Work in Progress, Q. Cassetti, 2010The poster to the left is work in progress for Tburg’s Zydeco Trail Riders show at the Rongo prior to Grassroots. Still working with it and am thinking about color and junking it up a bit more. I don’t know if color will help this..you and I will see.
A lightning bolt from the sky happened yesterday. I heard my email ping…and checked a letter from a person who found my Fraktur inspired work. She is a curator for the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center in Pennsburg,PA and liked my work (Wunderfisch!) and was interested in my possibly having a show at their Museum. We have had, since then, a wonderful conversation about our respective passions about these people, their beliefs, the imagery—We may be looking at a show in 2012 (so I can expand the body of work…maybe work a bit with the images I want to do from The Long Lost Friend. My new friend clued me into an individual in the 1800s from Penn Yan, the Public Universal Friend, Jemima Wilkinson>> From Yates County.org says:
Jemima Wilkinson, the first American-born woman to found a religious movement, was born in Rhode Island in about 1765, of Quaker parents. In 1776 she fell ill of a fever. She awoke from a coma and told those standing by that Jemima had died and a spirit from heaven now inhabited her body. She never again used her birth name and until her death in 1819 was always referred to as the Public Universal Friend.
Her teachings were influenced both by the somewhat mystical version of Quakerism current at the time, by the Shaker movement founded a few years earlier by Mother Anne Lee, and by the New Light Methodists, whose meetings she had attended. She wore androgynous clothing, rode horseback, let her hair hang loose on her shoulders and wore a man’s broad-brimmed hat; and she preached in public, a tremendous novelty for a woman in the 1770s. She preached all over southern New England and beginning in 1782, in the Philadelphia area. Sometime about the middle 1780s she determined to remove her followers from the persecution and distractions attendant on living among people not of her faith.
ooooh weeeeee~! Bring it on!