WINGED SOULS OF WOMEN

Basel WBB Exhibition, Heiderose Hilderbrand

Pandora..., the tale told by Hesiod, blaming all the world's follies and ills on a woman who opened up the box of Spites, is not a genuine myth. Rather, according to mythographer Robert Graves, 'Pandora's jar originally contained winged souls.' Because of an idea begun in Santa Barbara, women artists from more thirty countries are sending their winged souls into the world in tiny boxes.

Mary Heebner, Box Network Santa Barbara Magazine Fall 1995

Daniela von Waberer, Untitled Germany	Maja Clas, Untitled Germany	Jenny Marketou, Amazons of the Next Millennium Greece

Opening WBB Basel. Antiken museum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, Switzerland Ellen Wessing- hage, Lorraine Serena, Sania Papa (WBB/ Greece Curator), woman to right of Sania Papa, Vana Xenou (WBB artist Greece)

Anne-Kathi Wildberger, Educational Curator and Heide Bilderbrand, WBB Austrian participant had the inspiration of including a segment of WBB along with Pandora, Women in Classical Greece, an exhibition of vessels and objects from 5th Century Greece, organized by Dr. Ellen Reeder of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dr. Margot Schmidt, assistant director of the Antiken Museum, also wrote of this possibility, "I am looking forward to the realization of this project. If we can join WBB with Pandora in Basel, it would mean that we would link not only women of our time, but we would also link with the ancient Greek women who, at their time, had a strong need for solidarity. Pandora is the first ancient art exhibition in the world to center around women, and provides a groundbreaking perspective into their lives, customs, rituals and myths in an unprecedented gathering works of art from Greece."

As these ensembles stream in toward us from so many different places on earth, it is as if they brought to us the essence and spiritual climate of the land and its inhabitants. From South America, festive rites are defined in the pictorial language.

The voice of the Swiss artists is cooler, more intimate. In Greece one feels in the familiar company of myth. And the Americans radiate self-assurance. Cradle and coffin, boat and garden, altar and shrine expressed by what are at first only anonymous little boxes.

Dr. Sania Papa (Greece), Lorraine Serena, Dr. Margot Schmidt (Switzerland). Ella Van der Meijden (Switzerland), Frank Serena, Vana Xenou (Greece) at opening of WBB Basel

These happenings out of the lives of women, transformed through pictorial images, have nothing to do with feminine art but rather with the life wisdom of women - birth, death, transformation. With that wisdom, even within the smallest thing can lie the embryo of the great. Whoever finds her own vision as truly as possible has the power to grasp the world in the hollow of her hand.

Annemarie Monteil - Art Historian, Switzerland 1996

Student in Basel, Switzerland participating in a "box workshop"	Sania Papa, Silvia Buol, Marianne Eigenheer, Claire Niggli, Lorraine Serena

Anne Sauser-Hill, Untitled (Pandora) Switzerland	Lydia Dambassina, The Last Child Greece