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Humanity prevails in poet-painter Shaun T. Griffin’s ‘Border Stories’ at Nevada Humanities Program Gallery

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“Looking Through the Wall”
Nevada Humanities / Courtesy

Northern Nevada poet, painter and educator Shaun T. Griffin has dedicated his life to helping others. But sometimes, a problem is too vast and the suffering too immense for even him—a man who has changed the life of countless Nevada prisoners by teaching them poetry, a man who co-founded and directed the social justice agency Community Chest—to solve.

Such is the case with the global refugee crisis. About four years ago, Griffin was moved by the plight of the Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar. Feeling powerless to help, Griffin turned to making art.

A couple years later, the same thing happened again, this time at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Griffin was in Tijuana helping asylum seekers through the humanitarian organization Al Otro Lado, but it wasn’t enough.

“Borderless Child”

“Borderless Child”

Back home in Virginia City, Nevada, the image of “all of these people trying to find their way into this country through that very, very small port of entry” lingered in his mind, he says.

Feeling overwhelmed, Griffin began to paint and write poetry.

That’s the origin of Griffin’s new exhibition for Nevada Humanities, Border Stories. In it, Griffin seeks to spotlight the struggles of refugees, immigrants and anybody stuck at an international border. Most of the images arise from newspaper clippings.

“I’ve never worked on anything more intensely in my life,” Griffin says in a video he made to accompany the exhibit.

The first image is a downer. “Looking through the Wall” shows a mother and children—featured often as they are the most vulnerable—staring through bars and barbed wire. They appear to be imprisoned, and in a way they are. Their situation is dire, but a small glimmer of hope remains. Maybe they will get through to a better life on the other side.

“I wanted to articulate what I saw, which was untenable grief, and inexpressible hope all together,” Griffin says of the refugee experience. “So often it just gets discarded as if these aren’t people we’re talking about. … I had to try to document it so they wouldn’t just disappear as if they don’t exist.”

Griffin quickly realized that it would do no good—artistically or altruistically—to paint a bunch of depressingly bleak scenes. So, as the series continues, the images zoom out from what is to what could be. The border becomes a thin ribbon across a mountainous region and, finally, the natural landscape takes over. In other images, whimsy and magic emerge: The border wall becomes a series of colorful doors and windows, then abstract stacked hands, then simply a place where two crows meet. In “The Border to Us,” the wall bends sideways to let a woman pass. What once blocked the woman now is her royal entry.

“The arc of the show is from desperation to hope,” Griffin says in his video. “I still believe [that despite] coronavirus and every other damn thing that’s going on in this planet that there’s hope. We have children; we have grandchildren; thousands of people are being born every day. There has to be a way forward. Period.”

The ultimate transformation takes place in the watercolor “Borderless Child.” A little girl that Griffin had seen playing in the dirt by the border wall is elevated into a religious icon. Concertina wire becomes an elaborate frame as she stands in front of a stained glass window. She looks not toward the fence but toward the viewer, exalted.

“It inverted the image of her being a subject of derision to a subject of adoration,” Griffin says. “And I really, really liked that.”

Griffin says that his paintings are “not intended to look pretty.” But just as the child refugee becomes a queen, so do Griffin’s watercolors become heartbreakingly beautiful.

While the paintings might take center stage due to their size, do not miss Griffin’s poetry. The award-winning author of multiple books is a 2014 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Inductee. His poems about the border add additional depth and feeling to the show. The poem “Running From Skin” opens with the lines, “At the border, concertina wire/loops from McAllen to Donna/like earrings on women who string/a river without family.”

After a lifetime spent in the service of others, Griffin is ever optimistic, but he’s not naive. “I know that [this series] is not going to alter the course of things,” Griffin says. “What it’s going to do is change individual perceptions—if it does—and that’s how change works, right?”

Border Stories: Paintings & Poems by Shaun T. Griffin Through January 21; Tuesday-Thursday, 1-4 p.m.; First Friday until 9 p.m.; free. Nevada Humanities Program Gallery, 1017 S. 1st St. #190, 702-800-4670. Call or email [email protected] to schedule a viewing.

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