If necessity is the mother of invention, then it is also the stepmother of art.
For a new widow with seven children in the northern Mexican desert 50 years ago, it was a powerful motivation to create something out of nearly nothing, to feed her family, to fill her life with fragile beauty. And out of her desolation came more than one lifetime of flowers.
Paper flowers still bloom from her fingers, taking root as well in the small hands of the children who gathered around 90-year-old Maria Enriquez de Allen at the Chicago Public Library’s Toman branch this week as Hispanic Heritage Month came to an end.
Though de Allen’s craft stems from humble beginnings, it has earned her a respected niche as an artist and, just as important, as a link to the distant folk arts of Mexico.
“She’s the real thing, what the Japanese call a living treasure,” said Francisco Arcaute, the library’s public relations officer who translated for de Allen. “She’s not a Frida Kahlo wannabe.”
Wielding scissors and attacking crepe paper, dozens of children shared last weekend in the passion that has decorated de Allen’s life. It is this ability to reach into the past, to reach people 80 years her junior, that Arcaute finds so valuable for his young constituency.
“It’s really important not only to read, but (for them) to take pride in their culture and community,” he said. “If you have those things, your community is strong, it stays together. This is something they learn to do with their hands, something you invest in kind of like reading, where you get a result.”
Anna Madrigal, 8, of the Back of the Yards neighborhood, who had created a carnation, or possibly a peony, agreed. “It comes out pretty for all the hard work,” she said.
De Allen herself learned to make paper flowers at about “the age of these children,” she said, and it was a decision that burst on her with such force that she still remembers it. “I saw some women showing off their work in a store window, and I ran home and told my sisters: `This is what I will do.’ “
But as the library students were discovering, turning wire, paper and glue into creations whose beauty rivals the real thing is not the easiest of tasks for young fingers. De Allen, however, was determined to learn the tradition that flourished of necessity in the arid climate of her childhood, spent in Piedras Negras, a town in the state of Coahuila. Though the residents of Piedras Negras honor the Day of the Dead, they eschew the skeletal imagery often associated with the holiday, choosing instead to pay tribute to death with the flowers they lacked in life.
De Allen’s work took on a most personal meaning many years later, when she created altars to honor the husband and child she had lost by age 40. But along with the dead, she had to remember the living. And she and her seven children were not going to get by on her schoolteacher’s salary.
“That’s why I fell in love with flowers, why I still always love them,” she said. “Because they helped me those years. I had such good fortune that I took samples of my flowers to three stores and all of them bought.”
Though art can bloom in a desert, it took a move to Chicago more than 30 years ago to help de Allen blossom. “I became an artist here in Chicago thanks to all the people,” she said. “University of Chicago, Columbia College, they all know who Maria Enriquez de Allen is.”
If they don’t know her, chances are that they at least know one of her children — all artists, including local muralist Mario Castillo — or her husband Harold, a photographer whom she met while exhibiting at the Art Institute.
De Allen still exhibits around Chicago, sometimes creating altars such as the one that dominates her Pilsen house, a complete garden of more than 1,000 flowers that took her six months to make. And over the years, nothing has been safe from her hands. Any kind of paper — Kleenex, napkins, brown bags — will do, but de Allen also has kept pace with technology, studying plastic milk jugs until she figured out how they could be transformed into lilies. Even egg membranes and the skin of garlic cloves and tomatoes have too much potential to discard. Covered with wax and protected by glass, they become still lifes.
“This is clearly art with Third World roots,” Arcaute said. “She throws nothing away.”
For the children at the library, the paper flowers reminded them of another ephemeral art form that is closely tied to their culture: the pinata.
Clarissa Sepulveda of Little Village said she and her uncle made paper flowers for her first communion. She, too, wanted to learn to make flowers after seeing stores full of them on a visit to Ocampo, Mexico.
At 10, Clarissa towered over de Allen as the artist patiently created a rose, working slowly with hands that show the decades of wear and tear.
But de Allen thinks they have held up well.
“They can roll and cut, not much else,” she says.
But she is thankful for that. It is good enough.
“El que mucho abarca, poco aprieta,” she admonished a student who was trying to push a flower where it wouldn’t go. “Don’t let your reach exceed your grasp.”
