Virginia Mallon / Fat Canary Journal

ARTIST STATEMENT

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As a toddler, my dad rode me to Montessori daily on the back of his bike. I was 2 or 3, but I still remember those rides. A story that he often shared was about my first day at school. As we stood in a room filled with crying children who were desperate for their parents to stay, he braced himself to comfort his baby. I scanned the room, assessed the matter, and flatly told him, “It’s ok. You can go.” He was devastated.

 

From an early age, I was intent on asserting my independence but, over time, I grew to understand his special place in my development. I am my father’s daughter. We had very different life experiences, but my sense of humor, my love of characters, and my way of being come largely from him. And now that I’m older, and he’s with me only in spirit, this first collaboration between my dad, the artist, and me, the storyteller - is my way of calling out to him and, unlike the first day of Montessori, yelling, “Come back!” My world is safer and more interesting with him in it. 

 

My dad, Clarence John Guienze, was born in Franklin, Louisiana in 1929. Like most Blacks in that place and time, his family was humble and hardworking. He discovered the opera at 6 years old, while scanning the radio dial. He dreamed of participating in a spectacular operatic production, so he would sing at the top of his voice in the back yard, hoping that a white person on nearby Main Street would discover him, and make him a star. The opera was his first artistic expression, but over time, he realized, that if he were going to rise above his circumstances, it would be through his own efforts. And, so, the mother of this gifted son, while working as a domestic, took on a second job doing laundry for white families to support his dream of going to college.

 

He excelled at Southern University, became class president, and, upon graduating, headed for the Pacific Northwest to become a painter. His life as an artist then had many highlights – exhibits throughout Seattle-Tacoma, a one-man show at the Otto Seligman Gallery, and a twice featured artist in the Northwest Annual at the Seattle Museum of Art - but once married with children, he surrendered his artistry for the stability of a career with the Department of Justice.

 

I am the spoiled and coddled beneficiary of my father’s sacrifices. It took years before I appreciated what I imagine to be the hardship of his journey. I use the word “imagine” because a bitter word was never spoken by him, despite being Black and from the south. I, on the other hand, enjoyed an upbringing marked by ease. Hardships were at a distance from me – they were the stuff of my parents’ generation. Far into adulthood if you’d asked me what my life was like in Tacoma or Milan, Michigan, I would have said that race had nothing to do with those experiences. Ironically, I learned decades later that both of my brothers endured regular physical attacks for being Black in towns where I’d thought life was color-free.

 

Miraculously, my dad managed to be an artist all of his life. He performed with the New York Chorale Society, the Cantata Singers in Ann Arbor, and did a fundraising tour of recitals performing Negro Spirituals for Nyack College, where he was a board member. Photography became his favored visual art form, and he exhibited widely in the northeast, with favorable reviews from the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. While a Warden with the Federal Bureau of Corrections and Commissioner with the State of Maryland, his artistry and humanity were reflected in Transcendental Meditation and art appreciation programs.

 

The faces of Franklin, Louisiana captured by my dad provide a setting for this exhibition that highlights both pioneers and contemporaries. Interspersed amongst those images are the stories of the coddled daughter, a modern-day descendant of Franklin, who was born and raised in such northern privilege as to think that racism affected only her father’s generation. These are tales of boundaries realized and boundaries deferred until the truth could not be overlooked. 

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