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Patricia Reser Center for the Arts

Wasp Love

Wasp

When the honey, fruit and flowery tablecloth were whisked from the table in one sweep, it flew off with a start. Entangled in the suffocating smoke of the curtains, it buzzed for a long time. At last it reached the window. It beat its weakening body repeatedly against the cold, solid air of the pane. In the last flutter of its wings drowsed the faith that the body’s unrest can awaken a wind carrying us to longed-for worlds.

You who stood under the window of your beloved, who saw your happiness in a shop window – do you know how to take away the sting of this death?

by Zbigniew Herbert

***

Imagine entering a small garden, overgrown paths lined with lungwort. A humongous fig tree granting shade, a few vegetable beds exploding with the smell of ripe tomatoes. Sun dappled verdant corners, whimsical ceramics catching the light here or there.

Red calla lilies shining like little lamps eager for attention, chicken contentedly clucking in a coop next to the persimmons, fruit still green.

Your eye is caught by the plum trees, laden with fruit, some ripe on the ground, the purple skin of Italian prunes encasing glimpses of gold where the fruit has split open.

A feast for wasps, and wasps were what I came for.

An art book about wasps, to be precise.

Let me hazard a guess: your first reaction upon hearing the word “wasp” was not entirely positive. Pesky yellow jackets interfering with your labor day picnic, stings that not too infrequently hurt like hell or even lead to anaphylactic shock, visions of angrily buzzing swarms of insects building their dreaded nests too close to the eves of your house.

Wasp nest, displayed in the artist’s studio.

You would not be alone in this assessment, and surely not the first one. Already in 300 bc, Aristotle insisted ‘Hornets and wasps … are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterize bees; this we should expect, for they have nothing divine about them as the bees have.’

A recent scientific study published in the Royal Entomological Society, found that people across 46 countries really had it in for wasps. They are universally disliked much more than bees or other insects. The public associates them with negative terms like angry, painful, dangerous, scary, and those sentiments map onto relative research efforts: wasps are significantly under-studied. Across 40 plus years of thousands of papers published in entomological journals, more than 80% cover bees, and not even 20% wasps.

Paper fold drawing our attention to common reactions.

Consequently what we know is relatively little, and what little we know is not communicated sufficiently to open people’s eyes to the utility of wasps for humans as well as their general importance for ecosystems as a whole.

From the studio collections.

Just a few facts: the wasps that bug us – the yellow jackets, the hornets – represent less than 1% of the stinging wasps, the species Vespines. Wasps belong either to social or to solitary species – the latter containing many more species, in fact hundreds of thousands of them, who do not sting and live quite separate from human contact areas.

Folded paper telling a story.

Wasps have several functions. Like bees, they pollinate our crops (although to a lesser extent.) They excel, though, in helping get rid of parasites. They regulate populations of arthropod pests and vectors of disease, decompose organic matter and improve soils. Important contributors to maintaining biodiversity, then, and now severely threatened, just like bees. Agricultural practices (use of genetically modified seeds, pesticides, etc.) habitat loss due to encroaching urbanization, and climate change all contribute to endangering these guardians of our ecosystems.

Eco prints of plants frequented by wasps.

Our implicit bias against wasps can only be remedied, if we change the rhetoric of fear to a rhetoric of love. For that to happen, we need to be familiarized with what there is to love: the beauty, the amazing survival mechanisms, the intricacies of wasp life cycles, and last but not least the tremendous ecological services these insects render. Which brings me to the owner of the enchanted garden described above, artist Diane Jacobs who has just finished creating a book celebrating all things wasp, the culmination of years of study and creative exploration of the subject.

***

Jacobs received an MFA in printmaking from San Francisco State University in 1996. and was awarded multiple prizes, fellowships and residencies in the years since. Her work – prints, sculptures and folio books – can be found in museums (The Portland Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the De Young Fine Arts Museum,), and educational institutions (The New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Alberta, University of Chicago Library, University of Miami, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Yale, and Stanford among them.)

Artist Diane Jacobs.

Her newest book intends to educate us about wasps and show the intrinsic beauty of Apocrita, those narrow waisted insects that populate pretty much our entire planet. Wasps and their environments are represented in stunning detail and through a plethora of artistic processes. The deeply serious intent to help us overcome our antipathies by getting to know the various species and their quirks, is often softened by using more whimsical means to do so.

Pop-up structures vie for attention,

Pop-ups.

paper layers inviting hands-on folding and unfolding to reveal ever more details are hidden in various pouches along the folios.

Paper folding for multi-surface info presentation.

Miniature sculptures made of natural and artificial materials expose the delicateness of wasps’ body parts, and also point to means of helping identification.

Beads and plant materials (thorns from a defunct dragon tree) sculpted into antennae.

The work evolved through Jacobs’ friendship with naturalist and photographer Kate Taormina, their shared interest and separate expertise cross-pollinating a successful collaboration. The joint project started in earnest during Jacobs’ 2024 residency at PLAYA, located in extremely remote Lake County in Oregon. The prestigious PLAYA residencies foster interaction between international artists and scientists, true to the belief of the organizers (and many of the rest of us who happen to have a foot in each of those camps!) that interdisciplinary exchange helps shape new ways of seeing the world, ultimately enhancing our approach to conservation. The concept of the book evolved over time. Now each page affords glimpses into a different universe, some pleasantly playful, others creating a sense of awe given nature’s diversity.

Whatever I learned about wasps, I learned even more about what can happen when an artist puts their mind to a singular pursuit of topic, but is open to embracing a huge number of different representational processes. Some of them surely needed to be acquired long after formal education had run its course.

Woodcuts in paper windows.

Just look a the list of processes and materials that the artist provided, all used to create the 16 hand-made copies of this book – one already snapped up by Yale University.

” Materials and printmaking techniques for this project include reduction woodcuts, wood engravings, mono print, lithography, photogravure etching, stitching, beading, hand painting, pressure printing, collage, polymer plates, book cloth, ceramic wasp, beech wood, unique eco print, and glass petri dish. Papers include Kitakata, handmade abaca, kozo, Gampi, mino washi, masa, Rives Lightweight, rayon, and Tyvek. All text on pages is handset and letterpress printed. Some booklets are letterpress printed from polymer plates and some are handset.”

So many artists who have had a successful 30 year career really stick to the tried and true, their developed expertise, even their general subjects. To embark on new fields of learning, as well as new processes that require tolerance of potential imperfection, takes courage. Jacobs, for example, was introduced to photogravure etching only 3 years ago, during a workshop at Mullowney Printing. Also fairly recently she learned how to do wood engraving. For Wasp Love alone the artist was going to carve 8 little wood engraving blocks. “It took me a bit to get in the groove.”

Wood engraving.

Yes, it takes courage, or at least an absence of vanity in pursuit of a greater goal. In this case helping nature to survive human indifference, or, worse, capitalism’s endless extractive exploitation, by deconstructing one stereotype after another.

Jacobs’ book Wasp Love is a marvel, not least in the way it balances education with art to be appreciated in its own right, independent of the book’s subject. Pacific NW audiences will be able to see and explore a show copy next February at The Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. It will be shown together with her wasp-related sculptural work and a series of her eco prints, as well as installations and paintings by Susan Murrell and my photomontages, in the context of Collective Effervescence. The exhibition is dedicated to our love of and fear for nature.

Pop-up folio.

***

Replacing the rhetoric of hate with the rhetoric of love – not an easy task. One of the obstacles lies in the psychological nature of hate, compared to love. For hate all you need is a simple, stereotyped target. There is “the enemy,” out to get us, in a zero-sum game of one side wins, when the other side loses. “Wasps are aggressive and hurtful.” Simplistic ideas like that are much more easily communicated and adhered to, than more complex ones.

It’s more difficult to convey the many aspects of multidimensional targets – endless species of wasps, a variety of functional advantages outweighing the occasional sting by a minority of Vespines. Complex concepts defy our desire to stereotype by means of their sheer diversity. You need to learn and integrate so many different facts. Which is made even more difficult by the reality that our old feelings were negative and now need to be recalibrated (in comparison to just sticking to your culturally transmitted biases that ruled the world across time.)

Wood engraved plates.

Art is enormously useful here. It can try and break the cycle of negative stereotyping in many different ways.

There is poetry. If we go back to the beginning of this post, you have Zbiegniew Herbert’s poem that subtly reminds us of the similarity of wasps and humans, not elevating one species over another. Rather than showering us with facts, and patronizing demands to let go of prejudice, its symbolism offers something that speaks to our emotions. Are we not all familiar with the feeling of being trapped in certain realms of our existence? Are we not all hoping against hope, to the last breath, that moving forward at all cost will bring us to a longed-for future, no matter how much we bang our heads against the wall? Because we look in the mirror, the observed death causes a premonition, a sting that cannot be resolved. Could it be that wasps are us?

Paper fold in book pocket.

Then there is literature. What comes to mind are Ursula LeGuin’s brilliant musings published some 40 years ago in The New Yorker. We are told that a woman is un-naming all members of creation, a woman who we later learn is Eve, about to leave Adam and the garden of Eden, unhappy with having been named in certain ways. The idea is that a name usually allows for categorization and/or stereotyping. Its absence will lead to equality not impeded by artificially drawn hierarchies.

“The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling away.

…

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. “

The merging of equals, affiliating through emotion, becoming extremely close: could it be love? As always with LeGuin, of course, there’s an undercurrent of brusqueness below the witty narration, pointing to the power naming has for those on top of social or gendered hierarchies.

Trial paper folding in the studio.

And finally, there is visual art. Jacobs’ book radiates joyfulness, in its colorfulness, playfulness with hidden and revealed shapes, its use of surprise perspectives. You cannot help but find these folios emotionally rousing, no matter how concept-driven and filled with scientific facts they are. The book might not manage to induce love, admittedly. But surely it ignites strong admiration for a life form that is so much more complex than we had known. A first step away from hate or fear.

I’ll take that in a heartbeat.

Or a wingbeat, as the case may be.

Snippets in Jacobs’ studio.

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Quail Eggs

A lot of eggs popped up last week. First a nest with duck eggs right off the footpath – unclear who was more startled, the duck who sat on them when I walked by, or I, when the duck flew up in a panic, practically fluttering into my face. (If s/he does that every time someone walks by, I predict there will be zero ducklings hatched…)

Next I saw a number of eggs or egg-shaped forms of various materials arranged in the house of a friend. A ceramic artist herself, she creates beauty with whatever she finds.

We shared the excitement of seeing bushtit parents flying in and out of a nest next to her kitchen window. Alas, the very next day the nest was destroyed by predators. Another generation lost.

My friend sent me home with a bag of quail eggs which are now on my windowsill until they, predictably, rot and start to smell up the kitchen. The eggs, in turn, triggered thoughts about genetics, since I had just read Brian Klaas’ fascinating essay about research into genetics and the question who owns your genome. If researchers discover information about our genome that contradicts everything we believe to be true about ourselves, should we be allowed to interfere with publication of that knowledge? Should they be allowed to withhold that information from us? And how are those questions linked to potential abuse by people with racist agendas? If you find the introduction below of interest, here is the link to the whole piece:

“…..Thus began a descent down a fascinating rabbit hole into the thorny philosophical debates that define modern research into population genetics. What happens when longstanding historical narratives of identity collide with hard genetic evidence? Should DNA scientists always publish findings that could destroy a population’s sense of itself? And, if not, who gets to decide which kinds of scientific research are too sensitive to release?”

Science caught my eye, or my brain, as the case may be. But so did poetry – again related to stories of origin, linkage to tribal membership as juxtaposed to “others,” and, of course, quail eggs. The lines below were published in 2022 (link in the title.)

Sonnet with Bird

1. Seventeen months after I moved off the reservation, I traveled to London to promote my first internationally published book. 

2. A Native American in England! I imagined the last Indian in England was Maria Tall Chief, the Osage ballerina who was once married to Balanchine. An Indian married to Balanchine! 

3. My publishers put me in a quaint little hotel near the Tate Gallery. I didn’t go into the Tate. Back then, I was afraid of paintings of and by white men. I think I’m still afraid of paintings of and by white men. 

4. This was long before I had a cell phone, so I stopped at payphones to call my wife. I miss the intensity of a conversation measured by a dwindling stack of quarters.

5. No quarters in England, though, and I don’t remember what the equivalent British coin was called. 

6. As with every other country I’ve visited, nobody thought I was Indian. This made me lonely.

7. Lonely enough to cry in my hotel bed one night as I kept thinking, “I am the only Indian in this country right now. I’m the only Indian within a five-thousand-mile circle.” 

8. But I wasn’t the only Indian; I wasn’t even the only Spokane Indian.

9. On the payphone, my mother told me that a childhood friend from the reservation was working at a London pub. So I wrote down the address and took a taxi driven by one of those London cabdrivers with extrasensory memory.

10. When I entered the pub, I sat in a corner, and waited for my friend to discover me. When he saw me, he leapt over the bar and hugged me. “I thought I was the only Indian in England,” he said.

11. His name was Aaron and he died of cancer last spring. I’d rushed to see him in his last moments, but he passed before I could reach him. Only minutes gone, his skin was still warm. I held his hand, kissed his forehead, and said, “England.” 

12. “England,” in our tribal language, now means, “Aren’t we a miracle?” and “Goodbye.” 

13. In my strange little hotel near the Tate, I had to wear my suit coat to eat breakfast in the lobby restaurant. Every morning, I ordered eggs and toast. Everywhere in the world, bread is bread, but my eggs were impossibly small. “What bird is this?” I asked the waiter. “That would be quail,” he said. On the first morning, I could not eat the quail eggs. On the second morning, I only took a taste. On the third day, I ate two and ordered two more. 

14. A gathering of quail is called a bevy. A gathering of Indians is called a tribe. When quails speak, they call it a song. When Indians sing, the air is heavy with grief. When quails grieve, they lie down next to their dead. When Indians die, the quails speak.

By Sherman Alexie

(Alexie has acknowledged sexual misconduct allegations in 2018, and apologized. Many of his prizes and fellowships were rescinded or renamed. I do not know if he has written a novel since then, but his short writings appear on his substack. As always, we can debate if you can separate the person from the work, but I often go back to reading his words.)

May the quails be silent this weekend, and may lots of eggs hatch….

***

Speaking of hatching: PLEASE SAVE THE DATES:

I have two exhibitions coming up. One will hang at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stvenson, WA, starting June 24, 2026 with a reception on September 11th, 2026 ( a combined celebration of lace artist Maggi Hensel Brown and community lace makers and my photographic work.)

Fragility is a 2025 series of photomontages that grew out of ongoing concern about insufficient environmental protection. Fauna and flora in the depicted landscapes – photographed mostly around the Pacific Northwest – are endangered. Climate change and the renewed threat of industrial extraction of resources, forests and minerals alike, will do irreparable harm. I thought the ephemeral nature of clouds and the fragility of lace (superimposed on the landscapes) were fitting symbols for why we need step up in our efforts to turn things around.

—

The other one opens with a reception on February 5, 2027 6-9 PM at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

Collective Effervescence brings together the work of Diane Jacobs, Susan Murrell  and my own to explore our evolving relationship with the natural world. Rooted in shared energy, connection, and interdependence, the exhibition examines how human actions shape and destabilize the landscapes we inhabit. Through painting, photography, printmaking, and mixed media, we create environments that are at once familiar and altered. Together, we invite viewers to look closely, to explore and perhaps share the artists’ fervent belief that we can have a positive impact on preserving nature, once we shift from individual awareness to shared responsibility, and from observation to action. My contributions come from a new series When We Broke the World.

I will post more detailed information closer to the dates – just put them in your calendars for now!

Music today is from all around the world, I guess every shared gene pool! A collection of modernized folksongs. A beautiful album by Marisa Anderson.

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The Boost We Could Use.

Yesterday I spent a lot of hours in a meeting at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. In between conversations and checking out the lay-out of the building for a planned exhibition, I caught some glimpses of the art currently on display.

I said glimpses and I mean glimpses. This is not a review, just what my camera was drawn to for quick snaps when walking the halls. Or my iPhone, as the case may be.

Upstair is devoted to The Nest Project, work by Debbie Baxter, in the context of the current show at the Reser: Hope is beyond Words. The multi-partner art exhibition focuses on survivors of domestic and sexual violence in Oregon. It was created in collaboration with the City of Beaverton Police Department and City of Beaverton, Family Peace Center of Washington County, and Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. (Run time April 3 – May 17, 2026)

A huge actual nest filled with down is an attention magnet, and photographs line the walls depicting various instantiations of Baxter’s idea of having people strip to their newborn status and find shelter in often fetal positions in the handmade nests created on each occasion. (David Slader at ArtsWatch described the project at length last year.)

Image by Debbie Baxter from her website.

The main gallery downstairs features a collection of works by people who experienced abuse. Here is the gallery blurb:

Uplifting voices and holding a safe space for self-expression, Hope is Beyond Words showcases creative works drawn from survivors’ experiences. Serving as a catalyst to prompt conversations about collective responsibility and eliminating violence in our communities, individuals come together to help other survivors realize they are not alone that behind the faceless statistics, trauma affects real people in our lives. Demonstrating the human spirit through visual art and written word, individuals from Beaverton and Washington County share insights into the complexities, struggles, realities, and resilience of experiencing trauma, recognizing that everyone deserves to be physically and emotionally safe in our community.

The cocoon can be entered. Fashioned by multiple artists, from what looked like paper machee and coffee grinds.

Two things stood out for me – the variety of ways to express loss and resilience, and the range of ability to elicit curiosity as well as empathy. As I said, this was not an occasion for me to linger with the work, or take it all in. But I WAS taken in by something that could have easily been trite, and has become such a fashionable mechanism to elicit viewer interaction: the opportunity to write down a few words related to the focus of the exhibition, in this case survivors.

Seeing them strung up on the walls, the words spoke to me, and actually gave me a lift. Some earnest about self acceptance, some brutally honest, some just witty. All meant to boost without sneering, and that, truly, hit the spot.

The strangest juxtaposition to a short (6 minute) clip I had watched that very morning, sent by a friend. “The Employment” is clever, handpainted animated work from 2008, by Santiago “Bou” Grasso  an Argentinian artist, describing the alienation in a capitalist world, where people are treated as and become objects. Not so at the Reser: people communicating with people, creating bonds through shared experiences or just empathy, and giving comfort. And advice: If life gives you lemons, become a used-car salesman…

The boost needed for this weekend.

Music to get us into the weekend.

.

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Talent, Conversing.

· "Dialogues: An emerging Artist Showcase" at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts ·

May I suggest that when the weather permits you plan a visit to the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton? I predict you’ll find it worthwhile, telling by my own reaction when I was there on Wednesday.

Dialogues: An emerging Artist Showcase, shown in the gallery until February 17, 2024, is an exhibition with a sufficiently catch-all title that makes one wonder who is supposed to be talking to whom. The one voice that mattered, however, was heard – the art spoke to me. Or shall we say a lot of the art – so many varied voices: painting, sculpture, woodworking, installations, fiber arts, ceramics and photography – some loud, some whispering, some tongue in cheek and some refusing to tell a story unless you invested enough curiosity to find out.

In fact, dialogue is offered on multiple levels – the artists, all still in training, self-taught, or recently graduated, reach out to the viewer in direct appeals to converse. Or they confer with imaginary representations of the past, unraveling narratives that cloaked something else. Or they are settling scores with departed lovers, or yell back at a world that is intolerably judgmental, or deliver simple, but insistent monologues. Then there are the conversations between those looking at the art and offering different takes. Or, if you’re lucky, you get to listen to the curator, Karen de Benedetti, explain some of the works that benefit from background information. Much talk in this gallery!

The Gallery at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts

The level of talent and expertise was as varied as the voices on offer, and that is a good thing. For me, one of the outstanding services The Reser Gallery provides for the community is the approachability of art for populations that are not necessarily familiar with it or are shy to reveal their own lack of knowledge, putting “art” on a pedestal. Showing art by young people who are still in the process of finding their voice, or the facility with the tools to express their ideas, is so very encouraging for the rest of us who are drawn to it but might feel inadequate. It creates engagement and might spark artistic explorations for those who can observe here that work evolves and improves over time, far from perfect in early stages of a career.

Noelle Herceg Jellashells Installation

That said, there were creative ideas all around the building, and some serious beauty to be had, with or without narratives. I will not be able to talk about them all; after all you should visit and see for yourselves! Instead I chose a few of the story tellers whose stories moved me, and a few artists who helped me to stop thinking or forever running my brain, by presenting work that simply enticed with visual beauty, feeding my eyes and soul instead.

Jessica Joner Of What Was

Upstairs a table surrounded by chairs awaits you, quite literally inviting people to sit down and talk, with many following the invite during the opening night, by all reports. Everything on the table is made or created by the artist, Jessica Joner, who embroiders surfaces with encouraging messages, and offers pottery for a multiple course meal. I spontaneously use the word inviting, but that is really how her work feels on second thought: it invites you to be with her, her ideas, her audience, an act of sharing, opening dialogue in the community.

Jessica Joner Respite (left) Ceaseless (right)

Downstairs my eyes were drawn into a large, multiple-part installation that on first glimpse seems to tell one story, and upon closer inspection hides a second, underlying, much darker narrative. Katherine Curry‘s surface depictions, with computer-assisted cuts of wooden circles into the most intricate doilies next to a video of the slow unraveling of a delicately crocheted doily by the artists hands, tell of family traditions of specialized handiwork, patterns handed down from generation to generation. Behind the beauty and the shadow play of the wooden models lurks something uglier, seemingly making its way through the generations as well, with family represented in a large photograph behind the lacy screen, trying to put a conventional smile on the face of harshness, if not intimations of violence.

Katherine Curry A Nuclear Family Details below

A bit further into the room, handmade soaps covering photographs of family members echo the theme of a film of civility cloaking the tension underneath.

Jessica Joner Wash your Mouth out Again and Again and Again

One returns, if these are the interpretations that formed, almost with relief to the video where the unraveling of a pattern now takes on a restorative tone: there is an end of the line, the string freed, and the path to something new is open.

There are other stories to be found in the gallery: the miniature perfection of a dream meal envisioned by someone with allergies suffering a restrictive diet (Leah Yao well aware of the consequences of junk food down to the grave.)

Leah Yao Mini Memento Mori Details below

A letter written after having been abandoned, Eliza Williams‘ incantations feeling like an attempt at self hypnosis to get over the spell cast by the lover. You’ll see for yourself, if you have a chance to visit, how many variations there are of engaging in one or another form of speaking out.

Eliza Williams I used to know you Details below

Quieter work, or shall we say work absent a storyline, was also well represented. There were ceramic containers by Kelsey Davis Hamilton, carefully placed on chosen fabric echoed in some form or another in her voluptuous sculptures that reminded me of tropical succulents, their lack of restraint juxtaposed with these constrained patterns from tartans to the dot alignments familiar from eastern European stoneware.

Kelsey Davis

Kelsey Davis Her House of Laughter

There were Tanner Lind‘s works on paper, radiating joy, the smaller ones more successful than the larger ones. The former were not shy to allow background breathing room to provide a stage for the perceived movement of the affixed figures. It is terrific work, reminiscent of Alexander Calder or Joan Miró if you blink, but in no way derivative. Leaving space empty when there is a lot of space to fill is definitely difficult – but Lind’s unerring sense of geometry and color should propel him towards solutions.

Tanner Lind Microzone 1 (left) and Microzone 2 (right) (perfectly placed above the recycling containers that lend themselves to a Gesamtkunstwerk….)

Tanner Lind Microzone 3 Details

I was absolutely smitten by an installation of organic shapes that hung in the window on the ground floor. Noelle Herceg creates these ephemeral shapes from gelatin, a material that makes them prone to fading, breaking, given that Jell-O skins are not exactly meant to last. I first thought they were made out of glass. Learning that they were not, added a memento mori quality to the work that enhanced the appreciation. Herceg’s website (link above) explains both process and underlying thoughts about her approach in better detail, both concerned with memory of a past and a loss thereof.

Noelle Herceg Jellashells

A few months ago I had explored another exhibit with organic shapes hanging from above, albeit huge ones. Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back) by Mercedes Dorame is an installation at the Getty Center in L.A., conjuring the views of ocean coastlines of the Tongva People, with the suspended sculptures representing abalones – a culturally important mollusk for the Native peoples. This artist, too, relates work to memory and the constructs built around what gets handed down. I found the size overwhelming, though, and the opaque pastels too saturated.

Mercedes Dorame Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back) at the Getty Center

Herceg’s work, in contrast has a gentleness to it, a cautiousness almost, as if there’s fragility all around us, one sharp look potentially shattering skins. Really hard to convey, and perhaps just my personal echoing of the theme, but the installation is worth exploring, something digs deep.

Noelle Herceg Jellashells

Last but not least let’s make some room for talking with your hands… or at least one prominent finger extended to all those engaged in fat shaming – here’s to holding your ground! The zest for life depicted in this painting -oh grant me just a small percent of that!

I expect we’ll see many of these young artists more prominently in the years to come, if we are lucky to be around. The Reser show certainly raised hopes for that.

Rae Sheridan Vickie

In keeping with the theme, music today is a dialogue between two instruments, a terrifically re-arranged Rite of Spring for piano and marimba.

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