It’s not apparent on first sight what yokes the art of Dawn Whitfield with the art of Sodam Lee.
Whitfield makes dolls — tall, long-limbed female figures with hand-painted ceramic faces, their wiry bodies wrapped in tribal African costumes.
Lee makes fine art prints from woodblocks and mixed media. Her images are modern on first glance, sharply imbued with patterns of light, color and dark.
The two women artists have merged their work for a show opening Friday at the B.B. King Museum in Indianola. A reception for the public will be held in the museum’s interpretive center from 6 to 8 p.m.
Both Lee and Whitfield work in the Fine Arts Department at Mississippi Valley State University. And though Whitfield is a Mississippian and Lee is a native of South Korea, as women and artists they have more in common than a glance at their work reveals.
Look a little longer at Lee’s multi-layered prints, and patterns begin to emerge — layers from the past, landscapes and objects from foreign lands, images that illustrate the contrast between rich and poor, material and spiritual.
Whitfield will tell you she was led to the past of her distant ancestors, tribal African women, through a disconnecting personal experience that forced her to look deeply inward.
Both women are searching for a way to link their experiences as modern women and artists to the long thread of history and experience.
Lee has taken been the path of an academic, from Korea to the United States, from a university in Iowa to Mississippi Valley State, with fellowship residencies in Italy in between, as thoroughly disorienting a journey as any modern soul can conjure.
For Whitfield, the single working mother of two college-age children, the journey was from a relationship fraught with domestic violence to self-sufficiency and health.
“I did my undergraduate thesis at Delta State on domestic violence,” Whitfield said. “I wanted to talk about my life, and I started reading about African tribes and learning about the symbols in their art and language that stand for wisdom and courage.
“To me, they stood for the survival of women, African-American women like me.”
Some of Whitfield’s dolls are dressed in burlap to represent bags used by slaves for picking cotton. Some are wrapped in fabric that has been embellished with a bleach pen, imprinted with symbols representing toughness, endurance, unity and justice.
Whitfield runs her finger across a doll’s headdress. “She encouraged me to do my art.”
She refers to her colleague, Lee.
“She is strong-willed, dependable and reliable.
“(Sodam) and I wanted to show our work to the public, and she encouraged me to follow through,” Whitfield said.
“The B.B. King Museum was her idea,” Lee said. “When I first came to the Mississippi Delta and to Valley, Dawn and I had many discussions about hardships here, about discrimination in Mississippi.
“We had an intellectual and political connection,” Lee said.
Together, the two women have melded visions to include both of their histories through place — from Korea to Ghana to Venice to Mississippi — and through the resiliency both have experienced as independent women.
Whitfield hopes to pursue graduate studies in art, and Lee intends to help guide her.
Their friendship and their art know no bounds.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com
