Tag: art

Something to think about

Several recent e-mails and posts about politics and art made this quote I stumbled across in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way so timely:


Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-groomed, and unaggressive.
Leslie M. McIntyre

Button Sunday

“Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 70 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. The group is based in New York City.”

I would have LOVED to have been part of one of their latest missions, freezing in place in the busy Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Check out this video on their web site to see the fun.

Button Sunday

These buttons are very much like a larger collection of buttons from 1960-1970 that I saw today at the Menil Collection’s exhibit Lessons From Below: Otabenga Jones & Associates. The exhibit presents “African-Americans creating their own sense of identity, drawing on historical civil-rights and black-power images of the 1960s, socially conscious hip-hop of the 1980s, and contemporary black culture.

“For this project, the group searched through the Menil’s ‘treasure rooms’ and other storage and archival areas to create a hybrid exhibition-classroom-performance piece. The material on view include[s] masks, headdresses, and figures from the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and other African nations; sketches from Ellsworth Kelly’s massive ‘Tablet’; slave-trade documents; a bronze bust of Paul Robeson; a Joseph Cornell box; a Surrealist landscape by Yves Tanguy; Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portrait of Chairman Mao; lapel buttons commemorating political and sports figures; photographs, including selections from Emil Cadoo’s ‘Harlem’ series and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s portrait of Malcom X; memorial memorabilia honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Walter de Maria’s stainless steel ‘High Energy Bar’; and maps of Africa” among other items.

I’ve mentioned before that the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel are two of my favorite places in Houston.


I was at the Rothko Chapel today while they were preparing for this event. It was quite stirring to hear their voices practice their chanting while I was visiting my beloved paintings. No photography is allowed inside either the chapel or the museum, but I’ve included photos of the area behind a cut.

click here for photos

Because every time I do one post…

…I immediately need to do another. It’s LiveJournal crack.

Earlier, I heard dogs howling in various pitches and thought, Oh, no, you’re not luring me out by barking at the mail carrier when we all know I’m getting nothing, NOTHING, but political flyers and solicitations for one organization or another.

I was wrong. Fedex dropped by.

Though I’m usually going on and on about only one of them here, my life is blessed with two Timothys. Way back when, Timmy provided his LJ friends a look at some of his art, and I see that I commented that I particularly liked “Lightning.”

Even though my camera is screwed up (no doubt it overheard tales of my lust for a digital SLR and is punishing me), I was able to capture evidence that “Lightning” has been renamed “Roots” and is a new addition to The Compound art gallery.

Timmy, I love you. Of course, you understand why my rush of gratitude was accompanied by hysterical laughter. You are utterly adorable and funny and wonderful. I know exactly where I’ll be hanging the painting so that I can enjoy it every day and think of your generosity (and the conversations that have made me laugh so hard). Thank you so much.

Thinking about water

Water

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

—— Robert Lowell