Brenda and Wojtek
Despite their very different histories and approaches to art, this team immediately found "common ground"
In 1963, in the middle of the Cold War, 10-year-old Wojtek (pronounced “Voi-tech”) Sawa moved to the United States from his native Poland. His youthful exposure to the dehumanizing policies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet regime left questions and emotional scars that have fueled his career as a filmmaker and conceptual, multi-media artist whose work is often based on mathematics.
In 1963, Brenda Robinson was growing up in rural North Carolina, “a little brown girl” in the midst of the civil rights era. For decades she told herself she wasn’t an artist because she couldn’t draw. It wasn’t until the day that she conquered her fear, smeared paint on a blank canvas and “listened to what it was telling me,” that she found her calling as an “intuitive” painter whose haunting portraits of women evoke a shared humanity.
Superficially, you might think it would be hard to find two creative people with less in common — one white, one Black; one male, one female; one shaped by communism, the other by the South and the strong women in her family.
Yet after they were paired as a team in the “Common Ground” project and began talking about the challenges in their lives, Wojtek and Brenda found an almost instant bond.
“One of the dominant challenges for me and her as it turned out,” says Wojtek, “was the idea that we have and inside and an outside — an outside that is, not a false front necessarily, but a facade to shield what we’re protecting, an inside which we keep hidden.
“There is always this dynamic between the exterior and the interior and what we’re afraid other people might see. My greatest fear was that they would find nothing inside and my whole facade would crumble.”
For Brenda, the dichotomy between the face we show and what we hold within resonated in another way. Just months before she joined the project, she had lost her husband of 55 years, Myron Robinson, to Alzheimers. The disease that took his life stole his memory and cognitive ability, leaving a different sort of internal void.
“We felt we could create a symbiotic approach from these two different angles,” Wojtek says, “both terrifying in their own ways.”
Though most of the portraits Brenda paints are of radiant, dark-skinned women, she has always felt they represented a human spirit beyond race, color or gender.
“The buzzword these days is ‘connection’ and it sounds trite, but that’s always been why I paint,” she says. “My thing is that we all got these raggedy threads that hang from us and they all become entangled and because we have the same DNA, we’re all connected. Through my paintings people see the essence in all of us.”
While the women in her portraits are beautiful and radiant, they may be hiding wounds that cannot be seen.
“The worst scars are not the ones you can see but those that have healed over,” she says. “The worst scars are the ones that are invisible in your brain.".
Most of Wojtek’s past work has involved installations that include a participatory, interactive aspect, so he immediately conceived of building an structure that would symbolically represent the human body. It eventually took the shape of an octagonal “booth” with one open panel that would allow a viewer to both circle the structure and look at the outside, and also to enter into its interior.
On the outside of the structure, the team decided to hang a variety of Brenda’s portraits, representing the “face” we show to others.
But viewers will also be able to step through a gauzy curtain (for privacy) covering the open panel and share their own inner fears and hidden secrets by using a marker to write them on the blank interior walls.
“People can come in and share their thoughts about what they’re hiding,” Wojtek explains. “By having different people share their similar fears and thoughts, it builds a community.
“It shows we are all in this together. And within this sense of isolation, there is a common space we can share.”
All participants in “Common Ground,” including the collaborating organizers, are donating their time to the project. If you’d like to help with the expenses involved in art materials, promotion and exhibition costs, we welcome tax-deductible donations to the SPAACES Art Foundation (nonprofit EIN 84-500-4237). You can donate online at the SPAACES website (https://spaaces.art) or you can send a check to SPAACES, at 2087 Princeton St., Sarasota, FL 34237.
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This is a wonderful project! Looking forward to the experience.
Wow. Can’t wait to experience this project. Brilliant concept.