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Chatty Turtle Mothers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 1, 2023| 4 Comments »

Photo: Zoo Leipzig.
The endangered Arrau, a giant South American river turtle, has unusual conversational attributes.

I remember a fad (perhaps it wasn’t a fad, perhaps it’s still going strong) of expectant mothers exposing babies-in-the-womb to classical music, art museums, and breathtaking scenery. The idea was to inculcate certain interests before birth. Turns out, there’s a turtle mom that does something similar.

Dino Grandoni writes at the Washington Post about turtles that “talk” to their babies before they hatch.

“Camila Ferrara felt ‘stupid’ plunging a microphone near a nest of turtle eggs. The Brazilian biologist wasn’t sure if she would hear much. She was studying the giant South American river turtle, one of the world’s largest freshwater turtles.

“ ‘What am I doing?’ she recalled asking herself. ‘I’m recording the eggs?’

“Then Ferrara — who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, a U.S.-based conservation group — heard it: a quick, barely audible pop within the shells.

“The hatchlings seemed to be saying to one another, she said, ‘ “Come on, come on, it’s time to wake up. Come on, come on.” And then all the hatchlings can leave the nest together.’

“Researchers for decades thought of aquatic turtles as hard of hearing and mostly mute. … But recent recordings of these turtles’ first ‘words’ — before they even hatch — challenge notions not just of the turtles’ capacity to communicate, but also of their instinct to care for young. Now the discovery has spurred an urgent count of this talkative turtle’s numbers, and may shape protections. …

“Known locally as the arrau or tartaruga da amazonia, the giant South American river turtle lives throughout the Amazon and its tributaries. During the dry season, thousands of females at once crawl onto beaches along the river to lay their eggs. For other kinds of turtles, the mothering usually ends at the beach. Many turtle hatchlings are left by their parents to fend for themselves.

“But that’s not the case with the arrau. After nesting, females often hover by the shore for up to two months waiting for their eggs to hatch.

“So Ferrara and her colleagues wondered: are mother turtle and child turtle communicating with one another? To test the idea, her team spent months taping the turtles — on land and underwater, in the wild and in a swimming pool. The team recorded a wide repertoire of whisper-quiet calls from arrau of all ages.

“Embryos appear to chirp together to coordinate hatching and digging up to the surface. With so many jaguars and other predators lurking, it is safer for baby turtles to move en masse toward the river.

“The mothers, meanwhile, approach and respond to the calls of their young. Once the hatchlings reach the water, the baby turtles migrate down the river with the adult females, Ferrara’s radio-tracking research shows.

“When her team published an early study on turtle vocalizations a decade ago, Ferrara said, academic journals resisted putting the phrase ‘parental care’ in the title of a study about turtles. …

“But Ferrara and her colleagues have gone on to record vocalizations from more turtle species, including the pig-nosed turtle in Australia, Blanding’s turtle in Minnesota and Kemp’s ridley sea turtle in Mexico, one of the world’s most endangered. …

“Other researchers may have missed turtle noises since they tend to be quiet, infrequent and low-pitched — just at the edge of human hearing. Leatherback sea turtles, for instance, appear to have ears tuned to the frequency of waves rolling ashore. Some species can take hours to reply to each other.

Some species can take hours to reply to each other.

“ ‘Had we had a bit more expansive imaginations, we might have caught this earlier,’ said Karen Bakker, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study who wrote about turtle vocalization in her book, The Sounds of Life.

“ ‘We’re looking for sounds in the frequencies we can hear,’ she added. ‘We’re looking for sounds at a temporal rate that is as quick as we speak.’ …

“As a group, turtles are more ancient than dinosaurs, and are central to many cultures’ creation stories. Yet today they rank among the species at most risk of extinction. Nearly three in five species may vanish, according to a recent assessment, with climate change, habitat loss and hunting posing risks.

“The Amazon once teemed with so many turtles, it was difficult to navigate. While Indigenous people have long relied on turtles for meat, the arrival of Europeans accelerated their decline. …

“The species still faces serious threats. A boom in dam construction threatens to cull their numbers. And a continued appetite for turtle meat sustains a lucrative illegal trade, where middlemen can buy an arrau for $50 and sell it downriver for $450. …

“For [Ferrara], the real fight is not in the field, but in the cities, convincing regular Brazilians to refrain from eating turtle meat. For her, changing the minds of just a few folks would be a victory.

“ ‘What I want is to see two or three people stop.’ “

More at the Post, here.

Turtles that take a long time to answer another turtle are like Bob & Ray’s Slow Talkers of America.

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500-Year-Old Black Composer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 31, 2023| 4 Comments »

Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro at the New York Times. Photo: Getty Images.

A black musician who composed sacred and secular vocal music more than 400 years ago is getting attention at last, thanks to the internet. Garrett Schumann recently wrote for the New York Times about composer Vicente Lusitano.

“On a day in June 2020, Alice Jones was in her Brooklyn apartment getting ready to attend a Black Lives Matter rally. Dr. Jones, a flutist and composer who serves as an assistant dean and faculty member at the Juilliard School, was adamant about expressing herself as a Black classical musician. …

“Dr. Jones designed a sign that listed Black composers throughout history. After adding Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the 18th-century subject of the upcoming film ‘Chevalier, she faintly remembered another, older name: Vicente Lusitano.

“Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a married Protestant.

“He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on improvised vocal counterpoint. …

“It took until the late 19th century for new scholarship to revisit Lusitano’s printed works, beginning a 150-year-old reclamation project. Important strides were made in the 1960s and ’70s as new sources emerged, most notably a 17th-century manuscript that describes Lusitano as ‘homem pardo,’ a historical Portuguese term for certain mixed-race people of African descent. And since 2000, the internet has become increasingly important to Lusitano scholarship; the summer of 2020 saw the onset of a new and ongoing flurry of interest whose roots are entirely digital.

“Dr. Jones’s demonstration sign played a part in the current wave of activity: A picture of her placard went viral on social media and broadcast Lusitano’s name to a new audience. Joseph McHardy, a Scottish-Congolese conductor and early music specialist based in London, was stunned when he saw Dr. Jones’s post. ..

‘Learning about Lusitano reminded me of the feeling I got when I learned there were Black people in the Roman Empire.’

“After seeing the sign, McHardy quickly searched for scores of Lusitano’s music to perform with his church choir, but could only find scans of the 16th-century originals. So, he spent that summer making his own updated versions. He’s one of many experts and enthusiasts who produced the first modern editions of Lusitano’s compositions and shared them on free online databases. The result was a burst of new performances in the months that followed. Nearly five centuries after Lusitano’s death, dozens of choirs in the United States, Canada and Europe performed his music for the first time, largely because his scores were finally accessible.

“Britain has been the epicenter of Lusitano’s current musical resurgence. In June, McHardy partnered with the Chineke! Foundation to produce a tour highlighting Lusitano’s sacred works with an ensemble composed entirely of vocalists of color. The motets’ beauty astonished McHardy, who said, ‘We had no idea Lusitano’s pieces would be so enjoyable to sing.’

“His collaborators, too, were impressed. ‘I have fallen in love with Lusitano’s music,’ said Malcolm J. Merriweather, an American baritone and conductor who performed on the tour.

“The Marian Consort, another British choir, led by the conductor Rory McCleery, preceded McHardy’s tour with a 2021 concert series featuring one of Lusitano’s works, which they also performed at that year’s BBC Proms. …

“Today, Lusitano is not easy to study, even if you can find performances of his music on YouTube. Little correspondence and few records of his life are known to have survived, both because earlier scholars had no interest and because his sociopolitical disenfranchisement constrained the production of such documents. Contextual evidence is critical, especially with respect to his identity.

“We know other pardo people existed in 16th-century Portugal. At the time, thousands of African and African-descended people, most of whom were enslaved, lived in the country. … Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure illustrates the kind of collective activity that has traditionally excluded composers of African descent from classical music’s conventional performance and academic institutions. Melanie Zeck, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and former reference librarian at the Center for Black Music Research, emphasized that the first historians of Black classical music responded to these exclusionary tendencies by developing what she called a ‘totally separate practice from mainstream academic scholarship.’ …

“Now, the internet and social media can empower these principles of Black music scholarship, though, as Dr. Zeck said, ‘misinformation abounds.’ But for Lusitano, these technologies nevertheless have helped the truths of his life and music become more accessible than ever, 500 years after his birth.”

More at the Times, here.

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Kids Identify Misinformation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 30, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Vesa Laitinen for the New York Times via the Jordan News.
Teacher Saara Martikka (in pink sweater) works with students to identify misinformation. Media literacy is taught in Finland starting in preschool.

I have long admired Finland for its educational system, but this beats all. The country starts teaching children how to identify misinformation at a very young age. That’s why it “ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria.”

Jenny Gross has the story at the New York Times.

“A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?

“ ‘Just because it’s a good thing or it’s a nice thing doesn’t mean it’s true or it’s valid,’ she said. In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect that the videos had on them.

“Her goal, like that of teachers around Finland, is to help students learn to identify false information. … Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.

“ ‘No matter what the teacher is teaching, whether it’s physical education or mathematics or language, you have to think, “OK, how do I include these elements in my work with children and young people?” ‘ said Leo Pekkala, the director of Finland’s National Audiovisual Institute, which oversees media education. …

“The survey results were calculated based on scores for press freedom, the level of trust in society and scores in reading, science and math. The United States was not included in the survey, but other polls show that misinformation and disinformation have become more prevalent since 2016 and that Americans’ trust in the news media is near a record low. …

“Finland has advantages in countering misinformation. Its public school system is among the best in the world. College is free. There is high trust in the government, and Finland was one of the European countries least affected by the pandemic. Teachers are highly respected.

On top of that, Finnish is spoken by about 5.4 million people. Articles containing falsehoods that are written by nonnative speakers can sometimes be easily identified because of grammatical or syntax errors. …

“While teachers in Finland are required to teach media literacy, they have significant discretion over how to carry out lessons. Mrs. Martikka, the middle school teacher, said she tasked students with editing their own videos and photos to see how easy it was to manipulate information. A teacher in Helsinki, Anna Airas, said she and her students searched words like ‘vaccination’ and discussed how search algorithms worked and why the first results might not always be the most reliable. Other teachers also said that in recent months, during the war in Ukraine, they had used Russian news sites and memes as the basis for a discussion about the effects of state-sponsored propaganda.

“Finland, which shares an 833-mile border with Russia, developed its national goals for media education in 2013 and accelerated its campaign to teach students to spot misinformation in the following years. Paivi Leppanen, a project coordinator at the Finnish National Agency for Education, a government agency, said the threat of Russian misinformation on topics such as Finland’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ‘hasn’t changed the basics of what we do, but it has shown us that this is the time for what we have been preparing.’

“Even though today’s teenagers have grown up with social media, that does not mean that they know how to identify and guard against manipulated videos of politicians or news articles on TikTok. In fact, a study published last year in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found that adolescence could be a peak time for conspiracy theorizing. …

“For teachers of any age group, coming up with effective lessons can be challenging. ‘It’s so much easier to talk about literature, which we have been studying for hundreds of years,’ said Mari Uusitalo, a middle and high school teacher in Helsinki.

“She starts with the basics — by teaching students about the difference between what they see on Instagram and TikTok versus what they read in Finnish newspapers. … During Ms. Uusitalo’s 16 years as a teacher, she has noticed a clear decline in reading comprehension skills, a trend she attributes to students’ spending less time with books and more time with games and watching videos. With poorer reading skills and shorter attention spans, students are more vulnerable to believing fake news or not having enough knowledge about topics to identify misleading or wrong information, she said.

“When her students were talking this summer about leaked videos that showed Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, dancing and singing at a party, Ms. Uusitalo moderated a discussion about how news stories can originate from videos circulating on social media. Some of her students had believed Ms. Marin was using drugs at the party after watching videos on TikTok and Twitter that suggested that. Ms. Marin denied having taken drugs, and a test later came back negative.

“Ms. Uusitalo said her goal was to teach students methods they could use to distinguish between truth and fiction. ‘I can’t make them think just like me,’ she said. ‘I just have to give them the tools to make up their own opinions.’ ”

More at the Times, here.

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Norman Rockwell’s Drawing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 29, 2023| 11 Comments »

Art: Norman Rockwell.
Study for “The Problem We All Live With” (1963), Wolff pencil and charcoal on paper, Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, from Lynda Gunn, Norman Rockwell model for “The Problem We All Live With,” a tribute to a brave little American, Ruby Bridges.

When I was growing up, Norman Rockwell art was everywhere, not just on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. I think that, partly because it was so available, it was undervalued by art snobs. Abstract Expressionism was the only thing for serious artists, supposedly. But the public at large loved Rockwell’s storytelling, and in recent years the snobs have begun to notice the skill underlying those stories.

Lauren Moya Ford writes at Hyperallergic that the new Norman Rockwell: Drawings, 1911–1976 is the first book dedicated to the artist’s prolific but largely private drawing practice.

“Norman Rockwell produced nearly 3,000 images for publication over his six-decade-long career, but he made many more drawings and sketches that have never been seen,” she reports. “For the artist and illustrator known for depicting charming views of daily American life, putting pencil or charcoal to paper was more than just a quick, problem solving process.

‘Drawing is a complete expression of my idea in line and tone,’ he wrote in 1948, adding that ‘sometimes I feel that making this sketch is the most creative part of making a picture.’

“Norman Rockwell: Drawings, 1911–1976 (Abbeville Press, 2022) by Stephanie Haboush Plunkett and Jesse M. Kowalski … sheds light on the artist’s personal and professional drawings, including his preparatory sketches for advertisements, books, and magazine covers, as well as his illustrated letters, travel sketchbooks, cartoons, and caricatures. Rockwell has long been celebrated for his technical expertise, light humor, and meticulous attention to detail, traits that come through perhaps most strongly in his drawings. …

“Born in New York City in 1894, Rockwell grew up watching his father and maternal grandfather draw and paint in their free time. At age 16, he left high school to study art, first at New York’s National Academy School, and later at the Art Students League, where he excelled in figure drawing. At only 19 years old, he was appointed Art Director at Boys Life magazine, and in 1916, he began his 47-year tenure at the Saturday Evening Post, where he produced more than 300 magazine covers that reached — and delighted — millions of Americans.

“Despite ongoing project deadlines, Rockwell remained a methodical craftsman. Each finished piece could take as many as 15 steps and countless sketches to complete, and his preparatory drawings are often so impressively executed that they could easily be finished works, though they were never shown publicly. The book explains that Rockwell’s fastidiousness owes itself at least in part to his love of the Old Master, and he referenced and sometimes imitated Raphael, Leonardo, Dürer, Vermeer, and others in his work. For example, Rockwell’s ‘Rosie the Riveter’ (1943) takes the same pose as Michelangelo’s ‘Prophet Isaiah’ (c. 1511) from the Sistine Chapel, and in ‘The Art Critic’ (1955), his son poses as a young gallery-goer admiring a Rubens-esque portrait, modeled by the artist’s wife.

“Rockwell used live models and real props to create his work during the first decades of his career. Later he incorporated photography, though this didn’t necessarily make his process any less elaborate. Ever the perfectionist, Rockwell sometimes took more than 100 shots of the individual models and elements he planned to draw at different angles and positions. But the rapid technology allowed Rockwell to use more animated poses and expressions, and to incorporate people, places, and things from outside of his studio. …

“One of Rockwell’s most famous pieces is ‘The Problem We All Live With’ (1963), his tribute to the bravery of Ruby Bridges. It was the artist’s first image for Look magazine, a publication that Rockwell began working for after being frustrated by the Post’s policy against depicting people of color, except in subservient roles. Rockwell was a life member of the NAACP. At Look, ‘his hands were no longer tied, and he felt free to create artwork that underscored his personal beliefs and called attention to the civil rights issues of the day,’ Louis Henry Mitchell writes in his foreword.

“The image was so timely and powerful that one Look reader wrote, ‘The truth is pretty hard to take until we get it from a Norman Rockwell.’ Although Rockwell has sometimes been criticized for his whimsical, even idealized portrayals of American life, this book reveals him to be a tireless worker whose drawings carried much more skill, substance, and conviction than previously recognized.”

More at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. Terrific pictures.

For a treat, try to get to the Norman Rockwell Museum (“The Home for American Illustration”) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Right now they have a special exhibit on Hilary Knight, featuring Eloise, among other works. And of course, there are guided tours of the museum’s extensive Rockwell collection.

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Masterpiece Spotted in Old Film

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 28, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Sony.
A scene from the children’s film Stuart Little with artist Róbert Berény’s long-lost painting hanging in the background.

Wouldn’t you love to discover a missing artifact while watching an old children’s movie with a kid? That is what happened to a Hungarian art researcher who thought he was just relaxing and off work.

I saw this 2014 report from Agence France-Presse in Budapest at the Guardian.

“A long-lost avant garde painting has returned to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian, who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little.

“Gergely Barki, 43, a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery in Budapest, noticed ‘Sleeping Lady with Black Vase,’ by Róbert Berény as he watched television with his daughter Lola in 2009.

“ ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Berény’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,’ said Barki.

‘A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.’

“The painting disappeared in the 1920s, but Barki recognized it immediately even though he had only seen a faded black-and-white photo from an exhibition in 1928. He sent a flurry of emails to staff at the film’s makers, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, and received a reply from a former set designer on the film – two years later.

“ ‘She said the picture had been hanging on her wall,’ Barki said. ‘She had snapped it up for next to nothing in an antiques shop in Pasadena, California, thinking its avant garde elegance was perfect for Stuart Little’s living room.’

“After leaving Sony, she sold the painting to a private collector who has now brought the picture to Budapest for sale by auction.

“Berény, the leader of a pre-first world war avant garde movement called the Group of Eights, fled to Berlin in 1920 after designing recruitment posters for Hungary’s short-lived communist revolution in 1919. … According to Barki, the buyer at the 1928 exhibition, who was possibly Jewish, is likely to have left Hungary before or during the second world war.”

So what else can we learn about artist Róbert Berény? Here’s what Wikipedia says: “Róbert Berény (18 March 1887 – 10 September 1953) was a Hungarian painter, one of the avant-garde group known as The Eight who introduced cubism and expressionism to Hungarian art in the early twentieth century before the First World War. He had studied and exhibited in Paris as a young man and was also considered one of the Hungarian Fauves.

“A Berény painting titled Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, whose whereabouts had been unknown since 1928, was rediscovered by chance in 2009 by art historian Gergely Barki upon watching the 1999 American film Stuart Little with his daughter, where the piece was used as a prop. An assistant set designer had bought the painting cheaply from a California antique store for use in the film, and had kept it in her home after production ended. The painting was sold at auction in Budapest on 13 December 2014 for €229,500 [about $249,524].”

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall. Donations welcomed. Nicole Waldner’s blog has a lot more detail, here.

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Mysterious Carvings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 27, 2023| 6 Comments »

Photo: Yamagata University/ via Reuters.
Peruvian and Japanese researchers from Yamagata University recently discovered 168 new designs at the UNESCO World Heritage site, the Nazca, on Peru’s southern Pacific coast.

Although the latest headlines from Peru are all about political upheaval, isn’t it the case that whatever the headlines, there is always more going on in a country than politics?

From today’s story, we learn about the recent discoveries of a team of Peruvian and Japanese archaeologists.

Victoria Bisset writes at the Washington Post, “Researchers have identified more than 150 new designs in Peru’s southern Nazca plain, known for its mysterious large-scale artwork carved into the desert.

“The latest images were discovered by archaeologists from Japan and Peru, who used high-resolution aerial and drone photos taken between June 2019 and February 2020 to identify 168 new geoglyphs of animals and humans, including birds, killer whales and snakes, carved by the region’s pre-Hispanic inhabitants.

“The Nazca Lines, which are part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, cover an area of almost 175 square miles on Peru’s Pacific coast.

“The lines ‘were scratched on the surface of the ground between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500,’ UNESCO says. … Their purpose is still unknown, but UNESCO says they may have served ‘ritual astronomical functions.’

“The latest geoglyphs to be discovered are believed to date back to between 100 B.C. and A.D. 300, researchers from Japan’s Yamagata University said in a statement announcing the find earlier this month.

“While most of the site’s most famous images are so large that they can only be seen from the air, the most recent images are mostly small, measuring less than 10 meters (around 33 feet) in diameter. …

“The findings will be used in shaping future surveys carried out by artificial intelligence to protect the area, according to the university.

“The site faces threats from urban and economic developments, Masato Sakai, the lead researcher and a professor from Japan’s Yamagata University, told Reuters news agency.

‘Some geoglyphs are in danger of being destroyed due to the recent expansion of mining-related workshops in the archaeological park,’ he said.

“The Nazca Lines have also been impacted by smaller-scale incidents: In 2018, a truck driver damaged part of the site after he ignored warning signs and drove over the area.

“In 2014, activists from the environmental group Greenpeace sparked outrage when they left marks at the site while carrying out a protest — although researchers later said that a grant given to help them repair the damage had led to the discovery of 50 new geoglyphs.”

What do you think the indigenous people who made the carvings — before Peru was Peru — intended? What does “ritual astronomical functions” mean? If they were trying to communicate with beings they perceived in the sky, it makes sense: most of the glyphs can be seen only from the sky.

Read more at the Post, here. If you don’t have a Post account, you can see all the carvings at Reuters, here.

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Climate Detritus Used for Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 26, 2023| 9 Comments »

Art: Cara Despain via the gallery Current Work.
Increasing numbers of artists are addressing climate disasters, as in “test still no. 1 (Upshot-Knothole — Simon)” (2022), graphite on paper, above.

I always feel grateful to artists for the way they make the invisible visible to those of us who lack a second sight.

Hyperallergic recently posted an article about artists using ash and residue from natural disasters to convey their messages about the environmental calamity they perceive.

Reporter Scotti Hill gets a bit sidetracked by other environmental disasters in the Hyperallergic article, but I thought her words on the art itself were worth sharing.

“Many of us recall the haunting early pandemic-era imagery of individuals wandering amid orange, smoke-filled backdrops that synthesized the reoccurring horror of wildfires on the West Coast and beyond. Such images accompanied headlines of widespread home evacuations, wildlife loss, and blankets of smoke covering entire states.

“Now artists on a local and international scale are using their craft to bring attention to this issue, using a novel formal process — cultivating ash and residue from natural disasters, namely fires, as an actual medium of expression.

“Cara Despain’s work, which ranges from public installation to video and painting, confronts complex issues of wildfires, nuclear testing, and land use in her native Utah and beyond. Her latest exhibition, Ashes of Her Enemy, [has been] on view at new Salt Lake City gallery Current Work. …

“Upon encountering Despain’s photographs of beautiful landscapes, chosen by the artist for their similarity to famously iconic Western views like Monument Valley, one detects a scarring on the face of each image. Here, Despain devised a frame with a fuse inside that, when lit on one side, ripples across the image, burning the pristine image in its wake. She ignited each of the images at the exhibition opening for an active audience. To Despain, this process is a metaphor for the West’s changing landscape and the fallacy of pristine nature untouched by human intervention. …

“Despain’s wildfire paintings … are made from the soot of the wildfires that share their name. She crafted the works’ scale and composition to work in dialogue with large-scale Thomas Moran-style landscape paintings. …

“Despain is not the first artist to incorporate ash into her creative process. Artist Zhang Huan crafts large-scale paintings made from the ash residue of burned incense used in Buddhist temple ceremonies. By foraging ash from various temples around Shanghai, Huan sees the ash as symbolic of ‘the fulfillment of millions of hopes, dreams, and blessings,’ according to his website.

“In the months preceding the pandemic, Filipino artist Janina Sanico used ash from the active Taal Volcano in her watercolors, while German artist Heide Hatry incorporated cremated remains into darkly meditative portraits. …

“This fall, the Palo Alto Art Center debuted Fire Transforms, an exhibition featuring several Bay Area artists whose work considers the impact of fire in the area of the country most fraught by wildfire devastation. … 

“Artist Andrea Dale forages the burnt remnants of plants and human-made structures left in the aftermath of California wildfires. Her application of ash draws inspiration from East Asian ink wash painting with an application that is at once loose and also sequestered to the bottom quarter of pristine resin-covered panels. New Mexico-based Nina Elder crafts intricately detailed drawings of decimated forests from the incinerated debris of pulp mills to ‘focus the viewer on the textures and scale of deforestation,’ according to her site.

” ‘We often look at big catastrophes, but it’s the small stuff that’s going to get us,’ [Despain] explained in an interview at Current Work of the particulate matter left behind after fires, often invisible yet enormously destructive. Despain emphasizes that fire is a natural part of environmental ecology, yet the increased prevalence and scale of wildfires is unprecedented and follows a decades-long history of nuclear testing. …

“For Despain, the story of the West’s atomic testing is personal — her mother grew up in Southern Utah’s Cedar City. Due to atomic testing, half of her high school class died early of various radiation-related ailments. … After the war, expansive areas of government-owned land north of Las Vegas were designated as optimal sites for domestic nuclear testing. [Residents] of Southern Utah’s Iron County received assurances that atomic testing was being carried out with utmost safety. Yet, in the years to come, those same residents would suffer startlingly high rates of cancer, birth defects, and adverse health issues. …

“Such histories often recede into the realm of whispers, relegated to the annals of history and individual familial tragedy. Yet, they are part of the indelible fabric of the West both past and present that are connected to the environmental calamity unfolding before us. Formally, artistic processes which imbue ash and residue visualize the otherwise infinitesimal markers of this legacy.”

More at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. Contributions welcome.

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Turning Carbon into Rocks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 25, 2023| 5 Comments »

Photo: Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute.
Geologist Peter Kelemen surveys an outcrop of exposed mantle rock in Oman. “The light material is a carbon-based mineral that has reacted with the rock to form a solid deposit,” reports Columbia University.

Scientists from many specialties are working on new angles for dealing with global warming and carbon in the atmosphere. Today’s story features geologists.

Kevin Krajick reports at Columbia Climate School’s State of the Planet, “Geologist Peter Kelemen has been working in the desert of Oman for more than 15 years to study natural chemical reactions within rare deep-earth rocks that pull carbon from the air and lock it into solid mineral form.

“His goal: harnessing and speeding up those reactions to remove carbon on an industrial scale. Based in large part on his research, Omani entrepreneurs recently formed 44.01, a company working to scale up and commercialize the processes. The company was just awarded a $1.2 million Earthshot Prize. … We spoke with Kelemen about the science behind the project, its current state, and its prospects for the future.

“Tell me about the rocks in Oman, and what makes them special.
“The mountains of northern Oman and along the coast of the United Arab Emirates host a huge block of oceanic crust and upper mantle that was thrust onto the edge of the Arabian continent. … It is 350 kilometers long, up to 50 kilometers wide, and many kilometers thick. It is tilted, and exposes rocks that formed more than 20 kilometers below the sea floor. Surface exposures of the Earth’s mantle are quite rare, and this is the largest in the world. …

“Rocks like this react rapidly with CO2 in the atmosphere and surface water, and this forms solid carbonate minerals, for example limestone. The process is spontaneous. So we’ve been seeking to understand how it works, and then design methods that accelerate it in order to store significant amounts of CO2 on a human time scale. We are focusing on injecting CO2 dissolved in water underground. It might use a lot of water, and of course water is very valuable in the Middle East, so we look for areas near the coast. …

“How did 44.01 start, and what is your involvement?
“I and my colleague Jürg Matter, who was formerly at Columbia, were first approached by on Omani entrepreneur, Talal Hasan, in about 2017, when he was working for Oman’s sovereign wealth fund. Talal hoped to persuade the government to invest in CO2 storage in the mantle rocks. But then he ended up leaving the fund, and he and a childhood friend founded 44.01. Jürg now works with them about half time. I plan to remain in more of an advisory role.

“Where would the carbon come from?
“44.01 has obtained a solar-powered device that removes CO2 directly from air, from the Swiss company Climeworks. They’re operating it near Oman’s capital city, Muscat. For pilot studies, we could also use CO2 captured from smokestack sources, like the many gas-fired power plants, water desalination plants and other industrial operations in Oman and the UAE. …

“We’ve obtained government permits and run some small pilot projects at a former scientific drilling site. We are now planning two much larger pilot projects, both expected to take place in 2023. Ideally we would achieve substantial results before the COP28 meeting in the UAE, in 2023. Eventually, we hope, some government or group of governments would pay them to lock up the carbon, at a rate of maybe $30 a ton. Globally, such costs end up being a few percent of GDP, comparable to the current costs of solid waste management.

“The main concern is that the rocks are not very porous. That leads to two difficulties. One, it can be difficult to get fluids to circulate rapidly through the rocks, and two, the pore space might eventually clog up with newly formed carbonate minerals. However, we are inspired by the fact that in some places the rocks have naturally become fully carbonated. That is, every magnesium and calcium atom in them has combined with CO2 to create solid minerals. So we know this can happen, and we have ideas about how it works. We have done theoretical calculations, and conducted experiments at the laboratory scale. But in the end, only field scale experiments will allow us to refine methods to do this at a reasonable cost.

“Are there other places with similar rocks?
“Yes, but Oman and the UAE are the best. The next largest outcrops are in New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. They would be great places to take CO2 from the air, but I think we need to demonstrate that this process works on the Arabian peninsula before trying to get things going on islands in the southwest Pacific. There are other, smaller areas that could work, including parts of California and Oregon. However, those spots are water-limited, and I expect local stakeholders would be concerned about that. …

“In addition to forming solid carbonate minerals, the reaction of surface waters with mantle rocks can form free hydrogen gas. It is widely viewed as a potential replacement for fossil fuels, specifically natural gas and oil, for transportation and home heating. And if derived at low cost from natural sources, it could also be used to generate electricity. We are continuing academic research on the rate of hydrogen formation, and studying ways that could be accelerated.”

More at Columbia Climate School’s State of the Planet, here.

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Harnessing Bees to Make Guitars

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 24, 2023| 13 Comments »

Photo: Rachel Rosenkrantz.
Rachel Rosenkrantz, a luthier, uses all-natural materials. For example, to build a bracing structure for the instrument above, she followed a bee blueprint, placed the structure in a hive, and waited for a year.

Now here’s a commitment to using natural materials that I bet you never heard of.

The nonprofit ecoRI News is great at finding stories like this one by Emily Olson on a Rhode Island luthier who makes guitars using mushrooms and honeycomb.

“During the pandemic lockdown,” Olson reports, “local guitar-maker Rachel Rosenkrantz collected shells from her daily two-egg breakfast. They seemed an appropriate — and certainly plentiful — biomaterial to integrate into a USB-chargeable electric guitar she was working on.

“ ‘Calcium is an integral part of violin varnish because it contributes to the sound quality,’ she explains. With this in mind, and inspired by the work of Gaston Suisse, a French art deco artist who worked with eggshell inlay, she used a laser cutter and manicure file to shape her collected shells into tiny triangles. The eggshell guitar was the last in a series of biomaterial-based instruments she completed during the pandemic. …

“Rosenkrantz had a thriving and well-established career as a commercial furniture and lighting designer when, 10 years ago, she had an epiphany.

“ ‘I can always make money,’ she says. ‘But I can’t make time. … I had been daydreaming about being a luthier for too long to not do it.’ …

“Rosenkrantz grew up just outside Paris in Montfermeil, an industrial town she describes as ‘the Fall River of France.’ She is the daughter of a family of tailors; her grandfather lived in an apartment above his small tailoring shop. …

“Rosenkrantz studied at l’ESAG in Paris, and in her college days, crossed the ocean a couple of times, first as an exchange student at the Rhode Island School of Design — ‘I loved the name Providence,’ she recalls. … She now lives just outside Pawtuxet Village in Cranston … above her guitar-making studio, Atelier Rosenkrantz. ‘I guess I’ve come full circle,’ she says, referencing her grandfather’s shop. … ‘This is my happy place.’ …

“Rosenkrantz is well aware of the negative impact guitar-making has on the environment. Though little seems more environmentally conscious than someone sitting outside plucking a guitar, guitars are made from wood. And it isn’t always harvested in a sustainable way. …

“Rosenkrantz relies on timber updates from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, a Switzerland-based organization that, through international agreement, offers a framework to ensure that when plants and animals cross borders, a species’ survival isn’t threatened.

“ ‘Brazilian rosewood is a big no-no because their rainforests were depleted,’ she says. But it isn’t just the type of wood used that she considers; she also considers how a country manages its resources. ‘India, for example, manages their rosewood really well,’ she adds. …

“Replenishment also is important. ‘Every guitar-maker, every woodworker — if we consume wood, we should grow wood,’ she says. The alternative, of course, is to not use wood at all. …

“One afternoon Rosenkrantz was at RISD, where she teaches spatial design, and decided to spend some time in the Nature Lab.

“ ‘RISD has a whole library of natural specimens, including biomaterials,’ she says. … ‘I know that Styrofoam conducts sound because it’s full of air, so I tested RISD’s [imitation Styrofoam] mushroom sample with my sound diffuser and realized that I could make a solid body sound like a hollow body.’

“The thing that excites her most about using farm waste inoculated with mushrooms in her craft is that she can grow her own design — a plastic mold is at her feet, leaning against the bench. ‘It takes about a week to grow a guitar body — four days to grow, then four days to let a crust develop,’ she says. …

“She slides a banjo from a shelf behind her and explains the body is made from kombucha leather. Kombucha home brewers are familiar with a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY), a cellulose mat that forms from the basis of kombucha — sweet tea — and houses the cultures that turn sweet tea into more kombucha. To get a SCOBY large enough make adequate leather for a banjo, Rosenkrantz brewed kombucha in a fish tank. ‘It took 11 tries before I made enough leather for one instrument,’ she says. …

“Rosenkrantz began dabbling in beekeeping, and as she researched hive options, quickly discovered the top bar beehive … a horizontal box with bars on top that support honeycomb, and it allows bees to build the way they would in nature. … ‘The bars in a top bar hive reminded me a lot of the bracing that goes in the front of a guitar that provides rigidity and guides sound,’ she says. … ‘I wondered if I provided the bees with bracing, if I could trick them into building a guitar.’

“But bees are not so easily tricked. ‘Bees have their own egress and architectural code,’ Rosenkrantz says, and she had to learn those codes to encourage the bees to collaborate on a design.

“So, after a great deal of research, she built a bracing structure according to the bees’ blueprint, placed it in a hive, and waited for a year. The result was something she never could have anticipated. The bees not only accepted her design and built their comb along her bracing structure, but they maintained the wood.”

More at ecoRI News, here. Amazing pictures. No firewall.

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An Artist of Quiet Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 23, 2023| 13 Comments »

Art: Meredith Fife Day.
Studio Life.

The day job of artist Meredith Fife Day was for many years running a department at a community newspaper chain in Massachusetts. That is where I met her. She was my first boss in publishing. After retiring from the newspaper, Meredith focused on her art while teaching art at a local college during the day and working with the amazing nonprofit she founded, Making Art with Artists (MAwA). MAwA enabled low-income urban kids to practice art under the guidance of working artists. I wrote about the award Meredith received for that work here.

Recently, I asked her if I could do a post on her art, and she sent me these riches.

From her bio: “Her art reviews and essays have appeared in a variety of publications for more than 25 years and she chronicles her days through journaling. She writes poems which, like her paintings, are frequently in homage to observational response, memory and imagination.

“She has exhibited paintings for more than four decades in numerous invitational shows and national competitions. She earned an MFA degree from Boston University after receiving BA and MFA degrees from Louisiana State University in her native Baton Rouge. Meredith has been awarded fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Va., and Auvillar, France, and Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, N.Y.  She has taught at Art New England/Mass Art summer workshops in Vermont and Cullowhee Mountain Arts in North Carolina.” 

Note how much the ficus plant below returns Meredith’s love by modeling for her on repeated occasions. And do you sense the joy the artist takes in homely things lifted to a spiritual level? I love her work.

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Can Cleveland Be a 15-Minute City?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

Photo: Wikimedia.
Cleveland in 1922, when the city was more walkable. Note the trolleys, which eventually succumbed to Americans’ love affair with the automobile.

For decades, cities were planned around cars and the convenience of people driving in from the suburbs. Now planners are giving more thought to urban quality of life and the “15-minute city” — even looking back to the Old Days for ideas. How lovely to live in a city and be able to do most of your daily errands within 15 minutes of your home!

Adele Peters writes at Fast Company, “When Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo touted the idea of becoming a 15-minute city — a place where it’s easy to reach work, school, stores, and other destinations on a short walk or bike ride — it didn’t have as far to go as many other cities. Hidalgo has pushed for multiple changes to help cut air pollution and improve quality of life, from making a highway car-free to adding so many bike lanes that the streets now look more like Copenhagen. But Paris was already compact, densely populated, and relatively easy to walk. …

“The goal is a bigger challenge in Cleveland, which currently has a Walk Score of 57 (Paris has a perfect score, 100 out of 100). Cleveland’s 35-year-old mayor [Justin Bibb], who took office earlier this year, still wants to move in the same direction.

“ ‘We’re working toward being the first city in North America to implement a 15-minute city planning framework, where people — not developers, but people — are at the center of urban revitalization, because regardless of where you live, you have access to a good grocery store, vibrant parks, and a job you can get to,’ Bibb said in his first State of the City speech in April. …

“The city was more walkable in the past, and more people lived a short distance from their jobs. ‘We had an industrial heritage, and we had housing very proximate to these plants and factories where people worked,’ says Jeff Epstein, the city’s chief development officer. Corner stores and other neighborhood retail shops were also within walking distance from homes. But as factories closed, and highways helped spawn the growth of suburbs, city neighborhoods became much less dense, and people had to travel farther. …

“Says Jason Kuhn, communications manager at the bike advocacy group Bike Cleveland, [‘You] ended up with this network of roads that are really built for car movement efficiency, and really not for people on bikes. There’s a potential, absolutely, to turn back to the other direction and really make the city work for the people who live there.’

“New protected bike lanes that run through the middle of the city and from east to west are already planned, though the overall bike network needs to improve. ‘You might have a road where there’s a bike lane for a mile, and then maybe it’s gone for two, so it’s kind of broken,’ he says. ‘So it’s still difficult to move around the city by bicycle just because the network is incomplete.’ A new ‘complete streets’ ordinance will help improve planning and deal with challenges like wide streets that are difficult for pedestrians to cross, he says.

The city is also starting to map out assets like parks and stores and identify which neighborhoods have the most potential now to be 15-minute neighborhoods. …

“Planners are also looking at where there are clusters of amenities near transit, and looking for ways to increase the number of people living in those areas. A neighborhood called Detroit Shoreway has the basic assets of a 15-minute city, but needs around 18,000 more housing units strategically located near public transit. There’s plenty of space, they say, to build new housing, from former industrial sites to closed fast-food restaurants, underused parking lots, and land owned by the city itself.

“On the riverfront — where the water was once so polluted that it famously caught on fire, but is now much cleaner — a new 35-acre development plans to add new park space, 2,000 housing units, and new office and retail space, all designed to encourage people to live downtown and easily walk where they need to go.

“ ‘We came in with that as a fundamental objective — planning to create 15-minute neighborhoods, and also to be an essential component of getting downtown Cleveland to be part of an 18-hour city, which in essence means that folks can come downtown and find something to do for at least 18 hours of the day,’ says Kofi Bonner, CEO of Bedrock, the real estate firm developing the site. The firm just completed a master plan for the area; the first steps for construction could begin in 2024, depending on the city permitting process, but the full project will take 15 to 20 years. The development will help connect the riverfront to the rest of downtown.”

My friend Mary Ann bikes Cleveland with her family. I love seeing her photos of nighttime group rides.

More at Fast Company, here.

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Dancers Go Goofy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 21, 2023| 8 Comments »

Photo: Holger Rudolph.
A performance of “La Grande Phrase” by French company Campagnie Didier Théron. The idea is to share the fun of dance and draw in new audiences.

I love reading about serious artists reaching out through humor. But what is going on in the picture above? One kid is watching the playful performance and wearing a big smile. Everyone else is looking in another direction with solemnity. Bad choice of illustration?

Celina Lei reports at Australia’s ArtsHub that the “French dance company Campagnie Didier Théron will soon land in Adelaide to upend expectations of dancers’ bodies with a dash of humor.

” ‘Dance!’ Usually when kids hear this cue,” she writes, “they immediately start wiggling their bottoms and shuffling their feet – circling, hopping and swinging their arms.

“But often as we grow, we grow more hesitant, our movements become more restricted and choreographed in fear of embarrassing ourselves. So what if to dance is to be silly?

“Wearing colorful inflated suits and roaming across streets, parks and city centers, La Grande Phrase (The Big Phrase) is a dance-work series by Montpellier-based Campagnie Didier Théron that explores ways to upend stereotypes of what a dancer should look like or do.

“The self-taught dancer and choreographer Didier Théron tells ArtsHub that the work was born from a journey of experimentation and collaboration with international artists and dance companies, allowing dancers the freedom of movement while wearing suits inflated with air. …

“Théron points to the German artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), as well as Venus figurines of the European Paleolithic period, as inspirations for these dramatic bodily forms. The movement of dance and the flow of air within the suits further activate these forms.

“After touring in cities around Europe and taking out the 2013 Grand Prize of Setouchi Triennale in Japan, the company will bring three dancers to WOMADelaide (SA) this March where ‘any space shared with the audience becomes a performance space.’

“In the same way that contemporary visual artists are continually challenging the notion of a hushed, white-cube gallery, dance with a splash of humor can provide multiple access points for different audiences.

“From the time of Charlie Chaplin, who pulled off every sequence with full comic relief, to more recent contemporary experimentations such as the UK’s New Art Club combining dance with stand-up comedy, there are plenty of examples where humor can support choreographic expression.

“Théron says: ‘This project always surprises me in the reactions of the people and how they receive it. The first time we performed it outside was in a suburb of Montpellier. It was not easy to have a cultural artistic project in this area, but we crossed this line with these characters and everybody was laughing or smiling.’

“Taking this performance [onto] the streets also offers the dancers greater freedom, and the audiences more opportunities to interact, adds Théron. …

“Roving performances were also something that had a great impact on Théron as a child, from the very first time he encountered a ritualistic dance parade in his grandparents’ village in the centre of France.

“He says: ‘That was the first dance I saw and members of my family were also dancing (only men at the time), but it was very powerful and filled with a deep joy. This performance allowed me to reconnect with this memory.’ …

“What the company hopes to bring to the audience is an invitation to think about dance and dancers’ bodies ‘beyond the norm,’ and perhaps at some point share the joy of movement.

‘There is something in being this character that [gives] us permission to do many things. I think it’s a real positive body and filled with possibilities that we can experiment with all the time,’ concludes Théron.”

More at ArtsHub, here. No firewall. Funny pictures.

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Talking to Houseplants

Posted in Uncategorized on January 20, 2023| 8 Comments »

Photo: John and Suzanne’s Mom.
My anthurium is growing on me.

Every week, I look forward to Friday, when I can give six ice cubes to the plant my niece and nephew sent when my sister died. An anthurium.

I mean, I really look forward to it!

I know. Sounds like I don’t have much of a life. But I have become quite attached to this plant. I haven’t been able to get the red leaves to grow, but I do love watching the little green shoots unfurl and reach toward the sun. Now, after reading today’s article, I’m thinking maybe I should start talking to this baby.

Stacey Colino of the Washington Post explains. “Plants don’t interrupt when you’re speaking. They don’t argue or ask difficult questions. And regardless of whether they’re actually listening, research has shown them to be a calming presence. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of us talk to ours.

“In a 2022 survey by trees.com, 50 percent of the 1,250 respondents reported talking to their plants and/or trees. When asked why, 65 percent said they believe it helps them grow. The research, however, isn’t definitive about this point. While studies have found that vibrations caused by sound do affect plants, the jury’s still out on whether the human voice offers any specific benefit.

“For many plant owners, though, the science is beside the point. Marquis Matson, co-founder of the blog the Indoor Nursery, says she talks to her plants every day because ‘it feels nice. … I think plants get a sense of community from my talking to them and that keeps them going.’ …

“A study in a 2003 issue of the journal Ultrasonics investigated the effects of classical music and the sounds of birds, insects and water on the growth of Chinese cabbage and cucumber. The conclusion? Both forms of sound exposure increased the vegetables’ growth.

“In a 2015 study published in the International Journal of Integrative Sciences, Innovation and Technology, researchers exposed marigold and chickpea plants to light Indian music as well as to traffic noise: They found that both types of plants grew and developed better — gaining increased height, a greater number of leaves, and a healthier look — after being exposed to the music for four hours per day, but not to the traffic sounds.

“ ‘Plants definitely respond to vibrations in their environment — which can cause plants to grow differently and become more resistant to falling over,’ says Heidi Appel, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Toledo in Ohio. ‘Those vibrations can come from airborne sounds or insects moving on the plants themselves. And plants will respond differently to tones and music than to silence [but] we don’t know if talking to them makes them grow differently.’”’

“Despite the lack of studies and evidence about the benefits of talking to your plants, there is at least one theoretical perk: ‘If we identify with a living organism that we’re tasked with taking care of, we’re going to take better care of it,’ Appel says. …

“Regardless of whether talking to the plants helps them, does it help us, as human beings? In that same 2022 trees.com survey, 62 percent of the participants who reported chatting up their greenery said they did so because it helped their own mental health. …

“One study in a 2018 issue of the journal HortScience found that transplanting plants reduced mental stress and anxiety in young adults. And regularly spending an hour gardening has been found to improve mood and reduce stress among healthy women, according to a study in a 2022 issue of PLoS One. …

“While there isn’t published research on whether talking to plants is therapeutic for people, there are plausible reasons it might be, experts say. For one thing, it may come to us naturally. ‘As humans, we often speak to what we’re caring for — it’s built in,’ says Patricia Hasbach, a psychotherapist with Northwest EcoTherapy in Eugene, Ore., and author of Grounded: A Guided Journal to Help You Reconnect With the Power of Nature — and Yourself. …

“For another thing, it can be a way of expressing thoughts and feelings out loud, in an effort to make sense of them. ‘I think of talking to plants as a way of talking to ourselves,’ says Kenneth R. Yeager, a social worker and director of the Stress Trauma and Resilience Program at Ohio State University. ‘As we’re talking to our plants, we’re talking to ourselves — and formalizing our thought process.’

“Talking to your plants is also a relatively low-risk proposition. ‘You might not want to do it in front of someone else,’ says Elizabeth Diehl, director of therapeutic horticulture at the Wilmot Botanical Gardens College of Medicine at the University of Florida. However, when you talk to your plants, they are, quite literally, a captive audience. ‘Plants don’t judge,’ Diehl says.”

I like that plants don’t judge or interrupt — and, presumably, never say, “Keep in mind.” But that could also be said of teapots and hubcaps. There is so much more personality to a plant. Check out the Post article, here.

Do you talk to your plants?

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Reinstating Bessie Mae, Animator

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 19, 2023| 4 Comments »

Photo: Manitou Productions via Wikipedia.
Bessie Mae Kelley, an early animator and director.

The New York Times has been making an effort to give credit to those who have made important contributions to our culture but have been overlooked. They tend to be women and people of color. If you read the Times, you may have noticed new obits, for example, highlighting the lives of people who died decades ago. Better late than never, I guess.

So after animation scholar Mindy Johnson shared her research on early female cartoonist Bessie Mae Kelly, Brooks Barnes of the Times wrote about it.

“The pioneers of hand-drawn animation were all men,” wrote Barnes last December 13, “or at least that is what historians (men, almost exclusively) have long told us.

“Winsor McCay made the influential short ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ in 1914. Paul Terry (Farmer Al Falfa), Max and Dave Fleischer (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop) and Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) each made well-documented early contributions. Walt Disney hired a team that became mythologized as the Nine Old Men.

“Earlier this year, however, the animation scholar Mindy Johnson came across an illustration — an old class photo, of a sort, depicting the usual male animators from the early 1920s. In a corner was an unidentified woman with dark hair. Who was she? The owner of the image, another animation historian, ‘presumed she was a cleaning lady or possibly a secretary,’ Johnson said.

“ ‘I said to him, “Did it ever cross your mind that she might also be an animator?” ‘ Johnson recalled. ‘And he said, “No. Not at all.” ‘

“But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name she had discovered years earlier in an obscure article about vaudevillians who became animators.

“As part of an investigation that found Johnson cold-calling people in Minnesota, digging through archives at the University of Iowa and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film from a San Diego garage, Johnson confirmed her hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she animated and directed alongside many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley started her career in 1917 and began to direct and animate shorts that now rank as the earliest-known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.

“So much for that cleaning lady theory.

“ ‘History is recorded, preserved, written about and archived from a male perspective, and so nobody had really examined the level of what women did — their contribution was often just passed off as a single sentence, if at all,’ Johnson said. ‘Finally, we have proof that women have been helming animation from the very beginning.’ …

“Johnson will present her findings on Monday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The evening event will include the first public screening of two restored, previously unknown short films by Kelley. One is called ‘Flower Fairies’ and was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation on top). Sweet-natured, human-looking creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them. …

“ ‘Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare it to something like Walt Disney’s “Goddess of Spring,” which was about 15 years later,’ Johnson said. She was referring to a Silly Symphonies short that Disney based on the Greek myth of Persephone. ‘Goddess of Spring’ is viewed as a critical steppingstone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for the rendering of human forms, with the groundbreaking ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937) as a result.

“Kelley’s second film had a Christmas theme and was made in 1922. It includes stop-motion animation and finds a girl reading a book beside a crackling fire, a stocking dangling from the mantel. Santa climbs out of the book and sets about his duties.

“ ‘Mindy has made a significant breakthrough, filling in an important gap in our understanding about the beginnings of this industry and art form,’ said Bernardo Rondeau, the Academy Museum’s senior director of film programs. Johnson’s presentation at the museum is part of a series of screenings and talks dedicated to newly preserved and restored films from the Academy Film Archive.

“The stash of materials that Johnson located in San Diego — in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew — also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films; copper prints; a journal and scrapbooks; and photos with notations by Kelley. One of the cans of film included a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed with characters from ‘Gasoline Alley,’ the comic strip that debuted in 1918.

“Johnson also discovered that Kelley helped design and animate a mouse couple from Paul Terry’s influential ‘Aesop’s Fables’ series (1921 to 1933). Johnson noted that Walt Disney spoke about being inspired by the series. (‘My ambition was to make cartoons as good as “Aesop’s Fables.” ‘) …

“ ‘I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,’ Johnson said.”

More at the Times, here.

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Photographers Tackle Flowers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 18, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Abelardo Morell.
“2016–Flowers for Lisa #30” (2016) at Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Lauren Moya Ford at Hyperallergic asks, “Can photographers capture the vitality of flowers compellingly, innovatively, and beautifully?” She reviews a new book that answers the question in the affirmative.

“In the late 1830s,” writes Ford, “the Welsh botanist John Dillwyn Llewelyn began making photographs of orchids he’d grown at his home near Swansea. Llewelyn’s pictures are thought to be among the first to use the photographic process to identify plant specimens, though he himself found them lacking. ‘I have amused myself with making Daguerreotype [sic] portraits [of several flowers], and from their exact accuracy they are interesting,’ he wrote in an 1842 letter to the director of London’s Kew Gardens, ‘though the want of color prevents them from being beautiful as pictures.’ …

“Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography by William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud (Thames & Hudson, 2022), features 200 photos taken over the past 30 years. The lavishly illustrated book follows its 1991 predecessor, which covered the period from 1835 to 1990. The newest edition features more than 120 artists from 30 countries working with digital and analog photography in a variety of modes, including performance, collage, and textiles. 

“Some of the most provocative images come from artists who use flowers to take on today’s pressing political and social issues.

In the book’s first photo, taken at the 2020 Belarus protests by the Polish photojournalist Jędrzej Nowicki, we see the hand of a demonstrator gripping a small bouquet of white flowers tied with white ribbon, the color of the opposition.

“ ‘The Pansy Project’ by Paul Harfleet documents single pansies that the artist plants at the site of homophobic abuse. And Thirza Schaap’s brightly-colored, modern-day vanitas ‘Plastic Ocean Series’ features floral still lifes made of discarded waste. …

“Other photos are personal, documentary, and playful. Some of Ewing and Panchaud’s selections riff on the way flowers have been depicted in the past, while others push in new directions. Flowers are a well-worn subject matter in the history of art, appearing in human production well before Llewelyn’s snaps in the 19th century. This book shows that they remain a powerful springboard for visual experimentation and meaning.”

I have chosen to illustrate this post with Abelardo Morell‘s photo both because I like it and because Abe and his wife were friends of my late sister. Nell knew them decades ago at Columbia University, when as a relatively recent immigrant from Cuba, Abe was doing menial jobs and thinking he might like to take up photography. The rest is history. Now his photographs are collected in museums.

More at Hyperallergic, here. Read about Abe here. He’s an interesting guy.

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