I invite you to spend some time with these interviews and poems inspired by Stars of America
Listen to interview with Lois Reitzes for City Lights with Melvin Toledo and Madeline Beck, Marietta Cobb Museum of Art' curator here
Interview for Univision with Andres Quinones en espanol
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees – Robert Irwin
Ode to Melvin Toledo
by Evelyn Asher
Obscured. Misunderstood.
Dominoes of fake news
Robs generations of immigrants of opportunities
Glass ceilings muddied.
Myths busted by the artist’s brush
The artist’s passion spotlights the subject’s strengths
Hurdles overcome –new homeland, novel language
Foreign tongue that follows the innocent home from toil.
Willing to learn, willing to labor
While slurs, gunfire, tear at men’s souls,
Yet the artist sees beyond
The rubble to a promised spirit.
Linger before these “Stars of America” portraits
Realize more deeply, suspend your disbeliefs.
Let us support humanity as one, dignify existences
Without borders.
Suffering from pogroms my Ukrainian ancestors witnessed,
And escaped from, was silenced in the children’s presence.
Shielded from news, conversations about the “old country”
Violence was not tolerated. Curiosity. Attention. Encouraged.
Who am I? Every day, I gaze at my maternal great-grandparents’ photo,
In a tiny silver frame, they are dressed for an occasion, light in their eyes.
Safety among relatives, fifty years and counting, my trials melt in comparison to theirs
Street knowledge, genuine interest in humans, versus abhorrent interest rates.
Melvin Toledo seeks the beauty in all things.
Examine his canvases, gaze at the eyes, the hands,
Sense pride, dignity, value. These portraits depict humanity at its finest,
Their jewels mirror windows to the soul.
America the (One Day) Beautiful
by Jamie A. Hughes
With thanks to Melvin Toledo for “The Stars of America”
The exhibit features portraits
of immigrants, given pride
of place—shown in their passion
and peril. Their hands occupied—
painting, lifting weights, playing guitar,
packing a bento box, gripping a tool,
raising a flag, holding another close—
as if they can’t resist the urge to make,
to make better, to dare you to look,
to laugh, to call them “illegal” anything.
Another room tells the darker story.
In one portrait, a father runs in twilight,
child on his hip, panic in his eyes.
In the other, the holy spirit of a mother
left behind, kneels beside her son, dead
on a river’s edge, refusing to leave him
alone in the failing light. Between them,
a cage like those at the border where children
are kept away from childhood.
Visitors are encouraged
to come inside, to write a note.
Scriptures you’d expect were invoked.
A few others asserted, “This isn’t America.”
But it is. For now.
Others for lack of something to say
(but not the urge to speak) left
jokes and banal advice. How can you
walk in a cell, feel the pressing dimensions,
the cold floor, and think such words
meet the moment?
I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose.
Mine is a place where people used
to lynch black men after Sunday services,
who bought postcards featuring the dead,
sent them to relatives with a note
ending with XOXO.
We still won’t recognize another’s humanity;
it’s too close to acknowledging our own—
to admitting the heliosphere of privilege
is gossamer thin, that it could easily
be our children in a cage, our brother
at the end of a rope.
To the ones who didn’t arrive,
to the ones who did
only to find another cage,
to the ones still thinking
it might be worth the risk—
to the ones who made it
and keep on making...
I see you. I love you.
You are the best of us.
Please take this country
between your palms
and make it beautiful
for the first time.