W Weekly
Blind Ambition
Without sight or sound, Jessie Dunahoo manifests his own reality
By Robbie Clark
Its hard to imagine what goes through Jessie Dunahoo’s mind as he laboriously weaves hundreds of recycled plastic grocery bags together with impeccably straight seams as he renders his 3-D spacial installations. It’s hard to imagine if he’s pleased with the finished product as its strangely draped across a spider web network of ropes, strings and wires. He’s never seen a finished product. Jessie Dunahoo is blind, deaf and has a developmental disability.
Regardless of his disability, Jessie works with vigor and tenacity of a young farm hand trying to finish his daily chores before the sun goes down, pulling threads and needles from his denim overhauls while he uses his legs to pull the material taught as he sews. He communicates using erratic sign language while others draw patterns in his hand. He isn’t distracted, and his sense of touch becomes his eyes as he feels the fringes looking for the next step in his process. “A whole lot of what he is doing is controlling the very little space he actually has control over,” said Bruce Burris, the co-owner of Latitude Artist Community, an arts program geared to meet the needs of artists who have disabilities where Jessie has created for over eight years. “I think, though it’s sure as hell not fair to say these things because I really don’t know, that it’s about having some control over the very little space he owns. He works by feel; I can’t add anything to it. I can’t even tell you where he gets his needles. They materialize. I don’t know where he gets them from.”
It’s hard to tell Jessie’s story, as he can’t tell it himself. For a few years, he did attend the Kentucky School for the Blind, but he was mostly left to his own devices while he was raised on a farm through the ‘30s and ‘40s, when he began his unique manipulation ans assemblage of outdoor spaces which have proliferated into his golden years.
Now Jessie lives in a group home and spends about eight hours a day, three days a week at Latitude with other artists.
“Jessie inspires all of us in an incredible way as role model for other artists here,” Burris said, “Outside of Latitude, he functions, as they say in the business, at a pretty high level. He does need certain supports to help him, but truly he’s incredibly self-sufficient, and what he gets out of his work, primarily, is self-satisfaction. He’s really pleased when other people enjoy it, but he’s seems to be making this work for his own very personal reasons, as a way, I think, to alter and control his environment.”
Jessie’s work has been recognized outside of Latitude, and he’s exhibited at the University of Kentucky Rasdall Gallery and The Transylvania University Shearer Gallery. He was the featured artist in 2003 for the Successful Aging for People with Disabilities Conference and the Sanders Brown Conference on Aging, both at UK.
On August 6, Jessie will turn 75 years old, and in a striking coincidence, will have his work on exhibition at three different places throughout the month of August.
“The kind of thing he makes, it’s ungainly,” Burris said. “They are mostly three dimensional and they are difficult to place in homes and sometimes even in galleries. Just trying to enlighten people about them is excruciating. Lexington just doesn’t have the type of space we need show his work off well.”
Given Jessie uses recycled plastic bags in his creations; an installation was an obvious choice for the Lexington Art League’s current exhibit Recycled Matter(S). Later in the month, the Lexington Art League has invited Jessie to present an installation at the Woodland Art Fair, where it can be hung the way it was intended outside. On Saturday, Aug. 4, Jessie and five other Latitude artists will open their exhibit at Jones Gallery on Maxwell Street.
It’s and impressive showing for an individual who might not even consider his creation art. “I don’t think he sees it as art, so it’s kind of unfair to call it art, but that’s how we promote it,” Burris said. “Its an amazing thing; it’s a combining of many different components which lead eventually to this thing we recognize as an accomplished art object. All we do is take what he is already doing and providing enough support to say, ‘Hey, this is important work, it’s of value. You should consider it, and perhaps through it get some small understand of the man who created it.”
This is also another function Latitude hopes to perform, giving exposure to artists while downplaying their disabilities.
“As much as possible we try to minimize even bringing up disabilities,” Burris said. It’s impossible not to, because when artists are exhibiting at a gallery, beyond the art itself there is also a natural interest in the life of the artist.”
Unique to Latitude, which Burris and Crystal Bader opened seven years ago, is its community and social advocacy capacities toward enriching downtown Lexington. Burris want to empower artists and give them a voice by enabling them to make contributions, not arbitrary contributions, but meaningful contributions to the community.
One of the most important contributions came form the artist Belinda Sellers, who, because of the problems associated with accessibility she encountered in her wheelchair downtown, started Project Easy Access Lexington, which has brought attention to the inadequacies of downtown in terms of transportation and sidewalks. The group has hosted two public rallies at Triangle Park, where they took people on the an In- Accessibility tour, a four block jaunt that highlighted the very basic problems on the street level, such as curb inclines and gaping holes in the sidewalk. To supplement this group, Sellers started the Brick Squad, where she, Burris and other artists tote bricks and sand with them on daily outings from Latitude and repair pieces of damaged sidewalk themselves, one brick at a time.
Sellers and Burris also pitched the idea to Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government to from a commission on disability, which will meet for the first time on Aug. 30. Both were asked to serve on the commission.
“Here’s a woman in a wheelchair with no formal education, is considered to have a developmental disability and absolutely no voice in the world… And she has totally gone from a person who was marginalized to a person who is a player, a key part of what occurs. To us, this is the most significant part of our program.”
