Tribal Portraitf: Beauty
and Brutality
An artist’s look at Duality in all things
This exhibit observes the destructive and restorative cycles that we as humans have perpetuated since the beginning: War, Brutality, Greed, Hope, Redemption, Purification and Rebirth.
The title for my exhibit, Tribal Portrait, came to me last fall when I was headed for Namibia, Africa. I thought that I’d do something having to do with apartheid and the Namibians struggle for independence in the 1980’s. But then I really started thinking about the word Tribal. The Struggle in Namibia was racially based – black against white, but then I thought Sunni’s and Shiite’s in Iraq, Arab Tribes vs. African Tribes in Sudan, in the Middle East Jewish Tribes and Arab Tribes, sometimes its Christian against Islamic as in Bosnia, Rwanda the Hutu’s ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi’s and the examples go back thousands of years. There are tribes within tribes in the US, but collectively we could be called the tribe of the oil seekers, or the seekers of material goods, or maybe the tribe that proliferates weapons. The United States, Russia, and France collectively sold 44 billion dollars worth of small arms in 2004. Amnesty International estimates that small arms are responsible for 50–75% of all human rights abuses worldwide.
Essays
Tribal Portrait: Beauty and Brutality
Tribal Portrait: Encountering Messengers in Unpredictable Places
