BEAUTIFUL BEINGS!

I sent my last newsletter just after that epic solar eclipse in Aries. I’d received short notice that my lecture on the Shaker Era of Manifestations through The Last Tuesday Society had been rescheduled (It’s now November 18 btw! Scroll down or check my EVENTS PAGE for programs starting as soon as this Friday).

I did not think another 6 months would pass before I wrote.

In a recent insta post I made this analogy which seemed to resonate- that attempting to share good news can feel like a game of double dutch. Remember that push and pull of the body- ropes flying in opposite directions past your face as if the chance to jump in will never come. Rocking back and forth, negotiating courage and timing. The split seconds of parting ropes must align with your commitment to BOLT between them. I doubt I need to explain that the “ropes” in this analogy are gut-wrenching, heart-breaking world events that can make anxious, skittish kittens of us all. And I’m aware that for me, the “ropes” are mostly stories and their repercussions, which certainly have an impact. But for others, they’re storms of fire, water, and chemical warfare that whip through whole cities. The window of escape, if there is one, can make a difference for generations of life and creativity.

On that note, please watch my insta feed + stories for calls to action and mutual aid opportunities. Recently I launched Hawk-Eye painting and La Leonessence fundraisers to support devastated communities in Appalachia and Palestine. Click here or photos below to learn more! 👇

( These images present a touch of paradoxical foreshadowing. I AM that 90’s Trapper-Keepin Space Jammer AND ALSO a Medieval Alchemist - IT IS WHAT IT IS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I’m full of thoughts, rage, disclaimers, worry. I struggle with hope, but it’s there. Some are addressed in the insta post I just shared about my recent trip home to Tennessee. I normally drive down and back from Boston. Moving through Appalachia’s lush gradations always softens my entry and exit. This is the land of my ancestors and where all of my family still lives (and they are safe, thankfully). For once, though, I flew home, and did not expect such an easy return to Boston with the storm coming. We did not expect it to move that far East… My heart swells and shatters for my community in the path of “Helene”. I’m struggling to eloquently describe my complex feelings of grief, longing, and humility…

I went home to screen Sacred Sheets in the Nashville Film Festival. It played in the very theater where I saw Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Independence Day… all those Patriotic 90’s movies that molded our brains. Totally wild. I’m not exactly a filmmaker, but I’ve gotten a good sense of Hollywood. I should be unsurprised to catch no other Keffiyehs at the events.

Though a fish out of water, I was proud to tell people that the cinematographer of our film, Gabe Elder, also shot Familiar Touch, which had just been awarded “Best Debut Film” at the Venice Film Festival. I caught wind of this great news about a week before the NFF- as videos circulated social media channels of Jewish American director Sarah Friedland’s brave speech which called out Israel’s genocide and 76 years of occupation in P@lest!ne.

The time for sharing good news will never feel just right but there are ways we can stay grounded in the simultaneous joy and pain of life. I wish that the good news I have to share could be delivered on such a platform as Sarah’s. My news is much less heroic, but it is really important to me and the ~25 years of strenuous physical, creative, psychic, and administrative labor I’ve hustled as a tenacious mystic queerdo. Being an artist in the so-called United States shouldn’t feel like being a warrior, but I have learned everything about fighting, persisting, and clutching inklings of hope from continuing my work in this absurd field, which benefits from the passionate and compassionate even as it often quiets, undervalues and punishes personal and artistic integrity. This isn’t a call-out of anyone I’ve worked with recently, but we’ve all seen universities, museums, and institutions across the disciplines making decisions they will one-day regret, or at least try to hide. The drama of our current eclipse season certainly shines through my mercurial musings, but here comes the window between swinging ropes.

Just going to jump in

FROM COAST TO COAST, MY FIRST TWO MUSEUM SOLO SHOWS ARE CURRENTLY ON VIEW!

Okokok, so technically I’ve had two collaborative “solo” shows at museums - in 2021, Unseen Hours opened at Fruitlands Museum, and in 2016,  Second Hands, created with like a hundred children, opened at the MFA Boston (<— btw! I just retrieved our massive quilt from the MFA. It’s available to exhibit again!)

But for all intents and purposes, these two shows, one in San Luis Obispo, CA and one in Brockton, MA are major milestones in my grown-ass, broken-back career, fittingly landing on my 40th year around the sun. I’ll start with the one that closes soonest!

BEAUTIFUL SEVEN @ SAN LUIS OBISPO MUSEUM OF ART (CA)

Returning to San Luis Obispo after their monumental mural on the back of the Fremont Theater in 2021, Molteni presents their exhibition Beautiful Seven at SLOMA. Building upon an ongoing project Counting to Infinity, Beautiful Seven gathers around a set of fifty hand drawings and found stones. Colored fingers reflect Molteni’s childhood habit of counting Hail Marys on their hands, like a decade of rosary prayer beads. The work reflects the artist’s avid interest in the Pleiades star cluster (a theme of their Seven Sisters mural in SLO), an original deck of playing and divination cards that reference the popular Italian game Scopa (meaning “broom,” or “to sweep”) and the artist’s pilgrimage to Southern Italy’s Seven Sisters – historic Marian miracle sites sacred to the mountainous region of Campania.

Connecting to the exhibition title, the term Settebello literally means “beautiful seven”, naming the luckiest card in the game of Scopa. The imagery in Molteni’s original deck, Stelle Scopa (meaning “sweeping stars”) pulls from their drawings and references sacred stone collecting as bead/body-based prayer. Stelle Scopa departs slightly from tradition to include five suits, with terrestrial planets in place of typical Court cards, and a set of eleven asteroids. Sixty-one total cards equals the full number of beads on a Rosary. Tabletop mosaic constellations, hand rolled beads made from rose mud, two video works set to sounds of the Moon and Venus, seven portal-like grottos (small cave-like altars), open hands modeled after Virgin Mary statues common in Italy, and respective handcrafted brooms further explore themes of queerness, intersectional feminism and gender expansiveness with a lens towards inner spirituality and cosmic cycles.

Molteni began this series serendipitously on the Great Solar Eclipse of 2017, when they found their first Italian Scopa card on the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. This discovery is representative of Molteni’s multi-disciplinary practice, where elements from diverse spiritual influences converge and inform each other, and the natural world — shells, lagoons, comets, stars — hold significant meaning. In 2024, Molteni returned to Italy in community with fellow queer and trans Italian-American artists. Using specific holy sites as research — and the offerings and energies left there, Molteni invites us to extend beyond binaries through play and prayer.

ON VIEW THROUGH NOVEMBER 4

About one year ago, on October 8 to be exact, myself and fellow enby Italian-American artist witches Ash Capachione, Vin Caponigro and Laura Campagna launched a spell in several mercurial mediums: a zine, short film, and letter of resistance that rounded out the Summer Solstice ritual we hosted atop my triple spiral labyrinth. We gathered to invite Medusa Consciousness to replace the colonizing Christopher Columbus’ severed head. Our media launch expressed critiques of historic “Columbus Day” celebrations through the lens of mythology, queerness and Italian-American experiences.

In the following newsletter, I reflected on six months of genocide in Palestine and how the themes explored in Gateway to Infinity’s zine and film relate to generational trauma and resistance, reflection and accountability.

MEDUSA ~ MYTH, MEMORY, ANTI-MONUMENT zines are still for sale in my shop and the black and white PDF continues to be linked through the project page.

TRISKELE & THE MONSTER’S TOOLS: A SOLSTICE INVOCATION OF MEDUSA CONSCIOUSNESS remains viewable online and will continue to screen in festivals and exhibitions (reach out if you’d like to show the film!)

THE ARTWORK MAY GO…

I’m very sad to share that the groundwork I spent HOURS charting out, with chains, buckets and dollies, then hand painting, with 2” paintbrushes … may be removed as soon as this month! : ((

The piece had an 18 month contract, so I knew this was a possibility, but it’s held up well, so I’d hoped we’d leave it as long as it persisted. It sits atop slick granite, so we agreed that I’d paint it to be durable, but not totally permanent. A major component of my art practice has been putting an insane amount of physical and alchemical labor into an artwork and then tossing it out into the world to do with it as it will. The basketball Net Works are an early example of this practice of loving and letting go. For a good ten years now I’ve been creating what I call Horizontal and Anti-Monuments, which are meant to prop up living communities rather than abusive colonizers made of stone, or even individuals at all. Though my work is hardly recognized by initiatives such as Monument Lab and the Un-monument, Re-monument, De-monument program, it seems that interest in this kind of work is rising.

As I grow older, the impact of creating these ground spells certainly stays with my body (it does indeed keep the score), even as some of the works fade away. This is honestly hard for me to witness, particularly as I struggle to keep my head above water and monitor requests for painting advice from new muralists. Wall pieces like Seven Sisters: Celestial Subduction feel even more valuable to me now. By the way I checked on the sisters during my trip to SLO and, 3 years after painting that MASSIVE mural, she shines bright and unscathed. I would love more opportunities to paint on walls, so please keep me in mind! It’s not been easy to maintain my moral integrity as well as my bank account. Speaking out against genocide is not such a lucrative endeavor in America.

But as for my swirling downtown Anti-Monument, I cannot say for sure when it will be removed. I’m encouraging the Greenway to let it survive through the spring, but there’s a chance it will be washed away by November 1. If you haven’t gotten to walk its meditative spirals, get yourself down there in the next few weeks (It sits just between the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion and the Greenway Carousel, or just between Faneuil Hall and Christopher Columbus park). I’m honored that it shares a stretch of land with dear, old friends Jeffrey Gibson and Lani Asuncion too. I’ll keep y’all posted as we finalize the deinstallation dates, but cross your fingers it gets to live a bit longer!

And again, HUGE THANKS to my small team of incredible artists who crouched, sweated, and labored with me over this MONSTER of a groundwork: Ali Reid, Laura Ganci, Nicole Hogarty, y’all are amazing!

BUT THE SPELL LIVES ON ~

In closing, I’ll share some photos from the opening party of the Nashville Film Festival, which took place inside of the first Parthenon I ever knew- THE NASHVILLE PARTHENON, Y’ALL! Ours is an exact replica of the original, built for a worlds fair in the late 1800’s, but I was hanging out on its steps long before I knew where Greece was on a map. It’s now so old that its been restored! I knew that the giant golden Athena was waiting inside for us filmmakers (fun fact: my childhood acquaintance’s father sculpted it). I wore my fanciest, second hand, gold sequin dress with plans to confront the towering Athena. With my Medusa zine and Matriarchal oil in hand, I told her that the ways of men and their wars are over, that upholding their supremacy, wielding the Master’s Tools, will not end in victory. I told her: MEDUSA WILL BE FREE and PALESTINE WILL BE FREE, and invited her to trade in her aegis for the MONSTER’S TOOLS.

Finally, a small gift for those who could use some materials. Click the image above for a free printable PDF of the Free Palestine / Stop Cop City cards. I cut them in half to fold like a gift card or cut all 4 like postcards them however you like. Print and distribute as you like- if you post to the internet or forward to others, please credit me for the design <3

Thanks for following along and being interested in what I’m up to.

With love under the stars,

❤️‍🔥 Maria 🌹