Essay by Rebecca Alvarez—

What is beautiful?
What is powerful?
What is seen?

When Zhou Chen drew his Ming Period street-cleaner striding proudly
with a cleft lip, the onlooker was generously challenged to ask if
perfection is what makes something beautiful. Whether the street cleaner
could be as perfect as those pristine vases so popular to the period.

When the Mesoamerican Olmecs sculpted were-jaguar children with their
snarling lips, they were depicting both the pain of the child born with a
cleft lip and a child undergoing a shamanistic transformation.

To feel and to persevere was not only powerful, it was godly.
What is it to be seen and to see clearly?

Does it take a smooth unbroken surface or does it necessitate a crack
through which one can peep?

Felice Tebbe’s drawings reminds us to revere the viscera, the cracks out
of which we ourselves emerged and to allow ourselves to be interrupted
long enough to re-envision the perfect, powerful self

—Rebecca Alvarez, Philadelphia, PA, July 2010

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© 2010 by Felice Tebbe & Rebecca Alvarez. All rights reserved.