1937- September 16, 2024

Two practices, listening to hidden stories and engagement with communities, tie together Gloria Bornstein's 43 years of art-making. She began developing these methods in 1972 while working with Haida basket maker Lena Dunstan, who taught her “how to make your own song by the sounds around you.” Gloria's apprenticeship with Lena was life-changing, as were her conceptual studies with poet David Antin who introduced her to counter-narrative forms at UCSD. In the 1970s and 80’s, alternative feminist narratives structured my weavings, performances, and artist’s books, including: Public Document, Soupkitchenwork, and The Green River Trilogy.

Eliciting hidden stories through community engagement is a practice Gloria also employed in her public art projects, including Shoreview Points, Neototems, Recharge Chambers, and Sentinels. For each project, the conceptual approach of listening to community residents inspired her to make art that resonates with the history of the community, providing a forum for future conversations. This process brings invisible stories to life, enabling art to become part of an ongoing dialogue with children and adults. Gloria's whales express this impulse as they evoke a subterranean song - of issues of violence against people and creatures, including the possibilities of healing and repair.

The connective tissues in my works are the hidden voices Gloria sought to make heard. She worked with basket weaver Lena Dunstan in the performance Public Document, with homeless residents of the Cascade community to develop the performance, Soupkitchenwork, went drumming with Macah tribal members for Neototems project, and listened to activist Donnie Chin for Sentinels.

Gloria's public and freestanding artworks are like collective songs emerging from these dialogues, which will be re-sung and retold, generating ongoing conversations about Northwest life. A hallmark of her practice was flexibility regarding medium. Each story project requires its own medium, each “song” realized in materials determined by the concept: weaving, performance, installation, and public art in bronze, water, and glass.

Gloria's process had also been informed by her training as a psychotherapist, through which she observed counter-memory in dreaming and storytelling. The dialogue between the conscious and unconscious in psychology mirrors the dialogue between the artist and the community in her interactive art. Respect for counter-narratives and engagement with interior and exterior lives was a theme driving all her art.

Sometimes the voice of her unconscious emerges in Gloria's studio installations. The artwork "Gauging" developed from her travels to Nagasaki, my husband’s family home. While visiting the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, she saw charred remains of artifacts, including children’s lunchboxes with ashes of rice. Her experience triggered memories of her own family’s experience during the Holocaust.

After being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011, Gloria's arena for art-making was redefined, but it had not stopped her creative process. In a following project, she focused on 43 years of scribbles and dreams in 115 notebooks, reflecting multivalent voices and identities. It brought her full circle to her early basketry art with the experience and wisdom gleaned from mediums and stories she learned along the way.