Green’s Your Color

This exhibition, taking its title from a line of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, will feature new paintings by Karen Seapker.

artist: Karen Seapker

dates: May 6 - June 24, 2023

Exhibition Statement

I have a tendency to pocket lines from books and poems so that I can keep them close. I often reach for these lines, fumble around with them in my fingers, memorize their shape.  In recent months, I have been holding a line from a poem To the Young Who Want to Die by Gwendolyn Brooks. It reads, “Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.”  

This line was introduced to me in a book by the brilliant poet, writer, gardener, Ross Gay.  And as it did for him, it accompanied me through times that felt in moments insurmountable. Wondering how to move forward, this line buoyed me, nudged me along. I almost heard it say gently, “come on, sugar.”

My studio windows look out to the garden that I have poured myself into for the past several seasons. It’s become so much more than a landscape. The growing plants, the ever-increasing species of insects and birds, the always busy squirrels, the occasional possum and skunk and fox, the persistent groundhogs that my family and I have come to chase more regularly than I’d like to admit, the night visiting deer and raccoons, my children and their friends who become pirates and superheroes and chefs and paleontologists.  So many living things share this space. Such an abundance of riches have sprung from or revolve around the plants that have replaced the lawn we inherited. Every year, we learn more. Every year, the garden also reminds me of our common condition of passing and passage as the abundance slips into winter.

I have been thinking about the role of dormancy in the life of seeds, how they need a kind of suspended sleep to grow. Darkness can be restorative. Punctuating life as it does, it serves a purpose.

This movement in and out of light is something we also do daily, like a kind of breathing. Every night, darkness arrives accompanied by the moon, a point of reflection, if we allow it to be so.  Reflection on where we have been is essential to setting intentions for a path forward.

Under the moon, plants are also served by darkness. While they constantly respire, a function that is essential for growth and maintenance of plant tissues, it is at night that they take a break from photosynthesizing and receive the restorative benefits of respiration, channeling the huge amount of energy they’ve stored throughout the day towards growth.

To respire also means to recover hope, courage, or strength after a time of difficulty. It’s no wonder this has been on my mind, here in Tennessee. In light of the recent “slate of hate” aimed against our LGBTQ+ community. In light of the Covenant tragedy. I have wanted to whisper into the ears of all of those affected, “green’s your color.”

This exhibition includes three paintings of handwritten messages created by my (then) five year old daughter. She is innately passionate. She has come along with us to protests over the years, and she thinks a lot about what messages she wants to send out into the world. Lately, she has been writing these messages in notes and books that she gives to me. Some of these are too beautiful to not reflect back to her, too rich to not paint so that I may reflect on the pride and sadness they bring to me. She’s also taken to making drawings based on these paintings.  Our little call and response. 

Another thing about growth, about moving forward, is that we don’t do it alone. I only need to look out my studio window to see evidence of symbiosis, the way one species calls to another, that we were in fact made for (and by) one another. Cooperation is an evolutionary force, a central driver of change.

And to go back to the deep well of brilliance that is Ross Gay. He might suggest that one way we can come together is through our common sorrow.  In his most recent book, Inciting Joy, he proposes perhaps what emanates from us as we help one another carry our sorrows— is joy. And in our shared joy, we find solidarity. And perhaps a way forward. 

Nudge. Green’s Your Color.

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love… It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”

-Ross Gay

Hear Roxane Gay read "To the Young Who Want to Die" by Gwendolyn Brooks

Incorporated into the exhibition are a "seed exchange" and a "bouquet exchange" that will run through the course of the show.  Bring a bouquet from your yard or extra seeds that you have for the garden.  Come and trade them for a bouquet offered from someone else in our community, or for seeds that someone else has given to share.