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CONTACT: aliene.howell@gmail.com

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My creative impulses arise from questions in the air around me regarding humanity and roles of power and prejudice in human interactions. My work is not an analysis, but an assertion of these questions, which I have pursued since earning my BFA through specific research projects: my series on the Greensboro Massacre, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil. Working within a community framework strongly stimulates and informs my conceptual process, an interaction that first bore fruit with my senior thesis on the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, during which ten union and civil rights marchers were gunned down by local police acting in concert with the Ku Klux Klan. Combining my devotion as an artist and the responsibility I felt to the survivors electrified my paintings. To portray the history as accurately as possible, I spent hours interviewing survivors and volunteering at Greensboro's Truth and Reconciliation Project. To place myself within the events, I pored over books, microfiche and documentaries to the point of having nightmares about the Klan. After graduation, I moved to Northampton, Massachusetts to work with massacre survivor Marty Nathan, who runs The Greensboro Justice Fund from her house. Working as administrative assistant, I mobilized college students and designed posters and t-shirts for the 25th anniversary commemorative march. We completed the unfinished 1979 march route. My paintings were displayed at the march starting point as well as at the seating of the Greensboro Truth Commission. Standing near the front of the march, looking back over the torrent of 1,200 people wearing the t-shirts and carrying the posters I had designed, I felt both humbled and proud, amazed by the power of representational forms to connect the past and the present and to help nurture a spark of common humanity in disparate groups of people.

Inspired by this, I applied the same methodology during a stay in Brazil, where I began another series concerning the largest social movement in Latin America, the Landless Workers' Movement. I stayed with a large family outside Sao Paulo in their plywood and tarp shack in a workers' encampment, where I harvested corn, bathed alongside children in a river, conversed at length with workers, and attended meetings with organizers, becoming a part of the routines within the movement even as I documented its members, triumphs and setbacks in photographs and paintings. This was exciting, because unlike the Greensboro massacre where my paintings were a posthumous documentation of the events, my work actively participated in history as it unfolded.

I have just begun to explore human consciousness as a major dynamic in my work. Although my work's overt political consciousness leads some viewers to conclude that I traffic solely in allegory, my real intention is to chip away at questions regarding the human psyche on an individual level. What dysfunctions in the mind could lead one person to inflict suffering on another? What social conditions bring these dysfunctions about? Whence springs humor, among the oldest of individual weapons against injustice? I want to investigate the relationships between self-perception and dissent, between body and mind, between the communal and the particular. My work situates the personal both within and beyond the political, a process with which all human collectives struggle and whose inner workings I hope to illuminate.

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The Greensboro Justice Fund

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