Crooked Fool: Grandma’s Secret Basement Art Show

My grandmother was an interesting woman. A Trump, conflict, and Pee Wee Herman-hating, family and church-loving, obsessive picture taking, quilting and crafting former teacher, she was perpetually baffled that the two L’s in “tortilla” made a Y sound, and saw all of my shows twice. There’s a lot I could say. But this isn’t actually about her.

It’s about all the random shit she left behind.

Currently, in an old, crappy townhouse I share with two roommates, I have a number of small crafts with a little paint signature that reads “Sharon,” followed by a year. There’s a painting of Holly Hobby, an old children’s character my mom used to love; a ceramic smiley-faced pumpkin; and a series of random fruits painted on various wooden wall decorations. There’s also a full-sized, handmade quilt hanging in my bedroom, originally gifted to her good friend Lynette. Decades later, she would three-way call me while I was trying to order a bagel, giddy and laughing with her old friend, to tell me that the old quilt would be sent to me in short order.

And then there were the pictures. Somehow, I got volunteered to make a slideshow for her funeral, and my mom insisted that we go through every single picture she had. There were Rubbermaid tubs full of them. She had filled several of those cardboard filing boxes. And then, when we thought we were done, somebody opened the closet in her study, revealing stacks more. And none of that included the ones she had taken after she got a smartphone. Then, of course, the church had a strict policy against slideshows at funerals (???????), so we played it before the service and I ran around the church hassling everyone to go in early and view the 130 slides.

Grandpa sold the house not long after she died, leaving a mess of clutter to sift through. Both at the house and the storage unit after, I pulled the most random old crafts out of boxes and bins. Even with the entire family going through things, I’m sure some got thrown out. And I honestly couldn’t have kept everything if I wanted to.

But I’m still glad she made them. And I’m glad she kept them. The point of it all wasn’t to end up in some fancy art show or to sell stuff on Etsy as a side hustle. It was just to create beauty where she could. To make the things she wanted to make. Seeing the weird nonsense she made when she was bored in the 70’s speaks to her humanity: the person she was and how she inhabited the world.

And even if every last craft had been thrown away, I would still have been glad that she made them. Just like I’m glad when a small town theatre company puts on a show or a local band plays at my favorite bar.

And especially as someone working in the arts and facing the ever-present pressure to gain recognition and make my mark in an ever-more competitive market, it’s helpful to remember that the value in her creations is not that they made money or made her famous. It’s that she made the things she wanted to make because she could. She declared without words what she saw as beautiful. She proclaimed her divinity and her humanity. And for that reason, I hope that someday whoever I leave behind will see evidence of the things I created with my own hands, body, and voice while I was here, even if they weren’t funded, and even if no critic will ever praise them. It’s not all about getting famous or being recognized in a thousand years. It’s about our human right and need to create.

Even if we are nobody for the rest of our lives and die forgotten, we can still have our say.