40 Wild Mules and an Acre of Dreams

Artist: Noreen Dean Dresser 

Co-Participant: Anna Deavere Smith 

With Additional Assistance from Molly, Federal Mule Department of the Interior

"Forty Wild Mules and an Acre of Dreams," a mixed media painting installation that frames the dreams of urban America using charred wood from the firestorm that swept through Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, was exhibited in the summer of 1992, at the Dayton Visual Arts Center, Dayton, Ohio.  Artist Dresser created this installation with Anna Deavere Smith, creator and star of the Off-Broadway hit "Fires in the Mirror."  

The public was invited to the artist's salon/reception at 7:00 P.M. July 17, at the Dayton Visual Arts Center.  The artist was joined by Bing Davis, Chairperson of the Department of Art at Central State and Director of the African American Museum Association; Dr. Joseph Jordan, Chairperson of the African/African American Studies at Antioch College; and Dr. Thandeka, an Emmy Award producer and Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.  The salon conducted a forum for an in-depth examination of the critical issues facing our multicultural society at the beginning of 21st century.

Concerning her work, artist Dresser says that she is interested in framing the ethical issues of contemporary life.  "I want the public to join with me in the aesthetics of reflection and insight.  I am not interested at all in creating works that venerate a small mark of an artist as a new twist in the visual vocabulary.  I am interested in creating art that links the subjective life of the individual to the social forces in contemporary society.  I resist meaninglessness as a presupposition to contemporary life; this presumption allows us to dodge the important problems demanding our response. "

Artist Dresser's decision to work with Anna Deavere Smith, centered in Ms. Smith's profound insights into our multicultural contemporary society.  Her work as actress, writer, Stanford University Professor of Drama, and 1991/92 visiting scholar at the Bunting Institute in Cambridge, MA, has given contemporary theater a new window on the world.

Initially, Dresser asked Ms. Smith for a sign, symbol or word that she would leave on a wall for generations to come.  Ms. Smith gave Dresser the word WANT.  Dresser built out of scrap wood a railroad platform and covered it with earth and ashes from the Los Angeles firestorm. She painted the word WANT at the upper left in gold oil.

Dresser's installation/mixed media painting consists of a painting of the sky in transition, a railroad platform, steel rail and Kente cloth.  The sky entails multiple perspectives in a continuum.  At the top of the canvas, the perspective is that of space from 500 miles above the earth.  The central section of the canvas is a curvature of a cloud bank that is the color of smokey dusk gray. The cloud bank gives way to a starling red orange sunset.  

Dresser conceived of the piece on an early wintry morning as she saw four homeless men struggle up the street toward a canteen.  "Half-light halos covered their labored forms as they moved ever so slowly before the dawn.  These men made me think of railroad platforms, the underground railroad, the A train which carried the southern to northern migrations of rural African Americans and all the other promises of change that railroads hold.  Following the Rodney King verdict and the firestorm that swept through Los Angeles, Sam and Leroy, two homeless men, provided me with charred wood from the burnt buildings." 

The platform is set over railroad ties that extend beyond it to the left.  A steel rail crosses the ties and then twists and bends.  Kente cloth, a traditional African fabric, is tied to the steel rail's twisted end.  Underneath Anna Deavere Smith’s word WANT, and moving across the platform, are a herd of hoof prints in gold.  Dresser worked with Molly, a United States Mule from the Department of the Interior, to cast her hoof prints in plaster. Molly's parents are both part of the Department of Interior's Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Program. Molly herself was born in California's high desert of a wild-horse and burro.  

Dresser was directed to Molly by a Department of Interior staff-person.   Onsite Dresser was able to hear from the corral, the sudden sound of hoofs in the distance.  She was able to hear the herd pounding by her into a series of corrals.  Wild horses, caring this electrical charge of will and muscle, each for the other, the herd dashes by into the sunlit desert  —  free.  

Dresser recalls crying, so moved by the wild horses’ presence.  “It is in these experiences, such as wild herds, that one finds the simple truths that a free and self-determined community is demanding and necessary for the reward of life itself.”

Anna Deavere Smith has continually expressed our hopes, abuses, conflicts and possibilities in the American experience in her ongoing works.  It was a privilege to receive her wall statement that so aptly described the decades as they have since unfolded.

“What I see in the 90's is wonder.  I see a frontier. 

I see a desert too.  It is hard to imagine that we are coming to an end to the millennium.  I wonder if we have an anxiety to be more than the past. “ —  Anna Deavere Smith

C 1992