Joan Baez: Mischief Makers at Seager Gray Gallery

JOAN BAEZ

Mischief Makers

Joan Baez: Mischief Makers In her history-making career as an international performer and activist, Joan Baez has been on the front lines of just about every nonviolent social justice and human rights movement of the past century.

She walked arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights marches in Mississippi, got thrown in jail for protesting the War in Vietnam and conspired with Vaclav Havel to spark the Velvet Revolution. Along the way, she serenaded Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi and survived the American bombing of Hanoi.

Her 75th birthday celebration at the Beacon Theater in New York was recorded for the PBS series “Great Performances,” and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

This is the first formal exhibition of her art, and it is consistent with her background as an antiwar activist that she would choose to paint portraits of courageous people – some she’s known intimately -- who’ve made a difference, disrupted the old order, spoken truth to power and done so not only with commitment and courage, but also with a certain charm, a sense of humor, the ability to shine light in the darkness. That’s why she calls this show “Mischief Makers.”

Joan Baez: Mischief Makers Exhibition: September 1 - September 30, 2017

Front Cover: Joan Baez, Self Portrait, detail, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 in Back Cover: Joan Baez, photograph by James Croucher Text by Paul Liberatore Photo Credit for Paintings: Electric Works SF Many of the painting were inspired by photographs. These photo credits are as follows: Joan Baez: Yousuf Karsh Reverend William Barber: Gerry Broome Harry Belafonte: Dorothy Wilding Bob Dylan: Ken Regan Mimi FariĂąa: Jim Marshall Vaclav Havel: Tomas Turek/Czech News Agency Dolores Huerta: Jon Lewis Martin Luther King: Jack Lewis Hiller (Photo in the collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery) Aung San Suu Kyi: Platon Catalog Design: Donna Seager, Seager Gray Gallery Cover Design: Alexandra Washkin

All rights reserved.

Direct all inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941

The choice of subjects for this, my first exhibit, “Mischief Makers,” emerged from the storm of corruption that followed the most recent change of high office in this country.

In an attempt to confront the collapse and disintegration of morality being played out for us day after day, I painted portraits of people, most of whom I have known personally, who, with tenacity, courage, intelligence, risk taking and resilience have made another kind of social change. Through direct action and a willingness to accept suffering, but never to inflict it, they have confronted pernicious bodies of power.

Some have taken life-threatening risks, others have suffered discomfort, humiliation, separation from and fear for friends and family. All have rejected violence as their means to an end.

The added element, which is often buried under the weightiness and dedication to positive change, is mischief -- the coyote element, imaginative trickery, slyness, the shenanigans that give a movement its soul, confound the oppressor and create laughter and music.

I have always drawn animals, flowers, people - and continue to sketch cartoons, right and left handed and even upside down. It was, however, when I began painting with acrylics that I began to immerse myself in the process. I am so grateful to those who have steered my course of painting discovery - specifically my essential teachers, artists Jylian Gustlin and Ona LeSassier and to Liz Amini-Holmes who introduced me to acrylics.

Working with the faces of these “Mischief Makers,” people I have so loved and admired, has been especially gratifying and seeing them displayed all together makes a statement that speaks louder than words.

Joan Baez July, 2017

Joan Baez, Self Portrait (1941 - )

As inspiration for her own portrait, Joan chose a 1969 photograph of her

by Yousuf Karsh (1908 – 2002), an Armenian-Canadian photographer whose portraits of notable people led to him being considered one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century.

When the photo was taken, Joan was living at Struggle Mountain, a compound in the Los Altos Hills that was a haven for draft resisters. Her husband David had recently been arrested there by federal marshals and carted off to prison to begin serving a three-year sentence for draft evasion. Joan was pregnant with their son, Gabe.

“Three or four guys from the Resistance were living there on the property,” she recalls. “A lot of this was around the Center for Nonviolence. It was all very political.”

She had cut her famously long black hair into a more utilitarian bob, a style that horrified the stuffy, buttoned-down Karsh when he arrived at their mountain retreat.

“He was aghast,” she recalls with a giggle. “I don’t know how he pulled himself together.”

The photographer would probably approve of the alteration she made when she used his photo to paint her portrait. It shows a famous young performer and activist with her face in her hands and with her long hair once again flowing over her shoulders, looking like the folk madonna Karsh had envisioned.

“I gave myself my hair back,” she says with a grin.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968)

MLK, Jr. had Joan’s number. “They say he used to prolong his speeches about nonviolence when I was there because he loved to see me cry, ” Joan says, then imitates his stentorian voice, “Every time I say nonviolence, I know Joan Baez is going to be in tears.”

She once joined him and other civil rights leaders for a march in Grenada, Mississippi. He had come in late on the plane and went to take a nap in a bedroom of the home he was staying in. When he hadn’t gotten up and it was getting later and later, Joan was sent in to see if she could rouse him. In her silvery soprano, she sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

“He just rolled over and said, ‘I think I hear the sound of an angel,’” she recalls. “Then he said, ‘Let’s have another one, Joan.’ And he went back to sleep. It was very funny.”

On another occasion, Joan was invited to ride along with Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young when they drove to pick Rev. King up at the airport for a Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting and march the next day. “I was excited to hear how they would plan the march,” Joan remembers.

“Instead, they told off-color jokes from the airport back to the conference.

That evening I told Andy (Young) that I was surprised and disappointed, saying I thought I was going to hear how they planned a march. Andy just smiled and said, ‘You did.’”

Vaclav Havel (1936 – 2011)

No one rivals Vaclav Havel, leader of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, when it comes to being the quintessential mischief maker with purpose, courage and elan. A playwright, poet and political dissident, Havel would go on to become the first president of the Czech Republic after his Velvet Revolution toppled communism in 1989. He died in 2011 at the age of 75.

Joan’s portrait of him captures some of the boyish insouciance, the cigarettesmoking Eastern European charm that she remembers so fondly. She tells a story about the night that he and some fellow dissidents came to her hotel room in Prague to plot some “mischief making” at her concert that night.

Havel had already spent four years in prison for his political activities and was under the constant surveillance of the secret police.

“We all drank beer and planned how we would disrupt the concert that evening because it was on national television,” Joan recalls. “How crazy were they to want to do this?” To sneak the future Czech president past the authorities and into the theater, Joan had him walk in with her, carrying her guitar in its case. (After that, whenever they would see each other, he’d joke, “I’m roadie.”) Once inside, Havel, who delighted in the unexpected, took a seat in the balcony and waited for the mischief they had arranged to unfold.

About midway through the concert, Joan turned to the crowd and said, in Czech, “And now I’d like to introduce my good friend Vaclav Havel.”

“The place exploded,” she remembers. “It just exploded. The government immediately had the TV feed turned off. I sang ‘Swing Low’ to him without a microphone because the sound system wasn’t on. And that’s when we bonded.

Later, he referred to it as the last drop before the revolution.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945 – )

Joan’s two portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi, one as a young woman and the other as she looks today, show the admiration and affection she has for the Burmese champion of democracy.

Suu Kyi, who would become the first woman to serve as minister of foreign affairs in Myanmar (Burma), was held for more than 13 years under house arrest for her opposition to Myanmar’s brutal military regime. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.” The Nobel Committee said it was “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.”

Suu Kyi, wearing the flowers in her hair that have become her signature, had just come down from the stage at the Forum 2000 Conference in Prague after giving a moving keynote speech when Joan famously slipped past a security guard, took the stage and sang “Gracias a la Vida” in her honor. “A lifetime dream fulfilled,” she said afterward. The next day, when the two women met for the first time, Joan presented her with a poem she wrote for her in 1990.

“Under house arrest in her apartment Aung San Suu Kyi keeps the sun at her feet for beauty in the fall, warmth in the winter and kickball in the spring.

Wild flowers grow on her censored bookshelves And birds deliver a hundred handwritten messages a day She carries silence in her glass steps, listening to Mozart in her head Played on a piano every note sublime Outside the government crumbles.”

John Lewis (1940 - )

As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Georgia Congressman John Lewis was the youngest of the “big six” leaders who organized 1963’s March on Washington. One of the original Freedom Riders, he became a hero of the civil rights movement on March 7, 1965, “Bloody Sunday,” the day he led some 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. When they stopped to pray, they were attacked by nightstick wielding state troopers. Lewis suffered a fractured skull, but managed to bravely go before the TV cameras, calling for President Lyndon Johnson to intervene in Alabama.

Joan’s portrait of him shows a man bristling with courage and dignity.

“His bravery went above and beyond,” she says, admiring his commitment to nonviolent protest that continues to this day. A leader of many lunch counter sit-ins back in the day, Lewis led a Democratic party sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives in 2016, demanding action on gun control legislation following yet another mass shooting.

“By sitting in and sitting down,” he said, “we’re standing up.”

Harry Belafonte (1927 - )

“His was the easiest portrait I’ve ever painted,” Joan says. “He’s so frigging handsome. His face is so smooth. It’s like a setup.” Belafonte was “The King of Calypso” in the 1950s and ’60s, famous for his “Banana Boat Song” with its signature, “Day-O.” She first heard his records when she was 16, in high school, when the family was living in Redlands, California, while her father taught physics at the university there.

“He was the first singer I heard in folk music, before Pete Seeger and Odetta,” she says. “I couldn’t know at that early age that we would end up marching with Dr. King and that he would become a close friend of mom’s.” Joan’s mother, often referred to as Joan Sr. had a special place in her heart for Belafonte, an early supporter of Dr. King’s and one of his confidantes. She swooned whenever she was around him and kept his signed picture beside her bed.

But he was an even closer friend of Joan’s. When he met her son, Gabe, who was still in his teens, he shook Gabe’s hand and said, “If I’d played my cards right, you’d be MY son.”

“We had a little thing,” Joan admits. “I always just took it as a compliment that it came to his mind.”

The Dalai Lama as a Boy (1935 - )

The 14th Dalai Lama replaced the 13th Dalai Lama when he was two years old. Following signs and visions, a search team investigating the births of unusual children found him living with his farming and horse trading family in a small house at the end of a twisting path in a Tibetan village on the border with China.

When they showed him the Dalai Lama’s rosary, the child toddled over and asked for it. The Panchen Lama said, “If you know who I am, you can have it.”

The little boy said, “Sera Lama, Sera Lama,” in a Lhasa accent, a language the family didn’t speak. He then correctly identified, from pairs or objects, all of the things owned by the previous Dalai Lama, saying, “It’s mine! It’s mine!”

And that’s when they knew they didn’t have to look any further. They knew then they had found the 14th Dalai Lama.

He had been described as “a fearless child,” and his expression in Joan’s painting shows a little boy not sure of what was happening to him, but whatever it was, he was ready for it.

The 14th Dalai Lama assumed full temporal duties at the age of 15, just after China incorporated Tibet. In 1959, the Tibetans rebelled, China struck back and the Dalai Lama, fearing for his life, fled to Dharamshala, India, and set up “Little Lhasa,” a government in exile.

David Harris (1946 - )

While the hippie movement was flowering in the LSD-soaked Haight Ashbury in 1967, the Summer of Love, Joan was protesting the war in Vietnam, getting arrested – along with her mother, Joan Sr., and younger sister, Mimi Fariña – at a Bay Area anti-war demonstration and spending time in Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail.

Her husband at the time, David Harris, the father of their son, Gabe, paid an even higher price for standing up against an unjust war, serving 20 months in federal prisons. Harris was voted “Boy of the Year” at Fresno High School in 1963 and went on to become student body president at Stanford University.

He had the resources to get out of the draft if he had wanted to take an easy way out. But rather than flee to Canada as some draft resisters were doing, or come up with some phony medical condition that would get him rejected as 4-F, he and some other courageous draft protesters founded the Resistance, an organization that encouraged young men of draft age to refuse to cooperate with the Selective Service System, to return or burn their draft cards and refuse to be inducted. By banding together, they hoped to help bring about an end to the war. When Harris failed to report for duty, he was charged with draft evasion, a federal felony.

“The day we awaited his arrest, the house was filled with draft resisters and other anti-war activists,” Joan remembers. “When the sheriffs arrived they were invited in for coffee. They refused, put David in handcuffs and we all cheered as they put him in the car.” As the sheriff ’s car drove off, one of the anti-war mischief makers stuck a bumper sticker over the license plate. It said, “Resist the Draft.”

After being released on parole in 1970, David said, “In prison, I lost my ideals, but not my principles.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997 – )

The same enlightened twinkle Joan sees in Ram Dass she sees in Malala, who was 17 when she became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“There’s something about her crooked little smile,” Joan says, basing her portrait on an image from the 2015 documentary “He Named Me Malala” by Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim.

In October 2012, Malala had already won the International Children’s Peace Prize for her blog about her fight to protect girls’ education in her native valley in northwest Pakistan when a masked gunman boarded her school bus and shot her in the neck, shoulder and head.

She was sent to Britain for treatment and after many surgeries and months of rehabilitation, she was discharged from the hospital in January 2013. When she made her first public appearance six months later, the United Nations declared it “Malala Day,” promising to dedicate it each year to relieving the plight of the world’s most vulnerable girls.

In 2017, Malala celebrated her 20th birthday, embarking on a six-month “Girl Power Trip” that took her to North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

“I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not,” she says. “It is the story of many girls.”

Ram Dass (1931 – )

In the spring of 2017, Joan, Jackson Browne, Wavy Gravy and Kris Kristofferson performed in a benefit concert for SEVA in honor of spiritual leader Ram Dass at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Hawaii. SEVA’s cofounder, Ram Dass, best known for “Be Here Now,” a 1971 book that turned a generation on to alternative spirituality, yoga and meditation, lives in Maui and watched the show from a wheelchair as it raised $150,000 for SEVA’s sight-saving programs in 20 countries.

Now 86, he has been in slowly declining health since a 1997 stroke affected his speech and limited his mobility.

“When I saw him, I thought, ‘This guy’s enlightened.’ He glows, he just glows with an enlightened twinkle,” Joan says. “He can’t even turn himself over in bed at night anymore, and he knows he’s dying. I asked him, ‘Do you have pain?’ He said, ‘Lots.’ I said, ‘How is that for you?’ He told me this whole thing about how his mind does this and his body does that. And then he said, ‘And then I love it.’ I just sat and cried and held his hand.”

Mimi Fariña (1945 – 2001)

Joan’s younger sister became a folk music star in her own right in the mid-’60s, performing as a duo with her husband, singer-songwriter and novelist Richard Fariña. The couple recorded a couple of acclaimed albums for Vanguard Records, “Celebrations for a Grey Day” and “Reflections in a Crystal Wind.”

Richard, author of the cult novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,” was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966 on Mimi’s 21st birthday.

Mimi continued to perform, often in duets with Joan, but her real passion was Bread & Roses, a Marin County-based nonprofit she founded in 1974 to bring free, live music to people shut away in institutions — juvenile facilities, hospitals, senior centers, convalescent homes, homeless shelters, rehab facilities, prisons— anywhere folks could use the joy that music can bring.

Mimi died of cancer in 2001 after leading Bread & Roses for 25 years. It has lived on after her death. To this day, more than 1,000 volunteer musicians and performers present 626 Bread & Roses shows a year in 123 facilities in eight Bay Area counties, an average of more than one every single day.

“Mimi was a leading figure in the Bay Area and beyond,” Joan says. “Bread & Roses was her innovation, taking entertainment into these places. And it was so well organized for 25 years that it continues to this day.”

Bob Dylan (1941 - )

Joan refers to this painting as “Old Happy Face.” She and Dylan have a complicated, much publicized, formerly romantic relationship that goes all the way back to the early 1960s, when she used her stardom to help launch his career. She refuses to take credit for it, though, saying if she hadn’t done it someone else would.

They performed together on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 and ’76. The revue also featured Jack Elliott, Roger McGuinn and playwright Sam Shepard. Bobby Neuwirth put together a band that included T Bone Burnett and Mick Ronson.

Joan has some fond and funny memories of that wild ride, the first time she and Dylan had appeared together since their breakup in 1965. Dylan introduced her as “a special friend of mine, a friend of mine through the years. And she is great!”

Then they’d duet on “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

Once, between songs, “Dylan said, ‘Joan has a way of changing things.

You never know what she’s gonna do.” Sure enough, as Joan tells the story: “One evening I decided to black out a couple of teeth for our duet. I kept my mouth shut as I walked across the stage to our shared microphone. When I was two feet away I flashed Bob a big smile.

He literally jumped backwards, as I remember, and from the accounts from my friends in the audience. Later on, old happy face had an uncharacteristic fit of laughter.”

Reverend William Barber (1963 - )

Joan calls the Rev. William Barber, a North Carolina pastor and political leader, “the closest thing to a Martin Luther King we have.”

A dynamic speaker with a big body and an out-sized personality and spirit to match, Rev. Barber gave a speech in support of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 that was described as “remarkable” and “riveting.” Despite his bulk, he has been known to jump up and down after a passionate oration, exhorting the crowd with “What time is it? It’s movement time!”

A lifelong activist, he was elected president of the NAACP Youth Council at 15, high school student body president at 17 and president of the student government at North Carolina Central University at 19, graduating cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He got his master’s of divinity from Duke University and a doctorate from Drew University in public policy and pastoral care.

After leading civil rights protests he called “Moral Mondays” in North Carolina’s state capital, Barber was arrested when he refused to leave North Carolina’s legislative building in a protest over the Republican party’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, causing millions of people across the country to lose their health insurance.

At the same time, he resigned as president of the state’s NAACP to launch and lead a new “Poor People’s Campaign” aimed at building a progressive agenda to push back against the ultra-conservative policies of the right wing in state and national politics.

At the urging of a friend, Joan got in touch with him a year ago to offer her help and support. She sang by phone at one of his huge rallies, hearing the voices of thousands singing along from another state. After meeting in person at her concert in Raleigh they discovered that they both enjoyed, among other things, salty jokes, and have been friends and movement colleagues ever since.

“That’s a very King-like scenario,” she said. “He has a huge following. I like him and think he’s going to move some mountains around.”

Dolores Huerta (1930 – )

With Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farmworkers (UFW ) and was instrumental in organizing the Delano Grape Strike in 1965.

She was also the lead negotiator in the first contract after the strike.

“Whenever I was on the marches with Cesar Chavez, she was always there – young and tough and brave,” Joan says. “And she also has lasted.”

She certainly has, despite being severely beaten by San Francisco police officers in a peaceful and lawful protest against the policies of President George H.W. Bush outside the St. Francis Hotel in 1988. Baton-wielding officers broke several of her ribs and caused serious internal injuries that required the emergency removal of her spleen. She subsequently won a large judgment against the police and the city that was used to benefit the union.

After a lengthy recovery, she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, a grassroots organization to develop the next generation of leaders, and she traveled the country for two years on behalf of women’s rights, significantly increasing the number of women in government. At the 2008 Democratic Convention, she was chosen to formally put Hillary Clinton’s name into nomination as the Democratic candidate for president.

At 87, her honors include the Eugene V. Debs Outstanding American Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1993, she was the first Latina woman inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)

‘And Still I Rise’ “All the time I was painting I was listening to her autobiography on audio books,” Joan says. “Her writing is beautiful, her speaking voice is wonderful.

It’s the story of a child, the daughter of sharecroppers who got raped when she was eight. She didn’t speak for five years, but during that time she read everything she could get her hands on. She’s an amazing woman.”

As you may have guessed, Joan was listening to Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” the breakthrough autobiography that chronicles her life up to the age of 17. So she painted Maya Angelou as a young girl, her hair in little pigtails, her unsmiling face looking you square in the eye with unflinching intelligence and resolve. Joan has written “And Still I Rise,” the title poem of Angelou’s third volume of poetry, in cursive in a lower corner of the painting.

As an activist, Angelou was once a coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked with both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. She was a consultant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., and had the spunk to object to a paraphrase of a quote on the memorial that she said made King “look like an arrogant twit.” It was eventually removed.

Like Malcolm X, she rejected black nationalism and believed that it took black and white people working together to truly achieve equality and positive change.

“It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites,” she said. “Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air -- we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.”

Marilyn Youngbird (1939 -)

Joan painted her portrait of her dear friend Marilyn Youngbird, a Native American healer, teacher and lecturer, from a photo she took when she joined Marilyn at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to fight for their rights to their own land by shutting down the Dakota Access Pipeline.

They slept in sleeping bags in a 20-foot-tall teepee and were part of a peaceful protest by members of 200 tribes against the ecologically treacherous project.

“Marilyn was accustomed to the weather in North Dakota, and bundled herself into two sleeping bags,” Joan says. “She was concerned about my comfort. ‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ I said in my one sleeping bag. I not only froze, but periodically slid off my little mat onto the dirt floor of the teepee. It wasn’t even winter…”

A consultant to the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation, Marilyn was there to build a safe haven home for children on the Fort Berthold Reservation. “The work is challenging and unrewarding, but she isn’t asking for rewards,” Joan says. “You can see the oil wells belching smoke and encroaching on the reservation. Some of them are owned by Native Americans themselves. They are deepening the tragedy of Native American people who live there.”

“While I was there, I saw singers from tribes as far away as New Zealand, Canada and Hawaii take the microphone to perform in their tribal languages. I saw young people ride bareback through the tall grass under hundreds of bright-colored flags, past tents and teepees. At the same time, the faces of the elders reflect the decades of suffering and resignation they have endured. I found it to be very moving. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a movement.”

Marilyn, whose tribal name is “Chief Woman Among Chiefs,” is a member of the Arikara and Hidatsa nations. She’s been one of Joan’s spiritual guides and friends for many years. Through her lectures, seminars and workshops, she’s introduced people from all over the world to Native American philosophy and medicine.

When Joan’s sister, Mimi Fariña, was ill with cancer, Marilyn led healing sweat lodges and was there, supporting Joan and her family, when Mimi died in 2001. Joan has always referred to Marilyn as a sister, and while she was in North Dakota, she was adopted into Marilyn’s tribe in a ceremony at the Arikara Cultural Center. As part of the ritual, she was given an Arikara name that couldn’t be more appropriate: Sacred Voice Eagle Woman.

The White Flower of Bach Mai Joan began painting this portrait of a boy monk in her hotel room during her return visit to Hanoi in 2013, 40 years after she went there on a peace mission near the end of the Vietnam War. It’s from a photograph that happened to catch her eye while she was there. She painted the Vietnamese national flower in an upper corner in honor of the Bach Mai Hospital, which was nearly destroyed in the Christmas season bombings in December 1972 that killed 28 hospital staff members while Joan was in the capital. American officials said that bombs meant for nearby Bach Mai Airfield somehow missed their target and hit the hospital instead.

American B-52s pounded Hanoi for 11 straight days, sending everyone scrambling for safety into the bunker underneath Joan’s hotel, the Metropole Hanoi, the same one she would stay in on her return trip.

“When I went back, there were a few employees of the hotel left from the first time I was there,” she says one afternoon in her studio. “I told them the story of how I decided to be brave and wasn’t going to run to the bomb shelter. That was until there was this huge blast and people were passing me on the stairs right and left. After that, I was gone like a shot.”

Back at home, Joan recorded an album, “Where Are You Now, My Son?” that included the sounds of air-raid sirens and bombs exploding. “That was my first experience in dealing with my own mortality, which I thought was a terrible cosmic arrangement,” she told a reporter for the Associated Press. “It is OK for everyone else to die, but surely there was another plan for me?”

The bunker that everyone huddled together in during the bombing is now a memorial to those killed in the siege. When Joan stepped into it on her return trip four decades later, she placed her palm against the cement wall, closed her eyes and sang the African American spiritual “Oh, Freedom.” “I felt this huge warmth,” she said. “It was gratitude. I thought I would feel all these wretched things about the bunker, but I felt love that it took care of me.”

A Po r t i o n o f t h e P r o c e e d s f o r “ M i s c h i e f M a k e r s ” g o e s t o C a r a c e n S F CA R E C EN S F e m p o w e r s a n d r e s p o n d s t o t h e n e e d s , r i g h t s a n d a s p i r a t i o n s o f L a t i n o, i m m i g r a n t , a n d u n d e r - r e s o u r c e d f a m i l i e s i n t h e S a n Fr a n c i s c o Bay Area – building leadership to pursue self-determination and justice.

The Paintings 1. Joan Baez Self-Portrait, 2017

10. Ram Dass, 2017

2. Martin Luther King, 2014

11. Malala Yousafzai, 2017

3. Vaclav Havel, 2017

12. Bob Dylan, 2016

4. Aung San Suu Kyi, 2017

13. Mimi Fariña, 2012

5. Young Aung San Suu Kyi, 2017

14. Reverend William Barber, 2017

6. John Lewis, 2017

15. Dolores Huerta, 2017

7. Harry Belafonte, 2017

16. Maya Angelou, 2017

8. The Dalai Lama as a Boy, 2016

17. Marilyn Youngbird, 2017

9. David Harris, 2017

18. The White Flower of Bach Mai, 2016

Acrylic on Panel 30 x 24 inches

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Acrylic on Panel 24 x 24 inches

Acrylic on Canvas 30 x 24 inches

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