Curator's Notes

My work is concerned with social justice and ecological issues from an artistic perspective. Primarily through the lens of my Hasselblad, which allows the ‘unhurried visit’, I explore remnants and legacy, memory and mirror, and reflect on the civil contracts inherent between image maker, giver and viewer.

- Petronella J. Ytsma

Petronella Ytsma devoted her life to recognizing how social injustices affected those in the world who were without means of control or influence. Her documentary photographs for community art projects and organizations such as the Neighborhood Development Corporation and Park Square Theater exemplified her values as the essential core of her artistic practice. Petronella’s primary business documenting other artists work reflected her spectacular ability to ‘see’ the artist’s personal aesthetic and translate that into photos that clarified those ideas to others. She deeply believed the essential nature of the arts are efforts to define and explore ways of knowing and expressing the world’s inequities through elements of beauty and sometimes transcendence.

Petronella Ytsma & Friends focuses on a long ongoing series titled Murnan, black and white photos of flowers / botanicals to speak to processes of growth, beauty and decay or youth, life and death. The series was her way to address and respond to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It swept quickly through the arts, creating a great loss of many artists, musicians and creatives that never lived to bring their youthful potentials to full careers. She shared her images with those suffering, offering quiet beauty and perhaps a bit of hope. The series also delineates how Petronella’s work has always been reflective of her experiences, making a quiet, pointed commentary.

In the Treuren exhibition (2004, Augsburg College), Petronella presented over a hundred images of hands reaching out from the gallery walls, each photo projecting 2-6 inches from the wall, with burnt edges on every print. Here, the series is represented by four images, two of hands, two of glistening water droplets. The hands with burnt edges filled the entire front large gallery, while the pristine, elegant water droplets occupied a small second gallery separated by a wall. Lingering and thinking about the vast humanity of the many hands, the water droplets, interpreted by some as tears, were subtly jarring. An astute observer of the dynamics between the political and the natural worlds, Treuren was Petronella’s prescient warning that corporate control of clean drinking water sources would lead to a lack of access for the many. Now, clean water, a most basic human need, is a major social concern in much of the world.

Legacy of an Ecocide, Ytsma’s most important body of work, is rooted in the Viet Nam War, a defining experience of her lifetime - a jumpstart to social conscience for many in our shared generation. She demonstrated against the war, saw veterans return as broken human beings, witnessed the immigration of Southeast Asian populations who aided the US, and the array of veteran’s cancers and medical conditions consciously denied health benefits by the US government. Legacy was Petronella’s quest for truth and to bear personal witness to the extreme costs of the war, most especially those paid by the innocent exposed to the lingering effects of open dumps of Agent Orange and dioxin, US pollution of the Vietnamese landscape. These photographs of individuals born 2 to 4 generations after the war, many confined in hospitals and orphanages with all manner of heart-breaking birth defects, are hard to look at. While confronting atrocity, they assert respect for the person and often, the love of a parent/family caring for their children. Born of Petronella’s social justice concerns, they are evidence of her compassion, empathy, and unique ability to convey the beauty of the humanity of others through her photographs.

David Wells, Co-Curator, Artist and Friend February 2023

Petronella Ytsma

Tulipa Parrot, 2002

16 x 20" | gelatin silver print unframed prints available INQUIRE

Petronella Ytsma

Amaryllis, 2000

20 x 16"| gelatin silver print unframed prints available INQUIRE