Satchel Story Objects: A Visual and Literary Arts Exhibition
Tea with My Grandmothers, Collage on Wood Panel, 18”x18”, Renee Podunovich 2022
"Satchel Story Objects" runs Aug. 19th - Sept. 30 2022 at the Cortez Cultural Center in Cortez, CO.
This is a collaborative exhibit with artist Sonja Horoshko funded by an Individual Artist Grant from The National Endowment for the Arts through Colorado Creative Industries. The project explores the theme of human migration stories handed down through familial objects.
Tea with My Grandmothers, Self Portrait Cyanotype on Silk, 8”x11”, Renee Podunovich 2022
It was such a pleasure and challenge to be involved with this theme which has a literary and visual arts component. I pushed myself as an artist to include several visual arts pieces using self-portrait photography I have been experimenting with over the past year. I was able to combine the photos in collage and alternative process cyanotype developing.
Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue is Available through Sonja Horoshko and Cortez Cultural Center
The exhibition catalogues sold out fast, but more are coming. They are a great way to take the whole exhibit home with you as they showcase all the art in color and the full writing submissions from each of the 17 artists involved.
From the gorgeous full-color Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue:
Last Dance at Midnight in Kiev, Ukraine, before the Bombfall Oil and gold leaf on Arches paper on board, 24”x24”
and The Iconostases of Loss, Lament and Grief, Ukraine, Mixed Media, including oil on Arches paper mounted on board, 34”x34” by Sonja Horoshko 2022
Sonja Horoshko has served up a timely and timeless theme, interpreted by 17 very diverse voices, histories and artistic approaches, in a manner that gives a full picture of the common humanity around family stories and objects, migration and the changing conditions of life, as well as the resilience to be found in such challenging times. There will be a documentary about the exhibit coming out this year.
Containers of Resilience and Care
by Renee Podunovich
Published in Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue (Art Juice Studio Press, 2022)
When I got married, I was gifted with the usual array of household items; items that one needs to set up a home and start a family of one’s own; a stable life, a place to keep family heirlooms, carry on traditions as well as start new rituals in the current milieu of the times. My husband and I loaded all these gifted items in a big moving van and took them far away from family and the Southwest Colorado desert to lush Portland, Oregon, where we started our new life. Within six months, we sold everything except what would fit in a pickup truck we had outfitted with a camper shell designed to hold all we would need to live in a teepee (including hauling the long poles on top). Our family was horrified at this decision, but we knew we must take a journey into the unknown, see for ourselves what it meant to adventure, to find one’s spiritual calling rather than follow a predetermined practical path. It was a fantastic time, and I am grateful we took that journey.
To be the one in my family who has ended up with the treasured sets of china of both my maternal and paternal grandmothers is curious, considering my early pattern of discarding physical objects as burdensome and unnecessary weight in the world of movement and adventure. Here is the story of how I came to hold such delicate yet resilient items of beauty and utility in my hands, and how I inherited the knowledge to create a “safe container” for myself first and then for those I love.
“Oh, that beautiful wedding and all those gifts…and you sold them,” my paternal grandmother Podunovich (née DiCesare) often stated, aghast. In my 30s, when I did settle down into a home that I have now occupied for 20 years, my grandmother Podunovich was sure to send me household items she felt I needed. Most significant is a 50-pound pasta maker made in Italy that she sent by mail along with her handwritten dough recipe and a side note stating “Good Luck!” I still cherish it and use it. Lenora loved being a homemaker, cooking, and entertaining. She especially loved beautiful things of the Victorian era; figurines, glass candy dishes, a fabulous lamp with a naked Venus figure surrounded by plastic foliage around whose voluptuous body oil dripped down invisible wires, creating the look of illuminated rain.
Whenever I would visit, she would show me her china cabinet holding all the delicate cups and saucers she had been gifted or curated over the years, stating I should decide which ones I wanted so she could tape a note with my name to it. This way, everyone would know who would get which treasures when she passed. Most beautiful to me was a set of pale pink Depression Glass dishes. The story goes that her mother Nunzia Chiola brought them with her from Italy when she immigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy in 1919. Imagine choosing such a delicate treasure to take on a ship to a new land, to meet a man for an arranged marriage. The story also goes that when that man showed up to meet her at the docks, he hid first to catch a glance, to ensure she was attractive before committing. It is a story told with humor and ends happily with her getting married and raising a family in the steel mill town of Gary, Indiana. Yet I can’t help but wonder at her position in that story. She did not have the option to hide and consider the man she would marry. She didn’t have the power of that choice. I am told she was very loving and also loved beautiful delicate things, which my grandmother cherished after her.
This is how I came to have the Depression Glass of my great-grandmother. I, too, keep it safely; in a sidebar cabinet rather than a china cabinet, keeping it not for daily use but because they are beautiful and they came from the women whose blood is mine and because they are important somehow in connecting to the story of where my roots evolved.
At the funeral of my maternal grandmother Minniti (née Armour) my mother and aunt didn’t want to give her china to a thrift store, even though they did not want it. There was something precious about it— but what? I was standing there and was offered the heirlooms and took them. I was the only one who would, the one person in the family who had abandoned such attachment to delicate items that are precarious to move and care for. My mother had them professionally packed and shipped to me, ensuring they would arrive unharmed.
History shows, “The first cultural device was probably a recipient... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier,” says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). “Before the tool that forces energy out- ward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” This is what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.
I first read about Fisher’s theory my freshman year of college in a women's literature course. Ursula K Le Guin discusses it in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Literature” (theanarchistlibrary.org, 1986). However, I hadn’t thought of this essay in years until I considered further the value of this china and why it is the main thing I have inherited from these women, their migration, the new lives they created, and their homes and love from which I continue to benefit.
Le Guin speaks of human culture (and literature) by reclaiming the value of the gatherer’s story— the bringing home of “wild oats” rather than a sole focus on the “hero” story of hunting with tools developed for killing and dominance. She states, “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
My grandmother Minniti’s family history is broken. Jeanette’s mother died when she was 14-years-old and her father died when she was 17-years-old and so she was cared for by aunts and older siblings. She was married by age 17 and had four children by age 22. She worked full-time most of her life at a public utility company. She lived in the same home my grandfather purchased that was built for veterans returning from World War II. It was a small, modest home, and she also had a china cabinet with fragile, special items. Despite experiencing disrupted stability in her early life, she provided a stable home for her family. I love her china, and it is a pattern I would choose; deep ochre and cream with detailed gold leaf trim. It is elegant in a way that makes me consider her life and passions more deeply.
When I consider Le Guin’s insight about the development of containers to ensure care and survival, I also consider decoration and beauty. There is another level of tool making that includes beauty, and this is what interests me about the china because, in a way, it is frivolous, fragile, and a step beyond utility and purpose. If I had to take a few things to start a new life, it would not be fine china. It would be my computer, journals, and documents, things that are not replaceable. Perhaps this china felt irreplaceable to Nunzia as she came to a new land and life. Perhaps it felt irreplaceable to my grandmother Minniti, who had few evident material joys in her life.
Le Guin ends by saying:
“(I am) not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.
It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero…The killer story. It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”
The beautiful, fragile, cherished, kept and passed on to me “containers” hold stories I am listening to more deeply now. As so many things break in the world, still these dishes are intact and they connect me to rapidly disappearing times and places that will change with political and climate crises. Yet, what they connect me to is the resilience of women, the adaptation they find to continue to create “safe containers” for their own lives so they might flourish as best they can despite the repressions of the times they find themselves in. And further, to pass that flourishing on to their family and loved ones for generations.
In a world where meaning, identity and belonging are rapidly shifting, the china seems more fragile now than ever. I will keep these treasures as long as possible in my sidebar cabinet. But if I have to flee quickly for any reason, they may not be the things I chose to take with me. I am the next generation of these amazing women, seeking to continue to create safe containers for my loved ones in drastic and unprecedented times. I will know what I need to take when the time comes, and I will do so with my foremothers’ resilience, tenacity and beauty.