My granddaughter wrote a comment to an earlier post about airport art, and coming home from the East Coast, I saw a team installing the new show, Japanese Toys. Pretty cool show, I think. I had to stop and take some pictures. Half of the exhibit was set up, half in progress. Hope you like it, Lila.
Almost two years ago, I posted about Roberto Chavez’ show at the Autry Museum in LA. As part of the post I mentioned that over 30 years ago, a gallery owner had sold a wonderful self-portrait of Roberto with a lime-green background that we had loaned to the gallery for the show. Even though it was not for sale, the unscrupulous gallery owner sold it, and although Roberto gave us another painting in its place, I never really got over it. Continue reading “Internet magic”
Jweekly is the newspaper of the Bay Area Jewish Community. I get their weekly email version, and will have a poem in it for the High Holy Days this year. This week, they had an article about a project to animate Psalms. My favorite was by RachelLopez Rosenberg, an interpretation of Psalm 90. Worth a look!
I know it’s poetry Monday, but as I’ve been camping all week, no poem today. Instead, a little preview of the current exhibit at Terminal 3 at SFO. What a great idea to have art in the long corridor that leads from airport security to the gates. As we all have time to spare at the airport these days, it’s a pleasure to be able to wander through a corridor of art or artifacts. Continue reading “Recology”
I had a spare day in Washington, and went a few museums. I had read about the beeswax room, an installation by in the Phillips Collection by Wolfgang Laib and wanted to see what it would feel like to be in a small closet coated with beeswax. It was interesting, but not transformative. I thought if you were going to go to all that trouble, you might want to make it hexagonal. Continue reading “Museums In DC”
when you step off the Big Blue Bus and meet Jane, the hat designer, who has a live dove in her hat.
The #3 bus runs along Lincoln from LAX (or perhaps further south) to Santa Monica. It’s the best deal in town: $1.50 (or 50 cents if you’re 62 or older), and takes only slightly longer than a cab.
Jane was just a bonus.
One of the pleasures of a small museum, like the Rubin Museum in New York, is that you can wander through the entire museum in an hour or so and spend time on everything. It’s contained and focused. It doesn’t overwhelm. You can settle into the art without wondering where you need to go next.
Last week I went to see an intriguing exhibit of Lisa Ross photos of Muslim shrines called mazars in a huge Western desert region of China, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. I love the sense of vast places and minimal resources, and the significance that sense lends to the work of constructing even a fence post, a stick, a scrap of cloth. Continue reading “Museums: small, large, and outdoors”
Does everyone have boxes of children’s art, old letters, and other paper memorabilia they’ve saved over the years? I have at least half a dozen of them that I haven’t looked at in decades, and this week I tackled the first one, labeled “Calendars.” From 1976 through 1980 friends and I put together and sold “The Whole Woman Calendar,” a wall calendar with quotes and art by women. It also had little drawings in ink in the margins by my children. The first two years, Simone (a frequent commenter in these pages) did intricate line drawings in black ink.
The next two years were black and white photographs (mostly by my friend Maureen), and for the final year, the calendar was picked up by a NY publisher, and had full color photographs by a variety of women. The box contained make-ready from various years, ideas, calligraphy, and some original photos. This snow woman is one of my favorites, and I think it went with this poem by David Montfort (we didn’t discriminate against men…don’t they hold up half the sky?). Continue reading “Sorting through boxes”
Once in awhile you see an art exhibit that changes the way the world looks to you afterwards. This has happened to me twice before: after a show at the ukiyo-e (woodblock print) museum in Tokyo and an Edward Hopper show in San Francisco.
It happened again last night after seeing the show of Roberto Chavez’ work in the beautiful gallery at Santa Rosa Junior College. While I loved all the impressionist art I saw in Paris, after this show, it seemed merely decorative. The work here had a breadth and depth that was more powerful, more moving than anything I saw in France. Some paintings were hard to look at, some lovely, but the vision of the world they convey has added something to my perception of everyday objects.
No catalog or slideshow can really do the work justice; these just serve as reminders of the power of the work itself. So if you can get there before it closes on December 13, you won’t be sorry.
One of the pleasures of social media is seeing some a variety of photos–I thought I’d include a few of my favorites here, with thanks to Simone Treacy-croft, Lynn Kiesewetter, Lisa Alvarez, Tess Kincade, Molly Fisk, and others.
[slideshow_deploy id=1170]
It was raining hard our last day in Paris, so instead of wandering around Montmartre, we decided on Musée Quai Brainly. This museum houses primitive art from all over the world. Its design was very controversial–there is a long ramp up with nothing to see, and then you are in dimly lit halls with many small, box-like rooms. But the content of the halls is so stunning that I forgot the strangeness of the museum. Paintings, totems, sculptures, clothing, ornaments…it is all there and all amazing. But one of the most stunning exhibits was right at the entrance, a VW bug covered with Huichol beading. Almost anyone who has seen Mexican crafts has seen little bowls or figurines with thousands of colorful beads pressed into wax. This was a whole car, mirrors, hubcaps and all, decorated with the rivers, serpents and birds of Huichol artisans. 
Continue reading “Huichol VW”
At the Met, the permanent collections, the paintings that you just pass by on the way to the “exhibits,” are so compelling. It’s strange to think of people simply strolling by something like Henri Regnault’s giant image of Salome (1870) with eyes too full to notice it, but I’m sure it happens all the time. I like to go see her, though, she’s a stunner.
And outside, it was April in Paris, except NY. The weather was clement, the trees in blossom and the streets full of people in a reasonably good mood.
Here are two quick snaps, the first as I walked through Central Park, the second downtown. Continue reading “More art, inside and out”