Who’s Cleaster Cotton? A multimedia artist who just rolled into town and is showing off new “contemporary primitive” work at Pink Dog Creative this month.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Anthony Bellemare

She’s only been in Asheville since last fall, but Cleaster Cotton already has her hands in some buzzy projects. When she arrived from Atlanta last October, the longtime art educator landed a residency teaching art to kids through the Asheville City Schools’ TAPAS program (Teaching Artists Presenting in Asheville Schools). Recently, she started up her own afterschool art program at the W.C. Reid Center, and this summer, she’ll teach art to kids who can’t afford summer camp at the YMI Cultural Center in downtown Asheville. This month, she’ll also show off large-scale paintings at Pink Dog Creative’s grand opening show on June 11 and 12. That’s a Studio Stroll weekend in the River Arts District, so the event should be bustling. “People have felt my desire to not just come and take from a community but to bring what I have to a community,” Cotton says.

In her artwork, Cleaster (pronounced clee-ES-tah “like siesta”) converts everyday items into objects of beauty. Her materials vary depending on her location. “Growing up, we were not having the money to buy canvases so we had to make do with whatever was around us,” says Cotton, whose family has Southern roots but moved to the notoriously tough New York City neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. Then, she used paper and markers. These days, she makes marks on paper with a ball of twine or a bottle of shoe polish She might be just as inclined to use friends’ leftover art supplies or industrial scraps as she is to make a stamp with a carved potato. “The materials just present themselves, and they tell me how they want to be treated,” says Cotton.

Her work ranges from gestural portraits to abstract drawings, and often meditate on race. Her use of paper bags alludes to “the brown paper bag test,” a measure by which people were allowed entry into music venues based on their skin tone, she says. A brown eye and a blue eye in a portrait refer to the multiracial lineages of many African Americans. Cowry shells recall the continent of Africa.

When she was a teen in the mid-1960s, a summer art program in Brooklyn called Youth in Action provided a haven for Cotton and her friends. The Civil Rights movement was still new, and black empowerment was slow to take hold in downtrodden areas like Bushwick. “It saved our lives,” Cotton says of the arts program. “Not only were we off the streets for the summer, but we were learning a skill and we had self pride,” she says. “The other kids in the streets didn’t make it…They looked like survivors of a war.”

In Asheville, Cotton has started sharing some of those early lessons through her own program, SETSE (Self Empowerment Through Self Expression). Funded by Matt Logan and Kristie Quinn of 5 Walnut Wine Bar, SETSE provides a creative outlet for kids from low-income neighborhoods. Cotton says: “I’m teaching the kids that you can be anywhere in nature and be making art.”

See more of Cotton’s work at http://cleastercotton.blogspot.com. She shows new work at Pink Dog Creative at 342 Depot Street, June 10-12, during the River Arts District Studio Stroll. Opening reception on June 10 starts at 5pm. www.pinkdog-creative.com.