If Whishes Were Horses, We'd All be Trampled

Someone*****is sending me bad dreams
I have communion with
***the dead
All three*****Yes*****a Blakean mystic
Knowing then what I had to relearn
Now below
*****the Surface*****apple-core
*****woman power*****surging psychic
********covering fences
Leaving man thought — world*****behind
They say*****they say
She is be coming*

From Instinct for Survival, Ellyn Rabinowitz, 1977.

Interview with Ellyn Rabinowitz
By Erika Maeve

I was asked if I’d be interested in interviewing one of the artists whose work was exhibited this past September and October at Leslie-Lohman in a show entitled A Lesbian Vision: Art by Women Who Love Women [Sept. 16 - Oct. 25, 1997]. I said I’d be interested in the opportunity to have a dialogue with an artist whose work captivated me. At the gallery, I was drawn to a work of mixed-media pen, ink, and silk collage that depicted a skeleton set against a background of diaphanous, light green moss-toned silk fabric. To the extreme right of the figure looms a dark and ominous closet. The work, by Ellyn Rabinowitz, is entitled Coming Out. I experienced the quality and color of the silk as liberating, so airy in contrast to the gloom of the closet, and yet, why did I see a tormented skeleton? I wanted to meet and interview Ellyn.

Ellyn Rabinowitz, a native New Yorker and self-described " individualist,” is an artist, poet, feminist and community activist, and a social worker. She is dedicated to integrating politics, art and poetry.

For the past three years Ellyn has been working as a bereavement counselor for those affected by AIDS loss. This, as well as some other significant life experiences, was a major influence in her creation of Coming Out.

Ellyn explained that she had first sketched the work in the 1970s as a technical study of skeletons, when she was an undergraduate majoring in art at SUNY Binghamton. She had been profoundly influenced at that time by her teacher and mentor, Charles Eldred, who instilled in his students an appreciation of the " unseen and unknown.” Skeletons were one of the subjects for exploring this hidden, or invisible, realm. In studying with Eldred, Ellyn found that she was developing a " macabre” fascination with the structure and articulation of skeletons — human and animal. She was intrigued by animal skulls (as was Georgia O’Keefe): she " …loved the play of light on bone.” Ellyn was taken with the " …surreal, strange and fantastical,” and consequently she migrated from more traditional artwork to what she describes as " unconventional or experimental art,” as well as a mixing of media.

When, in 1993, Charles Eldred died, and Ellyn was contacted by the university to participate in a memorial show for him, planned for 1996, she went back to one of the skeleton studies she had created under Eldred in the 70s, and reworked it. Coming Out is a statement born of varied experiences Ellyn had between the 1970s, when she was a student, and the 90s, as a bereavement counselor. It strikes this writer that, among the experiences that contributed to Ellyn’s reworking the sketch into the collage, the two most significant are the counseling work in which she is involved today, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, and her past occupation as an art therapist in 1984, at the Children’s Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Michigan. Both of these careers brought into relief for Ellyn the power of family dynamics over the individuals, and how often families can have a destructive influence on the individual.

At the hospital, Ellyn saw that children who left the facility and went home well-functioning, often returned to the hospital in crisis. She hypothesized that perhaps these children’s problems lay with their family environments, and she became very interested in family dynamics and family counseling. In 1991, after she lost her sister, she returned to New York City and enrolled in a graduate social work program, earning her MSW; her thesis was on bereavement.

As a bereavement counselor, working with people whose partners and family members have died of AIDS, she’s been affected by the fact that many people die with their " …true, innate selves unknown, unaccepted, and unappreciated by family,... and what a tragedy that is .” She is appalled by the destructive aspects of some families. Ellyn said that " ...coming out for some lesbian, bisexuals, gays and transgenders can be a positive and affirming experience, however, many people are ‘in the closet’ vis a vis families, worried about nonacceptance and hostility.”

Ellyn said that in her collage she was responding to clients in Coming Out might be described as an X-ray of those of us with secret lives. In pondering the meaning of collage, Ellyn allows that the work has broad application, and is not only about gays and lesbians coming out, but could also speak for any person not feeling safe enough to be who she/he wants to be.

There is a personal postscript or revelation for Ellyn in Coming Out. While watching and listening to others who were viewing her work at Leslie-Lohman, it dawned on her that the work could describe Ellyn’s own fear of coming out as a bisexual and being accepted in a gay and lesbian space.