Artists don’t hold things in much, but they do hold onto things.
Looking carefully at the art displayed in the yard of Hunter Levinsohn, a longtime Chapel Hill artist, one sees that the materials used to make them are things she could not throw away, like the “Coat of Many Colors†made of plastic spoons, cut up chip bags and plastic newspaper wrappers.
As she says on her website (hunterlevinsohn.com), she feels one of her “prime responsibilities as an artist is to point out when the emperor is wearing no clothes.â€
Therefore, when Election Day 2004 ended without hope for change, Levinsohn knew she had to find a way to release the pain she felt for our country.
“I was so heartbroken when Bush was re-elected,†she said. “Four more years of that kind of policy made me ashamed to be an American. I was always a liberal but I was always very patriotic.â€
She wanted to do something positive with her despair and by the time of Bush’s second inaugural on Jan. 20, 2005, she had determined what it would be. From that date until Jan. 20 of this year, she has taken the full front page of the New York Times and folded it into an origami crane. From inside the paper, she has cut out the box that includes Americans lost in the wars, written the names of the dead on the wings and tucked the printed version inside the folds along with any editorials about the Bush administration. So great was her fear that documentation of his misdeeds would be lost, she also folded disclosing stories into cranes.
Each week’s worth of cranes was carefully folded into a blue plastic New York Times wrapper and each stored in a wooden crate she found at the Scrap Exchange in Durham.
She has kept them in order and on this Jan. 20, a few hours after President Barack Obama makes his first address to the nation, she (and a dozen friends) will take her bagged and boxed cranes to the Carrboro Century Center where she will remove them, blow breath into each one so they become 3-dimensional and place them on the floor, beginning with the first one in the center, into a three-circle Cretan labyrinth with four-foot aisles between the circles, that will be on display for 90 minutes for community members to experience.
She hopes people will stop by on their way to inaugural parties or on their way home from work.
“The labyrinth is the perfect metaphor; you walk into it, you walk out of it. It was a step I could make that was positive,†Levinsohn said.
She chose cranes for their qualities of hope, harmony, good luck and longevity. “They’re a symbol of holding onto something good,†she said.
What a nice image for surrounding ourselves in as one journey ends and a new one begins.
“I’m so much calmer now and it’s so much easier because there’s this real end to it,†Levinsohn said.
Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays@mac.com