New MAC exhibit ‘Conduit’ celebrates mothers and those who are mothering

In the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s newest exhibit, 38 faces stare back at visitors.

Most, but not all, are women or female-presenting. Some have brightly patterned clothing or statement earrings, others wear glasses or are barefaced. All seem to be peacefully frozen in time, as if they’re just about to speak.

These realistic egg tempera paintings are accompanied by audio recordings of the stories the subjects told the artist about the mother figure in their life.

“Conduit” is the work of Spokane-raised artist Doug Safranek in connection to the World Mother Storytelling Project, an organization which seeks to teach children of all ages how to tell their mothers’ stories and teach mothers how to tell their own.

“Conduit: Doug Safranek and the World Mother Storytelling Project,” opened Jan. 24 and runs through April 19.

Safranek’s first taste of success in the art world came as a student at Mrs. Castoldi’s Musical Kindergarten, when teacher Maxine Castoldi told Safranek’s parents that he had a gift with art, which especially excited his mother.

They encouraged his talents as he grew older, and Safranek, who moved to Spokane at the age of 5, began taking classes with Ken Spiering at the Spokane Art School. He also got support from his art teachers at Lewis and Clark High School, Gonzaga University professor Robert Gilmore and Scott Patnode, founder of the Jundt Art Museum.

After studying at Gonzaga and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his MFA, Safranek moved to New York City, where he lives today.

In New York, Safranek made a name for himself creating paintings of urban landscapes in which the artist would take a bird’s eye view of the city, looking at people in the streets of his neighborhood or more tourist-y hotspots like Coney Island.

He enjoyed seeing the diversity of the places he painted, but over time, Safranek realized he wanted to do work that was more directly engaged with social issues and with people in general.

“More of an activist art, rather than observing,” he said.

The first step toward this goal was taking a job as an instructor at the Arts Students League in New York. In this position, he reintroduced egg tempera classes, which had been previously missing from the school’s curriculum for a number of years.

The next step came nine years ago, when Safranek got the opportunity to paint portraits of friends, family members and fellow artists and began showing those works around the city.

“I was always interested in body language in people, trying to interpret their air and their attitude,” he said. “But I was witnessing them from afar. The cityscapes, I always considered them big stage sets for human activity. I was more interested in the people in the streets than the buildings around them… (With portraiture) you’re up front and confronting an individual. You’re coming in close, sensing their spirit, their narrative, their energy.”

Murray Nossel, founder and director of the World Mother Storytelling Project, saw those portraits and approached Safranek. He told the artist it “looks like each one of those people is going to open their mouth and tell me a story.”

He then told Safranek he had started an organization to preserve and celebrate the stories of mothers.

Nossel began the World Mother Storytelling Project after his parents were kidnapped as their car was stolen. After his mother convinced the thieves to let them go unharmed, Nossel realized he needed to hear more of his mother’s story.

Nossel asked Safranek if he would be interested in collaborating with him on art installations that promoted the idea of listening to the stories of mothers.

Safranek listened to Nossel interview children and mother figures about their stories and found it to be a heart-opening experience, so much so that he chose to interview his own mother.

“It’s such a wonderful thing for children of all ages, who, if your mother is still alive, to talk to them and get their stories,” he said. “Or if she’s passed, to sit down and really remember, if there are people still alive to put together these stories so that they’re able to be passed down to others. That is really the genesis of this project that you see at the MAC.”

When MAC Executive Director Wesley Jessup and Associate Curator of Special Projects Anne-Claire Mitchell met with Safranek, they originally had the idea to feature the artist’s cityscapes. Instead, they learned of his work with the World Mother Storytelling Project.

“If an artist is passionate about something, we do everything we can to facilitate their idea, so we followed Doug down this rabbit hole,” Mitchell said. “Something that drew me and our curatorial and education teams to the idea was the really expansive view that the expedition takes of who is a mother. Obviously that’s a social topic that is getting a lot of attention right now. I think it’s a conversation that we need to be having.”

“Conduit” features 38 portraits of people who participated in the World Mother Storytelling Project. Thirty of those portraits were completed in collaboration with the Sugar Hill Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York.

Museum staff chose 30 people from the community that they felt represented the demographic of the Sugar Hill Neighborhood in Harlem.

“It’s like a microcosm of the United States,” Safranek said. “Different cultures, China, Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, people who’ve been here for generations.”

The other eight portraits are of Spokane community members. With only about a month to make these Spokane portraits happen, the MAC team, including Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Rachel Allen, reached out to community partners, including representatives from the Spokane Tribe and Asians for Collective Liberation, to nominate someone to be painted.

“We wanted a really diverse representation of folks from the community,” Allen said.

Safranek met, interviewed and photographed each subject before returning home and painting them. Egg tempera turned out to be the perfect medium for this work.

“Each brush stroke dries individually, so you have veils of translucent paint piled delicately, one on top of the other, to create the final form,” Safranek said. “So poetically thinking, I felt like I was painting the spirit of the mothers they were telling me about in the face of the eight Spokanies that are represented in the exhibition.”

Along with the 38 portraits, there will also be a space at the exhibit for attendees to leave stories about their own mother or the mother figure in their life. The goal of the exhibit, Safranek said, is to inspire attendees to celebrate their mother and/or the mother figures in their life.

“Ultimately, (mothering) can transcend gender,” he said. “It’s not necessarily limited to a female gender, but ultimately these impulses toward kindness, generosity, patience, empathy, connection, are human qualities, aren’t they? So men and women alike, our aspiration is that listening to these stories inspires each and every one of us to find these qualities within and then bring them to a world which needs these qualities of cooperation.”