Joan Baez
Mischief Makers 2
Joan Baez: Mischief Makers 2 After a year unlike any other, Joan Baez emerges with her second collection of “Mischief Makers” – portraits of personal heroes, inspirational figures and extraordinary people who have made the world a better place. The follow-up to her first “Mischief Makers” in 2017, her debut as a visual artist, “Mischief Makers 2” celebrates a new cast of luminaries and activists in a range of fields -- from politics and public health to literature, sports, music, entertainment, environmentalism, spirituality and the counterculture. Since her decision to stop worldwide touring in 2019, the folk music icon has traded the stage for the art studio in her Northern California home, painting portraits of her personal heroes for this show, including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, filmmaker Michael Moore, former NFL quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick, gun control activist Emma Gonzalez, counterculture icon Wavy Gravy and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Alice Walker. As she did in her first “Mischief Makers,” Joan includes a self-portrait, this one titled “Black is the Color.” Just as she used her voice in support of causes close to her heart, she has used her art to benefit others in need. In March, she raised $50,000 for pandemic relief for Italians through sales of numbered and signed prints of her painting “Viva Italia,” which she said was “inspired by the viral videos of locked-down Italians singing from balconies and doorways, united in song and spirit.” After hearing that her friend John Prine had been hospitalized in critical condition with Covid-19, she video recorded a heartfelt rendition of Prine’s “Hello in There,” dedicating the song to him. When he died of complications from the virus, she created a series of prints in his memory, raising another $50,000 that went this time to the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University. Most recently, prints of a portrait of Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams went on sale to benefit Fair Fight, the organization Abrams founded in 2018 to counter voter suppression. Joan titled it “Georgia on My Mind.” With “Mischief Makers 2,” Joan paints people working for social justice and positive change through nonviolence. It’s art that not only illuminates. It inspires.
-- Paul Liberatore December, 2020
Joan Baez: Mischief Makers 2 Exhibition: January 6 - February 14, 2021
Front Cover: Joan Baez, Black is the Color, 2019, acrylic on panel, 36 x 36 inches Back Cover: Joan Baez, photograph by Marina Chavez Texts by Paul Liberatore Photo Credit for Paintings: Miguel Farias/ArtBrokers Many of the painting were inspired by photographs. These photo credits are as follows: Black is the Color: Inspired by a photo by Jim Marshall Greg Sarris: Inpired by a photo by Janet Orsi Patti Smith: Inspired by a photo by Laura Stevens Coretta Scott King: Inspired by a photo by Paul Sequeira Alice Walker: Inspired by a photo by Noah Berger Wavy Gravy: Inspired by a photo by Barry Feinstein Jack Kornfield: Inspired by a photo by Glen McKay Catalog Design: Donna Seager, Seager Gray Gallery All rights reserved. Direct all inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941
Joan Baez: Artist Statement When I developed the first Mischief Makers exhibit in 2017, the portraits I painted reflected what I hoped would be an antidote to the toxic politics poisoning the nation, an escape from the perilous mire into which we as a population were sinking. I saw our situation as one that could certainly not last. But it has lasted. The same month my new cast of Mischief Makers makes its debut in the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, California, we will have lived through so many grinding and heartbreaking events that many of us, on both sides of the aisle, are bone tired, waiting for a break in the news, a vaccine to appear, a president to disappear. Maybe this has been our darkest hour. And maybe you and I can help usher in a new dawn. During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in a moment of inspiration, I painted infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci (he prefers “Tony”) and posted his portrait on the internet with a single word next to his image: “TRUST.” It went viral, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Then I posted my painting of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg along with the word “VOTE.” She received the same response. For hundreds of thousands of people, these portraits were like fierce crocus blades, green and piercing upward through the frozen earth. I have never been one to endorse political candidates. But realizing that voting in the 2020 presidential election was the most important action anyone could and must take, I entered the political arena, painting then Senator Kamala Harris, now our Vice President-elect, with the inspired title “BADASS.” My little portrait campaign, the second iteration of Mischief Makers, has been my way of doing what I could to help win this righteous fight. If nothing else, I believe it has kept my subjects and me on the side of the angels. I hope this new collection of portraits inspires you. Maybe it will encourage you to go out and, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “make good trouble.” --Joan Baez December, 2020
Joan Baez, Black is the Color (1941 - ) As inspiration for this self-portrait, Joan chose a photograph by famed rock photographer Jim Marshall that graced the cover of her 1970 album “The First 10 Years,” a two-record compilation celebrating her first decade with the Vanguard label. “Sometimes my pictures feel like a different person,” Joan says, “but this one feels like me.” And it looks how she actually looked, despite the record company’s efforts to prettify her on the original version of the cover, taking away her natural beauty for some marketing executive’s airbrushed image of her. “They showed the cover to me and said, ‘How’s this?’” she recalls. “But there was no bump on my nose or bags under my eyes. I said, ‘What happened?’ Put the bump back on my nose and I earned those bags. I was really furious with them.” She calls this self-portrait, the second of her career, “Black is the Color (of My True Love’s Hair)” after a traditional folk ballad on her 1962 album “Joan Baez in Concert.” While she was painting it, she listened to the silvery soprano on her early records without any ego, as if she were hearing someone else. “It’s like the way I started my book: I was born gifted,” she says, referring to her 1989 memoir “And a Voice to Sing With.” “I don’t consider that it’s me, so I can say whatever I want about it. The vocals are just stunning.” And so is this extraordinary self-portrait, as honest and real as the artist who painted it.
Tony (Dr. Anthony Fauci) (1940 - ) When Joan posted her portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, he was under fire from then President Trump for having the audacity to tell people the truth about the coronavirus. One version of the portrait went viral after she added a single word: “Trust.” “Dear Dr. Fauci, I’ve painted your portrait to honor you and all you are doing for us and for the world,” she wrote on the post. “It will be a part of my second art exhibit of ‘Mischief Makers,’ paintings of people who have made meaningful social change without the use of violence. I don’t imagine you’ve ever thought of it this way, but you are engaging in nonviolent resistance every time you stand in front of the cameras and attempt to educate the public on how to survive the covid-19 pandemic.” When Joan heard that Trump was threatening to fire Fauci, she sent him a text saying, “Dear, Tony. Quit.” She soon thought better of it, encouraging him to keep up the good work he’s done for public health under six presidents of both parties. “He wrote back,” she says, “giving me a thumbs up.”
Kamala (Badass!) Harris (1964 - ) It takes one to know one department: Joan caused a stir during the 2020 presidential campaign when she posted her portrait of then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris along with the word “Badass!” “I painted you in honor of your intelligence, your guts and your charm,” Joan told Kamala. “So, from one California badass to another, you go girl all the way! And never let the bastards get you down.” As we all now know, Kamala did indeed go all the way, becoming the first woman and person of color to be elected vice president of the United States, serving under President Joe Biden. “Kamala, you have reintroduced the concept of what should have long been a constant in our lives: The beloved community,” Joan says. “What a joy to see your face as you cheerfully bring compassion and empathy, decency, and bravery - the virtues which should define us as a people - back into our discourse and our lives.”
The Glorious Notorious R.B.G (1933 - 2020) It isn’t every day that an American icon paints a portrait of another American icon, but that’s what’s so extraordinary about Joan Baez’s portrait of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aka RBG. Originally a commission from a fan of both Joan and Justice Ginsburg, the painting is in the collection of David Forrester and Edna Morris. The portrait fits snugly into the pantheon of “Mischief Makers” (leaders who make a difference through nonviolent social change) that was the theme of Joan’s debut exhibit of portraits at the Seager Gray Gallery in 2017. “Characterized by thoughtfulness and an ability to listen, RBG brought common sense and humor to the weighty decisions of the court,” Joan says. “And, with all that, in her 80s, she has become a cult figure adored by young and old alike.” “RBG spoke truth to power, and gave teeth to truth,” Joan says. “She could be counted on for her nonpartisanship and fairness, things that are now so scantily present in the offices of the highest law of the land.”
Baby Blue (Young Bob Dylan) (1941 - ) While she was painting this portrait of a young Bob Dylan, Joan had his music on in the background, inspiring her to call the piece “Baby Blue,” after “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a song from Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” She was working from a photograph of Dylan taken at the time when they were the king and queen of folk music, one of the glamour couples of the decade. “That’s the Bob I met,” Joan says one afternoon in a poolside art studio on the grounds of her rustic but elegant home in Northern California .“That’s the only time I’d seen him pose for a photo. It’s pure Bob.” The song was written just before her painful split from Dylan during a British tour in the spring of 1965, and there has been much speculation that she is the “Baby Blue” he is saying goodbye to in the song. One thing for certain, their breakup had long been a bitter memory for Joan, especially since she was responsible for introducing him to the public, launching his career. But as she worked on the portrait and listened to his extraordinary repertoire of sings, both old and new, something shifted emotionally. It’s as if the whisper of blue in the painting became a theme, a color of healing and forgiveness, and all the hurt and resentment she’d felt over the callous way their relationship ended slowly washed away. “As I painted his portrait and listened to his music, whatever resentments had lingered all these years quietly evaporated,” she says. “I felt enormously grateful to have been around at that moment in history, honored to have been his friend, and damn lucky I could sing.” From the Collection of Rob and Melanie Palumbo
Patti Smith (1946 - ) Joan calls Patti Smith “one of the most eccentric people I know.” “She’s also wise and sweet and funny and humble,” she says. “And a friend.” That friendship was cemented in 2015 when Smith presented Joan with Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award, marking the 50th anniversary of Joan’s performance at the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in Alabama. In her introduction, Smith said: “If the 16th century had Joan of Arc, we have Joan Baez.” She described Baez’s legacy as one of “solitary fierceness” that has been “a vehicle for social protest, a comfort and a ray of hope for people.” Smith’s activism is primarily centered around the environment. A big supporter of Greta Thunberg, another of Joan’s Mischief Makers. Smith spoke of Joan in a 2018 LA Times interview. “I did a concert in Cologne and Joan Baez joined me. We sang “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” together, and we were both in tears singing because a lot of these concerns are within the lyrics of that song. And Joan Baez is fearless. To hear her really that worried about our future environmentally — we were confiding in each other, really, that we both are concerned with our grandchildren.”
Greta (2003 - ) Joan gets emotional every time she talks about Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist from Sweden who was named Time magazine’s 2019 “Person of the Year.” “I can’t even begin,” Joan says. “She just has the guts and the wits, she’s fearless and funny. And she’s 24/7 for the cause.” Greta has been 24/7 for the cause since, beginning in August, 2018, when she was 15, a high school freshman who famously began skipping school on Fridays to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament holding a sign with “Skolstrejk for Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate) written in big, black, hand-written letters. Her action and her attendant overnight fame inspired 4 million people – many of them school kids like her -- to participate in a global climate strike in September 2019 that was the largest climate demonstration ever. Once so upset by global warming that she refused to speak, she has come out of her shell to spar with climate-denier Donald Trump on Twitter and has dropped the jaws of the powerful with her blunt speeches, saying to world leaders at a U.N. Climate Action Summit in September 2019: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Joan is particularly impressed by Thunberg’s commitment to practicing what she preaches. Refusing to fly in fuel-guzzling jets, she sailed across the Atlantic in a carbon-neutral catamaran and convinced her parents to give up air travel as well. “When she got her mother, an opera singer, to quit flying,” Joan notes, “her mother had to quit her opera career.” Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, seeing it not as an illness but instead as her “superpower.” “She’s open about Asperger, which is really helpful for people to be able to talk about things like that,” Joan says. In addition to appearing on the cover of Time, Thunberg’s image, with her intense stare and braided hair, has been featured on everything from coffee cups and murals to greeting cards, t-shirts and Halloween costumes. And now in a painting by Joan Baez.
Emma: Never Again (1999 - ) On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen students and staff members and injuring seventeen others. For Joan, whose life has been dedicated above all to non-violence, this tragedy cut to the core. She was moved by the student activists whose organization, “Never Again� galvanized the nation and inspired marches against gun violence across the world. She began work on a portrait of Emma Gonzalez, one of the student leaders. The portrait is a powerful one with Emma’s direct gaze challenging a culture in which young people should not be afraid to show up for school. The gaze is fixed and courageous, but there is a slight tear in one eye. The portrait was entered in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. and was among the 100 semifinalists chosen from among 2,765 entries.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962 ) Joan was on tour when Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962. When she heard the sad news of the great first lady’s passing, she announced it from the stage during a concert. “She was such an important personage that there was a big reaction from the people,” she recalls. “There was a gasp.” Following her husband’s death in 1945, Eleanor remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life. Clare Booth Luce once said of her: “No woman has ever so comforted the distressed or distressed the comfortable.” Like Joan, she believed in peace and famously said, “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” And work at it she did. She served as the first chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, playing an instrumental role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As someone who advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans and the rights of World War II refugees, she is a natural to join the ranks of Joan’s “Mischief Makers,” people who make positive change in the world through nonviolent action. For this portrait of a young Eleanor, Joan honored her with the most beautiful image she could find.
Alice Walker (1944 - )
Joan remembers meeting author and activist Alice Walker on one of the many marches for peace and justice they’ve been on together. “She was shy,” Joan recalls, “so I painted a sweet picture of her.” Like Joan, Walker is a pacifist. And, like Joan, she has been arrested for her nonviolent beliefs. Protesting the Iraq war, she and fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams were arrested for crossing a police line outside the White House during an anti-war rally. She wrote about it in her essay “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.” Best known for the novel “The Color Purple,” which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she has used her fame to further feminism and women’s rights as well as other social justice causes, once saying, “I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one we have dominant today.” Her activism has roots in her undergraduate years. While a student at Spelman College in the 1960s, she met Martin Luther King Jr., took part in the March on Washington in 1963 and volunteered to register African American voters in Georgia and Mississippi. On her website, she posted a quote that defines her world view and lifelong activism on behalf of the poor and oppressed. After returning from Gaza in 2008, she said: “We belong to the same world, the world where grief is not only acknowledged but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.”
Michael Moore (1954 - )
Joan’s put a jester’s cap on Michael Moore’s head in her whimsical portrait of the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker -- a reflection of the good natured political humor that leavens the serious issues he takes on in films like “Bowling for Columbine” (about gun violence), “Fahrenheit 9/11” (the war on terror) and “Sicko” (the sorry state of health care in America). “He’s fun, clever, kind and very humble,” Joan says. “He keeps making films and predicting election outcomes - and he’s seldom wrong.” In 2004, Joan and Moore became friends when she joined his tour of colleges in swing states to encourage young people to vote, singing “America the Beautiful” with him on stage. Her performance of the peace song “Finlandia” during the tour is a highlight of Moore’s documentary about it, “Slacker Uprising.” In 2019, they saw each other again in New York when he attended the final concert of her farewell tour. “He was so happy and surprised when I gave him a shout out,” Joan remembers. “He’s a big sweetheart.” And he’s a fan of Joan as a painter and an admirer of her choice of Mischief Makers, especially one in particular during the 2020 presidential campaign. Commenting on her “beautiful portrait” or Dr. Fauci, he wrote, “Two truth tellers, needed now more than ever.”
Colin Kaepernick (1987 - ) Nothing got more applause during Joan’s farewell tour than when she and her band would end each concert by taking a knee in honor of athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick. “We loved doing it because the audience would already be applauding, bursting at the seams over the show, and then we’d kneel and they couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “That was the high point of the concert.” At the start of NFL games, Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, famously knelt during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality, launching the era of activism among professional athletes. Although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would eventually apologize for not listening sooner to the concerns of African American players, Kaepernick’s protest cost him his career as an NFL player when no team would hire him. You will notice that Joan painted the NFL logo on Kaepernick’s jersey upside down. “Talk about being willing to give it all up for a cause,” she says. “It was brilliant. We didn’t get more applause for anything than when we took a knee.”
Coretta Scott King (I am not your Cute Little Colored Gal) (1927 - 2006 )
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. An advocate for AfricanAmerican equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. Following her husband’s assassination in 1968, Coretta founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and later successfully lobbied for his birthday to recognized as a federal holiday. “I must remind you,” King famously said, “that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”
Papa (Abo) Baez (1912 - 2007) When it came to nonviolent activists as role models, Joan didn’t have to look any further than her own home. She was a still a teenager when she joined her pacifist father, Albert, in passing out anti-war leaflets outside a movie theater showing “On the Beach,” a classic 1959 movie about the aftermath of a global nuclear conflagration. “He was a professor at Stanford and invited me to go with him,” she recalls. “It was organized by the American Friends Service Committee, the active branch of the Quakers.” Born the son of a Methodist minister in Puebla, Mexico, Albert became a Quaker after the family immigrated to the United States. While at Stanford, where he earned his doctorate in physics, he co-invented the X-ray reflection microscope, which is still used to this day for the examination of living cells. During the Cold War arms race in the 1950s, he turned down lucrative offers to work in the defense industry, devoting himself instead to education, research and humanitarian causes. He served as the first director of science education for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris and later moved his family to Baghdad for a year to establish a physics department and laboratory at Baghdad University. He chronicled the experience in his memoir, “A Year in Baghdad,” co-written with his wife, Joan. At MIT in Boston, he worked on physics education producing nearly 100 films for Encyclopedia Britannica. In retirement, Baez gave occasional lectures, but devoted much of his energy to serving as president of Vivamos Mejor, a nonprofit formed in 1988 to help impoverished villages in Mexico. Until shortly before his 2007 death in a Northern California retirement home at the age of 94, he lived in a landmark round house he designed on a boardwalk on the fringe of San Francisco Bay in Marin County. “With a role model like that,” Joan says, “it’s no surprise that I fell so naturally into nonviolent activism.”
Joan Baez Senior (Big Joan) (1913 - 2013 ) If there is anyone who epitomizes a mischief maker, it’s Joan’s late mother, Joan Baez Sr., affectionately called “Big Joan” by those who knew her and loved her. While others studied at Joan’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, her mother didn’t get her activism from lectures or books. “Mother was a natural,” Joan says. “She didn’t have to learn anything about nonviolence or human decency. It was just part of her nature.” In 1967, as the Vietnam War escalated, the two Joans famously spent Christmas in jail after they were twice arrested with dozens of others for peacefully blocking the entrance to the Oakland Induction Center. Released after being locked up for more than a month in Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail, Big Joan emerged looking plumper than she had been when she went in. The extra bulk wasn’t from jail food, which was surprisingly good, but from the contraband letters she’d hidden under her sweater from women inmates seeking to take advantage of the chance to write their loved ones without the intruding eyes of jail censors. “All the girls would be saying, ‘Mama, mama, mama,’ please take this,” Joan says, recalling that Big Joan also managed to smuggle out another memento of her time behind bars -- a Santa Rita Jail apron that Joan still has. Joan Sr. went on to write a book about her experience – “Inside Sant Rita: The Prison Memoir of a War Protester,” which earned a five-star review on Amazon. Joan Sr. died in 2013, a few days after her 100th birthday. Calling her death “my new adventure,” she left behind a farewell message for her family and friends. ““Take a moment for silence and wish me well,” she wrote. “I’ll hear you. Then make the bottles pop. You know I love champagne almost as much as I love you!” She signed it “Big Joan.”
Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013 ) Joan met Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday party – a gala, celebrity-filled tribute concert and dinner in 2008 in London’s Hyde Park. Seeing him for the first time, Joan was struck by how tiny he was physically. But belying his small stature, this giant on the world stage radiated an overarching charisma and an aura of wisdom and resiliency earned through decades of confinement, struggle, suffering and ultimately triumph. In 1994, four years after he was freed from prison, he was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president. “He was a gentle soul,” Joan says. “But you can’t get any tougher than being locked up for 27 years in a South African prison and emerging without a chip on your shoulder.” At the dinner, she was equally moved by Mandela’s prison comrades, who were anxious to tell her something that brings her close to tears as she recalls that moment all these years later. “The loveliest part was that his cellmates approached me to tell me how much my music had meant to them when they were in prison,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Really?’ Because I didn’t know that.” Without resorting to violence, this champion of social justice waged a lifelong fight against racism, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for dismantling apartheid, the government-sanctioned system of discrimination and segregation that oppressed its black citizens for 50 years. Mandela died in Johannesburg in 2013 at the age of 95. In his memory, Joan released a Grammy-nominated rendition of “Asimbonanga (Mandela),” an anti-apartheid anthem written while Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island by South African musician Johnny Clegg and his band Savuka. The title, in Zulu, roughly translates to, “We can’t see him,” alluding to the pain and frustration his followers felt while their leader was locked away from them and their movement. At the 90th birthday tribute concert in London, Joan, Clegg and the Soweto Gospel Choir performed the “Asimbonanga” together. After dancing on stage to the song at a concert in 1999, Mandela asked the band to play it again, saying, “It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world.”
Jack Kornfield: My Kind of Monk (1945 - )
Joan met Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield when her sister Mimi was dying of cancer two decades ago. “Since then, he’s been with our family as a resource,” she says. Trained as a Buddhist monk, Kornfield – co-founder of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County and the Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts – has been one of the key teachers making Buddhist meditation and mindfulness accessible to Western students. In that spirit of peace and equanimity, Joan painted him as “an island of serenity in a sea of riotous color.” His books, among them “A Wise Heart” and “A Path with Heart,” have been translated into 20 languages and have sold more than a million copies. In a New York Times interview in 2020, Kornfield was asked about how best to cope with the fear and anxiety of the covid-19 pandemic. “With this pandemic, we have to accept where we are, the uncertainty of it, and then say, ‘All right, I’m going to steady my own heart and see how I can contribute,’” he said. “If you’re a scientist, you contribute in your lab. If you’re a poet, like those people singing from the balconies in Italy, send your poems out and buoy up the hearts of others. If you have the capacity, buy groceries for your neighbors. So it’s not about passivity. In Zen, they say there are only two things: You sit, and you sweep the garden. So you quiet the mind, and once you’ve done that, you get up and tend the garden with the gifts you’ve been given.”
Greg Sarris: My Kind of Chief (1952 - )
Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Sonoma County, was so moved by Joan’s first collection of Mischief Makers portraits that he made sure all 14 will remain together as the centerpiece of a new civil rights and social justice learning center. In 2017, Sarris, an author and college professor, spearheaded an effort by the tribe, which owns and operates the Graton Resort and Casino in Rohnert Park, to buy the collection and donate it to Sonoma State University for a future campus center devoted to civil rights and social justice. Until then, the paintings, including portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., the late Georgia Congressman John Lewis and United Farmworkers co-founder Delores Huerta, are on exhibit in the university’s Green Music Center. “I can’t think of a better place for these paintings to be archived all in one place forever,” he says. Since 2005, Sarris, who earned his doctorate in modern thought and literature from Stanford University, has held the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State. He has written numerous books, notably 1994’s “Grand Avenue,” a collection of short stories about the Native American community that was adapted for an HBO miniseries co-executive produced by Robert Redford. In the Los Angeles Times, reviewer Robert Dorris praised it as “one of the most important imaginative books of the year.”
Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) (1936 - )
Joan sometimes likes to paint her subjects as they looked before they were famous. She did it with Gandhi, portraying him as a wannabe young Englishman, and she’s done it with hippie icon Wavy Gravy, painting an image of him when he was Hugh Romney, an aspiring young comedian and entertainer once managed by Lenny Bruce. The portrait was unveiled at the San Francisco memorial for Ram Dass in January 2020, adding to the emotional richness of the evening. Wavy was overwhelmed when he saw himself as he had been as a young man, and his wife of 55 years, Jahanara, remarked, “That’s the man I married.” As head of the Hog Farm commune, Hugh Romney would go on to become counterculture legend Wavy Gravy, a nickname he says was bestowed on him by B.B. King. His counterculture celebrity was born when he took the stage at Woodstock and announced, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” Wavy has two main causes that have defined his life of service. He and his wife founded Camp Winnarainbow, a children’s circus and performing arts camp in with special scholarships for underprivileged kids that they’ve run in Mendocino County every summer since 1975. His other great achievement is the Berkeley-based Seva Foundation, an international health organization for the poor he started in 1978 with Ram Dass and physician/epidemiologist Larry Brilliant. Seva, meaning “service” in Sanskrit, is best known for cataract operations that have restored the sight of millions of people in Cambodia, Nepal, Ethiopia, l and other developing countries. Wavy describes this work as “keeping blind people from bumping into stuff.” Acknowledging his good deeds and rock ‘n’ roll spirit, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir calls Wavy “a saint in a clown suit.” Wavy’s life of service with a smile and a fake red nose has been documented in the acclaimed 2009 film “Saint Misbehavin’.” Among the many charitable organizations Wavy has started is the lesser known Phurst Church of Phun. And in that funky, funny spirit, Joan painted his portrait on an old clipboard she found lying around in her studio.
Xiuhtezcatl (shoo-TEZ-kawt) Martinez (2000 - )
Joan was looking for a young face to represent the new generation of American environmental activists and found it in Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the Native American youth director of the worldwide conservation organization Earth Guardians. Describing himself as a “long-haired kid with the unpronounceable name,” Martinez gave three TED talks when he was still a teenager and burst onto the international stage with a sensational 2015 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, delivering it in English, Spanish and his native language, Nahuatl. In celebration of Martinez’s Aztec heritage, Joan painted the background of his portrait in an Aztec design He is one of the young defendants in Juliana v. the United States, a lawsuit against the American government for its inaction on climate change. Now 20, he lives in boulder, Colorado, and has worked to ban fracking in his state, to clean up pesticides in parks and to control the spread of coal ash. A hip-hop artist, he performs with his brother and sister as the Earth Guardians, spreading their message of social and environmental change to other young people through songs like “What the Frack” and “Speak for the Trees,” both on their debut album “Generation Ryse.” “This is the way I resist, the way I use my voice and fight for a world we can believe in,” he says. “Nothing can stop a revolution inspired by love and justice, and communicated through passion and art.” In 2018, he released his first solo album, “Break Free,” dedicating it to “the people of the world facing the greatest struggles of our times.” “These are songs of movements, pain, loss, life, love, and the world,” he says. “I’m telling my story using music that people will be able to relate to. I want this music to inspire you, to wake people up, make you dance and show you that hip hop can be a tool for creating change.” Already in his young life as an activist, he has received the U.S. Volunteer Service Award from President Barack Obama and the Generational Change Award from MTV Europe. He has also been included in Rolling Stone’s “25 under 25” list of young people who will change the world.
Gandhi as a Young Englishman (1936 - )
Joan once said that the spirit of Gandhi rules her life. He was the inspiration for the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence she founded in 1965 in California’s Carmel Valley. And his philosophy of nonviolence and peaceful protest, some of it cleverly mischievous, has been a guiding principle behind everything she’s done in her 80 years. For this portrait, she rejected the popular images of Gandhi in loin cloth, shawl and walking stick, deciding instead to paint him as he looked and dressed when he was a callow law student living in Britain, making good on a promise he’d made his mother to adopt English manners and customs, even taking dancing lessons. “I titled the portrait ‘Gandhi as a Young Englishman’ because that’s what he wanted to be,” she says. “You can see it in his outfit and his top hat and his schooling. If you’re a Gandhi person, you probably won’t recognize him. I love that about this portrait. I like to do that in my paintings.” There is a famous story about the time Gandhi was working as an aspiring lawyer in South Africa and suffered the indignity of being thrown off a train for being dark skinned, an incident that is said to have ignited his passion to fight back through nonviolence and peaceful resistance against nearly 90 years of British rule, which ended with Indian independence in 1947. If young Gandhi was a changed man when he returned to India, it was South Africa that had changed him. Throwing off the trappings of his past, he discarded his English outfits and posh manners, dressing himself instead in the homespun clothing of the Indian poor. He would often be pictured at a spinning wheel as a symbol of self-sufficiency. The honorific “Mahatma,” meaning “great souled” in Sanskrit, was first bestowed on him while living in South Africa. “It all started in South Africa,” Joan says. “Something clicked. He realized that his home wasn’t his home. The British ruled it. They wanted him to have an identity card to show that he was under British rule, but he just wanted to burn it. The whole point was to get out from under that.” Gandhi once said you must be the change you see in the world. In this portrait, Joan paints him as a young man on the verge of discovering his path and changing the world.
The Paintings 1. Joan Baez, Black is the Color, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 36 inches 2. Tony (Fauci), 2020 Acrylic on Panel 30 x 24 inches 3. Kamala (Badass!) Harris, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 24 inches 4. The Glorious Notorious RBG, 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 30 x 30 inches
(from the collection of David Forrester and Edna Morris)
12. Colin Kaepernick, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 24 inches 13. Coretta Scott King, 2020 (I am Not Your Cute Little Colored Gal) Acrylic on Panel 34 x 22 inches 14. Papa (Abo) Baez, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 30 x 20 inches 15. Joan Baez Senior (Big Joan), 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 30 x 20 inches
5. Baby Blue (Young Bob Dylan), 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 30 x 30 inches
16. Nelson Mandela, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 24 inches (from the collection of William Pereira
6. Patti Smith, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 34 x 22 inches
17. Jack Kornfield: My Kind of Monk, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 30 x 24 inches
7. Greta, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 34 x 22 inches
18. Greg Sarris: My Kind of Chief, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 34 x 22 inches
8. Emma: Never Again, 2018 Acrylic on Panel 38 x 26 inches
19. Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), 2019 Acrylic on Antique Panel 26 x 23 inches
9. Eleanor Roosevelt, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 30 x 24 inches
20. Xiuhtezcatl (shoo TEZ kawt) Martinez, 2020 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 24 inches
10. Alice Walker, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 36 x 24 inches
21. Gandhi as a Young Englishman, 2019 Acrylic on Panel 30 x 30 inches
(from the collection of Rob and Melanie Palumbo)
11. Michael Moore, 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 35 x 28 inches