"Adopted Child Turns Feelings Into Art" (Still a child at 54?)
Ray
performance works.
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By Mary Carole McCauley
Sun Arts Writer
Originally published March 12, 2003
More articles available at www.adopteenews.vze.com
Ann Fessler sat in her car on a street in an Ohio town, weighing the cost of
her curiosity.
The artist had approached her questions about her origins in a roundabout
way for years, putting together exhibit after exhibit about adoption.
Whenever anyone pointed out that the artist herself was adopted, she
shrugged it off.
She, after all, was raised in a loving, supportive family. She always felt
wanted, and her family was sensitive to the needs of adopted children. Her
mother was adopted. So was her brother. "I didn't set out to be an adoption
artist," she says.
Nonetheless, there she sat, trying to decide whether she should get out of
her car, walk up to a house she'd never been in and introduce herself to her
biological mother.
Fessler's two most recent works, Close to Home and Everlasting, are at the
Maryland Institute College of Art's Decker Gallery through Sunday. The
artist, a photography professor at MICA from 1982 to 1993, now teaches at
the Rhode Island School of Design.
The show is filled with sights and sounds reminiscent of Fessler's girlhood
in an Ohio farm town in the 1950s: Round iron cribs, one filled with corn.
(Crib - think of the double meaning.) Cracks in the ceiling through which
shine filtered points of light. The soothing, irregular rhythm of crickets.
The exhibit's centerpiece is a room containing seven wooden dining-room
chairs - elegant, feminine, solid - set in a circle. These chairs are meant
to evoke the owners of the seven voices that visitors will hear.
The voices belong to Baltimore- and Washington-area women who gave up their
babies for adoption between 1945 and 1973. The soft sounds continually
overlap and trade off, so it is difficult at first to tell who is talking.
Just when you get interested in one woman's story, another begins. Perhaps
that's the point.
This is what Fessler knows for sure:
She was born to a large farm family which lived in a riverfront town near
Dayton. She is of German and English heritage, as is evidenced in her
straight, blond hair and athletic physique. She was born in 1949 to an
18-year-old woman named Eleanor who would rather work outside than help with
household chores.
This is what Fessler does not know: Whether anyone in her birth family
shares her artistic interests or ability. The name of her biological father.
Whether contacting her birth mother would ruin that woman's life - and her
own.
"I've heard all kinds of stories: good, bad and ugly," she says. "In one
kind of story, the mother hadn't anticipated ever being contacted, and when
she is, it turns her life upside down. How does she explain to her children
that she's lied to them all these years?"
When Fessler was on a sabbatical from MICA, she put together her first
exhibit, Genetics Lesson. At the show's opening in 1990, a woman approached
her and said, "You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect
combination of me and the father of my child."
For a moment, the artist couldn't remember how to inhale or blink or
swallow. "You don't know what you're saying to me," Fessler finally replied.
"I was adopted. I could be your daughter."
Could be, but wasn't. The birth dates were a year off.
Still. Not only was the coincidence eerie, it was apparent that the older
woman had been scanning every female face she came across for four decades,
seeking the grown-up version of the small, thumbprint features that she
remembered.
Fessler was so affected by the encounter that her second exhibit,
Ex/Changing Families dealt explicitly with adoption. She later made a video
about her adoptive parents, Cliff and Hazel.
Meanwhile, Fessler's own story nagged at her. She obtained her birth
certificate, which she was entitled to under Ohio law. On a business trip,
she visited her birth mother's riverfront hometown, seeking her high-school
yearbook. Someone at the school mentioned that a man with the same last name
lived down the road.
Fessler drove over. "I met my uncle," she said. She didn't feel as though
she could tell him the truth, so she posed as the daughter of a former
schoolmate of Eleanor's. Soon, he was chatting away, telling Fessler all
about his kid sister. He even provided a current address.
That is how the artist came to be sitting in her car on a street in an Ohio
town, weighing the cost of her curiosity.
Questions remain
Fessler plans on re-creating the exhibit in other cities nationwide, using a
new group of local women each place she sets up. She will reach them in the
same way she reached the Baltimore and Washington women, by contacting
support organizations for birth mothers and adoptees. When she is finished,
the tapes will become part of the archive of Radcliffe College's Schlesinger
Library and available for future researchers in women's history.
All of which leads naturally to the question: Perhaps Fessler, who never did
get out of the car that day, should mount her exhibit in central Ohio. Who
knows? Maybe Eleanor would volunteer her own oral history. Birth mother and
daughter could meet that way.
Fessler laughs. "No," she says. "I don't think so. Sometime, I will write
her a letter. Probably."
Probably. Family is precious - and fragile, and fraught. One is as many as
most people can handle. "As an adoptee, you're curious, but you already have
a family," Fessler says.
"You're not looking to have a second one. What's typical is that the mothers
who surrendered their children want more of an ongoing relationship than the
adoptee does. The grown-up child might say, 'Now that I know who you are, I
don't want a relationship with you,' and it can be really traumatic for
everyone. It's not something you dive into lightly."
This ambivalence is articulated in the final image with which Fessler leaves
visitors to Everlasting. At the end of a darkened hallway is a video screen
showing a continuous loop of footage of a family, circa 1950. The mother,
smiling widely. The father, tossing his little boy in the air. The child,
laughing soundlessly. They all look so happy.
But the film seems to be played in reverse. The closer you get to the
screen, the farther away the people in the film get from the camera. The
ideal family, receding endlessly.
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