Craigslist.org is the great convener. Without it, how many of us would even know about the ID Project? So, one day, I decided to throw a “Call for Sentient City Submissions” up on Craigslist and see what would boomerang back to us. That’s when Niradhara came into our lives.

Niradhara answered my posting on the first day, announcing herself as an Agnihotri (a practitioner of Vedic purification rituals), who lives and works at Ananda Ashram at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. She said she has a meditation practice that includes Japa (a mantra-driven discipline, used in Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism) and that her primary media included meditation accoutrements, such as malas, rosaries and greeting cards, “heavy on the Sanskrit.” She sent me links to her website (www.jubileeartist.com) and to Ananda Ashram’s (www.anandaashram.org) in Monroe, New York, where she is the ashram studio’s founding artist and facilitator.

Reading the rest of her email, however, I was puzzled to find that her own studio is in Brooklyn, 11211. It seemed like it’d be quite a haul between a workspace upstate and one in north Brooklyn, especially if she were schlepping all the supplies she itemized in her practice – encaustics, organic prints, textile inks, ink-jet, beeswax, hand-stitchery in dyed cotton thread, and free-motion stitching on over-dyed linens. Niradhara had also captioned her thumbnail bio, which describes her as “an outsider artist with a visceral, process-driven visual voice emerging in NYC.” An outsider artist? Were we talking Georgia O’Keefe? Or did I have an Annie Sprinkle, Robert Mapplethorpe, or, God forbid, a GG Allin on my hands? (On a good day, a Sprinkle or a Mapplethorpe might make it into Sentient City, but an Allin would find a warmer welcome at the Bellvue bandstand.) There had to be a story behind this. I clicked on to her site.

I have to admit that, before I went to her sub-links or even her artwork, I looked at pictures of the artist herself. In one photo, Niradhara is leaning against a tree, topless, like St. Sebastian. Her arms are raised above her head, her wrists crossed one over the other. Feathers hang from the Diamanda Galas hair draping her breasts. Her torso, forearms and palms are covered in mystical tattoos. She’s wearing a nose ring, a string of jewels covers her third eye and she’s bedecked in rings and bracelets. Her stare is intent to say the least.

At first flush, her picture took me back to the fringe artist chicks who used to work at Urbis Orbis Café and Bookstore in Chicago in the early 90s. You didn’t want to monkey with them. They were similarly intent and tattooed; they lived amid infestations in low-rent apartments; and they’d tan and take your hide if you stiffed them on tips or even so much as thanked them for a refill. But, on her site, Niradhara described her stitchery work as “a mending of the broken human spirit.” This wasn’t the Urbis women’s style: they’d sooner break your bones than mend your spirit, and they sure as hell weren’t running home to make malas, much less rosaries, after their shifts. So who was this Niradahara, this outsider artist?

I explored her "Vision, Venue, Vessel, and Vocation" sub-links. The works were nothing short of exquisite. Featured under her “Mixed Media in Stitchery” page (www.jubileeartist.com/venue.html) are different series of textiles that envision the body as “holy book or sacred text” with titles like “Mirrors,” Wombs,” “Transient Altars,” “Temporal Coverings,” and then selected works that include such tapestries as “My Native Tongue,” where a proliferation of cloth tongues hang from a quilt as a testament to how each patch in a patchwork quilt tells the stories of the people and traditions from which it was torn.

My favorites are the ones in Niradhara’s “Sutra” series, where she represents the human body as “a shelter for the true self” and where she threads together “images of humanity…in the metaphor of the quilt as spreading the blanket of grace.” These works valorize traditional craftsmanship in an age of free-market imperialism and, in their execution, emphasize social and economic justice for women. Reading her site further, I learned that Niradhara taught stitchery to at-risk youth in Nantucket and women inmates at the state penitentiary in Massachusetts.

With that, I arranged a Sentient City interview with her for January 1, 2007 at Tea Lounge, near my apartment in Park Slope. She was a little late, having to negotiate the unseasonably rainy day and the trip from Monroe, New York to Brooklyn. Imagine my surprised when I saw that the imposing figure in that photo was actually a petite woman in a white cashmere turtleneck sweater. My interview offered even more surprises. Turns out, she had nothing in common with the Urbis Orbis Amazons. Rather, most of her life, she hadn’t lived in a big city at all. She didn’t even move to New York until her early forties. Not only that, but Niradhara is a grandmother to two grandchildren.

KTS:

You mentioned on your site how the word ‘sutra’ literally means ‘thread’ in Sanskrit. Is this how you came to the art of stitchery? To align with the sutras? Or was stitchery a way of stitching your life back together at a crossroads?

Niradhara:

No, I was born and raised in a drapery-making business in Pennsylvania. At about eight years old, I was working on a sewing machine and, by 14, I was working on the business end of things. It was my grandmother’s business. She supported three generations of our family with it. Her garage was much like that book The Red Tent, a lot of women hanging out, bonding. It was my entrée into feminism. The strong woman, the supporter. At the same time, I see a resurgence of those traditions: women becoming interested in domestic arts, knitting, and so forth.

In fact, Niradhara was born Lynne Marie. She took the Sanskrit name, Niradhara, which means “independence,” in honor of her own maverick spirit and that of her grandmother, who assumed the nontraditional role as breadwinner.

KTS:

So, your grandmother brought you into the drapery business.

Niradhara:

Yes, and at age 14, I wanted to take what I’d learned and create art with it. At first, I was making art out of trash that I’d find in garbage cans – and my grandmother would tell me, “Don’t play with that.” But it was my material, salvaged cloth. Much later, a friend told me I was making Katha cloth. In India, Katha is a tradition of telling stories through cloth-work. Mine was the same process, the same energy [as Katha], but that’s not how it all got started with me.

In the early 1970s, when she was a freshman at a Catholic high school, Niradhara had a gym teacher, who taught them yoga and meditation. Ever since then, Niradhara has sustained a practice of meditation. “I didn’t study Sanskrit back then,” she told me, “I didn’t know the meaning of sutras. In fact, I didn’t come back to the Diamond Sutra or the yoga sutras of Patanjali until I became ill. That drew me to the Upanishads and many sacred texts.”

Nantucket, MA

For over a decade, Niradhara lived as part of an artist enclave on Nantucket Island, which started an alternative gallery at a low-rent space that they named X Gallery. “Their work was a departure,” Niradhara says, “There wasn’t much of an art scene on Nantucket. There are regional crafts for tourists. You know, people painted lighthouses…the cornier the better. And then these artists came along and established this progressive gallery.”

While in Nantucket, Niradhara was also involved in statewide community work, especially with women inmates in the Massachusetts state prison. There, she threw a fireball into the inmates’ lives by giving them art journals to record their inmost thoughts through words and images, but she had to pass them off “prayer journals” to bring them inside. She also instructed the women in stitchery and quilt-making, which they took to ravenously, but she had teach them these practices under the rubric of “worship.” As Niradhara explains it, “When you enter prison, you lose your First Amendment rights. You no longer have the right to free speech. You can’t vote. But you do retain your right to worship. It’s a penitentiary. You do penance there.” In order to get her workshops past the prison chaplain, she had to set them in a religious context. “We read about the lives of four different women from the Bible. We talked about how their stories related to the [prisoners’] lives. Then we made a prison quilt.” The quilt is featured on her website: each square is a different female convict’s self-portrait. Combined, the squares form a Cross.

During those years, when she wasn’t conducting workshops, Niradahra was working in her home studio, sometimes as much as 80 hours a week, trying to make and sell enough art to keep body and soul together for both herself and her daughter. If nothing else, the threat of poverty kept her prolific. She also supplemented her income by working as an elder-care specialist and teaching art at local schools and centers.

KTS:

Why do you call yourself an Outsider Artist?

Niradhara:

That’s what they labeled me when I was teaching. I didn’t have an academic background. I didn’t come from art school. So, the schools called me an Outsider Artist.

KTS:

So, it was the academic community that made up that term?

Niradhara:

Yes. I had the skills [to teach] but I didn’t have the basic academic credentials that other people had. But they kept seeking me out and hiring me to teach.

But, in her heart of hearts, Niradhara didn’t want to teach. If she’d had her druthers, she would have simply done her art and sold it out of her studio or in venues like X Gallery. “Things change, though,” she observes. The gallery operated for more than ten years, but then, with so many of its artists leaving the island to take their work to different cities, it folded in 2001. By then, Niradhara’s daughter had married and was living with her husband and baby. The house couldn’t fit all four of them, so Niradhara took this and the gallery’s closing as her cues to head to New York.

Lyme sDisease

Niradhara had moved to the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in 2001. It seemed as good a place as any. She could live and work, day in, day out, in a simple studio. True, it might not have been the most affordable artist burg on earth; Manhattization was already setting in. But there was a lot going on, she could hawk her wares, she could get by.

Niradhara:

I wasn’t getting rich but I was getting by. I was energetic, very healthy, passing for half my age. Never thought about my body. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 13. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, what else could I have done to stay healthy? I thought I’d be this way till I was 100.

Then, on a visit to Nantucket, she contracted Lyme disease. One tick bit her neck (she has a bulls-eye tattooed at the scene of the crime). That wasn’t so bad: some antibiotics and she was back in business. But another tick bit the back of her head, right at the pituitary gland. This led to neurological disorders, including memory lapses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She had to be hooked up to an IV for two months. From there, she developed osteoarthritis.

Ananda Ashram

The minute she was off the IV, Niradhara told a friend, “I want to go to an ashram.” She didn’t know where that thought came from. There had been no deliberation. She just said it, as though she’d channeled the words. She then made her way over to her computer and ran a search engine, “Ashrams in New York.” Ananda Ashram was the first name to come up. She found out about their residency program; then she found out a friend of a friend was interested in finding a sublet in the neighborhood; she handed her keys over, sight unseen, to her friend’s friend and boarded the train for Monroe, New York.

That was over two years ago. As an ashram resident, she earns her room and board by working the standard eight-hour workday in the Baba Bhagavandas Publication Trust, where she curates and transcribes the teachings of the ashram’s founder, Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati. Part of Brahmananda’s genius was that, when he opened the ashram in the early Sixties, he had the foresight to know that he couldn’t gain an American audience by keeping his community strictly Hindu. He would have to syncretize and teach Vedanta and yoga as universal principles.

His example was highly inspiring for Niradhara when she enrolled in the New Seminary, an interfaith seminary on 29th Street in Chelsea. She has been studying there on her days off from the ashram, with an eye toward becoming an ordained interfaith minister. From there, she hopes to resume the kind of work that she had been doing at the women’s correctional facility and with at-risk youth, this time as an ordained minister.

Lyme disease has naturally influenced the current phase of her art, whose overarching theme is “responding to unwelcome adversity.” For the first time in her career, she’s making self-portraits; she’s no longer using models but rather her own body to contemplate mortality. “The guru gave a teaching yesterday,” Niradhara related, “He said, ‘Calamity is your greatest guru.’ I’m still warming up to that perspective, but I know it’s true.” Among many other pieces in this new body work is Niradhara’s Vesper series, which are images of the nightly rituals that she performs to restore her cognitive faculties to their former strength.

If Niradhara has one complaint about her life at Ananda, it’s that working full time there has kept her from working full time on her art. It seems like she’s always either in the Publications Trust or in the meditation hall or at fire ceremonies. She loves it all, but what sort of time does it leave for studio work? Luckily, the ashram has begun to allow Niradhara three days a week back in her studio in Williamsburg.

Still, things are not easy. She has to come up with rent - and New York ain’t Nantucket. All the same, she’s churning out as many pieces as she can to keep the wolves and the sheriff away from the door. Still, Lyme disease often wipes her out and she has to take time out to rest.

Asked about contingencies, she says, “I’m taking it a day at a time. I used to be a big planner. I’d plan and execute - plan and execute. Illness has taught me that your best-laid plans don’t always work. I’m getting comfortable with not knowing what I’ll be doing next.”

To check out Niradhara’s work, go to www.jubileeartist.com, where you can also contact her to ask about items featured and on sale.