#[constructs a shrine] i present to you... my baby boy

[mewyue]

fighter: must be babied at any cost

[therenaissancemystic]

Womb Priestessing

To my sister priestesses who work with the wombs, how did you remember?

I was a priestess initiate at the time and while we did give our wombs some love, it was by no means like the ways in which I work with wombs. It was more of a point of focus for meditation and just a general loving up on our magical lady organs.

I was in meditation and I was laying on my yoga mat which had the flower of life pattern all over it. It was a guided meditation with AA Kristiel/Christiel. My intuition then led me down my own path during this guided meditation. All of a sudden I was at an altar space in what appeared to be a private prayer room. There was a BIG crucifix hanging above the altar and I felt all this ooey gooey sexual energy rising. Mind you, I've never been religious and I never really felt connected to religious figures. I had only recently come to understand Jesus and Mary Magdalen as ascended beings, not just religious props.

I hear my guidance tell me that my womb had been sanctified, that I was holy space. I of course was trying not to judge my guidance, because feminine shame and sexual trauma would not allow me to believe such things at the time. So I continued on my way through this meditation. Where I felt like I was releasing sexual energy that didn't serve me, which was amazing. I don't tend to get aroused during meditation so this was odd for me.

I came to understand that sometimes sexual energy stimulates us physically even when the mind isn't in agreement. Very similar to when sexual abuse victims still orgasm during an unsolicited sexual act, the body does it's thing, the mind quite honestly can be in complete and total disagreement.

So I had this major release of what felt like decades of sexualization, abuse and so on. Each time I revisit this event I see something with a bit more perspective. There was this merging of energy, it felt like my past merging with the present in regards to this line of healing. I spent the rest of the time exploring my womb and what my womb meant to me. Mulling over what it meant that my womb was sanctified, that I was holy space.

I recall a few days before I asked my grandfather to get me some holy water from church, I wanted to use it to clean my altars and such. When I was done, I went downstairs and he found some Holy water that belonged to my grandmother, it came from the Saint Anne shrine in Quebec. Saint Anne is the Mother to The Virgin Mary.

I didn't really know of Saint Anne, I never heard of her. It dawned on me, although I did not grow up with religious indoctrination, I still as an adult admired saints and often felt like one of them. Not for the attention but for the marriage to my craft, my healing work. A saint in my eyes doesn't have to be religious but someone dedicated to helping others in an unconditional way.

I wondered why I had been presented with her energy and why during my mediation I was taken to a religious altar. Then it dawned on me, Jesus was my grandson. I had birthed his mother. So many times in my life I had felt pregnant without trying to become pregnant, medical knowledge was of no help to me. I'd believe I was having a chemical pregnancy if I was actually trying to conceive but if you know me, you know that's not the case. I have never TRIED to conceive.

I was taken back to a dream I had a few years prior, I was visiting this house which is not one I recognize and there were a whole bunch of people there. I'm assuming it was a small town just outside of a big city because buildings began to fall, there was fire raining down from all the destruction and everyone began panicking. I was not panicking, me and my little fur baby Niall were walking around quite calmly. I was looking for the "holy grail" This small dark haired boy appeared. He didn't belong to anyone and wasn't at the least bit effected by the outside commotion. I told him I was looking for the holy grail. I entered a room full of books, I opened one book and there was sort of gruesome religious imagery. Plague, leprosy and all around horror. I closed the book and put it down.

I left the room and looked around again, found nothing. Then I went back to the room with the books and he followed me. I picked up a book that had a deceptive sleeve on it. It appeared to be a book about fairies but it wasn't and I never got to read what was on the inside because when I tried to walk out with it, he stopped me dead in my tracks, and told me "you can't have this without the fetus, you have to have the fetus". There was a pregnant woman running around in horror outside due to all the destruction and he waved his little finger around and placed her fetus into my womb. That was the end.

Admittedly I woke up in shock. I didn't know how to take that information. Over time I realized that while I may not have ever given birth in this reality, there are other pockets of time and space where I am a mother and I have given birth to children. Which explains the overwhelming sensation of being pregnant even when I'm not. It was there that I felt in tune with myself in a vastly different way. There have been several times I've felt this way since. I believe being a mother is an activation of your womb space but what you are activating at the time of conception is whatever lives in the parents DNA currently.

I've continued to tune into what the womb space carries for me, I connect to and with divine feminine beings who tended to the sacred work of the womb, Hathor, isis, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalen, Quan Yin and more. I've come to understand the womb as an oracle. It is a portal to other worlds, to other realms, it creates or destroys life. It's not just something that brings us money when activated, that is reducing yourself down to a financial construct. Your womb space is a portal that only we can access and when we let distorted, traumatic or low vibrational energies remain in this space, we taint our portal. We experience disconnect from this space, we continue to experience a disconnect from our truth.

I've been held in a temple with divine feminine figures, encoded with beautiful energies and have been reborn in their imagine. Energetically, I've died and risen so so so so many times. We have to take time to understand ourselves, where we stand in relation to our womb space.

Much like making a baby, things take time to gestate, to build, to develop, to manifest. We are all so busy trying to use our womb as a cash cow that we overlook the potential for spiritual insight and healing that comes with it. There are women who make 7 figures who are still in abusive relationships so don't let anyone tell you that 7 figures equals a clear sacral center, it's just not true.

Over time I've been able to develop and build upon a craft that is intuitively channeled through me, it doesn't feel like a learning, it feels like a remembering. I've come to understand what sexual energies are innocent, which have a gross distorted undertone to them, where predatory energies seek to be housed in our wombs, where we ourselves make excuses for the things we give our energy over to and how we have an over reliance on them. How we sexualize people subconsciously, how to connect to their sexual energy without their permission and crate more karmic energy for ourselves.

I've also learned how to use my womb almost as a radar for sexual energy that needs healing. When dealing with women or men who carry a lot of lower vibrational sexual energy, I get cramps. I can tell they're carrying pain, burdens, guilt and shame there. I can pick up on energetic remnants of children who were just not meant to be at that time. Sometimes eggs are fertilized but never properly implanted into the uterus and their energy gets trapped there.

I've learned so much over the years by exploring myself and my clients. I love what I do and every day I'm so honored to be of service in this way. There is going to be a stronger pull this year towards working in the womb since I have Pluto, Venus, Vesta, Vertex, Mercury and Partof fortune all in my 8th house in my solar return chart. I will have a deeper and profound connection to the womb this year. I have a Gemini stellium in my 8th house. I keep being called to call Gemini energy like a bridge between worlds. This will all be within the realm of womb healing and how I utilize it as a portal.

If you stuck with me this far, YOU A REAL ONE! I hope this gave you some insight into where I've come from and what I'm about.

[yesdreamilyenchantingbouquet]

Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jan. 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the world remembers and mourns the victims of the Holocaust.

Please take a moment to read the below guest article and pause for a moment today.

AUSCHWITZ — 75 Years Later Deception Continues

By Gary McCullough

  The whistle bellowed and the tracks creaked, as we slowed, then stopped.  Shaking from the cold, I knew my anxiety would soon pass.  Folded in my vest pocket was my future, my family’s future.  The deed to a dairy farm, complete with four cows.  We had sold most everything in order to secure our peace; to purchase this deed and the train tickets my wife, my two bundles-of-joy and I were now traveling on.

  We brought with us our remaining precious belongings, including my father’s watch, safely tucked in my suitcase.  Monica and Teresa each had their suitcases, stuffed with clothing, most of which their mother had hand-sewn, and assorted treasures my four and six-year-olds had stowed away.  Each held tightly a doll from their Aunt Olga.  My family was ready to start our new life.  Here, far from the war, far from the anger and bitterness that had come with the war.  Here in our new home in Oświęcim.

  …Life is so good here.  Just as they promised.  Not a free ride, but with work, comes freedom.  The winters, they are not so bad, not as they were back home.  Both Margaret and I, we do love it so…

  My beautiful wife was reading aloud the letter for the hundredth time.  A letter written by Ben, the grocer from our neighborhood.  He and his family had come to Oświęcim about this time last year.  Six months ago he had written this letter to his parents.  When word went about town that we would be leaving, Ben’s parents made a present of the letter.  Over and over she read it to the girls, to encourage them on the long trip, to encourage me as well I suppose.

  The doors strained open and the cold damp air flushed my face as I stepped on to the station platform.

  “Leave your suitcases on the platform. Mark your name, age, and nationality on your baggage.  To fail to do so will delay the return of your belongings.”  The announcement was made again in another, and then another language.

  I gathered my family and we walked with the others through a courtyard, then through an iron gate.  Across the gate in bold black painted iron letters “WORK BRINGS FREEDOM”.  A twenty-five-piece band was playing a familiar tune, one that my mother used to hum.  The cheery flower boxes looked strange next to the double-barbed wire fence.  Still it was all quite an unexpectedly comforting welcome.  A distinguished looking man in a physician’s smock approached our growing group and picked a few men and me, most all the young-and-healthy sort, for a chore he said.  Just for a few minutes, he said, then we would be back with our families.  Well, I have made it this far by getting along with everyone. “I’ll be back in a minute honey!”

  Walking away, I glanced back to see my wife and girls walking into the hospital building.  The building with a big red cross painted on it.  Some kind of disinfectant shower, someone mentioned.

  * * * * *

  Attention: “Everyone, the shower here is simple disinfectant, not to worry, it’s not too strong even for your youngest children.  Please remove your clothing and fold them in neat stacks.  Your co-operation is greatly appreciated.”

  * * * * *

  The other men and I walked down some steps, through a tunnel, then waited, and waited.  We were given uniforms and wooden clogs and told to wait in another line.  As I changed my clothes, I slipped the deed into the lining of my cap.  I would just feel more at ease knowing exactly where it was.  It represented years of scrimping and all our savings.

  Finally, we are going somewhere.  Down more steps, another tunnel.  I was impressed by the sturdy construction of the walls.  And in front of us now were two narrow gauge rail carts, small enough for one man to push empty.  We pushed the carts up to where the tracks came to a double wide steel door.  Locked at the moment.

  An official looking gentleman unlocked and swung open the doors.  Without warning my eyes flooded with tears and I dropped to my knees, a cloud of blue-gray haze escaped the through the doorway.  As my eyes adjusted and cleared, I was kicked in the back.  “Get up, to work now!”

  “Doing what?” I began to twist around only to be booted once more.  The other men from the train were as perplexed as I.  We stumbled into the room.  I tripped, as my eyes were still watering, and I landed on something soft, something warm.  It was some, some person, an old man, he was limp.  I looked up; no words came to my lips.  As in a dream as you step off a cliff, you try and yell, but no words come out.  No sound ever comes out.

  Another and another and another body, no blood, no wounds.   There was a young woman, younger than my wife.  Next to her, a baby boy, not a year old, still clutching a brightly painted toy car, as I looked at him, such a beautiful healthy boy, the toy escaped his tiny little grasp, his fingers slowly growing cold.  The vast room was filled with hundreds of naked bodies.  Some of them still hugging each other, others piled on one another. Each one still warm, yet not one breathing.  Who are these people!?  Who were these people!?  What happened?  I looked up, screaming at God, and recognized a round, cone shaped, shower head.

  * * * * *

  In 1992 I visited three death camps in Poland.  On the walls of a building in Stuthoff and several building in Auschwitz, hang the portraits of over a hundred of the millions of victims of the gas chambers.  At both death camps, you can gaze upon piles of shoes, thousands of pairs of shoes, in all sizes.  And literal bales of women’s hair, stacked like so many bales of hay.  And next to the hair-bales are bolts of fabric that had been manufactured from the hair shaved from the heads of thousands of dead, murdered young women.  And suitcases, piled to the ceiling, marked with white paint, the name, year of birth, and nationality of the owner.  Many of the suitcases were of children; five, six, and seven years old.  Another room was full of eyeglasses, the next, brushes and combs, the next room, stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, were prosthesis all every sort, legs and arms, and wheel-chairs and crutches.

  This collection, this shrine to “Never-Again,” displayed what was but a fraction of the booty gathered from the killing of millions of mothers, sisters and brothers, husbands and grandparents and children over the years we now call the Holocaust.  These were the items that had not yet been packaged for shipment.   These glasses, shoes, clothing, etc. were to be shipped to people in need, taken from useless non-persons, to go to the sustenance of the higher race.  A guard, would pick through the belongings of the still warm non-person for something to send home to his family; perhaps a needed pair of pants, or a Sunday’s-best dress that his bride would wear about town with him on his next leave, a pair of glasses that would be of use to his mother, she has needed a better pair for oh so long.

  Of all these exhibits screaming of man’s inhumanity toward man, one moved me to tears, a small pile of children’s toys.

  As our tour group exited the building, I approached our guide.  Why didn’t someone stop this?  Why didn’t the townspeople blow the place up?  Why didn’t our allied forces obliterate the death camps?

  Her response was one well thought out.  As a guide at Auschwitz for seven years, she is asked that most every day.  She stated, “Many people for years, much wiser than I, have debated that exact question.  Survivors of this camp have said they would have gladly given their lives to see this place destroyed and the killing stopped.  One thing that most all agree on though, is in regard to the three sets of railroad tracks coming to the camp.  They should have been destroyed.  They knew where the killing was being done.  They had the ability, and even if the tracks would have been rebuilt in a matter of days, thousands of lives would have been saved, thousands of lives!

  Immediately I responded, “You know, that’s what we do.”  Up to this point, she did not know that the entire group touring Auschwitz that day were part of a group in the USA called Operation Rescue.  I went on to explain to her, and to myself at the same time, that when we rescue, we take out the tracks.  We don’t destroy the clinic/death-camp, we don’t kill the butchers.  But for a short period of time we keep the non-persons/the babies, from getting to the death-camp.  We buy a little time for the innocent.

  Two weeks later, while hand-cuffed, from the back of a paddy-wagon,  I found myself preaching to nine of San Antonio’s Finest.  While these officers were arresting and carrying away one limp rescuer after another I began to tell them of my recent trip to the death-camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Stuthoff.

  Officer, did you know…

  At the Auschwitz death-camp:

  Many Jews, Poles and others believed going to Oświęcim was an investment in their future?

  At the San Antonio death-camp:

  Many women come here believing that this is an investment in their future.

The Cyclon-B nerve gas was delivered in train cars marked with the Red-Cross as medical

  The killing devices are sold and delivered, and even tax-deductible as medical equipment. A heart injection was sometimes used to terminate the non-person.

  A heart injection is sometimes used to terminate the baby. Many of the bodies were burned in crematoriums, at the death-camp.

  Many of the bodies are burned in crematoriums, at the death-camp. The availability of healthy, live bodies drew many researchers for experimentation and profit.

  The availability of healthy, live bodies draws many researchers for experimentation and profit. They disguised the gas-chambers as hospitals and medical clinics.

  They disguise the abortion-chambers as hospitals and medical clinics. The Nazis dressed up in the clothing of priests, and mocked God.

  Pro-abortion advocates dress up in the clothing of priests, and mock God. Gruesome experimentation was performed, often simply for the sick entertainment of so-called doctors.

  Gruesome experimentation is performed, often simply for the sick entertainment of so-called doctors. Body parts were used for decoration and jewelry.

  Body parts are used for decoration and jewelry. Many, because of their health condition, it was considered dignified and more humane to end their life.

  Many, because of their health condition, it is considered dignified and more humane to end their life. All that remains are the ashes of millions of innocent people.

  All that remains are the ashes of millions of innocent people. Most Christians purchased their freedom by co-existing with the killing.

  Most Christians purchase their freedom by co-existing with the killing. Only a small segment of the Church took a stand against the killing and they were easily dealt with.

  Only a small segment of the Church takes a stand against the killing and they are easily dealt with. Most of the world could not or would not believe that such a holocaust was happening.

  Most of the world cannot or will not believe that such a holocaust is happening. Judges, Police, Guards, all said they were just, doing their jobs.

  Judges, Police, Guards, all say they were just, doing their job. The Church said they were just obeying the law.

  The Church says they are just obeying the law.

  We have simply become more efficient in the disposing of our non-persons.  In part, the job is much easier today because the bodies are smaller and more easily disposed of.

  Then the paddy-wagon door shut and a truck load of Christian men finding themselves on their way to jail began to pray.

  Others prayed aloud, for the mother waiting to enter the soon to be opened clinic, for God to rescue the children who would be killed there that day.  Then it was my time, before God, to open my heart…

  Dear Lord, I remember how angry I was, and still am over that pile of children’s toys at Auschwitz.  How these harmless steps we were taking this morning don’t seem to be a match to the violent death awaiting our holocaust victims.

  How could even a brain-washed Nazi death-camp guard take a toy off the still warm body of a dead child and give it to his child?!  In that sentence, God answered my question with His question:

  “How is it that you, my son, washed by me, give your children toys taken from the children killed at the abortion death-camps?”

  My crushing anger was now, full weight on me.  How can this be, Lord?  I am about to go to jail…again.  I am doing all I know to do!

  “For each child that is killed; his toys will instead be enjoyed by your children.”

  Like it or not I have to face the fact that each day I find something more important to do than saving an unborn child’s life, I have chosen that my job, my comforts, my wife’s clothing and yes, even my children’s toys were more important than the life of an unborn child.

  There is no “feel-good” end to this story; no secret solution.  We have gone too far down the road to Auschwitz.  We have a thousand Dachaus, Treblinkas, and Auschwitz in America, advertising in the yellow pages.

  As the death-camps reared their ugly heads in World War II.  Some of America’s citizens recognized the threat and rose to the challenge.  They didn’t wait for our nation to enter the war, they went to Canada, enlisted, and went to fight Hitler and the Nazi War Machine.  However, most of the nation waited for an official declaration of war.

  But when war was declared, every able-bodied, clear thinking man entered the fight.  If a young man was not serving his country, his courage and manhood was called into question.  Men and women came from the countryside to the cities to work in the factories as part of the war effort.  Factories that produced automobiles and appliances re-tooled to make items needed to win a war.  Housewives conserved everything from nylons to rubber-bands to help beat the Nazis.  And still the ashes of millions of burned bodies testified that we did too little, too late.

  When will the time has come for us to do our duty before God and country in regard to the holocaust of abortion?  When will it be time for every able-bodied, clear-thinking Christian to enter the fight?  If a young man is not saving the lives of innocent children, is his courage and manhood called into question?

  As in Nehemiah, chapter three, everyone from merchants to shepherds set aside their usual job for a time, to rebuild the wall.  Every Christian ministry, God ordained and set apart for a particular need, must re-tool to win this war.  To continue to do business as usual while there are death-camps operating down the street is an insult to our Creator.

  And still the ashes of millions of burned bodies will testify that we did too little, too late.

  In the story, Ben’s letter to his parents was forced and censored.  It was common practice to keep a few Jews, Poles, and others alive for six months.  They would be forced to write home and lie to their friends or relatives about the conditions at Auschwitz.  After the letter was written they would be taken to the gas chamber and killed like the others, then cremated.

  Hanging on the wall today in Auschwitz is a fragment of an actual uncensored letter from Monika Dombke, born 1920, to her mother.  That letter reads:

  Electric wires, high and double

Won’t let you Mom – you won’t see your daughter

So don’t believe those censored letters of mine

cause the truth is different; but don’t cry, Mom.

  And if you would like to seek out your child’s trace

Don’t ask anyone, don’t knock anywhere:

look for the ashes in the fields of Auschwitz

It will be there.  But don’t cry – enough of bitterness here.

  And if you would like to discover your child’s trace

look for the ashes in the fields of Birkenau

They’ll be there – so look for the ashes

In the fields of Auschwitz, in the woods of Birkenau,

Mom, look for the ashes – I’ll be there!

AUSCHWITZ — 75 Years Later Deception Continues Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jan. 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the world remembers and mourns the victims of the Holocaust.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: An Artist Who Conveys Messages from the Dead

With its multitude of painted images and constructions, Kornegay’s art-filled yard both conveyed spiritual messages and was a kind of visible, tangible message in itself, early 1990s (photo © Kevin Duffy, courtesy of Shrine)

Will — or should — the United States’ current climate of potentially explosive racial tension affect the ways in which critics, curators, researchers, teachers, and other specialists in the world of art and culture think about and discuss their respective subject areas?

In the visual arts, that’s a question that, in their own ways, art museums in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now effectively exploring as they make room in their collections for numerous works by self-taught American artists of African descent from the Deep South.

A baby doll and an old clock formed part of an assemblage in the art environment that covered Kornegay’s property, early 1990s (photo ©Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

That’s because, since late 2014, these museums have purchased and/or received as donations a collective trove of such works from the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The self-taught artists whose technically innovative, thematically rich works have been added to these museums’ holdings include, among others, Thornton Dial; Ronald Lockett; Joe Minter; Lonnie Holley; Joe Light; Mary Proctor; the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; Mary T. Smith; Royal Robertson; Georgia Speller; and Purvis Young.

Acquiring such artists’ works obligates these museums to rethink the ways in which they tell the story of 20th-century art, making room for the achievements of these often visionary autodidacts who lived on the far margins of the mainstream art world’s critical debates, stylistic movements, and institutions.

It is against this backdrop of revisionist art-history-in-the-making that Rev. George Kornegay: New Jerusalem, an exhibition of paintings on paper and mixed-media assemblage sculptures by the late, Alabama-based self-taught artist George Kornegay (1913-2014) has just opened at Shrine on the Lower East Side. On view through October 8, it reinforces what is now understood about the mix of artistic, spiritual, and social traditions out of which the works of art-makers like Kornegay emerged, while highlighting his own art’s distinctive inflections.

Rev. George Kornegay at his home in Bibb County, Alabama, in an image from the 1990s (photo ©Ted Degener, courtesy of the photographer)

Kornegay was born in Bibb County, southeast of Tuscaloosa, in east-central Alabama. His father worked on a farm, in a coal mine, and in a barrel-making mill. George, the second of his parents’ 10 children, attended a rural school for several years but left to help farm the 28-acre parcel of land his father had eventually managed to purchase, leaving sharecropping behind.

George married and, with his wife, brought up 12 children; he worked at a foundry in Tuscalossa and eventually became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serving several rural congregations. In interviews from the late 1990s with the researcher and art collector William S. Arnett, who was also the founder of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Kornegay explained that he had received “a divine calling” to enter the ministry. He said, “I run from it at first. I think I was afraid of it, but God, he stayed at me. I ask him to give me these signs if this is what he mean for me. And he sent them. And the end of it come from a choir of angels come to visit my house.”

With its multitude of painted images and constructions, Kornegay’s art-filled yard both conveyed spiritual messages and was a kind of visible, tangible message in itself, early 1990s (photo © Kevin Duffy, courtesy of Shrine)

Around 1980, at his home in Brent, about half-way between Tuscaloosa and Selma, Kornegay began constructing a multi-part, outdoor art environment that would eventually dominate his family’s entire compound. Keenly aware of his mixed African and Native-American ancestry, in his late-1990s interviews, Kornegay, speaking in his region’s noticeable dialect, said of his home, “This property is a sacred place. This was a Indian village way back before my daddy got out here. It’s a burial place. My daughter at certain times can hear voices out here talking but she can’t tell us what they’re talking about.”

Commonly known by historians of folk or vernacular art forms as “yard art” or “yard shows,” creations like Kornegay’s, fashioned out of wood and metal scraps, old furniture, cast-off toys, tires, pots and pans, bottles, farm equipment, and other found objects, trace their roots to the central-African homelands of their makers’ ancestors, who had been enslaved in the American South.

A teepee-shaped element in Kornegay’s art environment alluded to his Native-American ancestry, early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

The anthropologist Grey Gundaker, a Williams & Mary College professor who has long specialized in the history of this vernacular art form, noted in a 1994 Metropolis magazine article describing her visit to Kornegay’s property that “the rubbish heap is a metaphor for the grave and a point of contact with the world of the dead.”

Gundaker wrote that such yard shows, which can be found throughout the Deep South, “serve as rambling altars, places where spirits can be summoned and communed with.” (The theorizing that surrounds this phenomenon continues to unfold; in recent years, the art dealer, researcher, and collector Randall Morris, a co-director of Cavin-Morris Gallery, in New York, has also referred to them as “spirit yards.”)

Rev. George Kornegay, wearing a kente cloth sash, at his home in rural Alabama, early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

Gundaker is the co-author, with Judith McWillie, a painter, photographer, and former, longtime professor of art at the University of Georgia, in Athens, of the book No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African-American Yard Work (University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Recently, by telephone, McWillie recalled, “While I was teaching at the university, I began doing my own research about certain vernacular art forms I encountered in the South, of which African-American yard art was by far one of the most interesting and powerful. Decades ago, even before the question of whether or not such works could be called ‘outsider art’ emerged, some people in the art world were arguing about whether they should mainly be regarded ethnographically or if they could — and should — be discussed and appreciated aesthetically.”

McWillie’s research flowed into such projects as Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways Through the Black Atlantic South, an exhibition she helped organize for New York’s INTAR Latin American Gallery, in 1989, and the book No Space Hidden. “I was presenting a talk near Tuscaloosa in the early 1990s,” she said, “when people took me to see Rev. Kornegay’s yard. I saw it when it was in its prime.”

One of the artist-researcher Judith McWillie’s shots of Kornegay’s “yard show,” from her visit to the minister and art-maker’s property in the early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

“It was a terraced property,” McWillie recalled, “with Kornegay’s own house up at the crest, and each level filled with his sculptures. Even the brightly painted house, with its simple geometry, was an integral, expressive part of the whole experience.” The then-retired minister, she remembered, “was tall, thin, and elegant, with a sash of African kente cloth around his neck, and he proudly told me about his ancestry; in his facial features you could see evidence of his African and Native-American background.”

As Kornegay grew older, and word spread about his remarkable yard, he and his family sometimes made parts of his unusual creation available for sale, but only after deliberating about such transactions — and making sure that prospective collectors understood and appreciated their deeply spiritual character.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Animal)” (circa early 1990s), mixed media, 59 x 38  x 10 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

The current exhibition at Shrine has its roots in the longstanding interest of the gallery’s founder, Scott Ogden, in the works of self-taught artists, which he collects. Ogden, who is also an artist, grew up near Dallas and studied art at the University of Texas, in Austin, and at Queens College, in New York. He recalled, “During my first year in Austin, I heard a lecture about Texas prisoners’ art and the work of such self-taught artists as ‘The Magnificent Pretty Boy’ Henry Ray Clark and Frank Jones. Later, a teacher pointed me toward Bruce Lee Webb and Julie Webb of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, just south of Dallas. I was floored by the artworks on their walls, as well as by the stories they shared with me about how this kind of art had been created.”

Ogden acknowledged that, for better or worse, the often hardscrabble life stories of some of the best-known artists in the related outsider and self-taught art fields have become inseparable from showings of their work. Still, he pointed out, the art that has attracted him has always had “to be singular and outstanding in its own right,” irrespective of “the story of the individual who made it.” Ogden brought together his interest in the biographies and working methods of self-taught artists in Make (2011), a documentary he co-produced with the Canadian filmmaker Malcolm Hearn, which focused on Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005); the self-styled “prophet,” Royal Robertson (1936-1997); and Ike Morgan (all African-Americans from the South); as well as Judith Scott (1943-2005), a woman with Down syndrome who made unusual sculptural objects wrapped in thick layers of colored yarn and thread.

One of Rev. George Kornegay’s untitled, house-paint-on-paper images of a silhouetted figure, circa 1990s, 12 x 9 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

This exhibition is Kornegay’s first-ever solo presentation anywhere; Ogden organized it by tapping into several private collections. Whereas the simple, uncluttered, found-object assemblages of the blind Hawkins can feel eloquent and soulful, and those of Lonnie Holley often recall African-American yard art’s talismanic character, Kornegay’s works tend to address their subjects, both biblical and other themes, more literally, as well as with more quirky, formal-interpretive twists.

At Shrine, in works from the early 1990s, Kornegay’s “Untitled (Black Woman)” uses an oddly shaped board, scraps of black Naugahyde (artificial leather), sheet-metal shavings (for hair), and a few daubs of paint to fashion a female face and her robed figure. In both “Untitled (Animal)” and an untitled, bird-like form, whose face is white on one side and brown on the other, the artist used thick slices of tree trunks to craft unidentifiable creatures’ heads, trapping them in awkward, wood-and-metal frames or perching them on long, wooden legs.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Black Woman)” (circa early 1990s), mixed media, 28 x 27 x 3.5 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

Kornegay’s painting of what appears to be a member of a celestial choir employs a stripped-down palette of black, blue, red, and white on a scrap of corrugated metal. As clever as any classic modernist’s manipulation of found materials, here Kornegay used the vertical stripes created by the corrugation to suggest the folds in a long robe, literally giving them tangible form. Similarly, in his boldly colored works on paper, Kornegay used felt-tip markers or what appears to be plain house paint to produce abstracted, often silhouetted forms — of women, plants, and other, more indistinguishable creatures or objects. And then there is his multicolored toilet seat festooned with a cascade of shredded-fabric strips and dotted with white paint to render a simple, watchful face.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Figure)” (circa 1980s), paint on corrugated metal, 73 x 40 x 2 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

Kornegay regarded his yard and the individual elements it contained as a means of communicating messages to the living from the dead (their legacies, teachings, and wisdom) as well as an embodiment of those messages themselves. According to McWillie, when she visited the artist, he pointed to the objects in his yard and told her, “These are the things that can’t be said,” by which he meant, she explained, “that the entire yard was a spirit-filled kind of energy field.”

That’s a tall order for any work of art, but even here, in a Manhattan gallery, far removed from their original site and fuller context, Kornegay’s creations exude a compelling, mysterious air.

Rev. George Kornegay: New Jerusalem continues at Shrine (191 Henry Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through October 8.

The post An Artist Who Conveys Messages from the Dead appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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