A comparative literary scholar by profession, drawing lines between Portuguese, Luso-African, Brazilian, French and Franco-Algerian, Russian and East European texts and cultural contexts, I am an artist only in the sense of someone who cannot help scratching out her own sense of things by scrawling in the margins, sketching as a way of searching between the lines for what I cannot say or see otherwise, scavenging and sculpting in any spare moment also just not to sink, to survive rough crossings. That is to say that my art is personal. For a long stretch, it was private. Not that my scholarship isn’t personal, but it is far less directly so, and though my academic pursuits require countless hours of reading and writing in private, professors must profess publically, in the classroom, at conferences, through publication. My scholarship and art are interconnected. Increasingly, I see my art as a form of scholarship. Like my art, my scholarly work is concerned with connections between displacement, deterritorialization, digression, divided and doubled consciousness, deviance, dissent, dissembling, dialogue, translation, translingualism, transculturation and creativity. In my scholarly work, I read others’ works of art, verbal and visual. My critical writing has its own artfulness. I tend towards parataxis, swirling and slanted sentences, that seek to make sense, like many of the authors I study, through turns within a reflexive, recursive line. I write about writing in the margins, against a death sentence, extending and redirecting a life sentence, pitting digressive authorship against authoritarian dictates. My art is less intellectual, more intuitive, more intimate artifact. At the same time, my art is admittedly informed by my study of literature, film, and art history, as my reading of literary texts is informed by my study of art history and cultural semiotics, by my practice as an artist, by my personal cultural crossings and sensibilities. As a scholar, I’ve read cities as texts, literary texts as maps, maps as traces of cultural imaginaries, retracing correlations between art, architecture, and the architectonics of literary narrative. It requires different skills to seek sense or sculpt with words or stone, wax, clay, but these are interelated tasks for me. The material presses on me. I press back.
The books and notebooks on my shelves are full of verbal and visual maps and drawings, lines linking words and ideas, sketches fleshing phrases out as figures, not as illustration, but interpretation. Both writing and drawing are ways of navigation, seeing, searching and knowing for me. They could be considered post-modern constructs, deconstructive, but I think of my sketchbooks as mappings akin to those of ancient cartographers: multiple planes on the page refuting fixed perspective, navigational lines moored to familiar sites remaining strangely mobile, palimpsests with traced and retraced trajectories, redrawn and eroded shorelines, stretched horizons, limning of strange sea creatures, records of curious objects, recurrent symbols, notations evincing scientific curiosity, critical reflection, transpositions, composites, translations, mistranslations, digressions.
I took my first writing and drawing classes in Lisbon, Portugal. It was in Lisbon that I first read Dostoevsky and was drawn to the Russian literature that made strange sense of a complicated Portuguese reality and became a focus of my undergraduate work at Yale and in Moscow, my graduate work at Princeton and in St. Petersburg. It was in Lisbon I learned French that I continued to study as an undergraduate at Yale, a graduate student at UD and Princeton, and that took me to the Sorbonne and ENS and back again to Paris countless times, to study the city and citytext (literature, film, art and architecture), and then beyond Paris to Algiers. I spend a childhood playing amid traces of Roman and Moorish art and architecture in Lisbon and the Alentejo, a ubiquitous Manueline Baroque, expropriated styles from a global empire, the nostalgic authoritarian modernism of the Salazarist era, the urban bricolage of post-revolutionary shantytowns, walls layered in torn posters and graffitti. I was introduced to modern art at the Gulbenkian. This is to point out that before I ever began to write or draw or study in Lisbon and throughout my formative years, I was imprinted to the core by an extraordinarily complex, conflicted, though not yet very contested (post)colonial Portuguese landscape. My art and scholarship draw deeply on the liminal sensibility of cultural consciousness positioned on that western edge of Europe and sea in the midst of cultural turmoil. Lisbon and a stretch of the Costa Vicentina are my “terra”.
Yet I am both from Portugal and “not Portuguese”. I carry citizenship papers and passports from Canada and the United States. I was born in a Canadian border town to itinerant parents of immigrant Lithuanian- and German-American descent, the second child of a mother raised by a single self-educated working mother in Philadelphia and of a father born in Rio de Janeiro and raised by missionary parents preserving language and cultivating conversion among indigenous tribes in the Amazon before being shipped off to boarding schools, then the seminary in the American South where he met my mother. My parents went on to seminary in the mid-West US, then to work across the Canadian border, and, during my formative years, in Portugal. They moved often. Teacher and preacher by trade, they were writer, illustrator, and woodcarver by vocation. Our houses were full of Bibles, theological tomes and an odd assortment of other books in various languages, but also pocket knives and carpentry tools, jars of pencils, stacks of paper and wood. They were also always full of people, local and passing through, ranging from refugees and undocumented migrants to well-healed emigres and intellectuals and anyone of any class or ideological inclination in any neighborhood in which my parents lived or worked. My closest childhood friends were retornados and the children of migrants, living in barracas, concrete shanties across the street, high rises and provisional housing. Their lives were in many ways as provisional as, though less privileged, than my own. As much as through my motley education at public and private international schools in Portugal and the United States, my imagination and critical thought, cultural consciousness and conscience, aesthetics and ethics were shaped by my family’s continual relocations and connections to diverse communities. My childhood in Portugal was rather complicated, as is my relation to my family heritage, though both afforded me inexhaustible resources for critical and creative work. I have returned often to Portugal, and my perspectives have radically shifted as a function of sustained friendships across diverse communities, further cultural displacements and connections.
My earliest sketchbooks were thin cadernos, purchased in the early 1970s at the corner kiosk in Carcavelos or on weekly Wednesday forays with my mother to Lisbon’s Papelaria Fernandes. My drawings on those white pages marked with a red line running down the edge are full of irregular circles–everything is an approximate circle: human, house, boat, our one-eyed mutt Tippy. The circles are neither precise, nor concentric. Nor are they in the center of the page. They nudge each other towards the edges, overlap awkwardly, with skewed perspective. I like those early drawings, though they do not strike me as particularly precocious. Later drawings become more carefully constrained, conventional, kitsch. I look back on that shift and recall myself as a kid who tried hard to belong, in part by always coloring admirably between the lines (or duplicating precisely on the right side of the page, the colored model on the left side in the Portuguese coloring books, like I adroitly duplicated turns of phrase, accents, ideas). Yet I also recall my tendency, despite my best efforts, to fall out of line. If I did not feel free to pursue my own lines in drawings or academic and social performances for others, I did explore that freedom in the things I continually built for myself out of cardboard, concrete, and other scavenged materials. I was lucky that my playgrounds were abandoned windmills, construction sites and ancient ruins, woods and beaches, and the campo Caravela where I spent summers in the Alentejo, places conducive to creativity. I built worlds out of sand, odd sticks and stones. I was rather disaster prone, and I collected and retraced scars on my own and others’ bodies. I have always loved the oddly weighted contours of found stones, the contortions of bent tree limbs, torsos, faces, feet, old neighbors’ and grandmothers’ wondrously weathered hands. But many of these preferences, modes and places of play were secret, private–as they are for many children. I also read voraciously, and that was another space for discrete public and private pursuits.
At sixteen, I “returned” with my parents to the United States, to finish my senior year of high school in NJ, then study Russian and French literature, drawing and photography at Yale University, while working as assistant to curators of modern American art in the Yale Art Gallery. I subsequently received a Henry Hart Rice fellowship, supporting a year of research, drawing and photography in Russia and Ukraine, which resulted in exhibits of black and white photographs and pencil drawings at Yale and then a couple small venues in Pennsylvania, where I briefly set up a studio while taking graduate courses in sculpture at Millersville University. I taught children’s art workshops as well as languages and literature in Dallas, TX, while working as a freelance artist, before pursuing an MA in English and comparative literature and theory at the University of Dallas, then an MA and PhD in comparative literature and theory at Princeton University, with graduate work at the Ecole Normale Superieure and Sorbonne in Paris, St. Petersburg State University and Dostoevsky Museum in Lisbon, archives in Portugal, France, and Russia.
My early rigorous study of languages and canonical literature, like my cautious drawing of recognizable figures and forms, confined to the center of the page, proportions and perspective corrected, compass and ruler in use, shading precise, seems to me now one of many ways I tried to navigate a “correct” course per an evangelical heritage fearful of becoming unmoored, of veering into margins or worse, falling over the edge, into uncertainty – which has since become a lifeline. My early training in art was not unlike my early training in languages, based on theories of discourse and translation concerned with correctness, clarity, equivalence, exact comprehension. God aligned with grammar. A literary or cultural historian might understand my early training as a variant of an earnest socialist realism, informed by an anti-intellectual protestantism (despite my father’s early study of Latin and Greek, both my parents’ advanced study of theology, my mother’s early studies in art). Not that any of my work merits comparison to Van Gogh’s, but I recognize in it a similar struggle informed by a peculiar sensibility or susceptibility to people connected to the earth, to transcendance in the everyday, and to evangelicalism. My Portuguese and Ukrainian drawings in the late 1980s and early 1990s were a way to try to grapple with social responsibility and skepticism, connected to my reading of writers such as Steinbeck and Hurston and Dostoevsky (first in the vein of Belinsky, only later Bakhtin). While drawn from life, they approximate photographic realism, and correspond to my early documentary photography in the vein of Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt. My art was linked with narrative. I was drawn to form first through storied human figures, drawn to masterpieces like Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son.
Yet I was also drawn to materials, to the paper itself, the weight and texture of a piece of charcoal, the tremor of a pencil line, stone, clay, rusted metal. As I was drawn to language and form, inventive, indefinite. Through Gogol and Dostoevsky, I arrived at Pessoa, Mario de Andrade, the Russian modernists, Bely, Bulgakov, Nabokov, eventually Pelevin, Petrushevskaya, Lins, Lispector, Jorge, Antunes, Agualusa, and so on. With my turn to figurative sculpture (first through sketches of classical and renaissance works, then studies of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel’s work, then my own experiments with clay and bronze casting beginning in 1992), I began to find my way through the material past art as story and representation. As my art became more personal and experimental, a way of seeking, it became more private for me. Following those few exhibits of drawings in the early 1990s, the work that I was starting to make for myself felt too raw to show or sell. I did not like the posturing of the New Haven and New York arts scenes where I’d found myself briefly after my time in Russia and Ukraine. So I turned to the archives and literary analysis rather than visual arts for a profession, without quite recognizing the performative aspects of academe and the difficulties of seriously pursuing art on my own while working as a scholar.
For a dozen years, while finding my way as a scholar and attending to young kids, I abandoned sculpting altogether and drew sporadically, honing other ways of understanding through reading and recursive writing about the 19th-c, then 20th- and 21st-c novel, in Russia, France, Brazil, Portugal. My reading shifted to a mode of engagement informed by Russian formalism, French structuralism and post-structuralism, the Tartu school of cultural semiotics, etc. Though essentially a textual scholar (working in stages on Gogol, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Queiroz, Almeida, Machado de Assis… Proust, Gide, Sarraute, Pessoa, Andrade, Lispector, Lins, Bulgakov, Brodsky, Petrushevskaia, Ulitskaia, Jorge, Saramago, Antunes…more recently Sebbar, Boudjedra, Modiano, Agualusa, Ondjaki, Cardoso, Almeida, Miranda, etc), I still spent every free moment during my academic studies in Lisbon, Paris, St. Petersburg and Moscow studying visual art, increasingly that of the twentieth century, re-vising and re-casting cultural memory, reorienting cultural discourse. I read twentieth century art partly in terms of that civilization that Brodsky finds in the classical portico translated first to Petersburg and then onto the Russian steppe in the work of Mandelstam, partly in terms of the cannibalism of Brazilian modernismo. As comparative scholar, I became far more interested in deviating, digressive, slanted lines–visual and verbal–tensed between cultures, consciousness and context, modes of artistic discourse. Increasingly my navigational tool of choice in charting a trajectory through rather treacherous art, academic, and everyday terrain is an eccentric or ex-centric cultural compass, which gives rise to something more like the irregularly sketched circles I drew as a child. I began to draw and sculpt again regularly in 2012.
While a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lisbon, and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY, my research (most often in St. Petersburg, Paris and Lisbon) and corresponding publications and teaching have investigated intersections between art and literature. EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism: St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro (Manchester University Press, 2013), traces correspondences between the structures of verbal (literary) and visual (cartographic, lithographic, photographic) citytexts. Similarly, I have studied concentric, ex-centric, and eccentric reconfigurations of cultural authority through the remapping of sites of execution in literary and cartographic Paris texts, while working on a monograph provisionally titled Paris Palimpsest: Executions. I teach courses on border crossings between documentary and fiction and have written about (re)visionary filmmakers including Tarkovsky, Akerman, Kogut, Khrzhanovsky and Nelk, artists such as Varejao, Miranda, and Rego. My current work concerns ReVisionary Navigators: Lusophone Writers and Artists Remapping Cultural Memory, Reorienting Cultural Consciousness. My CV lists in more detail my critical scholarship comparing the geo-cultural re-mapping, gendered recasting, and generic reconfiguration of cultural memory in recent Luso-African and Portuguese, French and Franco-Algerian, Slavic and East European, and transnational literature, art, film and documentary photography.
In the past few years, I’ve increasingly devoted myself to my own creative work, mostly in isolation, in time and studio space carved out of rather demanding professional and personal lives. Breaking out of my isolation on occasion, I’ve exhibited photography, drawings, and sculpture as part of a couple local group shows (including The Nude and Earth) at the local Different Path Gallery, in support of the Morgan Manning House in Brockport, NY, to raise funds in support of humanitarian efforts for refugees in Ukraine and Mozambique, and placing ReMembering the Map in a juried show at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. My home has increasingly turned studio, a place where I cover the walls with sketches and stack up notebooks and sketchbooks on the shelves, where tables covered in tools and clay, found wire and sticks invite me (and my kids) to sculpt, where open music room with piano and cellos, clarinet, guitar and drums invites improvisation, where the books and art and music of others remind us of these creatively attentive ways of seeking…
