Sunday in the Art Room

 Welcome to 

SITAR is about ANYTHING art. Your art, someone else's art, writing, photography, the art of cooking, the art of sewing and textiles. Sharing historical art, street art, a story about art. Do you have a question or need help with art? Write a blog post and link it up here. We will all try to help with it. My only rule is that if someone asks for critique it must be done with generosity and consideration. 

This is a place of learning, encouragement and inspiration.

 

I'm thrilled to introduce to you 

Lisa Bufano.

Please watch

 Lisa was born to Louis A. Bufano and Elizabeth "Betty" Bufano in 1972 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Lisa was an active child being in ballet and tap dance classes and competing in gymnastics. Let us not forget she was a go go dancer while she attended Tufts University. Then tragedy struck.  Lisa contracted a life-threatening staphylococcus bacterial infection at age 21. There is no public information on how she contracted the infection, but the bacteria entered her bloodstream and triggered a rapid, severe systemic response (sepsis). This compromised her vascular system and blocked circulation to her extremities, ultimately making bilateral lower-leg and total finger-and-thumb amputations necessary to save her life. 

She graduated from Tufts University in 2003, and later from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA) that same year.  She worked as a web developer at the Museum of Science in Boston. She left that post in 2005 to pursue her interests in sculpture, stop-motion animation and other forms of the visual arts through The Contemporary Artists Center Residency in North Adams, Massachusetts 

After losing her limbs, Lisa began her performance and dancing career when a professor at the University of Linz doing research on the lives of amputees discovered her web page and offered her a stipend to perform in Vienna. She toured from 2006 to 2010 with the AXIS Dance Company. She preformed works variously choreographed by Victoria Marks, Joe Goode, and Kate Weare.  Her audiences where in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Canada, and performed to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts  as well as at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church, among other venues.

 Her dance work typically incorporated a variety of prosthetics and props (such as using wooden Queen Anne table legs as legs and arms), 

  

but also included segments where her unadorned body was the focus of the performance. 

  According to Bufano she manipulated her body as a way to explore alternative locomotion.

At age 34 she ran several miles a day on high-tech carbon fiber prosthetic legs.

Lisa did not publicly label herself as a "lesbian." Instead, she identified under the broader "queer" umbrella. 

While she explicitly stated that her work explored her sexual identity and was created for and alongside the artistic LGBT community, she preferred fluid terms rather than strict identitarian models. In both her life and art she identified with the "queer/crip" a movement, a community and framework that intersects queer sexual identity with disability pride. 

Lisa listed among her influences medical drawings, historical wax models, dolls, and optical toys; flip dolls and paper dolls; the structural aspects of Japanese jointed dolls, Hans Bellmer's doll work, Louise Bourgeois' cell installations, and the animation of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. One of her main projects was a white muslin dress which turned into a squid, for which she sewed thousands of detailed suckers.

 "She loved sewing sculptures made of fabric," her brother remarked in a remembrance. "She had a thing for the creepy-cute, the exotic, the bizarre. Things that were dark but also beautiful.

she explained her aesthetic and political goals when she claimed that:

Despite my own terror and discomfort in being watched (or, maybe, because of it), I am finding that being in front of viewers as a performer with deformity can produce a magnetic tension that could be developed into strength. I attempt to channel this tension by exaggerating the mode of physical difference (for example, presenting myself on stilts).

 

She likewise explained during her time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

My eye has always been drawn to abnormal forms ... It's just that now my tool is my body. I'm still animating a form, but it's my own form ... I'm not an astounding dancer ... But being a performer with a deformity, I find that there's a gut response in audiences, an attraction/repulsion aspect to it that can be compelling. I just hope that there's a balance between that gut response and the substance of a performance

 

Lisa Bufano died by suicide on October 3, 2013, in San Francisco, California; no suicide note was found. Two months later, her brother reflected on the inexplicable nature of her death.

"I'm surrounded by speculation about why Lisa took her own life. Facebook,  friends, family members, and her fans would all like to know. They want it to make sense to them. They want to feel okay. Ultimately they want her back.

But I am having great difficulty with all of this. Lisa didn't like other people projecting their idea of who she was on her. We'll never understand why. It will never make sense.

I believe she lived her entire life and that her life was many lives. I don't believe it was cut-off short. Her mission was completed and she must have understood that fact when she departed from this world. She was alone with her dog in her home in the middle of the night.

More than a year after her death, her work, along with that by Cara Levine, Shari Paladino and Sadie Wilcox, was included in Four Choreographies at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery in Berkeley, California. A further retrospective was held Storefront Lab in San Francisco in 2015

Five open mouths

This is an artist I knew nothing about. There is a lot of information about her art but not about her private life or the private lives of her family. 

I have left several links that if you are interested in Lisa you should click onto. 

Hope you enjoyed meeting Lisa.

 

Nicole 

 Lisa Bufano 

this is her website with amazing videos.

AVAC  

Read about the squid dress 

Kontejner  

Disability art history 

The art of dancing disabled