Intern Francesca Norman Joins us for the Summer - Spring 2022
We are delighted that Francesca will join us for the summer as she deliberates what’s next after recently graduating from the University of Dallas. Francesca follows her sister Ana who interned with us a few years ago. You will understand as you read below why we believe this will be a fun summer with Francesca not only learning a bit but also making a positive contribution to meeting our challenges over the next few months. You do need to know where you are before you can figure out where you are going. I think Francesca has that part worked out.
The best intern we have ever had at Shango Gallery by Francesca Norman
Hello this article is going to be three hundred thousand words long. John said it must be so.
My name is Francesca Norman. A few weeks ago I graduated from the University of Dallas with a degree in English Literature and a concentration in studio art. Someone asked me the other day how I was allowed to concentrate in something completely unrelated to my degree when a “concentration” is technically a more specific subcategory of a major field of study. I found myself answering that art and literature are actually completely related, both equal under the category of what it means to be storytelling animals. Culture, tradition, spoken and unspoken social rules, identity, self expression, and memory are all examples of our observation of the world put into form. In order to understand something we articulate it, we delineate it in an art piece or explain it in words, even if only words in our minds, and this re-creation of the visible and abstract world is something essential that distinguishes humans from animals.
Perspective is not the real world; perspective is a story though stories are no less real than the world. The ways in which we choose to capture a perspective - of an object, a feeling, the past, etc – if its articulation doesn’t completely miss the mark, determine the universe we see around us, determine ourselves and our gods and our meanings in life. Every person has a perspective and so, I think, every person is an artist as soon as they exteriorize what they perceive. In speaking, in writing, in drawing, in re-creating, we tell a narrative. Through these narratives – hopefully the more perceptive ones which add sense rather than nonsense to the world are perpetuated – people provide for each other a life full of meaning. The downside of this is that people can be wrong, can lie convincingly, and can perpetuate nonsensical stories until the masses are duped and believe in a world of delusion. Stories have power because through them we understand the nature of the world and of ourselves.
Surrounded by ancient art in the Shango Gallery and studying books in John’s library, I feel, if only in the slightest sense, what an ancient tribal world was made of and how different it was from my own 21st century world of orange street cones and ever present internet. The rich narratives that I see through the clay pots shaped like little men, and masks, and bowls with snakes and rabbits, and sacred sand drawings woven into colorful rugs tell of worlds in which every object had a purpose and every symbol had power. I can image that the rituals of a people who believed in these stories created a universe saturated with meaning.
Understanding the stories of the past told through art and writing will help me see the through lines that appear in every time and culture and let me in on the secret universe that can never be completely accessed by the people of the present. Despite the space between then and now, now that the past is in the past, it has joined the democracy of the dead that determines a foundation for the stories we tell today. They are a part of us in some way. We can’t abandon the clay pots and the gods of past, and why would we want to? They are beautiful and they expand the small world of the moment into a world full of stories.
Anyway, I am an intern and it is exciting. Not only do I get first hand advice on how to not wear ball gowns in professional settings, I get to hold the art and observe it up close and to ask questions while John organizes art deals. I don’t know what I am going to do next but maybe I will go back to school eventually because I missed my chance to drop out the first time.
