Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Art

Exquisite Gorge 3: The Listener

How does an artist decide which questions to raise and which, if any, answers to provide? How does an educator reach their audience and communicate innovative ideas hoping to stir up responses that foster curiosity and open or change minds?

Neal Harrington, Print Maker, Musician, Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Arkansas Tech University

I wondered about this when meeting Neal Harrington, the third of the print makers to be portrayed for Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge project: To recap, he too is one of 11 artists who in collaboration with community partners are carving woodblocks filled with ideas about individual sections of the Columbia River. All of the blocks will be aligned and printed by a steam roller at the museum on August 24.

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

Neal Harringto and Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

I visited with Harrington at the Farmers’ Market in The Dalles last Saturday where he, together with folks from his project community partner, The Dalles Art Center, made it possible for the public to catch a first glimpse of his wood block. He is both an educator and an artist, dual roles that can compliment each other but might also compete with conflicting goals or resource allocation. He is also a musician in a band named Black Sabbatical. No wonder I was hooked.

With an MfA from Wichita State University, and tenured faculty at Arkansa Tech University in Russellville, AK, Harrington exhibits several of the hallmarks that make, in my mind, for a great teacher.

He has an easy way with jokes (Hey, kiddos, let me grab your attention…)

He is deadly passionate when it comes to conveying substance (Think, folks, think!)

And, importantly, he knows how to listen (Tell me again?).

The last one matters enormously – it allows you to gauge the status quo of those who want or need to learn, and to respond at the appropriate level, easing their load or equipping them with challenges. (Mind you, my criteria are derived from a small sample, but then again, how many great teachers do you encounter in your lifetime?)

Visitors at the booth engaging with Lou Palermo, left, and J.Scott Stephenson, Executive Director of TDAC center.

Member of The Dalles Art Center helping with the booth.

Harrington certainly listened to the community feedback in his conversations at The Dalles Art Center and elsewhere about what people wanted to see in his representation of Section Five of the Gorge: Rowena to Browns Island. “Don’t just focus on the usual, the cherries, the grapes, the wheat barges, include what matters for the future!”

Part of the future arrived in The Dalles in 2006 when Google opened their first data center, joined last year by a second one, providing direly needed employment opportunities. They have invested $1.8 billion in their facilities and have been a generous neighbor:

In their own words: “Since 2008, we have awarded nearly $2.5 million in grants that impact Wasco County and more than $10 million in grants to Oregon nonprofits and schools in areas that we’re passionate about, including science and technology education, carbon reduction, and access to the internet.”

Detail from the Exquisite Gorge Woodcut

Harrington listened and came up with a wildly imaginative design that married the past to the future, leaving us grinning in the present: Columbia River Gorge fauna and flora are represented within an arrangement that echoes old canned salmon-tin labels, with one of the ospreys ubiquitous to the region at the center of the block, taking off with a mouse in its talons: a computer mouse that is connected to a mother board.

Detail from Exquisite Gorge Woodcut

Once you get over the surprise and amusement, you can go on to appreciate the intricate nature of the intertwining parts, the respect for both history and nature, the sheer richness of the drawing. It is a sight to behold.

Exquisite Gorge Woodcut

_____________________

As an educator you should listen to others. As an artist you have to listen to yourself, often ignoring extraneous demands or Zeitgeist pressures. It helps when the inner voice is deeply rooted in preoccupations or beliefs that shape your view of the world and are longing to be externalized. Harrington’s passions were built on exposure to Greek mythology and American Roots music.

What is it about small town boys and girls and Greek mythology? I envision Rapid City, SD, where Harrington grew up, not exactly as a teeming cultural hotspot. Forgive my stereotyping, it was encouraged by a look at the city’s website where next to Mt. Rushmore a cement dinosaur park and a reptile garden were announced as the main attractions. The same – somewhat small-town, isolated location – was true for the men who really brought Hellenism with all of its facets to renewed prominence in the West many centuries ago, in far away Germany: Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Heinrich Schliemann. I have written about them here and here respectively. It was true for me, too, growing up in a middle-of-nowhere German village after WW II and for several of my philhellenic artist friends across the globe.)

My theory (again with small sample bias) is that Greek mythology delivered the equivalent of what Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or, in the gaming and cinematic realm, the Legend of Zelda or the entire Marvel enterprise currently provide: fully structured universes with a set of characters, a set of rules, daring breaking of rules, magical powers, and importantly, unhappy endings, all of which allow you to escape, to adopt a different cultural identity and to engage in downward comparison. (Hey you might be bored to death, but at least you didn’t have to roll that boulder up a mountain or have your liver pecked for all eternity…. ) Of course that German preoccupation with tragedy, and the associated emergence of German idealism did not end well: cultural historians like Fritz Stern argued that it paved the way for the success of fascism. A story for another day. But, oh, how mythology can be harvested for print making!

Pandora – Woodcut, 42″ x 48″, 2013 

———————-

Harrington listens. He listens to music that is another font of inspiration for his art. Growing up with friends whose names were James Poor Thunder, Lawrence Ironcloud and Tammy Little Bear, he was early on exposed to different perspectives of the American Dream. American Root music clearly provides a narrative that Harrington’s art picks up and renews. Series like his Bootlegger Ballads or Hard Travelin Man are testimony to my point.

Possession Day Blues
Woodcut with India Ink Washes, 24″ x 24″, 2015

He listens to his 13-year-old daughter who cannot live without once seeing Ariana Grande live in concert, and chauffeurs her for that trip which turns from three to seven hours in the car, being held up by recent floods in the Midwest. He listens to and comforts his young son whose mom is Chinese, coming home from school perplexed that his classmates mistake him for a Mexican and nudge him to speak Spanish – apparently that particular Arkansas slice of the world is divided into Whites and Hispanics only.

Carving the Exquisite Gorge wood cut

And then he listens to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and preferably Todd Snider (born in Beaverton, OR no less, and for me a new discovery.)

Finding inspiration, sorting out questions and answers.

He listens. We should look.

1 Comments

Exquisite Gorge 2: The Witness

How do you tell a story that is not necessarily your own? How do you draw a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These questions pose themselves to any artist, anthropologist, historian who is aware of limitations of their own perspectives.

These kind of of questions also arise for me when constructing profiles of people who I find interesting, whose work I admire, whose politics I likely share and who I get to talk to only once.

Roger Peet, print maker and muralist

Case in point is today’s portrait of one of the artists chosen for Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge project: print maker and muralist Roger Peet who I met last Saturday during a public woodblock carving session at the Goldendale Public Library. He is one of 11 artists who in collaboration with community partners are carving woodblocks filled with ideas about individual sections of the Columbia River, all of the blocks to be aligned and printed by a steam roller at the museum in August.

During our short conversation before the public portion of the event, I was quickly convinced that the artist is someone who would ask himself the questions outlined above. His section of the river ranges from the Deschutes River to John Day, including The Dalles Dam, one of four dams built along this stretch of the Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s that displaced Native American communities and wiped out traditional fishing grounds. We ended up in no time discussing the historical, political and environmental implications of that structure as well as other effects of human interference with nature. Yet we also talked about whose story this truly is, embedded in the context of all other assaults on Native American rights, and how one cannot usurp that telling.

Peet is a reserved man, by temperament probably more so than by the stereotypical gage of nationality (he hails from Great Britain and arrived here in the late 80s.) No self-promotion from his end, despite a pretty insane list of accomplishments, from exhibitions to publications to awards, and a range of interests that spans a political universe. Just check the link to his CV on his website, which exhibits a sly sense of humor as well. I warn you, though, that you might be left, as I, forever wondering what differentiates his proclaimed interest in “civilized bad ideas” from uncivilized ones….

A major focus of his work is the Endangered Species Mural Project associated with the Center for Biological Diversity. He created more than 16 larger-than-life paintings of at-risk animals and plants indigenous to communities across the United States, often collaborating with local artists and scientists. Murals depict flying squirrels in Asheville, North Carolina, and a jaguar in Tucson, Arizona, to monarch butterflies in Minneapolis, Minnesota, white fringeless orchids in Berea, Kentucky and cuckoos in LA all bear witness to the fragility of our environment.

(You can read more about it here. Published this January in the National Wildlife Federation magazine, the article was called: Art of the Possible. I wonder if the staff author was familiar with the original source of that quote, Otto von Bismarck, the stern, conservative Prussian chancellor of the German empire from 1871 -1890. In its entirety it read “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” I wager von Bismarck and Peet would not have formed a mutual admiration society. I certainly believe Peet would not likely settle for the next best. But then again, all I can do is infer, claiming no privileged access to his story.

———————-

During our conversation I could not help but think of another lover of nature, Lage Wernstedt, the famous surveyor of the North Cascades in WA in the early part of the 20th Century. He mapped both the Mt. Baker National Forest and the Okanagan National Forest and inventively named a range of mountains, coming up with Mt. Despair, Mt. Fury, Mt. Terror, Mt. Challenger, Inspiration Peak, and last but not least Mt. Triumph (not that he climbed many of them, by all reports. Stellar photographer, though.)

Well, I don’t know about terror, but the remaining attitudes seemed to smolder under the smooth Peet surface, except that nature was allotted the part of triumph when eventually “calling a day of reckoning in response to our abuse,” to quote the artist.

I surely documented inspiration, the will to bear witness with his art to the parts of the story that belong to all of us: just look at the design on the baltic birch wood block that alerts to what we have diminished and what we have already lost. The big horn sheep and fish have been greatly reduced in numbers (this year’s salmon run alone were so reduced that they barely filled tribal sustenance needs, much less the commercial quota due to, it is presumed, overheated water in the Pacific spawning grounds.) The California condor in the design has long absconded our regions and the Columbia River Tiger Beetle has gone the way of the sandbars that were its home – submerged by the human alteration of the landscape for industrial interests, be they (now defunct) aluminum plants or commercial barge traffic.

————————–

Inklings of challenge, fury or despair all but vanished with the onset of the carving sessions, and what emerged was a gentle, attentive mentor who guided young and old participants alike with passionate explanations and much practical advice.

The Goldendale Community Library courtyard was the perfect setting to allow patrons to participate. A historic Carnegie library, it serves as much as a library as a community center, supporting local arts and artists, according to library manager Erin Krake, who gave a warm introduction to the afternoon’s proceedings.

Erin Krake, Library Manager
Lou Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum (center) with Erin and her library colleague Susan.

——————

Soon people of all ages carved merrily along, none with more concentration than Joseph Bookmyer who turned 6 years old that very day and whose Dad was happy to have him enjoy this event.


Joseph Bookmyer

————————

I left with a restored sense of hope that this kind of educational project put on by the Maryhill Museum and enhanced by the curators’ pick of engaged, thoughtful and conservation-oriented artists will have an impact. Each mind reached, each perception sharpened, any one consciousness shaped by those who bear witness, it will eventually make a difference.

In Roger Peet’s own way of telling the story:

Relief Print
Cranes Lettra 100lb Printmaking Paper
signed/numbered edition of 25
9″ x 11″
23cm x 27cm

1 Comments

Art on the Road: Exquisite Gorge (1)

I have on previous occasions written on this or that aspect of Maryhill Museum in WA which I like to visit as often as I can. An eclectic collection of paintings, fashion, artifacts of some Eastern-European aristocracy (Queen Marie of Romania), chess sets, native American basketry, 80 or so works of art by Rodin, displayed in an old Manor house with a fascinating history of its founder, beautiful grounds and a sculpture park – it has all drawn me for many a decade. In fact I remember when they still had peacocks roaming the manicured lawns and discreetly placed signs, warning you of rattlesnake danger, should you step off the paths…

This summer I have the best ever justification for more repeat visits, carbon footprint be damned (it is a 2 hour drive from Portland after all): the museum has a fascinating project called Exquisite Gorge under way which promises both, a distinct process and an exciting outcome for all of us interested in learning about as many local artists as we can and celebrating the history and beauty of the Gorge and its people. Here is the description of the brainchild of Lou Palermo, curator of Education at the museum, who has been instrumental in connecting artists and communities throughout the Columbia River Gorge.

Louise Palermo, curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the “body” that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.

I plan to visit with as many of the contributing printmakers and communities involved in the process as is feasible between now and August 24, when the collaborative efforts will be revealed and united via a giant steam roller at Maryhill Museum. I hope my reports will allow glimpses into the diverse, creative power all around us that we so rarely have a chance to observe directly, documenting the thinking about and carving of each of the 10 segments allotted to the individual artists. And of course I can’t wait to be part of that grand finale in August, interviewing Palermo in depth on her curatorial vision and her ability to forge alliances across diverse populations.

———————

Last week was off to a great start: I got to meet Jane Pagliarulo in her beautiful Atelier Meridian in North PDX which she co-owns with Barbara Mason (with whom she also shares a leadership role in Print Arts Northwest (PAN) a non-profit that has advocated the art of printmaking through exhibitions, professional development, and educational programs for almost 40 years here in Portland. (Photographs throughout are from the Atelier.)

Pagliarulo is a Master Printer with a life history that could fill several life times, or be made into one of those movies where you long to be the heroine – except you don’t have a smidgen of the energy displayed by this artist, or the courage to try so many independent ways of living – well, I don’t in any case. Educated at UMass at Amherst and Exeter in England, she traveled and worked extensively in Europe and eventually did fine art printing in Santa Fe, NM.

Jane Pagliarulo, Master Printer, in her studio

Before you know it, she was an outdoor guide and independent survey forester in OR where she also taught printmaking as an Artist in Residence in Hood River County schools. She co-founded a printmaking workshop in the Alpinee Hut in Hood River from 2000 to 2006. And now she manages the studio here and prints for other people as well as her own art while donating time, knowledge, materials and skills to various education projects, and raising a 12 year old. No wonder she recently received an award that was established in honor of a truly generous person and has been given to those acknowledged to contribute deeply and freely to community.

Ray Trayle Print Prize 2017

Her fierce devotion to nature and her extensive skill with a variety of printing techniques – lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and photogravures – as well as her connection to the Hood River community, made her the perfect choice for being assigned that section of the river. The baltic birch panel is ready and set to be carved at the shop – I will report back when the design materializes!

————————-

0 Comments

Bitty Bugs

Walking through my garden towards dusk this weekend, watering can in hand for the new plantings, my eye was drawn to numerous small creatures. Oblivious in their own small universe, perhaps tired, they did not budge when I moved the iPhone directly above them, my watering task all but forgotten.

In the mysterious ways memory works, I suddenly recalled a miniature landscape I had encountered years back in the middle of Manhattan, to be looked at through a glass embedded in, I don’t know, a construction fence? Some office wall? No, I checked: Wall of the Museum of Arts and Design, on Broadway.

The artist, Patrick Jacobs, builds pseudoscientific dioramas using paper, styrene, acrylic, vinyl, neoprene, wax, and hair, and photographs among other materials, viewing them through lenses as he works, using tweezers and brushes. They are lit from within and exhibit incredible depths. Below are links to some of his typical work. If you are in Italy, you have a chance to catch his most recent exhibit until June 9th…..

Miniature Landscapes Through the Looking Glass

You look at the panoramas through circular shaped lenses, which reminded me of the Claude glass, an optical device used by 18th century landscape painters. The convex black mirror allows you to asses tonality and light and shade ratios in its reflection. I have always thought it would be interesting to do a landscape photography project with one of those things – probably done already by numerous photographers. Nonetheless, it would fit into the themes of reflection and distortion so much part of my montage work. Which reminds me: I have finally re-designed my art website – give it a look, feedback appreciated!

And for your Monday morning jolt, here is another insect-related masterpiece….gives you a crunching start into a hopefully bug-free week:

Spitbugs!

Unless you want to end up like Rothenberg who does all this interspecies music.

He has shifted from insects to whales now…..

1 Comments

Community Memory

One of the regrettable side products of a society on the move – whether moving is voluntary or not – is the loss of historical knowledge. If you grow up in a place and stay there for most of your life you are usually familiar with the history of your surroundings. You relate facts and stories to the next generation and you recognize them in the art that surrounds you, if it is focussed on any of these issues.

None of that is true any longer when you move to another area, another part of the country, another country. You have to do painstaking work to put all the pieces together and even then you might not have the information that comes with narratives handed down from generation to generation.

I found myself reminded of that twice lately. Once when exploring some non-touristy areas in Santa Fe and seeing a lot of murals and graffiti that clearly spoke to some issues related to New Mexico, or so it seemed. I had, of course, no clue. Photographs today are from those jaunts.

The second time it happened when I read this ArtsWatch piece by Bob Hicks yesterday, describing the work of Henk Pander (full disclosure, they are both friends of mine) that relates the history of the Vanport flood. An exhibit of new work around this topic opens here. There has been a festival since 2015 that commemorates annually the 1948 accidental flooding of Oregon’s then second largest city and its horrific destruction of lives and housing in a predominantly black neighborhood. It took an artist and an art critic, however, to get through to people like me with the story.

Why should we care about knowing the history of any given place? For one, I believe it connects us to prior generations, increases an understanding of the place and provides a sense of belonging, which in turn makes it more likely that we stand up for “our” community when that is required. Secondly, we might learn from what has happened in the past to protect us against similar mistakes in the future. That covers about any area I can think of, from awareness of the fragility of an eco system, the perils of building in potential floodplains, preparedness for earthquakes, to the more sociological issues of housing segregation and so on. And, come to think of it, the folly of war.

And since this week was Malcom X’s birthday, here is a master story teller when it comes to drawing the arc of history from past to present, offering alternative visions, warnings and hope: the compilation of speech excerpts is exquisite.

And music? Turns out people use music, big time, to teach history….

Here is Malcolm’s Gone – performed by Leon Thomas.

0 Comments

Community Action

18.248 – that is the official number of refugees who during the last 5 years drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean, according to the newest report by the United Nations. The dark figure is likely much higher. Organizations like Sea Bridge have been trying to rescue as many as they could, but their work has been made increasingly difficult by the political right wing forces in Europe.

The official E.U. Marine rescue boats were already withdrawn when the new Italian government refused to allow any more refugees on land. The E.U. states could not agree on a distribution quota that would have swayed the Italians. Now private rescue operations are brought to a halt as well.

People who use their own boats to fish drowning refugees out of the water are threatened with up to 20 years in prison and insane fines for supporting “illegal immigration.” Last Tuesday the captain of the boat “lifeline” was sentenced to a 1o.ooo Euros fine in Malta for rescuing 230 migrants and bringing them on land.

That same approach to “deterrence” is of course also happening here in the US: the criminalization of humanitarian aid has progressed under the Trump administration to destroy potentially the lives of those trying to prevent deaths along the Southern Border. Whether you leave water for those trying to cross the desert, or pick them up in your car to bring to social services, you can be charged with federal crimes like trafficking. (This last article on the treatment of organizations that try to save lives is frightening.)

——————————–

In a statement last year the European rescuers declared: SEEBRÜCKE is an international movement, supported by several civil society alliances and people. We declare our solidarity with people who are forced to flee their homes. From German and European policy makers, we demand the establishment of safe routes for refugees, to stop the criminalisation of sea rescue and to receive them in a humane way whilst respecting their rights.

Last year, protest actions organized by Seebrücke were held in Greece and several German and Swiss cities. This week, there was a protest in Berlin.

One of the city’s landmarks, Molecule Man by Jonathan Borofsky, was clad in an orange life vest and black blindfolds by art activists. The 30 meter high sculpture was installed in 1999 and strategically placed in the river Spree where the former East and West Germany met. Refugees had sewn the huge (48 square meters) life vest by hand according to a pattern devised by a Syrian mathematician, also a refugee. Banners along the bridges proclaimed: Build Bridges not Walls!

Aktivist_innen der Seebrücke befestigen am 17.05.2019 ein riesiges Transparent in Form einer Rettungsweste am Molecule Man, einer Skulptur die sich in der Spree zwischen Elsenbrücke und Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin befindet. Foto: RubyImages/F. Boillot

Here is a fascinating, short video documenting the action.

—————————–

“Molecule Man” (1981) by Jonathan Borofsky

Here is another of Borofky’s Molecule Man, this one located in L.A. Any clever suggestions how to decorate that one to draw attention to the plight of those crossing the Sonoran Desert? And those trying to prevent them from dying of thirst? Garments of canteens, anyone?

Photographs today are of desert plants I’ve encountered in the US.

 

And here is some desert music although from a desert in a different continent.

2 Comments

Art on the Road: Where Tough meets Tuff

Double dipping today – this will be up at Oregon Arts Watch as well.

IT HAPPENED TO ME AGAIN. That’s twice now, in just two years. I had to revise my assessment of an artist once I got to know the history and environment that was essential to their work. The first re-evaluation took place both on an intellectual and an emotional level – where I truly disliked Frida Kahlo before, I came round. https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5790

Gerald’s Tree I, 1937 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And now I have to admit something similar is happening for Georgia O’Keeffe. I was never a fan of the endlessly repeated desert skulls or foreshortened flower paintings, imbued with sexual metaphors or gender-specific markers – references, it turns out, mostly peddled by the men in her life in the beginning of her career and appropriated by many a feminist at some later point. O’Keeffe herself rejected these interpretations just as much as being co-opted by the feminist cause. (For a thorough analysis of her relationship to feminism read Linda M. Grasso: Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism University of New Mexico Press, 2017)

I was also not particularly taken by the way the oil paintings were rendered. Even though the landscapes use saturated colors, there is often a dullness that does not capture the intense brightness of New Mexico’s high desert. Laura Cumming, reviewing the 2016 O’Keeffe retrospective mounted at the Tate Modern, says it better than I possibly could:

But by now, what strikes is the stark disparity between the sensuous imagery and the dust-dead surface. O’Keeffe’s oil paintings turn out to be pasty, matte, evenly layered. They have no touch, no relish for paint, no interest in textural distinction. They are as graphic and flat as the millions of posters they have spawned worldwide; in fact, on the strength of this first major show outside America, they look just as good, if not better, in reproduction. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/10/georgia-okeefe-review-tate-modern-retrospective

From the River – Pale, 1959 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Mostly I was put off, though, by her ways of perfecting a persona, here too some semblance to Kahlo. She paid a lot of attention to how she looked (perhaps to be expected in one so often photographed) down to having a beloved piece of jewelry recreated in a different metal that better matched the color of her now white hair. She insisted on – often self styled – black and white clothing when being photographed, although she appeared usually in quite colorful clothes. The environments she lived in, particularly later in life when fame also brought fortune, were carefully arranged with designer furniture – Mies van der Rohe and Saarinen pieces among them. It is unsurprising that we now have traveling exhibits dedicated to her style, her clothes, her surroundings. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/touring/georgia_okeeffe_living_modern

Cottonwood (Detail), ca. 1952 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And above all there was that myth making of the independent, strong, lonely recluse seeking solitude in the acrid Southwest after life got too complicated on the East Coast. I had trouble squaring my images of recluses with someone having a house keeper, a gardener, a staff, and a coterie of friends, neighbors and endless groupies while floating on ever growing fame as a true American modernist. She objected to be associated with anything commercial (allusions to the fact that some of her paintings foreshadowed pop art infuriated her) but her ascent was driven, in part, by the commercial aptitude of her husband, photographer, artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, a much older man.

•

SO WHAT SHIFTED? Why have I started to see the artist and her art with new eyes and a certain appreciation? It was a combination of three factors during my recent visit to Santa Fe. I saw her early work in the lovely museum dedicated to her (https://www.okeeffemuseum.org).

Black Lines, 1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Abstraction with Curve and Circle, 1915-1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
 

I watched a documentary movie that the museum offers, in which the artist ruminates on her own life, and I experienced the landscape of New Mexico for the first time.

Black Place III, 1944 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The museum offered the usual biographic time line. Born in 1887 to farmers in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe teaches school in rural Texas after training at the Art Institute in Chicago. She takes up with Stieglitz, a leading promoter of modern art, and becomes part of an influential intellectual circle that catapults American art out of the dark ages, including names now extremely familiar to us, among them “Make it new!” Ezra Pound and “The Local is the Universal!” William Carlos Williams. She is close friends with another photographer and protégé of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, as well as his wife Rebecca and later Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. When her husband turns to even younger women and their marriage falls apart she moves to the Southwest, having visited every summer previously for many, many years.

All that I knew. I now learned, that this path was also riddled with disease and breakdowns (psychiatric wards included,) not as extreme as that of her friend Frida’s, but enough to stress how strong she must have been to go her independent ways. I was also drawn in when she talks about happiness in the documentary. She said something along the lines that happiness is insubstantial and short-lived for most people. What counts is being interested and that she was. She also took, she insisted, throughout life what she wanted.

In the Patio VII, 1950 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

•

INTERESTED SHE WAS: it shows in her ways of learning and applying principles developed by other artists – and then giving those principles her own rendering, taking what she wanted, whether that meant sticking to abstraction, or emulating strands of Neue Sachlichkeit. Being able to see her early abstractions, not painted in oil, made that particularly clear to me. These lovely watercolors herald later form and point the way to her insistence on 2-dimensionality, even in her landscapes.

Black Mesa Landscape NM/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Interest helped her to extract what she could use from all these photographers around her: endlessly modeling for Stieglitz, Strand, Adams and later Webb did not stop her from taking from this art form what made her paintings part of the American Avant-garde: she zoomed in and out in her depictions, as if she had those different lenses, shifting from macro to wide-angle renderings, making things big that were small and vice versa. Lessons of scale drawn from photography clearly influence her during most of her career.

                                                   Ram’s Horn I, ca 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

(And talking about photography – it drives me to distraction that every exhibit of her work that I have ever seen or read about, is paired with photographs of her by all these famous men in her life. It really has the viewer focus on her as a subject rather than her as the agent of her art.) But she took what she wanted: she left when it suited her, she stood by her artistic vision even when pressed to adapt to that of those around her and she experimented with relationships at a time where it took even more courage than it does today.

Interest made her a world traveler – particularly later in life when she went all over the place, always to return to her home in New Mexico where she finally settled in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’ death. And this landscape, as I now understand having seen it, provides a superb match to anyone with photographic sensibility. The thin air and the way it affects vision upends our usual ability to judge distance; in this way her paintings are quite literal depictions, only intensified by her proclivity towards abstraction. It is also a landscape in which anything incidental disappears when trying to brave the harsh elements, the dryness, wind, dust, heat or cold. That, too, is captured in O’Keeffe’s work, with its singular focus.

  A Piece of Wood, 1942 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The ground she walked and worked on in NM consists of compressed material from volcanic eruptions called Tuff. It is a soft substance, crumbly, easily destroyed – everything the artist was not, even though she had to endure one of the worst nightmares imaginable for a visual artist: macular degeneration. It appeared first in 1964, and her last unassisted oil painting was finished in 1974. She died in 1986, 98 years old. She might have been self-absorbed, vain, single-minded, but she also was vulnerable, thoughtful and above all, tough. Can’t help but like that, and allowing it to color the assessment of her art.

Church Steeple, 1930 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

•

INTERESTED SHE WAS AND INTERESTING SHE REMAINS. If you are curious to learn more about O’Keeffe, here is your chance: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust education presents Carolyn Burke on Tuesday, 4/30 at noon. The renowned author will discuss her book,  Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury. 

http://www.ojmche.org/events/2019-brown-bag-with-carolyn-burke

And if you are lucky, you will have a chance to listen to a new opera about O’Keeffe wherever it will next be produced. Today it rains with music by Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed just saw its world premiere in San Francis late March. It is staged as a train ride that O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand take to NM, where they play drunken games and talk about their lives. https://operaparallele.org/today-it-rains-2/

The only musical excerpt I could find is late in this clip, start at 25:00: And yes, it’s modern chamber opera. You know what that means.

Photographs today were taken completely independently of the paintings in NM and only later matched up. Talk about translations of a landscape….


1 Comments

Props

Yesterday I wrote about how certain kinds of clothing signal political beliefs or status. I was particularly grateful to the many of you who emailed in with their own experience of the kinds I described. Lifts the isolation.

Today I want to share a wonderfully mischievous artist’s work, using clothing and other props to skewer political beliefs and/or stereotypes.

Sarah Maple is a young British artist of mixed Islamic descent who has been a rising star.

https://www.sarahmaple.com

She had her first solo exhibit in NYC this February, and has received numerous awards and commissions for specific purposes. Her art is daring (she receives regular threats and people throw bricks through her gallery windows etc.) and insightful.

Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series

I especially like how she is not fixed on a particular topic, say skewering gender stereotypes, or racism, or nationalism, or – well, you get the idea. She processes what is happening all around her with her art, in paintings, photography, mixed media installations and films. The fun she seems to be having with putting her ideas into image simply oozes out of every picture.

Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series

I am posting images of an early (2011) series that looked at the contrast between the dreams little girls (are encouraged to) pursue, dreams about the existence as a princess, preferably a Disney one, and the kind of professions that regularly exclude women. Hanker over that mermaid dress, and never mind that a little bit more self confidence could have you excel in the sciences…. I applaud the playfulness mixed with an understanding of the seriousness of the topic.

Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series

But I encourage you to check out her series about Brexit here, it drips with sarcasm: https://www.sarahmaple.com/paintings-2#/brexit/

Sara Maple Breast Series

Note, no complicated articles to read today! I’m too tired to find them as you probably are to read them.

I will, however, add to Maple’s clever work some photographs about abandoned props found by the wayside. And speaking of which: I am signing off to go on a little road trip. Communications will be intermittent, but will give you a chance to travel vicariously!

Appropriate music today, since I have no clue how people always get these insanely clever ideas, are some Enigma Variations….. composer Elgar being, of course, Maple’s Landsmann.

0 Comments

The Map is not the Territory

I do get a kick out of visiting art exhibits with my octogenarian painter friend – sometimes grumpy, often funny, never boring and always, always good for some revelations about art. Yesterday we did have a blast again, wandering through the halls of the Portland Art Museum, exploring its newest exhibit: the map is not the territory.

The exhibit, celebrating, in the widest sense, regional art, was put on by the new (2017) PAM curator of Northwest art, Grace Kook-Anderson. Despite some occasional misgivings, I was sold on her vision after finishing the rounds of exhibition halls. There was enough substance that it was easy to put aside what my friend sometimes calls “the exploitation of human tragedy for the production of trendy conceptual art.” The curatorial display decisions were strong, some individual art works truly stood out, and the whole of it radiated cohesion. It taught, and it moved.

Charlene Vickers Turtle Clan, part of the installation Ominjimendaan/to remember

A detailed description of Kook-Anderson’s curatorial philosophy and the coming together of a group of diverse and diversely talented artists can be found in an in-depth review by Laurel Reed Pavic here: https://www.orartswatch.org/the-map-is-not-the-territory-whose-border-is-it/

——————————————

It is a mystery to me how a curator can make limited choices when there is an abundance of good work to choose from. I’ve talked about that previously here:

https://www.orartswatch.org/art-on-the-road-au-naturel-astoria/

Mistaken cramming is often the result – none of that at this show. The works had space to breathe and the range of mediums used did not interfere with each other. I found the juxtaposition of natural materials (fish skins, wood, etc.)

Annette Bellamy Out of Water
Fish skin and artificial sinew
(Background installation)

and/or concrete natural forms with man-made or even machine-made abstractions thought-provoking. Weight was given to artistic expressions of native American peoples’ losses, strengths, collective memory and contemporary struggle – a fitting decision given centuries of willful ignorance or suppression.

Charlene Vickers Sleep Walking
Moccasins, beer case cardboard, thread, synthetic twine, glass bead, letter beads, faux fur, denim. cotton fabric, 1920s bedroom chairs, wool blankets, acrylic knit blankets, assorted mixed media and found photo works.

—————————

The first of my favorite two pieces was Annette Bellamy’s Moving Mountains. The work is luminous and suggests that defying gravity is possible, after all. The contrast of seemingly heavy stones and boulders (stoneware, presumably hollow) and a sense of ascending lightness proved nothing but up-lifting. The lines from which the individual objects are suspended become part of the installation, suggesting falling rain at the same time that optically there is a sense of upward motion. The shadows seem to shift as something existing independently. The installation moved me, deeply, although I suspect that was not the “moving” referenced in the title.



Annette Bellamy Moving Mountains
Stoneware, UV resistant line, steel pins, epoxy.

The second work, slipstream (by the light of the moon) was a gouache/ink drawing on black clayboard by Mary Ann Peters. It, too, had a mesmerizing quality, inviting thoughts about watery surfaces. Funnily enough, it reminded me of one of those Rohrschach inkblot tests used by clinicians of yore as a psychodiagnostic tool – long debunked. Peters’ projective plane seemed to contain the mirror images displayed in those test stimuli, but of course, on closer inspection, defied that expectation. Smartly done, thought provoking.

Mary Ann Peters Slipstream (by the light of the moon)
Gouache/Ink on black clayboard.

This was also the artist who apparently suggested the title of the exhibition, derived from Alfred Korzybski’s major publication: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1948.) The actual quote is longer: “The map is not the landscape, but if the map is similar to the structure of the landscape, it is useful“ which suggests a bit more than the general assumption that he referred only to the essential distinction between an object and its representation—or, more broadly, between our beliefs and the underlying reality.

Korzybski was trained as an engineer in Poland; he later developed a theory called General Semantics (GS) that he taught and wrote about here in the US. He had quite a bit of a following, many science fiction writers among them, and reached something akin to cult status mid-century. Most notably, he is considered linked to Scientology and in fact long passages of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard borrow from GS and the conceptual road-map laid out in Science and Sanity. Among early GS critics in the field of psychology and linguistics was Martin Gardner, who wrote a flaming rebuke in Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (1952.) More recent criticism has come from both Noam Chomsky and later Steven Pinker. In fact the latter’s book The Language Instinct (1994) has a whole chapter debunking Korzybski and his predecessors Sapir and Whorf.

Rob Rhee Marginalia
Alginate plaster, acrylic, construction adhesive, gourd sherds.

Ok, enough of a detour – I’ll take off my cognitive-psychologist-hat and put back on the one devoted to art. If the map is not the territory then the quote is not a mirror of an underlying dead-end theory. It is instead a suitable guide for what this thoughtful exhibit references: regional issues, across time, tackled by inquisitive artists and a curator with vision, making borders apparent and inviting us to examine the history of the land.


Music today in honor of maps: Kaija Saariaho’s Circle Map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPnNZydMYEI

Photographs are from the exhibit – many more works to be seen there, I had limited space, obviously.

1 Comments

The Final Frontier

That phrase originated with Star Trek, right? Space, where no man had gone before? Today it’s two women’s turn: two artists who have done some incredible work with space and constellations.

The first is Scottish artist Katie Paterson who has an enviable knack for combining scientific research with creative genius: In 2017 she built Totality, an installation that culled images of every stage of a solar eclipse from the body of 10,000 which have been created since a drawing in 1778.  The images span drawings dating from hundreds of years ago through nineteenth-century photography and up to the most advanced telescopic technologies. Over 10,000 images reflect the progression of a solar eclipse across the room – from partial to total – mirroring the sequence of the Sun eclipsed by the Moon.She printed each individual image onto a mirrored panel, and then inserted it into a disco ball spanning 32.5 inches. Each row was arranged in the order that the sun eclipses, so began with quarter eclipses and finished with totality. You can see the whole thing for yourself in the clip below.

This year she will show her newest work, The Cosmic Spectrum, which encompasses the color of the universe from its very beginning to its eventual end. Working with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum, Paterson created a spinning wheel which charts the color of the universe through each era of its existence. 

Here is her own description: The Cosmic Spectrum encompasses the colour of the universe throughout its existence, spinning in one continuous cycle. It charts a history of starlight, from the primordial era, through the Dark Ages and the appearance of the first stars, to the current Stelliferous Era and into the Far Future. It uses the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and speculative data from leading scientists to establish the average colour of each era. The 2dF Redshift Survey measures the light from a large volume of the universe, more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry analysis this data in order to determine the average colour of the universe today as it would be perceived by the human eye – a colour they coined ‘Cosmic Latte’.

Cosmic Latte – I like that!

While Paterson utilizes science, and conceives of her shows as exhibitions of ideas, Vija Celmins tackles the constellations as a subject for her passion:the illusionistic process of image making itself. The Latvian-American artist, now in her eighties, uses satellite photographs to depict the night sky. Over decades she painstakingly drew layers and layers of charcoal, often sanded down, and then used erasers to add the stars. A current retrospective runs at San Francisco’s MoMa, with at least 40 paintings and drawings of the night sky. https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/vija-celmins/

Nothing but horizonless sky, dotted with stars and planets. As a reviewer noted:One of the primary philosophical questions of art has to do with its dual function as an illusory window, through which we view a subject beyond, and as an object to be valued for itself. Celmins has dedicated her career to consideration of that great dilemma. Ultimately, as this exhibition reveals, the subject is the picture.

Here is a nice illustration of the starry night illusion:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CubCXWeo53w

And here are illusions of light:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2wnuBV_nRE

0 Comments
© 2026