Thomas Ferrella
1 MUNDO
Over the course of 10 years, Madison artist Thomas Ferrella has taken over 70 portraits. He photographs people through layers of glass and treats those layers with different substances, like a spritz of water or Vaseline. Through his process, the visible cues that distinguish us from one another — hair style, skin tone, gender, ethnicity — become blurred.
Ferrella, a former emergency room physician who often creates large, outdoor installations, assembled those photos into an exhibit titled 1 World. He was invited by the Cuban government to exhibit that body of work in November at the Larios Taller Gallery in Camaguey, a city of 321,000 in central Cuba. The trip was co-sponsored by the Madison-Camaguey Sister City Association and the Wisconsin Medical Project, which Ferrella participated in.
“Cuba and my country, the United States, have many similarities, but most importantly, we are countries of great diversity and culture,” Ferrella writes in a press release. “Thus, art becomes a powerful way to show our love and in a small way, 1 World breaks down these boundaries between our countries and allows us to demonstrate our love for each other.”
After returning to the United States, Ferrella talked with Isthmus about the ethos and reception of his exhibit.
The conversation about race and identity in America seems to be at peak intensity now, and your exhibit certainly engages in that conversation. But what was your impetus for this work when you started it 10 years ago?
The real stimulus behind this was a bizarre encounter I had with a guy at a gas station in Milwaukee. I don’t know his name — He was way, way out there. His battery had died, and his car was completely covered in all these pieces of paper with extremely racist and sexist material that he had laminated and glued on his car. On the roof he had installed a gigantic speaker, and he would go around and expound on those theories. It was this phenomenal piece of folk art, but his message was just horrific. One of the things he had on the car was something referencing “one world,” and his whole idea was that the world was going to be one Aryan race. So I completely co-opted that but I spun it around 180 degrees to expound on different political views in an artistic way.
What are the views your exhibit expounds on?
The intent is to de-emphasize our differences and give people the opportunity to think about what our similarities are, tearing down boundaries and borders and all the stuff we think about in terms of what makes us different. I’ve traveled all over the world, I’ve worked in other countries, and when I talk to people, everybody wants the same things: clean air, clean water, good schools, secure communities, valuable work and respect.
Do you think this message carries extra weight coming from an American in the age of Trump?
There’s no doubt this is resonating at a whole other level because of Trump. Obama opened the door just a millimeter and that made a huge difference for Cubans. Now Trump has swung that door back in the opposite way and they are very frustrated by that. They just can’t believe our country is being represented by that degree of ignorance. It was sort of the perfect storm to be talking about that. The audience just really embraced the message and they loved the fact that an American would talk this way. I was getting stopped in the street because people recognized me or heard about the American in town. I was getting hugs from people I didn’t even know.
