Kweli is thrilled to relaunch its Sing the Truth! series today as a tribute to Toni Morrison.
During “Art and Social Justice” at the Ambassador Theater, Toni Morrison reminded the audience that artists are “the ones that sing the truth.” The Big Box, Morrison’s first picture book collaboration with her son Slade, sings the truth about “[t]he plight (and resistance) of children living in a wholly commercialized environment that equates “entertainment” with happiness, products with status, “things” with love, and that is terrified of the free (meaning un-commodified, unpurchaseable) imagination of the young.”
Today, in Sing the Truth!, we celebrate multimedia artist, Cozbi A. Cabrera. Her dolls were featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Martha Stewart Living, Land Of Nod catalogue, and many US networks. Solo exhibitions include Thread That Binds (2017-18) at the Jewish Fund Gallery, Ernest Rubenstein Galleries and the Lincoln Center Education Art Gallery. Her dolls, quilts and paintings exhibited concurrently with the Gees Bend Quilts at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum (2017).
Cozbi’s illustrated titles include: Beauty Her Basket/Sandra Belton, and Thanks A Million/Nikki Grimes, Greenwillow Books; Stitchin’ and Pullin’ A Gees Bend Quilt/Patricia McKissack, Random House; Most Loved in All the World/Tonya Cherie Hegamin, Houghton Mifflin; Exquisite: The Poetry and Life of Gwendolyn Brooks/Suzanne Slade, Abrams Books. She authored / illustrated My Hair Is A Garden/Albert Whitman and Me and Mama/Simon & Schuster.
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Laura Pegram: Your muñeças are collector’s items, made in honor of your Honduran heritage. In an early interview, you mentioned that they often begin with a picture in your mind. Your forthcoming picture book, Me and Mama, is in the line-up for the debut year of Denene Millner Books. How did Me and Mama begin? As the author and illustrator, did you see an image first or did you first hear the lyric in a line?
Cozbi Cabrera: Me and Mama began with a broken cup. My daughter was about three, and wanted to do something special for me—bring me a cup of water. She put my favorite cup—curvy & ivory with a toile pattern—under the spigot of the water cooler, watched it fill to the brim, tumble over onto the ceramic tile and shatter into several pieces. I came into motherhood later than most, and in the yearning and waiting period, understood it to be the most sacred of all life contracts. In every other relationship of our choosing, sword to sword in conflict appears fair and remediable. In motherhood, you are the larger hand on the most tender of souls. Broken favorite cup aside, I chose to reward her intentions. A teachable moment. For the adult. So Me and Mama percolated over time, my ode to these tender relationships.
LP: What were some of the challenges of singing the truth in Me & Mama?
CC: The initial challenge for Me and Mama was to trace this tender relationship through their everyday objects, much in a way an anthropologist might infer and draw conclusions based on seemingly small evidences. In the end, I wound up showing a bit more of mother and daughter than I originally intended. This wasn’t to be a story about a major event with suspenseful or gripping detail. Rather, it’s about the power of everyday moments and the powerful shaping that occurs in those moments. It’s the stuff that happens in-between-the lines: how we wake, little habits, observations, responses, acceptance, and how we walk in the rain. My hope is that it gets the reader thinking about their everyday moments, to find beauty in that. To cherish the sweetness available in relatedness. This is the interior stuff, however granular and un-sweeping that sculpts us and assuredly changes the world.
LP: My Hair Is a Garden is the very first book you authored and illustrated. You said it summoned up a “boldness” in you, so you were able “to pry some of [your] many stories out of the drawer and give them a place with young readers.” Is there a graphic novel in your drawer space, making its way into your future?
CC: Ha! There is! I’m tip toeing toward it on tippy toes.
LP: You taught a series of community quilt making workshops in 2017 to a diverse community of Anglo, Hispanic, Hassidic, African and Cantonese speakers. The “Lower East Side Quilt Making group ranged from pre-schoolers and their parents to seniors, all working to piece together a narrative quilt, tapping into their familial and social trees while exploring the power of narrative.” What did that experience teach you about the art of storytelling and how did it influence the way you approach a story today?
CC: That workshop taught me and us that stories are everywhere—in every family, culture, society, generation and individual. Here was a group of seemingly disparate people, disarmed by each other’s honesty and vulnerabilities, finding power in humor and grief, forming into relatedness and intimacy. Whether it was the night the Klan came to torch and this now-senior was a little girl hiding under the table, or the sole and favorite dress (the first and only of its kind that wasn’t a hand-me-down) that never showed up from China to America no matter how many boxes were unpacked, because it had been gifted to a cousin, or the cherished pet pig that was given to a neighbor for safe-keeping because it couldn’t board the plane to the States, only to be seen by little eyes straining for a view through the fence, lanced and rotating over the roasting pit.
Details varied, yet everyone could find common ground in our understanding of human emotion and human heart. We may not have been the little girl in Sri Lanka, looking through the bowl of water at the solar eclipse, but we’ve joined ourselves with her. I saw first hand in a group of “non-writers” the universality of honest stories, having power to heal, touch, and gain access to heart. This group was transformed. Myself included.
LP: You have taught heirloom doll-making workshops which have been inspired by performances from Lincoln Center’s Jazz and Chamber Music orchestras. Has does music inspire your picture book making process?
CC: Music has the power to change our very states. The best musicians are like messengers and guides that bring us into other-worldly places and spaces. They leave us transported and transfixed. That’s some kind of power. All disciplines are related. It’s a humble quest to attempt to tie them together or in the case of the heirloom doll-making to create a visual translation or visual equivalency. You never get there, but you’re better for trying. Try finding a visual equivalent for Nina Simone singing “Ain’t Got No!”
LP: Your exhibition at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina featured illustrations for Patricia McKissack’s book Stitchin’ and Pullin’ a Gee’s Bend Quilt. The book tells “the story of the community of Gee’s Bend quilters through the eyes of a young child, as the women work together, sharing stories, songs and their common history as they “stitch and pull” thread through cloth.” Did Patricia McKissack provide any notes for you before you created the dummy and started painting the spreads?
CC: Oddly, there weren’t any additional notes from Patricia—she left me to read through her manuscript and do my own research. The custom for the major houses then was to have illustrator not communicate with author until after art delivery. The thought was to see what the illustrator might come up with, unencumbered or limited to merely trying to express the author’s wishes. I was able to talk to some of the living quilters, understand the history of the Gees Bend community and their place and genius in history, as well as draw from my experiences as a quilter. Patricia was known for her exquisite prose. There was so much to find in the reading and rereading of her manuscript. After the book was published I was able to spend some time with her on book tour. I remember a morning at breakfast – she came through in splendor, telling a story that left those of us at the table in rapt and wonder. She poured out herself to transport and transfix. She understood and fully claimed her powers as a storyteller.
LP: How do you balance the art making with book tours, school visits and family time?
Art making requires that I go into a tunnel. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. That means I’m unplugged. My family and best of friends understand that. Making art has been like standing at the door knocking. Rarely does the door open immediately. I have to woo it open, by consistently showing up, declaring my intentions. When the door opens a crack, I have to apply and ply all of my powers to the discipline of capturing what shows up. It’s a lot like fireflies in a mason jar. That’s where I build momentum and get to that flow state. In flow, things happen, problems are solved in wake, and in sleep and it looks like there’s possibility. I’m sure it all would be a lot easier if I went with the most obvious of solutions and could be happy with that. The self-critic in me won’t allow it. I’m only happy when I push myself and keep growing, evolving.
Family has a baseline. I have committed to 3 basic things: being emotionally present while doing hair, packing lunch, homework help, for example; creating frameworks and schedules where everyone gets to flourish and creating dinner hour, resplendent with color, flavors, texture to delight the senses and to show up with a’ listening’. I define a listening as that generous state where you’re not trying to get your needs met, rather you’re clear that you’re being present for another.
I undertake book tour and school visits as seasonal. I manage them better when dates are clumped on a calendar. It’s a fun gear shift after moons in semi-isolation.
LP: Illustrators are increasingly blending traditional and digital media. What is your preference as an author/illustrator? And what advice would you give to an emerging artist today?
I came into design, just prior to the industry going full throttle into digital. Every caveat was that the tools were tools, not the creator. Tools were only as good as the hand, mind and heart wielding them. Illustration was a respite for me then, one way to keep in practice evidence of the human hand while spending increasing time in front of my computer screen on my day job.
Those little evidences matter to me. I’m touched when I see them in another’s work. I would advise an emerging artist to keep a sketchbook, a place to play with textures, color mixing and a way of jotting down any areas for further exploration, discovery and observation. These unique jottings are what enrich your work, the absence of which is cause for dry wells and the homogenization or sameness that’s so dull and prevalent.
That said, what good are tools without mastery? Play with your tools. Play with them in such a way that you can’t exhaust what’s possible with them. This is the only way to stay in love and excited, anxious to greet a new day and growing. Keep a digital sketchbook as a companion to your traditional one.
I had a wise instructor at Parsons in Paris, the director of the program, James Parker. He used to say “Never draw when designing. Only cut and paste!” When pressed why, he’d say, “When you draw you become too attached to what your precious little hands have done.” He was implying that you would not be able to discard that idea for a better one, having invested so much of yourself and your time. Translating that principle to illustration in a pre-digital age: After you’ve painted in all the eyelashes, are you willing to move the figure over to the left by three inches, because that’s the best placement? Or do you place in a tree or some extraneous filler to hide a compromised composition? The beauty of digital tools is now you can draw and cut and paste. You can try out several options swiftly and come to the best conclusions. Delivery is cheaper and easier without shipping of traditional boards and scanning. But don’t be afraid to stand apart with evidence of your hand and diligence to your craft, like Patricia McKissack at a breakfast table, an unexpected gift --unique and astonishingly powerful.
LP: Thank you for Singing the Truth! with us, Cozbi. We can hardly wait for Me and Mama to be in the world.
Cozbi A. Cabrera holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design. She has illustrated several books for children and is also well known for her handmade cloth dolls. Cabrera lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Laura Pegram is the founding editor and publisher of Kweli Journal. She lives in New York City.
