September 2017. I didn’t know where I was going to live.
I’d been surviving rent-free as a “granny nanny” in Orange County, California, for three years, living on $600 under-the-table per month. The agreed-upon term was over, and I was beginning to hope for a future sans caregiving.
With the help of paper-and-book artist Jill Littlewood, I was building an anti-lynching website to call attention to historical and modern-day racist terrorism. I planned to use Paypal Credit for a long-overdue trip to visit my 80-something mother in Seattle. I had been reading about a 70-something-year-old Black woman, an unhoused former actress and Post Office employee, who was sleeping in an Orange County parking lot when a much younger man attempted to rape her. As she fought him off, her head hit the concrete, killing her. And that was when my brother called to tell me our mother had just died from a heart attack and/or a stroke. The vascular dementia had not killed her, but our pesky blood vessels had certainly played a role in her demise.
“Come to Santa Barbara,” Jill said, shortly after I got the news. She’d just lost her own father, and she suggested a writing residency in her attic, an ancient cocoon that had sheltered Afghan women fleeing abuse. And then the largest wildfire in California history to date, the Thomas Fire, forced Jill and her husband to flee their 120-year-old home with whatever belongings they could fit into their Subaru. The fire burned for six months. But once Jill returned home, I set out for the Central Coast to accept her invitation.
Before I moved into that attic-cocoon, I stopped for a week at a Montecito Airbnb, courtesy of a lifelong friend. I wanted to extend my stay, but the casita was booked, so I ended up in a Santa Barbara hotel.
The next morning, mudflows roared down the Santa Ynez Mountains into Montecito, burying 23 people.
Jill, who once worked as a scientific illustrator for the LA Museum of Natural History, has always loved dioramas. She describes them as “one part mystery of miniature, one part natural history museum (with all the problems that raises), one part toy box, treasure chest, jewelry box with ballerina dancing when you open it … the enchantment of the ordinary.” For a short while, I lived inside Jill’s diorama, a home overflowing with objects and artifacts and specimens, a hive mind, a safe harbor.
And so, five years later, when Jill sent notice of Lezley Saar’s “Diorama Drama” exhibit at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, I knew I had to see it. According to art critic Nancy Kay Turner, “Saar here creates fantastically invented narratives of soothsayers and seers who use amulets, bones and tinctures to fix what is broken, find what is lost, or cure all manner of maladies.” In these surreal days of pandemic death, so much of it ignored or forgotten, I thought, maybe Saar’s art could help fix what is broken inside me.
The day before an atmospheric river was to drop on California, I made the trek from my new Orange County apartment in my decade-old EV.
Like Jill, Saar is fascinated by dioramas. Her father, ceramicist Richard Saar, was a conservator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and she spent many hours exploring its exhibits as a child. She grew up in a family of creatives; her mother, Betye, and sister, Alison, are noted artists, and her sister, Tracye, is a writer.
The exhibit’s altered books and transformation of themes from literary works into visual narratives appealed to the writer in me. But two mixed media totem sculptures in a piece called Fever Dreams stopped me in my tracks. The first — Reuel is a shaman and spiritual healer…..a living personification of the head-on collision of Catholic and African religions — was a towering figure, crowned with a mass of ebony woolly fiber atop a faceless, limbless, genderless frame. It was swathed in ceremonial garb, complete with feathered shoulder epaulets, ornamental bits of nature and a mojo bag, plus an oversized, evocative antique keyring. At Reuel’s base, the diorama was ringed with objects of spiritual power often found in traditional African diasporic traditions, including Vodun, Santeria or hoodoo — dolls, an African mask, a beaded bottle, an eight-key musical instrument. A giant compass-like object rested at the base. In this direction healing lies. …
Equally hypnotic is Mourna is the mother of the deceased, whom she keeps in the dark depths of the earth. She protects all their secrets and memories, swaying to faint music, making the ground slippery with her tears. This mixed media figure, with an ebon woolly, faceless head shaped like an elaborate hat, wore a tapestried shawl and Victorian-style black velvet dress festooned with dangling black or near-black objects: a purse, hand mirror, cross, huge skeleton key (again) and a book of prayers. Black feathers and candles and ceremonial vessels sat at Mourna’s feet.
I see Reuel and Mourna as curers of maladies,
as death doulas — as conjuring go-betweens
I gaze upon for solace.
Though the figurine is mostly black, Mourna reminds me of the other colors of grief: my mother breathless on her bathroom floor, California’s parched earth, its disappearing waters, orange flames racing down a hillside, mud sliding. Saar created both totems in 2019, the year I left Santa Barbara County after evacuating from the Cave Fire.
Today, in these surreal days of a million-plus hushed pandemic deaths, of drought and wildfires and bomb cyclones, I see Reuel and Mourna as curers of maladies, as death doulas — as conjuring go-betweens I gaze upon for solace. The visionary work of Lezley Saar, modern-day shaman-artist, conjurer of spirits who transforms cast-off materials and found objects and bits of nature into towers of ritualistic magic, helps us survive an uncertain future on this broken Earth.
Charlotte Watson Sherman, a former Seattleite, has published poetry in Another Chicago Review, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Rootwork Journal and Zora’s Den: The Fire Inside, Vol. 2. She lives in Southern California.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Lezley Saar’s ‘Diorama Drama’ and me.
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