3. Installation Art Encounters: Extending the Invitation

Extending An Invitation

To:  Toni Morrison

Because: Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors.  I first encountered her work in undergrad with The Bluest Eye, and my favorite novel is Song of Solomon.  I feel she should be invited because her novels mainly concentrate on black women, an underrepresented yet major part of our society.  Before her days as an author, she strove to bring black literature to the mainstream (notably Angela Davis) as an editor at Random House.  She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university- Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University.  While she does not identify her work as "feminist," she does not subscribe to patriarchy and believes in equitable access for all.

Nominator:  Rodney Draughn

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/morrison.html



I thought an image of a tree with roots would be an apt visual metaphor.  If one is familiar with Morrison's novel Beloved, the image immediately echoes the scars on Sethe's back, emblematic of the painful horror of slavery, but also invoking the idea of family.  I also feel the image of roots beneath the tree speaks to Morrison's story telling.  As a child, Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community which she incorporated into her own stories.  We are all a combination of numerous stories from our past, and other stories we have co-opted along the way, as we create and tell our own stories about ourselves.