Never thought I could put Gone with the Wind, nuclear waste, Spanish land grants, and the California red-legged frog together in a sentence without creating a string of non sequiturs.

Then I joined a hike into the Upper Los Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve, a 3,000 acre section of the Santa Monica Mountains. Hollywood studios loved this area.

The rolling hills, grasslands, stands of valley oaks, and sycamore-bottomed canyons have stood in for the Crimea (Charge of the Light Brigade), the Great Plains (too many Westerns to name), and, yes, the Georgia ridgeline where Scarlett O’Hara raised her fist to the sky and swore she’d never be poor again.

Mike Malone, a retired National Park Service ranger, led us up onto Lasky Mesa, named for Jesse Lasky, the early movie mogul who formed the partnership that became Paramount Studios.

  At film sites along the way. Mike augmented his informative briefings with enlarged movie stills and off-camera production candids.

Upper Las Virgenes was one small part of a 1795 land grant of more than 110,000 acres, stolen from the Chumash and Tongva nations who were its first inhabitants. Beginning in the 1960s, a succession of companies attempted to develop the land, meeting decades-long resistance from local environmentalists and open-space advocates.

Ultimately, the land’s proximity to the former-but-still-toxic Santa Susanna Field Laboratory site was the developer’s undoing. The closest extraction well to the proposed 3,000 luxury homes reportedly held traces of the solvent trichloroethylene that were more than 480 times federal limits.

It didn’t help that the area was home to that red-legged frog, the San Fernando Valley spineflower, and Southwestern willow flycatcher, all on state and/or federal threatened species lists.

In 2003, the final private landowner sold the property to the Santa Mountains Conservancy for a below-appraised price of $150 million, mostly paid by funds from California conservation bonds. The preserve was dedicated the following year.

Two Ladies of a Certain Age were telling a clerk in the museum gift shop how they had been students at Immaculate Heart College when Sister Mary Corita taught there. “Oh yes,” she says, “we hear that a lot.”

 It was the final day of Someday is Now: the Art of Corita Kent, a massive retrospective of the print-maker’s work at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Scores of visitors moved through the spacious gallery pausing to gaze at the large, colorful silkscreened prints. In one sheltered corner, a biopic of the artist, Primary Colors, played to a rapt, standing-room-only audience.

Like the Ladies, I, too, have a connection with Sister Corita, though more tangential and, perhaps, more complicated: From 1992 to 1995, I taught at Immaculate Heart College Center, the graduate-level successor to Immaculate Heart College, which closed in 1981. As a welcoming gift, I was presented with a framed Corita print and came to learn about the artist’s tenure with the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic religious order.

Long before I came to Los Angeles, however, I knew Sister Corita’s art from the covers of Daniel Berrigan’s books, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine  among others, and, of course, the 1985 LOVE stamp she created for the U.S. Postal Service (at 700 million impressions, the most reproduced artwork ever).

Born as Frances Kent in Iowa at the end of WW I, she became Sister Mary Corita in 1936 when she joined the IHMs in Los Angeles. She graduated from Immaculate Heart College and began teaching there in 1947, but did not learn the silk screen process until 1951, as she worked on a master’s degree in art history at the University of Southern California.

 Someday is Now was heavily weighted towards Corita’s political serigraphs of the late 1950s and 1960s and the playful Alphabet and Circus prints from the period after she left religious life in 1968 until her too-early death in 1986.

Only a few of Corita’s early, distinctly religious works were displayed. This included one of her first prints, “The Lord is With Thee,” which surprised her by winning a first prize in printmaking at a 1952 juried LACMA exhibit. Another, based on the New Testament “wedding at Cana” story (John 2:1-11) reflects Corita’s association with a wide swathe of the artistic avant garde: She depicts First Century wedding guests seated in wire side chairs designed by noted mid-century modernists Charles and Ray Eames.

This lacuna left me wondering what kind of art Sister Mary Corita was making before she found serigraphy. And I thought about her in those pre-Vatican II days working in the college art studios in black habit and veil with stiff white wimple. How did she balance the demands of religious life with college teaching, lecturing, and art making? (With difficulty, apparently; her insomnia was legendary.)

Answers to those questions lie in the plethora of books about Corita and her art published this year: Someday is Now, the exhibition catalogue (already out of print); a biography by April Damman, Corita Kent: Art and Soul; and Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, a more scholarly examination that positions Corita within a wider artistic and social context.

  This is as good a place as any to clarify that the iconic, Vietnam War era sunflower poster proclaiming, “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” was not the work of Corita Kent but another Los Angeles print maker,  Lorraine Schneider, who was active at the same time.

Both artists, however, donated their work and royalties to nonprofit organizations. Poster-sized reproductions of “War is not healthy . . .  “ can be ordered from Another Mother for Peace. Medallions, stickers, infant t-shirts, bumper stickers and embroidered patches also are available. You can peruse the large catalogue of Corita Kent’s work on the website of the Corita Art Center, maintained by the Immaculate Heart Community.

 This is what I knew about the woman calling herself Frau Fiber: She was a former East German garment worker who went around town showing people how to repurpose clothing, like turning an old dress shirt into an apron. At times she used a bicycle-powered sewing machine that she brought to the site by, yes, bicycle. Also that last year, she opened a store front in Long Beach that she called Institute for Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms, ILGWU for short.* Oh, and that she usually showed up wearing a uniform made of reworked denim that looked not a little like the old Girl Scout leader’s uniform replete with self-designed, embroidered badges.

Though curious, I wasn’t able to catch up with die Frau until last month when I received notice that she would bring her Sewing Rebellion (Stop Shopping, Start Sewing!) to Atwater Village. She promised to show us how to construct a knock-off of an H&M jersey dress.

At the appointed time and place, Thank You for Coming†, I arrived cradling my venerable Kenmore sewing machine with a cloth bag of bobbins, scissors, tailor’s chalk, etc. over my shoulder. There, in the flesh, was Frau Fiber along with three Faux Fraus, young women aides sporting the same denim cap as the echte Frau. The narrow work space slowly filled to capacity and the crowd was pleasingly diverse (though mostly women).

In a high, breathy, unaccented voice, Frau Fiber showed us a finished dress, pointed us towards fabric and copies of a brown paper pattern, and set us to work. Amidst a mixed level of skills and multiple projects, die Frau was a calm center, patiently answering questions and, as needed, sitting at a participant’s machine to skillfully solve a problem.

Although required to take Home Economics throughout junior high school and having made a number of blouses, skirts, and dresses, I’m not a confident seamstress. I prefer knitting garments to sewing them. Which perhaps accounts for the fact that after tracing and cutting out the pattern, of the three seams I sewed before quitting time, I had to rip out two because I had sewn the wrong pieces together.

The biggest lesson of the night, however, was learning that Frau Fiber is actually the alter ego of Carole Frances Lung, a fashion activist with a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the Fashion and Textiles faculty of CSU-LA’s Art Department. Her c.v. is five pages long, filled with lists of exhibitions, grants, artist residencies, and honors. And she’s from North Dakota, not East Germany.

It’s easiest to let Lung explain. Her artist’s statement says that she created Frau Fiber in 2006 as a former East German Garment worker, whose textile job was lost with the fall of the Berlin Wall. . . . Frau Fiber represents the Lost Generation of workers, who failed to assimilate to the new united Germany and never had the economic success of the communist times. Embodied in the uniforms she wears and context in which she appears, Frau Fiber transformed herself into a textile activist, drawing attention to the labor behind the label of the garments we wear. Her work is grounded in generosity, commemoration, and gestures of work.

Fiber art as cultural criticism and social activism sweetened with sly humor: just my cup of tea!

Lung writes that she designed Frau Fiber’s various projects, such as the ILGWU and Sewing Rebellion, to deliberately expose the time, process, and labor that garment production requires. Using skills sharing and sewing instruction to foster micro-economies and provide an alternative to the global garment industry, asking participants to exchange their leisure time for production and mending of ones own textile and apparel goods. She reveals the collaborative aspects of piecework, and its ability to help create social bonds. These works are firmly connected to historical instances of organized labor, and are a vehicle to think about self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, communal experience and happiness in work, as well as a tool for fighting poverty and oppression.

I haven’t made much progress on the H & M knock-off since that night, but that’s okay. Frau Fiber said she’d be back and in the process I became reacquainted with my sewing machine, wondering for the Nth time, why I don’t get it out and plug it in more often, an inquiry die Frau would no doubt encourage.

+++++++

*Readers of a certain age will recognize ILGWU as the acronym of the former U.S. needle trades union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, whose label had to be in any clothes my union-supporting parents would buy.

†Thank You For Coming: Yes, that’s the name of the store front restaurant cum art studio (or art studio cum restaurant) on Glendale Boulevard in Atwater Village, just west of the railroad tracks. It will get its own blog post, just as soon as I figure out what it’s all about.

For all the times I’ve walked by the exercise studio at Sunset and Golden Gate in Silverlake, I’d never registered that its grey walls resemble a blackboard. Sure, the wall would be tagged occasionally and, just as often, quickly painted over. But those were indecipherable, spray-painted territorial markings.

Then, last week, chalk inscriptions appeared, an unknown individual’s paean to peace, love/amor, and freedom that declared Silver Lake is “always & 4ever free” and “we don’t worship the almighty $.”

Lovely sentiments, especially given their location on the same block that’s recently undergone Santa Monica-fication.

When the Library Foundation’s ALOUD lecture series announced it would present excerpts from Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, I made reservations immediately.

A lengthy and dense work, Ask your Mama is a scream of a poem—Hughes wrote the entire piece with the caps lock on—a phantasmagorical journey through centuries of injustice, brutality, suffering. Sadly, it never received the full multi-media treatment envisioned by Hughes before he died in 1967.

Then, late in the ‘00s, composer Laura Karpman, in collaboration with soprano Jessye Norman and neo-soul/rap group The Roots, created a fully orchestrated production that premiered at Carnegie Hall and later played to sell-out crowds at the Hollywood Bowl and Apollo Theatre in Harlem.

Earlier this month, Avie Records released a studio recording of “Ask Your Mama” featuring soprano Janai Brugger. She joined the composer on stage at the Central Library to reprise sections of the work. Victoria Kirsch accompanied on piano along with bassist David Young; Taura Stinson provided additional vocals as Karpman led the capacity audience on a tour through her production.

I harbor more than a casual interest in Langston Hughes.

Picture the year: 1963.

Picture the place: an insular small town built of red brick and prejudice

Picture me: ninth-grader, recent transplant, outsider.

Hughes came into my life through the grace of older siblings and the nonchalance of liberal parents who encouraged me to read anything, as long as it wasn’t Nancy Drew. In him I found a companion in outsiderness, an otherness that bound us together and, paradoxically, kept us apart. For both, I remain deeply grateful.

With warp and weft of words, Hughes wove magic carpets that didn’t take me away from  the pain of not-belonging but into its belly, transforming distress into art.

This is a song for the genius child.

Sing it softly for the song is wild.

Sing it softly as ever you can—

Lest the song get out of hand.

Abandoned as a child, first by his father and then his mother, Hughes wrote lines that pulsed with loneliness, yet also with hope. He stood in the mire “seeking the stars,” as one of his poems attests. His life and literature abounded with dreams deferred and opportunities seized.

At 19 he left college from the strain of Ivy League racial prejudice. As a 23-year-old bus boy, he shyly, and slyly, slipped his poems to a noted littérateur in a hotel dining room and got his photograph in newspapers across America.

Nobody loves a genius child

Can you love an eagle,/ Tame or wild?/ Wild or tame, 

Can you love a monster / Of frightening name?

I alway knew I was an eavesdropper, an interloper, listening to Hughes across the chasm of America’s racial divide. Harlem rent parties, Parisian jazz bands, dark virgins and red stockings, daybreak in Alabama: This was not my world. I might imagine myself a kindred spirit, but the reality of being “Negro” in America was as far from me as the surface of the moon. Through Hughes, I learned about that reality: the lives of domestics and elevator “boys,” sharecroppers and urban party-goers. He introduced me to the Harlem Renaissance, Crispus Attucks, be-bop, lynching, and Jim Crow laws. He pulled back the curtain on a different world and I marveled, albeit from afar.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Kill him—and let his soul run wild!

Hughes plowed literary ground for me so that, when the time came, I could hear James Baldwin and Richard Wright and, too many years later, Zora Neale Hurston, his one-time friend and collaborator. Because of his conscientious words and phrasing, I would read, admire, and even dare to teach Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, bell hooks, Audre Lorde.

It all goes back to the Hughes, who addressed the alienation of a 14-year-old white girl, separated by race, a half-century in age, and a literary era long since passed. My affection for Langston Hughes was improbable—and yet, there it was and has remained.

Thank you, Mr. Genius Child.