Muriel Stockdale's Art at Charlotte's Place in Manhattan
Mounted on the clean white walls of Charlotte's Place, Trinity Church's airy new multi-purpose community space in lower Manhattan, close to two dozen bright rectangles of color and light invite neighbors and visitors into conversation and community.
At first glance, each work of art seems to be an American flag: one rectangle in the upper left hand corner of each piece constitutes the “star field” and the rest is the thirteen band “stripe field.” In fact, they are all American flags, yet each is unique and individual, dense with symbols and echoes of cultures from all around the world.
Stockdale's E Pluribus Project: American Community and Diversity
These brilliant and vibrant flags constitute E Pluribus, the still-growing, still-expanding artistic vision and achievement of textile and mixed-media artist Muriel Stockdale.
Charlotte's Place: Lower Manhattan Community Outreach of Trinity Church
Recently, at Charlotte's Place at 109 Greenwich Street in New York City, Muriel Stockdale met with exhibition visitors, neighbors and drop-ins to discuss the progress of both her E Pluribus flags and the large Out of Many, One Community Art Project.
Stockdale sees her work as a celebration of American cultural diversity and says her inspiration has come from both her personal experiences and her understanding of major changes in America's political life over the last twenty-five years.
Muriel Stockdale: Citizen and Artist
A naturalized American citizen, Muriel Stockdale emigrated from England to the United States as a girl. Arriving in 1967, Stockdale was moved by what she saw as the harmonious co-existence of citizens and immigrants from countries and cultures all over the world. She admired and then loved the America she first encountered in the 1970s and 1980s and believed that the United States as she knew it represented an important, viable model of successful political community.
After completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Vermont and New York University in theater and theatrical design, Stockdale embarked on what would become an extensive and varied career in the United States and Europe in costume and scenery design. Over a period of twenty-six years, Stockdale worked with The Jim Henson Company (constructing, for instance, all of Kermit's suits in “Muppets Take Manhattan”), Disney, NBC, CBS, PBS, ABC, The Public Theatre and numerous regional companies. Simultaneously, Stockdale taught figure painting and and drawing in the Graduate Theatrical Design Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. A former member of the non-profit association of New York Women in Film and Television, Stockdale has recently expanded the scope of her creative endeavors and accomplishments. Over the last ten years, Stockdale has written, directed, produced and collaborated on a number of independent films, winning the Roy W. Dean New York Film Award in 2004. Stockdale is also an artist-producer at City Spirit Productions, LLC, a partner in Raasa, LLC and the founder and director of The Institute for Spiritual Entertainment, New York.
Reaction to 9-11
In the months following 9-11, Stockdale found herself, as both an artist and a citizen, disturbed by the call to war and the dangerous fracturing of America's core sense of community. She saw the ideals of the American motto “e pluribus unum” – United States' citizens' ability to be unified in spite of all their differences – as disappearing into feelings of “us versus them, all fights among ourselves, against ourselves.” Speaking emphatically, “That's wrong,” she said. “Just plain wrong.” And the ubiquitously displayed American flag came to symbolize militarism, war and the deepening divisions of Americans against Americans.
Immersed artistically for decades in the many ways in which textiles can convey meaning, Stockdale conceived her American flag project in 2003. The idea came to her, she said, all at once: in her mind's eye, she envisioned scores of flags, each recognizably American in layout and structure and simultaneously unique in its evocation of a particular culture, ethnicity or nation.
Unity, Community and Diversity
“Each flag celebrates our diversity, here: right here, in America,” Stockdale explained. “The flags affirm the freedoms in our diversity.”
When planning each culture's flag, Stockdale considers the ideas, symbols and practical items Americans associate with each. Stockdale identifies several ways in which cultures enrich each other and contribute to shared communities. Cultures exchange material goods, such as particular foods, textiles, or design motifs. There are social and psychological exchanges, too, ideas and habits that help us manage our shared lives. Mayan worry-dolls diminish our anxiety; coffee and tea from distant continents enrich our mornings and evenings. French champagne heightens festive spirits; Cuban rumba and Puerto Rican salsa steps enrich our traditions of ballroom dancing.
Some cultural gifts are spiritual in nature. Indian gods and goddesses expand our ability to describe the divine; Tibetan prayer flags promise a peaceful future for us all; Middle Eastern “evil eye” ornaments protect us from harm.
Stockdale brings all these material, social, psychological, and spiritual cultural gifts together to identify each ethnicity's contributions to the complex culture of the United States.
Indigenous Textiles
The most common design elements of the different flags are indigenous textiles. The Zaire flag is made of raffia bark Kuba cloth; the Argentina flag is constructed from Gaucho sashes; the India flag consists of Varanasi silks; the Panama flag is put together with Mola cloth blouse panels.
Some textiles are so identified with particular cultural groups that they carry political and religious meaning in addition to social or ethnic meaning. Stockdale's Palestine flag displays the instantly recognizable red and white Keffiyah men's head wrap and the Israel flag is made of the centuries-old blue and white tallit or prayer shawl. The stars of the Palestine flag are represented by Palestinian wedding hat coin adornments and the star field of the Israel flag contains ancient sacred symbols, including the Star of David. In hanging the collection, Stockdale deliberately placed the Palestine and Israel flags together, enabling viewers to see the consonance of their beauty and to imagine a peace-filled Middle East.
By her own account, the overarching and unifying themes of Muriel Stockdale's E Pluribus flag collection are celebration and affirmation. The contributions of immigrant cultures to American life are celebrated; simultaneously, the flags affirm America's traditional ability to create unity from diversity.
9-11 Tenth Anniversary Response: Community and Art at Charlotte's Place
Because Muriel Stockdale's E Pluribus art had been displayed at Charlotte's Place since its opening in the early spring of 2011, Jennifer Chin, Director of Charlotte's Place, quite naturally thought of including Muriel Stockdale in Trinity Church and Charlotte's Place conversations about appropriate commemorations of the 9-11 ten-year anniversary. Stockdale explained, “They wanted to use art in some way that would involve the community.” The idea of a large community banner gradually emerged, a flag embodying some of the themes Stockdale was already exploring. In addition, the community flag would be constructed in such a way as to draw the community into its very creation. “Hands just seemed natural,” Stockdale said, “Hands were simple, accessible, fun, and they would make it very easy for many people to participate together.”
Trinity Church approved the project in June, 2011, and Stockdale began the process of collecting hundreds of fabric hands, big and small. Trinity Church publicized the project widely. The official title of the work, Out of Many, One: A Community Art Project and the description of its construction process summarized the project's goals and purpose. “Help create a flag in memory of September 11,” called out the Trinity announcement, “Charlotte's Place, a free gathering space on Greenwich Street, and Muriel Stockdale, a Lower Manhattan artist, are teaming up to create a 12-foot-wide community flag to remember the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. The project is open to everyone.”
Fabric hands arrived at Charlotte's Place from all over the world. Throughout the summer, adults and children, neighbors, visitors and tourists dropped in at Charlotte's Place, found themselves drawn into the project, outlined their hands on paper or fabric, cut the fabric, and then left this tangible piece of themselves to become a visible part of a community. With Muriel Stockdale's guidance, dozens of Charlotte's Place neighbors and visitors contributed to the final sewing and gluing of over 2,000 hands on the community flag.
Many Hands Together: Affirmation and Celebration
The celebratory spirit of the E Pluribus flags is expanded in the Out of Many, One flag and made even larger; it is also, in spite of the large size of the flag, more intimate and tender.
The hands all stretch upward in a single gesture of hope, optimism, and exuberance. The harmony the hands convey is both peaceful and energetic, celebrating the best traditional American values as evoked by the image of the American flag. The hundreds of hands applaud the ideal of American unity even as each hand's distinctiveness epitomizes every citizen's unique potential to shape the country's vibrant and productive future. The fabric hands remind us that all patriotism, at its core, is very personal.
Visitors to Charlotte's Place respond to the flags with enthusiasm and pleasure. Children gravitate to some of the flags' individual elements – the Austria flag's fringe of miniature cow-bells, the Russia flag's tiniest nesting dolls, the India flag's Hindu deity medals, the jade zodiac charms on the China flag – and delight in the gradual realization that there's something the same about all the colorful flags. According to Charlotte's Place volunteer Craig Curley, tourists and foreign visitors sometimes seem to enjoy both the E Pluribus flags even more than American citizens: they recognize immediately the flags' different cultural identities and they understand the flags' celebration of diversity within the context of American community.
Muriel Stockdale's flags convey interconnected political, personal and artistic ideas about celebration and affirmation, twin concepts that ground and inform all her work. Particularly now, as we begin the second decade after 9-11 and prepare for national elections in 2012, Stockdale worries about America's current social and political climate. She believes that America's political and moral strength can recaptured and re-energized only when differences among individual groups cease to be vilified and when the contributions of diverse groups are applauded and extolled.
Spiritual Purposes of Muriel Stockdale's Art
Even deeper than the political purpose of celebrating diversity and the artistic purpose of affirming community are the spiritual purposes in Muriel Stockdale's work.
Art at its best, Stockdale believes, should engage makers and viewers alike in the human capacity for good. Stockdale notes that the day-in and day-out commitment to what is good requires a greater spiritual discipline than mere complaint about what is bad: working for peace is ultimately both more difficult and more lastingly important than mere strategizing for non-violence.
Muriel Stockdale's art affirms the resilient worth of the human quest for community and celebrates the brilliant and innumerable gifts we give each other along the way.
For more information: Muriel Stockdale EPLURIBUS
Jean Terepka - Jean Ballard Terepka is an historian with specialties in American and African-American church history as well as music, art, and textile ...
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