COVID-19 PAGES Featured Artist – PAMELA HARRIS-LAWTON
Lawton, the Florence Gaskins Harper Endowed Chair in Art Education at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is a fifth-generation educator and native of Washington, DC. Her artistic and scholarly research revolves around visual narrative and intergenerational arts learning in BIPOC community settings.
In 2019 she was an associate artist at the Tate Exchange in London. Her project, Artstories UK, involved collaborating with 1800+ museum visitors over the course of five days. She was also the 2019 Distinguished Chair Fulbright Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her artwork is grounded in social practice; seeking to illuminate contemporary issues, cultural traditions, and the stories of people affected by them.
In addition to many scholarly publications, her artworks are in collections at several universities, the Tate Britain Library, Eugene E. Myers Charitable Unitrust, Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center, and Zenith Gallery.
Lawton’s contribution to the COVID-19 PAGES is a self-portrait entitled, “Be strong, Be the Coffee.” The Artist states:
“I take inspiration from my family history, most notably the women in my family and the work of artist Elizabeth Catlett. For [sic] the piece I submitted, I’ve had to wear as a mantle to stay grounded in these unprecedented, challenging, and scary times. This wood-cut with hand-drawn elements was initially created as part of an artists’ book collaborative work with 8 other mature Black women artists. The theme of the book I created this piece for, was “We, the Coffee,” a riff on a proverb in which a daughter comes to her mother complaining about her struggles and being in ‘hot water.’ The mother says, you can be an egg (which gets hard in hot water), a carrot (which gets limp in hot water), or coffee—which gets stronger the hotter the water is. Like coffee, Black women come in various tints and shades—so around the portrait are different types of coffee: cafe au lait, expresso, cappuccino, and mocha.”
To visit COVID-19 PAGES: The Influence & Inspiration of Women, click on the following link: https://wellsinternationalfoundation.org/covid-19-pages-exhibit/
