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Bio-Sketch
Claire Carew was born in Guyana and is
of African, Arawak and European ancestry. She began her visual
arts career over 25 years ago with a Bachelor of Arts from the
University of Guelph and studies at private art schools.
Carew also holds a Diploma in Education, a Visual Arts
Specialist from McGill University and has completed studies in
drama at the University of Toronto. Carew’s work has been
shown in Canada, Mexico and the United States. Her work is also
in private collections in Brussels, England, Guyana and Russia.
more bio
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Claire still
remembers fondly her loving father sending first class
tickets for herself, Mrs Carew, and sisters Vivvette,
Corinne and Debbie to travel from Guyana to Canada in
1967. Luckily, they visited EXPO-1967, the world
exhibition held in Montreal in that year, before moving
on to their new home in Vancouver. Mrs. Carew is the
"political one who gives me all the news hot off the
press", says Claire.
Claire went to
secondary schools in the provinces where dad worked .
Art, she explains, came to her "naturally". A distant
relative is renowned Guyanese novelist Jan Carew. In
Toronto, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art
and then did a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of
Guelph, also in Ontario province, where she was an
outstanding student.. Last year, she completed her
Masters of Art at Institututo Allende/ University
Guanajuato in Mexico.
The Artist as Social Activist
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Carew has a remarkable
canvas on her living room wall. It is an
essay of powerful images of spirituality,
conquest, struggle, resistance,
self-assertion. Here is the struggle of the aboriginal against conquest, there’s
the brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe,
here are John Carlos and Tommy Smith
with fists raised in Mexico, there is the
back of the Mexican maiden slowly
receding away, and at the center the
native face with clear eyes gazing back,
neither in defiance nor humility, but just
“returning the gaze” as Claire puts it.
Scattered around her neat
semi-detached home in Toronto’s west end are paintings
ranging from rich to subdued tones, all commanding your
attention. There is a lot of power in these pictures,
belying the gentle Guyanese tone of Carew’s strongly
Guyanese accented words. But there is nothing “soft”
about Carew when she asserts,
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“As a woman you don’t have too
much freedom. So the least you can do is paint what
you want to paint. That’s when you can get your
freedom. Because in society a woman is always told
what she ought to be. So art is one way a human
being can express herself.”
Claire Carew:
Giving Voice Through Art
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Table
Claire Carew ::
Artist
My Thoughts on
International Women’s Day
By
Claire Carew
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Physically
disabled, she used a wheel chair when need be. She was
openly bisexual and of Indigenous, Spanish, and Jewish
ancestry. An accomplished artist and a member of the
communist party she voiced her opinions often in
demonstrations. One of her last photographed public
demonstrations was in support of the people of
Guatemala.Today she would be
considered an environmentalist as her work often depicts
landscapes animals and flowers. Her emotional and
physical pain many of us know of personally. She gives
meaning to our vulnerabilities. Her struggles are
ours, her beliefs and values we share and support. Long Live Frida is
indeed true. She continues to live in the hearts and
minds of many people. She is a part of us and will
continue to live as long as we continue to identify with
her trials and triumphs. Frida the artist. Frida the
communist. Frida the feminist. Frida the naturalist.
Homage to Frida Kahlo |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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January 2012
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