Kali Quinn’s ‘Compassionate Creativity’ & Border Life

We visited with Kali Quinn, director of the Center for Compassionate Creativity in Bisbee, Arizona, a hilly old copper mining town about 10 miles from the US/Mexico border.

Kali is a multimedia artist who used to live in Brattleboro. Former Marlboro College professor, actor and beloved denizen Jerry Levy lives with Kali and her partner Kelly Orr, who works with wood and fabricates interesting metal fences all around this strange town.

Kali, Jerry and I all shared a deep friendship with Rupa Cousins, a Brattleboro star who died in 2017 and who we all miss very much. Rupa loved Kali’s emphasis on ‘compassionate creativity’ which she describes as “a way of life that embraces a growing interconnectedness with the natural world, oneself, and others (“strangers,” friends, family & ancestors) through truth-seeking, artistic expression & community story-sharing.”

Kali is a true multi-media artist, fluidly following her talents in performance, puppetry, composing, singing, violin, visual art and more recently, film. She trained at Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater in Humboldt County, California. After a stint teaching acting at MIT in 2019 and the pandemic shutting everything down, Kali and Kelly drove west to explore new ways of being.

What they thought would be a few days staying in an off-the-grid yurt with her cousin outside Bisbee turned into three months. They decided they would live there permanently. Kali and Kelly invited Jerry to come for the winter, so that he wouldn’t be so isolated with the continuing pandemic. He fell in love with Bisbee too. Now they all live above and around the Center for Compassionate Creativity, a community art space they helped create.

Kali had spent most of her life on the ocean. She thought she needed to be near it. Once she got to Arizona, she realized the whole place seemed like the bottom of an old ocean, which in fact it is. “Being in Bisbee, I’ve realized that what I actually love is being able to see wide open, wild space around me. Since it was once at the bottom of the ocean, it’s an infinite beach full of rocks and fossils and sand.”

Since moving to the desert, Kali’s been creating contemplative films and collage. Layering materials on old ironing boards, whe explores themes of ‘women’s work’ and native feminism. Several examples of ‘Many Moons: Ironing Board Medicine Shields’ grace the Center’s glass display windows. A Chiricahua Apache (Dine) land acknowledgment is affixed to the front door. English words in script with spanish translations grace the facade: “mourn / lamentar”, ‘tend / cuidar’, and others.

“The Center is here for the use of the community. Since we are new here, wanted to listen and basically provide the conditions for things to happen, whether it is Jerry practicing violin with friends playing on the piano or a woman down the block wanting to give a talk on prayer rugs.

Last year the Center was the Arizona host for the national ‘Liberty Mural’ Project which invited people to get creative to support reproductive freedom. The Center announced they’d spend the day making panels for a crocheted mural and were delighted to see (mostly) women come to spend 8 hours crocheting together, later assembling the quilt, representing 40 panels by 40 women, and hanging it prominently in town. See: https://www.kaliquinn.com/projects/az-liberty-crochet-mural.

“When I slowed down during the pandemic, I noticed that my art consistently moves through this cycle of grieving and dreaming anew by putting the pieces back together. A constant collage,” she said. “I want the Center, this place within this place, to be a home for artists and activists needing time and space for similar processes.”

Activism is always on Kali’s mind as she confronts the realities of indigenous past and present on this land, the gaping wound in the Earth the old mine represents right in the middle of town and especially the US/Mexico border. “The border is right here, the mine is in your face everyday. They are not abstract ideas,they are a day-to-day reality,” Kali says.
She visits the border often to shop, go to restaurants and visit friends. Many Americans go there for dental care, which, Mexico’s tourism sites say, can provide quality dental care at about half the cost of in the US. Kali says you have to actually walk around a giant Walmart in Douglass, the US town of about 16,000 to get into Mexico’s Agua Prieta, a town of about 80,000. Agua Prieta hosts a variety of maquilas, transnational factories (Velcro is a big one) existing within a special category of ‘border industry’ which pay low wages and avoid standard Mexican and US environmental standards. Walking along the developed but deserted street along the fence in Douglas, Agua Prieta looked the same, only a lot livelier.

“The Border is such a failure, such an artificial, inhumane, unworkable construct,” Kali said. “The fence that Trump built is actually collapsing already in some areas due to water incursions.” In some places the fence is tall and imposing, then just a mile away, there won’t be any fence. “People and animals and water have always moved back and forth here and they always will,” Kali said. But only half of them will be treated as criminals for doing what comes naturally.

Driving out of Douglass North toward New Mexico on stunning Route 80, the road was empty and the desert stretched in all directions toward pointy old volcanic mountains on either side. Suddenly I saw two teen-aged boys running full speed through the desert, bobbing up and down, in and out of view, until we sped past and they disappeared in the distance. It is one thing to read about the bodies routinely found around here as people attempt to cross the desert, it is another to see the desperate dash first hand.

Kali and I took a morning hike up one of the sides of the canyon to one of several little buddhist shrines locals have built and embellished in the hills around town. We climbed one of many stairwells leading out of Brewery Gulch’ where miners boozed and brothelled for about 80 years. Now thrift shops and bars, movement spaces and galleries line the long, dusty street.

Kali feels there are strong affinity between Brattleboro and Bisbee, but also major distinctions. She notes a similar strong working class element built each town, and how expressions of individual art exist playfully in both. She says Bisbee is more raw, has a haphazard quality at odds with the older, more orderly vibe of New England.

“The desert is not meant to be lived on in a permanent way, but people try,” she said. “There’s more focus here on shear survival because of the dryness, the prickly vegetation, the difficulty growing food – it puts you into a more primal relationship with the land.”

As we were walking we passed giant agave plants, their wild limbs pointing out in every direction. Agave are also called century plants because they live a long time but flower only once, just before they die. I took comfort from those plants, thinking there’s hope for us all yet.

See Kali Quinn’s website