ARTISTS DEFY WHITE SUPREMACY

December 14, 2015, The New Haven Independent, by Lucy Gellman - "The first time artist Scott Schuldt looked at the words of Ben Klassen, founder of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator and a believer in race-based eugenics, he could hardly stomach what he was reading. Vitriol sprawled across the page, glorifying 20th-century lynchings and the barbecue-like gatherings of white townspeople who came out to watch. Instead of putting them out of his mind, he formulated a response piece, turning to his beadwork and his research with a compulsion to respond to those awful words. Unbound, a traditional mourning sampler depicting the hanging body of Laura Nelson, who was lynched by a white mob in 1911, is the answer to that. Jarring in its juxtapositions of bright, domestic beadwork, soft black fabric, a hand-embroidered alphabet at the top, and Nelson’s violently limp form in the center, the work has a double effect: It hits hard, and then burns slowly, a long-festering wound of a piece. Along with close to 50 works by 37 other artists, Unbound is part of “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate,” a traveling exhibition now at the University of New Haven’s Seton Gallery. The show will be up through mid-December, when it travels to New York..."

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