How To Live With It

Art gallery collection by Karen Wangare Leonard

What Had Happened Was…

Trauma is a fragmenting force and in this piece there is an almost incoherent accumulation of scenes attempting to explain the unexplainable: mental health crisis. The viewer is not meant to fully understand. However, they are able to put themselves in the chaos by looking in the mirror through the silhouette of the artist’s figure.

Amid the images of life, death, and birth, there is a focus on the body and its reconstruction. The silhouetted right arm bears the words, “we are a gift” because Leonard wasn’t sure how much usage of her arm she would gain back. The frame of the mirror is wrapped with papers from an old medical book describing madness and mental illness, broken up by the questions of origin, recovery, and of freedom.

All That I Touch Does Not Turn to Gold

This story always comes back to hands. What Leonard touched did not turn to gold, instead there was blood. The jagged cut down the middle of the painting is symbolic of her arm injury. The fragments of vintage Christmas ornaments are representative of the life she used to live, now shattered. The cut on the painting allows people to see into the wound. If they look close enough, they can see themselves in it.

I Refuse to Drown

Painting with her feet and mouth, Karen took an excerpt of her writing and brought it to life.

“I don’t know what forgiveness is but sometimes I imagine myself, hand on my scar, thanking it for holding my skin together. I imagine waking up, and not hating myself for all this violence I enacted on my own body because of violence I was forced to move through. I imagine a pool of grace and I am submerged but not drowning.” -Karen Wangare Leonard

This is Not My Redemption

This piece is Leonard’s story written out. The left side of the mirror is written with the accuracy the artist had prior to the injury and the right side depicts the deterioration of hand function post injury. The silhouette was made by tracing herself on a map of East Africa. Her right arm is severed from the rest of her body, disappearing from her story. Her left hand holds Kenya as her place of birth, place where her arm died, and the place she still calls home. The artist states, “The retelling of this story is not an attempt at redemption. This just is, these are the facts. I am telling my own story on my own terms. I am both contextualizing my injury and reclaiming my voice in a world that is eager to spin disability as inspiration instead of confronting ableism.”

Survival Takes Many Forms

This diptych is a self portrait completed with the artist’s feet. A reminder for always: Survival takes many forms… and today it looks like you, here, looking at yourself breathing.

*The piece pictured below is not a part of the above collection, How To Live With It, but was featured in the entrance to the gallery space instead.

Bastardized Moses

Bastardized Moses is a distorted reflection through a river of water that invites viewers to view adoption differently than the heavily propagandized, altruistic system people pretend it to be. The top right corner of the piece has a woven copper wire as a nod to the American empire, which encourages and manufactures family separation. The whole piece is framed in black lace, unable to contain a simple happy adoption ending as the picture in the box leaks out the edges. The adopted person is a collage of water, seen at three different life stages.

The first stage is family separation: mother and sister are hiding in the reeds as they send a basket downstream. Unlike the Moses story we are told, there is an adult in the basket looking back for family.

The second stage is adoption: a silhouetted adoptive mother, a strange void, holding the infant she acquired via adoption, not yet big enough to form their own opinions about their story.

The third stage is adulthood: the child all grown up eclipses the new mother and pre-verbal self and is grappling with what family is.

The top right corner of the piece has a woven copper wire as a nod to the American empire, which encourages and manufactures family separation. The whole piece is framed in black lace, unable to contain a simple happy adoption ending as the picture in the box leaks out the edges.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” -Toni Morrison

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