The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Tanya Walker
Research and Studio Artist Maplewood StudioBio
ABOUT CREEK STAND BISCUIT ARTS IN OHIO
from Tanya Willis-Walker, B.S., M.Ed., 7th generation daughter, Research and Textile Artist
I merge the diaspora facts of my matriarchal art generations from the Alabamian Creek Stand region, to Ohio. These facts are recreated into art quilt and visual art forms or words. This diaspora is native to the African American diaspora from the deep south. It is also influenced by the FDR Urban Relocations of 1952, of Native Americans into the State of Ohio, from reservation regions. In the year of 1836, the native cottons, seeded, washed, dried and stitched for home quilts, were worked in my family roots of Alabama, and by our ancestors of Creek origins with Jewish cotton broker Abram Mordecai. Later, Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington triggered schools, so that my four generations of mothers and aunts, returned to Alabama to broaden the scope and methods of quilt making, bead workings, textiles, and sewing in our communities. The cottons were folded in the hands of the hat makers and textile artists and of our family communities from good harvests. It was my job to assist.
It was my joy, unlike the stigmas or shame, related to cotton harvest years, to create cotton plats, plug rolls of textiles, and trapunto the cloth from Jewish Peddler routes or merchants. My college art achievements in forms, drawing, math, dimensions, and color groups, mix with my research profiles and sources for exhibition themes. As I age, complications of diabetes challenge these former years of college achievements. The colors, shapes, sizes, and dimensions have evolved stronger, with cotton biscuit folds, studied from in the hands of my matriarchal quilt makers to college art critiques.
I have added a link to the profile from the Encyclopedia of Alabama. My mixed racial ancestry motivates the direction of my pen, now in larger bolder prints and with lower vision devices. SOURCES: “The Price of Whiteness’: Jews, Race, and American Identity”, Eric Goldstein, “Off-White: a memoir” by Laurie Gunst. “The Hand of Esau: Montgomery’s Jewish Community and the Bus Boycott” by Mary Stanton, “Strength to Love” by Martin Luther King Jr., “Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South” by Gladys-Marie Fry.
Artist Statement
I pluck the folks from deep southern racially mixed cultures and histories, to sculpt, big stitch, wood carve, clay seal, or trapunto with art forms of quilts. I research heroic and everyday people profiles with life facts that break, or redirect the stigmas and stereotypes of human skin codes, or malicious slurs about deep southern cultures. I have submitted an image of the Paradise Clowns, where a collage approach creates the common color of GREEN, that gardens foods, because HUNGER is a basic need, like love, belonging, food, shelter, and forgiveness. I add HEALING QUILT concepts and art forms to cover, love, and warm those whom have suffered. I can witness and relate these stigmas or malicious stereotypes, to stress related illness such cancer, kidney diseases, diabetic flares, or hypertensive strokes with poor health care options among Native and African Americans families. The bible talk words from the ministry of my father, and hearts of my mothers, from whom my strong Cherokee and Creek ancestry, and Sephardic Hebrew studies, was nurtured are soft-sculpted, collaged or stitched in 2D and 3D forms: Love, Peace, Hope, Jesus, and Trust.