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Community Artist Collective.   I am so honored that Michelle Barnes, co-founder and director of the nonprofit art space Community Artists’ Collective, invited me to show my work there.  The Collective was established by Ms. Barnes, artist, educator and gallerist, and Dr. Sarah Trotty, artist and educator at Texas Southern University in 1985, to meet the needs of professional African American artists. It aims “to promote and preserve for all people evidence of African American cultural traditions.”  In addition to exhibitions, it focuses its efforts on arts education for youth and adults, entrepreneurship, and community development. At present, its space in the Bermac Building in Houston includes exhibition space, the Jubilee Quilt Circle, and a small shop area. 

Social Change

13"h x 34"w x 12"d - Cement, resin, acrylic, metal, fiber

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Refuge(e)

5"h x 17.5"w x 7"d - Plaster, acrylic, metal, and fiber

Innocence Lost

4.75"h x 5"w x 4.75"d - Found objects

Memento mori (my shoes)

5"h x 9"h x 8"d - Found objects and underglazed clay

Requiem

5"h x 7"w x 7"d - Underglazed clay, glass, resin and bone (S)

Choked on Cotton

The opening of my show “Choked on Cotton” was to have been April 25 2019. The Collective is closed, and I am sheltering in place in Austin. During this period, I have been focused on paper and canvas work that I can make with the resources available to me. I am using my website to flesh out my ideas and to examine the art as I conceptualize and produce it. I would love to have a conversation with you about this endeavor. Please email me directly here.

Choked on Cotton at CAC

Community Artist Collective. I am so honored that Michelle Barnes, co-founder and director of the nonprofit art space Community Artists’ Collective, invited me to show my work there. The Collective was established by Ms. Barnes, artist, educator and gallerist, and Dr. Sarah Trotty, artist and educator at Texas Southern University in 1985, to meet the needs of professional African American artists. It aims “to promote and preserve for all people evidence of African American cultural traditions.” In addition to exhibitions, it focuses its efforts on arts education for youth and adults, entrepreneurship, and community development. At present, its space in the Bermac Building in Houston includes exhibition space, the Jubilee Quilt Circle, and a small shop area.

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Dirt paintings

Codex: Map of my Childhood includes footprints between places in my world of the 1950s when my summer life revolved around our antebellum family house Klein, my best friend’s house and her family antebellum house, the swimming hole, and the church. These antebellum structures were in disrepair and one would later be torn down and the other preserved. Read more… (this would need a second page built on the back end for the “read more” content, like you did for another section). NOTE THAT THIS IS THE CARD LAYOUT, TO GIVE SOME CONTRAST TO THE SUMMARIES (ON THE LEFT COLUMN).

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Self Portrait in Thought

During the period in which I did not have access to a print studio, I experimented with digital prints. This series layers a line drawing of myself deep in thought, which was based on a photograph of my walking through the house after I first inherited it, when I felt overwhelmed with the task ahead and unsure of what to do. The figure pops up all around the sign, similar to Waldo from the “Where’s Waldo” children’s book. She examines the house from multiple angles, inside and outside. She contemplates her grandparents’ photographs. She hovers over her great-grandmothers book, on a palimpsest page with her great-great-grandfathers’s resolution covered by her great-grandmother’s recipe for fruitcake. These prints all address Gottlieb’s careful consideration of aspects of her Southern heritage, with a view to change what needs to be changed, while preserving the positive human aspects of that fraught time. YOU SWITCH FROM FIRST TO THIRD PERSON HERE - BE CONSISTENT IN WHICHEVER ONE YOU CHOOSE.

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Matriarchs

Matriarchs will be based on Matriarchs Installed at Klein, two plates, one of Lucy Wallace Baker and one of Kate Henderson Wallace. Lucy Wallace was enslaved by Kate Henderson Wallace’s family. The two families have come together again as their descendants serve on the Klein Arts & Culture Board and participate in the Klein Homecomings. The installation for the Choked on Cotton exhibit will include plates with images from both families, including homecoming photographs. These may be hung as an expanding circle as a wall installation or placed in a china cabinet as a sculpture.

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Sculpture with collection plate

Cotton Economy: Spirit 1, when complete, will have pennies enameled white with cotton bolls on one side, alternating to show Lincoln or the Lincoln Memorial on the other. These ar to be placed in a brass collection plate sourced from Mobile, AL (on eBay) with some stacked by the side. The pedestal on which the plate and stacks are placed sits within fabric draped across wood dowels to emulate a church (sharp roof steeple and two sides). The fabric has the Klein front and the Scott’s Grove church (if I can find an image) silk screened onto it. This cannot be completed until I am able to return to Houston to access my enamel kiln.

Cotton harvest viewed from Scott-Bradford cemetery from Nell Gottlieb on Vimeo.

NOTE: This video is vertical, so it influenced the design of the entire page - which I’ve designed with three vertical columns. Video. Cotton Economy: Spirit 2. This video shot from within the Scott-Bradford Cemetery (the next plantation over from Klein) is of a mechanized cotton harvest in 2019. The cotton field abuts the cemetery. The mode of harvest is in sharp contrast to that of antebellum and early 20th century times, when people tilled and harvested the fields, enslaved people during the antebellum period which is evoked by Cotton Economy: Spirit 1.

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