TOKELI
CONSCIOUSNESS & ART 

Genealogy Series 2019: Photograph and Mixed Media on panel 20” x 16” I discovered a family archive. In it were pictures, playbills, articles and such for my great grandparents, Violette Curtis and Pork Chops Evers. They were my mother’s father’s parents. Violette Curtis met George Washington Evers, who went by Pork Chops Evers, on the S. and C. circuit, and they were quickly wed. He was almost 30 years her senior, and had a successful career of touring and performing in the s

Violette I Genealogy Series 2019: Photograph and Mixed Media on canvas 16” x 12” This is my great grandmother. Her name was Violette Curtis, but that’s not even true. We found out much later that her birth name was Bessie Rychow and she was Polish Jew. She’d been adopted by a Philadelphia Mainline family and raised with a silver spoon in her mouth. But her birth parents had died in a fire in New York City in the garment industry where they were laborers, trapped to death in a

Genealogy Series 2019: Photograph and Mixed Media on canvas 14” x 11” and 20” x 20” I am 7 years old. My brother has not been born yet, so I think of myself as a single child. I am not a happy-go-lucky child. I am very serious. [I’m told that I informed my grandmother when I was 4 years old, “Gagum, all is not right in the world.” She had a little chuckle at that one.] So, I’m 7 and I’m at the pool at La Casa del Zorro in Borrego Springs. My mom is dating an Italian poet (not