing out their CDs on the beach like rockstars landed in Greece and traveled across Europe until settled in Germany with their band. But we also teamed up with someone named Abdalaziz Alhamza who is the subject of the documentary City of Ghosts by Matthew Heineman, and he was part of a group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, RBSS, which was an underground citizen journalist group in Syria documenting the rise of ISIS with sort of secret body camera footage. And he really guided us less towards stories of just processing art, but more towards the questions of freedom of expression. Where are there artists who have tried to speak up against the regime, but because of the lack of freedom of expression, were put in prison, were tortured, and in some cases killed? So he introduced us to another artists named Abu Hajaar who is a rapper. He has a group called Mazzaj and he did a lot of rap during the uprising that had him imprisoned and tortured. Diala Brisly is an artist we met, again through Abdalaziz, who makes kind of lighthearted-seeming animated works. Her work is like a Trojan horse. The images look lighthearted and sort of youthful, and yet they are images of the horrors of war. And so using a certain aesthetic to maybe allow an audience or a viewer to access the work in a way that maybe they wouldn’t expect to if they saw something like destroyed buildings right up front. So these were some of our first artists and then we met other people. In Lesvos we met a break dancer Bboy Shadow and followed him across Europe and talked to him about how he uses his dance to process the war. We met another dancer in Berlin named Medhat Aldaabal who is a choreographer who really takes his specific haunting memories of his year traveling across Europe and trying to make it eventually to Germany, and he uses specific moments like when he was huddling on the side of the road in Greece, freezing in the winter, with no place to sleep. And he uses that feeling of huddling in his choreography. He is working with a great company called Sasha Waltz’s Company in Germany. I kind of digress here, but we found these amazing artists, and there are others as well. And just their inspiring stories of how they did not look away, but how they used their art to look directly into the heart of hell that they had fled from.

Jo Read: I’m curious how you approached them, how you talked to them about what you wanted to do, and how open they were at first. Did they have misgivings? How did you earn their trust?

David Henry Gerson: Yeah, great question. There is a line in the film where one of the artists named Bahila Hijazi, who was in the first all-female rock group in Syria, a band called Karma Band. And she has a line in the film that says, We end up now just being lab rats for documentaries. I would say everyone who we approached to be in this film had a very healthy dose of skepticism coming into this. Because they have, many of them, not all of them, done many other interviews, been on PDC and CNN and different news sources around the world, and they are trying to live their lives. I mean, here I am coming along asking them to open up about these really awful circumstances that, in many cases, they are just trying to get away from. So to kind of earn trust and respect, I did end up speaking quite a bit about my father and my grandmother and how my own grandparents were processing World War II and the Holocaust, and sort of using that kind of personal story as a way to start speaking about their stories. I think it is harder to just walk up to someone and say, Hey, tell me about what happened. Like, who are you? And, in a way, you know my father died in the middle of making this film, of editing it, and in a way, because I had had these intimate conversations with everyone, they became some of my best friends during my grieving period. And, in a way, editing the film and weaving their stories together while I was dealing with my own grief and speaking to them about their grief and sort of behind the scenes, they are speaking with me, became a very healing process. So I don’t know, maybe the best answer is I tried to become friends with them first before anything else.

Jo Read: The film as this arc of moving through this political awakening and action in Syria, and that moment when Syrians, these artist, are sure change is going to happen. And they are very expressive of that exhilarating feeling they had. And then we have the government response, which was violent and fierce and relentless. And you show a lot of the footage of attacks on demonstrators. Obviously, you weren’t there for that. You got that from someplace else?

David Henry Gerson: Correct, yeah.

Jo Read: And then that wrenching decision to leave, as they realize, My god, if I like something that’s posted on Facebook, I can be arrested.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah.

Jo Read: And I think it’s so hard for us in the West –in Europe and in North America--to really understand the implications of what it means to leave your country. Even though, as Medhat pointed out, this has been going on for thousands of years. But to be at the point, when you’re living in your country and realizing as he said that you just don’t want to understand this anymore. That it’s time to go.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah, right.

Jo Read: It just tore at your heart.

David Henry Gerson: I know, for me, I grew up where, being a Caucasian man, I could protest. I could go to the White House and protest any time I wanted. And I did. To learn from them that protesting is a life-or-death situation, and like you say, even liking on Facebook, sharing something, anything online showing your interest in this expression of grievance against one’s government could and, to my understanding, continues to this day, land someone really in a dire, terrible situation. That was shocking to me, given my background as an American. And of course, I knew about it. And of course, even now I know about it. And of course, I know more today than I did when I started the film, by far. But this was just very hard to process. I think Diala in the film says at one point, You know, American movies show bombed out buildings and destruction here and there, but it’s so hard to comprehend. And even after having looked through hours and hours of awful, awful, awful footage, very little of which is in this film, it’s such an alien experience. And some of them have even said, even though you’ve experienced it yourself, once you’re living freely in France, as she is, it’s hard to think, did this really even happen? And I think that’s where art has a very unique power to illuminate these complexities to a viewer. And of course, we have many different forms of art in the film. We have dance and music and visual arts. And I think that was really the main impetus for doing this, was seeing this destruction and other realm through their lens, through their art works. Not in a literal way,  n this Trojan horse kind of way, of allowing a viewer to come in more gently perhaps into this world. I often talk about something called the Van Gogh effect, where we see Van Gogh’s Starry Night on a sidewalk, on a billboard, on someone’s backpack or computer screen. You see it so many times that when you go to the Met or the MOMA or wherever it is and you see the actual painting, it takes about ten minutes of looking at the image before all your preconceived notions can disappear, can just dissipate. And the same is true for Syria or a Holocaust film or any kind of film where we have preconceived notions. You have to find a way to bypass this Van Gogh effect. And I think that’s what these guys do really brilliantly.

Jo Read: Well, One of the artists in the film, the extraordinary painter Tammam Azzam said, I think very rightly, Art can talk about politics. Politics can’t talk about art.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah.

Jo Read: And he’s also an example of the Trojan Horse you referred to. He uses western images imposed on scenes of destruction—images of the Mona Lisa of Goya’s The Third of May superimposed on scenes of destruction in Syria.

Jo Read: Like Goya’s The Third of May or the Mona Lisa or these images that he then superimposes and they are extraordinary work.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah, yeah. Tammam’s journey is tracked in the film and those works came very early. It was called the Syrian Museum. They became very famous. They were on CNN. They became very popular on Instagram. These were images where he did mashups of photographs of the destruction of Syria against popular Western images. Like you said, Third of May, Mona Lisa, Gauguin, Clint, Matisse. He took these iconic images, again, to try to find a way to get a Western world to look at what was happening in Syria.

Jo Read: Exactly.

David Henry Gerson: These were images that he posted very early on, I believe 2012, to bring attention to what was happening. Then, after he left, and now ten years later, the mission changes. The immediacy of trying to get people to pay attention to this injustice changes. And you’re trying to go on living your life and you’re no longer in Syria, and in some cases your family is still there, and you don’t feel that your uprising is making the change that you had hoped for. And the artwork changes, therefore, too. His works now are no longer these graphic designed smaller images. He makes, and you see them at the end of the film, these larger, immersive, paintings that fill the periphery of your image. And I feel when I see Tammam’s paintings, it’s as if he’s transporting himself back to Syria. And there’s a mixture between images of destruction and images of the natural landscape, which is a volcanic rock landscape near Suwayda in the south Syria. And it’s this abstraction between nostalgia for home and horrors of home that can only be accessed in art. I find that fascinating. I find that evolution of his work just really fascinating, in watching how an artist evolves over time in processing this war.

Jo Read: And one of the methods he uses in these paintings and we see it in the film is that he layers paints on the canvass and then scrapes it away which of course changes the color and the texture and it seems like such a fitting way to depict destruction and what lies beneath.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah. Absolutely.

Jo Read: I thought the musicians had more difficulty in expressing themselves through their art than the visual artists. And I think they felt it too. Abu the rapper says, Yes, I have freedom of expression but it doesn’t make sense now. Because there are no echoes.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah.

Jo Read: And Anas who was in the rock band says, What am I saying with my art now?

David Henry Gerson: Yeah.

Jo Read: And obviously, language is an obstacle if you’re living in Berlin, you’re living in France. If you’re rapping and singing in Arabic, who is the audience and where does this resonate? Especially when you’re also looking to survive and searching for an artistic identity in a country that isn’t your own.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah. We had, early on in the film, a question. And the opening sequence of the film is a song by Anas, sung in Arabic, filmed in a place that still has the destruction of World War II in it, an old music hall in Berlin. I was speaking with Anas about this the whole way through. We didn’t know whether we should subtitle the work or not. And that’s something unique to obviously language of music that the painters don’t have to deal with as directly. The song-- there were just so many metaphors that were beautiful, but sometimes just hearing the song itself transported you more than if you had to use your thinking brain in looking at the actual words. And I think you’re right. I think that’s one of the challenges is on what level can I fully communicate? And again, as my audience changes, as my community changes, how do I find new tools to communicate and to express myself, both to get it off my own chest and so that the receiver of my artwork can grasp the full meaning and intent of what I was after?

Jo Read: Yeah. Anas certainly had a thriving career and now he’s living in a room. And that has to be a very hard transition.

David Henry Gerson: Yes. I think also, one thing that isn’t entirely clear in the film, that room in the film is a dorm room. He is studying at Bard College in Berlin. So he was going from being this rocker to studying and living in a dorm room. He does have a studio and other places he is working. And it is a transition, though, for all of them. And really, for any artist you know. There’s the ups and downs of a career and what I find most inspiring by Anas and by many of the other artists in the film is how no matter the circumstance, no matter whether you’re Medhat on the road, struggling to survive, or you’re in your dorm room or you’re in your larger studio, they are always finding ways to turn these very dark, awful circumstances into creativity and not looking away, but looking into it and using it. And I find that very inspiring. We’ve all in this world, globally, had a very difficult time during Covid and the pandemic of last year and continue to have, and I see what these guys do and whenever I’m feeling sad or lost or hopeless, when I look at their stories, I feel real hope and that resilience is just such an important character trait. I just feel very inspired by their ability to always rise.

Jo Read: Well, I think it was Medhat who said, You know, well I’m lucking I'm an artist. I have a place to put these memories.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Jo Read: And I was also so moved by Medhat teaching traditional Syrian dance at a community center in Berlin as a way of giving back, of offering something to the country that took him in.

David Henry Gerson: And it’s beautiful. I’ve taken part in that class. Obviously, we filmed it. But I got to take part as well in his community Dabke classes. And Dabke is the Syrian dance. And it’s just like such a beautiful, joyful thing, of people from all nations, all cultures coming together, putting their hands together, dancing in a circle. And I think that’s just like, some people ask about integration and assimilation, and these are very difficult words because, as Abu Hajaar says in his rap, Do you want me to eat your currywurst instead of my tabbouleh?

Jo Read: Yeah.

David Henry Gerson: Well you should still be able to eat your tabbouleh. And I think the ability not to deny one’s identity, but to actively share it and help people and educate and bring the beauty of one’s culture, that’s what the free world is about, in my opinion. And, again, I find that really beautiful and inspiring.

Jo Read: I think if we’re talking about resilience, we have to call out the dancer Mohammad Sabboura.

David Henry Gerson: Also known as Bboy Shadow.

Jo Read:  Also known as  Bboy Shadow. Talk about exuberance! He’s gone through so much and yet, his spirit and his embrace of life is infectious.

David Henry Gerson: He’s amazing. We met him dancing in Lesvos in Moria. Moria, I think the closest word I can associate with Moria is Babel. There are 73 different nations, or there were. It’s actually burned down last year. There were 73 different nations from around the world in one camp that was built for around two thousand people that was housing, at the time that we were there, 14,000 people. I’ve never seen this many people living on top of each other and just the most difficult place I’ve ever been to. He we met jumping. Literally doing backflips, flipping around inside of this place. And he said to us, I need to dance every day to get the negative energy out of my body. And it’s like, that’s how we survive as a human species. And is just like a beautiful encapsulation of that, of his ability to just transform energy in his movement and in his body. And we have a scene with him calling his mother.

Jo Read: I was just going to ask you about that. Oh my god. Yes please.

David Henry Gerson: And even then, she was at that time still in Syria and in a terrible situation without ability to get electricity or diesel or gas to cook. And he’s charming her. What else is he going to do? And he’s making jokes on the phone.

Jo Read: And cooking with her.

David Henry Gerson: And cooking with her, yes. That’s something that I particularly liked.

Jo Read: I love that. We should explain he’s in this communal kitchen and he’s facetiming with his mom and cooking as they’re speaking and she’s giving him advice about what he should be doing.

David Henry Gerson: And he’s bringing a smile to her face. Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s just really the resilience and the buoyancy of his spirit is something that really felt just totally inspiring and something I was glad to be able to share with people.

Jo Read: Oh, and I was so glad to see it. Tell me about the editorial process. I don’t envy you for a second.

David Henry Gerson: I don’t encourage you to envy me. I like to think of myself like Penelope weaving the tapestry of Odysseus. And these artists were Odysseus and I was Penelope, weaving and unweaving every night. Trying to weave the story together is very, very difficult. If you’re writing a screenplay, and my background is really a narrative work, if you’re writing a screenplay, you can look at it as for every letter you’ve got one click. Right? If you’re editing a film, it’s more like eight clicks. So it takes eight times as long in a way, because you’re looking for something, you’re finding it, you’re finding the effects, you’re finding the right song to match with this and that. And it became really an almost immersive process for myself. We started off with another editor named Christopher Robin Bell, who is fantastic, and he really helped us do the sort of what I call the paper edit. Where he really got the words laid out. And then, like I said, my father got ill and I moved to Washington and brought the hard drive with me. And just almost as a coping mechanism, and throughout Covid actually, had the project to really just get lost in interweaving, in trying to find where the through lines in the artworks and the stories to bounce off of each other, have moments where there’s humor or total tragedy and then cut the tragedy with humor, and really trying to bring their personality and their creations into one cohesive piece. Yes, it’s an arduous process.

Jo Read: I bet. Because you brought in their visual work, their music, their dance.

 And I wonder, did you consult them about which paintings you were going to show and how you were going to show it? How involved were they in the editorial process, or were they not at all?

David Henry Gerson: Every step of the way. I mean, not every step because, obviously, you’ve got to show options to them. But certainly showing them, saying, Well, do you like this image? Are there images you like more? Should we subtitle the song or not subtitle the song? It was very much working with them, but also they kind of provided and very generously opened up their archives, both of their photographs and videos from their journeys, as well as all of their created works, really giving us sort of full range to play with and intersperse as we felt made sense.

Jo Read: You know, I just want to touch on this briefly because I think it’s important. So you do the film. You have it scored. It’s done. You even have all the permissions taken care of. And I know what that’s like. And then you have the great joy of distributing it. Job number two, and it’s really probably the more tiresome one, but equally important.

David Henry Gerson: It’s a whole different part of the brain. It’s a whole different part of the brain. And we are still looking for distributors, so if you’re listening to this, give us a call. But, you know, it’s a different part of the brain. As a creator, as an artist, on the one hand you want to just get lost in creating and weaving and creating. I’ll just leave it at that. And then you’ve got to get people to see your work. As inspiring as Van Gogh is, I don’t want to cut off my ear and die before anybody sees what I’ve made. We’re making this to have an impact, and you really want to reach the widest possible audience so that the film can do the greatest amount of good, if it can. And so it is a whole different thought process. And so we’ve just had our first festival premieres. The German ambassador in Washington opened her doors to us and had their sort of first kind of roundtable conversation about the film following the premiere. And it’s those kinds of conversations amongst artists, policymakers, organizations, that is really what we hope to continue to do with this film, so that it, again, can be used. I sort of said to them that day, another kind of mythological analogy, but I like think that this film is like a shield and my hope is that the Achilles’ out there, the warriors out there who are doing this fight on the ground can use this shield for their purposes. And that’s the task now, is finding those organizations, finding the people who are doing the work in refugee camps, in Syria, around the world dealing with these issues, and allow them to have the film so that they can create dialogue and awareness and use it as best that they see fit.

Jo Read: You’ve had premieres at Hot Docs and AFI DOCS fest. And AFI and, I imagine Hot Docs was too, was a hybrid. It was virtual but then there were some things happening in theaters.

David Henry Gerson: Yeah.

Jo Read: So what was that experience like, of screening this virtually?

David Henry Gerson: Honestly, I grew up in the theater. I grew up as an actor and in the theater, and I love being on stage and I love the interaction with an audience. And a virtual screening is very difficult. It’s very hard to gauge how your audience is feeling. Where are they silent? Where are they crying? Where are they laughing? So it’s very difficult. On the other hand, virtual is beautiful because people around the world who would not be able to see it otherwise, or at least these are geo-blocked screenings, in the United States or in Canada were able to see the film that would not have been able to if it was only in theaters. So there’s plusses and minuses, and again, the goal is for the greatest amount of people to be able to engage with the film and use it.

Jo Read: And then being there in person of course is the interaction and the connections that you can make.

David Henry Gerson: Absolutely.

Jo Read: Which happens with festivals and which is so important for independent film.

David Henry Gerson: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Finding your allies is so essential when doing independent projects like this. For anyone listening who does do independent film, you know, you just have to constantly be knocking on doors and pushing your project forward because you don’t have the massive supports. So anybody who comes along, like you for example, who helps give a platform to your work really means the world.

Jo Read: Can you tell me how the artists in the film are doing? You say at the end they’re still creating. Are they thriving?

David Henry Gerson: I guess it depends on how you define thriving. They’re really all in various degrees of their careers. Some of them are still dealing with visa processes and the sort of bureaucratic applications of asylum and stuff like that. Some of them never applied for refugee status at all. One, Tammam for example, is up in D.C. having an exhibition right now, had an exhibition in San Francisco at the Haines Gallery, just finished a month-long solo show in Berlin at the Kornfeld gallery. In fact, they just projected his images you were speaking of in like the Bundestag and other government buildings around Germany. Other artists are having residencies, are working, and some are very much struggling, as any artist does. What’s kind of exciting for me about the film is it’s really a wide spectrum. Tammam is really the most, in a way, successful Syrian artist, or sort of renowned Syrian artist. And on the other side of the spectrum, for example, B Boy Shadow, even though he’s got ten thousand Instagram followers, he’s getting a start. He’s a younger guy and it’s a different medium as well. So there’s really a variety, and we’re doing all we can on our Instagram, which is @thestorywontdie and on our website thestorywontdie.com to keep sharing works that they’re doing, concerts, exhibitions, performances, so that if people want to support these artists, I think the best way is go see their work and help champion their work. And other artists like them.

Jo Read: David, thank you. And I truly mean this. Thank you for making this film. I find immensely it moving.

David Henry Gerson: Thank you so much. I’m really honored.

Jo Read: That is Director David Henry Gerson we were talking about his film The Story Won’t Die.  Find out more about the film and about the truly extraordinary artists whose stories it tells on Instagram  @thestorywontdie.  And we also heard “El Ra’sa” (The Dance) which was composed and performed by Anas Maghrebi. It’s from the film The Story Won’t Die.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Keep up to date with everything happening at the NEA including information about ARP funding for arts organizations at arts.gov.

I’m Josephine Reed. Stay Safe and thanks for listening.

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Jo Reed: I think if we’re talking about resilience, we have to call out the dancer Mohammad Sabboura.

David Henry Gerson: Also known as B Boy Shadow.

Jo Reed:  Also known as  B Boy Shadow. Talk about exuberance! He’s gone through so much and yet, his spirit and his embrace of life is infectious.

David Henry Gerson: He’s amazing. We met him dancing in Lesvos in Moria. I think the closest word I can associate with Moria is Babel. There are 73 different nations, or there were. It’s actually burned down last year. There were 73 different nations from around the world in one camp that was built for around two thousand people that was housing, at the time that we were there, 14,000 people. I’ve never seen this many people living on top of each other and just the most difficult place I’ve ever been to. He, we met, jumping. Literally doing backflips, flipping around inside of this place. And he said to us, I need to dance every day to get the negative energy out of my body. And it’s like, that’s how we survive as a human species. And is just like a beautiful encapsulation of that, of his ability to just transform energy in his movement and in his body. It’s just really the resilience and the buoyancy of his spirit is something that really felt just totally inspiring and something I was glad to be able to share with people.

Hi, I’m Vanessa Hua, NEA Literature Fellow, author of A River of Stars and Deceit and Other Possibilities. My next novel Forbidden City comes out next Spring and I’m really hoping I can meet readers at events again. The isolation of these many months has reminded us of how precious these moments are. That’s why I’m vaccinated to protect myself, my family, and my community. Please, get vaccinated too so that people can connect once again!

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Anita Fields:  I started thinking about all of the mentors that I've had, all of my teachers, all of the people who shared their skills and their knowledge. But most importantly they taught me how to create-- how to connect my hands to my heart, to my mind, to be able to make an expression. And they gave me the confidence to do that.

Jo Reed: That is Osage ribbon worker and multi-media artist Anita Fields sharing the thoughts she had when she learned she was named a 2021 National Heritage Fellow. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Born in Oklahoma, Anita Fields, a citizen of Osage nation, is a renowned textile and clay artist. Her art reflects the world view of Osage philosophy and its connection to nature as it explores the complexities of Native history and culture. Native American ribbon work is colorful, precise, and complex. It’s the cutting, folding, and sewing of different colored ribbons into geometric patterns—it’s a form of applique and used as a decorative overlay, especially in ceremonial clothing.  The style of Osage ribbon work is unique and Anita Fields is an exemplar of the art form. An innovative artist, she honors the tradition while taking it to new places—drawing on the designs of ribbon work and incorporating them in her ceramic and clay pieces for example.  She is inspired by the Osage culture and inventively incorporates some its visual language into her art. Anita textiles and clay art pieces have been exhibited nationally and internationally—her art is part of the permanent collections at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A Tulsa Artist Fellow since 2017, her work was also part of the landmark 2019/2020 traveling exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. 

While Anita Fields was named a National Heritage Fellow for her outstanding Osage ribbon work. She clearly is a multi-media artist equally at home with clay as well as textiles. And that’s where I began my conservation: by asking her about navigating these two very different mediums--textiles and clay-- and the innovative ways her art frequently brings them together.

Anita Fields:  My work as an artist is multidisciplinary and I work in several forms, several mediums, primarily clay and textiles and the combination of the two. My background comes from very early childhood of learning how to sew when I was really young, asking my grandmother to teach me how to sew, but also, just creative play, playing outside with natural materials, dirt, mud, rocks, sticks, those are my earliest memories of creating. So, as an artist, I feel free to go in and out of materials and so, my practice covers a lot of materials, kind of whatever I feel is comfortable and what needs to be in the piece, but yeah, a lot of my work, my clay work is found in museums, galleries, collections, as well as my textile work too.

Jo Reed: I know you were born in Oklahoma. Were you raised there?

Anita Fields: We lived in Oklahoma until I was about eight to ten years old. I was born in Hominy, Oklahoma on the Osage reservation. My dad built us a home on his grandfather’s allotment, original allotment and we moved to Colorado. We made this kind of journey back and forth from Colorado back and forth to Hominy until we settled in Denver, Colorado. My dad was there and he wanted to be a guide and outfitter, which he accomplished and so, there was this back and forth journey for a couple of years because my mother was lonesome, but we always came home and stayed with our grandparents, our grandmothers during the summer. Yeah. It was a trek that we made many, many times during the year.

Jo Reed:  Your father was a painter and as you said, your grandmother was a great seamstress. So, I would have to imagine that art and appreciation for visual languages was something that you really grew up with.

Anita Fields: It was. My earliest memories, really, of pattern and design come from the trunks that my grandmother had that held her most prized possessions, which were our Osage traditional clothing and she would open those up when it was time for our dances and for our ceremonials and she would lovingly take each item out and kind of assign what relative would be wearing what, what cousin, what brother or sister and as an adult, I realized that was really my introduction to something finely and beautifully made with love and integrity, which held all of the basic principles of art, which are pattern, design, color and my dad was a painter and he painted wildlife scenes and he was really good. He didn’t have a lot of formal training, but he really enjoyed it and his passion showed in his paintings.

Jo Reed: As you said, your grandmother taught you to sew. This is random, but do you remember the first thing you made?

Anita Fields: Oh, I do. Yeah. So, my grandmother was a great seamstress and she had these baskets full of scraps of fabric and she would just throw them in there and I would kind of play around with those. So, one day, I asked her and said “Teach me how to sew.” So, she taught me with a needle and thread, first of all, you know, how to sew and encouraged me to do that for quite a while and I had this crazy cheap rubber doll from the dime store and she was probably only about five or six inches high and so, I made her a gingham-- it was blue gingham-- I can picture it right now-- blue gingham coat. I went into my grandmother’s bathroom and she had this little glass container of cotton balls, pulled out some of those cotton balls and glued them on to the cuffs and to the collar of the coat and it’s funny. I don’t remember a whole lot of clothing that I made for that doll after that, but that memory is really vivid to me.

Jo Reed: You ended up going to the Institute of American Indian Arts and you went to study painting, but there, you discovered other media. Tell me about the experience of being there.

Anita Fields: Okay. At the Institute of American Indian Arts, we were encouraged to try every medium that was available to us and at that time, I had very little experience with other mediums other than the ones that I was introduced to in high school or that I had found on my own. So, we were highly encouraged to try a little bit of everything hoping that we would land in a place where our passion was really at. So, that was my first introduction to clay and to multimedia and I felt like clay was-- that I was home, that I was very comfortable with it. It felt very intuitive to me to be working with it, that it’s just something that’s very easy to form, manipulate. It’s very human-like. It has a memory. For instance, if you roll out a piece of clay and you crack it and you repair it, it’s going to kind of remember that place where it was torn or it had been repaired. Yeah. It has lots of characteristics. It can be forgiving, it can be easily transformed. That’s one of the things that I really am drawn to by working with clay is that it’s a very transformative material to work with and, of course, it’s the earth that holds us up, provides everything for us.

Jo Reed: You were at the Institute of American Indian Arts at a really interesting time. Things were really breaking up and breaking out when you were a student there, correct?

Anita Fields: Yes. Yeah. There was lots of things happening in the world at that time and there was-- like this time when there was civil unrest and also, for native people, that is during the time that Wounded Knee was happening and protests were popping up on native reservations, on Indian land. So, there was a lot happening and that filtered through to the kind of work that people were doing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I would think. You met your husband in Santa Fe and he’s a photographer, whose work is really pretty fabulous.

Anita Fields: Right.

Jo Reed: You got married and began having children. Did you return to Oklahoma then? Did you stay in Santa Fe? Just geographically, where were you situated at that time?

Anita Fields: Came back to Oklahoma.

Jo Reed: Okay. Here’s the question. How did you juggle making art and being a young mother?

Anita Fields: That’s a great question because it was really difficult. I found myself wanting to continue to create and so, I would always try to find a community center, a junior college. Sometimes I just enrolled in classes to be able to have a studio to go to work at, always taking classes to further my practice in finding new ways to be able to create. But it’s hard because having little children, there’s little time left for that kind of thing. So, it was definitely a juggling act that went on for quite some time, but luckily, I always found the time to be able to satisfy that urge to be able to make something and to be able to create.

Jo Reed: Is this when you began to learn ribbon work or had your grandmother taught you some of the aspects of it previously?

Anita Fields: My grandmother did not teach me some of the aspects of ribbon work. So, when I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband worked for the Osage Nation. He’s not Osage, but he worked for my nation and so, they held classes at the Osage Museum for ribbon work, shirt making, Indian dyes, a lot of the cultural items that we use and make within our culture. So, these classes were free and they would provide all of the materials and had great mentors, great teachers who were very knowledgeable, who were skillful, who were masters at what they did and they were very generous in sharing that with the people who had interest in learning how to make these things. So, they would begin with kind of the simpler designs and encourage you to keep working up to the more difficult stages of making these items.

Jo Reed: Well, I saw a YouTube video of you making a ribbon and it is an immensely complicated process. Do you think it’s something that you can describe so even though we’re listening to it we can kind of see it in our mind’s eye?

Anita Fields: I’ll try.

Jo Reed: I know it’s asking a lot.

Anita Fields: We use all kinds of ribbons. Depending on what pattern you’re going to work on, if you’re working on like a four-ribbon pattern, the ribbons, perhaps, might be two to three inches wide and you would sew those two down the middle to create a seam, open those up. You would baste on top two other ribbons that are of contrasting colors. You would take a design-- for us, Osages are known for their patterns that are geometric-- and you would trace your pattern on one side. You would flip that pattern to go on top of the ribbon on the other side and then this is a process of cutting and folding under those top ribbons. When you fold those under, when you snip and fold those ribbons under, the two colors that are underneath those top colors create the design and so, then depending on what it’s going to be for, if it’s going to be for a woman’s skirt or a man’s blanket-- it just depends what it’s going to be for-- would be how long that pattern needs to travel.

Jo Reed: I saw that in my head. So, that was good.

Anita Fields: I was like-- I don't know if this will make sense or not, but it’s definitely visual.

Jo Reed: So, they’re used for skirts or for blankets-- decorative items that people would wear?

Anita Fields: Sure. So, they decorate the traditional clothing that we wear and they trim women’s skirts and women have traditional Osage women blankets. So, they also would be added to those. Osage men have a blanket that they wear and then that can be also the border for those blankets. The suits that men wear for the traditional dances are trimmed, the men’s bridge clothes and their leggings, all of that is trimmed with ribbon work.

Jo Reed: And the designs have meanings. I mean, there’s significance to the patterns that are used. Is that correct?

Anita Fields: Yes, they do and some of them are easily identifiable, like the double arrow pattern. There’s different patterns that have evolved. There are patterns that at one time denoted clans or belonged to families and depending on how you were taught and who introduced you to ribbon work, some of those names are going to vary a little bit.

Jo Reed: You’ve said that your artwork is really guided by Osage philosophy and duality has a centrality in the philosophy and in your work. Can you share a little bit more about that philosophy and then how you manifest it through your art?

Anita Fields: So, I’m looking into the worldview of Osage, of our culture and that is a worldview that is based on observation of nature. There is an order found within nature and so, our worldview thinks of divisions between the early and sky and so, they found that to be true in everything that happened within one’s life. So, this idea of earth/sky, night/day, man/woman, really these contrasts and these things that you find in everyday life in one’s time here, in one’s journey. And so, for instance, things like the movement of the sun, that is something that happens every single day and that it has a path and it has order and there’s order found in nature on this observation of nature where everything is interconnected and things rely on one another to exist.

Jo Reed: Okay. You had said that you really came to a decision that art is what you’re going to do. You really just committed yourself to art. Can you tell me about that moment and what shifted for you when you made that decision moving forward?

Anita Fields: I was young. Well, actually, I wasn’t that young. Yeah. It was very distinct. It was very direct and I was at a time in my life when I was having a lot of difficulty in deciding what was true for myself, what it is, what was it that I needed to be doing, doing things that weren’t really healthy for me, partaking in those kinds of activities and I was really looking at something to ground myself and to really find out what it is I was supposed to be doing for the rest of my life and so, I knew that making art was part of that. I knew I was having a difficult time attaining that because all of these other things that were happening in my life and so, I just really made a commitment to be able to honor my time here and begin doing what I was supposed to be doing and that really was the shift because I think it was the shift in my heart and my mind, alerting my hands that this is what I was going to be doing and I fully committed right then and there.

Jo Reed: Were you working in both textiles and clay then?

Anita Fields: More so in clay at that time.

Jo Reed: When I think about working with clay-- and this is everything to do with me and being limited-- I tend to think of things being functional, making things that are beautiful, but functional. You make things that tell stories. That is a qualitative difference. Can you tell me how you arrived at that?

Anita Fields: That was actually what that shift that I’m talking about because up to that point, I did make things that were utilitarian, throwing on the wheel. I still throw on the wheel because I can alter things to fit the ideas that I’m having when I’m making these things that are more narrative, but up to that time, that’s pretty much what I was doing. I was making things that were utilitarian, that you can use. It was when I made that shift in my mind that I decided to tell things that were-- I call them narrative. They’re pieces that are narrative in nature. I can be inspired by lots of things. I can be inspired by a good book. I love poetry. I can be inspired by poetry. Many times before I begin a body of work, I’ll just sit and read poetry. I can be inspired by something that I see at a social gathering with Osage people. I can be inspired by the kinds of things I was talking about earlier that is found in our world view. For instance, I make these landscapes and they’re abstract in nature, but to me, being able to travel to our Osage original homelands, which I had been fortunate enough to be able to do brought this feeling that the earth holds memory and that it holds the memory of the cultures who were first there and because of the way that clay is created, that erosion, time, layering. I think of all those kinds of things and clay holds this memory. So, it’s the perfect material to transform these kinds of ideas. So, yeah, it was definitely a shift with what I was talking about earlier.

Jo Reed: Well, it’s so interesting because you’ve made every-day objects with clay but in the service of telling a story and an example is your 2001 installation. In English, it’s called “Call to Eat.” I’m not going to attempt the Osage pronunciation but there you created a table set for dinner ready for a family or a party. Can you describe that installation and what you were doing and how that’s part of your philosophy of work?

Anita Fields: So, that piece is called “Wa-No'-Bree” and that’s the Osage word for “Come and eat,” the call to eat and so, this is particularly about Osage dinners and the sharing of food. We don’t do anything without the inclusion of food. As Osage people, we gather at that table in all of these instances from the celebration of a marriage, sending a soldier off to war, welcoming him home. It would be naming babies. It would also be saying goodbye to somebody on their final journey home. Every aspect of our lives, from birth to death, you gather people together to come and share this food with you as an expression of who we are. And I find so many things within our culture so very beautiful, and I’m always looking for the essence of what’s happening within these experiences and these times.So, in that particular piece, kind of based on memory when I was a young girl then I was thinking about the dinners when I was particularly a young person going to them with my grandmother. So, I used her dishes that she had, as many as I had left, and I press-molded the clay into her dishes so that they were actually the dishes that my grandmother used and then I used Osage designs on linen napkins and imagery that would reflect us and I know I took my tape recorder to a dinner and after the prayer, I told my relatives who I was sitting with what I was doing, that I was making this art installation and that I just wanted to record the noise that was happening around us and so, I put out my tape recorder and then everybody was quiet. I wasn't trying to intimidate. I was just trying to gather you know what it sounds like at a dinner.  And because a lot of these dinners, they don’t happen inside of a building. They happen outside under a tent. then I think I remember that the installation included, you know, limbs and trees and a scrim, you know, to give us the idea of being in nature.

Jo Reed: And you also had real fry bread.

Anita Fields: I did have real fry bread. I forgot about that. Yeah. I had real fry bread that I dipped in polyurethane about 10 times.

Jo Reed: Sometimes you take details from your ribbon work, and you recreate them in clay.

Anita Fields: So, for a long time, you know, I was just trying to replicate ribbon work on to clay like the surface, you know, when I would think about surface decoration, and it just wasn't working. For me it just wasn't happening. It didn't hold the kind of nuances that I wanted. And I thought, well, ribbon work is ribbon work. And this clay is the clay and the surface, they’re two totally different things. And then I thought about, well, I could take my patterns and impress them in the clay and make clay stamps. And then I could use those stamps to develop textures on the surfaces of my clay. So I would take bits of clay and flatten them out and then impress the clay stamps of ribbon work into them. And then just, you know, I call it's kind of like a clay collage for me, where I take these fragments of clay, stamp the texture into them and then apply that with slip to the surface of my clay forms. And I really I like that. You know? That worked for me because it was just a layer again, you know, of these languages that I have developed as an artist. And I think of that, you know, directly as that. It's a language that I have developed for myself because, you know, the ribbon work patterns aren't the only thing. I use all kinds of different objects to impress into clay to make stamps and they can be from a walk. They can be from travel that I've had. They can be a favorite pair of earrings. They can be, you know, beadwork. So, I think of it as a language, you know, that as an artist that I have developed that tells the story of my journey. But I also think of it, you know, as the language that this is the language as an artist that I have chosen.  Just as, you know, when I was a really young girl remembering the language that I remember my grandmother and all her relatives and peers, you know, speaking Osage as their first language.

Jo Reed: I'd like to talk about the exhibit Fluent Generations which was a show with work by you, and your husband who's a photographer, and your son who's a painter. And I can only imagine what that experience was like for your family.

Anita Fields: It was, first of all, a great honor to be able to show with them. And, you know, we don't really as a family sit-down and-- well, we do talk about art quite a bit. But we don't really talk about how we influence each other because that's just how we live our lives. We don't really have conversations about the relationship of my work to my husband's work or my work to Yatika’s work. Yeah. I try to stay out of the creative aspects of when somebody's making something about  what your opinion of it is because we know that that's a real solitary decision that has to be made by the person who's doing it. We think of it more in like, just real general terms, that we raised our children to understand this language of art, not to be intimidated by it. That this is very natural. And so, that exhibit we had to really kind of slow it down and really start thinking about those things because people started asking us those questions. And you know I thought about it and thought well we just wanted to give our children a lot of experiences to be comfortable in the creative aspects of life and to feel comfortable with it. And if that is the path that they chose then that's great, because we, as a family, all understand that it's a language that we do understand and deeply, deeply appreciate, and know its importance, you know, in our lives and in other people's lives, how important it is in culture.

Jo Reed: I wonder when you see your work in a gallery or a museum, is it like seeing it with fresh eyes? Is it seeing it anew in some ways?

Anita Fields:  It is. And it's, you know, it's one thing to see it in a beautifully lit gallery, a beautifully lit space, you know, with lots of light and plenty of room around it. As to seeing it on the table that you're creating it on, you know, or taking it out of the kiln or, you know, putting it under a sewing machine, you know, that's one thing. But yeah, when you are able to see it, you know, properly presented, it takes on a whole different air. I think more than anything when I'm able to see a piece I haven't made in a few years, you know, and I'm able to revisit that that is sometimes when I have these kind of really surprises. And then, you know, start thinking about oh I kind of remember that time and I think I'm seeing you know this in it where I wasn't really consciously thinking of that when I made that. You know? So that kind of realization oftentimes comes later.

Jo Reed: There was a large important path-breaking exhibit that you were a part of called Hearts of Our People, Native, Women Artists. And you created an installation for it called It's In Our DNA. It's Who We Are. And I would really like you to describe this for us. And beginning with how you begin a project like that. How you begin to conceptualize it.  Where do you start?

Anita Fields: So, I've been wanting to make a contemporary Osage wedding coat for quite some time. And I started that with my daughter, a couple of years earlier. We started one. And then the opportunity came a commission from, you know, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts for the show “Hearts of Our People”. And proposed making the wedding coat-- another wedding coat. So, you know, the wedding coat is based on a military style jacket that has history and that is an iconic piece of clothing for Osage people. They made their way into our culture in the very late 1700s at a time when, you know, we were negotiating with foreign powers including the United States with treaties. And they were given as gifts by these foreign powers to our chiefs. And they made their way back and so that they were given to the women.  And the women incorporated them into to the wedding ceremony but it's not just a wedding ceremony. These marriages were arranged marriages between two clans. until the ‘50s actually, the late ‘50s, you know, there were still a few arranged marriages happening. And when that was no longer happening, the Osage the wedding coat found its way into our ceremonial dance, called the I’n-Lon-Schka Dance which is a man's dance. And so, they are used as a way of gift-giving, from one drum keeper’s family to the next drum keeper’s family and committee. And, you know, my initial thoughts were that this is such an iconic item for Osage people that I think of it as holding this history, this really important history of who we are. And so I wanted to make a contemporary Osage wedding coat because I felt like it's the thread, you know, it's one of the items that links the past to now and on into the future. But I wanted my wedding coat to be something that was reflective of that kind of history. So on the inside it has a silk lining that that has been set up with Photoshop images.  And these images are everything from historic documents, photos of relatives. The idea of our creation story, there's images from that. Also, there's oil wells on it because, you know, oil has impacted our culture, you know, in a huge way, the economics of our culture. And so all of these images speak to who we are as Osage people. And then, you know, it's embellished on the sleeves with ribbon work panels and different items that we use as Osage people, metal dots, embroidery.  Most always the panels on the front of these wedding coats are embroidered. And so I wanted to hand embroider with symbols that are reflective, again of our history and with plants that were and are important to us. I wanted it to be a reflection of all of those things and pay homage to the Osage people that I know who sew all year round so that our culture can continue.

Jo Reed: It's stunning. It's just stunning.

Anita Fields: Thank you.

Jo Reed: I wonder now, Anita as you reflect upon your career and what you've done so far, whether there's a through line that's going through it and what that through line might be. Or another way is, you know, are there stories that you find yourself returning to again and again that you tell through your work?

Anita Fields: Well, this idea of transformation I think is something that I think about a lot whether I'm working in fabric textiles printing on cloth, or making a form out of clay. Because it's this overriding idea that the idea of transformation is bigger than just transforming a material. You know? Because when I look at clothing I think of it.… for instance, when you put your Osage clothing on you are able to connect with who you are. And so this transformation happens, not only physically outwardly, but it's something that is a transformation of your heart and your spirit and your mind.  And a reflection of where you come from because you're wearing the same type of clothing that your ancestors wore. I think of transformation a lot in my work in all of the disciplines that I work in.

Jo Reed: And finally, Anita, what did it mean for you to be named a 2021 National Heritage fellow?

Anita Fields: You know that I'm still soaking that all in actually. Of course, I’m really honored. But you know what it took me to thinking about the whole journey, the whole beginning of creating, making. And I started thinking about all of the mentors that I've had, all of my teachers, all of the people who shared their skills and their knowledge. But most importantly they taught me how to create-- how to connect my hands to my heart, to my mind, to be able to make an expression. And they gave me the confidence to do that. They gave me the understanding of there's no right way to make something, there's no wrong way to make something. There's only the way that you feel is the most expressive for you.  And I am forever grateful for that.

Jo Reed: And Anita, I think that is a really good place to leave it. Thank you so much for giving me your time because I know you're very busy. And congratulations again on this well-deserved award for your wonderful, wonderful work.

Anita Fields: Thank you. I really appreciate being able to talk to you.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

That was Anita Fields—an Osage ribbon worker, multi-media artist and 2021 National Heritage Fellow which is the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.  You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.

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