Rabbit Rabbit #26: A Head Full of Planets
Serendipity at the American Folk Art Museum
Untitled, 1965-1976
I love research. It’s a word I use probably too frequently to describe how I spend most of my time. I wrote my college essay about research– I bragged about spending Christmas Eve in 2016 at the public library reading about Margaret Sanger for my U.S. history project. It’s also a convenient excuse for that in-between-projects state when people start asking you, “What are you working on next?” Before writing something, it’s good to spend time accruing the necessary information to convincingly write it. This can take months, or maybe years. Sometimes you don’t realize whatever the hell you were doing was research until later down the line. “I spent a long time researching,” you can say, as critics applaud.
My favorite works of art are ones that you can tell have been meticulously researched– the filmmaker or author or playwright spent hours poring over marginalia, adjusting the knobs on a microfilm reader, or conducting interviews with experts and locals. To me, research is the act of intentional observation. You’re looking at something –a behavioral trait, a work of literature, a building– and trying to extract meaning from it. Research means reading with a pencil in hand. Research means the articulation of a question. And in some cases, research means obsession, which is my reason for loving it so much. It’s the guise under which we, real adults with complex tools at our fingertips, succumb to our obsessions, allowing them to teach and move us.
I am writing this newsletter from the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, widely lauded as the architectural Mecca of the Midwest. I’m sitting at a table under a bursting skylight between brick pillars that divide fiction from nonfiction. It’s a thrillingly meta experience; I’ve dreamed of quietly writing in this library for five years. I’m here with my friend Ella on a pilgrimage of sorts to witness the sights as depicted in the thoroughly-researched Columbus, Kogonada’s 2017 movie. Columbus is not today’s topic (in fact I have previously written about the brilliant film for RR), but amidst all the modernism, research has floated to the top of my mind. Kogonada is one of my major artistic influences due to his precision in presenting his research. It’s one thing to go and read or travel in the name of your work; it’s another to do something original with it.
I am most productive in brutalist workspaces
One Saturday in May, Sarah and I spent the morning at the American Folk Art Museum on a –you guessed it– research excursion for our upcoming short film, Wunderkind, which we’ll shoot this July in our hometown. The short, which Sarah and I co-wrote, features a 10-year-old visual artist whose work exists in the catch-all category of ‘folk art.’ Since Sarah will be hand-making some pieces for the set, and we have our former ceramics teacher on speed dial for the others, we decided to seek inspiration in person.
The AFAM, located at 2 Lincoln Square, is an unassuming space, almost entirely obscured by the beginnings of construction scaffolding for a massive summer facelift. We purposefully didn’t look up anything about the museum beforehand, favoring blindness over anticipation. After an immediate adrenaline rush from the museum’s gift shop, we were met with a wall mount that read “A HEAD FULL OF PLANETS,” the name of the solo show on display.
“A Head Full of Planets” featured a collection of 42 oil paintings and textile works by the self-taught Brazilian folk artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt. As the website for the exhibition reads, it “explores the context in which Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice crystallized in the early 1950s, after she became a live-in cook for the architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, at their home in Petrópolis, a mountain getaway favored by Brazilian high society. It was not until the mid-1960s, while working in another household, that she began to dedicate herself to embroidery and would begin creating many of the works for which she is best known today.”
Well, there was a lot to be excited about. Santos Reinbolt was an in-home cook for lesbians in the 1950s! Sarah knew Elizabeth Bishop because she was a contemporary of the poet H.D., which was the topic of her undergraduate honors thesis. One of the first oil paintings we came across reminded us of an iconic mural in our Massachusetts town, painted in 2002 on the wall of the local bagel shop, which features rows of notable buildings and historic homes. Santos Reinbolt’s untitled 1958 painting depicted the town of Petrópolis, and combined sand with her paints for a gritty, earthy texture. Each house was outlined in a beige square, perhaps suggesting the insularity of each household within a tight-knit community. At the bottom of the painting were a large rabbit and a frog, reminders of the natural world below the structures.
A big theme in Wunderkind is childhood – the heartbreak, luxury, and compulsive prolonging of it – and what it means to return to where one’s childhood took place. Sarah and I have been talking about our relationships with our childhood selves almost every day since January, so when we discovered that Santos Reinbolt’s quadros de lã (translated from Portuguese to ‘wool paintings’) both depicted and incorporated themes and symbols of childhood, we were overjoyed.
On a placard titled, “The Worlds Within,” assistant curator Dylan Blau Edelstein wrote, “Each work by Madalena Santos Reinbolt represents a microcosm of time, space, and racial dynamics” with “subtle spaces of friction and conflict…memory thus becomes a tool with which Santos Reinbolt interweaves her past and present, her experiences and expectations, her reality and her dreams.” Santos Reinbolt worked from memory, using her senses to weave together both domestic scenes and scenes of the earth and wilderness. Colorful and vibrant, splashed with bright pinks, reds, yellows, and purples, the quadros de lã conjured an air of magical realism.
Our favorite woven painting, completed between 1965-1976 from acrylic wool on burlap, was a timeline of the childhood and adolescence of “Chico Ferramenta,” the youngest child in the Buaraque de Faria family, for whom Santos Reinbolt worked for many years. Ending at age 25 with Chico’s graduation from engineering school, the work was produced many years before many of the depicted events took place. It’s a sort of mystical foretelling of the young boy’s future, and much of it came true after the artist’s death in 1976.
“I can see it all even with my eyes closed,” Santos Reinbolt said of her memories. It reminds me of a pivotal scene in Virginia Woolf’s The Years when the Pargiter family packs up their family estate to move. Crosby, their housekeeper of more than 40 years, exclaims to the eldest daughter, “Oh, Miss Eleanor, I remember everything!” before leaving to take a room in a boarding house for the rest of her life. It’s one of my most beloved moments in literature, and for the same reason I was bowled over by the later works of Santos Reinbolt: the keepers of homes, the caretakers of families – they come to know and love these spaces even deeper than their rightful owners. What a melancholic thing.
The free-associative, achronological curatorial style of “A Head Full of Planets” fit Santos Reinbolt’s style perfectly. It harkened questions like, what are we talking about when we talk about the past? Personal? Individual? Historical – of a people, of race, of labor? Perhaps all of it, all at once. So much of the past exists as a tangle of time and space, rhyming and repeating and tumbling around in a cosmic washing machine, bubbling up as a collective sense of déjà-vu.
As someone who’s always been sharp at both remembering and documenting my past, Wunderkind has been an interesting challenge for me. Sarah and I had to write scenes that convey a fictionalized past for characters that are believable enough in the first place to earn a past, one that is unreliable and unfixed. When Sunny and her younger half-sister Eleanor step into a car together for the first time in a long time, what is happening at a molecular level between them? What do those tiny moments –a smirk in the rearview mirror, the slamming of a car door– say about lineage, inheritance, and memory? The past is always present, the exhibition seemed to say, as does most work that deals with the remembered and imagined past.
Towards the end of our promenade about the room, a young man approached us warmly and asked for our opinion on an outdoor scene woven by Santos Reinbolt. Did we think the animal in the bottom right was a turtle? A fox? It was too obscured to know for sure. And what did we think about her choice to show only the heads of cows in a crowd instead of their full bodies? We quickly struck up a conversation with who turned out to be Edelstein, assistant curator and PhD candidate in Princeton’s Spanish and Portuguese department. “Are you enjoying the exhibit?” he asked. “Yeah, can ya tell?” I answered, referring to our excessive squealing and picture-snapping. We complimented his erudite placard copy – very Karen Russell, syntactically speaking – and told him about Wunderkind. We sent him an email the next day thanking him and promised to send him the film. Research means human connection too; I’d take a head full of planets any day over living on one of my own.
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Recs: This defense of my favorite Austen novel, and, apparently, the world’s least favorite. Catherine Moreland FTW. Unsurprisingly, another slam dunk piece by Vinson Cunningham for the New Yorker’s centenary issue. And lastly, in time for Pride Month, the amazing short films of the inimitable Cheryl Dunye, available on Criterion Channel. I especially love She Don’t Fade.
