Oil painting coming home to Utah from South African embassy

Steven Lee Adams will soon be receiving a large crate at his studio in Mapleton containing a painting he loaned to the U.S. ambassador to South Africa three years ago. His painting has been hanging in the embassy there as part of the Art in Embassies Program.

In an excerpt from a letter sent to Adams by Ambassador Donald Gips, he thanked the artist and wrote, “As I conclude my tenure as U.S. ambassador to South Africa, I want to thank you for the beautiful artwork you so generously lent to my wife, Liz, and I to display in our residence. Your piece, ‘Winter Evening’ was a gorgeous addition to our home and we have received countless compliments on it. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Art in Embassies program, an important tool for U.S. diplomacy. As Secretary Clinton said, art provides us ‘with another language of diplomacy, one that evokes our universal aspirations as human beings, our common challenges and our responsibilities for thinking through and addressing the problems that we face together.’ I am honored that we were able to showcase your work to the scores of South African, American and other international visitors we have hosted over the last three years.”

President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie started the AIEP in 1964. The program places more than 5,000 works of art on loan in 170 U.S. embassies around the world.

“When Donald Gips and his wife came into my gallery I knew them well since they had been my customers for years,” said Mary Williams, owner of Mary Williams Fine Arts in Boulder, Colo. “He had been appointed as ambassador to South Africa and was looking for art for the embassy. They are not allowed to hang their private collection in the public areas but must choose works from museums and professional art galleries.”

“I happened to have this giant painting by Steven hanging in my gallery and they loved it. It’s an honor to be chosen to participate in the Art in Embassies Program, and Steven agreed to loan ‘Winter Evening — Timpanogos,’ ” she said. “It does mean of course that I lost a sale of an A-plus painting, but Steven and I have an unusual artist and dealer relationship after 17 years together. It’s not common for the artist and dealer to continue working together for so many years but it’s been very rewarding watching my community in Boulder embrace him and love his art.”

The ambassador chose other works of art, including photographs by Edward Curtis, but when the embassy catalogue was published Adams’s painting was chosen for the cover.

Adams was surprised when he was contacted three years ago by representatives of AIEP.

“The ambassador chose my painting because he wanted something that reflected the Rocky Mountains and the West,” Adams said. “The paintings help the ambassadors feel at home while they are living abroad and expose international visitors to American art.

“This particular painting was from a photo I took after I had finished skiing at Sundance. I was in the upper parking lot area and I saw this image at the end of the day and took out my camera that I carry everywhere for just that purpose. I’m an artist and I look for those images in nature.”

The award-winning Utah artist began his painting career at a young age after being encouraged by his family, especially his grandmother, who recognized his talent when he was in fifth grade. His art teacher at Lakeridge Jr. High encouraged him and he took art classes at BYU, but he didn’t paint full-time until he was 30 years old.

“I had married young and had four children to support,” Adams said. “After my divorce at age 30, I decided I would try and be an artist full-time. My dad, a friend, and Repartee Gallery helped me to be able to paint for nine months and have a show, which launched my career. I try to tell young people it’s not too late to do something. Being an artist can be terrifying. When you have a job you can do your work without a lot of people looking at you all the time, but when you are an artist it’s like running out into the world naked. It takes courage to put yourself out there. It’s worth it when you see people crying and telling you that your paintings touch them.”

Another painting of Mt. Timpanogos by Adams is more familiar to Utah County residents and visitors. He was commissioned to create the paintings of Mt. Timpanogos and Bridal Veil Falls that hang in the entrance of the Utah County Health and Justice Building in Provo. He was surprised to be chosen.

“It was amazing and wonderful,” he said. “I was actually shocked to be asked to do both. It took nine months to get them both done and it was a diComing into focusfficult time for me because my son Brooks had just died in an accident. It became a bittersweet experience.”

For USC’s Marqise Lee, there’s quite a story behind the smile

The smile has come to symbolize the jaw-dropping football feats of this USC sophomore, who was voted the nation’s best wide receiver while becoming a favorite for next year’s Heisman Trophy. Yet to those who know him best, the smile is less about stardom than self-defense.

“He smiles so much, you never know what is wrong with him,” said his younger sister Stacy Lee. “I guess he doesn’t want to show anybody his pain.”

You see the smile. What you don’t see are the seven tattoos, high on his arm and shoulders so they’ll be hidden by a shirt, the ink of his grief. There is a tattoo for the deaf mother who was ordered to relinquish custody when he was a child. There is a tombstone tattoo for the brother who was murdered by a rival gang who shot him five times in the back. There is a praying hands tattoo for, among other things, the brother who is serving time in a Mississippi jail for attempted murder.

“People say things happen for a reason; well, I’m not trying to hear all that,” Lee said. “I don’t care about any reasons, some things just shouldn’t happen.”

You see the smile. What you don’t see is Lee dropping to his knees in a crowded end zone before every game and making the sign of the cross seven times, once for each member of his family and support system. He prays long and hard for the group that inspired his unusually selfless Twitter handle, @TeamLee1.

“If you notice, I’m always one of the last guys to leave the end zone,” he said. “I’m praying for the safety of a lot of people.”

You see the smile. What you don’t see is Lee sleeping on the couch at his Inglewood home, or sleeping on the floor next to Robert Woods’ bed in his campus house, or sleeping almost anywhere but on his own bed in his own room. After being tossed between foster homes and cheap hotels while growing up in South Los Angeles, Lee can best rest when he’s literally surrounded by family and friends.

“He’s got a bed, but he doesn’t use the bed,” said Steve Hester, whose family informally adopted Lee during high school. “After all he’s been through, he likes to spend his time in the middle of people who love him.”

You see the smile, but you didn’t see him in the visitors’ locker room after this fall’s 39-36 loss in Arizona. Lee had just completed one of the greatest games for a wide receiver in NCAA history, with a Pac-12 Conference-record 345 yards receiving, 469 all-purpose yards and two touchdowns. But he couldn’t haul down a potential Hail Mary touchdown pass on the game’s final play. Even though the ball was batted away in the end zone, he considered it a personal failure.

He crumpled to the ground and wept. He continued weeping as he walked off the field. He staggered into the locker room and punched a mirror, cutting his arm. He disappeared into a back room where he continued to loudly weep and moan while Coach Lane Kiffin was attempting to give his postgame speech.

He will climb into his 1996 Impala on Christmas morning, leave his rented home near USC and drive through South Los Angeles streets whose cluttered and cracked narrative matches his own.

Lee will first pass the Inglewood home where the police removed him and his four siblings from his mother’s care when he was 6 years old. Toy Williams, like Lee’s absentee father Elton, is deaf. Relatives feared she couldn’t care for the large family, and she eventually agreed.

“My mom felt like there was too much working against her, and so she just gave up,” said Lee’s older sister Latoya Reid, 25.

He will pass King’s Motel on Imperial Highway, a worn building with barred windows on the first floors, a place where he and Stacy lived for two years with their grandparents.

He will pass the home on 111th Place where he lived with his grandmother and great-grandfather. This is where he nearly joined the Bloods gang that eventually claimed the life of older brother Terreal Reid and led brother Donte Reid into jail.

“I really wanted to join the gang, those dudes were always real cool and doing everything for me,” Lee said. “But out of respect for my brothers, they wouldn’t let me.”

Lee will then stop and make a Christmas Day visit at the modest stucco home of Maria and Armando Flores, the young couple who became his foster parents for five years. He and Stacy came to their house to play with their two youngest children and never wanted to go home.

“He would be at my house and nobody would call about him, nobody would come for them,” Maria said. “He was just a little kid starved for affection.”

Lee will end his Christmas drive by pulling into the place he considers his permanent home, the Inglewood house of Steve Hester and Sheila Nero, who informally adopted him during his sophomore year at Gardena Serra High. Lee began hanging out with their son Steve, then Hester began giving him rides to school, then eventually Lee just wanted to stay at their house full time. Without ever signing a paper or asking for a dime, they took him in.

At the time, they had no idea he was capable of being a star athlete, or even finishing high school. At the time, they knew him only as a child who just kept showing up.

“He was such a good kid, he latched himself on to our house, he started bonding with us, and we couldn’t say no,” Hester said.

On a recent Sunday evening in this small, warm place, the couple known as “Big Steve” and “Miss Sheila” pointed to a large lump under a blanket on the family room floor. Marqise Lee was snoozing peacefully while several other young adults were laughing and joking and watching TV around him.

Lee used to rarely show it because of anger issues. He would get so mad at himself or others while playing youth basketball, he would leave the court in the middle of the game and storm outside to cool off. After one particularly galling loss in AAU basketball, he challenged his entire team to a postgame fight, vowing to pound them one by one in a nearby hotel lobby. Lee would get so mad at his lack of control over his unsettled life that coaches and parents would have to physically calm him down.

“I was hot, I was really upset at life, I wanted to get revenge, I wanted to so bad,” Lee said. “You always have the dream of getting out and doing something with your life, but I would look at my situation and be like, it’s just not gonna happen.”

It has become a cliche to say that it takes a village to raise a child, but in the case of Marqise Lee, it is the truth. In the middle of all this anger and turbulence — he changed elementary schools five times — the village took over. The village gave him that smile.

“I am honestly surprised that he was not smoking weed and hanging out and following his brothers into those gangs,” Latoya said. “A lot of people have stepped in and help him live.”

People like Armando Flores, the first long-term foster father, a former gang member who taught Lee humility by once pulling up alongside him in the street and pointing a cellphone at his head.

Nursing home patients rebuild lives through gardening

Nursing homes can invoke a mental picture of glassy-eyed residents walking up and down hallways or sitting, day after day, in the same chair or bed staring out windows or at blaring televisions.

Arroyo Grande Care Center, 1212 Farroll Ave., is changing all that with service-based therapy programs.

Patients at this skilled nursing home rebuild their lives by working on a fully-functioning farm to benefit local low-income seniors or by gathering, sorting and distributing school supplies and clothing for teenage students in need.

“One of the challenges we have in nursing homes and that we’re just starting to realize is that, no matter how good we are, no matter how passionate, how clinically excellent we are, it puts them in the position to just receive care, to thank us for that care. I think that’s the core of rampant depression in nursing homes. The core of the problem is that people still need to be needed,” said Matthew Lysobey, administrator of Arroyo Grande Care Center.

In November, maintenance staff broke ground on “The Farm,” a completely wheelchair-accessible, 1-acre produce and poultry garden.

In any given week, two-thirds of the home’s 90 patients can be found tending to raised plant beds, 26 dwarf fruit trees, a chicken coop and a 48-foot greenhouse. It was patients who planted the seeds, maintained the seedlings in the greenhouse and transplanted them to the garden. They toil daily on regular garden chores including watering, weeding, pruning and harvesting.

“The fact that we’re providing wonderful care doesn’t give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning, but  knowing that staff is not going to tend to the plants or the animals, that this food they produce goes to low-income seniors, that they’re needed, that’s what gives them a reason to get up,” Lysobey said.

Each week, gardeners harvest a crop that could include carrots, tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes and more, then deliver them to a free farmers market at nearby Grandmother’s Mobile Home Park. Low-income seniors there have their pick of the crop.

“For a lot of our patients, it’s the first time in years that someone has looked them in the eye and thanked them,” Lysobey said.

Rehabilitation Coordinator   Regina Beck said the garden provides a dynamic venue for physical therapy more closely related to real-life situations. Pathways, stairs, gravel, grass and other uneven surfaces add an element to physical therapy that smooth hallways cannot.

“Sometimes the patients get bored with our regular exercise programs and walking the halls. In the farm, we’re able to do the same exercises in a functional manner,” Beck said.

They practice dynamic standing while watering the garden beds, dynamic gate patterns while walking the uneven footing and a variety of other therapy motions while pulling weeds or harvesting plants.

“In this area especially, we have a lot of former farmers or people who spent most of their lives outside. Being inside all of the time is really tough for them, so this program provides activity that they can relate to, that they enjoy,” Beck said.

While Arroyo Grande Care Center focuses on their school-related and produce projects, Lysobey said it’s not the end product that matters but the sense of fulfillment patients get from the feeling of being needed.

“It’s not about the soap you make or the plants you grow or the homeless or low-income people you serve. We have countless nonprofits across this country doing good work. There’s a nursing home in every community full of people who want to help, who want to be needed, who want to have meaning and purpose in their lives. They’re waiting to be asked,” Lysobey said.

The work doesn’t go quickly, but speed isn’t the point of these types of programs.

“It might take one patient in a wheelchair with certain limitations half an hour to pick a pound of beans, but they feel good when they can go to farmers market and tell people that they grew these beans, they picked these beans,” Lysobey said.

The garden has made all the difference in the world to patients like Velma Stricker. The nonagenarian spends as many of her waking hours as possible in the garden and maintains an ongoing request that her bed be moved to the greenhouse so she never has to leave the garden.

“Velma was an avid gardener. She told me, ‘If I don’t have a garden to work in, I might as well lay here in bed.’ She promised that if we built it, she’d be out there every day. She’s been true to her word. She’s a dynamo out there. It’s nice to see her back and doing the things she loves,” Lysobey said.

Many of the residents have found their way to the garden of their own accord, but for some deeply despairing about their role as seniors, it took a little bit of convincing. One patient hadn’t left her room for years despite the urging of her family and staff. When she learned that she could help others by working on the farm, she stepped to. Those suffering severe dementia may not be aware of the garden, but when staff members put a garden hose in their hands, they know exactly what to do.

“Hours later, they don’t remember the work that they did. But that feeling in their chest that they’re doing something important stays. It’s not the memory of the task but that emotional connection to helping their community that they feel and express hours later,” Lysobey said. “It doesn’t have to be a farm. It can be anything as long as people are serving and being needed.”