NEW BEDFORD ART MUSEUM
Thursday, August 10, 5-7PM
Join Jane O’Hara for an Artist Talk and State of the Union Book Launch + Signing
Foreward
By Gretchen Primack
It’s 2019, and the artist Jane O’Hara is in West Palm Beach. As usual, she's thinking about the place she finds herself, its waters and myths and monuments. As usual, she's thinking about the way humans interact with other animals, the ones we cherish and the ones we disdain. And she is mixing paint to tell us this story.
What does her brush find there in her studio? Florida’s bright colors, graceful palms, vibrant fruit, achingly blue skies. Its caged primates and wild crocodiles; its endangered manatees and hunted bears. It finds captive orcas and free dolphins, sequestered calves and roaming panthers. Her brush finds glories and tragedies; the ways in which we honor and exploit other species based on culture, whim, convenience, capitalism, habit. It finds aesthetics, playfulness, humor, and darkness.
Inside a month, Jane has built a world on a 24-inch square, a world of our beauty and horror, the ways in which horror wedges into and floats above the beauty.
Inside a year, she's realized that every state is part of the story, and that only with all fifty can it really be told.
Calling the State of the Union series ambitious is like calling a bonfire a lit match. If it had taken eight years, no artist or appreciator would have blinked. But Jane completed every detail—each bubble, each letter, each petal of South Dakota’s sunflower profusion—in less than half that time. She researched assiduously, plumbing each state’s personality, myths, and realities, and made each painting communicate how the states promote and disguise themselves in all their complexity and nuance.
Now, with the book you’re holding, we viewers can linger over each rendering, turning the page to find another chapter of our nation's story. Through Jane's choices, be they of brushstroke or image, we move closer toward seeing ourselves: the choices we make, the assumptions we privilege, the ills we ignore, the kindnesses we favor.
There’s no preaching here. As Maya Lin would put it, the effort is to “mine the facts and stand back.” This is Jane’s project: Not to shame us, but to show us. To show us all of it.
I’ve been thankful for Jane O’Hara’s work for many years, but I’ve never been more thankful than now. To see America through Jane’s work is, to put it simply, to understand the country better.
Gretchen Primack is the author of Kind, republished by Lantern Books in 2021; Visiting Days (Willow Books Editors Select Series); and Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple). She also co-wrote, with Jenny Brown, the memoir The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Ploughshares, and other journals and anthologies. Primack has administrated and taught with college programs and poetry workshops in maximum-security prisons for many years.