Grandma, Aunt Margaret, Grandad, and Sonja Jean.īeatrice or Aunt Bea, as we called her, was so beautiful and could sing, really sing. From her, I learned the importance of timeless style. She went from West Virginia to Pennsylvania, from farm to coal mining town. Had an infectious laugh and wonderful sense of style. Aloe plants in the house for cuts and burns and could recreate any outfit she saw in a department store window from scratch. Helen, my grandmother, she was more of a Victorian-shaped-by-the-Depression-era type not very huggie-feely, but very industrious. When I think about the muses that fuel my creative and personal styles, I have to begin with my aunts and grandmother. The crystals that share that same name have the same solar night rainbow effect-blues, purples, greens, golds. There are southern lights too, depending on where you are looking up, into the cosmos. The aurora borealis is the polar lights also known as northern lights. Every time my family would visit her and my Aunt Beatrice at their shared home in Akron, Ohio, I would look for all of the aurora borealis jewelry I could find, earrings, necklaces and brooches abound. They were “aurora borealis and pearls,” she told me-this must have been the late 1970s or early 80s. The second time I heard the words aurora borealis, my grandmother Helen Fagan was describing the earrings on her bedside table. "Each star its own aurora borealis / suddenly you held me tight / I could see the midnight sun."
The first time I heard these words aurora borealis was when Ella Fitzgerald sang the words Johnny Mercer penned to the instrumental composed by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke, Midnight Sun. It sounds like the name of a character in one of Nnedi Okorafor’s Black futuristic science fiction novels. Reserve your ticket to see this stunning exhibition, including a creation from Tereneh in the Made In Pittsburgh gallery, before it closes. As the Maker & Muse exhibition comes to a close, guest labelist Tereneh Idia reflects on her early muses.
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