ART BIZ | "Hope", Museum of Visionary Art - Yanni Posnakoff

Yanni Posnakoff, "Everything Is Possible."

I'm in Baltimore and today visited the "Hope" show at the Museum of Visionary Art. Much of the art is "folk" or self-taught or "naive". It has a curious appeal when combined with the theme of hope.

For example, there is a film show in which a 22-year-old man tries for the third time to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. The speaker, a former police officer, was trying to talk the would-be suicide out of what he was trying to do. (He notes that dying this way is grisly and, contrary to the belief of some, often gruesomely painful.)

The young man asked the police officer - "Have you every heard of Pandora's Box?" The officer replied yes, the box was given by Zeus to Pandora (from a story in Hesiod) with the instruction that it was full of evils and she should never, ever to open it. Pandora couldn't resist opening it and all the evils flew out, leaving only Hope.

Yanni Posnakoff, "Even Toy Soldiers Must Be
 Abolished. We Must Disarm the Nursery."n.d.,
Watercolor, ink and acrylic on paper. Courtesy
Philip Binioris.

Then the young man said: "What if the box is empty, and there is no hope left?"

Then he jumped to his death.

Some of the art in the show is about people who have suffered intensely but have translated their suffering into a determination to hope and to work toward a goal that will help others to hope.

Yanni Posnakoff is one of these artists.

Another story of hope - Sadako Sasaki.