Karla and Carlos by Debi Bodett

Karla

AND

Carlos

Karla

AND

Carlos

Karla Moss Freeman

October 5, 1935 — May 11, 2017

Carlos Freeman

May 7, 1932 — December 23, 2021

It was a wet summer when our family moved to the land on McNeil Canyon. While building, we slept in the soft duff under the giant boughs of the big spruce tree at the canyon’s edge. By snowfall, our 20 x 24, two-room cabin was ready enough, with tar paper on the outside, Visqueen on the inside, and insulation in between. Mama always made it cozy. With time, we learned how to live the subsistence lifestyle, gathering and putting food by, fishing, hanging and repairing the nets, chopping and hauling wood and coal, and always making--- mittens, gardens, bread, fires in both the heat and cook stove. After a long winter, spring brought fiddleheads, nettles, and wild mushrooms that Ruth Kilcher had taught us how to harvest. It is a story of great love and passion for each other and life. Their values shaped how we lived: anti-consumerism, 1

creativity, resourcefulness, curiosity, do your best at whatever you do, question injustice, speak out, make it right, work for a higher culture. As siblings, we were expected to always be kind to each other, not allowed to squabble. Karla and Carlos loved to laugh. They were spontaneous and game for adventure. We learned how to make do. When I mentioned that I might like a pair of Levi 501 jeans, Mama found a 3XL denim jacket complete with brass buttons in the laundromat free box. “Take it apart, make them!” she exclaimed, “we don’t have to be consumers, buying everything.” Despite my concerns that the other seventh graders might not see it that way, she encouraged me, down to a custom-drawn leather patch on the hip. “I’ll show you how to make a pattern,” she said. “Do quality work, make it your own.” Although we didn’t have many things, we always had books, a diverse record collection, and art supplies. Much of what we had, we made. Papa made wooden sculptured toys-- a rocking horse with a saddle and mop for a mane, a trapeze, a

folding puppet theater for our collection of handmade puppets. Mama painted, made huge exquisite tapestries, and sewed unique clothes for us from scraps of fabric and leather. Karla and Carlos insisted on craftsmanship and constant learning. Before we could work on his boat, we had to know fishing knots and how to tie a bowline with our eyes closed. We had to understand a slide rule before we could use a calculator. A self-proclaimed feminist, he passionately believed in and supported progressive politics and social and racial justice. In spite of ridicule and prejudice, Karla was outspoken in her commitment to community-building. She fought to establish Homer’s public radio station and grow a branch of the University of Alaska in Homer. We lived a subsistence lifestyle in a cabin in the woods in a remote Alaskan town at the end of the road. Our parents valued education, books, and culture. Mama would say, “I hope you each finish school before you die; it will open the world for you, and you for the world.” TARA SPENCER MOSS

ROBERT OTTER, CAFÉ WHA? ON MACDOUGAL STREET, 1963

KARLA MOSS FREEMAN Karla Moss Freeman was born Karla Lu Kaplun on October 5, 1935, in New York Hospital. Her parents, Jacob Wolf Spencer Kaplun and Rebecca Weiser Kaplun lived on East 4th Street in Greenwich Village. Painters who came of age between the great Wars, they were ardent intellectuals who instilled in her a passion for artmaking as a critical act of freedom and appropriate expression of power in a world struggling to survive the rise of fascism. 4

KARLA, AGE 4

SHALOM ALEICHEM HOUSES

Karla’s father Jake, was a sailor. Escaping pogroms, his family’s ship was the last merchant vessel to sail from his birthplace, Riga, Latvia, into the port of New York in 1900. Jake never attended college, but he was offered a professorship in “new math” at Yale. A talented artist, Jake loved to socialize with the Bohemian set in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He chose the adventure of merchant ships for his work and a berth at sea.

When Jake boarded a merchant ship for the next big adventure, Betty moved herself, Karla, and Karla’s older sister, Lois, to Shalom Aleichem, a stately secular Jewish housing complex at 232nd Street in the Bronx, now called Van Cortland Village, with artists’ studios, an auditorium for lectures and performances and cafeterias for functions and an inner garden courtyard. This vibrant infrastructure shaped Karla’s vision for community ever after.

Karla was a latchkey kid. She spent long hours exploring art at Shalom Aleichem after school. Sometimes Karla and Lois went to Coney Island for hot dogs and ferris wheel rides. Later, in the summer, Karla joined Jake in the artists’ colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts. While Jake talked shop with the Bohemian set, who were exploring a new voice in American painting, Karla listened and explored the dunes. Back to school in New York City, Betty taught special education in Chinatown, and Karla attended the High School of Music and Art. KARLA, AGE 18

Karla was very musical. She picked up the guitar in high school and later piano and percussion. She loved old-time mountain music, folks songs, ballads, and lullabies. She loved singing to children and often tucked her kids into bed with songs. She knew dozens of songs. Some of our favorites: - All the Pretty Horses - Baby’s Boats - Curly Headed Baby - The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night

KARLA PLAYING GUITAR, 1950

JAKE’S MANY CARICATURES AT MAYFLOWER CAFE INCLUDE HIS SELF-PORTRAIT (LEFT)

JACOB WOLF SPENCER KAPLUN

Jake’s favorite watering hole in New York City was Minetta’s Tavern, a Lower East Side bistro covered with his conte crayon caricatures. Jake’s drawings also enliven the Mayflower Cafe in Provincetown, where he introduced Karla to the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay, painters Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, sculptor Ibram Lassaw and actors Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who “gave” Jake his pen name. 7

MINETTA TAVERN, NEW YORK

OGONQUIT HARBOR, MAINE, 1937, BY BETTY KAPLUN

BETTY AND JAKE, 1930

BETTY’S ART SHOW

BETTY AND BABY

Betty and Jake were employed as artists by the Works Progress Administration. While Karla was at summer camp, Betty studied painting. She attended Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk in the forties and completed a Masters of Art at Columbia. She later wrote plays and created shadow puppets to accompany them. She moved to Alaska in her nineties and had three painting exhibitions in Homer before passing on at the age of 101. 8

KARLA, AGE 25

Karla’s coursework at Music and Art was rigorous. She excelled in art history, writing, and studio art. She started college at Boston University and later transferred to UC Berkeley. She was told by her teacher, David Park, that if she could paint as well as she 9

could write, she had better study writing since history had proven there were no great women artists. With her friends and colleagues, Joan Brown and Jay Defeo, she persevered, graduating with a Masters in Art in 1959.

KARLA AND TARA

Karla followed her childhood sweetheart, Melvin Moss to California. She explored the rich progressive environment of the San Francisco Bay Area. She shared studios with Joan Brown and Manuel Neri. She heard Buckminster Fuller speak about design for a new age. She studied Back to Eden, Jethro Kloss’s treatise on healing food and medicine.

She fell in love with the Pacific Coast and life in the countryside. She and Mel married, moved to Big Sur, then Stinson Beach, and had a child, Tara. Karla taught art for San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. Between 1960 and 1974, she had a solo show almost every other year at the Berkeley Galleries. 10

KARLA, AGE 27

Karla’s work was featured in Prizewinning Paintings, published in 1959. 11

She was living in San Anselmo with five-year-old Tara when she met Carlos, who became the love of her life. They shared almost 50 years together, inspired by travel, adventure, and art. Karla and Carlos took film classes at San Francisco Art Institute in 1968, then drove to Mexico. Karla was expecting baby Asia. A Korean war veteran, Carlos wanted their child to have the option to avoid the draft. Karla and Carlos drove to Mazatlan and settled into a cottage overlooking the Pacific. Tara attended a Mexican convent school. Carlos fished with the locals. Carlos wrote to Yule Kilcher asking if he needed a hand on his boat. Yule wrote back, requesting his help on the Mary M, a 75-foot herring seiner. Yule wanted Carlos to run it as a salmon tender. Five weeks after Asia was born in Mazatlan, they drove up to Alaska. The Freemans fished seasonally out of Homer before moving there permanently in 1975. Carlos and Tara followed an owl from the Kilcher 13

homestead to a stunning spot on the edge of McNeil Canyon where the Freemans purchased six acres and built a house. While caring for three daughters and several foster children, Karla gardened, raised chickens and ducks, smoked fish, and sewed the kids’ clothing. She hauled groceries in a toboggan over snow, ice or mud. She taught art for Community Schools and helped start KBBI. She kicked off Homer’s first Spring Arts Festival with a memorable two-hour lecture on the history of world art to a packed high school gym in 1978.

CARLOS AND TARA

ASIA

KARLA, MOLLY LOU, AND CARLOS

Karla produced radio. Her weekly show, Hotel Mars, featured dramatic readings of great literature in local voices, aired on KBBI. She was awarded grants from Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities for The People Speak, interviews with Indigenous Alaskans. Karla flew all over rural Alaska, collecting stories from Indigenous leaders, elders, and artists impacted by colonization. She created programs for public radio for years. These recordings honor Alaska Native resilience and adaptation from Point Lay to Mud Bay. The program was syndicated by Alaska Public Radio Network. KARLA’S WRITING STUDIO, HOTEL MARS, WAS FORMERLY THE CAMPER ON BLACK BEAUTY, THE TRUCK WHICH BROUGHT THE FREEMANS TO ALASKA.

“Growing up in Alaska in a cabin my father built surrounded by miles of wilderness, I listened to stories. There was no television. Inside our cabin, my mother was producing radio. She recorded and edited dozens of tapes of Alaska Native Elders, leaders, and artists sharing stories of survival and struggle to keep families and communities together in the context of colonization. These stories of strength and inexorable connection to the land shaped me and reinforced the privileges of my upbringing, ultimately leading me to art and curatorial practice in Alaska.” ASIA FREEMAN, DECOLONIZING ALASKA

Karla taught Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, and Art History classes for the Kachemak Bay Campus for twenty years, following the college through three expansions and nurturing many painters noted in Homer today. She showed her artwork at the Pratt Museum, Alaska Pacific University, Kenai River Campus Gallery, and Bunnell Street Arts Center.

BIRCH WOODS, VIEW FROM KARLA’S STUDIO, 2007

Karla had twenty solo exhibitions of her artwork. Her paintings, pastels, and monoprints are featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Rental Gallery, Casa Dahlia Gallery in Cabo San Jose, Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, and the permanent collections of the Alaska State Art Bank, The Pratt Museum, and many private art collections along the Pacific Coast.

NATURE REMEMBERED

Karla and Carlos moved back to Mexico in 2007. They were in their early seventies, and they settled into the community of Todos Santos with the same industry and vision that carried them to Alaska. Once again, they built a studio overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Karla’s new body of work married the bold abstract mark of the palette knife with the vibrant color of the Sierra Laguna mountains. She was invited to join galleries in Cabo San Jose and Todos Santos. She hosted family reunions in Mexico over Christmas holidays involving much feasting and sometimes including ten additional family members. 17

CARLOS, LEILA, KARLA, AND TALIA

Health concerns caused her sudden return to the States in 2016, where she painted in her tenth and final studio near Humboldt Bay in Eureka, California. She passed away at home at the age of 81, surrounded by loved ones and flowers from her garden. ASIA BRAULIA SPENCER FREEMAN TARA SPENCER MOSS

MOLLY LOU AND ASIA, YULES 1976

MOLLY LOU AND ASIA, 1978

CARLOS AND KARLA IN GARDEN, 1980

CARLOS AND SANDOR IN SOU’WESTER

TARA AND KARLA SMOKING FISH

TARA AND CELIA

TODOS SANTOS

My mother’s late paintings are the Baja series, abstractions upon the Sierra de La Laguna mountains. These paintings are pink, cadmium lemon, blue, russet, and rose, often with small houses scratched in as squares, geometrical abstractions. It’s many-colored 21

sunset or sunrise, the land brown and arid, glowing, the sky a petrol blue. These are depictions of Mexican Farmland or Italy, Tuscany she also called Mexico. And the granite background in a soft line is those southern mountains. The paintings have an

orange kind of chiaroscuro— warmth of people gathered around a candle in a room— and the brown scratched through to the orange undercolor. The place of her paintings: images that warm my home, our homes, and recollections, tell a story of travel, sun, green and winter wrought landscapes, the earth underneath our feet, the little houses that people it, the

SIERRA LAGUNA MOUNTAINS

lines of time, dust, light that softens the world, Italian colors, red, peach, rose, violet, gray, lavender, blue, ochre, green, sun, night, wind, water, sand, snow, stars, mountains. The softness of her paintings, the deftness of her rendering—a great humility. MOLLY LOU FREEMAN

BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR

CARLOS, AGE 6

1940S OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

C A R LO S F R E E M A N Carlos was born Alan “Carl” Freeman on May 7, 1932, in Oakland, California, the one son of Maria Theresa “Zita” Desousa (of Portuguese-Italian bloodlines, a social worker); and the eldest son of Alan Carter Freeman (a military man and chaplain of British Isles origins whose forebears traveled over on the Mayflower). Zita was born in Hong Kong in 1904 and raised in Macau. She attended convent school until the age of 14 when she and her family emigrated to Berkeley, California.

The Portuguese ancestors lived in Macau, China; Goa, India; had tea plantations in Africa; they were world-wanderers with a fine mansion in the Berkeley hills, who lost their fortune (a trunk of treasure entrusted to a stranger!) as a fire raged up the canyons. Before that burn, the family knew themselves as Europeans of wealth and prestige; when all but ruins and ashes remained, the Desousas were as American as anyone.

CARLOS’S SHOE SHINE BOX

CARLOS, CIRCA 1950

Raised on notions of faded grandeur by his strict Portuguese grandmother and single mother, young Carl was often left to his own devices: he dismantled a clock in a downtown theatre, sold newspapers on a street corner, bought his first sailboat with a tin can-full of silver dollars earnings, sailing the Timothy Dennis out on San Francisco Bay alone.

At eleven years old, his first ‘real job’ was as a shoe-shine boy in San Francisco’s Mission Street Station. Living with his mom in a 1906 Earthquake Shack on Telegraph Hill, he attended Galileo High School and sometimes ran away like a hobo, riding the freight trains on the California line.

Accustomed to dissimulating his age, Carl, the teen, worked as a choker-setter in the Oregon woods with a fake draft card. Before the age of 21, he trained in Hawaii for the military. In the Marine Corps in the Korean War, he repaired, rode, and drove the Sikorsky helicopter, an unarmed transport bird, hauling out the dead and wounded. Now a veteran, Freeman returned to the US to work at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and sailed as a merchant seaman to and from Formosa, the Philippines. (Once he bought a monkey shipboard and taught it to swear!) He later trained as a civil engineer on the GI Bill, and was responsible for surveying the line for the SF Bay BART trains, the Oakland Coliseum, US 101. In 1967, in an evening film class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he met Karla Kaplun Moss. Charmed by her artistic flair and beauty, in a burst of passion, he introduced himself as Carlos, changing his name to complement her own. Carlos and Karla and her young daughter, Tara, envisioned a voyage to Europe. Dan Breslaw and cousin Willa Desousa’s photos of the Kilcher homestead in Homer were an inspiration to explore Alaska.

WILLA AND CARLOS, 1969

CARLOS, BABY MOLLY LOU, AND KARLA, 1970

KARLA, KILCHERS AND TARA, 1969 ASIA AND TARA AT NANA ZITA’S, 1973

VIEW FROM THE HOUSE ON MCNEIL CANYON

ASIA, CARLOS AND MOLLY LOU, 1977

MCNEIL CANYON KITCHEN, 1977

MCNEIL CANYON KITCHEN, 1999

Carlos and Karla would pursue a life of adventure and travel together, heading first south to Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico in 1969, where baby Asia was born, then north up the Al-Can to work for Kilcher, tendering the Mary M on Cook Inlet. The following year, their daughter Molly Lou was born. Carlos continued to work Alaska waters in summer and fish the California coast in winter. In 1974, Carlos returned north as a Registered Land Surveyor for the BLM, following the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, helping people of the YukonKuskokwim Region to survey their land claims. In 1975, the Freemans moved from Marin County out to McNeil Canyon to raise their three daughters and their teen foster sons, David “Rabbit” Mogar and Noah Robbin. 29

CARLOS’S NOTES, FLYING OVER THE YUKON KUSKOKWIM DELTA, 1974

Carlos and Karla were married on their land in 1977. Carlos built a wood frame cabin, fished his Cook Inlet drift permit on the Starlight, then the Stavanger Fjord, a wooden cabin skiff, later, on the wooden Valiant Maiden, and finally, for 25+ years, on the Sweet Sage, the drifter he was known for in the Homer and Ninilchik harbors as well as on the Kasilof River. He raised his family on the boat, bringing aboard many a local deckhand. His vocation as a ‘low-liner’ was sustainable fisheries, filling the freezer, handing out some free Alaska tens after a good season. On the lower Kenai, Carlos worked winters as a surveyor. A fine draftsman, he mapped countless local lands, from Bradley Lake to Ninilchik, including most of the bays and coves on Kachemak: ‘never a subdivision!’ Carlos and Karla were married a second time, enjoyed a late-life retirement in their home in Todos Santos, Mexico, if not sailing the Sea of Cortez.

Seasoned by wind, sun, and the water, Carlos’ soul force was as an Alaska fisherman; his credo: family first. A smitten husband, adoring papa and loyal friend, he radiated lifelong purpose and optimism. His family and friends remember him as an all-time adventurer, an outdoorsman, a quiet trailblazer, a mariner, a lover of film, music, and culture, a gourmet eater-ndrinker, a teller of merry stories and irreverent jokes with resounding laughter. MOLLY LOU FREEMAN

Zita’s father, Alfredo Mario Desousa, was born aboard a Dutch steamer bound for Singapore from Quelimane, Mozambique, in 1858. Zita’s mother, Maria Adelaide Castelo Branco, was born in Lisbon in about 1873. Zita loved to cook, draw and make tiny things like miniature photo albums, painted ornaments, and dolls. For many years after she retired from social work, she had a preschool in her house. She loved to dress up and host a party. She was 4’ 10” in bare feet, and she had tiny child-sized feet and an amazing collection of wigs and shoes that Tara, Asia, and Molly Lou loved to wear. While Zita worked for the Red Cross, Carlos lived with his grandmother, “Maria Delighty” from age 4 to 7. She spoke only Portuguese and Italian and would not let him play with neighborhood children; however, he was allowed a small dog. He accompanied her to mahjong games with her Portuguese friend, Mrs. Delmada. Zita’s friends, Marcho and Louis, fished a wooden albacore troller off Catalina Island. Carlos worked for them, discovering a passion for fishing at age 11 that shaped his life. 31

ZITA WITH HER SISTER MARIA THERESA “ZITA” DESOUSA

Alan Carter Freeman was born on August 5, 1906, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Mayflower descendant, his 7th great grandfather was Samuel Freeman, who immigrated to New England in 1630. Alan studied theology at St. Johns College in 1924. He enlisted in the US Marine Corps in 1927. He ascended to Corporal, serving as a purchasing clerk in the Quartermaster Department of the Fourth Marines in Shanghai and Pearl Harbor. A man of keen intellect, trustworthy, tactful, ambitious, and accurate in his work, Alan was fluent in French and spoke Shanghai Chinese. His second child, Priscilla, with Florence N. Davis, was born June 23, 1936. He worked for Luckenbach Steamship Co. Pier Dept. Pier 29 San Francisco, then joined the Army. He served in England and France during WWII directing cargo operations in Normandy and Cherbourg. 1944-1945 Alan was Troop Commander Prison Escort Guard Co. with 300 Nazi SS Troops to the US. Alan met Ruth Lois Hilleson in 1946. Kirsten Aagot Freeman was born October 16, 1946, and Thomas Eric Freeman was born February 25, 1948 (1948-2006). Alan was assigned to manage warehouse operations in Okinawa as part of the rebuilding of the Island. Ruth and children traveled to Okinawa to live with

ALAN CARTER FREEMAN CIRCA 1930

SIBLINGS, BETH, CARLOS, TOM AND KIRSTEN, CIRCA 1983

Alan around 1950. Elizabeth Ruth Freeman was born in Okinawa on December 12, 1952. The family returned to California in 1953. Captain Alan C. Freeman retired from the Army in 1956 with six medals. He had advanced Parkinson’s Disease when he died in 1972. 32

PAN AMERICAN UNITY, DIEGO RIVERA

UNTITLED, JOAN MITCHELL

On the last two days of his life, my father looked at paintings. He spent several hours looking deeply into some of the biggest, boldest paintings I’ve ever seen at SF MOMA, and the de Young Museum. He sat in front of “Pan American Unity” for a long time, taking in the scale, detail, narrative, and, most of all, Rivera’s politics—elevating the common worker, the laborer, as the source and measure of dignity and power in a picture of a nation’s progress. About Joan Mitchell he said, “I like some of them…. Very much, the spacious ones, the peacefulness she finally arrived at, that was ‘sauvage’ earlier her in life.” ASIA FREEMAN SAN FRANCISCO DECEMBER 25, 2021

BIRTH PROJECT TO DEATH AND EXTINCTION, JUDY CHICAGO

He was blown away by Judy Chicago’s journey from the Birth Project to Death and Extinction, moving from pastel and paint to ceramic, tapestry, cast paper, and glass with utmost craftsmanship and curiosity about how the nature of materials can so finely trace the mystery of existence. He said, “She expressed the divine feminine.” The last painting he admired at the de Young was Pat Stier’s “Black and White One Stroke Waterfall,” a meditation on nature, gravity, and paint. “It’s complete,” he said and turned toward the elevator to the observation deck. Perched above the tallest eucalyptus, the floor seemed to float on fog. He scanned San Francisco in every direction, holding the compass on my phone. 37

BLACK AND WHITE ONE-STROKE WATERFALL, PAT STEIR

Ever a land surveyor, checking his bearings. “It’s still a beautiful city,” he said, “I’d like to return on a clear day.”

HOMER, 2017

PHOTO BY SHERYL MAREE REILY

Tara Spencer Moss, Kat McAbee, Sandor Kelsey Stockfleth, Molly Lou Freeman, Roman Carlos Michel Serrière, Asia Braulia Spencer Freeman, Leila Kamille Moss, Jacob Freeman Marquardt, Talia Sophia Moss, Michael Patrick Walsh, and Carlos Freeman Written by Asia Braulia Spencer Freeman, Molly Lou Freeman, and Tara Spencer Moss Designed by Debi Bodett © 2022