Clerc Scar and Wordgathering articles

Betty G. Miller's painting of a woman signing "birth."

There are two postings to share with you. First, In August, Patti Durr featured a painting by Betty G. Miller in an article she wrote for Clerc Scar, an “email publication of the signing community.” From the same people [John Lee Clark (ASL Deaf-Blind 2nd generation) & Adrean Clark (ASL Deaf)] who produced the popular “Tactile Mind Weekly,” Clerc Scar publishes essays, poetry, fiction, and artwork that, as we sign it in ASL slang, “scar” your minds! Instead of multiple pieces in one long email message, each item appears in its own email message, allowing you to keep, delete, and forward exactly what you want to keep, delete, or forward. Everything is archived online as well.

Thanks to those archives, you can read Patti’s article about “Birth of a Deaf Woman,” the painting she bought last fall at the art show at NTID. Patti Durr teaches in the Department of Cultural and Creative Studies at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

If you’re not yet getting Clerc Scar in your inbox, just send an email to subscribe@clercscar.com with the message “Subscribe me.”

Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.clercscar.com/archives/20090803b.html

"Blossom" shows the sign for blossom intertwined with a growing flower.

The second article is one I wrote for Wordgathering, an online journal of disability poetry. I’m not sure who followed whom first, but Michael Northen, editor of Wordgathering, and I developed a relationship on Twitter. Michael told me that they’ve begun covering visual arts as well, and asked that I write an article about Betty’s work. I did, and it’s online:

http://www.wordgathering.com/issue11/art/creighton.html

Also in this issue, under “Essays” is work from two other deaf people: “Letter to Sean Penn” by Raymond Luczak, and “Response to Dialogue on Disability” by Curtis Robbins.

http://www.wordgathering.com/issue11/essays/essays11.html

Hope you enjoy these articles, and I look forward to any comments you have on them.

Nancy Creighton  @purpleswirl

 

Etsy online store for original art is now open

Now that Betty G. Miller’s retrospective is open at the Dyer Gallery in Rochester (more in a later post), I finally completed the writing and image preparation for the online store for original art on Etsy: http://purpleswirl.etsy.com. We reserve the right to use the images, but you’ll be buying the original. Etsy allows you to use PayPal to pay for the artwork, which is a good way for us to accept credit cards, and you to maintain your financial privacy.

I’ll be adding more artwork to this store soon– in the meantime, check out the first five works posted– four by Betty G. Miller, and one by her father, Ralph R. Miller.

 

Viva De’VIA group on Facebook

Last week, on June 13th, I set up a group on Facebook for fans of De’VIA. The name came from Patti Durr– Viva De’VIA is what she used as a title for the poster explaining De’VIA for the NAD Conference’s De’VIA Creative Space. I invited 50 people, and just now, I saw that there are 91 members and 114 invitees haven’t replied yet. That is a hands-on lesson for me in the “viral” properties of Facebook. Wow. Maybe we’ll reach 100 before today ends.

 

De’VIA Creative Space at the NAD Conference

Betty got a request from Chuck Baird (CB) and Patti Durr for photos of several of her artworks to be part of a poster project for the De’VIA Creative Space that’s going to happen at the NAD Conference in New Orleans in July. So, I’m working on getting the photos with the proper dpi and size ready to send to Patti at RIT.

What’s De’VIA? Deaf View/Image Art, also known as De’VIA, is created when the artist intends to capture their deaf experience in their artwork– by sharing the beauty of American Sign Language (ASL), or showing the world how it feels to be deaf. Much of Betty’s work is De’VIA, not a lot of mine is, but I am a deaf artist. I just don’t choose to make a lot of art expressing my deaf experience (not yet anyway!) For more about De’VIA see http://bettigee.purple-swirl.com/DeVIA/DeVIA.html.

CB is going to guide folks– adults and children– in creating their own works of creative expression of their deaf experience, through hands-on visual art creation and ASL stories and poetry performances. The De’VIA Creative Space is going to be open for four days of the Conference, and the walls are going to be covered with posters. That’s why I’m pulling together Betty’s photos. It looks like it’s gonna be good, makes me wish I could go to the Conference this year.