Students Communicate in English, Art

We tend to picture artists alone in their studios, needing isolation from the outside world to create art.

Painter and graphic artist Mariona Barkus dispels that notion with her project, “Wordworks: Art as a Second Language”: more than 60 word-and-image posters created under her guidance by adults taking English as a Second Language classes.

Two series of these posters are now on view at Beyond Baroque and the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice.

The posters were done during art workshops presented by Barkus on Friday nights at the Venice Community Adult School for six months last year. Fifty students from nine countries passed through these classes. The posters depict the students’ perceptions of life in the United States and their own countries and pay homage to their families, jobs and personal interests.

Barkus also collaborated with students to design a poster for the interior of a bus and one for the back of a bus. The first encourages fighting discrimination; the second discourages drug use. These posters are now displayed on Southern California Rapid Transit District buses on the Westside.

Barkus took it upon herself to create the project, applying for and receiving a grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. “I believe in giving back to the community and giving something to people who need it,” she said.

With her teaching credential, she has had extensive experience teaching English as a second language to adults. She chose to combine her abilities as a graphic artist with her teaching skills to encourage students learning the language to express themselves.

“The students say things about Los Angeles or the United States that I had never thought would be perceptions of this country,” Barkus said. “For instance, one woman focused on shopping in America and commented that everything is on sale. She assumed we have holidays so that we can have sales.”

A student from Mexico and another from Guatemala chose to compare foods from home with those in the United States. In both posters, color photographs of fresh vegetables and fruits of their native countries are contrasted with pictures of our fast-food products and other processed-food items.

Barkus has nothing but admiration for her students, who were working eight- to 12-hour days five to seven days a week and going to school four nights a week to learn English, but still came regularly to her workshops.

Her time taken up with the project and the people in it, she feared that her own painting--which evokes emotional and spiritual content with luminous color and form--would suffer. But that is not what happened.

“The project fed into my painting. Having experienced the people, with their inner core of energy and spirit that continues to survive against enormous odds, I’m now depicting that kind of spirit in my work,” she said. “My painting has made enormous leaps.”

“Wordworks: Art as a Second Language,” at Beyond Baroque and SPARC, 681 and 685 Venice Blvd., Venice, through Feb. 29. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Call (310) 822-3006.

The first poster in the exhibition “500 Years Since Columbus: The Legacy Continues,” at Cal State Northridge’s Art Galleries, sets the tone for the show. It quotes an African proverb: “Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.”

The show of almost 200 political posters from throughout the Americas--from Canada to Chile--commemorates Columbus’ arrival in America from the perspective of the descendants of the people who were there when he arrived.

“These posters tell the stories of the people who don’t get into the encyclopedias. They are the people without power, or on the side of history that is unflattering or challenges the status quo,” said Carol Wells, executive director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, which organized the exhibit from its own collection.

Wells, an art historian who teaches part time at Cal State Fullerton, began collecting political posters in 1981 when she was in Nicaragua on a grant from UCLA to document the effect of the Sandinista revolution on art produced in Nicaragua. She collected all the posters she could find there and brought them home.

Unlike centers and museums that collect political posters but rarely exhibit them, Wells has made it her mandate to show them to as broad an audience as possible. For the first five years after her trip to Nicaragua, she organized only Central American poster shows. Since then, she has put together exhibits that focus on such subjects as women in war and peace, liberation theology, AIDS and the politics of immigration.

By 1988, when people started approaching her to do exhibits for conferences, Wells filed to incorporate the center as a nonprofit, tax-exempt educational archive. “People had posters. We became an excuse for cleaning the house,” Wells said. “La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley donated 1,000 posters from a 20-year-old collection. They knew we would do something with them rather than let them collect dust.”

The five-part exhibit at CSUN covers a historical overview of the European conquest and its impact on American Indians and African-Americans, compares the notion of America as the great melting pot with experiences of immigrants and minorities, illustrates ongoing struggles for self-determination in Latin America and expresses people’s hopes for a better world.

Through images and words, various posters demand that we “Remember Wounded Knee” and “Boycott Grapes”; remind us of Harriet Tubman, who, speaking of the underground railroad during the Civil War, said: “My train never jumped the track, and I never lost a passenger,” and pose such questions as “Who’s the illegal alien, PILGRIM?”

The first poster Wells acquired in Nicaragua is in the show. It depicts a woman holding a basket of coffee beans and (translated to English) states: “In constructing the new country, we are becoming the new woman.”

“It was given to me by those who made it, and it reminds me of that dream,” she said.

Monday at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m, and 2 p.m. Tuesday, Wells will speak in the gallery on the show and the center’s activities.