Kea Tawana

After the Hamilton Waygoose in early November, it was time for our annual visit to the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan. The surprise exhibit this year was about an outsider artist named Kea Tawana, who was completely unfamiliar to me.

Tawana is a mysterious figure: she is referred to with feminine pronouns, but even that is assumed, it seems. Her birth origins, according to the Wikipedia, include a couple of options. She was probably born in 1935, and she died in 2016. 

Things that are sure: She could make many kinds of things with her hands, and she lived in Newark, New Jersey, from the 1950s until the late 1980s, where she created an 86-foot-long Ark out of salvaged materials. 

The city condemned the Ark and Tawana deconstructed it, then moved to Port Jervis, New York, which is where she died. Only photos of the Ark exist today.

The pieces on display at the Kohler were found in Tawana's apartment after she died: her stained glass work, collages and assemblages she made from from magazines, the intricate wooden trunks she made to hold her collections, and her self-taught architectural drawings:

 

The museum displayed more than a dozen of Tawana's architectural drawings, but I only photographed one, the first floor of a high school:

I felt a strong affinity with with her drawings because I used to make architectural drawings of large public buildings as a young person, trying to envision better ways for the world to be. Hers are neater and more exact, as well as larger in scale, but they have a naive enthusiasm that I recognize and identify with.

Gallery Aferro, based in Newark, is responsible for preserving Tawana's work. More of it can be seen on the site they have made about her, including many of her drawings, reproduced better than my photo.