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Planning an Arts Center for Philly

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 19, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: Isabel Kokko, Forman Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, via the Art Newspaper.
Inside the former electrical substation as it appears today. The Forman Arts Initiative plans to renovate four buildings in Kensington to hold a gallery, performing arts venue, garden area, and FAI offices.

One of the cool places I get leads from is ArtsJournal. The variety of topics is great because they check out way more sources than any one person could monitor (or pay the fees for). Today’s story is from the Philadelphia Inquirer and covers an art initiative not far from where I used to live in Pennsylvania.

Rosa Cartagena writes, “A new 100,000-square-foot arts campus coming to West Kensington will open in stages over the next two years. The Forman Arts Initiative, an arts organization that awards grants to local creatives and arts nonprofits, plans to renovate four buildings on American Street. The multipurpose space will hold a gallery, performing arts venue, and garden area, in addition to FAI’s offices.

“Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice, the art-collecting couple behind FAI, envision the campus as a cross between an arts center, coffee shop, art-making studio, and gallery space where they can publicly display their collection of more than 800 artworks. The collection — largely works from artists of color and women — includes such names as Philadelphia ceramist Robert Lugo, legendary photographer Gordon Parks, and abstract painter Alma Thomas.

“ ‘We live with our art, and we think of our collecting more as stewardship than ownership,’ said Rice. … ‘We’re really looking at using art as a tool for education, community engagement, performance, and inspiration.’

“In late 2022 and early 2023, the couple purchased a vacant lot and four adjoining buildings on the 2200 block of American Street. … FAI will work with Philadelphia architecture firms DIGSAU and Ian Smith Design Group to transform the 100,000-square-foot site. Forman said it’s too early to know how much the restoration and renovation will cost, but FAI plans to finance it internally and will seek government funding and potential support from local foundations.

“FAI has also attracted one of the most influential people in the art world to serve as lead designer: urban planner and sculptor Theaster Gates. Forman and Rice first connected with him as collectors of his art and when they began developing plans for the campus, they approached Gates for his unique style that combines ‘social practice and art practice,’ said Forman.

“In Chicago, where Gates lives and works, he is renowned for repurposing abandoned industrial buildings into arts spaces, archives for Black culture, affordable housing, and artist residences that have revitalized a South Side neighborhood.

“Philadelphia has been a site for his artwork, as well. In 2020, Gates created the public work Monument in Waiting, in a response to the movement to tear down Confederate monuments. The sculpture, which critically questions national heroes, has been on display at Drexel University since 2022. …

“FAI is undertaking an extensive listening tour to determine what exactly the West Kensington neighborhood needs and wants from a space such as this. Gates will work with newly appointed FAI executive director Adjoa Jones de Almeida, who was previously at the Brooklyn Museum, and associate executive director Sunanda Ghosh, a local nonprofit strategist who has worked with BlackStar and Asian Arts Initiative, among others.

“ ‘We are very intentionally saying to people, “We actually don’t know,” because, truly, we are emphasizing the design of a communities engagement strategy,’ said Jones de Almeida, who moved to East Kensington earlier this year. The plan is to incorporate input from the neighborhood’s residents and organizations into the design of the space.

“She’s interested in ‘radical collaboration’ with neighborhood organizations such as the Norris Square Neighborhood Project and Taller Puertorriqueño, both recipients of last year’s FAI grants. …

“Forman and Rice believe that West Kensington is the best location because, despite being systemically overlooked and under-resourced, the community has a strong arts community, including Crane Arts and the Clay Studio.

“ ‘We were interested in the notion that we’re not displacing anybody — the buildings that we bought were all commercial,’ said Rice. ‘It’s just repurposing.’ …

“ ‘You have to enter with big ears and an open and pliant heart,’ said Gates. ‘The work of creating a creative space and making a significant investment in a place that’s been highly underinvested is hard work when you’re trying to really listen, because there’s a lot of bruised feelings.’ ”

More at the Inquirer, here. And the Art Newspaper version has no paywall, here.

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17th C Blue Jeans

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Galerie Canesso.
An unknown artist now dubbed “Master of the Blue Jeans” created “A Woman Sewing with Two Children” (c. 17th century).

In case you missed it, several outlets wrote recently about a Parisian gallery’s exhibit drawing attention to what looks like blue jeans in 17th century paintings. What? They weren’t invented by Levi Strauss?

Vittoria Benzine writes at Artnet News, “A new exhibition opening at Galerie Canesso will highlight the contested origins of blue jeans, with the display of 17th-century paintings that appear to depict the fabric. Levi Strauss is often credited with creating the sartorial staple in California 150 years ago, though France and Italy have made their own claims. But 10 early artworks featuring blue jeans complicate the narrative.

“In 2004, curator Gerlinde Gruber reattributed these works to an unknown artist dubbed the Master of the Blue Jeans. By 2010, the Italian dealer Maurizio Canesso had bought up all of the mysterious painter’s works. Two will appear in his gallery’s 30th anniversary show, taking place in Paris (May 16—June 23) and Milan (May 23 — June 23), but only one of them, Woman Begging with Two Children, will be for sale.

“Since Galerie Canesso’s last exhibition in 2010, which presented the full-known oeuvre of the Master of the Blue Jeans, the dealer has located one additional example, which he bought in Buenos Aires.

“The original 10 paintings by the Master have always been traced to Northern Italy during the 17th century, but were previously attributed to Michael Sweerts, Diego Velásquez, and Georges de Latour. While they are all early genre scenes centered on society’s poorest people, most feature flashes of prototypical jeans crafted from blue cloth and white thread.

“ ‘People are still not very familiar with the true history of blue jeans, as they confuse it with the material made by Levi Strauss,’ Canesso told Artnet News. ‘One has to distinguish between blue jeans and denim: jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes.’ The Italian specimens were woven with perpendicular stitches, while their French kin were woven in chevron patterns.

“ ‘An amazing thing is that until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere to the fabric,’ Canesso continued. ‘Only in the year 1000 did this begin to happen using woad leaves, and at a very high cost. The genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make this an industrial and therefore low-cost process.’ …

“Genre painting flourished in the century that followed, but these works stand out. ‘The Master of the Blue Jeans is the only one who painted jeans,’ Canesso wrote. ‘These paintings are the story of a family: they are always the same characters, wearing the same clothes — clothes that they used every day. And they are true jeans fabric: when it tears, the white thread comes out.’

“This feature is especially visible in ‘A Woman Sewing With Two Children’ — another work by the Master of the Blue Jeans set to go on view at Galerie Canesso. It will be on loan (like most works in the anniversary show) from the collector that Canesso originally sold it to.”

More at Artnet News, here. No paywall. If you prefer an audio version of the story, check out radio show The World, here. That’s where I first learned about this.

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Student-Acquired Art Collection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 15, 2024| 2 Comments »

Art: Jonathan Lyndon Chase.
“Calm Touches” (2021), acrylic paint, oil stick, and marker on canvas, 20 x 20 inches. One of the pieces that students chose for the art collection at Wake Forest University.

I’ve been reading Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her life with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and I’ve been thinking about how young artists carve out new ways, how they realize they have a different vision and develop the confidence to stick with it.

So it was with interest that I read at Hyperallergic about a university tapping youthful insights about art to form a very special collection.

John Yau reports from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, “Wake Forest University is one of the few American institutions of higher education to establish a collection of student-acquired art.

“Once every four years, a small group of students, along with faculty advisors, travels to New York City to buy art for the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art. This collection was started in 1963, at the beginning of a convulsive era in American history.

“Mark Reece, the dean of students and college union advisor, decided the school should establish a collection of contemporary art chosen by an acquisitions committee composed solely of students. In June of that year, Reece, Dean Ed Wilson, Professor J. Allen Easeley, and two students, David Forsyth and Theodore Meredith, drove to New York to visit contemporary art galleries. Working within a budget that Reece had cobbled together from unused funds, Forsyth and Meredith chose 18 works by 17 artists. 

“Earlier this year, Wake Forest University celebrated the 60th year of this program — and the 16 trips that have taken place since the program’s inception — with a selection of works obtained by previous generations of students. The exhibition, Of the Times: Sixty Years of Student-Acquired Art at Wake Forest University at the Charlotte & Phillip Hanes Art Gallery, was curated by Jennifer Finkel, who also contributed to the catalog, along with Leigh Ann Hallberg and J. D. Wilson. 

“The collection comprises more than 130 works, including, paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints. Unsurprisingly, given that the acquisitions committee changes every four years, no style, movement, or material dominates. The one constant holding the collection together, though in no obvious way, is the mandate that Reece gave the first two students, which has been followed ever since: the art they buy must be ‘a reflection of the times.’ 

“During my time on campus, I was invited to sit on Professor John J. Curley’s class, titled Slow Looking. The small group of students, seated in a semicircle, faced Ida Applebroog’s ‘Promise I Won’t Die?’ (1987), a work on paper combining lithography, linocut, and watercolor that the acquisition group elected to buy in 1993. …

“By asking students to research an artist and carefully scrutinize a particular work of art, Curley encouraged them to go down a rabbit hole, where they can consider what they are looking at and how it communicates with them. This level of engagement is hard to achieve without being in the presence of a physical artwork. That it was chosen by a group of students 30 years ago underscores this collection’s ongoing vitality and relevance. 

“On campus, I also met some of the students who participated in the most recent New York buying trip. All were genuinely excited. They talked about how they prepared for the trip, beginning with Reece’s original mandate. They began compiling the initial list of 300 artists once they had been accepted into Contemporary Arts and Criticism. Throughout the semester the list expanded and contracted until it was down to 20 names. The students met in and outside of class. Each week, they presented a short list to their two professors, Finkel and Curley. 

“The students discussed what they thought art reflecting the times would look like, and who might make it, resulting in a racially diverse group. Before the trip, they made appointments with the artists’ galleries. Some dealers, I learned, were arrogant to them, treating them as if they didn’t know what they were doing. Others were warm and welcoming. At least one gallerist kept looking to the professors who accompanied them, convinced it was they who would make the final decision. …

“This immersive art-buying experience … mirrors this country’s changing demographics. For the first decades, the artists on the list were all or nearly all White. In 1989, the students bought Robert Colescott’s painting ‘Famous Last Words: The Death of a Poet’ (1988). … Four years later, the students bought ‘Untitled (Four Etchings)’ (1992) by Glenn Ligon and ‘Untitled (from the Empty Clothing series)’ (1991) by Whitfield Lovell. In 2001, they added South Korean artist Do-Ho Suh and Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander to the collection. They confronted controversial subjects, such as Congolese child soldiers, photographed by Richard Mosse, and Pakistani artist Salman Toor’s paintings of queer Brown men. 

“This year, the eight students chose the work of eight artists: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Jonathan Lydon Chase, Melissa Cody, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Emilie Gossiaux, Melvin L. Nesbitt Jr., Willa Wasserman, and Zhang Xiaoli.

“My only criticism,” Yau writes, “is that the university has no building dedicated to this collection, and it really should. Yet the diversity of artists, mediums, and practices is to be applauded. Taking their cues from Reece’s mandate, Wake Forest’s students have assembled an impressive gathering of art.”

I love how the university recognizes that young people have different sensibilities and how it honors that. More at Hyperallergic, here. No paywall. Subscriptions encouraged.

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African Nation Boosts Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 12, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: British Museum.
Benin bronzes.

Around the world, looted national treasures are beginning to return home. Among the most famous are the bronze plaques made in Benin, Africa. Now that country is building museums to protect its returning bronzes — and all its art.

Chinma Johnson-Nwosu writes at the Arts Newspaper, “The Republic of Benin, which is making its debut appearance at the Venice Biennale this year, is turning to culture as part of a strategy to spur economic growth. Its government is building four new museums in a range of locations and a cultural quarter in the largest city, Cotonou, in addition to boosting investment in arts education.

“A museum in the coastal city of Ouidah, from where the last recorded shipment of slaves to the US departed in 1860, will explore the history of slavery. It is scheduled to be completed at the end of this year, the first of the four new museums slated to open over the next five years in Benin. Maison de la Mémoire et de l’Esclavage aims to tell the history of slavery from African, American and Caribbean and European perspectives, says Alain Godonou, the director of museums for the national agency of heritage and tourism.

“Between 2016 and 2026, the Benin government plans to invest €250m [more than $5 million], with the goal of making culture the economy’s second pillar after agriculture. In addition to building museums, the government’s focus is on preserving non-material heritage, increasing cultural tourism and offering financial incentives to private investors.

“Promoting the arts goes beyond fostering a sense of national identity, says Babalola Jean-Michel Abimbola, the country’s minister of culture. ‘It’s a fight against poverty, allowing us to create jobs and build a better economy.’

“Construction began last year on a new cultural quarter in the centre of Cotonou [Le Quartier Culturel et Créatif] which is to host a contemporary art museum, a sculpture garden, a Franco-Beninese cultural institute, a concert arena, commercial galleries and a crafts village showing local crafts and heritage. …

“Further plans include the Musée des Rois et des Amazones du Danhomè in Abomey, where visitors will in future be able to explore the 300-year history of the kingdom of Dahomey. Musée International du Vodun, located in the capital, Porto-Novo, aims to rehabilitate the image of a much-maligned and globally poorly understood Indigenous religion, also known as Voodoo.

“The government hopes that the new museums will build on the success of a 2022 exhibition, where 26 recently repatriated royal artefacts went on display in the presidential office. These were shown alongside the contemporary exhibition, Art of Benin From Yesterday and Today: From Restitution to Revelation.

“The show drew more than 230,000 visitors in the three months it ran, 90% of whom were citizens of Benin, Godonou says. … While he concedes it may be too ambitious to expect to replicate the 2022 success annually, he believes a target of 100,000 would be sustainable.

“Last year, the government launched an Agency for the Development of Art and Culture. The ministries of tourism and finance are also seeking to introduce tax relief policies for the cultural industries.

“The kind of publicly funded, government-led major museum projects Benin is undertaking have little precedent in Africa. … The Benin government’s plan does, however, envisage involving the private sector. By showing entrepreneurs that people in the country are interested in art, Abimbola hopes to spark business interest. In some parts of Cotonou that is already happening. Septième Gallery, which already had a space in Paris, launched in Cotonou in 2022. …

“Investment in arts education and professional training is also increasing. Sèmè City, a government-backed development project, has revealed plans for a new Africa Design School campus located in Ouidah. The school launched in Cotonou in 2019 in partnership with L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique and has since added a masters programme and an exchange programme, in which 11 French students participated in 2023. …

“Last year, the École du Patrimoine Africain, which trains heritage professionals, celebrated its 25th anniversary. When it began, only 5% of the people working in Beninese museums were trained in heritage preservation. Now the figure is 80%.”

More at the Art Newspaper, here. Can you guess what country was the colonizer? Consider the names of the museums.

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Skyscraper Graffiti

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 10, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Dezeen.
Abandoned Los Angeles skyscrapers covered in graffiti.

Is graffiti a scourge or an art? I guess that depends on the graffiti and your point of view. In Los Angeles, graffiti on a monumental scale is the subject of debate.

Corina Knoll reports at the New York Times that, first, there were fancy buildings.

“It was a billion-dollar aspiration meant to transform a neighborhood. A trio of shimmering skyscrapers would feature luxury condos, a five-star hotel and an open-air galleria with retailers and restaurants. …

“The vision was called Oceanwide Plaza, and the chief executive said it would ‘redefine the Los Angeles skyline.’ An executive for the design firm said it would create ‘a vibrant streetscape.’ The website said it would be a place of ‘rare and unexpected moments.’

“All these statements, some would say, proved to be true. Just not in the way originally imagined.

“Funding for the venture quickly evaporated. The towers went up but were unfinished and empty. Plagued by financial and legal issues, the plaza was in a quiet limbo for five years. …

“Now those skyscrapers have become a symbol of street swagger, ‘bombed’ with the work of dozens of graffiti writers and artists. Their aliases cover windows that rise more than 40 stories, visible from the nearby highways.

“ ‘Everybody’s talking about it, of course,’ said Ceet Fouad, a French graffiti artist based in Hong Kong, known for his commissioned murals featuring cartoon chickens. … ‘It’s the best promotion you can have.’

“The sentiment is obviously not universal. Many Angelenos see the graffiti as unconscionable vandalism, encouraging waves of crime. Those who live near it say it has jarred their sense of safety. Civic leaders see it as an immediate hazard to the neighborhood as well as to trespassers, not to mention a worldwide embarrassment.

“Others have admired the work, some traveling to see the embellished towers for themselves and ruminate on what they represent. …

“A subculture took note that no one was bothering to clean off the fresh paint. Crews were trudging up together, their backpacks rattling with spray paint. Some lugged up gallons of paint and roller brushes. Security guards on patrol were easy to evade. Inside, they saw loose wires dangling from ceilings and rebar left exposed. Ladders and buckets littered the concrete floors. Bathtubs were full of water from the rain.

“ ‘We got a little lost at first; it’s kind of like entering a little city,’ said a graffiti artist who goes by Aker and managed to paint his alias twice. Although advice was passed around (bring water, the flight up is killer), he said there was no coordination among artists, just individual ambition. …

” ‘This is the problem of the city, people do whatever they want,’ said Rodel Corletto, who built Aladdin Coffee Shop on a nearby corner four decades ago.

“Mr. Corletto, 76, said that over the last 15 years, his windows have been broken, his chairs thrown into the street. He often feels like there is no recourse. The plaza, he said, was a larger example of downtown’s lawlessness. …

“In mid-February, city leaders were scrambling to figure out their role in a private property gone wrong. They had a responsibility, they said, to keep people safe and set an ultimatum: The plaza owner, Oceanwide Holdings, a conglomerate headquartered in Beijing, was ordered to secure the property within a matter of days. …

” ‘For them to have just completely abandoned these properties speaks more volumes about their irresponsibleness as opposed to the graffiti artists,’ said Kevin de León, the councilman who represents the area.

“The city earmarked $1.1 million to start to secure the property, including fencing. Mr. de León also said city leaders were looking into estimates for graffiti removal and putting a lien on the property. ‘The taxpayers will be repaid,’ Mr. de León insisted. …

“Some residents have openly wondered whether the funds might be better used to house the homeless. Or whether the trespassing will be curbed completely. …

“Whatever happens, graffiti artists like Aker say the takeover magnified and transformed a company’s folly hiding in plain sight.

“ ‘They failed not just themselves but the city,’ he said. ‘And this is what happens when things just get left — graffiti artists are like spiders, we’ll go out and put webs up there.’ “

Many outlets have covered this. More at the Times, here, at Dezeen, here, and at the Guardian, here.

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World’s Biggest Comics Collection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 18, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Nora Hickey/ Hyperallergic.
A Veronica comic strip drawn by Dan DeCarlo.

What cartoonists and comic strips did you read as a kid? My mother wanted me to be a child always, so she bought Little Lulu comics until I was into my teens. Not that I didn’t like Little Lulu, but I really, really wanted to know about the romantic adventures of Archie, Veronica, Daisy, Jughead, and all that gang. I wanted to understand why the blond was never as popular as the brunette.

Comics are an art that draws in young and old. But they have not often received attention as an art. Until now.

Nora Hickey reports at the art magazine Hyperallergic, “In an unendingly flat city nicknamed ‘Cowtown,’ the Ohio State University (OSU) erupts as an archetypal college campus. A miscellany of stone and brick buildings from various eras look over pedestrian paths bisecting green lawns. In one of these limestone, academy-coded buildings resides a museum and library dedicated to a genre long thought to be miles from the ivory tower: comics.

“The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum claims to house the world’s largest collection of cartoon- and comics-related materials, including a range of inked paper, artifacts, newspaper clips, magazines, scrapbooks, and even the drawing board used by Chester Gould, who created the Dick Tracy comic strip (1931—77).

“But it is much more than an archive: it is at once a museum, center for scholarship, and venue for events, all of it surprisingly accessible. … First, it costs nothing to attend. Also, the materials and displays are easy for anyone to understand, comics aficionado or not. And, if you — that is, anybody — want to see any of the holdings, you can request to view it onsite.  

“This approachability may be due in part to the fact that the comics genre has been routinely underestimated, despite its outsize impact. It’s one of the only historically disposable art forms — think of those painstakingly conceived, drawn, inked, and colored newspaper funny strips smeared with wet from their hasty relegation to the recycling bin. …

” ‘The Billy Ireland was founded back in 1977 through a donation from the cartoonist Milton Caniff — who was at one point one of the most successful and influential American cartoonists in American history,’ explains Caitlin McGurk, curator of Comics and Cartoon Art and associate professor at OSU. Caniff, a ‘celebrity’ artist (‘he would appear on late night TV,’ McGurk tells me) who created the widely read Terry and the Pirates (1934–73) and Steve Canyon (1947–88) adventure newspaper strips, was an Ohioan and a 1930 alum of OSU. As he prepared for retirement, he aimed to donate all of his work to the library of the university to which he felt he owed his career. ‘The libraries at OSU actually turned it down,’ McGurk told Hyperallergic in an interview. …

We show visitors the archive and people cry — especially if you’re a maker of this form that has been so long disrespected.

“Luckily, as Caniff produced newspaper comic strips, the journalism department decided to take his archives. … With Caniff’s encouragement of his fellow comic creators and Caswell’s outreach, the Billy Ireland would become a top choice for donations.

“Bill Watterson, for instance, the famously private artist of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95), entrusted his entire backlog to the museum — the only collection in the world to hold his archive. There are also lesser-known treasures, like the namesake of the museum itself, editorial cartoonist Billy Ireland, whose fame waned after his death but was resurrected by the Museum. …

“Behind the Ink: the Making of Comics and Cartoons … explores the variety of tools and art-making techniques employed by cartoonists over the years. The other current exhibit is Depicting Mexico and Modernism: Gordo by Gus Arriola, which details the life and work of the Modernist Mexican-American cartoonist.  Then, in May, a bonanza exhibition of the sardonic, iconic Nancy goes up, accompanied by a weekend-long Nancy fest on the 24 and 25 where Nancy scholars, cartoonists, and fans will dig into their favorite wisecracking character.   

“Below the exhibition spaces are the archives themselves. ‘Since OSU is part of a land grant institution, our archive is completely open to the public, which is pretty rare,’ McGurk explains. Some highlights are zines from the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1980s, which bear the raw emotion of their creators, and scrapbooks of cartoon engravings kept by a wealthy English family in the 1700s that painstakingly depict events long past. … There’s also a collection of 2.5 million comic strips saved by a single man (Bill Blackbeard). Personally, I loved seeing the colorful mid-century manga laid out as a huge page of frenzied activity punctuated by moments of photorealistic pictures. 

“The ability to see the comics in all stages of development — from nascent sketches, to embryonic penciled pages, to White’d Out and inked final pages — is a rare treat because of how such work is typically experienced: in reproduction on a mass scale, in frequent installments. To see the original version of a comic read by so many of us feels like seeing the artist at work. …

“ ‘We show visitors the archive and people cry — especially if you’re a maker of this form that has been so long disrespected,’ McGurk said. ‘Then you see this place and you’re like, all this is for comics? This is amazing.’ “

More at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall but subscrptions are encouraged.

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Ice Shacks for the Arts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 8, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Ben Hovland/MPR News.
Art Shanty #1 stands on the frozen surface of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis.

I once read that an eggshell is simultaneously one of the most fragile and also the most durable of Nature’s materials. Isn’t art like that, too? Both lasting and ephemeral?

Consider the on-again off-again role of ice in artistic output, from New Year’s Eve ice sculptures to colonies of working artists on frozen lakes. Alex V. Cipolle reported at Minnesota Public Radio about the latter.

“In the winter of 2004, something funny was afoot on Medicine Lake. There were ice fishing houses like always. But on the frozen lake, away from the fishing holes, was another shanty. This one was made with shiny red vinyl, a circle window and a wood sign hanging from the door that said, ‘The Poet is In.’

“The inhabitants weren’t fishing. Instead, they hosted birthday parties and built a heart-shaped ice skating rink for Valentine’s Day. They had a sleepover and screened the icy horror flick The Thing.

“This was the first-ever Art Shanty, created by local artists Peter Haakon Thompson and David Pitman.

“ ‘I had been talking with a couple of friends and was trying to convince them that we should build this shanty that we were going to put on Medicine Lake for the winter as our sort of fort-clubhouse-art studio,’ recalls Thompson.

“ ‘Just the creativity of what the possibilities were, were endless,’ Pitman adds. ‘As we’ve sort of seen 20 years later.’

“Twenty years later, one shanty has become a village, and a circle of artist friends became an arts nonprofit — Art Shanty Projects —  annually programming two weeks of free art events on ice. Now on Lake Harriet, Jan. 27 to Feb. 11, the frozen lake becomes a temporary arts community with about 20 shanties, each with a different theme, which host live performances, yoga sessions, and a polar bear (‘Lady Bear’) that walks the grounds. …

“To mark the 20th anniversary of the little red shack, the Art Shanty Projects team has recreated it, calling it Art Shanty #1.

“ ‘I had been going through old photos,’ says Erin Lavelle, the artistic director for Art Shanty Projects. ‘And the picture of the original shanty is just so iconic.’ … Lavelle wanted to bring in new artists to activate the classic shanty, so she tapped Richard Parnell and Tony Chapin, both based in Minneapolis and longtime shanty artists. During December and January, they rebuilt Art Shanty #1 in the Ivy Arts Building in South Minneapolis, using photos of the original as a guide. 

The original shanty was built with found materials and red-vinyl-covered plywood lifted from a Walker Art Center dumpster, says Thompson. 

“ ‘In the spirit of the way they had built theirs, we repurposed a lot of materials,’ Parnell says. Parnell volunteers in public schools so had access to gymnastic floor mats and plexiglass COVID shields that were being thrown out. The floor mats are now insulation and the shields are windows. …

“Thompson and Pitman, who are no longer officially involved with the event, say they are excited to see the shanty recreated, and the art shanty village flourishing two decades on.

“ ‘I don’t think either of us anticipated that it would be something that would continue hardly for any time at all,’ Thompson says. …

“ ‘What really excited me was seeing all these other people coming up with ideas for similar things within the limitations that were kind of set in this unregulated land,’ Pitman says.

“ ‘Relatively unregulated,’ Thompson adds, laughing. (The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Water Patrol board and the Department of Natural Resources require permits.) …

“The growing art village hopped from Medicine Lake to White Bear Lake and now Lake Harriet, and has had a few evacuations due to melting ice. In 2023, Art Shanty Projects moved it ashore for ‘Plan Beach.’ … 

“Today, the Art Shanty Projects is sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘Burning Man on Ice.’

“ ‘I’ve always been rankled by the whole Burning Man, Frozen Man comparison,’ Thompson says. The ever-expanding Nevada festival has become infamous for its impact on the environment.  With the art shanties, Thompson says, ‘We’ve followed this “Leave No Trace” ethos on the ice.’ ”

More at MPR, here. No paywall.

This year was one when the ice colony had to evacuate. The New York Times has that story here.

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Inspiration from a “Rat Hole”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 28, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Chicago’s ‘Rat Hole’ has become an unofficial city landmark as hundreds have flocked to pay tribute to the unidentified rodent imprint,” Hyperallergic reports.

Never underestimate the capacity of humans for fun and creativity. And be glad that social media amplifies good things, not just bad.

Rhea Nayyar writes at Hyperallergic, “In less than two whole weeks, the internet has turned a mildly interesting pavement impression on a residential sidewalk slab in Chicago into a viral local tourism site and a wellspring of artistic inspiration.

“The Chicago Rat Hole is exactly what it’s named — an imprint of a rat (or perhaps a squirrel) that fell with some force on a sidewalk panel that hadn’t fully dried yet. Some locals say it’s been there for over 20 years, but all it took was one post on X [site formerly known as Twitter] to turn the Rat Hole into something just short of a national landmark.

There is so much whimsy in going about your daily life here! That’s what I love about the Rat Hole the most

“Since artist and comedian Winslow Dumaine tweeted about his pilgrimage to the Rat Hole [January 2024] hundreds of people have flocked to the city’s Roscoe Village neighborhood to pay tribute to the unidentified rodent and its signature. What began as an innocent meme crept slowly into a small monument as people started leaving loose change and cigarettes and pouring one out over the hole, and then spiraled into something major. Offerings went from coins and smokes to flowers, cards, jewelry, hats, trinkets, toys, posters, and personalized artwork as the site drew more attention on TikTok and X.

“But it didn’t stop there. People built a community around the Rat Hole. Some groups have congregated and started drinking and partying together at the site, one couple got engaged in front of it, and another held a gay wedding there, complete with a balloon arch and everything. …

“Chicago-based artist and Etsy seller Margot la Rue was quick to cement the Rat Hole into the city’s iconography by replacing the stars of the official flag with silhouettes of the imprint and adding it to the label of the locally famous Jeppson’s Malört liquor bottle motif for iron-on patches. La Rue told Hyperallergic that she visited the Hole and chatted with a neighbor who was sitting on her porch at the time.

“ ‘She said over the weekend there was a line down the block to see the rat hole,’ La Rue recounted. … ‘It is very Chicago,’ the artist continued. ‘The city is simultaneously shiny and gritty — turning a rat shape in a sidewalk into a cultural landmark is very on brand.’ …

“Anthony Hall, one half of the Chicago-based design duo Harebrained, shared that people can get their very own Rat Hole t-shirt now. … Nick, a tattoo artist who goes by Inked Skunk on social media, recently moved to Chicago from New England and was really excited by the buzz around the Rat Hole. Enamored by the culture, Nick is offering Rat Hole-inspired tattoos. … ‘Since moving here, I’ve picked up such a different energy from the people and the area itself. There is so much whimsy in going about your daily life here! That’s what I love about the Rat Hole the most — it’s just a silly reminder that life doesn’t have to be so serious.’ …

“A less permanent option for Rat Hole fans who happen to be baddies is local nail technician Jena’s (@nailswithonen) artistic nail set tribute to the landmark. …

“Perhaps the most impressive ode to the Rat Hole is its commemorative plaque commissioned by Riot Fest, Chicago’s annual punk rock music festival. … The plaque has been converted into a t-shirt as well with all proceeds directed toward benefiting the city’s Douglass Park neighborhood and surrounding community via the Riot Fest Foundation. …

“But considering that the Rat Hole sits on a residential street, the loitering, littering, and loud noises have become a nuisance for the locals. One neighbor even took to Reddit to bullet-point out how the Rat Hole frenzy has impacted their life. … To anyone looking to make a pilgrimage to the Rat Hole as its future remains unclear, remember to be respectful of the neighborhood and keep the area clean.”

More at Hyperallergic, here.

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Goya’s Tapestry Factory Carries On

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 10, 2024| 4 Comments »

Art: Francisco Goya via Museo del Prado.
The Parasol (also known as El Quitasol) is one of a series of oil on linen paintings made by Francisco Goya. This series was made in order to be transformed into tapestries that would be hung on the walls of the Royal Palace in Madrid.

Companies that last over many generations know how to evolve with the times. There are a few in the US but more in other parts of the world. In Spain, for example, a factory that once converted pieces by the painter Francisco Goya into tapestries for his clients still plays a role in art and design.

Irene Yagüe writes at the Associated Press (AP), “Spain’s Royal Tapestry Factory has been decorating the walls and floors of palaces and institutions for more than 300 years. Located on a quiet, leafy street in central Madrid, its artisans work with painstaking focus on tapestries, carpets and heraldic banners, combining the long wisdom of the craft with new techniques.

“The factory was opened in 1721 by Spain’s King Felipe V. He brought in Catholic craftsmen from Flanders, which had been part of Spain’s empire, to get it started. Threads and wool of all colors, bobbins, tools and spinning wheels are everywhere. Some of the original wooden machines are still in use.

“The general director, Alejandro Klecker de Elizalde, is proud of the factory’s sustainable nature. ‘Here the only products we work with are silk, wool, jute, cotton, linen,’ he said. ‘And these small leftovers that we create, the water from the dyes, or the small pieces of wool, everything is recycled, everything has a double, a second use.’ …

“The factory recently received one of its biggest orders, 32 tapestries for the Palace of Dresden in Germany — worth more than 1 million euros and providing work for up to five years, according to Klecker de Elizalde. …

“Creating a tapestry is a delicate process that takes several weeks or months of work for each square meter. A tapestry begins with ‘cartoons,’ or drawings on sheets of paper or canvas that are later traced onto vertical thread systems called warps, which are then woven over.

“One of the factory’s most illustrious cartoonists was master painter Francisco Goya, who began working there in 1780. Some of the tapestries he designed now hang in the nearby Prado Museum and Madrid’s Royal Collections Gallery.”

Just for fun, see if you recognize any companies on the list of the world’s oldest companies, here. There’s one called Adam & Eve, which you’d expect to be old! It’s a pub in England, founded 1249.

More at AP, here. No paywall. Wonderful pictures!

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Inuits Reclaim Their Tattoos

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 3, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Adeline Heymann/One Ocean Expeditions.
Candice Pedersen, a guide for One Ocean Expeditions in the Arctic, tells passengers that Inuit women feel empowered reclaiming traditional tattoos for themselves.

I love the radio show called The World because of the international focus. It always has a deeper take on mainstream media stories, and you can hear music you’re unlikely to be exposed to anywhere else. Recently, Joshua Coelda, Sejersdal Dreiager, and Shirsha Chakraborty reported about a tradition that is coming back from the brink: Inuit tattoo art.

“Najannguac Dalgård Christensen, 35, pulled back her sleeve on one forearm to reveal a pair of tattoos shaped like train tracks across her wrists. …

“These are traditional Inuit tattoo patterns that speak to her Indigenous Inuit heritage. The markings, she said, represent Sila, a word that carries many meanings, including ‘breath,’ ‘sky,’ ‘spirit’ and ‘universe.’

“To Christensen, who got the tattoo several years ago, it also means ‘the Greenlandic belief that we should be aware of who we are and what we can be, and that is attached to each other.’

“In precolonial times, Inuit women of Greenland, and across much of the Arctic, would have tattoos on both their bodies and faces, holding important pre-Christian spiritual meaning. Today, some Greenlandic Inuit like Christensen are reclaiming their identity through this long-lost art. 

“She said that she didn’t always embrace her Greenlander identity — because it is often associated with negative stereotypes about the Inuit diaspora living in Denmark, who colonized the North American island three centuries ago.  

“ ‘I felt empowered by getting the tattoos because it was like there was some kind of relief that I didn’t have to be embarrassed about being a Greenlander anymore,’ Christensen said. …

“The custom itself is far from new, but tattoos were some of the first traditions to be discouraged when Danish-Norwegian missionaries started colonizing the island at the beginning of the 18th century. The missionaries found tattooing incompatible with Christian faith, [Randi Sørensen Johansen, intangible cultural heritage curator at the Greenland National Museum and Archives] said. …

“As the custom disappeared, so did much of the knowledge about the tattoos’ meaning. ‘We didn’t have that tradition of writing down,’ Johansen said — Inuit passed knowledge through oral storytelling. …

“Inuit would use amulets to protect them from ‘unwelcome spirits,’ but also to help certain attributes or ensure a successful childbirth, among other things. It is likely, Johansen said, that Inuit tattoos were seen as a kind of amulet, giving strength, help or protection to the women or — in rarer cases — men who had gotten them.

“The tattoos were most often made as linear patterns across the brow and vertical lines on the chin made by using both a puncture or dot technique and a sewing technique. The latter technique consisted of pulling sinew dipped in soot under the skin with a needle made of animal bone, curator Johansen said.

“Maya Sialuk Jacobsen is one of about a dozen Inuit tattoo artists across the globe reviving this traditional art. … It was she who created Christensen’s tattoos. For over six years, she’s been helping Inuit like Christensen who live in Denmark connect with their culture through ink. Like Christensen, she is of both Danish and Greenlandic Inuit descent — a group she describes as an emerging ‘third culture’ in the Scandinavian country.

“The community is fairly small in Denmark and not well-defined demographically. According to StatBank Greenland, there are a little under 17,000 people born in Greenland currently living in Denmark. But community leaders, including from the Greenlandic House of Aalborg, aren’t even sure about the exact number of Inuit in Denmark. The number of self-identifying Inuit could be even higher, due to the presence of third-culture community members, who are partially Inuit. …

“Sialuk Jacobsen said, ‘It’s basically identity work all the time.’  Many come to her with a feeling of sadness, in search of a sense of belonging, she said. ‘They need to talk about these things, and to learn about the culture, they just want to learn.’ …

“While Sialuk Jacobsen said she uses inks and needles approved for tattooing on clients in Denmark, her research into the traditional techniques has included experimental tattooing on herself, and using her own right leg as her test area to reconstruct authentic methods of inking up.

“But in Denmark, finger, hand and face tattoos are prohibited (though it’s not illegal in Greenland). So, Sialuk Jacobsen is limited to tattooing the rest of the body. …

“The legacies of colonialism hang heavy over the community living in Denmark. Greenlanders are overrepresented among Denmark’s homeless population — accounting for 7% of people experiencing homelessness, according to VIVE.

“In recent years, Denmark’s colonial past came under public scrutiny.  For her master’s degree, Christensen looked into a form of ‘modern boarding schools.’ She found that Inuit children in Denmark are more likely than Danish children to be taken away from their families and placed in foster homes, which are almost always Danish families. 

“ ‘They learn to speak Danish, and there isn’t any focus on the Greenlandic language, so they lose their Greenlandic language. And when the parents only speak Greenlandic, they can’t talk to each other without an interpreter.’

“Christensen, who has become an activist through her research, believes the government should make it at least mandatory for Inuit children living in foster care to have lessons on Greenlandic.”

More at PRI’s The World, here, and CNN, here.

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What Artists Can Bring to Medicine

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 11, 2024| 9 Comments »

Photo: James Lee Chiahan/Procedure Press.
“Tone Shift,” by James Lee Chiahan. depicts musician Yoko Sen’s journey from being patient in the hospital to working to improve the sounds of ICU alarms around the world. Chiahan is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist currently working out of Montreal, Canada.

Those of us who have ever had a hospital stay know how difficult it is to get any sleep. Part of the reason is noise. Today’s article suggests that since artists started applying their creativity to the challenge, hospitals have new ways they could improve sounds and doctors have new ways to improve patient interactions.

Mara Gordon at NPR (National Public Radio) begins her story with Emily Peters, who had a rough time with the health care system when her daughter was born. “Peters, who works as a health care brand strategist, decided to work to fix some of what’s broken in the American health care system. Her approach is provocative: she believes art can be a tool to transform medicine.

“Medicine has a ‘creativity problem,’ she says, and too many people working in health care are resigned to the status quo, the dehumanizing bureaucracy. That’s why it’s time to call in the artists, she argues, the people with the skills to envision a radically better future.

“In her new book, Artists Remaking Medicine, Peters collaborated with artists, writers and musicians, including some doctors and public health professionals, to share [ideas] about how creativity might make health care more humane. …

“For example, the book profiles electronic musician and sound designer Yoko Sen, who has created new, gentler sounds for medical monitoring devices in the ICU, where patients are often subjected to endless, harsh beeping.

“It also features an avant-garde art collective called MSCHF (pronounced ‘mischief’). The group produced oil paintings made from medical bills, thousands and thousands of sheets of paper charging patients for things like blood draws and laxatives. They sold the paintings and raised over $73,000 to pay off three people’s medical bills.

“It’s similar to a recent performance art project not profiled in the book: A group of self-described ‘gutter-punk pagans, mostly queer dirt bags’ in Philadelphia burned a giant effigy of a medical billing statement and raised money to cancel $1.6 million in medical debt. …

“There’s very little in the way of policy prescription in this book, but that’s part of the point. The artists’ goal is to inject humanity and creativity into a field mired in apparently intractable systemic problems and plagued by financial toxicity. They turn to puppetry, painting, color theory, and music, seeking to start a much-needed dialogue that could spur deeper change.

“Mara Gordon: What made you want to create this book?
“Emily Peters: I think I’m always very curious why so many people – really the majority of everybody in any way involved in the health care system – feel so powerless. … And so the book came about as thinking about power and change. And then I realized that artists have this unique intersection where they are very powerful, they bring a lot of the things that were missing in health care, trying to build a better future.

“MG: What is it about art that feels like a tool to challenge that feeling of powerlessness?
“EP: The very first person I interviewed for the book was a photographer, Kathleen [Sheffer], who was a heart-lung transplant survivor. She used her camera in the hospital to try to be seen as more powerful, to be seen as a full person by these very fancy transplant surgeons who are whisking in and out of her room, viewing her as just a body. I saw that she had gained that power through being an artist.

“I had another conversation with a physician out of New York, Dr. [Stella] Safo. … She really highlighted that there’s this crisis of imagination. Everybody feels so demoralized that we can’t even imagine what we want to ask for to make it better.

“That’s a creativity problem. And the people who are creative are artists. They are really good at sitting in complexity and paradox, and not wanting everything to be perfect, but being able to imagine. And so that was the hypothesis: Oh, there’s something really interesting at this intersection between art and medicine. …

“MG: My favorite part of the book was the section where there’s a color palette, named for different medical phenomena: pill bottle orange, Viagra blue. … I think a lot of people in health care worry that too much color somehow distracts from the seriousness of medicine.
“EP: So many of these things, somebody chose, and they didn’t do a huge amount of research on it. They just chose it, and we take it as gospel now.

“The white coat ceremony. [I had thought it must have started in] medieval Florence: they were putting white coats on medical students and welcoming them into the guild, it just feels like this ancient tradition. And it’s something that was invented in Chicago in 1989. A professor was complaining that the students weren’t dressing professionally enough. …

“We surveyed a couple hundred people [and published the results online]: ‘What colors would you want to see in the hospital?’ I was expecting those soothing pastel tones. And it was totally different: it was neon purples and oranges and reds. Don’t assume what people want. We have the technology and the capability now to build in systems that give people some control and some agency over things like color. …

“MG: Has anyone told you that they think that health care is too important for art?
“EP: I’ve heard the criticism that this is just about wallpaper on a pig: ‘You’re talking about adding more sculpture gardens and increasing the cost of health care.’

“I did not want it to be a book about creating more luxurious hospitals. We have a crisis of financial toxicity, we have a crisis of outcomes. It’s specifically a book about fighting those things. …

“MG: Do you think medicine takes itself too seriously? Do we need more humor in health care?
“EP: You’re holding somebody’s heart in your hand – this is a very intense job. You’re trying to convince somebody to enter hospice – that is not easy. This is not an easy job. But that seriousness can feel almost like play acting and really inauthentic to people. …

“And that’s such a waste to me, because it is such a beautiful, incredible profession. We, as patients, also want you guys to be humans. We’re on your side.”

More at NPR, here. No paywall.

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Modern Menorahs

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 7, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Janie Korn.
“Challah Menorah” by Janie Korn. 

Today is the first day of Hanukkah, and I can finally share the Hyperallergic article I’ve been saving on the creativity that goes into making menorahs.

Sarah Rose Sharp writes, “The central activity of the eight-night holiday is the lighting of candles, which symbolizes the restoration of the Temple of Jerusalem in 164 BCE, reclaimed from Seleucid takeover in 175 BCE. After Judah the Maccabee led a rebel force to win back the Temple, only enough lamp oil remained to last for a single night. But legend has it that the lamps burned for eight nights, and because of this, celebrants light an escalating series of eight candles held by a menorah.

“As a fixture of even largely non-practicing Jewish households, menorahs come in all styles, from traditional to modern, simple to maximalist. Their aesthetics and symbolism are a vast subject, but in honor of Hanukkah year 5783 (by the Hebrew calendar), let’s take a look at some great menorahs that break the mold!

“New York’s very own Jewish Museum has a vast collection of Hanukkah lamps — the largest in the world, with more than 1,000 pieces — like a whimsical deconstructed menorah by Peter Shire. Senior Curator Claudia Nahson explained how artists like Shire, working in the 1980s, began to upend the centuries-old menorah design. …

“ ‘Peter Shire typically takes familiar objects and reimagines their shapes, colors, and materials so that we barely recognize them,’ Nahson told Hyperallergic. ‘In his inventive Hanukkah lamp, a mixture of pastel and hot colors, industrial metals, and a cantilevered, swirling arrangement of parts challenge the modernist aesthetic of simplicity that had dominated design for a century.’ …

“While most menorahs rigidly indicate where to place the nightly candles, the ‘Emerald Ripple Menorah’ by the local industrial design studio Friends Of takes a more organic approach, enabling the user to arrange the candles in circles that radiate out from the center point, occupied by the shamash that is used to light the other candles. …

“Why not celebrate Hanukkah with a candle-lit shoutout to everyone’s favorite egg bread? This incredible menorah [above] was created by visual artist and curator Janie Korn, and is sure to make any carb-lover light up.

“Since holidays of all kinds are an opportunity to gather with your community and engage in the roots that connect us to something bigger, menorahs of mushroom clusters by ceramic artist Ben Noam perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the season. Noam’s series, which he began for his own family to celebrate the holiday, reimagines the age-old rites of Hanukkah in a fun and colorful piece that can displayed year-round.

“ ‘[I] drew on the California Clay Movement to create a psychedelic fantasy rooted in Jewish stories,’ Noam told Hyperallergic. ‘The mushrooms form architectural villages — like a shtetl — inspired by the bright colors of Chagall, Jewish modernism, and the forest mushrooms that emerge with the changing of the seasons.’ …

“Holidays are also a great time to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going. In 2021, the Jewish Museum Berlin expanded their collection to include their first-ever modern menorah, a stunning 1924 work by the German-born sculptor Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert that evokes Art Deco sensitivities. Hetty Berg, the museum’s director, explained that the acquisition was in line with the institution’s focus on Jewish ceremonial objects by German artists from the late 19th and early 20th century.

“ ‘We want to document the stylistic change that took place during this era,’ Berg said. ‘Only a very small number of Jewish ceremonial objects made by artists in Germany during the 1920s still exist today. Wolpert’s Hanukkah menorah is a prime example of this decisive period and Modernism’s creative awakening, and it fills a gap in the museum’s collection.’

“And this is hardly the only 20th century artist moved by the imagery of menorahs. Though the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí was not Jewish, he produced several sculptures inspired by the branches of the olive tree that grows in Jerusalem. (The olive tree is also an important symbol of Palestinian resistance.) Dalí’s 1981 ‘Peace Menorah’ has organic lines and subtle details, including a face and a star of David etched into its stem.

“When it comes to fine art menorahs, there are clearly many directions one can turn, but obviously the most avant-garde is not part of any museum collection, but available online at BananaMenorah.com. … Very much in the spirit of Hanukkah, Banana Menorah is an institution born out of scrappy necessity. According to their website, Samantha Weisman was visiting her goyish boyfriend, Zach Lupei, over college winter break and needed to improvise a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah.

“ ‘That first menorah was created from an underripe banana, a chopstick, and some creative thinking,’ according to Weisman and Lupei. They’ve celebrated with banana menorahs ever since, and finally decided to quit wasting bananas and make things official in stainless steel.”

More great menorah photos at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. And check out the wild array of menorahs at the Jewish Museum in New York, here.

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Hudson River Art Aids Scientists

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 4, 2023| 5 Comments »

Art: Asher Durand.
Nineteenth-century paintings of old growth forests are helping ecologists learn about what we have lost. Asher Durand, for example, understood the way that beech trees fit into their forest habitats. A) “In the Woods” (1855); B) “Woodland Interior” (c. 1854), oil on canvas; C) “A Brook in the Woods” (c. 1854), graphite, gouache, and white lead on paper.

Call me retro, but I’ll always love the Hudson River School paintings of a long-gone majestic American wilderness. So do ecologists, as it turns out.

Elaine Velie reports at Hyperallergic on a new study showing that the 19th-century paintings have a value beyond the aesthetic.

“The Hudson River School movement is an enduringly popular slice of 19th-century American art history,” Velie writes, “but as beloved as it is, its paintings of bucolic hills drenched in golden light are not particularly known for their adherence to reality. In a recently published study, a team of ecologists and art historians set out to determine just how true to life these works really were.

“Using onsite sketches and historical writings, the team determined that some of these paintings were true to life. … 

Some were so detailed that they could even help scientists today learn about the centuries-old forests that were destroyed before the advent of color photography.

“Dana Warren and Harper Loeb of Oregon State University published their findings last month in the academic journal Ecosphere along with scholars Peter Betjemann, Isabel Munck, William Keeton, David Shaw, and Eleanor Harvey.

“ ‘I have been interested in understanding older forests and old growth forest systems in the Northeast for a while,’ Warren told Hyperallergic. … ‘I was interested in these 19th-century paintings, but I had always thought that issues of artistic license removed the potential for any of these images to be used in a rigorous quantitative way.’ She paired up with art historians to investigate.

“The interdisciplinary team focused on Hudson River School paintings completed between 1830 and 1880, when Northeastern forests were being cleared for farms but more remote regions still remained untouched by European colonizers. Blights and invasive species had yet to arrive, and trees like the chestnut, ash, and elm still shaded the woodland floor. …

“In the early 1800s, American painters began working en plein air. Portable oil paints had come into fashion, and growing infrastructure made it easier to venture upstate. A fascination with ‘wilderness’ in literature and art emerged alongside the dark underpinnings of ‘manifest destiny‘ and colonial expansion. 

“As creators emphasized nature, they were acutely aware of the changing landscapes around them.

“ ‘The beauty of [untouched] landscapes is quickly passing away,’ Thomas Cole, the painter credited with founding the Hudson River School movement, wrote in 1836. ‘The ravages of the axe are daily increasing — the most noble scenes are made desolate.’

“While painters like Cole crafted dramatic allegorical renderings of the forests disappearing around them … other artists adhered to observational truth. 

“Warren and her team used the interior forest scenes of prominent Hudson River School painter Asher Durand (1796–1886) as a case study, examining his onsite sketches, writings, and oil paintings to establish the veracity of his finished works. …

“Durand explicitly stated his emphasis on depicting the natural world just as he saw it. Like other artists, Durand had been familiarized with the specimen-based botany that had been available in published form since the 1700s. 

“The scholars examined an 1855 Durand painting of the Catskills titled ‘In the Woods’ — a calm depiction of a shady stream lined with beech trees. Notably, an 1854 painting of the same scene excludes these plants, but an onsite sketch of a similar setting includes them, signifying that the artist added the trees into his final painting from a real sketch. …

“Warren said her recent study is a ‘proof of concept,’ and that she thinks the team’s exploration of Durand’s paintings can extend to the work of other artists. For now, Hudson River School depictions of microhabitats — groupings of flora like mushrooms on tree trunks and mats of moss on bark — can help ecologists learn about what old growth forests were really like. 

“With an interdisciplinary approach to ecology and art history, the scholars think paintings of the American West could help scientists learn about long-melted glaciers and plowed prairie biomes, and artworks showing the coast could help researchers study lost marsh habitats.”

Today we have lots of color photography, but if any of you artists out there want to help the scientists of the future, you know the way.

Check out the art at the Hyperallergic, here. No firewall, but subscriptions solicited.

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Fairies Forever!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 3, 2023| 6 Comments »

Photo: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker, 1934 Flower Fairies.
The Crocus Fairies from Flower Fairies of the Spring – the watercolors are still popular today with “fairycore” fans, the BBC opines.

Hannah will remember my devotion to the subject of today’s post. Fairies. I have always been into fairies, and long ago Hannah joined me in bringing them to life.

Meanwhile in the UK, the BBC’s Holly Williams writes this about them: “Imagine a fairy. Is the picture that appears in your mind’s eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals?  

“If so, it’s likely you’ve been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK.  

“The Flower Fairies’ influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world. … Barker’s delicate watercolors certainly helped cement several tropes we now consider classic – almost essential, in fact – in the iconography of the fairy: they are miniature, sweet and youthful, they are intertwined with plants and the natural world, and they are distinctly twee.

“Yet her drawings were also ‘firmly footed in realism’ points out Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of the show. … Barker drew children from the nursery school her sister ran in their house in Croydon near London; each was assigned a flower or tree, and Barker’s detailed illustrations were botanically accurate – she would source samples from Kew Gardens, says Slattery Clark. Even the petal-like wings and fairy outfits were closely based on plants: an acorn cup becoming a jaunty cap, a harebell becoming a prettily scalloped skirt. 

“The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 1920 and 1925, including in Enid Blyton‘s first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite‘s ethereal drawings, and helped popularize them by sending them in postcard form. …

“But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. ‘In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy,’ points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian.

“Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. … Fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum. …

“Barker never made any claims for fairies being real – ‘I have never seen a fairy,’ she wrote in a foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside. But it is worth noting that she first published the Flower Fairies at a moment when the desire to believe in magical beings was at a rare high. In 1920, Britain was gripped by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, after two girls claimed to have photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden in West Yorkshire – and were widely believed.

“Their beautiful photographs were created by paper cut-outs, floating on hat pins. Although many were skeptical, they nonetheless also fooled many of the great and the good – the photographs were brought to prominence by no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.

“Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretense that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. …

” ‘For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception,’ says Sage. ‘And obviously that’s connected to the loss of his son in World War One.’ …

“Sage is pleased to see the Flower Fairies exhibited in a fine art context at the Lady Lever gallery. For a long time, men painting fairies has been considered art – but when women do it, it’s just silly flowery stuff for children. ‘This is fine art – it’s mass, popular fine art,’ insists Sage.”

More at the BBC, here. No paywall. If you live in the UK, you have until November 5 to see the fairy exhibit at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village.

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A Floating Wetland

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 10, 2023| 5 Comments »

Photo: Alexandra Ionescu/Rhode Island Collective.
This floating wetland, an artificial island hosting a human-made ecosystem, was scheduled to remain in Ice Pond in Southborough, Mass., until Sept. 17.

Here’s a new thing under the sun: a floating wetland. Art and science join forces, and Frank Carini at ecoRI News has the story.

“Floating in a circle around a pond in Massachusetts is a mini-wetland built by six Rhode Islanders. Earlier this summer, the mostly natural creation was chosen as the winning installation in the seventh annual Art on the Trails outdoor art and poetry program.

“But the freshwater wetland, built by a group of Ocean State artists, designers, and a botanist, wasn’t commissioned to win an award. It was designed to raise awareness about the importance of wetlands and show how they work. Mission accomplished.

“Art juror Sarah Alexander, who chose ‘Below and Above: A Floating Wetland Supports Life” by the Rhode Island Collective as the best installation, said, ‘The amount of careful research and thoughtful response to the space, along with the combined efforts of its dedicated creators, blew me away.’ …

“The wetland has been floating in Ice Pond in Southborough since June 11. It was created by sourcing native plants, and experiments with natural cordage. It shows how pollutants could be sucked from stressed waterbodies with a little help from human hands. A single anchor line keeps the wetland floating in a 15-foot circle, and not all over the popular skating pond.

“Members of the Rhode Island Collective include Holly Ewald (visual artist), Maxwell Fertik (interdisciplinary artist), Alexandra Ionescu (ecological artist), Hope Leeson (botanist), and August Lehrecke and Matthew Muller (co-founders of an inflatable architecture studio), who led the project’s construction. …

“ ‘The floating wetland ecosystem creates a habitat for the more-than-human world below and above the water line through the growth of native macrophytes. Through the plants’ life cycles, they regenerate the food web, amplifying the natural processes between sunlight, water, and microorganisms,’ according to the Collective. …

“Their structure was built using dried Japanese knotweed, broadleaf cattails, and bamboo for buoyancy, as alternatives to petroleum-based materials such as plastic and foam typically used to construct floating wetlands. A small amount of stainless steel wire mesh and cable holds the craft together.

“The knotweed used to create the floating wetland was harvested in late winter as dry stems from Mashapaug Pond and Gano Park in Providence. Fertik said repurposing invasive species for the project’s pontoons removed some of their biomass from the environment and transformed the nonnative plants into a vessel to improve water quality and promote biodiversity. (The dead stalks weren’t capable of spreading.) …

“The craft is home to 18 native wetland plant species: American bur-reed; bayonet rush; brown fruited rush; Canada rush; common cattail; Alleghany monkey-flower; blue flag iris; boneset; cardinal flower; flat-topped goldenrod; Joe-Pye weed; New York ironweed; northern water horehound; pickerelweed; swamp milkweed; buttonbush; silky dogwood; and steeplebush. …

“Suspended in water, the plant roots provide a home for diverse communities of algae, bacteria, fungi, and protozoans, known as periphyton. As the plants upcycle nutrients from the water into their roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, the periphyton provide nutrient uptake, filtration, oxygenation, and toxin removal.

“Southern New England’s freshwater lakes and ponds, especially the shallow ones, are being stressed by development, wastewater overflows, old and failing septic systems, antiquated cesspools, and stormwater runoff carrying nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers and roadway pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. …

“The Collective’s 48-page PowerPoint presentation noted Indigenous communities built floating islands for hundreds of years by harvesting natural materials found in their surroundings. ‘By incorporating native plants from freshwater marsh and pond ecosystems, we are supporting a variety of other life forms,’ they said.

“Ice Pond, part of the 58.5-acre Elaine and Philip Beals Preserve, is a healthy ecosystem in little need of a floating wetland to pull pollutants out of the water, but it did give the Collective an opportunity to learn how floating wetlands create a habitat, observe the decay of the natural materials used to build the craft, and document the growth of the native wetland plants. … The Providence Stormwater Innovation Center has requested the craft’s presence for the ponds at Roger Williams Park. …

“Art on the Trails is an annual site-specific ecological sculpture park exhibition. To watch a video about the project, click here.”

More at ecoRI News, here.

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