With poor TV reception and the nearest movie theater 60 miles away, Sally Alatalo grew up depending on the world around her–namely her father’s Texaco station in northern Michigan–for visual stimulation.
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Alatalo’s interests might have remained mere diversions had she followed the usual path for girls in her hometown: early marriage; motherhood; endless days of laundry, cleaning, and cooking; and maybe a part-time job to supplement the family income. But her small-town existence was disrupted when she won a poetry contest in high school. Part of the prize was a scholarship to the Interlochen Arts Academy. Alatalo spent two years studying at the prestigious boarding school, receiving encouragement to take her writing and art seriously and to look beyond her hometown for fulfillment.
After Interlochen she attended Marlboro College in Vermont, taking time off in 1979 to hang out in New York City, where she lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side and earned her way as a dishwasher. She also filled lots of sketchbooks and visited museums and galleries.
Duz #3, just out, comes in the form of a large piece of yellow wallpaper–an homage to the classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman novella The Yellow Wallpaper–over which Alatalo has printed birds in flight, knotted ropes, and a repeated portrait of a woman in 50s-style formal wear (a black dress and pearl necklace) with carefully coiffed hair and a perfectly blank smile.
–Jack Helbig
