Nancy Romero & the Crown of Creation

Nancy Romero with her painting, “Adam and Eve.” Photo

Nancy Romero with her painting, “Adam and Eve.” Photo

Picking apples in the Garden of Eden
Nancy Romero is “In the Beginning” at El Camino College

Okay, what was the starting point? Do you know? And if you say yes, how do you know? Who told you? And who told that person?
For a group show, “In the Beginning: Origins of life on Earth from mythic to scientific,” is about as wide-open a topic as one can imagine. Curator Susanna Meiers took the first line from the Book of Genesis, which is “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and invited a number of artists to run with it. As she notes,
“This exhibition intends to examine thoughts about the initial origins of life on earth. Did we slither up from the mud? Did we spring from the hand of the Father? Did the initial Big Bang explode nothingness into something-ness?” Of the 15 artists whose works are on view, she says, “I have found in curating this show that the approach of each person is so different, each one from the next.”
Whether envisioning a certain text or putting their own spin on established creation myths, foundation myths, etc., all of them attempted “to comprehend the emergence of form from chaos.”
One certainly doesn’t need to be an artist to ask these heavy questions or to supply a response. Stephen Hawking posed the question, “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” and then asked, If there’s a Creator, who created him? Rather poetically, José Saramago wrote that “God is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.”

A whimper, or a shout?
Nancy Romero has had her head in the mythological clouds for many decades, and her artwork, both the colorful paintings and the automata, or art toys, have often gone to the fountain’s source, where various civilizations or cultures first attempted to wrest meaning or significance from the natural world. She also manages to convey her findings in a manner that’s inviting but not heavy-handed.
As we stand among her paintings and constructions, she says, “What I strive for in all these things is that they’re open-ended symbols and they really could be interpreted in any way. The viewer has to get involved. A lot of these are also kind of humorous; they’re not really deadly serious.
I characterize them as rather whimsical, and whimsy, she replies, is one of her favorite words.

Nancy Romero with her art toy, “The Apple of Discord.” Photo

But let’s go back to another sort of beginning.
“When I was 13,” Romero says, “somebody gave me a book called ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces,’ by Joseph Campbell. I was so overcome by that, that I couldn’t wait to get more of him, so I went to Sarah Lawrence College where he taught, and I took his class.”
Romero was on the road to becoming a mythologist, she says, but Campbell “was the whole discipline at that Time.”
“So I went into anthropology, thinking that would give me the foundation for a lot of mythology.” This was at the University of Pennsylvania. However, it seems that Campbell’s ideas weren’t looked upon favorably. “They hated him; they called him literary. They said he was making vast assumptions about world motifs when it was unsubstantiated and they were all independently invented.”
I later bring up Robert Graves, who was original and idiosyncratic in his views (“The White Goddess” being a good example), and Romero, after saying “He’s wonderful,” mentions “the whole Jungian contingent” and their “very personal cast on all these things. But there’s really no one way of looking at it.”
“Anyway, I was in anthropology for a couple of years and decided I was not in the right discipline, so I left.” She took her interest in the mythological with her, of course, which she’s continued to tap into from time to time.
When Meiers broached the idea of the current show, “it brought up a project that I was working on after I got out of university,” Romero says. “I wanted to do a film on creation myths from around the world, each one animated in the style of the country that it came from. I wasn’t an artist then, I was this mythologist, but I had a woman who was an animator, so we started. It floundered because I kept finding that all the myths that we had were translations, and the translations varied widely. I didn’t want to put something down and call it ‘the Tibetan creation story’ if it was just a bad translation; it become history once you do that and I was very sensitive to that… So I kind of drowned in all these details.”

“God Abides Alone in the Garden of Eden,” by Nancy Romero

A painter among painters
Along the way, Romero mentions that she didn’t begin painting until she was 35, which naturally prompts the question, What did you do before then?
“Well, I was an artist,” she replies. “I did commercial design, housewares, stuff like that, and I did ceramics. Then I met my second husband, Frank Romero, who’s a well-known painter… That kind of got me started. We shared a studio for 20 years and I painted along with him, using bigger brushes and more vivid palettes due to his influence. When we split up, now 17 years ago, I kind of created my own look.”
Knowing this, anyone who’s at all curious can make their own comparisons. But wait, there’s more…
“My mother was a painter, too,” Romero says.
“Her mother also started the Craft and Folk Art Museum across from LACMA,” Meiers says. “I started working there when I was 19 or 20, and that’s when I met Nancy.”
I’m not sure if Romero herself was going to offer up this vital bit of biography, but anyway, too late, the cat’s out of the bag now.
“Frank and I traveled a lot and I collected tons of folk art and toys, and I also bought stuff for the museum.” All those little wind-up or mechanical art toys of hers that make an exhibition of her work so charming? This seems to have been the spark.
There are two in the current show, one of them, “The Apple of Discord,” given its title by her 10-year-old grandson.
“The apple being the device that brings death and time into the world, right?” Romero says.
“Death, time, and knowledge,” Meiers interjects, although I’m beginning to wonder if the apple, as such, wasn’t akin to Pandora’s Box in that many other elements took wing as soon as Adam and Eve had finished taking bites from it.
The other art toy, “The Next Iteration,” is even more elaborate, being a tree of evolution with a gibbon and an orangutan toward the bottom, a gorilla and a chimp a little higher up in the branches, Adam and Eve near the top, but something else even higher, hidden among the leaves, with the (judgmental) finger of God pointing down to it from the top of the work. Perched on the frame itself, two crows or ravens are having a tug-of-war over a worm: they seem to symbolize the dog-eat-dog struggle to survive. The piece itself suggests that evolution is ongoing and that we humans are not necessarily the end product. If you read the daily news, you’re bound to agree.

“The First Last Supper,” by Nancy Romero

The handful of paintings brings us in for a closer look. The largest canvas (“Adam and Eve”) depicts a pair of monkeys squatting on a table, their innocence about to vanish courtesy of that shiny red apple they’re about to share. Various toys around them emphasize their childlike, curious nature.
Walled in to keep at bay the dry and bare landscape just beyond, we see a verdant oasis in “God Abides Alone in the Garden of Eden.” Romero offers up an interpretation of the piece: “It’s okay to have an Eden, but relationships and other things are equally as important, and people can isolate themselves. They struggle for a goal, and then they find that they’re all alone in the world because they’ve left everybody else behind or gotten rid of them. The door is locked, the door is barred, and there’s just a little chair in there that’s been waiting for Him to come and sit.”
Perhaps by the time one decides to sit down and rest it’s too late to enjoy the garden. Think about yourself and your 9 to 5 job and all the bills that return month after month. But as I mention to Romero, one can imagine many scenarios from looking at her pictures.
I won’t describe every piece that Romero has in the show, but we do spend a few minutes in front of “The First Last Supper” with, sorry, no reference to Leonardo da Vinci.
This picture, again with Adam and Eve in the bucolic Garden of Eden, features quite a cast of chummy animals. It’s like the neighborhood block party where everyone’s in a good mood.
“They’re all living peacefully together,” Romero says. “The peaceable kingdom. And they’re saying, Have one of these. Totally innocent. So this is the last supper, the last time everybody sat down in peace. Because after this everybody ate each other.”
Romero doesn’t simply focus on one culture or one religion. “I’m very universal,” she says of her approach, “and I see so many similarities and processes.” Through her work she wants us to sense the connections. As for what binds all of them together, “we have to look for that common humanity.”
In the Beginning: Origins of life on Earth from mythic to scientific goes on view Monday, with an artists’ reception set for Thursday, Sept. 6, from 7 to 9 p.m. A gallery talk is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 1 p.m. In addition to Nancy Romero, the exhibition features work by Phoebe Barnum, Joyce Dallal and Naima White, Satoe Fukushima, Lauren Kasmer, Peter Liashkov, Yvette Mangual, Nancy Mozur, Victor Raphael and Clayton Spada, Vojislav Radovanovic, and Frank J. Williams. Hours, Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., plus Wednesday and Thursday from 12 to 7:30 p.m. Through Sept. 20. Call (310) 660-3010 or go to elcamino.edu. ER

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