Denver-based artist Suchitra Mattai tells stories using paint, found objects, light, history and memory.
Suchitra included a video in a show at a Denver gallery. She did not project her images on a rectangular screen. Instead, her images spooled across larger-than-life silhouettes of two young women in what appeared to be school uniforms. They faced one another in conversation. Or play.
The video Suchitra projected on those figures included rural landscapes that she had recorded from her car window during a road trip from Denver to Minneapolis, her home town and the city where George Floyd died under a police officer’s knee. Suchitra alternated her nature scenes with footage of marches in Minneapolis against racism and against police violence.
I told Suchitra, who had multiple images of heroic Black and brown girls in her show, that her video reminded me of a protest against racism I had covered in Denver.
Black student leaders from across Colorado, many of them young women, had organized the protest, and made a point of including moments of reflection and even celebration in their demonstration at the state Capitol building. Poetry was read, and the crowd did a languid Cupid Shuffle. Photographs of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and others were arranged on the Capitol steps with candles and flowers, creating an art installation.
When I described the scene to Suchitra, she responded: “You have to mourn. And celebrate. And plan.”
On my way home from the protest, I had found myself singing “Ella’s Song,” which was written by musician Bernice Johnson Reagon and inspired by Ella Baker. Baker started working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1930s. In the 1960s she mentored black student activists and in the 1980s protested apartheid. She was a human rights activist until the day she died at the age of 86 in 1983. One line in “Ella’s Song” goes: “The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on/ Is when the reins are in the hand of the young who dare to run against the storm.”
Those protesters at the Capitol were daring and ready to run. But they understood the importance, as they are embarked on a long campaign, of the need for time to rest in order to see the fight through. On road trips, we stop for gas and might even correct our route after checking the map.
The students at the protest and Suchitra in her gallery were saying: “Take a breath. Now get back to the work of changing the world. Take a breath. Now get back to the work.”
Looking to the future while being inspired by the past helps us cope with the present. Art, which connects us to our dreams and to our memories, is as essential to living as breathing.