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Art on the Road: Monet and Venice.

“Although I am enthusiastic about Venice, and though I’ve started a few canvases, I’m afraid I will only bring back beginnings that will be nothing else but souvenirs for me”.

Claude Monet, letter to Gaston Bernheim. Fondation Monet.

***

In the early 1980s you could sneak into a Forbes exhibition of Fabergé eggs in New York City for free. I went there during my lunch breaks at the New School, across the street on 5th Ave, entering windowless, dark rooms with glass vitrines lit by invisible sources. Inside, the ornate concoctions nestled in dark blue or black velvet, each prettier than the next, gold and pastel colors. As long as you didn’t think about the way the Russian peasantry’s blood and toil enabled the Tsar to acquire such luxury items, you could revel in their beauty.

These associations popped up when I visited the de Young museum’s current exhibition, Monet and Venice, in San Francisco. Dark, windowless rooms, painted in velvety blue, contain numerous gold-framed, jewel-toned showpieces, each as pleasant and precious as a Fabergé egg, albeit rectangular. Fetching, exquisitely crafted, decorative. First impressions, of course, for someone who has never been much of a fan of Monet, and is wary of the through-line of decorative focus expressed by much of his work.

Claude Monet Palazzo Ducale (1908)

Second impression was admiration for how the entire exhibition was set up. The stellar collection of some 30 plus Venice paintings from the artist’s 10 week visit in 1908 (many executed from sketches, likely photographs, and surely memory in the ensuing 4 years back at home) is smartly framed by additional materials. Visitors get exposed to historic photographs of the city, as well as of the Monet couple visiting, and are provided with lots of quotations from the artist about his approach to art, process and subject. First shown at the Brooklyn Museum last fall, the exhibition was co-curated by  Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Melissa Buron, director of collections and chief curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. A truly successful collaboration.

Carlo Ponti Piazza San Marco ca 1860-1870

Importantly, some works of other artist fascinated by Venice, among them Turner, Sargent and Canaletto, are interspersed with Monet’s cityscapes. (By all reports, he was hesitant to visit the city in the first place because so many admired colleagues had painted it, and the trip was planned by his wife Alice as a recuperative sojourn only, for the aging and cataract-plagued painter. But paint he did, barely arrived.)

Giovanni Canaletto Venice, the Grand Canal looking East, with Santa Maria della Salute, (1749-1750)

Michele Giovanni Marieschi Views of Venice (1741)

John Ruskin The South Side of the Basilica de San Marco, from the Loggia of the Palazzo Ducale, ca 1850.

Give me a Turner, any time.

J.M.W. Turner The Campanile and Piazza of San Marco, Venice (1840)

J.M.W. Turner Boats at the Entrance to the Canale della Giudecca, Venice, off Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana (maybe 1840)

That said, the shimmering Adriatic light of the Venice lagoon was spectacularly captured in Monet’s paintings on display, but it (or any other bright light) was sorely missing from the surround. The contrast between the dark walls and the relatively small, bright canvasses made the latter into somewhat confined objects, constrained instead of unfolding into their surround.

Claude Monet San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908)

The only thing viscerally reminiscent of Venice were the crowds – here as there, amorphous units wafted from painting to painting, location to location, nowhere more dense that in the final room where large water lily paintings hung. The lure of the familiar, I guess. (This, by the way, despite timed entry slots for the exhibition. Lucky I was double masked.) The contrast could not have been more pronounced: the small cityscapes felt like glorified postcards compared to the immersion effect provided by the large pond canvasses, any given visual angle across the room still enveloping the viewer into the depictions.

Claude Monet Water Lilies (1914-1917)

The works themselves were pleasing in the impressionistic way, but for me became interesting at second glance, if and when I had a chance to break through the cordon of visitors bulging in front of each painting. They are, in some sense, studies of a given subject – this or that Palazzo – from slightly different perspectives (often just a minimally extended surround included) and under different lighting conditions that change the hue of the pastel tones applied. But they are also often horizontally bifurcated – with the top half devoted to depiction, however impressionistic, of a given architectural structure, and the bottom half a laboratory of ever more abstract painting of water.

Claude Monet The Grand Canal, Venice (1908)

The proportions of water to shore (large over small) seemed different from my memory of the canals (narrower in relation). I first thought that maybe we were seeing the psychological effect of boundary extension. This concept refers to remembering a previously viewed scene as containing a larger extent of the background than was actually present, and information that was likely present just outside the boundaries of that view is often incorporated into the representation of that scene. But here we are confronted with the reverse: it is the foreground, the water, that is larger (and also emptier, rid of most of the water traffic surely present in 1908 as well,) than the likely objective perspective. Lots of canvas space to develop abstraction rather than depicting optical impressions, uninhibited by the need to represent anything, perhaps. Have to give Monet that – always exploring, even towards the end of his by then illustrious career, at the height of his renown.

Claude Monet The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (1908)

Some sentence I picked up at the Marmottan in Paris at a previous visit had stuck with me: “The artist invites universal thoughts of peaceful contemplation.” I wondered how this could come from a man, who was, in his own ways, politically engaged. He was a friend of Emile Zola’s and joined him and other liberals in their belief that Dreyfus was innocent, during the times of the Dreyfus Affair. He was drawn to Courbet, a radical leftist at the time. Prime minister Clemenceau was his friend, and during WW I Monet saw it as his patriotic duty to support the war effort with a victory garden and donations of his paintings to raise funds for victims and the wounded. I scoffed at the notion of art => peaceful contemplation, thinking of it as placating, rather than depicting the world as it is, moving us to remedy what’s wrong.

Goes to show that I am as thoughtless as the next person, if biased about a source. The same invitation to slow down, contemplate and introspect from a different corner – the curator of this year’s Venice Biennale – seemed like just the ticket. Then again, maybe it is not the act of contemplation, but the subject that irked me: Monet hoped for the restorative effect of contemplating the aesthetics of fleetingness in nature, the light, the atmospherics, major keys beauty. Which brings me to Venice 2026, more precisely the 61st Biennale which is about to open in early May. Here we are asked to focus on the “minor keys, the overlooked, disguised, fervently guarded spaces reserved for human dignity.”

(And yes, to all of you who frown, “What’s wrong with restorative beauty?” Nothing at all. It, as any consoling work of art, certainly has a prominent role for anguished souls. I just feel that time is running through our – my – hands like sand, urging a use of art to focus on the most important issues of our world to save what can be saved. Art as the canary in the coal mine. To put it bluntly, the beauty of water lilies or Venice will be a mute topic, once the ponds are dried out, the city drowned.)

Claude Monet Water Lilies (1907)

***

In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.

—Curatorial statement by Koyo Kouoh, “In Minor Keys,” 2025

***

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026. It has seen its share of tragedy and upheaval long before it started. Curator Koyo Kouoh, highly respected in the art world, died suddenly late last year, leaving her team scrambling to consolidate and materialize her vision for this year’s exhibition. Another death struck, with Henrike Naumann, who was to represent the German pavilion, succumbing to cancer at age 41.

Then South Africa canceled its pavilion. The South African minister of culture had taken political issue with the work of Gabrielle Goliath, who had been unanimously selected by committee. “Elegy” was a decade-long project, a performance and video series that honors women, gay, and trans people who have been victims of violent killings. The new iteration at Venice was to include a tribute to Hiba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike, as well as the tens of thousands of women and children who have died in Gaza since October 2023. Government and artist tied up in law suits over this perceived censorship move, until the state declared final refusal to be represented this year in Venice at all in February.

The U.S. was not far behind. We will have a Pavilion, but the final choice of representative is highly controversial. For the first time ever, the State Department took on the selection process, sidelining the NEA with budget cuts. Applicants had to pass the “Trump test” that proposals must not “operate any programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.” Apparently, the almost unknown artist Robert Lazzarini had initially been selected before being nixed by the State Department, to be dropped for “bureaucratic rather than ideological reasons,” as later reported. Other artists came on with proposals, among them  Andres Serrano and Curtis Yarvin.

Who was finally picked? An American born sculptor, living in Mexico, who never applied to show at the Biennale in the first place. Alma Allen has only once been included in a major exhibition in the States, the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Last year some of his sculptures could be seen adjacent to NYC’s Park Avenue. Compare that to the standing of his Biennale predecessors: including Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Martin Puryear, Simone Leigh and Jeffrey Gibson, among others. He is currently not represented by any gallery. This was his commentary in the NYT: his galleries, Mendes Wood and Olney Gleason, asked him not to accept the Venice Biennale commission and dropped him when he did. Both galleries confirmed that they were no longer working with him, but declined to explain why, making the entire nomination and the obscure process behind it even more controversial.

I learned that “organizing the pavilion this year is commissioner Jenni Parido, founder of a pet food company and now executive director of the mysterious American Arts Conservancy (AAC), a new Florida-based nonprofit established this September with a mission to advance American visual art through diplomacy, education and cultural legacy. As its website states, it was “founded on the belief that art is a foundational element of a thriving democracy.” (Ref.) All in line, one presumes, with what curator Jeffrey Uslip highlights as “Allen’s alchemical transformation of matter explore the concept of ‘elevation,’ both as a physical manifestation of form and as a symbol of collective optimism and self-realization, furthering the Trump Administration’s focus on showcasing American excellence.”

***

Pavilions unfilled, pavilions filled with murky selection processes, and now pavilions demanded to be removed: many artists sent out an urgent call to ban outright or relocate national representation of countries engaged in warfare or genocidal action, including Russia, Israel, and the United States. There are precedents: the Russian and South African pavilions had been previously excluded, and there was political reaction to Pinochet’s takeover in Chile in 1974, with all national pavilions closed.

Not exactly minor keys, but a loud cacophony of conflict preceding the opening of this important touchstone in our contemporary art world. More Shostakovich’s 7th in C major than a Schumann concerto in A minor. I will report later how it all unfolds after the opening.

In the meantime, pay the De Young a visit if you are in San Francisco. It is a treat to see the accumulated art works in the current exhibition.

Here is my musical choice, to no-one’s surprise .

Claude Monet The Palazzo Contarini (1908)

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Whiplash

I look at a typical day right now (see below) and am not surprised that I am at times overwhelmed. As you likely are. So I will take a little time off from regular posting, go visit my kids down South, and along the way gather some renewed energy.

Morning: I read poetry, made for the moment, by Lebanese-Armenian poet Perla Kantarjian. Beirut is in flames as I write this. Under the cover of another war next door. If I had the energy I would write about the long-term environmental consequences of all the burning oil, in addition to the human suffering right now, but I don’t.

So I cry.

***

Then I go for my neighborhood walk, and find a fence made beautiful with eye candy – a group of crafters probably decorated together during the recent yarn crawl. This is an annual Portland experience, an event for fiber enthusiasts — knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, and felters — who spread through the city on a particular day to explore and support the many independent shops in and around Portland, Oregon, rather than buy on-line. Such a spot of upbeat color.



So I rejoice.

***

In the evening, I think through what art I saw that lingered from this day. Without competition, it was a project filmed in 2002 near Lima, Peru. A Belgian and a Mexican artist mobilized some 800 people to shovel sand to shift the top of a dune. You are rolling your eyes? Francis Alÿs is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on shared cultural histories, urban engagement, and the human impact on the environment. I saw his work years back at the Tate Modern, and continue to follow what he is doing. Here is an older project particularly apt for our current situation: It was called Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains) – and really: isn’t that what we need right now? Even if change is imperceptible, going slow, needing a lot of organizing and solidarity, something IS happening? Watch the video and see how students define their understanding of art, its social context and implications, the consequences of communal action.

So I feel hope.

I also feel whiplash, with all those intense emotions shifting constantly. Time to take a break! I’ll be in touch sporadically.

Here is music to help us crawl through the days.

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The Columbia Gorge Museum: Lacing Communities Together.

Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.”

Brunonia Barry. The Lace Reader (2009) p.29

***

The words above come from a recent novel where a particular make of lace plays a key role in the plot. (Historical murder and mayhem, inter-generational strife, an imaginative, fun, and occasionally overwrought romp.)

The first part of the quote felt timely in describing a turning point in the world, this March of 2026. The second part referred to something that sprung from the author’s imagination: descendants of the Salem witches divining the future from lace. So not a real thing – lace reading – that I naively assumed did exist. After all, people read tea leaves, crystal balls or cowry shells, why not lace? A “still point” seemed such an intuitive concept.

Our world is shifting and heading in another direction, though, isn’t it? So why do I turn to the topic of lace today, and not to other alternatives? I could think through how we should deal psychologically with our worries and fears, or how to seek community as to not face a crumbling world alone?

As you will see, lace, as introduced today, will speak to all of it.

Burratto Lace Grapevine Motif Italy 17th C

Lace is going to be at the center of this summer’s exhibition and activities at the Columbia Gorge museum. Executive Director Lou Palermo builds on the ideas and successes of previous projects for which she was instrumental during her time at Maryhill Museum. As I reported then, the Exquisite Gorge I and II programs collected the works of PNW printmakers and fabric artists, respectively. All of them celebrated aspects of the Columbia Gorge associated with a particular region. They were eventually displayed on the museum grounds in installations that preserved the geography of the river and its surrounds.

One of the most exciting part of these enterprises were the ways community was involved – community partners were called, and answered with extreme generosity, creativity, in-kind and financial support for all that was happening. Workshops involved library and schools, field trips allowed other artists to learn during master classes, people donated materials, opened their studios. From kids to grown-ups, participation was key – from learning to make prints, to how to weave, or do silk screenings; from studying natural dyes collected from native plants, bee keeping, to learning about Native-American symbols and history associated with the Columbia Gorge.

It was this aspect that Palermo and her great team at the Columbia Gorge Museum wanted to make central in this year’s adventure: lacing communities together. They are encouraging engagement with a heritage art form that will create samplers devoted to core aspects of the region, the trees and the salmon. Under the guidance of a remarkable contemporary lace artist, Maggie Hensel-Brown, everyone who is interested can learn and contribute, not just select artists. By the end of August, the museum will have collected regionally, nationally and internationally stitched lace samplers that will be arranged into beautiful installations reminding us of the value and beauty of the landscape surrounding us.

Czech Lace Emilie Palickova (Detail) mid-1900

Multiple organizations have already pledged their collaboration. From Skamania Lodge, multiple library districts, the History Museum of Hood River County, to several lace and fiber arts-oriented organizations, like the Columbia Fiber Guild, Portland Lace Society, Lacemakers of Puget Sound and not least, the Arts in Education of the Gorge, all will help this project along. Local libraries will even hand out kits with all the necessary materials for making a small lace triangle to contribute to the installation to those interested.

Flanders Lace (Detail) 1700 – 1750

Are you among the many currently grieving the dissolution of the social fabric? That will be counterbalanced by fabric, holes and all, that was produced by a diverse community united in the hope they could deliver a thing of beauty, or at least an attempt to get there – you should see my first needle stitches. Not to worry, Hensel-Brown absolutely encourages imperfection, as long as you have fun trying. Huge relief, if you ask me.

She also provides step-by-step instructions for those new to the art form, both on video and as PDFs. She explains how you can gather the simple materials needed, and what to be on the lookout for, or practice with care. Her instructions are easy to follow, which does not mean that the first steps into needle lacing are a breeze. The needle work requires serious attention. I consider that one of the best ways to distract yourself from other thoughts, mind you. I am grateful for any half hour these days when I am not thinking about what is going on in the world, and strict attention protects my thoughts from straying.

I also found that the repetitive motions, once you have learned the one simple stitch involved in it all, can be extremely meditative. The kind of meditation that stills you and silences the worries for a while in this world that has shifted to yet another war. Check it out – you might find yourself as a part of a community that is learning and connecting while celebrating nature. Just what so many of us currently need.

Here are all the instructions helping with the Community Lace-Along.

https://www.columbiagorgemuseum.org/lace-project

***

Lace has had a complex history, influenced by diverse cultural backgrounds, and dependent on how it was created. Needle lace was started in the 15th century, made by women in Europe, popularized for the next 200 years. That lace is made entirely with a needle using a single thread on a temporary backing, wich is later removed. I love its name: Punto in Aria, stitches in the air. Angry at the world? Stab the air… a peaceful and productive way of letting off steam.

Lace can also be made with bobbins, a technique derived from braiding, developed pretty much in parallel to needle lace, using multiple threads. You can also create lace patterns with crocheting or knitting, but none as fine as the traditional techniques.

The art form and geographically refined patterns spread from Italy to Spain, France, Flanders and England. Lace makers fleeing religious conflicts often settled in other lace producing regions, interchanging patterns and techniques. Lace was a time-consuming art form, much prized as a status symbol for aristocrats or rich merchants. It certainly drew the attention of European painters of the Golden Age who left us with detailed examples of what their patrons wore. In fact, when I hear the word “lace,” it is these paintings that come to mind, long before thinking of fancy underwear, or bridal veils, or prayer mantillas, all commonly associated with the fabric.

Thomas Gainsborough Portrait of Mary Countess Howe (1760) Detail.

Eventually machines took over the jobs. The manual production knowledge might as well have died out with the professional lace makers after the industrial revolution, had it not been for artists who picked up on lace, and designers who saw its potential. Since the 1970s, there has been an explosion of interest in contemporary lace making, with societies founded to celebrate and educate about lace, museums established to preserve the history, and exhibitions devoted to many aspects of lace production, not least last year’s DesignBiennial in Venice.

How things are depicted changed with ever improved or altered techniques. What it is that was expressed in lace changed as well. Earlier simple geometric designs gave way to representations of nature. (The many gorgeous examples of trees shown on lace were of particular interest to Palermo, given the intended celebration of nature found in the Gorge.) Depictions of nature gave way to whole narratives, with human figures in cultural or political contexts, entire stories implied on small lace tableaus.

***

Here are just two striking examples of contemporary perspectives – Maggie Hensel-Brown‘s work and that of Agnes Herczeg which I find equally thought-provoking.

Some three years ago, Hensel-Brown gathered community to create an incredibly beautiful accumulation of leaves that were then conjoined. Over 400 participants, some 700 leaves, instilling a sense of fragility and resilience at the same time.

Maggie Hensel-Brown Radiance (2023) (Detail below)

The artist’s individual work is characterized by story telling. She takes everyday scenes and infuses them with magic, via a pattern defined by negative space, all with a needle and a single thread. The portraits capture emotions, anchoring those universals in the specifics of our Covid- or Internet-driven times. Details abound, asking us to explore deeper and deeper into the fray.

Maggie Hensel-Brown Quarantine Self Portrait I (2020) (all images from her website)

Maggie Hensel-Brown Sheets (2022)

Maggie Hensel-Brown Not useful, not beautiful (2023)

Maggie Hensel-Brown January 24th (2024)

I cannot wait to see her work in person.

***

Herczeg is a Hungarian artist who combines lace creations with branches and sticks she finds along the local beaches of the river Danube.

The juxtaposition of the airiness of the lace and the hardness of the wood creates a sculptural effect, with each medium competing for attention, yet emerging as an organic whole. I am particularly drawn to her hand coloring of the lace once the needle work is done. It provides additional depth to the configurations, further strengthening the sense of sculpture.

Agnes Herczeg: The resting place, 2019, 5 cm high, Needle lace with silk thread and thin wire contour combined with poplar branch, hand-painted

Agnes Herczeg: The tree, 2019, 9 cm high, Needle lace with silk and juta thread with thin wire contour, combined with beech bark, hand-painted. (Source)

We’ve come along way since the 14hundreds. It is glorious to think that the heritage is preserved and continues to be handed down to each next generation, with ever new twists and turns, not only of needles. Much to look forward to this summer, when the Columbia Gorge Museum will display lace variations and a renowned artist available on location.

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Skirt Variations.

I am skirting the issue. I should be writing about the politics of war, but my head would explode. Let’s turn to the interesting people department instead. Given that it is Women’s History month, I’ll start with a 19th century poet and union leader attuned to skirts.

The Skirt Machinist

I am making great big skirts 
For great big women— 
Amazons who’ve fed and slept
Themselves inhuman. 
Such long skirts, not less than two 
And forty inches. 
Thirty round the waist for fear 
The webbing pinches. 
There must be tremendous tucks 
On those round bellies. 
Underneath the limbs will shake
Like wine-soft jellies. 
I am making such big skirts
And all so heavy, 
I can see their wearers at 
A lord-mayor’s levee. 
I, who am so small and weak 
I have hardly grown, 
Wish the skirts I’m making less 
Unlike my own.


By Lesbia Harford

StitchesbyHB7’s Paris Skirt

Lesbia Harford was an Australian poet, lawyer and labor activist. Her father abandoned the family after bankruptcy, her mother toiling to get the 4 young siblings fed and educated. Harford was one of the first women to get a law degree at Melbourne University in 1915, where she became interested in the politics of class relations as well as feminism. She decided to work in the garment factories to understand truly the conditions of working class life, particularly among women. Despite having congenitally defective heart valves which made physical labor difficult, she went on to become a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) around 1916.

She was openly bisexual, often in polyamorous relationships, and radically honest in her poetry around feminine issues that would not be discussed in public. She died from tuberculosis at age 36, her last years of life tortured by illness and dependency.

The poem struck me as both anguished and angry. Here is this small person, overwhelmed by the weight of the production task, metaphorically as well as literally. Stunted, she sews for women who are clearly of a different class, unrestrained in their consumption, free to eat and rest. Yet even these Amazon-sized women are burdened by the weight of heavy skirts, jelly-like limbs prohibiting escape.

Heaviness even when the contraptions of previous eras – the crinolines, the farthingales, the petticoats – were long abandoned. Skirt length and materials varied across time, of course, not least affected by the economics of any given era. If you look at shapes and lengths in relation to war vs. peace times, for example, you find straight correlations, with skimped materials when times are hard. Length also, eventually, became a means of protest and liberation – the mini skirts of the 1960s the most famous example.

***

Skirts were on my mind for a number of reasons. I had read about a woman who collected woolen skirts for decades from Midwestern thrift stores, up until she was 89. For the next 10 years – Audrey Huset lived until her 99th birthday – the collection of over 1000 vintage skirts was stashed in cartons in a garage. Her granddaughter, artist Mae Colburn, started to archive them in 2022, with the help of her parents, professors of costume design and photography, respectively. They sorted them according to a range of colors, plaids, and silhouettes – here is the link to the digital archive where you can be amazed at the collection.

I try to wrap my head around the motivation: how can you accumulate so much stuff, without even using the garments? Then again, I can just see the joy of the hunt, the glory of a find of an unusual specimen, the hope that these will make some warm recycled rugs in the future, the physical pleasure of touching woven wool of that period (much denser and of higher quality than what we see today.) A passion that gets you out of the house and in contact with people into your high eighties…still. Collectors are a mystery to me.

***

Then another skirt appeared on my screen. An expert knitter, designer and dancer had shared the instructions for a voluminous, long skirt she called the Paris skirt, and asked her 35.000 subscribers on Instagram (or anyone else) to knit along. There was a huge resonance, an exploding array of pictures posted of the variations generated by knitters across the globe. A new community instantly created, although I have asked myself how people who have not been knitting for ages, could afford to participate.

The pattern is not difficult. The materials required, on the other hand, are prohibitively expensive, if you do not already own a stash of remnant wool accumulated across many former projects. The mohair wool, for example, costs an average of $30 or so for 50 grams, which give you some 500 yards (the project requires over 2700 yards for larger sizes, and that does not account for knitting with double or triple strands that give the skirt some heft and bounces on the bottom.) Five different sizes of circular knitting needles required: the largest alone, US 13 mm, costs easily $27. If you had to start from scratch you could spend $300 or more, for a homemade skirt!

But again, the use of leftover materials is a sustainable practice, and the making of your own clothes a political act. Add a community that derives a sense of connectedness from the shared experience, and you have truly accomplished something. The designer herself considers knitting a form of resistance.

***

Then a book appeared in the mail, a gift from a friend who rightly anticipated my pleasure of receiving it. Loosely bound in recycled (and strangely fragrant) jeans material, it is titled Fav Pieces of, followed by some 50 names of people from across the globe. Let’s ignore the fact that the choice of font, an illegible page of contents, and an occasionally tortured introduction trying to provide intellectual heft, all scream for attention. It is, after all, published by Thaddaeus Ropac Publisher of Modern Art. (I did not yet see the book on their publications website.)

Let’s focus instead on the fabulous idea of editors Frauke von Jaruntowski and Gerhard Andraschko Sorgo, to collect essays from people with various backgrounds about their favorite piece of clothing or other adornments. And admire the range of images provided with the design, including portraits of items, owners, or both, and some contextual pictures that are meaningful, ranging from laypersons’ snapshots to serious photography.

The essays make us think about our relationship to clothes and, in turn, the ways beauty norms, body image, experienced gaze, memory, class conformity, politics, moods as well as our yearnings, influence our consumerism – or our rejection of it.

It is a fascinating read, if only for the comparison between explanatory attempts. Some people reveal intensely private information, others block with superficial description. Multiple owners describe how the item makes them feel internally for its own relevance, history or associations. Several emphasize how a given piece allows them to create a persona projected outwards. A few discuss the relevance of fashion in their lives, yet others the need for comfort, rather than public effect. Some are eloquently descriptive of beauty, others refer but to function.

Oversharing, reticence, courage to expose vulnerability, vanity, strategic self positioning, thoughtful introspection, or simple autobiographical anecdotes – all can be found between two covers.

Only two skirts made the list. One is from an exchange between designers, a hand-stitched, non-traditional patchwork quilt in return for hand painted plates. The essay informs about the history of Scottish tartans, symbol for traditional Clans. It then turns to lovely interpretation of the possible meaning of patch-worked remnants, creating a style that belongs to all. A Mix-and-Match Clan for a rootless citizenry, a remix overcoming divisions, and an important reminder that we can create something new from old. The reader truly understands why that is a favorite piece in this context.

The other skirt appears to have been protectively underused, in contrast to its oft worn twin in more muted colors, both purchased at KENZO in 1980’s London, simultaneously. The beloved bright one was a match for the buyer’s brilliant mood at the time, the darker one more likely acceptable in the owner’s day-to-day existence. A short comment on personal history that brought the good mood in the 80s in stark relief, and a cryptic snippet on how she regrets not having worn the favored piece enough, are the parentheses for the half-page long musings.

***

I used to wear skirts all the time. These days, not so much. I live in the functional, no need to think, can get dirty, ready to hike, comfortable uniform of pants and sweaters. But my favorite item in my closet is indeed a skirt, and it has accompanied me through good times and bad ones, for probably 20 years or longer. It replaced an old, red, star-sprinkled favorite that somehow got lost during emigration. I wear it when I travel, when I give lectures, or when I need a boost to my sense of who I am, during tricky encounters.

I picked it for my double portrait sessions with Henk Pander when he was still alive, a project, Eye to Eye, where he painted the photographer, I photographed the artist, across weeks of sittings. The skirt felt like the appropriate feminine counterweight to the absence of feminine symbols, eradicated by mastectomies for cancer. It’s most important attribute, other than a cheerful patchwork of patterns, is that it is light and wide enough to run in. No heavy skirts, no constricting pencil shapes ever again!

Henk Pander in his studio.

The skirt is also associated with something I am occasionally proud of: resisting overconsumption, for the most part, sticking to the tried and true. (I previously reviewed fiber artists, Ophir El-Boher, who embodies that concept in her art.) Of course that, too, comes from privilege. When you have permanent space to store things forever, when you have enough clothing that any one item is not worn to threads, when you have the funds to buy good quality that lasts, it is easy to do the right thing and not yield to compulsive purchases. In that way, then, the skirt reminds me to be grateful for all the choices I have.

Music today leads us back to the top – the fate of seamstresses in an exploitative economy. A Yiddish Ballad about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

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Borrowing today.

Here you see me, with my morning coffee cup, thinking what I should do for the next blog. I was working on a longer piece, but would not finish in time. My focus was drawn to the cup because I had recently encountered a series of paintings containing cups, presented by the inimitable French gallerist Yoyo Maeght.

So I thought, let’s offer some of those and some additional ones, celebrating the joys of hot coffee during cold days. Or any day, come to think of it. After all, new Harvard research shows that 2 to 3 cups a day are tied to significantly lower dementia risk, and slower cognitive decline. (Not the decaffeinated kind, though – the more caffeinated, the better, it looks like.)

Paul Cézanne, Woman with a Coffeepot (1890–1895)

Just then, a friend sent me the essay below, which I decided to post in full. It is something I rarely do, but the writing resonated on so many levels and the shared love for birds is obvious. The observations and emotions expressed feel familiar in almost uncanny ways. At the same time I decidedly disagree with some of the sentiments. A piece to make me think, then, so very welcome. The author is Chloe Hope who has been writing about death and birds with sensitivity and wit for quite some time now. Here is her substack link, so you can see for yourself.

You get the somewhat haphazard combination, in other words, of a borrowed text and a borrowed visual idea, the former defiant, the latter comforting. I guess as good a combination as any to start our week with.

Félix Vallotton Nature morte avec des fleurs (1925).

in accordance

one eye on the sky…

By Chloe Hope

Someone in the village has been feeding the Kites. There’s an unusual number, wheeling above the valley—David counted forty, the other day, spinning a languid gyre. I’ve a cricked neck from holding my face parallel to the sky, and at times they hover so low I can see the whites of their glassy eyes. Their constant spectre is as intimidating as it is hypnotic, and they drift overhead like a half-remembered dream, while we press on below. One eye on the sky. I find myself envious of their honeyed glide. The grace with which they seem to meet the day. I have, of late, become increasingly irritated by my seeming inability to feel a sense of ease. The news cycle exhausts and demoralises. What was a creeping sense of disquiet has become a steady march of dread, and the crumbling of systems which long presented themselves as trustworthy continues unabated—each passing week seeing the circle of complicity widen, and the nature of what was being protected grow ever darker. The news is magnetic interference and my mind a compass needle that cannot find true north. I am exquisitely disoriented by this moment in time. My defensive go-to, since childhood, in the face of confusion and unrest, is to sense-make. The tumult that infused my youngest years saw understanding become sword and shield—and confusion my mortal enemy. Those grasping arms served me well; until, of course, they didn’t. Until wielding tools of rationale became as insane as the thing I was fighting. Some things will not yield to understanding. Certain darknesses have no angle from which they begin to resolve, and to keep searching for one eventually becomes its own kind of madness.

Henri Matisse Laurette with Coffee Cup (1917)

Over the years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune of being involved in the early weeks of many a young Bird’s life. As with any newborn being, there are exciting points of progression which way-mark their developing birdness: eyes opening, pin feathers forming, perching. A particular favourite of mine to witness, however, is the first wing stretch. Any wing stretch is a joy to see, but there’s something about the first one that feels seismic—as though the wings themselves are making a declaration of intent to the sky—“Soon, vaulted blue. Soon.” Each time the sight lands sharp in my chest, the strange sting of something so perfect it makes me nervous. Each time I am made to question what I will declare to the sky. A wing is a refusal of gravity; a rebuttal, made of bone. The architecture so ancient it renders us a footnote. Feathers extend in graduated tiers, the whole apparatus light but not frail—hollow bones latticed within, muscles knitted along the keel. When a Bird lifts its wings, it is shaping pressure. Curving and carving air. Whether Robin or Raptor, they sense the invisible and answer in accordance.

Francisco de Zurbaran Still Life with Chocolate Breakfast Undated

Flight is a holy intimacy with the world, one clearly reserved for those who know how to belong to it. And few belong to it more completely than the Andean Condor. These spectacular Birds have a wingspan of over 10 feet, stand more than a meter tall and, weighing 15kg, are among the largest flying Birds in the world. At the turn of the decade, a study of these Condors revealed that, while airborne, they flap their wings less than 1% of the time. One of the Birds monitored flew for over five hours, travelling more than 100 miles, without beating their wings once. These magnificent beings take to the skies, and surrender to the currents they find there. They do not fight the air they’re met by, nor wish for better winds. They sense what is, and answer in accordance—and the world, thus met, holds them aloft. Their surrender is not capitulation, but an active and intelligent response to the world exactly as it is. And their radical trust ignites my own.

Henri Fontain LaTour Vase de fleurs avec une tasse de cafe (1865)

Surrender is exquisitely difficult—for me, at least—and it seems that no matter how many times I manage it, it never becomes something that I know how to do. I’ll mither and loop, all while knowing there is an alternative, but it somehow feels out of reach. I wonder whether the act of letting go, of yielding to the very is-ness of things, tends toward rocky terrain because some part of us knows that a day exists, suspended in the geography of the future, where the final task to be asked of us will be that very thing. Each time I open my arms and tilt my head to the sky, and meet the world on its own terms in a posture of vulnerability, I am preparing for—and speaking to—my ultimate surrender.

It’s windy here, today. There’s a horizontal line of chimney smoke scoring across the garden. The Kites are undeterred—in fact I think they’re playing in it. May we each meet the day with the grace of these Red Kites, and may we each meet Death with the grace of a soaring Condor.

Jean Etienne Liotard Lavergne Family Breakfast (1754)

“Suspended in the geography of the future” – I just love that phrase; it applies not just to eventualities we meet in our own lives, but also in the unfolding of art history. Just look at the Liotard version of breakfast and then take in Juan Gris – a mere 160 years apart.

Juan Gris Breakfast (1914). 

What sticks with me, though, from the essay, is the distinction between capitulation and surrender, and the sense that an unwillingness or inability to surrender might be problematic. That we have to practice surrender for the day when it is inevitable. I disagree. I think we have to practice NOT to surrender, particularly as women in this world, or as people dealing with illness. Why worry about attitude, when death might sneak up on us unexpectedly, or soothe us into a non-conscious state before departure, or simply declare the time is now. You don’t expect an emotional stance from a baby being birthed, it simply has no choice in the matter. Why then from the person who is equally forcefully dragged into the reverse process?

The implication is somehow that an approach of a certain kind can and will ease things at the end. Yet I have seen during hospice work that all 4×4 combinations – letting go, fighting against, good death, bad death – regularly occur. Why use energy now to shape yourself into something you hope matters, when that energy could be used to pursue what you love now, what feels comfortable now, what strengthens you in daily struggle now? There are dangers to surrendering in advance – in politics as much as on the sick bed.

I’ll place myself happily among the group of defiant young women and their cups below, by one of Sweden’s foremost contemporary painters. Just dare me to let go!

Karin Mamma Andersson About a Girl (2005.)

It is claimed that Johann Sebastian Bach insisted on his morning cuppa.  “Without my morning coffee, I’m just like a dried up piece of roast goat.” Here is his Coffee Cantata.

Édouard Vuillard Tasse et Mandarine (1887)

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Daffodils.

Portrait with Yellow Daffodils (1907) by Oskar Zwintscher (German, 1870 - 1916) | Portrait ...

Oskar Zwintscher Portrait with Daffodils (1907)

This is how I look today: red nose, running like a faucet, teary eyes, head cold stuffing my brain. So we’ll keep it short and take joy from daffodils, signs of better times to come. I don’t even have it in me to pair them with my photographs of these yellow wonders. In German they are called Easterbells, but here they already sprout early February.

Just take in the brilliant color. Spring will emerge.

John Dobbs Daffodils 2023

Daffodils in Long Grass

Helen Firth Daffodils in Long Grass (late 20th C)

Still Life of Daffodils in a Blue and White Vase

Lily Yorke Still Life of Daffodils in a Blue and White Vase (1890)

A. van Haddenham (Dutch, 19th/20th Century) | Daffodils, Century, Flowers

A. van Haddenham Daffodils and other flowers in a hamper (19th century)

Daffodils by Berthe Morisot: High-quality fine art print

Berthe Morisot Daffodils (1885)

The Role of the Dancer - Cincinnati Art Museum

Gustav Klimt The Dancer circa 1916–18 – Daffodils central among all the rest….

Mat Grogan | Still Life Daffodils | MutualArt

Mat Grogran Still Life with Daffodils

WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920 - 2021), Daffodil, from Recent Etchings I | Christie's

Wayne Thiebaud Daffodil (Etching)

Maria Sibylla Merian: A Revolutionary Scientist | DailyArt Magazine

Maria Sibylla Merian Daffodil, Scorpion grasses and Butterflies, ca 1657–1659

And just as a reminder, this very flower from the genus Narcissus was claimed to have sprung from the site of Narcissus’ death, after he glared too long into his watery mirror image, fell in and drowned.

Hoping for renewal after narcissists’ demise. May there be millions of these flowers around!

Claude Monet | Landscape of daffodils in a field | MutualArt

Claude Monet Landscape of Daffodils

Daffodils Grey Light by Paul Rafferty | Natura morta, Dipinti, Fiori

Paul Rafferty Daffodils Grey Light

And here is Schumann on spring….

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Without End

In the Evening

By Else Lasker-Schüler, translated by Eavan Boland.

***

It was pure coincidence that I visited Cara Levine‘s exhibition Without End at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Holocaust Education Center during the same week that my kids arrived in town. They are permanently relocating as survivors of the Altadena /Eaton Fire that destroyed their house, their neighborhood, their newly planted gardens and every memento they owned from more than three generations. Not a coincidence, then, that Levine’s current work, concerned with grief elicited by climate-related natural disasters and originating in exactly those same (Palisade) fire-induced losses, intensely resonated on a personal level.

Levine’s work has focused on loss, grief and pain of all kinds across the years of her practice since she earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (2007) and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2012). More importantly, though, it has offered perspectives on both, the causes of losses and communal ways in which healing can be implemented. Put differently, the work is not exclusively focused on individual experience, but on unveiling the collective circumstances that are producing loss, as well as offering tools to overcome trauma.

Before I get into the specifics, let me emphasize what I consider the strongest aspect of her work before us.

Real grief strikes down to the bone. There are no layers, no occlusions, no obscurations that it does not penetrate – they all become irrelevant. Levine’s sculptures and installations have that same directness: what you see is what you get. In our world where art often takes pride in obscurity, the need for deciphering, the veiled references, the analyses left to those in the know, her work will have none of that. Language is explicit, forms are defined, function leaves no room for interpretation. The art directly communicates shared human experience, and the artist is on an equal level with the viewer, no hierarchical distancing allowed. This, of course, is the basic element of communal experience, a focus of Levine’s makings, just as much as the individual’s grief.

***

I first came across Levine’s projects in 2022, when I was writing about the waves of eco-anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder of climate catastrophe survivors seen by clinical psychologists. Therapists face both increasing number and intensifying depth of anxiety disorders related to climate change. Data from the general population confirmed the trend. “A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” 

What could be done before you need to find a therapist? Some political moves might help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness. And then there is art: Levine and other contributing artists invited people to participate in physically digging a hole to throw in their grief. For seven days, echoing our Jewish custom of sitting Shiva after a death – a time when community meets and supports the mourner – a large hole was dug in Malibu. The project happened on the grounds of the Shalom Institute campus which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018, an early taste of the fiery destruction to come. It struck me at the time that digging that hole might be one of the ways in which we could dig ourselves out of one: forming alliances (the contributors ranges from Chumash tribal leaders to cantors from local Synagogues) would provide an exit to suffering grief in isolation. Alerting community to the causes of wild fires might also lead to collective action to tackle climate change denials.

A video of the project can be watched at the current exhibition. So can a subset of exhibits from Levine’s project alerting us to the number and types of deadly shooting of unarmed civilians.

***

This is not a Gun (TINAG) was triggered by an article in 2016 Harper’s Magazine that depicted objects held by unarmed victim of police shootings. The artist carved replicas of these innocuous objects, and workshop participants created ceramic models while discussing topics of racism and police brutality often associated with these kinds of shootings.

One of the most famous of these cases happened in New York City in 1999, when unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo was struck with 19 of 41 rounds fired by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers. They were charged with second-degree murder and subsequently acquitted at trial in Albany, New York on the grounds that they had a reasonable expectation to be endangered and drew a gun first in self defense.

Since then, long-term data collection revealed the fact that these shootings disproportionally victimize Blacks and other people of color. But there is also research evidence that Blacks and Whites both misperceive something innocent to be a weapon more often, if the object is held by a Black rather than a White person. In other words, all of us are likely to exhibit modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness.

You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics. (For a more detailed discussion see my review here.) Projects like Levine’s draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations.

Acknowledging the existence of racism, explicitly or implicitly expressed, and the hold it has on our society is the necessary antecedent to fight it. I can scarcely imagine a more timely reminder given what is unfolding in our communities at this very point in time, regardless of the color of unarmed victims of state violence.

***

The new work in this exhibition centers around containers of sand, intended to be deposits of what we release into them – drawing our sorrows, by hand or dowel. For those dealing with climate-related losses a lasting memento is offered – “silver linings” made of pewter filling in the contours of a sand drawing (by appointment, see the OJMCHE website)

They will be given to the participants and a replica stored in the artist’s collection. Examples from prior studio work are on display.

Sands shift, patterns will disappear, but the act of thinking what to depict and the physical act of drawing might very well form a containment that holds the grief momentarily outside of ourselves. Only to return.

Without end. As the aptly chosen exhibition title suggests.

Maybe the healing comes not from the unrealistic termination of the pain, but the insight that we walk on shared ground, sand before us containing multitudes, a communal experience. Certainly in the case of our own family’s post-fire trajectory, community sustenance made all the difference. The help – emotional, physical, financial, spiritual – being extended from the farthest corners was medicine. Solidarity as a first hand experience.

But maybe it is also a time to put the aspect of healing on a slow burner, and instead increase the heat of resistance against forces that create avoidable losses in the first place. Climate change denial is just one of the aspects of hostility towards science that we are currently experiencing, but one that has huge implications for the planet at large. Our time is running out to implement the necessary changes that can prevent the worst suffering for millions of people killed or ravaged by loss through climate catastrophes.

An installation of imprinted birchwood panels on some sort of infinity loop names types of loss, predominantly private causes, but also some of the general political challenges we face, from the legality of immigrants, the divisiveness in our society, to the lack of protecting our earth. I found myself longing for stronger words, in visually more prominent positions. The TINAG project was so courageous and openly political. Why not here? We live in an age of multiple mass extinctions around the world, at a time when authoritarian or even fascist history repeats itself in a variety of disguises across nations. This is a time of pandemics, starvation and withholding of medical or economic aid that dooms hundreds of thousands of people. Horror without end.

How do you draw a representation of genocide in a sand installation? The birchwood would have held the word.

***

What held grief was a dream catcher high up, pretty easy to miss, commemorating the untimely death of artist Peter Simensky, chair of the Graduate Fine Arts MFA program at California College of the Arts, Levine’s friend and mentor, to whom this exhibition was dedicated. For those unfamiliar with this unusually creative, political and perceptive artist, here is a link to an exhibition booklet from a previous memorial exhibition at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery and here is a link to his website.

I could not discern if one element of the dream catcher was indeed made out of pyrite, a kind of rock central to Simensky’s last artistic endeavors, Pyrite Radio works. Doesn’t matter. Whatever form his signal takes, I believe it will contain pride and joy at what is on display in the gallery below, the courage not to walk away from grief included.

Without End – Recent work on Grief by Cara Levine

Until May 31, 2026

OJMCHE

724 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday – Sunday: 11 – 4

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Rest in Power, Michel Saran.

· 1938 - 2026 ·

My heart is heavy today, after a German friend and mentor died peacefully two days ago, surrounded by his family. I am grateful that we were able to say Good Bye on the phone last week. I learned that he was fully ready to walk on, with cancer having wrecked his body. His biggest complaint to me concerned the fact that he was no longer able to paint, having intense double vision in addition to balancing problems. Passionate about his craft to the last, the artist in a nutshell.

In retrospect, one of his strongest series of obscured faces seemed to anticipate the inability to see. More likely, it expressed one of the greatest fear of any visual artist: loosing their eyesight. Those paintings, some of which I photographed in his studio, also encapsulate another truth. It was hard to see the subject behind the paint, hard to really know the painter behind his ever voluble quipping, joking, story telling. Endless colorful anecdotes obscured a number of significant losses across a lifetime, rarely discussed.

Michel was born in 1938 in Halberstadt, a small city in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, in the Harz mountain range of Eastern Germany. A military base since WW I, the city became the center for Junker aircraft production during WW II, housing an SS forced-labor camp, not far away from the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp. The Luftwaffe airbase was target of Allied bombing campaigns in 1944; during the last days of the war, after the Nazi town administration refused to surrender, 218 Flying Fortresses of the 8th Air Force, accompanied by 239 escort fighters, dropped 595 tons of bombs on the center of Halberstadt, killing about 2,500 people. The left-over 1.5 million cubic meters of rubble were handed over to the Soviet Red Army forces in June 1945. Imagine experiencing this as a 7 year old. I don’t even know if he lost family or neighbors, and I have known him since 1969.

At that point he had been in then West Germany for 8 years. By chance, Michel was abroad in 1961 when East Germany erected the wall, keeping its own population from leaving the country. He decided to stay in the West, another rupture, given the future inability to visit with folks at home. He had been trained as an optometrist, then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. He now transferred to the Staatliche Kunst Akademie in Düsseldorf, studying painting under Ferdinand Macketanz (as did Gerhard Richter, same class, same year) and under the far more interesting Gerhard Hoehme, a close ally of Jean Dubuffet’s Art Informel movement. Despite being a Meisterschüler, a kind of post-doc for graduates with distinction, Michel had to leave the lively artistic and intellectual environment of the city. Married to a young writer and poet, penniless with a child, soon two, on the way, he took a position as a high school arts teacher in the provinces, guaranteeing a steady income – and isolation.

This is where I met him, in the school’s art studio where I hung out, when the rest of my class, all boys, no girls, had sports or religious instructions (I was not part of that entirely catholic environment.) I had transferred to that public school from a despised private all girl boarding school after months and months of hospitalization, to be closer to home. Spent the summer in daily tutoring in a stuffed study of an ancient, smelly prof to pick up two years of Latin in 6 weeks – not exactly a great time in the life of a 16-year old. Michel’s first action proved he was a real Mensch: I was overcome with unanticipated menstrual pain to the point of fainting, embarrassed beyond description in that all male environment, and he just picked me and my bike up and drove me home, in the middle of the school day.

The artist and his wife eventually bought and remodeled an old vicarage in one of the small villages of the Selfkant region where I grew up. It was a bastion of colorful decorations and lights, a wild garden, progressive politics and conversations about art and literature through the nights, all amidst an environment that was deeply conservative, religious and narrow minded. I learned a lot about the courage to be different during later visits, after I had long moved to the big city to go to law school. I also got sternly scolded by Ingrid, and affectionately distracted by Michel, when I appeared again and again after yet another fling gone south, heart broken, driving 100s of kilometer through the night to seek sanctuary. “You need to find a sturdy farm boy, with intellectual potential!” was the recurring instruction. Well, I happily ended up with the intellectual potential, if not the farm boy….

We stayed in touch, by letters, phone and visits, during the tough times of Ingrid’s tragically early death from breast cancer; during the years I had moved to the U.S.; during the times Michel was more upset than I had ever seen him before, when his second wife was gravely ill, followed by a miraculous recovery. He rarely talked about his feelings, but proudly reported on his two children and grand children, who live in New Zealand and Holland, respectively, and were luckily able to be with him during his last days.

He claimed he was not surprised that I eventually began to make art, not just write about it, and was one of the first substantive and engaged critics. These phone and email conversations were essential for someone like me who had never had any formal art education; they were also influenced by the fact that he was always open to new ways of seeing and depicting the world, open to new mediums like my photomontages.

I have written a bit about Michel’s approach to art here before. What strikes me today, during the type of retrospective one is drawn to by permanent loss, is his willingness to risk change. There were so many oscillations between abstract and figurative approaches, exploring sculpture in addition to two dimensional work, systematic experimenting with closed vs. open perspectives, shifting from whimsey to deadly serious depictions.

I am also thinking about the role of chance. So often, in the art world as everywhere else, your success depends on external variables beyond your control, and not necessarily on the depth of your talent, or your ability to strike new territory. What would life have been like, if East Germany had not become an authoritarian state? What would have been possible, if a monthly state stipend or other sponsorship had made an independent artistic career possible, without being encumbered with a “day job”? Would it have made a difference if his studio had been in an urban environment rather than the rural landscape of the western provinces? Would his regional recognition be supplanted by a national or international one?

We will never know. What I do know is that his family lost a man who loved them deeply. I lost a relationship that was special for its transformation from a student-teacher status, where a 16 years age difference was huge, to an egalitarian friendship between adults, signified by shared knowledge of loved ones we had lost – my parents, his first wife. The world lost yet one more gifted, interesting artist who worked, relentlessly, in the margins of the art world, overshadowed by the few of his generation who made it big, and yet had not necessarily more to offer. It did not matter much to him – all he cared about was being able to bring his vision onto the canvas.

In our ultimate phone call he was still clear enough to tease me. Fritzi, he called me one last time, even though he knew full well I despise the nick name and always protested.

Well, Michel, Fritzi mourns you.

May your memory be a blessing.

Sketch he did of me as a 17 year-old. The portrait never got finished, with a baby and a toddler in his house.

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When the World Looks Away

“There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.” – Sophocles

Three years ago, I visited the Alexander Art Gallery for the first time. I had come to review Henk Pander’s The Ordeal, not knowing it would be his last solo exhibition before he died the next year. Paintings and drawings from across a lifetime depicted apocalyptic scenarios and narratives that referenced predominantly death and destruction. As I wrote at the time, “No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand.”

The painter would have probably agreed that some of these sentiments apply to the work currently at the gallery. Sam Marroquin‘s exhibition When the World Looks Away is about the years of ongoing horror experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. The artist confronts us with depictions of humans under existential threat, their bodies and spirits under relentless assault, their culture and history intentionally eradicated, their grief more than a single generation can hold. As of this writing, there are now Israeli orders for even Doctors without Borders and other aid organizations to leave the strip by February, during ongoing mass displacement. This, and continued violence despite the cease fire agreements, will worsen the situation for the civilian population.

Alexander Art Gallery featuring Sam Marroquin

Henk would have been thrilled to see that there is a young artist at the beginning of her promising career taking up the mantle of bearing witness, and calling on us to do the same. This is pretty much where the comparison ends, though, given that he created huge oil paintings, and large pen-and-ink drawings thriving on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings. Marroquin’s, in contrast, are mixed media works, blind contour outlines drawn in charcoal, filled with acrylic paint, with added text for many of them.

I had seen a smaller subset of these intense paintings before, impressed by the use of her non-dominant hand to produce fluid impressions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by Palestinians and other witnesses on site. At the time, the focus in conversations with the artist was on the selectivity of our media diets, connected to where we feel ideologically, or intellectually or “tribally” at home. Live witness accounts of the trauma are available, but never disseminated by most of the mass media, or are actively suppressed by factions on either side of the conflict. Marroquin felt compelled to step into the breach and expose us to the accounting, provide access to information that is not predetermined by the setting on our news channels and social media.

Sam Marroquin Despair (2024)

Seeing the body of work a second time, now in its entirety of over a hundred paintings, smartly curated by Kate Simmons, reinforced some of my earlier reactions and provoked additional observations. Unsurprisingly, my current (independent) reading also shifted the focus, and so will make an appearance here in a bit.

Sam Marroquin Starving (2024)

***

On a number of dimensions, Marroquin’s work reminds me of that of Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in Auschwitz. The German artist’s paintings were fluid, influenced by graphic design, amounting to the impression of a graphic novel. They were narrating the autobiographical experiences, early life and later suffering of a Jewish woman who had to flee state violence and racist persecution, to no avail. Caught in France, she was shipped to the camps, her paintings survived in hiding. It was a large body of cumulative work, depicting multiple facets of life under existential threat on pieces of cheap paper, with whatever coloring materials could be secured in exile. She added text to amplify the universal meaning of individual experiences.

Charlotte Salomon  Life? Or Theater?  Excerpts (1941-1943)

When the World Looks Away shows a lot of stylistic visual resemblance, eschewing conventional painting for a more graphic style. Manga books come to my mind. The compulsive inclusion of every aspect of the narrative is also present. Marroquin refers to the loss of life and limb, the hunger, the bombings, the absence of medical care or the difficulty to obtain it. She depicts the attacks on select groups beyond Hamas terrorists, journalists, medical personnel and aid workers included, on top of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. The painter describes the intentional destruction of cultural and educational institutions, the fate of political prisoners. She also refers to the international protests, and the treatment of protestors as criminals. The artist uses script often by doubling and superimposing words, creating an echo effect that resonates across time. Just like in Salomon’s work, witnessing is one of the through lines of Marroquin’s approach.

Sam Marroquin Goodbyes (2024)

Over and over the current paintings return to the children: innocents swallowed up into a maelstrom of violence and grief, at times specifically targeted, least able to defend themselves against the dangerous pressures of hunger, disease and cold. Irrespective of type of conflict, partisanship, country, from the Middle East to Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo, young non-actors who are most in need of protection are sacrificed to the ravages of war. Orphaned, disoriented, starving, burnt and maimed, they induce such a fright into the empathetic viewer that you want to turn away.

Sam Marroquin A Fine Line Between Life and Death (2024)

Sam Marroquin Where to? (2024)

Sam Marroquin Starved to Death (2025)

The artist bears witness – and tries to compel us to same – to the agony war unleashes onto humanity, regardless of who are the perpetrators, who are the victims, what cause can claim to be justified or what lessons of history are ignored. (Regarding the Gaza conflict, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague is considering a case since late December 2023, claiming Israel was violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide through its actions in Gaza. It will likely take until 2028 to get a decision. Full arguments for the case from Israel are due next week, January 12th, 2026. If ICJ judges will find that both acts of genocide and incitement to genocide have taken place, their orders should bind states. However, there is really no mechanism to enforce international law, in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law.)

Marroquin’s unflinching gaze on suffering, pain likely vicariously experienced when putting it into visual form across years of exposure, is remarkable. I would not have that in me. I can barely look at it for long amounts of time, which makes me ashamed.

Sam Marroquin To Grieve (2024)

***

It’s one thing to feel shame about not meeting your own standards. It is an uncomfortable feeling, and saddening. Emotions run even higher when I am told by others, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” But I am also mindful of the converse — when, for example, I find myself angry that others are not ashamed by their (often tacit) acceptance of actions or events I regard as vile. I certainly find myself enraged when the powerful act hideously and with no sense of shame.

Shame, and its counterpart shamelessness, deserve a closer examination, given that they are ubiquitous, and clearly provoking massive reactions. They are of importance in my own ways of approaching the world, obviously including the reception of art. They are also important in configuring the world I live in, often not for the better (just think of all the shaming around body image, or sexual victimizing on the internet, as just one example.) Two recently published and/or translated books are currently on my desk to help understand what’s at stake.

David Keen’s Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion just arrived, so I can only report on the introduction, but am already intrigued. Keen is a British political economist and Professor of Complex Emergencies at the London School of Economics. The core of the book tackles how shame can be instrumentalized, in politics, in war, in social hierarchies that assign (and reserve) a space to victims or for perpetrators. Shame can be loaded onto people, often with nefarious purposes, and in turn falsely promised to be lifted (often by the same actors who impose it in the first place.) In a social-media linked society where shame and shaming is increasingly prevalent, “shamelessness itself can be sold as an attractive spectacle – a symbolic escape from shame, a taste of freedom, a flight from the constraints, disparagements, insults self-doubt and self-admonishments to which mere mortals are regularly subjected and subjecting themselves.”

Sam Marroquin Amputee (2025)

French philosopher Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Shame approaches shame from the psychological perspective of the individual at the intersection with society, inextricably linked. Shame can be instilled by being assigned an inferior place in a hierarchy – there are plenty of “shame-generating frameworks” like stigmatisation, stereotyping, and inferiorisation by mechanisms of race, gender and class, or sexualized violence. We internalize that these relegations are our fault, and correspondingly feel shame rather than disgust for the perpetrators. In this sense, shame silences, subjugates and damages.

However, the philosopher also believes that there is an element of anger and rage in shame, which will, if we turn it against us, be very destructive. If I look at massacres of civilian populations, for example, I might be enraged, ashamed at my powerlessness to do anything about it. Often, and particularly if I am implicated by association with a perpetrating nation or group, that shame might convince me to close my eyes towards the cruelty committed in my name. It is simply too overwhelming to feel the shame, so I blind myself to the facts.

Yet, and this is the core message of the book, shame can also spark positive action. It might become an “ethical” shame where we project ourselves into a future reflecting on actions that would or would not shame us. Shame can be a stimulant, in other words, for imagining possible worlds and behaviors promoting desired outcomes. We live in a culture that ver much wants to distract us from assessing the ethical standards involved in the nation’s actions. The author’s prescription: “A proper response to shame has the potential to draw our attention to injustices or moral failings instead, and rouse us to resist and attack the status quo.”

Shame can rouse conscience in some way, then, just as Marroquin’s work does by relentlessly reflecting a reality that questions the morality of our actions, even as remote bystanders. We have choices: to look at suffering or not; to avoid complicated conversations or not; to support those in need or not; to make our voices heard or not.

To imagine a better world, or support the status quo.

If shame works as a catalyst toward defying shamelessness: bring it on!

***

‘When the World Looks Away’

Sam Marroquin
Jan. 5–Jan. 30, 2026

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Artist Talk: Wednesday, January 14th from noon to 1pm.

Alexander Gallery is located in the Niemeyer Center at Clackamas
Community College.

19600 Molalla Avenue
Oregon City, Oregon 97045



Sam Marroquin World’s Child (2025)

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Entering 2026

What to write for the first column of the New Year, a year that started with fresh horrors on top of the old ones? I was determined about one thing: it should be something positive, following the oft mentioned abolitionist Mariama Kaba’s instructions toward hope as a discipline, a practice. I wanted content that inspired hope, then, before landing on all the evil currently unleashed onto our world. I also wanted something close to my main interests of science, nature, art and politics. The latter two won out, with a little help from my friends.

Two of them seeded the idea: one gave me a book about artists and resistance under fascism, as a Hanukkah present. The other pointed out Mamdani’s inauguration as new Mayor of New York City. It contained a plethora of cultural references linked to artists and art that fight for a better future or strengthens the belief that all of us can be agents towards that goal.

I will focus today on the inauguration because it affects us here and now in our own cultural milieu. The general history of artists resisting fascism will take more time to learn about and digest, will return to it at some later point. Not that I understood all of the contemporary inauguration references either. I had to dig to make sense of some of them, derived from and directed at a younger generation that has been successfully awakened to participate in politics. Happy to share this new knowledge!

(Snapshots are from NYC some years back. The people make the city in all its glorious diversity.)

First, though, let’s look at some of the more familiar appearances during the inauguration. Actor and LGTBQ rights activist Javier Muñoz sang the national anthem. He is best known for starring and co-creating the role of “Alexander Hamilton” in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. That musical was, of course, about the American Revolution and Hamilton’s role in it, casting founding father roles with non-white actors. The creator and the producer of Hamilton recently canceled the show in reaction to the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center. It was scheduled to run between March 3 and April 26, 2026, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

 Mandy Patinkin sang “Over the Rainbow” along with a Staten Island elementary school chorus. It is a song of wanting and longing for a better future, written by a Jewish composer and a Jewish lyricist. Composer Harold Arlen was born in Buffalo, NY in 1905, to a Jewish cantor. Lyricist Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg) was born in 1896 on the Lower Eastside, to Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. Harburg was a close friend of Ira Gershwin since his schooldays and, according to his son, a “democratic socialist, [and] sworn challenger of all tyranny against the people”. He championed racial, sexual and gender equality as well as union politics, and was an ardent critic of high society and religion. Harburg’s song Brother, can you spare a dime is almost as familiar as Over the Rainbow. Both artists are definitely cultural touchstones for a demand for a more just world.

Lucy Dacus performed the labor anthem “Bread and Roses.”

I found the lyrics in the Jewish Women Archives, spelling out the 1911 poem by Jewish writer, editor and Jungian analyst James Oppenheim. It was based on a famous line by Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish Labor Union Leader.

Oppenheim was the founder and editor of The Seven Arts, a progressive magazine declaring “it was is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community.” It published, among others,  Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Paul Rosenfeld.

For her part, Rose Schneiderman was instrumental in the fight for unions and parity for women. She worked and organized from the tender age of 13, became vice president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and she helped organize the Uprising of the 20,000 for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and their conversations on labor issues led to Franklin Delano Roosevelent appointing Schneiderman in 1933 to the National Labor Advisory Board, where she fought to include domestic workers in social security and argued for wage parity for women workers.(Ref.) The Bread and Roses reference pertains to the need for subsistence (bread), but also the need for other support (roses,) including better schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women.



The theme of inclusivity and fighting for a better future was central to the inaugural poem Proof by Cornelius Eady, reciting his poem here. He dedicated it to all of his students currently particularly affected by the hatred and revulsion expressed by the administration for all that is deemed “DEI.” The poet ends with “proof” that our hopes can become reality if we pursue large goals unimpeded b lack of imagination.

Proof.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark, too large, too queer, too loud?
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?

You have to imagine it.
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name to invisible?

You’ve got to imagine.
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it.
Who checked their watch and said, “Not now.”

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

New York City of invention, roiling town, refresher and renewer.
New York City of the real will.
The canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.

New York, where your lucky self waits for your arrival,
Where there is always soil for your root.

This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us,
the colors and the rhythms and the beats of us,
In the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are.

City of insistence.
City of resistance.

You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet,
A joy that wears down the rock of “no,”
Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear,
Up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit on its way.

This moment is our proof.

By Cornelius Eady.

And finally, a cultural reference by the new Mayor himself. Mamdani cited the rapper Jadakiss (of the trio LOX.) “We will, in the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss or J to the Muah, be “outside.”

What does that mean? I learned that the phrase “I’m outside,” “means having street credibility and being present in one’s community, often used to assert authenticity and connection to one’s roots. It became a cultural catchphrase representing a commitment to being engaged and visible in the real world.” (Ref.)

Being present in our community: how is that for a start to 2026, a resolution that focuses on us being in this together rather than alone. It certainly has helped a progressive candidate unafraid to confront the Goliath(s) of structural obstacles, racist individuals and institutions, malignant narcissists, billionaires guarding their turfs, and corrupt agencies he now has to run, to secure a position of power. How much he will be able to transform his proposals into reality will depend on how much support he can garner along the way. He faces formidable resistance against his plans that serve the interests of the many, rather than the profits of the few.

Here is Mamdani’s full speech after being sworn in as Mayor.

For me, the selections of these particular songs and poems signified two important points: people have lived through difficult times in this country, whether the plight of European (and other) immigrants, the starvation of farming families in the dustbowl, the workers without rights, the women as second class citizens, the non-White population exposed to Jim Crow. Hard times arch across history, not exempting the present. Importantly, though, these pieces of art speak to meaning or even victories born from activism – progress has happened, through labor and union movements, through the civil rights movement, through women liberation movements.

Yes, the powers that be ardently want to turn back the clock. But prior generations have modeled for us that we can fight for our rights and win. The vast coalition supporting the new Mayor of New York did well to remind us of that. Onwards!

Music is a Bread and Roses version sung by Joan Baez chosen for the video commentary on women’s existence.

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