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Selma Waldman’s life is either a cautionary tale or a miraculous triumph of artistic spirit. It all depends on how a viewer of her art feels about being made a witness to torture in drawings that are anything but pretty.

That, of course, isn’t the point, nor was Seattle’s 77-year-old grand dame of global justice — Waldman died of cancer in April — concerned with what she viewed as the petty vagaries of gallery representation. In charcoal-on-paper works drawn in a seeming frenzy of bright or muted colors, her concern was that observers feel the pain of being strung up, beaten, choked, electric-shocked, starved, or nearly drowned by agents of organized violence from the Balkans to Guantánamo.

Between that intensity and Waldman’s uncompromising personality, no galleries carried her work, leaving her little known in Seattle at the time of her death. Museums around the world collected her pieces, however, with a memorial exhibition that opens Sept. 25 at Seattle Central Community College — “Pornography of Power: The Anti-War Art of Selma Waldman” — showing why.

The exhibit samples a lifetime of Waldman’s work and the different series she produced, including “Unearthly Grief,” an example of the artist’s “Gravity of Earth” series. In it, the face of a man is a white scribble that glows with horror, the red veins and arteries of his shackled arms bulging with pain and stress. The work hangs in a small replica of the studio Waldman had in her Columbia City home that includes the articles, photographs, and quotations she clipped for inspiration along with “House Raid,” a last, unfinished work depicting four helmeted soldiers about to kick in a door.

Two walls are also devoted to the more recent “Naked/Aggression: Wall of Perpetrators IV-V” – two of five sets of framed vertical triptychs that Waldman called The Hague Project and had one day hoped to hang on the walls of the world international court.

Each triptych contains three black sheets of 9-by-12-inch drawings in which layers upon layers of white, muted green and sometimes neon-bright lines vibrate with fear and pain. In one, two figures hanging by their necks in a field of blood-red color flank a military figure in dress uniform. From his neck hangs a shiny medal that shields his genital area.

Larger works in the exhibit are overt in connecting sexual drive and aggression, a major theme in Waldman’s work, says Susan Noyes Platt, the show’s curator. In “The Thin Red Line,” a depiction of Seattle’s WTO protests, police officers stand shoulder to shoulder like a dangerous organism, Platt says, plastic riot shields protecting their exposed red phalluses. In “House Raid,” the soldiers about to charge the door all have bare genitalia.

Waldman’s son, Rainer Adkins, an artist and teacher, says his mother’s focus on injustice and human degradation began with a Fullbright Fellowship she received in the early 1960s. After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts degree in Texas, where she grew up, Waldman took the family to Berlin on the scholarship, giving her a visceral introduction, Adkins says, to what the Holocaust had been like for fellow Jews.
“Falling Man” series
Selma Waldman “Falling Man” series. Photo courtesy Susan Platt.

The result was “Falling Man” — a series of distorted human forms that appear suspended in air — and a lifelong devotion to social activism that would lead Waldman to capture the physical effects of apartheid and other injustices in book illustrations, paintings, and drawings. The “Wall of Perpetrators” series, Adkins says, started in the 1990s in response to the mass violence in the Balkans and moved forward to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

His mother wanted to throw a bucket of water on people, Adkins says, to wake them from their complacency and complicity. “It’s all too easy to become complacent and believe that it’s a form of protection,” he says. “The reality is that engagement is the surest form of self-protection.”

Waterboarding — a frequent subject of Waldman’s — is mentioned in the press so often now, Platt says, that people have become immune to its meaning. “It’s like saying ‘skydiving,’” she says, “but [Waldman] wanted people to see exactly what it is.”

Being out on that edge made it difficult to get attention, says Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett, who has written about Waldman and compares her work to that of famed artist Leon Golub. But where Golub paints scenes of injustice from a dispassionate, outsider’s view, she says, Waldman puts people inside the experience in a way no other artist has.

In the “Falling Man” series, “you’re looking at it and you’re already a corpse,” Hackett says. “You know what it means not just to die, but to die in a pile of thousands of other people.”

In contrast to the hardness of her subject, her choice of charcoals and pastels represents the softness of humanity and its spirit, Adkins and Platt say — a delicacy that will make the dozens of works left to Adkins hard to preserve. He plans to form a nonprofit foundation to sell his mother’s work and carry on her legacy — something that Hackett says could make Waldman more famous in death than in life.

“I think the worse the world looks, the greater it’s going to be for Selma’s work,” she says. “As things become more cruel and more haunting, as we slide further into a nightmare accelerated by the Bush Administration… Selma looks golden. I think this is her moment.”

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