Defining Moments: Artist Gypsy Ray Creates Beauty out of Adversity

by Brent Calderwood

reprinted by permission from A&U Magazine, November 2010 

For the last thirty years, Gypsy Ray’s photographs and drawings have exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Her photographic works are included in collections in the U.S. Library of Congress and at the British Museum in London.

In the mid-1980s, Ray’s widely acclaimed documentary photographs of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS were exhibited in San Francisco and thereafter were included in several group exhibitions and solo shows throughout the United States. Twenty-five years later, their startling intensity and immediacy prove timeless. Courageous, candid, and undeniably artistic, they create beauty out of tragic circumstances. They also challenge notions of photojournalism and art photography as separate categories.

Ray has said that she eschews labels such as “artist,” “photographer,” or “documentary photographer.”  While these are all apt descriptors, they fail to capture the ways in which she blurs these lines, sometimes literally, as in her mixed-media series “Concealment”; inspired by her personal battle with breast cancer, Ray’s black-and-white drawings of bandaged bodies, often hazy and in extreme close-up, obscure gender and color in an effort, she says, to make their message universal.

I recently spoke with Ray from her home in Kilkenny, Ireland.

Brent Calderwood: How did you come to photography and drawing as a career? 

Gypsy Ray: I studied drawing and photography at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.  It was known as one of the very few photography programs within an art department [in the 1970s]. It was an enlightened place to learn photography because it combined the science of photography with the art of that medium. I then did an independent program through Goddard College’s San Francisco office to receive my Masters so that I could teach.

How did living in those different locales affect your work?

GR: First living in Iowa City informed my AIDS work because I started a series on the male nude there, and several of my models were friends who were gay.  Then, living in the Bay Area, I saw the need to work on a visual response to HIV/AIDS, both a personal and political response to what was happening in the mid-1980s press. Also, we—my husband and I—were experiencing the loss of friends through the disease, so this felt very important to do.

The HIV/AIDS photographs seem so intimate. How did you find your subjects, and how did you get them to open up to you?

GR: I almost always work thought an agency, at that time with San Francisco AIDS Foundation and San Francisco Hospice. This lends validity to my presence and helps establish contacts and trust. It is then up to me not to betray that established trust…. It is hard for me not to become involved with the people I work with. I am an artist but also have been a teacher in my working life. So being supportive and often fond of subjects comes automatically.

How is your approach to photography different from—or the same as—your approach to drawing?

GR: Although the technique is different, my approaches to both are similar. Recently, as a response to illness, I combined the two, using a photograph first and then obscuring it with drawing in a series entitled “Concealment.”

What can you tell me about that series? Images like Concealment #30 are striking, and yet it’s not clear what part of the body they show. Is this intentional?

GR: This work was a necessary working out of my own experience with cancer.  But in doing it I realized that I did not want the series to be either so personal or so gender-specific that it couldn’t also be universal. During chemo, I looked a bit like an egg! [Laughs] And in a photograph, [I looked] neither male nor female, so some of the images are myself.  But many are of others and are obscured so that the viewer has to search the images.  Everyone has a trauma they need to cover over to get on with daily living.  Thus,“Concealment.”

In addition to breast cancer and HIV/AIDS, your projects have addressed subjects as various as urban schools and the Special Olympics. Do you see a common link in these projects?

GR: I am drawn to documentary subjects. Breast cancer was a personal response that evolved into a specific, not just female, response to covering up trauma. “San Francisco City Middle Schools from the Early 1990s” was another project I was invited into and embraced. “Special Olympics” began as a student volunteer project when I taught at Cabrillo College [in Santa Cruz County, California] and then extended to my own work with the U.S. Special Olympics and similar work with Camphill Communities in Ireland where I now live…. All of these are, in a sense, educational.  Perhaps their link is a desire to visually teach.

How did you wind up in Ireland?

GR: I moved to the Bay Area to receive a Masters, and I ended up staying. Then I married a man from Ireland and moved back [to Ireland], where we could afford to finally purchase our own home. Working here has changed my work, but so has age. I find that drawing offers me the quiet I need. And yet now, through the Kilkenny County Council, I’m photographing an extended family of Irish Travellers at their halting site, so … I am still doing documentary photography. I am still, at 61, passionate about both drawing and photography.

What’s next for you?

GR: I am heading to the studio full time, retiring from teaching. This is emotional but also exciting.  I have been fortunate to be the arts facilitator for a wonderful group of women in a socially inclusive program. It is hard to leave this but also a wonderful way to end my teaching career…. Going into the studio full time is very exciting. I have so much I want to do and explore.

You can learn more about Gypsy Ray’s work at http://gypsyray.wordpress.com.

Brent Calderwood is a San Francisco-based writer and activist. His essays, reviews, and poetry have appeared widely, including in A&U. His Web site is www.brentcalderwood.com.

True to Life: Artist Lenore Chinn Portrays the Depth and Diversity of Our Relationships

by Brent Calderwood

reprinted by permission of A&U Magazine, October 2010 

San Francisco native Lenore Chinn, who’s been exhibiting her photorealistic acrylic portraits locally and nationally since 1977, has described her work as “fusing an Asian aesthetic of sparseness and clarity with visual narratives” that veer away from stereotypical depictions of gender, race and sexual orientation.

Recently, Chinn’s work appeared in the remarkable exhibit, “We Were There: The Lesbian Response to the Early AIDS Epidemic among Gay Men,” at San Francisco’s African American Art & Culture Complex. Amid the mostly black-and-white photography and ephemera, Chinn’s paintings of her gay male friends, many of whom succumbed to AIDS-related illness in the eighties, stood out as indelibly warm in both color and emotional content.

Based primarily on the photographs she takes herself, Chinn’s paintings are so detailed that the viewer can see the grain in a hardwood floor, the headlines on a newspaper, the stitching on a pair of jeans, and—most compellingly—the emotional truth of their human subjects. Every shared look between lovers, every pensive solitary gaze, every proud stare into the lens of the camera, is captured affectionately and meticulously.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Chinn about the paintings in the “We Were There” exhibit, as well as her work as a whole.

                                                                                                                

Brent Calderwood: Do you consider your art political?

Lenore Chinn: The immediacy of an image is very powerful. Once an image is seen it cannot easily be dismissed. In that sense I do view my work as a form of activism and that is a conscious choice.

I view my work as a catalyst for change, for creating an environment in which the viewing public might rethink how art is defined, viewed and considered. Art is a powerful tool in the social justice movement though not everyone has that perspective–yet.

What early experiences influenced your philosophy and approach to your art?

What I believe greatly affected me was the times in which I came of age as a young artist. I went to San Francisco State when … the country was in the throes of the Vietnam War. Civil Rights issues were front-page news and ethnic studies was a burgeoning concept. Women’s studies came later….I still have black and white photos (pre-digital of course) taken of the SFPD on campus with full riot gear, mounted on horses and motorcycles, marching through campus. It was the time of the Kent State student deaths by National Guardsmen; college campuses were sites of resistance and national student strikes.

How did you start using photography in your work?

Photography was a tool from my early years of painting and I have always carried a camera with me wherever I went. It used to be a 35mm camera (Minolta or my dad’s Pentax), now it’s an Olympus digital. I learned to view through the lens and my photographs became my source for drafting works on canvas….I shoot a lot of photos wherever I go, sometimes documenting events or people, and whether I intend for something to end up on canvas or not, I know when something might have potential.

Although your paintings are based on photos, they reflect conscious choices about factors like color scheme and light and shadow. How do you determine what changes you will make in taking your images from film to canvas?

I work with texture, color and light to bring out the most effective image I can convey. Sometimes my photos are not shot under the most ideal lighting conditions or there are extraneous things that don’t lend themselves to the strength of a composition. So I do make choices and adjustments where I find it will create a more focused image.            

How do you determine the subjects for your paintings?

My friends had always been intricately involved in my work, both as subjects and as supporters of my work. They were often artists and we supported each other’s aspirations. So they did figure prominently in my paintings.

When I started college as a young art student some of my closest friends in the arts were young gay men. Through one of them….I became acquainted with a core group of gay Latino friends who would become extended familia. Then I got to know all of their partners over a period of many years. Almost all of them died of AIDS or AIDS-related complications between 1984 and 1990.

In the past my work had been viewed in the context of documenting a gay, LGBT or queer community but that was not my intention when I painted each subject. They happened to be largely people I knew, often good friends, or I was commemorating a relationship. So in that sense it became a visual journey of our history as a community and some of that was a painful episode in our collective histories.

Your work as a whole conveys the importance of representing women and people of color. How do your portraits of gay men fit (or not fit) within your oeuvre?

            The twin friends [in “Son Cuates”] identified themselves as Mexican American but their father was white. John, in “The Family,” is half Puerto Rican. My friend “Robaire” in “Departure” is also of mixed heritage, French-Moroccan Sephardic and Jewish. Others are Cuban American. I think my work reflects the complexity of our country’s tapestry of people.

Do you think audiences for your work are more savvy about the sexual, racial, and cultural aspects of your work today than they were in the eighties, or less so?

Whether audiences are more savvy now or then I cannot say. But I do feel that those who see themselves in my work or can identify with a life experience in my canvases come away with a positive affirmation and this is something that is not so common in the fine arts. By my approach I make our existence visible. We count.

For more information on Lenore Chinn visit www.lenorechinn.com

Brent Calderwood is a San Francisco-based writer and activist. His essays, reviews, and

poetry have appeared widely, including in A&U. His Web site is www.brentcalderwood.com.