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It Takes a Canvas
Blending artistry and activism for animals
By Amy Abern
About 10 years ago, Best Friends co-founder Cyrus Mejia began a new chapter in his life as the Animal Activist Artist. Or the Artist Animal Activist. Or the Activist Animal Artist. The order of words doesn't matter. What does is this: Can art create awareness? Absolutely. Can awareness inspire art? Of course While Mejia continues to create the Best Friends brand of heartwarming and whimsical art he's become known for - images of happy animals on T-shirts, coffee mugs and even wine labels - he's also committed to creating art as a means of inspiring dialogue, thought and action as it pertains to animals. And Mejia's not doing this in a vacuum. He's part of a growing population of artists, curators and animal welfare enthusiasts working to promote art as activism and activism as art.
Mejia recently participated in, animalkind, a multi-artist exhibition presented at San Diego State University. The exhibition featured the work of several artists expressing the complex relationships between humans and animals, notably our roles as animal saviors, captors, friends, enemies, lovers and murderers. Some of the pieces made people smile and chuckle; others brought tears to the eyes; some made viewers cringe. And that was the idea.
"I looked to create a balance in the show," explains project curator Tina Yapelli, professor of art and director of the University Art Gallery at San Diego State University. "The art encompassed a broad spectrum of perspectives and issues - some controversial, others not. And this diversity was intentional. Different approaches affect different people. And as long as the exhibition raises consciousness, it achieves its goal."
Raising consciousness
For animalkind, Mejia displayed his oil-on- panel portraits of the Vicktory dogs, 22 pit bulls rescued from former pro-footballplayer Michael Vick's Bad Newz Kennels. The dogs now live at Best Friends. The formerly abused and traumatized animals are portrayed as the dogs they've become: happy, friendly and full of love.
William Wegman contributed a continuous loop of 23 short videos showing the "human" side of his Weimeraners. Jean Lowe hauled in three cardboard bookcases that she had created, full of "must reads" for animal lovers. Some of the papier-maché books had familiar titles like The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs and The Black Stallion, but there were a few that Lowe had invented to provoke thought, like Romantic Vegan Delights and Teach Your Pet English.
Ernest Silva's work offered a subtle reminder of how our appreciation of the beauty of animals doesn't always prevent us from hurting or killing them. One of his paintings features a deer standing dead center in a faintly outlined bull's eye.
It was impossible to ignore the paintings of Sue Coe, an artist, writer and vegan animal activist. She provided a series of canvasses portraying circus animals being tortured and dying awful deaths. She also presented a lecture that included a slide show of her paintings of images from slaughterhouses, images she saw firsthand. Some of her slides included photos of people who had tattooed her art onto their bodies as a way to promote veganism.
"I've been told many times from people that they've turned vegan after seeing my work," says Coe. "And that's great. But what I really hope to do through my art is to open a dialogue: Why do you think these circus animals are treated so cruelly? The last thing I want to do is tell people what to think. I merely want to get them to think."
Yapelli, who has volunteered annually at Best Friends since 2002, married her parallel passions of animal welfare and art for the first time through the creation of animalkind. She hopes to put together another animal-welfarerelated art show in the future. (For more information, visit artgallery.sdsu.edu.)
Mejia's moment
Mejia's marriage of causes took place after he read one simple sentence back in 2000: "Five million animals die each year in U.S. shelters." He says, "I just couldn't get my head around that number. It was too much. I just couldn't take it in."
So he crunched the numbers and came up with 575, the number of animals put to death each hour in U.S. shelters. It inspired Mejia?s 575 Project, an installation of sculptural pieces created to communicate this sad statistic visually. For instance, one of the pieces consists of 575 dog collars covering an empty doghouse. In an audience participation piece, 575 candles in cat-food cans are lit, allowed to burn for a short time, and are then blown out.
In 2006, Mejia built "Ark," his tribute to animal rescuers in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He crafted a boat of stretched canvas over a wooden frame, mimicking the flat-bottom jon boats used to rescue animals from flooded areas. He then covered the canvas with a collage of animal intake forms.
Mejia added another layer of collage with labels from pet-food cans and bags, along with various images of Hurricane Katrina taken from newspapers and magazines.
Mejia's latest creation is Pits & Perception, a collection of a dozen portraits of pit bulls on 49- by 56-inch oil paintings on birch panels. The collection was made possible by a grant from the Culture and Animals Foundation. The idea for the series came to Mejia while he was painting the Vicktory dogs. At the sanctuary, he saw the Vicktory dogs evolve from living in fear, anger and hurt to enjoying lives filled with play, attention and love. And that's when he got the idea to create a room full of pit bulls - larger-than-life, in-your-face portraits of these loving, intelligent animals.
The images need to be huge, says Mejia, to inspire people to see beyond the common perception of pit bulls as aggressive, dangerous dogs. "It's ridiculous," says Mejia. "When I was a kid growing up, pit bulls were the family pet. Petey the pit bull was the family pet on the TV show The Little Rascals. At some point, the perception of this animal as the loving family pet changed. And thanks in part to the media concentrating on the bad-news stories, these dogs are accused, as a whole, of being dangerous. It's no different from racial profiling."
Changing perceptions
It's an enormous challenge, changing popular perceptions. But Mejia's not alone in his undertaking. Pits & Perception will be on exhibit at F.U.E.L. Gallery in Philadelphia from August 15 to September 15. The show was made possible in part through Best Friends supporter and animal activist Buzz Miller. Two years ago, Miller opened Buzzy's Bow Wow Meow, a pet merchandise store. All profits from sales go to a variety of local animal-welfare projects. Miller is also in the process of forming a nonprofit organization, People/Animals = Companions Together (PACT). As part of its educational goals, PACT aims to dispel "the myths of breed prejudice." Mejia's work, Miller says, illustrates the importance of this particular initiative quite effectively.
Pits & Perception made its first appearance this summer, courtesy of a partnership through the Community Folk Art Center within the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University and the Syracuse Public Art Commission. Mejia's images from Pits & Perception were selected for inclusion in the Urban Video Project, a slide show featuring socially significant images projected onto buildings throughout downtown Syracuse. In 2010, Pits & Perception, along with other selected works by Mejia, will be featured in a two-month exhibition over the summer at the Community Folk Art Center.
"We're excited to have the opportunity to showcase these important works," says Community Folk Art Center curator Gina Stankavitz. "We want to share Cyrus' visions on animal welfare issues with our community with the hope they'll be inspired to become active within local organizations that promote animal welfare." And that's the idea: combining activism with art.
Artist Cyrus Mejia's Pits & Perception is on display in the following cities and venues:
Urban Video Project / Syracuse, New York
www.urbanvideoproject.org
The F.U.E.L. Collection / Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
(215) 592-8400
www.fuelcollection.com
August 15 to September 25, 2009
For more work by Cyrus Mejia, go to www.cyrusmejia.com
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