It's important to remember that it's not only about the social, political and spiritual goings on in the world that influence our art, but our culture.  When considering culture there is the mass culture and then we all have a personal culture.  For some of us it is designated by our religion, our ethnicity or region of the country we were raised or live.  It's not often that we think about culture related to something so personal as one of our senses, but that's exactly what comes into play when you see the work of Uzi Buzgalo.

Uzi is a painter who uses bright and vivid color, builds his unique frames and gets his message out loud and clear.  The differentiating factor is that he doesn't do it with his voice, but with his hands.  Uzi Buzgalo is one of America's leading deaf contemporary artists.  His work is both a tribute to the deaf community and an educational tool to the hearing world.  Having studied American Sign Language I'm aware of the cultural concerns of the deaf community and they are a community.  For fourteen years I lived and worked minutes from the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, California.  Because of the school the city had a large deaf community with lots of ways to support deaf culture.

I mention this because Uzi's story told through art is both acknowledgment and validation for famous deaf people in our history.  His portraits of these people are the tribute deserved by the contributions made by these amazing talents.  Having portraits of famous deaf people let's people know who in history was deaf, for some that may be surprising, but more importantly it demonstrates the contributions made by the deaf community and that different is not bad.  We need to recognize the community as part of our human fabric.

The other work on display is Uzi's abstract pieces.  They have a Matisse quality and are very alive.  His frames are really a part of the painting and help to tell the story.  One example is a frame that is made to look like the Torah scrolls.  He has made the frames fun and sometimes there are interactive pieces to the painting.  One piece that discusses self-image has a painted center, but then you can pull a knob and it opens to a mirror so the viewer can see themselves...it's better to see then to be told about it.

We all think about our hands when we consider how we create our work.  Uzi not only demonstrates his creative talent in his paintings, but then his hands go on to tell the story.

Dancing hands...
Greg

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