When people click “like” at one of my entries, I go look at their site. Often I find that we share interests. Art is one interest.
Katie J. Anderson clicked “like” for the post “Art in the Exurbs.” I think she is an artist in Scotland.
Her WordPress blog, here, led me further, to an artists’ cooperative blog where she volunteers time. The site is the Commonty, which in Scottish law is a “common; a piece of land in which two or more persons have a common right.”
Following Ariadne’s thread from one blog to another can confuse a person. Thus, the Commonty took me to “The Stove,” which the site says emphatically is not the Commonty although TheStove’s home page also seems to be the Commonty’s.
Perhaps confusion is a hazard of a blog run by many people. I dug some more and found this: “an artists collective from SouthWest Scotland, The Stove is occupying a 3 storey building in the heart of Dumfries as the HQ for an adventure that asks useful questions about the role of a southern regional capital in contemporary Scotland.”
Which doesn’t sound that different from this: “The Commonty was formed, and is run entirely, by working creative people on a voluntary basis – we have nobody’s remit or priorities except our own.
“We are committed to the vision of Dumfries and Galloway as a region whose character is significantly shaped by the creative people and projects that are based here — we see a vital spark in the interconnections between our environment and culture, making this the place that we want to live, and a place that we are proud of.”
In a recent post, the Commonty notes with pride: “The Theatre Royal, Lochside Theatre, and The Stove have received funding from Creative Scotland as part of a national programme which helps organisations carry out refurbishments and purchase equipment.”
Does someone from Dumfries or Galloway want to tell me more?
A busy holiday here in New England with both our kids, their spouses, and the two grandsons. Every time we thought we were nearly done opening presents, one or more of us needed a nap.
The distaff side produced a chicken masala (with rice, nuts, raisins, cilantro, coconut, and chutney from Swaziland via the Servv catalog), creamed spinach, salad, and pear crumble.
Meanwhile, here’s a Christmas-y story from South America …
“In 2001, when Argentina’s economy was near collapse and property prices plummeted, UCLA art prof Fabian Wagmister bought a 15,000-square-foot abandoned warehouse in Buenos Aires. When he finally set out to clear the remaining debris from the building last year, he uncovered more than 100,000 Christmas ornaments piled in one of the back rooms.
“What to do with a trove of metallic bulbs, plastic wreaths, and bags of fake snow for a sunny Argentine Christmas?
“Re-gift them, of course,” writes Elise Hennigan at Pacific Standard.
“ ‘As artists we were immediately taken by the powerful expressive potential of the materials,’ says Wagmister.
“Now the director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance (REMAP), Wagmister invited a team of ten artists, researchers, and programmers from Los Angeles to distribute the ornaments to the surrounding community …
“Starting on December 15, the team invited community groups to visit the warehouse, one among many lining a historically working-class district that has seen an influx of technology companies. There, the researchers have encouraged participants to develop projects that will use the ornaments to express their identities, struggles and aspirations. On December 23, the groups took to the streets and decked the halls accordingly.” More.
Photograph: Pacific Standard
Some of the found ornaments going up around Argentina’s capital
At this time last year, I wrote at Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog that I came home from running an errand and found mystery cookies in the back door. It didn’t take long, however, to recognize the artistry of a certain family Suzanne has known since kindergarten.
This year, the pater familias presented me with a cookie I guarantee has never been seen before.
Perhaps you have heard of the Higgs Boson, that elusive particle that physicists claim is necessary for mass. It was thought to have been corralled last July after “a decades-long search [and] the construction of one of the most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, the Large Hadron Collider, able to create and study Higgs bosons (if they exist).” Thus, Wikipedia.
Do you believe in things unseen?
Well, let me tell you: if Higgs Boson were a cookie, this is what it would look like. (Please note the H and the confusion in the brain.)
Neda Ulaby, a National Public Radio (NPR) reporter, had an intersting story a while back about a vibrant art community in rural Marfa, Texas.
“This tiny town perched on the high plains of the Chihuahua desert is … a blue-chip arts destination for the sort of glamorous scenesters who visit Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum ...
“It all started when the acclaimed minimalist artist Donald Judd left New York City in the 1970s for this dusty dot of a town. He wanted to escape the art scene he claimed to disdain. With the help of the DIA Foundation, Judd acquired an entire Army base, and before he died in 1994, he filled it with art, including light installations by Dan Flavin and Judd’s own signature boxes. One hundred of them, made of silvery milled aluminum, are housed in two old brick artillery sheds. … Now, all 400 acres of the site are run by the Chinati Foundation. …
Sculptor Campbell Bosworth, for one, loves living and working in Marfa.
” ‘You just come out here and you feel like, I want to make something; I want to do something!’ ”
Read more about art in exurbia. Cities are not the only places where art can be made.
But you knew that.
Photograph: Judd Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY In the 1970s, minimalist artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa, Texas, where he created giant works of art.
Public banks can be helpful in emergencies, and what with hurricanes, tornadoes, and all, we sure seem to have a lot of emergencies.
Grand Forks, North Dakota, figured this out after one of their floods. Most banks have to make sure their loans meet the tough safety and soundness requirements of regulators, so they may not come through fast enough for people trying to rebuild after a disaster. Grand Forks isn’t relying on them.
Kelly McCartney at Shareable (by way of the Christian Science Monitor) says that the Public Banking Institute blog at WordPress “cites a powerful example of how a public bank can help a city bounce back from a devastating natural disaster. As Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts unfold, there’s a lesson from history about the role of strong local financial institutions in increasing urban resilience.
“In April of 1997, Grand Forks, North Dakota, was hit by record flooding and major fires that put the city’s future in jeopardy. One of the first economic responders was the Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the only public bank in the United States.
“What’s a public bank, you ask? Public banks are owned by citizens through their government. They have a public interest mission, are dedicated to funding local development, and plow profits back into the state treasury to fund social programs and cover deficits. Rather than competing with private banks, BND partners with them to meet the needs of North Dakotans. …
“As a public bank, BND was able to respond to the ’97 flood in ways that a privately owned bank could not …
“Right after the flood, the Bank of North Dakota got to work, established a disaster relief loan fund, set aside $5 million to assist flood victims, and set up additional credit lines of around $70 million.” More.
Photograph: Reuters/File Residents of Grand Forks, N.D., carry their pet dog to safety in the shovel of a frontloader April 20, 1997. The more than 50,000 residents of the city were forced to evacuate as the Red River reached 25 feet above flood level. A public bank, owned by citizens, was a key player in the city’s recovery.
Right outside my window at work is the rejuvenated Boston Tea Party Museum, which I watched rise from the ashes over a period of years.
On Sunday, December 16, there was a public reenactment of the original Boston Tea Party. A Boston Globe reporter got into the action:
“Upon entering the museum,” writes Christopher Klein, “we were given cards with brief biographies of actual Tea Party protesters, identities we would assume for the next hour. I realized I was dealt a bad hand as I read about my alter ego, John Crane, the Colonist caper’s lone casualty. After being knocked unconscious by a falling tea crate, Crane was thought to be dead and hidden by his compatriots under a pile of wood shavings in a nearby carpenter’s shop. “He awoke hours later, however, and given a new lease on life, much like this museum itself, which was destroyed by a lightning strike in 2001 and set ablaze again in 2007 from sparks from a construction project on the Congress Street Bridge. Reborn after a $28 million makeover, the attraction features historically accurate replicas of two of the Tea Party ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver, which were modified from wooden fishing vessels.” More at the Globe.
Photograph: Christopher Klein for the Boston Globe Costumed volunteers at Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum where they toss crates of tea into the harbor.
Here’s another nice story about using the arts to inspire kids who are turned off by school in troubled districts.
Writes Patricia Cohen at the NY Times, “Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity. The chair’s unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.
“The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close’s show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.
“Saved from closure by a committed band of parents, the school was one of eight around the country chosen last year to participate in Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment that puts the arts at the center of the curriculum.”
Read about the reactions of the students — and more at the NY Times.
Photograph: Kirsten Luce for the NY Times
The artist Chuck Close giving a private tour of his show to students from Bridgeport, Conn.
Deanna Isaacs has a funny post at the Chicago Reader. It’s about the Storefront Playwright Project.
“Tired of sitting around watching paint dry?” she asks.
“Then get yourself over to 72 E. Randolph, where, thanks to the League of Chicago Theatres and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, you can watch a real, live writer at work.
“The Storefront Playwright Project is putting 27 authors on exhibit this month in the big front window at Hot Tix/Expo 72.
“Never mind that writing is right up there with sleeping as a potential spectator sport, so stimulating that the writer him- or herself often has to bring the action to a complete stop in order to check e-mail, clean a closet, or book a flight and get the hell out of there. …
“Guessing that dramatists would be more dynamic at work than, say, novelists (readily observed in deep rumination at most any coffee shop), I stopped by last week, when Emilio Williams was on display.
“The playwrights each take a four-hour shift. Williams was a couple hours into his afternoon stint, gamely focused on his laptop, which was perched on a small white table and hooked into a large screen mounted in the window. The big screen faces outward, allowing passersby a look at the creative product the instant it emerges from the writer’s brain. …
“Behind the glass, Williams pursed his lips and crossed his ankles. …
“He leaned his chin on his hand and scrolled through several pages of dialogue that went something like this:
“Mar: Done?
“Ted: Yep.
“Mar: You don’t sound very enthusiastic.
“Williams paused.
“He blinked.
“He scrolled again.
“And then, it happened!
“On the big screen, before my very eyes, the cursor hesitated. It stopped. And it backed up, deleting as it went, wiping out ‘tucitcennoC’ and replacing it with ‘Lake Geneva.’ ” More from Deanna, even funnier.
Readers may recall several posts I wrote on a playwriting class I took the summer before last. (For example, here.) I thought the class got playwriting out of my system. Should I reconsider now that playwrights have the opportunity to sit in storefronts where strangers can watch them think?
How much fun would this be: to sit next to a music group that uses improvised passages, and to write a words on scraps of paper indicating how you would like to hear the next bit played, and to hear the words take shape as sound?
That is what NY Times critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim got to do recently, and I have to say, I admire her word choices.
“On a recent rainy afternoon,” she writes, “I was sitting at an old-fashioned desk in a bare concrete loft in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, listening intently to the members of So Percussion, joined by Grey McMurray on electric guitar, rehearse a composition called ‘Toothbrush.’ …
“I was busy tearing scraps of paper out of my notebook and scribbling words on them. ‘Feathery,’ for example, and, ‘Question everything,’ and, ‘You want to dance.’
“Then I would dash over and deliver my note to one of the players and hear it translated into sound or action.
“ ‘Toothbrush’ is an otherwise fully composed and notated piece featuring instrumental music, singing and spoken dialogue — plus one silent participant who sits onstage listening and writing down notes that become in-the-moment instructions for players to improvise on. …
“Next to me, Adam Sliwinski was tapping out a crisp rhythm on a tom-tom with one hand and on a tambourine and wooden plank with the other. ‘With Outrage,’ I scribbled on a scrap of paper and placed it in his field of vision. Almost immediately, mallets went flying in an explosion of angry energy.” More here.
I want to try this. Just need to find a willing musician.
Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times Jason Treuting rehearsing with So Percussion.
Writes Jan Gardner at the Sunday Globe, “About a block from the Cambridge Public Library, its Lilliputian cousin is perched atop a post on the sidewalk. At this Little Free Library, open since mid-October, there are no due dates, late fees, or library cards. Made out of recycled wood, it consists of a single shelf that holds about 20 books.
“The library’s founders are Laura Roberts and Ed Belove who put it in front of their house at 1715 Cambridge St. so they can keep an eye on it. …
“Sabrina Françon, a student at the nearby Harvard Graduate School of Design, sees the Little Free Library as an example of tactical urbanism, a trend she is studying. She wants to determine whether small playful citizen projects like the Little Free Library influence a neighborhood’s social capital.” Roberts reports to Françon what she sees from the window.
“The little library had its origins on Facebook. A friend of Roberts posted a message about Little Free Library, a nonprofit that started in Wisconsin three years ago. Founder Todd Bol built the first library in tribute to his late mother, a book lover.”
More from the Globe. You may also want to read my earlier post on the concept here. By the way, have you ever noticed that the Globe posts weekday articles fast, but Sunday Globe articles like this one may wait until Tuesday.
Suzanne says I have an art esthetic. That makes me laugh.
My esthetic, as far as I can tell, is mostly a preference for painting that is wavy: Charles Burchfield, Virginia Lee Burton, Grant Wood, Marsden Hartley, Kate Knapp, Edvard Munch, Reginald Marsh.
A massive mural by one of my wavy favorites, Thomas Hart Benton, has recently been rescued from storage. Carol Vogel has the story in the NY Times.
“On New Year’s Day 1931, a new and radically different building opened amid the town houses of West 12th Street: Joseph Urban’s International-Style New School for Social Research, with one room in particular as a star attraction. Thomas Hart Benton, the American realist painter, had lined the third-floor boardroom with nine panels of what would be a 10-panel mural, ‘America Today,’ depicting a panoply of pre-Depression American types, from flappers to farmers, steel workers to stock market tycoons. Lloyd Goodrich, a prominent art historian, pronounced it a breakthrough that heralded a new approach to mural painting, ‘of actually taking reality and making mural art directly out of it.’
“Eight decades later, ‘America Today,’ now considered one of the most important and famous examples of American scene painting, is languishing in storage. That will change, however, because AXA Equitable, the insurance company that bought it nearly 30 years ago, has decided to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. …
“The only problem,” writes Vogel, “is that the museum is so squeezed for space that the mural’s first public appearance after the handover won’t be until at least 2015, when the Met takes over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (after the Whitney’s move to the meatpacking district).” More.
Something to look forward to in 2015.
Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
An editorial in the NY Times earlier this month praised the efforts of a Long Island organization committed to rescuing a lovely, endangered body of water.
The editorial said that in Shinnecock Bay, “pollution from fertilizer and septic runoff feeds frequent algae blooms that block oxygen and sunlight. … Once-lush beds of eelgrass, shelter for the little fish that feed bigger ones, have largely disappeared from the western part of the bay.”
But there is hope. “What Shinnecock Bay has going for it are scientists working to restore its waters and tidal flats to health. The Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program, run by Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and its Institute for Ocean Conservation Science, means to fix the problem, not just study it.
“The institute’s executive director, Dr. Ellen Pikitch, said a big part of the job was as simple as replanting eelgrass and seeding the bay with clams and oysters, which filter the water clean and make the bay better able to fend for itself. … Local officials were doing their part by agreeing to close sections of the bay to shellfishing.”
More on what is being done now and ideas for even bigger efforts here. The program could serve as a model for sustainability elsewhere in the world. And we can all do our bit by using less fertilizer and thinking first before putting pollutants down our drains.
Alden wrote on Facebook that he was going to cut off all access to the outside world last night and just listen his Ella Fitzgerald album. It sounded like a good idea to me.
Where do you look for healing? People have their ways. Getting lost in a book, attending a Handel’s “Messiah” (“Comfort ye, My people”), playing with a child too young to understand, breathing deeply in a florist shop, creating a self-imposed news blackout.
Once you turn your face to things that are beautiful and good, once you feel able to stand upright, you may be up for action. Donating to an organization that can help, volunteering, writing to your congressmen, composing a poem or a requiem. Take your time.
Every day, no matter what else is going on around the world, artists are thinking of new ways to express beauty.
Henry Grabar writes an AtlanticCities “postcard” about two Belgian designers’ insight that plates lit from the inside could make something wonderful out of discards — while saving a tree from being cut down for Christmas.
The resulting “tree” of broken cups and plates glows ethereally and was selected for display in the town square of Hasselt, Belgium.
” ‘We decorated the tree with objects which would otherwise have remained invisible,’ MOOZ designers Inge Vanluyd and Stefan Vanbergen wrote in their DesignBoom submission.” Not just invisible, I would add, but thought to be useless.
For architecture buffs everywhere, an article on a collaboration between Hariri Pontarini Architects and Gartner Steel and Glass that has led to an unusual place of worship in South America.
Lisa Rochon writes in Toronto’s Globe and Mail that starting last September “at the Gartner Steel and Glass testing facility in Bavaria, Germany, translucent panels of cast glass [were] mocked up. Artisans at Toronto’s Jeff Goodman Studio, working in close collaboration with Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects, produced the thick, milky glass for a Baha’i temple on the edge of metropolitan Santiago, Chile.
“The protective embrace of the domed temple, to be defined by nine petals (or veils), will be fabricated of myriad shapes in cast glass, with 25 per cent of them noticeably curved. Luminous and white is what design lead Siamak Hariri had in mind; seen up close, they look like streams of milk frozen in place.
“It took years of testing and the rejection of hundreds of samples at the acclaimed Goodman Studio (which typically makes chandeliers or small-scale screens of glass) to arrive at the 32-millimetre-thick cast glass with matte finish. ‘That the design is finally being mocked up in Germany represents a major milestone,’ says Hariri. …
“The project is unique in the world, says Gartner’s managing director, Armin Franke, from his office in Germany. Hariri’s exacting specifications have presented many challenges. For one thing, the architects want only the most minimal silicon joints between the heavy cast-glass panels. The panels – made from countless glass rods laid on a sheet and baked at Goodman Studio – are stronger than stone, according to tests, to satisfy a Baha’i requirement that the building endure for 400 years, and to survive one of the most active earthquake zones in the world.”
I love how many players around the world are collaborating on the innovations behind this project.
Lots more on the project here and at the Baha’i website, here.
Photograph: Hariri Pontarini Architects. A computer-generated rendition of the Baha’i House of Worship under construction in Santiago, Chile.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 