NOT EVERYTHING IS AS IT SEEMS

What looked like one of those cardboard boxes that we all use for packing books sits near some concrete benches in a small park at UCSF. When I saw the box on the ground, I thought someone had left it out and forgotten to take it with them. When I got closer to the box, I realized it wasn't cardboard but a metal replica of that common object. Next to it was one of those ubiquitous plastic chairs found at any big box store, except this one was bronze. The maker had a sense of ironic humor creating something permanent from something that we think of as a throwaway. These objects represent one of the main purposes of art: to question what you see in front of you.

Some recent sculptures express the dilemmas of our history. "Hollow" by James Shefik presents a Confederate commander as one of those toys that allows you to push a button on the bottom of its stand to make the figure fall over. When you release the button, the figure pops up again. The sculpture stood in the middle of a large exhibit of work by Bay Area artists and startled me with its clever depiction of history and its cycles. The sculpture reminded me that we are a complicated country. We are the neighbors who will help out when needed and are the raging insurrectionists breaking windows and harming people hired to protect all of us. "Hollow" shows us that ideas and convictions flourish and diminish in the cycles of history.

We attend performances at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, which since 2016, has interspersed musicals, Shakespeare, and puppetry with plays that contain timely subjects. Early in 2016 Berkeley Rep began their season with a new production of Sinclair Lewis' novel, It Can't Happen Here, written in 1935, about a fictional political figure (based on Huey Long, governor of Louisiana at the time) who becomes president. The play shows the effect that his fascist policies have on America. John Moffit turned the novel into a play and it is a not-so-subtle rendering of the potential of a dictator like Hitler and the importance of being informed, verifying information, and voting.

Since that year, Berkeley Rep continues to remind us of parts of our history that many people are trying to bury with book bans and eliminating uncomfortable parts of our history from public schools. Last season, we saw Mother Road by Octavio Solis, which chronicles the journey of a group who migrate from California to Oklahoma, the reverse of the migration depicted by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. The play shows the effects of the earlier migration on various ethnic groups who were displaced by the desperate, mostly White, migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl. Another play, Far Country, by Lloyd Suh concerns the plight of Asian immigrants from the early 1920s who faced the consequences of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept them on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay for 18 or more.

This past week the New York Times published a list of words that they found had been removed from various Federal agencies' documents and websites. The list is long and exclusionary, eliminating such words as women, bias, Black, Native American, equal opportunity, and hundreds more. As "Hollow" depicts, ideas and policies, even the most divisive, never disappear.

Well worth the time to scroll through James Shefik's website for his sculptures here:

https://jamesshefik.com/portfolio-james-shefik-1.html

Check out the article in the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html?searchResultPosition=2 

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John Lewis: "We may all have come on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now."