Suzanne Benton: Behind the Mask

Suzanne Benton and...

Merida, Disney's most feminist Princess. Separated at birth?

     “We do a million things and never get an award,” says Suzanne Benton, referring to the unsung women of history. “That’s why this means so much to me.”

     Benton is clutching a trophy to her chest. It’s a miniature Statue of Liberty.  Benton and Amy Weintraub, a longtime advocate of reproductive rights, both were given one — the Gardner Beckett Civil Liberties Award -- by the Pinellas Chapter of the ACLU for their roles in launching and organizing the largest protest demonstration the county has ever seen. The Women’s Solidarity March in St. Petersburg, held on January 21, 2017, drew 25,000 to downtown St. Petersburg. It was the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump. It was also Benton’s 81st birthday.

      Benton cherishes the ACLU award so much that she carries it with her back and forth between her home in Ridgefield, Conn. where she summers, and her condo in St. Petersburg’s harbor side Maximo Mooring where she winters. The condo -- Benton calls it "a sacred space" since the march was planned in her living room -- is a stone’s throw away from Eckerd College where for the past 14 years she has been a guest artist in the college’s Visual Arts Department.

     A metal sculptor, mask maker and performance artist, painter, lecturer, workshop leader and pioneer feminist activist, Benton, now 84, has had an impressive art career: 175 solo exhibitions, 150 group shows, two retrospectives of her work and visits to more than 30 countries with her art, with no sign of slowing down. Sixteen of those solo shows and 37 of those group exhibitions have been held in her Seventies and Eighties, including the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Creating over 700 welded steel and bronze metal sculpture works and masks, she is represented in museums and private collections throughout the world. 

My photo from the Women's March

Monoprint from Benton's Vermeer series

       She greets me at her condo as if we have known each other for a long time. I feel immediately at ease with this woman with her halo of curly hair and easy smile. Although her billowing coif is white not red, she reminds me of Merida, the most feminist — and fiercest — princess in the Disney canon. I look around and spot an easel and a piano, Benton’s two passions. Along the wall is a long table where she will show me examples of her latest monoprints and the exquisitely etched metal plates she uses in the process of making the one-of-a-kind prints. They are made with hand-made glued paper called chine colle which are pre-inked and hand-painted. The etched metal plates emboss a complex texture onto the prints.

     I am meeting Benton for the first time to talk about her current show of monoprints at Cobb Gallery on the Eckerd campus. All of them were Made at Eckerd (the title of the show), 22 chosen from more than 400 she has created during her time at the college, including selections from two recent series, From Paintings in Proust and Circling Vermeer.  She will be talking about the show and her life of art and activism there on February 10 from 7-8:30 p.m.

       She tells me that she is not interested in rattling off her accomplishments.  "What I want to talk about at my lecture at Eckerd is this: What brought me to this place in my life?"

     For years the Brooklyn-born Benton had little time for her art. Yet she persisted. She was married, raising children. Then she was divorced. After years as a painter, she began making steel- and bronze-welded sculptures when her youngest was two. She thought the choice understandable. "With all that heat (a welding flame is 3100 degrees C) and pounding, I was releasing the anger and frustration I felt." Only recently has she realized that she also needed to release another emotion: grief. One of her three children, a daughter named Lisa, was born with a rare genetic disorder that progressively destroyed nerve cells in her brain and spinal cord. She went blind, couldn't sit up and never spoke. She died at three. For a long time Benton was unable to talk about Lisa's death. "I'm just beginning to be able to say those words out loud," she says.

     Art, which can be cathartic for the artists who makes it and for those of us who view it, has helped her heal.   

      My conversation with Benton is free-wielding and exhilarating, jumping from art to politics to family. She talks to me about her mother whom she once called harsh and unloving, but whom now she thinks of more kindly. “As we grow older, we have no more need for villains,” she points out. “My mother was a feminist in her own way,” she remembers. “She certainly didn’t coddle her daughter.” Her mother pushed her to graduate from Queens College at 20 with a B.A. in Fine Arts when she herself hadn’t even finished high school. 

The Hidden Smile: monoprint with chine colle

      She talks to me about her second daughter Janet, born the day after Lisa died.  “She’s my best friend,” she says simply. She hands me an oversized postcard, a publicity flyer for her daughter’s novel: Lilli de Jong by Janet Benton. “You need to read it,” she tells me. It is the story of a mother. In 1883 Lilli de Jong, an unwed Quaker mother, is told she must give up her baby. Instead she chooses to keep her. "So little is permissible for a woman," writes Lilli in her diary, “yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.” 

     In 1996 the Veteran Feminists of America (an organization Benton helped found) was set to honor Benton and other activists on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW). Benton, however, was busy leading a series of mask and story workshops with refuges in Bosnia and couldn't make it to the awards ceremony. So her daughter went instead. An excerpt of Janet's acceptance speech on behalf of her mother, posted on the VFA website, gives us the flavor of their mother/daughter bond: 

   

Benton with her daughter Janet

   

Delilah as the Sphinx

    It wasn't always easy having a mother dedicated to feminism and to becoming herself. I came home from third grade to find that my full-size baby carriage and baby doll who wet her pants, along with Barbie, her lovely accessories, and most of my stuffed animals, had been donated to a day-care center. While I got an appendectomy a few months earlier, Mom was marching through New York City streets with a procession of women wearing her metal masks, proclaiming the second coming of the great goddess. And after my parents divorced, I often came home to an empty house. It was a strange irony, the way that a joyous liberation and a freeing divorce sucked the joy from my life.

     But I also received a treasure, one that I have come to understand as rare since hearing many people tell me what happened to the dreams, to the capacities of their mothers, and that is that my mother is a creative, strong, courageous woman who will never give up. The pride she has brought me, and the self-respect and assertiveness she has worked so hard to teach me, have proved more nutritive than hundreds of perfectly cooked meals.

     So thank you for acknowledging Suzanne's thirty years of work on behalf of women. It means a lot to both of us.

  

Benton performing

      When I ask her if she ever gets discouraged by the setbacks in women’s rights, she retrieves a white wrinkled mask with crude holes cut in the place of her eyes and mouth and presses it to her face. “Are you afraid now that you know it can be taken? Stolen?” she says in a deep voice that echoes the female archetypes from mythology she channels in her performance art. “I promise you, you are not alone. I tell you, there are others. I believe in we the people. I tell you, if you stand up, you will find powers you never knew you had.  I have come to give you courage, to take away your despair. Find your cause. It’s waiting for you.” 

       Women's rights have been Benton's cause in both her life and her work so it is not surprising that so many creative women have crossed her path from the surrealist painter Leanora Carrington, who was a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico (she met her in New York) to feminist icon Doris Lessing to sculptor Janet Echelman. 

      Benton met Lessing at the 1989 International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in Fort Lauderdale, an annual conference devoted to the fantastic in literature, film, and other arts. Lessing was the main speaker; Benton had been invited to perform with her masks. When she went up to meet Lessing, she was so tongue-tied at the thought of talking to the giant of feminist literature that she couldn’t remember a single title Lessing had written (though she had read them all). 

Benton with her portrait of Alice Paul

     Echelman, the Tampa-born artist commissioned to create one of her famous billowing net sculptures for the St. Petersburg Pier, sought out Benton. Echelman was applying for a Fulbright scholarship and wanted to talk to Benton about her experience with the prestigious scholarship: In 1992-93 Benton, on a Fulbright lectureship, had brought her masks to Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India. In the course of the conversation, Echelman suggested that if she got the Fulbright, Benton should take her place as artist in resident at Harvard. “Of course, Janet got the Fulbright and I ended up going to Harvard,”  she laughs. In 2008 Benton donated her papers to Harvard/Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library Archive.

     Sometimes Benton talks about women she has met only on a canvas. She shows me her painting of Alice Paul, a longtime resident of Ridgefield who was a Suffragist and main leader and strategist in the campaign for the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote, ratified 100 years ago this year. While researching Paul's biography for her painting, Benton discovered a family connection to the women's rights activist.

     "My father's sister was a Suffragist," she says. "Throughout my childhood, my father would proudly tell me that she had an 'audience' with president Woodrow Wilson to convince him to support the Women Suffrage Amendment." When she found out that Paul had formed a contingent of women to talk with the president, she realized "that's when my Aunt Regina Elkins Fruchter (who died in 1929 before I was born) met face to face with Wilson.""

      Benton's painting of Paul is part of a year-long Portrait Project Benton has launched in Ridgefield, she explains, to celebrate the Women’s Suffrage Centennial. She had originally kickstarted a similar endeavor here with a group of women artists, members of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Florida National Women's Caucus that she founded last year. The two projects, however, have slightly different focuses. In St. Petersburg the paintings are equal-sized portraits of 36 diverse working women who are known for fostering their communities. Officials in Ridgefield, on the other hand, agreed to an interesting twist. Paul is the only famous woman who will be included in their Portrait Project. All the others will be portraits of the working women who toil behind the scenes in Ridgefield’s Town Hall. 

     Those women who do a million things and never get an award.

Andrea Camilleri & His Alter Ego Montalbano: Fighting the Imbecility of Power

      I spent the last days of 2019 and the first days of 2020 with a gruff but lovable, aging detective named Salvo Montalbano.
      Montalbano is not a real person. He's only a character in a mystery series set in the fictional town of Vigata (which bears a strong resemblance to a real town in Sicily called Porto Empedocle). But I needed to be with someone who understands the importance of fighting "the imbecility of power." I also wanted to end and begin the year honoring Andrea Camilleri, the creator of the iconic Montalbano. Camilleri, who was born in Porto Empedocle in 1925, died in Rome in July just short of his 94th birthday.

Author Andrea Camilleri

     The books that I read were the 22nd, 23rd and 24th in the series starring Montalbano:  The Pyramid of Mud, The Reluctant Kidnapper and The Other End of the Line.

     Camilleri has been a hero of mine for some time.
      A successful playwright, director and screenwriter in Italy, Camilleri decided at age 69 to see if he could write a mystery.  In The Shape of Water, he introduced Commissario Montalbano, an inspector in his fifties who was more interested in getting justice than getting credit. That first foray into mystery writing was so successful it spawned two dozen and a half more books, a TV series and a prequel to that TV series (The Young Montalbano). In a nod to all the tourists who flocked to Sicily to track down the picturesque scenes they read about in Camilleri's books, the town of Porto Empedocle actually officially changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigata.  
        With Montalbano, Camilleri created an alter ego who is younger than himself, but not by much. I think Camilleri chose to tell the story of an older detective because at age 69, he himself had begun to reflect on his own path toward, well, the end of the line.
     In The Smell of the Night, the third book of the series, for example, Montalbano reflects on his longtime relationship with Livia, his girlfriend who lives miles away in Genoa on the other end of Italy: "But why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, thought the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old -- for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names -- we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."

    

      In the latest three books translated into English which I have just read, Montalbano's complaints about aging had become even more pronounced. He fretted about going a bit deaf and that his memory wasn't as sharp as it used to be. He was alarmed when Livia stopped bickering with him on the phone: He worried that it might be a sign that she had given up on life. At one point he even worried that age was affecting his appetite, which would be a disaster for someone who loves to eat so much.

     In a poignant author's note at the end of The Other End of the Line, Camilleri thanked his long-time assistant Valentina Alferj for helping him complete the book, "not only physically but also by intervening creatively in its drafting." Camilleri explained that he had gone blind. "I would not have been able to write this story (nor those that I hope will follow) without her," he admitted.
     Thankfully, more books did follow Number 24, as Camilleri had hoped. The 25th book in the series will be issued in English this Spring. And there are two more already published in Italy that have yet to be translated into English.
     The best part, however, is that there is still another Montalbano book, truly the last one that will ever be written about the Sicilian detective. This one hasn't even been published in Italy yet.  Camilleri wrote it 13 years ago and sent it to his publisher with the stipulation that it only be published after his death or if he became incapacitated and couldn't write anymore. He didn't want someone else deciding the fate of his creation. The book -- called Riccardino (Little Richard) -- describes the demise of Montalbano.
     "When I get fed up with him or am not able to write any more, I'll tell the publisher: publish the book. Sherlock Holmes was recovered," Camilleri told an interviewer for the Guardian in 2012, referring to the resurrection of that famous detective from a watery death at Reichenbach Falls after readers attacked Arthur Conan Doyle for killing him off, "but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he's really finished."

     Last year I read 54 books  -- one a week with an extra one for good measure. This year my New Year's resolution is to read 70 -- one for every birthday I have celebrated so far. I haven't picked out all the books I want to read yet -- but, if they are available, I hope to add the last four books written by Camilleri to that list.

The last published Montalbano book, not yet
available in English.

     "One of the pleasures of the books for English language readers, since the sequence began to appear in 2005 in Stephen Sartarelli's elegant translations, is the way they chart Italian history over the last two decades: the transition from the lira to the euro, the fluctuations in the methods and impact of the mafia, the turbulent government of Silvio Berlusconi," wrote Mark Lawson in the Guardian in 2012.
      That social commentary has continued through the series. In The Other End of the Line, Camilleri addresses with great sympathy the plight of migrants flooding into Italy, much to the chagrin of the supporters of Matteo Salvini, Italy's right-wing interior minister, and his anti-immigration policies.
      Camilleri's feisty response? "Salvini reminds me of a member of the Fascist regime." In 2007 Camilleri had told an interviewer in The Independent: "I've always tried to make Montalbano critical about the behavior and order of his bosses, the imbecility of power."
     Here's hoping that Sartarelli will be swift in translating the remaining Camilleri mysteries. Something tells me that Montalbano's wisdom will be more than needed in 2020.

14,000 Southwest Points & Other Things Left Undone

   
     A U.S. president was in the news again this month.
     No, not that one. Jimmy Carter. The 95-year-old ex-president, it was reported, was recovering from brain surgery, needed to treat a subdural hematoma that he sustained after hitting his head in October.
     Hearing the news someone re-posted this reminder below.  It had originally been posted just after that October fall:

     Soon after several of Carter's neighbors in Plains, Ga., were interviewed by USA Today about Carter's latest setback. While acknowledging that the 95-year-old Georgian isn't going to live forever, they seemed to think that the 39th U.S. president would bounce back one more time. One said that it would take more than brain surgery to keep him down. Another predicted that Carter would show up for the town's Christmas tree lighting on November 30.

    When I read that, I started to picture Carter's To Do list. Not all nonagenarians, of course, are as active as Carter has been (how many of us will still be building houses in our nineties?), but it occurred to me that inevitably there was going to be something on his list that eventually wouldn't be scratched off. A project that wasn't completed. A party never attended. A gift or letter never sent. A phone call never made.

    When my mother died,  I thought that she had died way too young. Many people around me tried to tell me that 92 was a good run, but it seemed to me that my mom was just getting started. She had so many plans. I remember thinking: She had so much left on her To Do list.

     She had more columns to write (At 86 she had started to write a monthly column for the then St. Petersburg Times, including an article on Dating in Your Eighties and Nineties). She had yoga classes, wine club sessions, grandchildren's birthday celebrations and dinner invitations from her two daughters in Milwaukee on her calendar. She had cookies to bake and letters to write.

     She obviously also had planned to take more trips (to Florida and to Washington D.C. to visit her out-of-town daughters perhaps): She had left behind 14,000 unused Southwest points.

     My sister Renee reminded me of those Southwest points when I was talking to her about the futility of getting everything done on our own To Do lists. My mother's unused points, which were not transferable, had died with her. 14,000 points. Good for one more trip, maybe two, we figured.

     It was a good reminder not to put off anything for later. At our age, later is now. But also that we shouldn't worry so much about getting through our whole To Do lists. No one ever does.

     I hope Jimmy Carter will be at that Christmas lighting ceremony in Plains, Georgia on November 30. And if he is able to go, I hope he puts next year's ceremony on his 2020 To Do list. After all, letting hope triumph over experience is what badasses do.