Rachel Asen likes to work with paper.
The 38-year-old St. Louis artist and mother of six works in many artistic mediums, but there is something about cutting paper into pieces and putting it back into something substantial that inspires her. She compares it to the Japanese pottery art known as “kintsugi” where broken pottery is mended with a lacquer mixed with gold.
Something broken becomes something beautiful, something more than it was in its original form.
“That is how I see myself,” Asen says. “I am broken but put back together with grace. It’s how I see humanity.”
The city where she was born and raised, the city she once expected to leave but never did, is broken.
For the second time in three years, St. Louis is addressing its historical racial divide, through protest in the streets, sparked by a police shooting of a black victim.
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After Ferguson, Asen painted. She produced a piece that became a mural on a building on South Florissant Road across from Cathy’s Kitchen. “A Dawn of Unity” was Asen’s attempt to do her part to help bring a broken city together.
She’s at it again.
A few weeks ago, she started sketching and writing and imagining a new piece of art to inspire her broken St. Louis. Her muse was one line from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “We are tied together in the singular garment of destiny.”
It’s important to Asen that people understand where she came from so they can see the deeper meaning in her art. She lives in the Skinker-DeBaliviere area, just two blocks from the home she grew up in on Pershing Avenue. The neighborhood, just north of Forest Park and south of Delmar Boulevard, is these days an upper middle class enclave. But growing up, Asen was one of the only white children on her block.
An only child, she is the daughter of a former theology professor and grade-school teacher.
“The neighborhood was very different from what it is now,” Asen says. “I grew up quite a bit differently than most people who look like me.”
The artist counts that as a blessing. Through her art, she wants other white people to open their hearts to the pain felt by blacks in St. Louis who feel that the arc of the moral universe King spoke of hasn’t yet bent far enough toward justice.
“We, as white people, are having a problem accepting our role in all of this,” she says. “Unfortunately, this city is wounded. We can put a Band-Aid on it, but if you don’t attend to it every day it’s going to fester. It’s going to get worse.”
Last Monday night and into the early morning hours Tuesday, Asen produced “Thread of Hope.” The paper craft shows a multihued person cradling a heart in its hands. A thread from the heart hangs over the multicolored hands and helps hold the person’s garments together.
Asen called me Tuesday after reading my column in which I said that the NFL protests and the ones happening in the streets of St. Louis “are threads in the same American tapestry.” We were using the same metaphor through different platforms to try to connect the people of St. Louis during a time in which many of them feel divided.
Asen’s art doesn’t highlight that division as much as it helps point to a path forward.
Instead of two worlds colliding in St. Louis — one black, one white, one in pain, one oblivious to the angst of those whose experiences tell a different story — Asen envisions two worlds coalescing, brought together by a thread of commonality, no matter how thin it might be.
Protests in St. Louis have been going on daily for two weeks now. Asen isn’t sure if her “Thread of Hope” might end up as a mural, as her post-Ferguson painting did. She just knows she wants to share it with the world — particularly the white world — as a way to further understanding in a city that needs it.
“I want people to see this and think that unity is a possibility,” she says, “particularly through love and action. I want it to be shared. I want people to feel it. It’s the mending of the wounded.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect location of a mural Asen worked on in Ferguson. This version has been corrected.