For the month of February I’m painting people who healed my view of the world. It’s a project that matters to me because I truly believe we all have the power to heal the world. Every single one of us has that power. This is an opening to a creative conversation about healing the unresolved trauma imprints within my dna.
This is the beginning of my digital painting class. I am pretty shaky. This is all new to me. I’m using a computer that allows a pen to draw on the screen. I like this class a lot. I am learning about cartooning, story boarding, figure painting and social media. The classes all seem to work together. It’s fascinating and incredibly fun.
Healing the ancestors pain within me.
Like this:
Like Loading...
February 4, 2014 | Categories: Examples of My Art, Gallery, Healing Ripple Effect, Learning to Change the World, Quotes, Social Justice Events | Tags: ancestors, February Art A Day Marathon, healing ancestors dna, healing inspiration, healing racism, ptsd | Leave a comment
Link
My Interview With SLUG Magazine
Click on the link above to access the interview with SLUG (Salt Lake Under Ground) Magazine. I’m the second person they interviewed on this podcast.
I hope it spreads some healing where it’s needed.
Thanks to SLUG Writer Tim Kronenberg and SLUG Magazine for their time. I want to correct an error on my part in the interview. It will be the 50 year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March in DC and “I Have A Dream Speech”, NOT 48 year anniversary.
Like this:
Like Loading...
August 7, 2013 | Categories: Examples of My Art, Gallery, Healing Ripple Effect, Learning to Change the World, Social Justice Events | Tags: African American, America, art, Art Access Gallery, black, Brolly Arts, David Martin, Ethnicity, healing racism, hoodie, Martin Luther King, mexican, ptsd, race, race mixing, Racism, Salt Lake City, Ted Fields, them, Trayvon Martin, us, Utah, white | Leave a comment
I haven’t slept for several weeks more than a few hours here and there. I don’t want to dream. But I want to sleep. Impossible. This morning I woke from a horribly vivid nightmare. This serial haunting follows me, when I’m stressed or upset. Reminding me that I am a hostage unless I talk about it. But, if I do talk about it I risk every thing. It’s not polite or pretty. But polite and pretty keeps me in this nightmare. I am held hostage, holding my tongue so I don’t pollute the air for those who haven’t experienced random violence, child abuse, rape, poverty, incest, trauma, racism, PTSD and anything else.I know things like this have happened since the beginning of time. But what if they happen because nobody talks about it?
Subconsciously, I believed that the victims on the news must have done something to deserve the tragedy that befell them. It insulated me from the thought that it could ever happen to me or anyone I love. I felt safe in my bubble of naiveté, “As long I do everything right, nothing bad will happen to me. I’m a good person.”
So, I became polite and pretty. But I can’t wear that title anymore. My nightmares are forcing me to jump out of the burning building of my past. And it is neither polite nor pretty. I descend knowing that I’m landing with truth.
My past is like a knife. I can use it to serve or harm. I can’t change the past. But I can follow hope as I navigate through this moment. Hope in humanity. The future is changed with one person’s thought, any person involved in the holograms of my life. I can’t control what they think. I can’t control the future.
I worry about offending everyone with my truth. But is it less offensive to deny it, to avoid the shattering of an illusion?
My dream last night was so vivid. I was trapped in a house with people who were suffering from different abnormalities. All were muttering to themselves, lost and paranoid. All were angry, sad and insane in their own unfortunate way, representing different aspects of my psyche. Long, shiny, silver, sewing shears were everywhere. I knew I had to use them to kill, for a chance at survival. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to go, to get out of this madness.
I grabbed a heavy cold pair of scissors as I looked for the door, planning the fastest path of least resistance. A nude, disfigured, blind woman slowly walked by me. Touching the walls feeling her way through the room.
Her heart was under her skin but above the rib cage. I could see the outline of it. Pumping and exposed as though it was calling me to kill her first. She would be easiest to eliminate. Her heart was asking for it, by being so exposed.
I planned my route for the escape and raised my cold weapon to plunge into her beating heart. I saw that she was me and I awoke in a cold sweat.
It shook me. Forgotten pieces of the dream came to me throughout the day. As I interpreted the dream, I realized there are things in my past that must be cut from my psyche and my life. Like a surgeon addressing cancer, I am the surgeon and I am the patient. I am the victim and I am the victor. I am the destroyer and I am the healer. I am a wanderer alone in a sea of people of the chaotic city and I am the butterfly floating gracefully in the forest.
I am so much more than polite and pretty.
Like this:
Like Loading...
July 8, 2013 | Categories: Examples of My Art, Favorite Completed Assignments, Learning to Change the World, Quotes, Social Justice Events | Tags: healing, nightmares, polite, pretty, ptsd, Racism, ugly | 2 Comments
To honor my murdered friends, Ted Fields and David Martin, I hope to do my part to heal racism. I joined Brolly Arts and Art Access Gallery for an art exhibition called Justice For Some? Amy McDonald, Brolly Arts, and Sheryl Gillilan, Art Access Gallery, both executive directors respectively, were so supportive of public acts of creative healing.
This exhibit opened with the most talented brave dancers who performed every 30 minutes for 3 hours. They sought to bring awareness to human rights issues that plague our society. The performers spoke about their personal journeys. It was so moving and powerful. Everyone involved in this project was a light of beauty.
Justice For Some? is the evolution of many Justice For Some? pilot projects that have included workshops, community outreach and performance. 2013
Justice For Some? offers a model that is replicable in other settings for populations and issues.
The components of Justice For Some? included choreography by Sofia Gorder and performance by dancers and Westminster College students, the Drum Bus whose focus is on bullying, and an installation by the authors of “What I Thought I Saw”. Carla Kelley of the Human Rights Education of Utah
workshopped with cast members prior to the event.
Justice For Some? is the evolution of many Justice For Some pilot projects that have included workshops, community outreach and performance. 2013
Justice For Some? offers a model that is replicable in other settings for populations and issues. This valuable model can be used to help bring the
awareness and information to a wide array of people, locations, and situations. The content of the program, workshops, discussions, and movement can be tailored to suit the needs and interests o the communities being served.
I dream of my beloved Granny when I create this art. I know that she and many of my ancestors walk with me as I descend into hell to retrieve my voice.
I used the newspaper articles that broke me at the time of the murders. I always avoided reading them. While I was creating my art I read many news articles for the first time. My parents shielded me from them when I was a child. I heard about them but didn’t read them. If I am honest with myself I chose not to read them because I knew it would be too painful. It took a long time to read them and process what I feel about them. I feel broken sometimes by them.
My PTSD has been hitting me hard lately. I have literally lost my memory FOR WORDS in mid sentence as I am talking to people. It usually only lasts for as long as it takes to breathe one breath. But it scares the hell out of me when it happens. I wondered if I was having a stroke. My migraines, loss of appetite or relentless vomiting and night terrors were amped up substantially.
But I have to keep moving towards the finish line. This is a very challenging journey to explain to people in words. It seems that my art communicates more clearly if I use the words of the news print at the freshest time of the murders.
As I created these pieces, I thought about my favorite Goddess story. It is eerily accurate in describing my world right now. It was written thousands of years before the bible.
“Inanna was the beautiful goddess of heaven and earth. She blessed people and their crops. She introduced the moon and the sun every day. She was loved and revered by all. One day she decided that she would go to the underworld to visit the ruler, her sister Ereshkigal.
She dressed in her finest jewels and gold, things of sentimental importance. As she descended into the earth she would come upon a gate. At each gate she was asked to give an offering to proceed. She entered the 7th gate naked. When she tried to embrace her sister she was killed by her.
Inanna was hung on a hook for three days while her sister joyously celebrated her death. For it wasn’t only the death of Inanna, it was the death of the earth and the heavens.
On the third day Inanna awoke. She emerged from the underworld that could not contain her. She was stronger and more powerful from the lessons she learned at each gate.”
I am at the 7th gate and there is no turning back.
See the links below for info for Brolly Arts, Art Access Gallery and articles from the media.
http://www.brollyarts.org/
http://www.accessart.org/news-a-publications/press-coverage/item/218-terry-jackson-mitchell-salt-lake-tribune-july-7-2013
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56549960-78/jackson-mitchell-art-black.html.csp
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2358140/White-survivor-Joseph-Paul-Franklin-tells-guilt-murdered-attack-took-lives-black-friends.html
http://www.globeslcc.com/2013/07/03/sorting-a-race-war-with-molecules-from-the-stars/
http://bringbalancetomylife.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/that-which-was-evil-was-made-good/
Like this:
Like Loading...
July 8, 2013 | Categories: Examples of My Art, Favorite Completed Assignments, Gallery, Learning to Change the World, Social Justice Events | Tags: art, Art Access Gallery, Brolly Arts, community, healing, Liberty Park, ptsd, Racism, Salt Lake City, Utah | Leave a comment
Terry J Mitchell Eportfolio 