Suleika Jaouad, Just Married, 2024. Watercolor on cradled plywood. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Courtesy of ArtYard/John Carlano
Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood brings together artworks created separately and at different moments in the lives of a mother and daughter. Carefully curated, this beautiful exhibition effectively reveals how these various media creations inform one another. The theme, alchemy (the medieval belief in turning lead into gold), refers to the transformative powers of art. Here we see negative energies (fear, isolation, anxiety, helplessness, and pain) channeled into reaching for the opposite - for vitality, strength, and survival, even if it means surrendering into a vast unknown. The "blood" in the title references the mother-daughter relationship and their shared experience fighting Suleika's leukemia, a cancer of the blood and lymphatic system.
Suleika Jaouad, Just Married, 2024. Watercolor on cradled plywood. Anne Francey, Red and Grey, 1988. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Courtesy of ArtYard/John Carlano
Within the ArtYard's generous spaces, we witness an emotional conversation conducted in radiant and hushed tones, revealing gut-wrenching truths that words may not adequately express. The images are surreal from a place where time and certainty do not exist. They float in their own magical environments liberated from literary constraints. The whole project testifies to the courage of these powerful women, blessed with abundant talents that nurture each other. As a whole, these paintings, shields, and video installation, achieve monumentality because of ArtYard's huge walls in its capacious galleries.
The ghost of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) also resides within these walls. Anne Francey gave Suleika a book about Frida Kahlo awhile ago. Knowing this information in advance of my trip to ArtYard, I noticed the influence of the preeminent autobiographical artist on Suleika Jaouad's fanciful style (also similar in spirit to Florine Stettheimer, 1871-1944) and considered the spiritual presence of Frida Kahlo as another blood-tie between this life-long mentor and her favorite disciple.
Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood opened on June 22nd and closes on October 6th. To learn more about the artists' decisions and motivations, please watch the recorded conversation with Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey, which took place on June 23rd.
From the ArtYard press release:
"The Alchemy of Blood is born of bodily transitions and transformations, limitations, and liminalities. Featuring works by Suleika Jaouad and those of her mother Anne Francey, the show pulls from periods of pregnancy, illness, and recovery — meditating on bodily agency, protective talismans, and emblems of the otherworldly that guided Jaouad and Francey through states of intense anticipation and corporeal metamorphosis.
The Alchemy of Blood is the first-ever art exhibition for Jaouad, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, which chronicles her experience of cancer in young adulthood.
During a spring residency at ArtYard, Joauad enlarged a series of delirious watercolor dreamscapes she had produced from her hospital bed during treatment for a 2022 relapse which had temporarily compromised her vision and ability to write.
Jaouad’s scenes and symbolisms share a foundational logic with the paintings Francey made three decades earlier while pregnant with Jaouad. Human-sized flowers seem to dance in vibrant washes of color — conjuring the womb and its growing life, on the brink between elsewhere and aliveness. Francey’s practice also shifted in response to her daughter’s diagnosis — she began making totemic ceramic “shields” to protect Jaouad through illness. These manifestations made concrete through clay and later woven hospital ephemera echo a medieval alchemist’s attempt to twist precious metals into a universal elixir for healing.
ArtYard is located at 13 Front St., Frenchtown, NJ, 08825. Free public hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 AM to 5 PM and Thursdays until 7 PM.
ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. Its campus includes an arts center featuring exhibition space and a state-of-the-art theater as well as two buildings housing its residency program. To learn more, visit artyard.org."
Swiss-American artist Anne Francey is a highly accomplished visual artist whose accolades include a 2021 Fulbright Fellowship in Tunisia, her husband's homeland. She is known for her group art projects that spark collaborative artistic expression from everyone, especially children. Most recently, she completed 1001 Bricks: The City in All its States, which included 550 participants, and was installed as a mural in Tunis. Her 1997-2014 NYSCA grant supported ceramic murals projects in schools and communities in New York State.
Anne earned a degree in painting and video from the École de Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland in 1981. Shortly afterward she settled in Manhattan for a two year stint at the School of Visual Arts. There she studied painting, video, and film. In 1983, she began her MFA at Hunter College, which she finished in 1987. Suleika was born in 1988.
Anne has exhibited in numerous galleries all over the world, most notably in Switzerland, Tunisia, Nebraska, Kentucky, and Hudson, New York. This year, in addition to exhibiting her work at the ArtYard, she exhibited at the Schacht Gallery in Schuylerville, near Saratoga Springs, where her husband Hédi Jaouad, Sukeika's father, teaches French language and literature at Skidmore College.
Suleika Jaouad, a graduate of Princeton University and Bennington College, became a best-selling author with her 2022 memoir Between Two Kingdoms. The book describes in detail her battle with leukemia at 22 through 26 years old, and her ambitious 100-day journey across the US to meet people who wrote to her during her first bone-marrow transplant. While going through her first bone-marrow transplant, she started a blog that was picked up by The New York Times as a column called "Life, Interrupted." This frequent feature brought her fame, especially within the community of cancer survivors or their survivors, families and family who lost a loved one to cancer. Since then her relationship with world-renowned composer and musician Jon Batiste has caste a wider spotlight on her life, creative work, and marriage which has navigated the highs of exhilarating joys and the lows of excruciating sorrows. Suleika's (with or with Jon Batiste) interviews are available online at 60 Minutes, Interview, The Today Show, The Atlantic, among so many others, and in the documentary American Symphony. She also gave a TED talk.
During the 2020 Covid Lockdown, Suleika (pronounced "Su-lake-a," one who is peaceful and beautiful) Jaouad ("Jay-wad," one who is generous and gifted) founded an online arts collaborative called The Isolated Journal, which sent daily writing prompts to readers for most of 2020 and 2021. Now Suleika sends weekly personal essays and prompts culled from her daily life and the lives of her friends, acquaintances, and/or literary stars. (I joined TIJ in April 2020.)
Photo: Courtesy of ArtYard/John Carlano
Photo: Courtesy of ArtYard/John Carlano
While celebrating the publication of her first book in 2021 Suleika relapsed late in the year. The watercolors on wood panels come from the period of her second bone-marrow transplant. Since the opening of The Alchemy of Blood, cancer was detected and she is undergoing treatment once again. "Survival is its own act of creation," Suleika often says.
Here, in this exhibition, her paintings seem to describe her drug-induced dreamscapes (what her husband Jon Batiste calls her "fever dreams"), the residue of visitations in a mind blurred by medicinal therapies. The work features familiar and phantasmagorical creatures supporting or surrounding her nude body connected to tubes hanging from bags of blood, her lifeline, and a metaphorical umbilical cord. Floating, drowning, swimming, and/or sleeping, she seems to surrender to these imaginary forces. Juxtaposed with her mother's gigantic growing, dancing flowers bursting with fresh blooms (new life), we notice an unintended relationship between their respective iconographies, for example in Suleika's Just Married, 2024, and Anne's Red and Grey, 1988 in the first gallery.
In Just Married a pelican-like bird holds a scale shaped like a kiddy pool in which a fragile nude female body lies supine with her blood supply close by. In the medieval Christian Bestiary, the pelican symbolizes selflessness and sacrifice. It kills and revives its young by plucking its breast to pour its blood on its chicks to ensure their survival. So too we know that Suleika's mother Anne gave life to her child multiple times, from pregnancy to caregiver - selflessly and tirelessly. She has been the guardian, the shield maker, and the unsung hero in this endlessly challenging role.
More specifically, Just Married tells us that this giant bird lifting up a fragile damsel references a bride and groom, Suleika and Jon (?), who were secretly married in February 2022 right before Suleika entered the hospital for her second bone-marrow transplant. Her husband too selflessly and diligently supported her, along with her parents and brother Adam, who was her bone-marrow donor.
On the wall text, Suleika wrote: "Sometimes the best creativity comes from a savage place, a place of urgency--because you are doing it to keep yourself alive. Anything becomes possible on the canvas or the page." The proof is in front of our eyes.
