"Medicine Ball": throwdown of the arts

Ladies! Gentlemen! No need to fight over me: there's plenty of my art to go around! [secretly hopes her art inspires the duelers to throw down harder]

"It's Already Happened Here" by Lisa Myers Bulmash. ©2017

I'm one of seven visual artists whose work kicks off Seattle's literary Cage Match of the Millennium. We've created work especially for "Medicine Ball: Playwrights v. Poets." 

A team of playwrights and a team of poets are now creating works inspired by the visual art, which speaks to the theme of "unity." Then on the weekend of June 22nd, the teams face off in front of an audience -- that's where you come in -- and the audience decides which poem or play they like best. Mainly, this battle is for (a little bit of) honor and glory: Winners take home a bottle of cheap wine; losers get a can of warm, cheap beer.

Should be interesting to see where they take my collage, which addresses a harsher kind of unity.

I'm sure the Confederate flag and the illustration of human trafficking are going to be a challenge. But you're up to it, right, poets? How about you, playwrights?

New work: some sort of unity

I had two whole studio days in a row to myself! One was even in my actual studio space! I made the most of it.

I'm going to submit this piece for an upcoming group show that speaks to the theme of "unity." But I have to say the unity I see in the world right now is more the (en)forced variety.

At best I see a clenched, we're-all-just-FINE kind of unity that seems to hold together by sheer force of will, or maybe just habit. So I've titled this collage "Reconstruction," after another (more visibly) chaotic time in United States history.

Photo credit: New York Public Library

From what I've read, historians think people were desperate to forget the horrors they endured during the American Civil War. That war is still the deadliest in American history. Not surprisingly, the South's version of what happened (and why) didn't line up with the North's narrative.

That divide continues here and now. Why else is there a Confederate soldiers' memorial in a place that wasn't even a state at the time?

Jefferson Davis Park, Clark County, WA. ©Lisa Myers Bulmash

No idea if this piece will be accepted or rejected. But it's worth the effort if the collage makes people think about the long-term, widespread unity requires.