Small Boxes, Big Messages

Small may be beautiful; it can also be profoundly expressive as well as easily transportable. The 150 pieces of art in the “Women Beyond Borders: The Art of Building Community” exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum are diminutive--each is based on a small wooden box 2those inches high and 31/2 inches wide--but, as compactly as a haiku poem, they can convey hope, fear or a passionate political point of view.

Ten years ago, Santa Barbara artists Lorraine Serena and Elena Siff met with a circle of friends to brainstorm about an art project that would involve women around the world. “We wanted to honor women’s voices and visions, and to provide a catalyst for community and collaboration,” says Serena, artistic director for what is now the Women Beyond Borders project.

To give the project unity, the group eventually decided on a small wooden box as the basis for the artworks. They could be easily sent into the world to be decorated, trimmed and re-envisioned, and just as easily returned to California to be organized into a traveling exhibition.

In 1995, with a colorful and varied array of boxes from 12 countries, Women Beyond Borders held its first exhibition at the Creative Arts Forum in Santa Barbara. Since then, an ever-morphing “world tour” has taken the boxes to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Australia, Russia and Kenya, as well as countries in Asia (including Japan and Singapore) and Europe (including Austria, Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) picking up new contributions along the way from two dozen more countries.

As the idea spread, and as the boxes were seen, the project inspired workshops and more boxes and more exhibitions, more than 30 to date. Today there are more than 700 boxes in the project’s official collection, only a portion of which go on exhibit at a time.

In the United States, Women Beyond Borders has been funded through donations and the occasional fund-raiser. Women in other countries have participated by mounting the show in venues of their choosing, then shipping the work to the next destination. Since everything fits in a compact 4-by-4-foot container, packing and shipping costs are kept to a minimum, and, Serena says, only three pieces have been lost in this self-policing system.

“The foundation of the project is about trust and letting go and giving it to somebody and letting it happen,” Serena says. “The project has a life of its own.”

The project began in 1992 with about 200 boxes that members of the original committee passed on to artists they knew, who in turn recommended other artists and friends to participate.

The boxes were dispatched around the world in an equally serendipitous manner. About a dozen were sent at a time--to a curator traveling to Japan, to a gallery owner in Kenya, to a contact at the Casa de la Mujer community center in Oaxaca, Mexico, who ended up ordering two dozen more to involve city and village artists. Those women, in turn, were instrumental in finding places to exhibit the results in conjunction with the internationally touring collection.

The organization puts no restrictions on where the exhibition can be shown, and venues have included community centers, art galleries, museums and airports. Perhaps the most innovative venue has been a train car, rented by a trio of Austrian artists--Veronika Dreier, Doriks Jauk-Hinz and Eva Ursprung--who decided that they would take the exhibition on tour, literally. Outfitting the train berths with display shelves, they started in Graz, Austria, moving through Vienna, Budapest in Hungary and Lviv in Ukraine, and ending up in St. Petersburg, Russia. During the three-day journey, they had “openings” whenever they stopped--handing out brochures in German, Hungarian and Russian.

The exhibitions are now supplemented by a Web site--www.womenbeyondborders.org--that shows 400 works.

The popularity of the project may in part reflect the appeal of the box as an artistic starting point. During a presentation that Serena gave at the Hammer Museum, one woman in the audience pointed out that the box was reminiscent of the hope chest young women used to keep before they were married.

“The beauty of it is,” Serena says, “that it becomes like a hope chest for women of all the possibilities that we can have for our lives--it represents womb, tomb, shrine, hope, gift, icon.”

Furthermore, the format seems user-friendly, and artists and non-artists alike have ventured to take on a creation. “The boxes somehow lend themselves to intimacy and profundity,” Serena says. “It’s not a huge blank canvas that is intimidating--everyone’s familiar with the box.

“It can be like a gift of one’s self, revealing oneself.”

The show at UCLA features 150 of the boxes, selected jointly by the Fowler and the UC Santa Barbara University Art Museum. It is a kind of retrospective of the show’s worldwide tour. Displayed in vitrines, sections highlight the original 1995 show, the European train adventure and the recent Singapore exhibition.

There are several recurring themes. Some of the artists treat the box as a secret or locked space--Anne Sauser-Hall of Switzerland mounts a metal top on the box, with a lock set into it, the key nowhere to be seen.

A number of artists create narratives by decorating the box and placing small objects in and around it. Some spin whimsical fantasies. With a colorful palette, Mexican artist Josefina Aguilar paints an idyllic ocean-deep scene around her box, placing clay figurines of a family seated inside it. Separately, figurines of an entwined merman and mermaid serenade one another beneath a red heart.

Others are directly autobiographical. Jana Zimmer, a Santa Barbara attorney, saw an article about the project in the local paper and requested a box. In “For Ritta,” she recalls the pain of being considered a replacement for an older sister who died young--a photo of a girl tops the lid, with another hidden inside, along with a typed scroll that tells the tale.

Mirrors, symbol of the self and self-examination, are often used. Two boxes by Madoka Hirata of Japan are mirror-lined. Each sits on a high-gloss geometric holder (one bright yellow, the other fire-engine red). Artists were encouraged to write statements about their pieces, and Hirata’s accompanies hers.

“In Japan, it is believed that people are able to keep supernatural, mysterious and precious things in a box,” she writes. “It is prohibited to show them to anyone. When the lid of the box is raised, it is supernatural and mysterious time, isn’t it?”

Some artists deconstruct the box--Maria Serrano, based in Japan, disassembled the six sides and has them held apart from each other, as if dangling in space, with thin metal rods. Patricia Smart’s “Whittle Box” has shaved surfaces and edges, the shavings tucked inside.

“My whittle box,” Smart wrote, “is an expression of the frustration and fatigue felt by those who give until it hurts, stretch themselves to the limit and find that sometimes, they lose sight of themselves.”

In “Of Sticks a Stack--a Stake (--a Failure?),” Renate Habinger went further, whittling down most of the box, then stacking the resulting whittlings and binding them together with ribbon onto the intact lid. “I failed at the object/box,” Habinger writes. “But here’s the result, just look at it: everything twisted, turned upside down.... Too small for burning witches, too small for celebrating heroes, but small enough for the kindling of a stirring idea.”

And some even burn the box--in one case showing a photograph of the charcoal bits, in another case, showing the charcoal bits. To add ritual to the process, Suzann Victor of Singapore gathered her friends to witness “a cremation of this box,” as she writes in the accompanying statement.

Afterward, the ashes were put in a cut-glass replica of the original, “to enshrine the diminishing of all borders that divide us.”

For Serena, overseeing Women Beyond Borders has become a full-time job. “It is my passion, and yes, I am obsessed with it,” she admits. And she insists there’s more ground to be covered.

“We’re working right now with the possibility of delivering boxes to women in Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq. I will not bow out of the project until we get that done.”

Last spring, the world tour of “Women Beyond Borders” culminated in Singapore, which displayed three sections of boxes by local women and children as well as 125 international boxes. Although Serena cites some 40 international venues clamoring for the show, it will be in the U.S. until its “homecoming” next year at the UC Santa Barbara University Art Museum--which Marla Berns, then the UC museum’s director, helped arrange before leaving that institution to assume directorship of the Fowler in November.

“I’ve watched it grow and develop,” says Berns, who has been following the project since the early 1990s. “I was really delighted and surprised to see how it’s taken off.”

What did she find most surprising?

“I never expected the range of transformation,” she replies. “It doesn’t surprise me that women have used it as a vehicle to talk about the joys and sorrows of their lives and their world, but I think it’s surprising to see the different artistic expressions--there are far more solutions than I would have ever imagined. It demonstrates that there’s no end to human creativity.”

Serena also believes that whether the women are professional artists or amateurs, accepting a box triggers something inside them. “Something inside you rises up to the occasion,” she says, “and you have to really bear down to this incredible moment, to send out a message, like a message in a bottle to the world.”

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“WOMEN BEYOND BORDERS: THE ART OF BUILDING COMMUNITY,” UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 405 Hilgard Ave., UCLA campus, Westwood. Dates: Through April 21. Open Wednesdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m.; Thursdays, noon-8 p.m. Price: $5, adults; $3, seniors and non-UCLA students. Free on Thursdays. Phone: (310) 825-4361.

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Scarlet Cheng is a frequent contributor to Calendar.