Writing Without Paper

Graphing Love's Course (Poem)

2012-01-31T06:30:00.027-05:00

Graphing Love's Course

Movement never lies.
You can chart it,

that graph of the heart.
Follow it, watch the line

rise and fall, so
zig-zaggy giddy

at the first kiss you
imagine needing

CPR and by the next,
longer still, you're wanting

to expose what's inside
to fully understand how

that muscle can take love,
like dope in a rolling vein,

just to maintain the high.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas

Monday Muse: Online Beckett Exhibition

2012-01-30T06:30:00.066-05:00

I don't find solitude agonizing, on the contrary.

Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.

~ Samuel Beckett in a Letter to Nancy Cunard, January 26, 1959

Once again the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has mounted a marvelous online exhibition, Fathoms from Anywhere, a homage to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). As noted in the Introduction, the exhibition derives "substantially from the catalogue published in conjunction with a Beckett exhibition [No Symbols Where None Intended] mounted at the Ransom Center in 1984 as part of a major conference" about the writer, at the time of which Beckett was still alive.

In 2007, the center acquired from Beckett's former editor Richard Seaver a cache of Beckett-related papers that included hand-corrected manuscripts, typescripts, galley proofs, and correspondence from the years 1953 to 1973. That acquisition was added to the books and manuscripts the center first began obtaining in 1958, when it purchased the library of T.E. Hanley. The center has continually added to its significant holdings. The current Web exhibition draws from the entire collection.

Be prepared to spend some time browsing, because what's online is substantial, although it is not intended to survey year-by-year Beckett's life or career or to account definitively for his work. The virtual exhibition generally covers:

▶ Beckett's career, from beginnings and early writings to final and posthumous works. On each page, you'll find links to manuscripts and publications, and, where available, information about productions and reviews, as well as audio of readings of Beckett's work. Individual pages are provided for such works as Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days. Coverage of radio plays, short prose works, and poems in English also is provided. In addition, a separate page addresses the award of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature to Beckett.

▶ Circle of writers, critics, publishers, actors, editors, philosophers, playwrights, and others well-known and associated with Beckett, among them Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard*, Peggy Guggenheim, James Joyce, and Kenneth Tynan. The brief summaries are not hyperlinked, unfortunately; however, they do provide insight into some of the more influential members of Beckett's circle.

▶ Biographical timeline, beginning with Beckett's birth in 1906 in Foxrock, County Dublin, Ireland, and ending in 1995 with the publication of Beckett's Eleutheria.

An interactive page allows visitors to share their thoughts and read others' impressions about the exhibition, their favorite Beckett work(s), why we should read Beckett, and questions about the writer.

Also of Interest

Samuel Beckett Collection at Ransom Center

Inventory of Samuel Beckett Papers in Carlton Lake Collection at Ransom Humanities Research Center

From the Samuel Beckett Endpage, which is hosted by the University of Antwerp and is the official page of the Samuel Beckett Society, you can access a range of Beckett-related resources, including Beckett journals, interviews, performances, and images.

* See the center's Inventory of Nancy Cunard papers.

Thought for the Day

2012-01-29T06:30:00.032-05:00

[. . .] If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees. [. . .]*

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

________________________________

* Quoted from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Trade, 2005; Riverhead Books, 1996), translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

2012-01-28T06:30:00.213-05:00

If you've come in from the cold but still have energy to expend, head over to New York Bound Books to browse selections relating to New York, test your mission-oriented game skills with Pheon, a multi-media alternate-reality game, try your hand at text-analysis at WordSeer, listen to PennSound Radio, or watch a visualization of the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. Then go download a poetry app.

✦ New York Bound Books — "All Things New York for Readers and Writers" — is reincarnated as a Website. Don't pass up the opportunity to browse its wonderful resources!

Clyde Haberman, "A New York-Centric Bookstore Is Reborn, in Pixels", The New York Times, December 14, 2011

✦ The Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog is one of my favorites, often offering links that send me exploring. A link in one recent post took me to WordSeer, an evolving text-analysis tool that produces visualizations of texts' grammatical structures. A current project is looking for language-use patterns in American slave narratives; an earlier one used WordSeer to compare use of the word "love" in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Also see "Search Shakespeare's Works". See other earlier WordSeer projects here. Visualizations using The New York Times to look at tagging, articles mentioning "riots", and so on are shown here.

5-Minute Interview about WordSeer with Aditi Muralidharan

Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Blog of Aditi Muralidharan

✦ PennSound Radio, a 24-hour stream of readings and conversations from PennSound's poetry archive, launched in mid-December 2011. The daily lineup includes rebroadcasts of a number of series, among them Live at the Writers House and Close Listening by Charles Bernstein, plus favorite performances. To access, use iTunes or the TuneIn app for iPhone, Blackberry, or Android.

PennSound Radio on Twitter

PennSound Daily

✦ Looking for poetry apps? Go here, where you'll find some of the best, from a free Poetry Daily app to satisfy your poem-a-day habit, to iPoetry, which allows you to see poetry performed, to AudioNote that can be synched to your typing, to Glossary of Poetry Terminology. AudioNote, at $4.99, is the most expensive app but most are just $0.99 or free. (My thanks to the Poetry Foundation for the link to Apps for Poets.)

✦ If you enjoy playing alternate reality games online, try Pheon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's a variation on "Capture the Flag". As explained here, players align with one of two groups, then compete to complete various missions in which SAAM's art collections, exhibitions, and programs feature. The objective is to obtain the pheon, a talisman that will restore balance to the virtual world of Terra Tectus.

Pheon on FaceBook (An app is available to play the game on FaceBook.)

✦ Brooklynite Alexander Chen, who spends his days at Google Creative Lab, has created a visualization of the first Prelude from Bach's Cello Suites No. 1. An interactive version will test your musical skills at an elementary level.

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Bach at Classical Archives

Video of Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude (Another Version as Played by Rostropovich)

Project Summary

Alexander Chen on Twitter and Google+

My thanks to PBS News Hour Art Beat for the link to Flowing Data, where this video was posted. Also see Chen's Conductor at this Writing Without Paper post.

All Art Friday

2012-01-27T06:30:00.389-05:00

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Iranian-born filmmaker and photographer Shirin Neshat created a video, "Winter", for The New York Times; a still from the video with an excerpt from Forugh Farrokhzad's poem, translated from the Persian by Farzaaneh Milani, was posted to the newspaper's opinion pages in December.

✦ A trailer for Alison Klayman's forthcoming Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry also was released last month:

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Ai Weiwei was runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2011. See "Ai Weiwei: The Dissident", Time, December 14, 2011.

✦ Late this past December the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities announced the selection of five curators to complete 25 "ground-breaking" public art installations for the 5x5 Public Art Project to be presented during the Centennial Celebration of the National Cherry Blossom Festival March 20 - April 27. The curators are Amy Lipton, New York City, co-director, EcoArtSpace; Justine Topfer, San Francisco, international curator and writer, Out of the Box Projects; Richard Hollinshead, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, director, Grit & Pearl, and an artist, designer, and curator; Laura Roulet, Washington, D.C., sole local curator for 5x5, an independent curator and writer specializing in contemporary and Latin American art; and Steve Rowell, Culver City, California, artist, curator, and researcher. The projects are temporary (not to exceed four months). Additional information about the curators and the five artists each has selected is here and at the 5x5 Website.

5x5 Project on FaceBook and Twitter

5x5 Project Blog

DC Arts Videos on Vimeo

DC Art Bank Collection

DC Creates! Public Art Program

DCCAH's Calls to Curators and Artists

DCCAH on FaceBook and Twitter

National Cherry Blossom Festival on FaceBook and Twitter

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ A solo exhibition, "Steven Katzman: Human Abstract" is on view through February 18 at Masters & Pelavin, New York City. Drawing on two decades of the artist's edgy, often disturbing photography, the show addresses the themes of love, death, religion, afterlife, and faith.

Steven Katzman Photography

Masters & Pelavin on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Last week saw the opening of "Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. On view through May 20, the more than 70 photographs in the show, taken between April and May of 2011, will tour nationally. Eventually, the images on display will be added to the museum's permanent collection. Among Leibovitz's photographic subjects are Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, Yosemite Valley, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, sculptor Daniel Chester French's plaster casts of his own hands, and the homes of Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Elvis Presley. The book Pilgrimage is available through the SAAM store. The photographer, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, spoke before a sold-out audience on January 24.

Annie Leibovitz, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, 2009

From Pilgrimage (Random House, November 2011)

Annie Leibovitz on FaceBook

Terence Monmaney, "Annie Leibovitz's American Pilgrimage", Smithsonian Magazine, January 2012 (This comprises a selection of images with commentary.)

Vincent Dowd, "Annie Leibovitz Captures America", BBC, December 8, 2011

SAAM on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and ArtBabble

✭ The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, showcases "Dan Flavin: Drawing", beginning February 17. Comprising more than 100 sheets from every phase of Flavin's career, this first retrospective of the artist's drawings also includes nearly 50 works on paper from Flavin's personal art collection, from landscapes by Hudson River School artists, to Japanese drawings by such artists as Hokusai, to works by 20th Century minimalists Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, among others. The exhibition will run through July 1. Among exhibition-related events is a symposium, "Minimalist Drawing: The 1960s and 1970s", scheduled for April 27 (tickets are required).

The Dan Flavin Art Institute

Morgan Library & Museum of FaceBook and Twitter

✭ A not-to-be-missed survey of photography by three dozen international artists, "An Orchestrated Vision: The Theatre of Contemporary Photography" opens at the St. Louis Art Museum on February 19 and runs through May 13. As the show's title suggests, the works are to be viewed as "meticulously construct[ed] environments" that "operate in the boundaries between fact and fiction." Among the three dozen artists represented by the more than 40 images in the exhibition are Tina Barney, Edward Burtynsky, Nan Goldin, Thomas Struth, Carrie Mae Weems, collaborators Alexander Birchler and Teresa Hubbard, Andrew Moore, and Gregory Crewdson. A related installation, "The First Act: Staged Photography Before 1980" is on view through April 29. Related exhibition programs are described here.

List of Works on View (pdf) and Digital Images (pdf)

Andrew Moore, Palace Theater, Gary, Indiana, 2008

Chromogenic Print, 40" x 50"

Collection of Robert Verdi

Courtesy of Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

SLAM on FaceBook, Flickr, and YouTube

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ At the Wellcome Collection you'll find "Miracles & Charms", comprising two exhibitions on view through February 26: "Infinitas Gracias: Mexican Miracle Paintings" and "Felicity Powell - Charmed Life: The Solace of Objects".

The first features more than 100 votive paintings from the collections of museums in and around Mexico City and two sanctuaries in the Bajio region. It includes images, news reports, photographs, devotional artifacts, and films and interviews. The virtual Votives Gallery includes a selection of stories and that paintings that bring them to life. Exhibition-related films are available online. The second displays 400 amulets, some simple coins and others elaborately carved shells, as well as 10 artworks by Felicity Powell. Browse the online Amulet Gallery and learn more about the objects and their owners.

The video below previews both exhibitions, which opened last October:

✭ The V&A Museum of Childhood is not just for the young. If you're in London, be a kid again and go see "Magic Worlds", continuing through March 4. The show, featuring costumes, tricks/illusions, film merchandise, optical toys, paintings and ceramics, dolls and puppets, illustrated books, and interactive activities, promises to delight anyone who enjoys fair tales and fantasy literature and wants to know more about the origins of magic.

Ackermann & Co., England, Fantascope, 1883

Museum No. E. 1879-1954

Selection of Exhibition Images

Victoria & Albert Museum

Children of Haiti

2012-01-26T06:30:00.111-05:00

The only thing that has changed is the sky.

Before the January 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated Haiti, hundreds of thousands of the "Sanguine" — or "soulless", as the orphans and abandoned children of Haiti are called — lived by their wits on the streets. Since the earthquake, these children's dire existence has become even more tenuous. In Strange Things: Children of Haiti, produced and directed by Alexandria Hammond, three of the Sanguine, youths in Cap-Haitien in the North, tell their stories. The documentary took Hammond three years to make. What is remarkable about the film is how beautifully it contrasts the hope we can hear in the boys' voices with the wreckage of the country. Amid both beauty and ugliness, the Sanguine hold fast to their dreams, which they articulate honestly, often movingly, and with great clarity.

Here's the 2:24-minute trailer:

STRANGE THINGS (Children of Haiti) TRAILER from Strange Things Movie on Vimeo.

Other clips are available here.

Here's the longer tv version (52:16 minutes) available from PBS Video via Independent Lens:

Watch Children of Haiti on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

DVD of Children of Haiti

Children of Haiti on FaceBook

Alexandria Hammond on Twitter

Independent Lens on FaceBook and Twitter

REMEMBER HAITI!

Wednesday Wonder: Do Ho Suh

2012-01-25T06:30:00.254-05:00

Like the moment of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism,

passing through a gate takes only a split second,

and then it's over. . . I wanted to extend that moment of

passage, to delay it, if only for an instant, to provide

the viewer that moment of insight.

~ Artist Do Ho Suh, on Gate

The Seattle Art Museum's exhibition "Luminous: The Art of Asia" ended January 8 but those lucky enough to see the exhibition in person also found themselves in the presence of a contemporary artist of uncommon talent: Do Ho Suh (b. 1962), who not only provided commentary about the masterpieces on view (see "Artist Do Ho Suh Talks About His Role in SAM Exhibit") but also created a multimedia installation, Gate, especially for the show. Comprising a fabric curtain that serves as a screen for projected images, a magical passageway, and a threshold through which one enters to reach a new space, Gate, Suh explains, allows us to explore notions of emptiness. "Our notion of emptiness is quite different in the East", the artist says. "The void is not empty or bleak but charged with meaning."

I've watched several different videos of Gate and each time come away marveling at what Suh has achieved. Watch the following 2:58-minute clip to get an impression of just how compelling a work Gate is:

You'll find additional short clips of Gate, showing it from different perspectives, here (2:26 minutes) and here (1:33 minutes).

The Korean-born Suh, who came to the United States in 1993 and now lives in New York and London, also created for SAM Some/One (2001), a poetic large-scale sculpture created from life-size stainless-steel military dog-tags, nickel-plated copper sheets, glass fiber reinforced resin, rubber sheets, and a steel structure. It's a provocative installation, raising questions about identity, both individual (each tag representing one soldier) and collective (the military as literally disembodied). The hardness of the steel in the completed sculpture evokes images of impenetrable armor, yet the armor is but scores of thin metal dog-tags, each calling up the memory of a life lost. Listen to Suh talk about Some/One here. His sculpture was first exhibited at (and subsequently acquired by) SAM in 2002.

Suh's Staircase, for the exhibition "Dreamscapes" at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, is shown being installed in this video and in place in this video. In this video, you can see the piece as it looked at Tate Modern. Another of Suh's installations exploring perceptions of personal space is floor (1997-2000), seen in a very brief clip here. Images of floor installed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art may be seen here. Additional work that merits attention includes Cause and Effect, commissioned for Western Washington University's Academic Instructional Center; Home Within Home, which was exhibited at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City; and Paratrooper at Tufts University Art Gallery (2008).

Following is an informative and insightful art21 presentation (2003) with Do Ho Suh:

Watch Stories on PBS. See more from ART:21.

____________________________________

Selected Images of Do Ho Suh's Work at Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Do Ho Suh's Fallen Star, 2008-2011, Video (Also see Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star, Stuart Collection at University of California/San Diego, here. You'll find a selection of images and background on the commissioned work. This article on the installation at Los Angeles County Museum of Art also is noteworthy.)

Do Ho Suh Interview at DesignBoom

Do Ho Suh on FaceBook

Seattle Art Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

Because It Is My Heart (Poem)

2012-01-24T06:30:00.024-05:00

Because It Is My Heart

Because it is bitter,
I think I need to ask

about taste buds,
what makes them ripple

on the accepting tongue,
resist sour so naturally,

go for peppermint's cooling
sensation when heat's

what the body's craving.
If I could trace through

my heart the geography
of highs and lows, mine it

with nerve receptors, code
it with a warning gene

to pass on in my DNA,
would love still tripwire

the explosion of sweet
in the spoils of a mouth dry,

make the eye so much better
at sorting sugar from salt?

© 2011, 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
_________________________________

The title and first line are an inversion of two lines from Stephen Crane's poem "In the Desert".

Monday Muse: Close-Up Poetry

2012-01-23T06:30:00.215-05:00

This past December Simon Armitage (b. 1963) launched "Close-up Poetry", a series at The Guardian in which poets read their own favorite poem before the camera. Armitage was first up with a straight-on reading of "An Accommodation", a prose poem from his 2010 collection Seeing Stars (Knopf, 2011), one of more than a dozen poetry books he has penned. Currently professor of poetry at University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, Armitage was awarded the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry in 2010 and a 1992 Forward Prize (for Kid). He has taught at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop at University of Iowa and is a freelance writer, translator (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Death of King Arthur), broadcaster, and playwright.

Sarah Crown, "A Life in Writing: Simon Armitage", The Guardian, December 9, 2011 (Profile)

Simon Armitage Poems at The Poetry Archive and at the poem

Simon Armitage Profile at Poets.org (Academy of American Poets) and Poetry Foundation

Simon Armitage: "Poetry is a form of dissent", Video Interview, The Guardian, November 7, 2011

* * * * *

Costa book-of-the-year winner Jo Shapcott (b. 1953) reads "I Go Inside the Tree" from her most recent and award-winning collection Of Mutability (2010; available through resellers; Faber and Faber, 2011, Kindle). President of The Poetry Society and professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, Shapcott has published more than a half-dozen other collections of poetry, including Tender Taxes (2002; Faber and Faber, 2010; Kindle), comprising versions of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems in French. Shapcott also is an essayist, anthologist, and translator. Among her other awards are several Forward Poetry Prizes and, most recently, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Jo Shapcott Poems at The Poetry Archive, Poetry Foundation, and Poetry Translation Centre

"Jo Shapcott Honored for Life's Work in Poetry", Poets & Writers, January 3, 2012

Kira Cochrane, "Jo Shapcott: the Book of Life", The Guardian, January 26, 2011

* * *

The series is a welcome introduction to poets on the other side of the Atlantic and is instructive for what it shows us about these talented writers' ability, or not, to deliver their words via video. Several of the poets give beautiful readings; one in particular would be wise, perhaps, to brush up on memorization.

Other poets participating in Armitage's series are: Paul Farley, reading "Treacle" from The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (Macmillan UK, 1998); Liz Lochhead, reading "My Rival's House"; Imtiaz Dharker, reading "Honour Killing" from I Speak for the Devil (Bloodaxe, 2001); Robin Robertson reading "At Roane Head", which received a Forward Prize for best single poem in 2009; Fleur Adcock, reading "Strangers on a Train", from her collection Dragon Talk (Bloodaxe, 2010); Fiona Sampson, reading "Envoi", from her collection Rough Music (Carcanet, 2010); and Michael Symmons Roberts, reading "Pelt" from Corpus (Cape, 2004), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award (now known as Costa Book Awards).

British Council Literature

Thought for the Day

2012-01-22T06:30:00.010-05:00

In difficult times, you should always

carry something beautiful in your mind.

~ Blaise Pascal

_________________________

Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, French Mathematician, Physicist, Inventor, Writer, Catholic Philosopher

Pensees (Video)

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

2012-01-21T06:30:00.151-05:00

Too cold today to be outside? You've come to the right place to warm up your brain. You'll find a new Website about early photography as well as links to that wildly popular Octavio Paz poetry app that everyone's buzzing about, a blog for DIY craft projects (including such inspirations as vintage-tapestry animals and a button piano), and the rather strange but charming world of Hobo Lobo. And don't miss Fiverr®.The video feature is Seventeen Evergreen's delightful piece on yarn-bombing. Enjoy!

✦ Understanding Early Photography from the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute launched late last year. The Website is intended to "communicate scientific and technical data to scholars and the general public" about early photographic materials discovered using techniques such as computational imaging and electron microscopy. Daguerreotypes are one of the early forms of photography examined in overview. (My thanks to The Bigger Picture blog for the link.)

✦ The collection of Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art records has been digitized. Go here for a post documenting the effort.

✦ As anyone will tell you, you can find anything on the Internets. Even if you're a writer. Maybe especially if you're a writer. Post at fiverr® whatever writing project you're willing to do for $5.00. (My thanks to Poetry Foundation for the link.)

✦ Proof that poetry is popular? A poem by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, "Blanco", has become a wildly successful app in Mexico. A Spanish-language video presentation of the app, which includes video interviews and texts by writers that influenced Paz, is on YouTube.

✦ If you're looking for a source for all levels of DIY craft projects, you need look no further than the Craft Blog. I especially like the recent post on life-size, taxidermy-style tapestry animals by French designer Frederique Morrel. (Be sure to take some time on Morrel's site; the creations there are stunning.) The button piano by sculptor Augusto Esquivel (stop in here, too!) also will leave you inspired. Additional views of the piano are here and in a video that features additional Esquivel installations.

✦ If you're a fan of pop-up books, you might enjoy the virtual pop-up world of the Hobo Lobo of Hamelin. (Be sure to move around or click your mouse to take advantage of sound and other effects.) For an explanation of the creation of Hobo Lobo, go here.

✦ Yarn-bombing has been the rage for a while. This video from Seventeen Evergreen is an example of yarn-bombing taken to another level. Enjoy!

Seventeen Evergreen - Polarity Song from Lucky Number Music on Vimeo.

All Art Friday

2012-01-20T06:30:00.367-05:00

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Drop in virtually to Still Point Art Gallery's online exhibition "Abstraction Attraction!" Six artists in the show have been named, deservedly, Artists of Distinction: Steven Bogart, Ling Ling Cheng, Nomi Drory, David Duane Kinsey, Keith Parks, and Cat van der Heiden. The feature remains online through February 14, 2013.

Still Point Art Gallery on FaceBook and Twitter

Still Point Art Gallery Blog and Arts Quarterly

✦ In a collaboration with poet Anne Waldman, artist Noah Saterstrom created a 45-foot-long frieze of oil paintings titled Soldatesque/Soldiering: with Dreams of Wartime. Exhibited last year at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center in Tucson, the panels may be viewed here at Saterstrom's site. A book about the project, including an introduction by Bill Berkson, is available through the BlazeVOX online store and at Amazon.

✦ Now in its second year, with a program launched in Washington, D.C., The Research Center for Arts and Culture, an affiliate of the National Center for Creative Aging, is behind an unusual intergenerational arts legacy project, Art Cart, that teams aging professional artists with graduate students, with the latter preparing and documenting the former's creative output. It's an important project that ensures artists' work is not lost and that gives students an opportunity to learn about artworks while building their own documentation skills. This video gives an overview of the project:

Art Cart - Saving The Legacy from RCAC on Vimeo.

Fellowships with Art Cart are available.

Art Cart Pamphlet (Two-Page Program Overview)

✦ Art selection by genome? According to this Wall Street Journal article, computers can "match specific searches with works that have the closest genome values. . . to offer a selection that anticipates a user's interests and tastes." A computer science engineer from Princeton University is behind Art.sy/, which is powered by The Art Genome Project, and chief curator emeritus at MoMA, John Elderfield, has logged on as an advisor. (Pssst. . . You have to ask for an invitation to see how well the project works for you. You'll want to be among the 1-percenters at a minimum.) Not interested in that game? Try Artsicle instead.

✦ The Guggenheim deserves praise for making available a downloadable collection of its titles, including essays and catalogues in e-book format, all searchable alphabetically or by date range, subject, or title. More on the museum's publications can be found here.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ At the Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, "Two Takes on One Space: Lauren Fensterstock and Steve Wiman" continues through February 19. Maine's Fensterstock has created two quilled room-size "landscapes" of intricately cut and curled black paper that address both the beauty of and chaos in nature. Austin-based Wiman has repurposed old objects into assemblages that reflect the artist's eye for combinations of texture, form, size, and color, allowing viewers to see his arrangements as something "new". His installations are wonderful.

Lauren Fensterstock, Mound (Detail), 2010

Paper, Charcoal, Plexiglass, 14' x 11' x 5'

"Lauren Fensterstock: Mound" at Sienna Gallery

"Mound", and "Third Nature", Installations by Lauren Fensterstock

My thanks to Ann Martin at All Things Paper for introducing me to Fensterstock's marvelous work.

Steve Wiman Artworks (Also see Wiman's Chair Series.)

✭ The photography of Arthur Drooker is on view in "Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas" at the Art Museum of the Americas (Organization of American States), Washington, D.C. Continuing through February 24, the show includes images Drooker took of 33 ruins in more than a dozen countries over three years, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a king's palace in Haiti, Inca fortresses in Peru, Maya pyramids in Mexico, and a pirate-sacked colonial city in Panama. Drooker used a specially adapted digital infrared camera to produce his otherworldly black-and-white photographs of ruins. A large-format book with 115 images and an introduction by Pico Iyer accompanies the exhibition. A "Lost Worlds" limited edition with a clothbound copy of the book and a choice of one of two signed prints is available, as are signed archival digital pigment prints in limited editions of 20.

AMA "Lost Worlds" Photo Gallery

Online Gallery of Images (Book Site)

AMA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ In Salem, Massachusetts, The Peabody Essex Museum just opened "Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art", on view through April 29. The exhibition of sculpture, paintings, ceramics, textiles, photographs, videos, and large-scale installations brings together both rare historic pieces and contemporary Native American artwork, showcasing both diversity and conceptual continuity. The show's nearly 80 works, which are drawn from public and private collections worldwide, are arranged thematically: "Changing: Expanding the Imagination", "Knowing: Expressing Worldview", "Locating: Exploring Identity and Place", and "Voicing: Engaging the Individual". A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

PEM on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube

✭ New York City's Asia Society is presenting through March 25 the work of Sarah Sze. The exhibition, "Infinite Line", features lithographs, silkscreens, and graphite, ink, and collage drawings, as well as all-new sculptural work that use the vertical format of a hanging scroll and extend from the wall to the floor. At the "Infinite Line" link you'll find an introduction to the exhibition, an interview with the artist, images of a selection of Sze's work, and a variety of resources. An exhibition catalogue by Melissa Chiu accompanies the show.

Asia Society on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

The Feynman Series

2012-01-19T06:30:00.000-05:00

We're exploring. We're trying to find out as much as we can

about the world. . . I can live with doubt and uncertainty and

not knowing. I think it's more much interesting to live not

knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.

~ Richard P. Feynman*

Nobelist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was a brilliant physicist, one of a number of esteemed scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project, the work for which resulted in creation of the atomic bomb. The wearer of many hats, he also was a translator of Mayan hieroglyphics, a musician, a teacher, and a story-teller. He remains a source of endless fascination, as a perusal of the News section of the Feynman Website quickly reveals.

Most recently, Feynman's life became the subject of the biographical comic Feynman (First Second Books, August 2011) by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick. Here's the trailer for the book, which has received some wonderful reviews:

Read an excerpt.

By chance, I learned that the creator of the much-lauded The Sagan Series, Reid Gower, also turned his attention to Feynman to create a companion project The Feynman Series, the objective of which is to promote scientific education and scientific literacy in the general population. Here's the first of three videos, Beauty (5:11 minutes). The other two are Honours (3:57 minutes) and Curiosity (4:24 minutes) All three are worth the brief amount of time required to view them.

________________________________________________

* Quoted in Beauty, Part I of The Feynman Series

Of Interest

The Sagan Series on YouTube

Feynman's Vision: The Next 50 Years, TEDx Caltech

Symphony of Science — The Poetry of Reality (An Athem for Science): Feynman makes an appearance in this music video, the fifth in a series promoting science through words of wisdom.

Richard Dawkins, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (Oxford University Press, 2009): A chapter on Feynman is included in Part III, What Scientists Think.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 (Feynman, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Julian Schwinger were awarded the Nobel jointly "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles".

The Art of Richard Feynman at Museum Syndicate

Color me physics Coloring Books

Feynman Postage Stamp

Wednesday Wonder: Weather as Sculpture/Music

2012-01-18T06:30:00.007-05:00

What I love about this work is that it challenges

our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary

belongs in the world of art versus science. . .

it offers an alternative entry point

into the complexity of science. . . .

~ Nathalie Miebach

Award-winning Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach has a deep interest in science, and specifically weather data, which she translates into astoundingly beautiful and highly complex woven sculptures and musical scores that are mapped to weather conditions occurring at a specific time in a specific place.

Below is Miebach's very brief introduction to and explanation of her extraordinary work. Be sure to view the images of her "Changing Waters", a series of sculptures, wall installations, and musical scores that examine meteorological and ocean interactions in the Gulf of Maine; "Tides and Poles"; and "Changing Weather". Go here to view images of and listen to a few of her musical scores.

Slideshow of Miebach's Sculptures and Music Scores

Artist Statement

http://www.ted.com/talks/nathalie_miebach.html

Miebach, a 2011 Ted Global Fellow, exhibited in 2011 at the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts.

Of Interest

Profile of Nathalie Miebach, The New York Times, July 9, 2011

Profile of Nathalie Miebach, MSNBC, June 9, 2011

Feature on Nathalie Miebach, Boston Handmade, January 8, 2011

Blip.tv Feature with Nathalie Miebach, April 2010 (This feature was produced as part of Miebach's show at Wellesley College.)

Interview with Nathalie Miebach, ArtSake, March 2010

"Weaving Science Into Sculpture", Lecture by Nathalie Miebach, PBS/NPR Forum Network, March 2009 (Video)

Interview with Nathalie Miebach, Peabody Essex Museum, June 2008 (Video)

Biographical Information and Images, Johanssen-Gallery

Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information (Die Gestalten Verlag, 2010) Miebach's work is included in this book.

Experiencing Change (Poem)

2012-01-17T06:30:00.005-05:00

Experiencing Change

We know of the rain burning
        the scent of orange blossom deep into skin,

five perfumed pistils like tiny fingers wagging
        their come-on to start new life. We know

of yellow stars tumbling to ground, teetering on pointe,
their diamond-sharpened edges etching water the color

of blue ice. We know of valleys in the moon
        so capacious we must mime our own arms spreading

wide to contain their black depths. We know of the fold
        of too-sun-tanned leaves giving up their grip.

Here, now, we welcome sleep quartered into its seasons,
let brain-stormed days break from fevered nights.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas

Monday Muse: Winter Reading

2012-01-16T06:30:00.331-05:00

Once a quarter I share with readers the books on my tables and night stand. Below, in alphabetical order by book title, are some of the books, not all new, that I've read over the last few weeks and months or am reading now. There is not one I wouldn't recommend. I have not listed all the poetry collections and chapbooks I'm dipping in and out of; some of those will be reviewed in my Monday Muse column in the coming month or two.

✭ Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf, November 2011) ~ I read this book — some call it memoir; Didion calls it nonfiction — almost straight-through and see it as the necessary companion to the author's The Year of Magical Thinking. Classic Didion, it shows us the raw, unexposed underside of grieving, the parts of loss we hold deep inside and on no day do not think about.

✭ Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translation by Edith Grossman (Vintage/Random House, 2004) ~ This autobiography ranges from birth year, in 1927, to the 1950s. Like anything by Marquez, this book will leave you awed by the writer's extraordinary story-telling ability. It's one of the most evocative romps through autobiography I've read.

✭ My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman (Yale University Press, 2009) ~ I discovered this compelling, award-winning biography while doing research for a post last fall about the work of the late Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. The book is both superbly researched and written, and I came away with great admiration for the poet whose contemporaries included the late Mahmoud Darwish. Hoffman, an essayist, critic, and co-founder of Ibis Editions, tells the story of a remarkable man, recreating his life's story within historical and cultural contexts rendered with objectivity and empathy. There is a lot of political history also in this book that I often found heart-breaking to read.

✭ Shoes Hair Nails: Stories by Deborah Batterman (Uccelli Press, 2005) ~ I received this collection of wonderfully told stories, set in Brooklyn, New York City, and Las Vegas, as a gift. Much of what makes these stories work so well is Batterman's skillful use of detail, her ability to create an authentic voice for each of her spirited characters, her humor, and her insightful reading of relationships. A story a night from the book is an ongoing pleasure.

✭ Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams by Herbert Leibowitz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2011) ~ Though I'm only a hundred-plus pages into this highly erudite, massively detailed, 452-page biography of the poet, I can say that it is clear that Leibowitz has hold of a subject of enormous interest to him. I find particularly interesting Leibowitz's perspectives on and literary analyses of Williams's poems.

✭ So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali, translations by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) ~ I found many of the poems in this collection to be moving. The poet's landscape, both internal and external, is deeply scarred yet there is place for humor in these poems and always the work evokes a sense of humanity, justice, and love come by naturally. Note: The Arabic version of each poem appears en face.

✭ Townie by Andre Dubus III (W.W. Norton, 2011) ~ I've been reading this memoir slowly, as I find I can take only so much of the brutality and grittiness Dubus delivers so cinematically. Dubus's portraits of the people in his life, from his divorced parents to street thugs, are drawn with great clarity and skill and are very much alive on the page. The old mill towns in which Dubus grew up are the kind many of us have at least passed through at some point in our lives and hope never to see again. The life Dubus lived is not one to envy. That he was able to make so much of himself despite his harsh environment is a testament to his strength to survive.

✭ Woolgathering by Patti Smith ~ Completed by Smith on her 45th birthday, Woolgathering was first published in 1992 by Hanuman Books. The new edition, republished late last November by New Directions, includes a selection of Smith's photographs and illustrations and a new piece, "Two Worlds".

Both memoir and fiction, Woolgathering interweaves childhood remembrances with self-discoveries, truths with the imagined. If you've read Smith's wonderful Just Kids, you know how beautifully she writes. Woolgathering is a small book that, to use Smith's words, "[carries] one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered." It belongs on your shelf next to your Annie Dillard.

The Host of Water (Poem)

2012-01-15T15:23:00.000-05:00

Jason deCaires Taylor, Sculptured Figure from La Evolucion Silenciosa

The Host of Water

Eden was never a garden
of stone, Adam never bolted

to a nightly sea bed, and that snake
never could be charmed by fire

worms or shoals of parrot fish.
But Eve, red coral wrapped

about her feet, is anchored now,
lone among the hundreds

that have gone down with her
in darkness to turn her face up

to the shimmery surface light
and accept the host of water.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
_____________________________________

This poem is my response to today's photo prompt at Magpie Tales, which features the image of one of more than 400 life-size figures comprising artist Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater sculpture installation La Evolucion Silenciosa (The Silent Evolution), an environmental public art project in Mexican waters intended to promote the recovery of coral life in the ocean. Read more about deCaires Taylor's underwater museum here. Additional images of the extraordinary project are here.

Write your own poem or flash fiction response to the prompt, using the image provided, then go here to add your own link and to read and comment on the other participants' contributions.

Thought for the Day

2012-01-15T06:30:00.029-05:00

. . . The rain I am in is not like the rain of the cities.

It fills the woods with an immense and confused

sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and porch

with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen,

because it reminds me again and again that

the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to

recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. . . .

~Thomas Merton*

___________________________

* Quoted from "Rain and the Rhinoceros" in Raids on The Unspeakable (New Directions, 1966)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Life and Works

Also see Thought for the Day, December 5, 2010.

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

2012-01-14T06:30:00.201-05:00

Today's edition of Saturday Sharing provides several links to several sites that will be of interest specifically to writers, including Writer's Voice; spotlights The British Newspaper Archive and the Visual Accent & Dialect Archive; and highlights a site devoted to the story of the "Peace Pilgrim", a woman who walked more than 25,000 miles over some 28 years to promote peace.

✦ A trove of historical newspapers that comprise The British Newspaper Archive is available to historians, researchers, and British history aficionados, courtesy of the British Library and brightsolid online publishing. Users may search news articles, family-related notices (births, marriages, deaths, etc.), letters to the editor, obituaries, and advertisements in the digital collection. Up to 8,000 digital images daily are being scanned. Nearly 4 million pages are already available for browsing; 40 million are expected to be digitized within the next 10 years.

BNArchive on Twitter

✦ A series of 13- to 18-minute documentary-style programs, Mondays with Merce, about the life and extraordinary career of the late dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, is available online.

List of Episodes

✦ Last month, the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog provided a link to the Visual Accent & Dialect Archive, which comprises a video archive of English-language accents and dialects from around the world. Including visual information (for example, gestural aspects of accent and dialect) on sound pronunciation, it's a marvelous resource for the theatre community and researchers, indeed, for anyone interested in the rhythms, intonations, and sound changes in various regions where English is spoken. If you have have an English-language accent or use a dialect, go here to learn how you can contribute a video recording for the archive. The site's Website was created and designed by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities whose own site is worth browsing.

Here's a brief video explanation of the crowd-sourced archive:

✦ Writers will appreciate Language Is a Virus, which offers all kinds of writing exercises and games, articles, how-to information, interviews, and more. (My thanks to Diane Lockward for the link.)

✦ If you like interaction while on the Web, you might enjoy VISPO Langu(IM)age. You'll find there interactive audio, interactive music and poetry games, texts that "twitch", "color music", and visual poetry, among other site components. (The site requires Shockwave.)

✦ You'll find in-depth interviews with writers of all genres, conversations with editors, agents, publicists, and other publishing industry pros, author readings, news, writing and publishing tips, and commentary at Writer's Voice, a national radio show and podcast. Produced and hosted by Francesca Rheannon, an independent radio producer and broadcast journalist, Writer's Voice is broadcast weekly to radio stations around the country, with podcasting on the Web. Since 2004, more than 250 shows have aired; the archives are updated continually.

Free WV Podcasts at iTunes

Writer's Voice on Twitter

✦ Born in 1908 in New Jersey and named Mildred Lisette Norman, she walked coast to coast, border to border, more than 25,000 miles over 28 years, beginning January 1, 1953. Her purpose? To promote peace. Take an hour and watch Peace Pilgrim: An American Sage Who Walked Her Talk (the documentary also may be viewed in Spanish). Among the Peace Pilgrim's other accomplishments: She was the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail and was nominated formally in 1981 for the Nobel Peace Prize. World-famous, she died in July 1981, still on her pilgrimage.

Peace Pilgrim Website (There is a lot here to browse, read, explore.)

Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (Entire Text Available)

Steps Toward Inner Peace by the Peace Pilgrim (Interviews are included here.)

Peace Pilgrim on YouTube

Friends of Peace Pilgrim on FaceBook

All Art Friday

2012-01-13T06:30:00.389-05:00

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The Scot Martin Boyce is the recipient of the 2011 Turner Prize. You needn't travel to the United Kingdom, however, to see some of his work. Thanks to the Percent-for-Art program, you'll find Boyce's wonderful Through Layers and Leaves (Closer and Closer) in Boston at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. The sculpture, completed last year, was commissioned for the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Learn more about the artwork here.

Installation View

Martin Boyce, Through Layers and Leaves (Closer and Closer), 2011

Galvanized Mild Steel, Epoxy Paint, Acid-Etched Brass

117.6" x 1186.2"

Commissioner with MIT Percent-for Art Funds

and Gift of Robert D. Sanders and Sara-Ann Sanders Family

✦ Interviews with artists James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Vito Acconci, Yvonne Rainer, and Vija Celmins are planned or already have been conducted with the Museum of Modern Art as part of its Artist Oral History Initiative, a project "to increase our understanding of artists' ideas, intentions, working methods, and specifically the materials and any sort of history or context that goes along with these products," MoMA senior archivist Michelle Elligott explained to Art Newspaper. For more on the project, see this Art Newspaper brief.

✦ There's still time to apply, if you're eligible, to the 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists. The deadline is January 31. Details and an application are found here.

✦ I first learned about artist Zena Assi (b. 1974) of Lebanon via Art of the Mideast. Here's a short video (animation) that will introduce you to some of her marvelous work. In addition to paintings and mixed media/collage on canvas (beautiful still lifes/nature, portraits (I love these), stunning cities), Assi is a sculptor who works with metal, wood, steel, and paper mache. She collaborated with architect Issam Barhouch on Bullet Points - Dresscode, an installation comprising heads of bullets.

Assi most recently enjoyed a solo exhibition, "Still Nature", at ArtSawa Gallery in Dubai. She is part of a group show ongoing until March 3 at Alwane Gallery in Beirut.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art is exhibiting through August 15 in the East Building Concourse "Mark Rothko: Seagram Murals". The murals, which Rothko painted in 1958-1959 in a palette of red, maroon, brown, and black, were commissioned for the dining room of New York City's Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue in the Seagram Building. Rothko produced 30 paintings; the dining room had space for seven. As it turned out, Rothko decided a restaurant was not, after all, an appropriate venue for his work and never allowed any of the murals to grace the restaurant's walls. Several paintings derived from the project are in the NGA's Rothko collection and it is three of these that hang now in the Concourse galleries.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Seagram Mural), 1959

Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation

1985.38.5

A side note: John Logan's play Red, which is a marvelous dramatization of Rothko's angst over the commission, begins playing at Washington's Arena Stage January 20; it will run to March 4 (details here). I saw the play on Broadway and highly recommend it.

NGA's Mark Rothko In Depth Feature

Mark Rothko Works on Paper Catalogue Raisonne in Progress

Mark Rothko The Mural Projects

Rothko Chapel

NGA on FaceBook, Twitter, and ArtBabble

✭ The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery is showing through March 18 Minouk Lim's 13.51-minute video The Weight of Hands (2010), which captures in thermal imaging the Seoul-based artist's performance of the perceived environmental effects of South Korea's controversial Rivers Restoration Project, one of the country's largest construction projects.

Freer | Sackler Gallery on FaceBook, Twitter, and Flickr

✭ Showing through March 4 at Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art is "Izquierdo: Seven Decades: Paperworks", comprising large pastel drawings and monochromatic prints, some never-before exhibited, part of a collection given to the museum by the artist's estate. Born in Madrid in 1925, Manuel Izquierdo, who died in 2009, made Portland his home beginning in the 1940s and became one of Oregon's most important sculptors and printmakers.

D.K. Row, "Manuel Izquierdo, 1925-2009: An Appreciation", The Oregonian, July 25, 2009

Profile (Exhibition History, Collections, Etc.) of Manuel Izquierdo at Laura Russo Gallery

PMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and Flickr

✭ Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid (b. 1950) is the subject of "Zaha Hadid: From in Motion" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition, which continues through March 25, is the first in the United States to feature her product designs, which include furniture, decorative art, Swarovski crystal-encrusted jewelry, and footwear made for Lacoste and Melissa. A highlight is Hadid's three-wheeled Z-Car I, a prototype she created with high-density foam. The exhibition page online includes two videos, a time-lapse showing installation of the exhibition and a glimpse of the custom fabrication required (both videos also are available at iTunes), in addition to a podcast offering an overview of the show.

Zaha Hadid, Z-Car I, 2005-2008

CNC Milled PU-High Density Foam With Pearlescent Finish

Phil Patton, "In Philadelphia, Zaha Hadid's Z-Car I Gets an Encore", The New York Times, November 23, 2011

Zaha Hadid Profile at Great Buildings Online

Zaha Hadid Resources at The New York Times

Zaha Hadid on FaceBook

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ Modern Art Oxford, United Kingdom, is continuing through March 18, "Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World", a collection of more than 80 works on paper — primarily of Welsh landscapes from the 1930s, arts created while an official WWII artist, and pieces from the 1970s following Sutherland's return to Pembrokeshire — and curated by 2011 Turner Prize nominee George Shaw. The show marks the first time that so many rarely seen Sutherland works on paper have been offered together; the art comes from both public and private collections across the UK. An exhibition catalogue is available.

Graham Sutherland, Dark Hill - Landscape with Hedges and Fields, 1940

Swindon Museum and Art Gallery

Additional Images

Sutherland Work at the Tate

Sutherland Tapestry at Coventry Cathedral

Modern Art Oxford on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ At South London Gallery, Dara Birnbaum's Arabesque (2011), a multi-channel video installation, is on view through February 12. The work is described as a reflection on the legacy of two compositions, one by Robert Schumann for his wife Clara and the other by Clara Schumann for her husband. Also included in the exhibition is Birnbaum's Attack Piece (1975) and other 1970s single-channel video works.

Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946) at Marian Goodman Gallery (The New York City gallery presented in the summer of 2011 one of the first solo exhibitions of Birnbaum's work since 2001. That showcased Arabesque, additional details of which are here.)

"Data Birnbaum: Arabesque", Art in Review, The New York Times, August 11, 2011

Dara Birnbaum Video Works

Dara Birnbaum - Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Video; 1978-79)

South London Gallery on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Interview with Artist Terry Dixon — Part 3

2012-01-12T06:30:00.265-05:00

I always tell my students

to never give up your dream of being an artist . . . .

~ Artist and Educator Terry Dixon

This is the third of my three-part interview with Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Terry Dixon. You will find Parts 1 and 2 here and here, respectively.

* * * * *

Artist Terry Dixon in His Studio

Maureen Doallas: Recently, the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland acquired for its permanent collection your remarkable artwork Re-Enslavement. Tell us what this wonderful event means to you personally and professionally.

Terry Dixon: I am very honored to have my art become a part of the permanent collection at the David C. Driskell Center. I was given a tour of the vault and I was impressed with the center's collection of very well-known African-American artists. This opportunity is pivotal; my art career can only continue to go upward. [This is indeed a great honor for Terry. The art collection at the center includes work by some of our greatest African-American artists, including Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, and Jacob Lawrence.]

MD: Your current ongoing work on the series Re-Enslavement, which was inspired by Douglas A. Blackmon's ground-breaking book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II*, addresses racism in America. What is your intention in this clearly sociopolitical work? What do you hope will be viewers' takeaway(s)?

* Available in paperback (Anchor; Reprint, 2009) A Website is dedicated to the book. A PBS broadcast of a documentary based on the book is anticipated this year.

Terry Dixon, Re-Enslavement

Mixed Media, 78" x 78"

TD: After I was introduced to Blackmon's book, I was impelled to explore the subject of re-enslavement. The biggest impact of the book [came from] the photographs of the labor camp inmates. The images [so aroused] my curiosity that I was inspired to create new work in this direction, and [through my artmaking] I have become connected to the book's content.

During my research, I found out that re-enslavement occurred when black men who had been incarcerated on trumped-up charges, or actual crimes they had committed, were sold or forced into labor camps that corporations owned. I was floored! I had to do something as an artist to express my feelings about the subject matter.

My goal for this long, ongoing body of work is to educate the viewer, all viewers — and they may get a little edgy about the subject — about this American history. [The reality is these labor camps existed] but, for some reason, [their existence] has been brushed under the rug. As an artist, it's in my best interest to reveal what has been hidden and express my views.

MD: What, if any, changes in your art have you observed as a result of your immersion in the issues you've been examining while creating this body of work?

TD: As I have been working on this subject matter for the past three years, I have seen my work take on dynamic changes, [not only] in subject matter [but also] the materials that I use to create my art. This has been a positive area for my growth as an artist.

MD: Where do you envision this project taking you?

TD: My future vision is [to inspire] a group collaboration. I would like to find other artists who are focusing on issues that parallel this subject and make others aware of this "hidden" history of the United States.

MD: Of what piece of artwork are you most proud, and why?

TD: Wow! That is not an easy question but I would have to say that I am very proud of Re-Enslavement [see image above], because it contains a hidden message and code.

Terry Dixon, Man & Bicycle

Mixed Media

MD: You teach classes in photography, animation, digital art, and sound and video production. What would you say is the most important aspect of your art teaching?

TD: I truly appreciate giving back to the students. There is no experience that can beat the feeling of inspiring someone who is learning a new technique or skill.

MD: What do you learn from your students?

TD: As a professor, I try to stay two steps ahead of my students but I am continually learning from my mistakes, whether they are big or small. I learn how to adapt to different learning experiences of my students. Teaching is a 360-degree learning experience, because there is always a give-and-take.

MD: What advice or encouraging words do you offer to your students or others who confide that they aspire to be artists exclusively?

TD: I always tell my students to never give up your dream of being an artist, and always continue to learn different skills. If you want to be strictly a fine artist, you always do best to also learn a different skill in digital media. Establishing an integrated interdisciplinary practice will carry you, your career as an artist, a long way down the road.

MD: How do you frame for your students the image of "working artist"?

TD: A working artist is smart and remains diligent in his or her focus on the business. Stay aware of changing trends in the art market, and always be straightforward about the mission of your work.

Terry Dixon, Will I See You Again?

Mixed Media, 36" x 48"

MD: Imagine for a moment having achieved great public acknowledgment as an artist. What might a critic say about your work. Alternatively, how would you like your work to be remembered?

TD: "Dixon's work is layer in various media and photographic images that capture the eye. The work is so full of texture that you want to reach out and touch it. Dixon touches on various topics that make viewers think about what they are seeing on the surface of his creations."

A critique may try to compare me to others but my work always will stand out as being unique, because of my style.

I would like to be remembered as an artist who was unique and stood out from the others.

MD: Any upcoming exhibitions?

TD: I will be exhibiting in a group show in 2013 sponsored by the David C. Driskell Center and the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. This art exhibition, focusing on art based on the topic of jazz music, will travel to different locations in the United States.

Terry, it has been my great pleasure to talk with you about your life and career as a successful artist. Thank you for allowing me to introduce you in some depth to my readers.
____________________________________

All Images © Terry Dixon Used with Permission of the Artist. Click Image to Enlarge View.

Terry Dixon Exhibition Resume

Terry Dixon Portfolio: Gallery 1 and Gallery 2

Photographic Juxtapositions

Terry Dixon on FaceBook and Twitter

Terry Dixon's Re-Enslavement Series on FaceBook (Additional images from the series may be seen here.)

Exhibitions at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora

The David C. Drisckell Center Art Collection

Interview with Artist Terry Dixon — Part 2

2012-01-11T06:30:00.217-05:00

I just stay hungry and keep creating!

~ Artist Terry Dixon

This is Part 2 of my three-part interview with Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Terry Dixon. You'll find Part 1 here.

* * * * *

Artist Terry Dixon in His Studio

Maureen Doallas: Terry, you began exhibiting in the early 1990s and within a decade began showing your work internationally. To what do you attribute this relatively short period in transitioning from emerging to established artist?

Terry Dixon: I have to say the keys are hard work, getting involved with the right exhibitions, staying focused, and never giving up. It is so cut-throat here in this art world, and you can get discouraged.

I still feel that there is more for me to create, and I guess I am always seeking that extra challenge of creating a body of work for a new exhibition.

MD: What would you describe as your "lucky break" as an artist?

TD: My lucky break was in May 2005, when I landed in BusinessWeek magazine's "Photography's Golden Age" article. [Terry was just 35 when the feature appeared.] Even thought it was about photography, I was partly included in this dynamic article because I combine my photographic images with my paintings. This feature drew the attention of national and international private art collectors.

Terry Dixon, Sharecroppers

Mixed Media, Diptych

MD: Who or what has contributed most to your artistic success or progress?

TD: I just stay hungry and keep creating!

As an artist, I can never [allow myself] to get soft and stop thinking about creating. I can never forget how much my mother pushed me to be creative; so, if it weren't for her in a lot of ways, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing today.

MD: How did you feel on seeing your work on exhibition for the first time?

TD: It felt like I had finally made it, that the hard work and my dreams had come true. I still get butterflies when I have exhibitions.

MD: You were born in Washington, D.C., but now live and work in Chicago, Illinois. How would you characterize the contributions of these cities to your artistic life? And, as an artist, what do you find in Chicago that you would not have in D.C.?

TD: I guess I never really thought about that too hard but I can say that Chicago has contributed to my urban-based mixed media artwork. I shoot various urban photographic portraits of strangers on the street and integrate the photographic images into my abstract paintings.

Chicago and Washington, D.C., offer a lot of interesting things but in Chicago there are more distinct cultural neighborhoods [than in D.C.], and this unique aspect that Chicago has to offer has a profound impact on me as an artist and on what I create.

MD: Do you have gallery representation? If yes, what do you consider its principal benefit(s)?

TD: I currently don't have gallery representation.

I think gallery representation can be good or bad, depending on how you look at things. An artist should always read a contract and be careful about what he's signing. It's up to each individual, but I always try to stay clear of having exclusive representation, because [that leaves you] no wiggle room to make other business deals. One good thing about being represented is that you have someone working hard in your corner and make sales happen for you. If you can get a real good gallery director who has great financial connections and buyers, you can be in a winning situation.

Terry Dixon, One Year Later

Mixed Media

MD: What is the price range of your art? How do you decide how to price your work?

TD: The price range of my art starts at around $2,500 and rises to $11,000.

How I price my work . . . well, that's a little bit of a secret. If I am exhibiting in a gallery, my prices can go up drastically, because the standard sales split with the gallery and the artist is 50/50.

MD: How do you market yourself as an artist? Do you find you have to spend a lot of time on the business of art?

TD: I do a lot of marketing online. I try to keep my collectors up-to-date on my exhibitions. I try not to spend all of my time on the business side of art because it takes away from creating.

MD: Looking back to when your career began, what do you notice has changed in the business, for good or bad?

When I first started out, people had more money to spend but now people are holding tight. I try not to look negatively at the economy and how it has damaged sales; it is the reality of the situation. People are buying, [and what's important is] keeping connected to the buyers who have the resources to make investments in your work.

MD: What kinds of social media do you use to facilitate your artistic career or promote the exhibition and sale of your work?

TD: I use FaceBook and Twitter for my exhibition advertisements; but a large portion of the advertising [I do] is by e-mail and sending materials in the mail.

My Website for my art has always been my home base, the place I send people who want to purchase my work or get in contact with me about exhibitions.

Terry Dixon, Conversation

Mixed Media

Tomorrow, in Part 3, Terry talks with me about the recent acquisition of his Re-Enslavement by the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, the inspiration for and progress of his Re-Enslavement series, his role as an arts educator and what he imparts to and learns from his students, and how he would most want to be remembered should he ever attain great public acclaim.
_____________________________________

All Images © Terry Dixon Used with Permission of the Artist. Click Image to Enlarge View.

Terry Dixon Exhibition History

Terry Dixon Portfolio: Gallery 1 and Gallery 2

Photographic Juxtapositions

Terry Dixon at Chicago Art Leasing LLC

Terry Dixon on FaceBook and Twitter

Terry Dixon Blog

Missing Person Report (Poem)

2012-01-10T13:30:00.076-05:00

Missing Person Report

We go on the police reports
        when we have nothing else

but bones — her legs found
        in 1996 — and her skull

that turned up fifteen years
        afterwards: just last year.

We can't say whether
        her light eyes darted uneasily

in the presence of a stranger
        or shined like the sparklers

we twirled those summers
        on Coney Island. Remember how

we held them up against our eyes
        to mesmerize our lovers' gaze?

We don't know if she was dirty
        blonde, her hair mimicking

the sandy color of some beach
        on Long Island, hiding the rest

of her as the tide rolled out.
        She could be 18 or 50, taller

or shorter that you or I or any
        average missing person. Take

a guess at her weight before you
        try to image who her killer is,

what he does while some Eyewitness
        reporter tags a part of her in his

camera's eye. She's been gone so
        long, and all we have are the pieces

of her dumped in sacks, one off
        Ocean Parkway, another, much later,

on Fire Island. A composite sketch
        posted to the Web includes no finger

prints — no hands have ever been
        recovered — so we can't claim

as certain she raised them in defense.
        Scars on her right leg, suture marks

on her left ankle might help in this
        ongoing investigation. What won't

is knowing that whoever she is,
        she polished all ten toes the color red.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
____________________________________

This poem is my response to a City Room blog feature, "Police on Long Island Release Sketch of Woman Whose Skull Was Found Last Year", which appeared in The New York Times on January 7, 2012. I've incorporated into the poem some of the few details available about this missing woman.

Interview with Artist Terry Dixon — Part 1

2012-01-10T06:30:00.370-05:00

Life is too short to worry about the small things.

I will always be a dreamer and bring my goals to life.

~ Terry Dixon

I first became interested in the interdisciplinary work of Washington, D.C.-born and now Chicago-based artist and educator Terry Dixon when a friend, the painter Tracey Clarke, told me enthusiastically about the "great work" I needed to see. I took one look at Terry's work and promptly highlighted in one of my All Art Friday posts Terry's 2010 "Black History Month" exhibition at D.C. Public Library in the District. Soon thereafter, Terry kindly followed up with a thank-you note, and we added each other to our FaceBook friends lists to be sure we would keep in touch.

Late last year, continuing to be amazed by the artwork he was producing, I asked Terry if he'd agree to do an interview via e-mail. Today, I'm delighted to post Part 1 of my three-part interview with Terry in which he talks with me about his artistic heritage, his formal art studies, his style, his artistic influences and inspirations, the "mechanics" of how he translates an idea to canvas, and what challenges him as an artist. Terry's tremendously talented. Definitely one to watch and collect now!

* * * * *

Artist Terry Dixon in His Studio

Maureen Doallas: Both of your parents were creatives; your mother was a painter and your father worked in advertising. What is your earliest memory of engaging with the visual arts?

Terry Dixon: As a child, I would always watch my mother work on creative art-based projects. One day I watched her as she stretched some canvas around a large frame, and I was amazed at what she did. I knew that [the world she part of] was the world that I wanted to be in.

MD: What kinds of artistic opportunities did you parents provide?

TD: In the 1970s, my father worked as a printer for a newspaper, so he would take me to the printing room where I'd have a chance to see how all the letters were set in traditional type.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., was a great benefit, because of the art museums downtown. My parents would take me a lot of the exhibitions at the Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum. I was always amazed at what I saw in the exhibitions, and my mind would race with many ideas of what I would create.

MD: To what extent, if any, did your parents' creative backgrounds influence your decision to become a professional artist? Did you ever consider any career other than art?

TD: Seeing my parents working in the fine art world and [having the opportunity to observe] graphic techniques at the newspaper were both an inspiration and the catalyst for my journey into my creative world.

As a child, I wanted to go to the Olympics as a professional swimmer. I also was fascinated with the Tour de France. So, had I not become an artist, I would be a professional swimmer or cyclist.

MD: How has your formal academic study [Terry's BFA in computer art and photography is from Atlanta College of Art; his MFA in art and technology is from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago] facilitated, if at all, your artistic career?

TD: I attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was another door that opened into an opportunity to enrich my creative vision and dream, [impelling me] to push myself academically and creatively.

Continuing my education as an artist allowed me to have access to a world that I may not otherwise have had the opportunity to experience; it gave me a creative edge. I learned valuable skills in [using] digital media, which, to this day, has allowed me to switch gears at any given point, to keep myself employed and on the cutting edge of trends in digital and traditional studio art practices.

Terry Dixon, Man With Hammer

Mixed Media, 48" x 48"

MD: How would you characterize your style? Do you have a defining characteristic that makes your work recognizable as Terry Dixon's?

TD: I'd say my style is a combination of a lot of things [embracing] the intuitive, the abstract, abstract expressionism, and the figurative, [especially] in my use of photography and mixed-media techniques.

Though it's natural that artists are influenced by other art they see, I have [created] my own unique style over the years; I have developed a uniquely intuitive and abstract line technique that I've integrated in my art. My viewers have said that my lines have a kinetic flow, that they look like schematics from a circuitry board. My incorporation of my lines with my abstract painting techniques and uses of oil pastels, ink, pencil, ripped canvas, and photographic images have become my signature.

MD: In what ways has your style changed or evolved over your career?

TD: I started taking various risks with my subject matter and exploring use of other media in each art piece. I try not to focus on what other artists create but [to develop my style] more dynamically by being self-conscious of my surroundings and the world that I live in.

MD: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Please tell our readers what that means.

TD: As an interdisciplinary artist, I explore and use various media [such as paint and photographs and video]. Working with [different] media can produce a more dynamic art piece and, depending on the subject matter, convey a powerful message to the viewer.

MD: Is there any medium in which you haven't worked that you'd like to explore?

TD: In the near future, I plan to include more interactivity in my work [by using] sound and video. My various plans for future artwork include using more digital media.

MD: What are your sources of reference, artistic influence, and inspiration?

TD: My references [range from] things that have happened in the past, to current events, to a photograph that I take of a total stranger for my urban art portraits.

I have always been inspired by various styles of artwork, such as abstract expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and some photorealistic work. There is so much art that I have absorbed that what I have found myself doing in the past 12 years is creating with a more intuitive approach. Focusing on a more intuitive approach allows me greater flexibility in my thought process.

Terry Dixon, Rail Prisoner

Mixed Media, Diptych

MD: Tell us about the preparations you make once you get an idea for an artwork.

TD: I work with my computer and my sketchbook, and, because I use various photographic images in my work, I use PhotoShop a lot to manipulate my images. Once I've manipulated an image, I find that more of my ideas about what I want to say come clear. I then print out rough ideas of my images, lay them out in my sketchbook, and create small collages of what I will develop on a large canvas.

MD: Are there any tools in your studio you could not work without?

TD: I can't live without my cadmium reds, pallet knives, and the various pencils that I use to create my intricate line work.

MD: What challenges you as an artist? When you respond to those challenges, what do you learn?

TD: I am my own challenge; so, I guess you can say that I challenge myself.

I work very well under time constraints and pressure while preparing for an exhibition [but] I've also learned that my own personal challenges can make an enemy of time when I need to get work completed for an art opening.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, Terry talks about transitioning from emerging to established artist, his "lucky break", who or what has contributed most to his artistic success, exhibiting for the first time, the contributions of place (where he lives) to his work, gallery representation, art-pricing, self-promotion, and use of social media.
_______________________________________

All Images © Terry Dixon Used with Permission of the Artist. Click Image to Enlarge View.

Terry Dixon Exhibition Resume

Terry Dixon Portfolio: Gallery 1 and Gallery 2

Photographic Juxtapositions

Terry Dixon on FaceBook and Twitter

Terry Dixon Blog

Terry Dixon at Chicago Art Leasing

Monday Muse: Carl Sandburg Film

2012-01-09T06:30:00.004-05:00

When the words and ideas move from the head to the heart

into those places where ideas and emotions are real, that's

when a film is really having an effect and that's what

I'm hoping to do with [The Day Carl Sandburg Died].

~ Filmmaker Paul Bonesteel*

The life and work of poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who also was a biographer, journalist, novelist, autobiographer, collector of folk songs, and more, is the subject of a new feature-length documentary The Day Carl Sandburg Died (Bonesteel Films).

The film, which was shown twice, on January 6 and 7, at the Poetry Foundation, in Chicago, Illinois, as part of the foundation's centennial celebration of Poetry Magazine, and will be screened February 18 at the National Arts & Crafts Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, includes interviews with family and those who knew Sandburg, were influenced by him, or have studied, read, and performed his work (Ted Kooser, Pete Seeger, and Studs Terkel among them), as well as archival film clips and footage from television appearances (he was on the Ed Sullivan Show and What's My Line?). (Go here to see cast.) It is an attempt to tell the story of a multi-faceted, fully engaged, even complicated man. Sandburg's poetry is part of that story.

Immediately below is the brief trailer for the film, directed by Paul Bonesteel, whose other documentaries included The Great American Quilt Revival (2005). Bonesteel has presented The Day Carl Sandburg Died at a number of venues, including Black Earth Film Festival, Galesburg, Illinois; the University of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Aperture Cinema, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Southern Appalachian International Film Festival. The documentary, which took a half-dozen years to make, premiered in April 2011 at RiverRun International Film Festival, Winston-Salem (see 2011 archive for film's screening here).

The Day Carl Sandburg Died documentary film trailer from Bonesteel Films on Vimeo.

_________________________________________

* Quoted from "An Interview with Paul Bonesteel, the Film's Director" (You'll find a Director's Statement at the end of the Q&A.)

Also Of Interest

The Day Carl Sandburg Died on FaceBook

Film Blog (You'll find brief but interesting posts here about the film's initial conception and production, including on-location shooting in Galesburg, Illinois, and about people involved in or interviewed for the film, including poet Yvgeny Yevtushenko and Sandburg's wife Paula and his daughter Helga Sandburg Crile. In some cases video with the interviewees are included with the posts. You'll find a list of film-related videos here.)

Carl Sandburg Home

Carl Sandburg State Historic Site, Galesburg, Illinois

The Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara, National Park Service, Flat Rock, North Carolina

Carl Sandburg Profiles at Poets.org (Academy of American Poets), Modern American Poetry, and Poetry Foundation

Carl Sandburg Research Website for Sandburg Studies

Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems

The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Rev. Ed., 1970) at Amazon

Justin Souther, "The Underdog Poet", Mountain Xpress, April 26, 2011 (This article looks at the making of the film.)

John R. Pulliam, "Documenting Sandburg", Galesburg - The Register-Mail, June 17, 2009

Ted McIrvine, "Goat-less Perspective on Carl Sandburg", BlueRidgeNow Times-News, November 4, 2007 (This article discusses a symposium on Sandburg, "Carl Sandburg: Modern Perspectives and Criticisms".)

Kathryn N. Benzel, "Prayers for the People - Carl Sandburg's Poetry and Songs", Prairie Fire, October 2007

Zoe Keating (Keating, a cellist, scored the film.)

Penelope Niven, Biographer; Author of Carl Sandburg: A Biography (Scribner's, 1991) (The book is available through resellers.)

Video, "Carl Sandburg: Moderninst?", April 2007 Symposium, The New York Institute

Lying in Wait (Poem)

2012-01-08T13:13:00.000-05:00

Lying in Wait

They want us to look up
to them, always be available

to smooth the crooked creases
between their brows, tell

them nightly, cool sheets pulled
down, who is lord and king

of all that they survey. Their voices,
raised against pursed lips, put us

in our places, a single sonic boom
enough to collapse the thinning walls

we build to shield our hearts' too
-quick beatings from pricked up ears.

They count on strength in numbers,
spit-blackened boots and push-button

armored personnel. We bide time's
hand sure on own own, content

to wait until the palace dogs have
stretched and yawned.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
______________________________________

This poem is my response to today's photo prompt at Magpie Tales.

Write your own poem or flash fiction response to the prompt, using the image provided, then go here to add your own link and to read and comment on the other participants' contributions.

Thought for the Day

2012-01-08T06:30:00.010-05:00

. . . real revolution takes place not through mass movements

but through the inward revaluation of relationship; that alone

is real reformation, a radical, continuous revolution. We are

afraid to begin on a small scale. Because the problem is so

vast, we think we must meet it with large numbers of people,

with a great organization, with mass movements. Surely, we must

begin to tackle the problem on a small scale, and the small scale is

the "me" and the "you". When I understand myself, I understand you,

and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor;

there is a lack of affection, or warmth in relationship; and because

we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy

in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces

further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with

blueprints for world reform and do not look to that

one resolving factor which is love.

~ J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life*

______________________________

* Daily Quote Archive, J. Krishnamurti Online

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

2012-01-07T06:30:00.152-05:00

Saturday Sharing's first edition in the new year shares links to the series "Library Hacks", the 84000 project to translate and preserve sacred Buddhist texts, an online program, Audiofiles, for radio lovers, the beautiful Visualising China site, and the searchable database of public library records of 1891-1902, What Middletown Read. Today's video feature is about the extraordinary architectural installations of Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen.

✦ Thanks to The Bigger Picture blog, I continue to discover the riches of mining online resources created by the Smithsonian Institution. One of note is the Smithsonian Institution Libraries blog, which is featuring an ongoing series "Library Hacks". A recent post highlighted the Libraries' tremendous trade literature collection, comprising more than 500,000 catalogues, technical manuals, advertising brochures, price lists, company histories, and other materials for more than 30,000 U.S. companies. You'll find all kinds of interesting stuff in that collection.

Smithsonian Libraries on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube

Smithsonian Libraries Blog

✦ Bristol University in the United Kingdom is behind the creation of Visualising China, a Web-based project that allows users to "explore and enhance" more than 8,000 digitized photographs taken in China between 1850 and 1950. Read more about the creation of the project here.

Visualising China Project Blog

✦ Seeking to ensure the preservation of sacred Buddhist texts, 84000 is a nonprofit global initiative to translate and make accessible to everyone the words of Buddha. The effort involves the translation of 1,169 Kangyur texts comprising 70,000 pages (these are Buddha's spoken teachings); 4,093 Tengyur texts totaling some 161,800 pages (these consist of Indian scholars' treatises on the Kangyur); and not-yet-counted Sungbum texts (Tibetan scholars' treatises on the Kangyur). Founding sponsorship opportunities are available; the project is seeking to raise US $5 million by 2014.

84000 on FaceBook

✦ An independent production created this past November, Audiofiles aims to compile for your listening pleasure all the stories other radio lovers enjoy. You may browse the site by selecting stories by type, producer, or source and even save a story to your personal playlist.

Audiofiles on Twitter

Audiofiles Blog

✦ The project What Middletown Read comprises both database and search engine built on circulation records of Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from 1891 to 1902. Slate published a feature on the project on which Ball State University is collaborating. There's also a blog that tracks updates and new site features. (My thanks to The Book Bench blog for the link to the Slate article.)

✦ Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen creates extraordinary installations, as shown in this approximately 44-minute documentary. It is mind-boggling to consider the work that she puts into deconstructing a set of apartments and then building an entirely new interior in a building slated for demolition.

ART WORK IN PROGRESS - an impression from Remmelt Lukkien on Vimeo.

All Art Friday

2012-01-06T06:30:00.339-05:00

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Minnesota Public Radio offers the weekly Art Hounds program, during which three people from the arts community talk about a performance, opening, or other event they think others will want to see.

Art Hounds on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Interested in a participatory art project? Check out Inside Out. Anyone may upload "messages of personal identity" that then are recreated as posters and returned for exhibition in participants' communities. Both individual and group portraits are accepted, and all displays of the posters are documented, archived, and viewable virtually.

Inside Out on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ Published twice a year by Forecast Public Art, Public Art Review focuses exclusively on contemporary public art. It includes opinion, analysis, and criticism and boasts a readership comprising artists, architects, curators, city planners, educators, students, design professionals, program administrators, writers, and others interested or working in the arts.

Forecast Public Art on FaceBook

✦ You don't have to go Paris or London to find wonderful art in the underground. The New York City Arts for Transit program, founded in the 1980s, oversees the selection of artists and the installation of their work in the city's subway and commuter rail stations. It encompasses not just commissions for permanent visual art (see calls for artists); it also includes Music Under New York. Among the artists whose work can be seen below ground: Robert Kushner, Jackie Chang, Roy Lichtenstein, and Faith Ringgold, who is the subject of the video profile below. Ringgold's work is Flying Home Harlem Heroes and Heroines, 1996, in the 125th Street Station. You'll find more information about it here.

Watch Art Underground: Faith Ringgold on PBS. See more from SUNDAYARTS.

Arts for Transit Podcasts

Arts for Transit Lightbox (Work of New York-Based Photographers)

Arts for Transit Poster Program and Art Cards

Arts for Transit on FaceBook and Twitter

Metro Arts and Architecture

"GrrlScientist Photographs the Museum Below: The Mosaics of NYC's 81st Street Station", Mosaic Art Now, December 5, 2011 (This great post highlights the mosaics and reliefs beneath the American Natural History Museum.)

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In New York City at Peter Blum SOHO, "Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art" continues until January 14. In addition to funerary vessels, paintings, pottery, weavings, and basketry from 14 tribes, the exhibition includes modern and contemporary works by Josef Albers, Max Ernst, Agnes Martin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock, as well as Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, among other artists. The show also displays a selection of important publications that document Native American life. The gallery has published in an edition of 1,500 a hardcover book with images of all the works in the exhibition and text by poet and art critic Carter Ratcliff and Comanche author, essayist, and associate curator, National Museum of the American Indian, Paul Chaat Smith. Images of a selection of 22 works may be viewed here.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Blue, Black, and White Abstraction #12, 1959

Oil on Canvas

16" x 30"

✭ A year ago I wrote a post about the discovery of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier, whose wonderful work currently is on exhibit at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City. The show, "Vivian Maier - Street Photographer", continues through January 28. Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City also is exhibiting Maier's photography, through February 25. On the West Coast, "Vivian Maier - A Life Discovered" continues, through January 28, at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. John Maloof, who acquired a cache of Maier negatives at auction, has edited Vivian Maier - Street Photographer (Powerhouse Books), which was published in November (information about the book is here). This article "Vivian Maier: The Unheralded Street Photographer" appeared in Smithsonian Magazine in December.

✭ Thirty sculptures in wood created over nearly four decades comprise the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture", continuing through March 4 at the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston. This is described as the first museum exhibition to focus on Kelly's "totemic" wood forms.

Peter Plagens, "Beautiful, Quiet and Spare", The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011 (Exhibition Review)

Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments (Checkerboard Films, 2009), a 65-minute documentary by Edgar B. Howard and Tom Piper (A short video excerpt is here.)

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks Gallery

MFA/Boston on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ "Charles Dickens at 200", featuring manuscripts, letters, original illustrations, and photographs, continues through February 12 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. If you view the online exhibition, be sure to read the letters, too.

Alfred Bryan, Caricature of Charles Dickens, 18__

Gift of Miss Caroline Newton, 1974

Morgan Library on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ In Poughkeepsie, New York, the Frances Lehman Leob Art Center at Vassar College opens "Marco Maggi: Lentissimo" on January 20. The show of all new work by the Uruguayan-born artist will continue through April 1.

Marco Maggi at Josee Bienvenu Gallery

Marco Maggi at Museum of Modern Art, New York

Marco Maggi at Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2011

Interview with Marco Maggi at White Hot Magazine, March 2009

FLLAC on FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo

FLLAC Blog Off the Wall

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ Science Gallery, an initiative of Trinity College Dublin, is showing through January 20 "Surface Tension: The Future of Water", in which artists, designers, engineers, and scientists collaborate to explore water's physical properties, its role in politics and economics, and how it is clean and distributed. View the online gallery of participating artists (click on each image for more information). The video below introduces some of the artists.

Direct Video Link

✭ Charles Dickens also is the subject of an exhibition, "Dickens and London", continuing through June 10 at the Museum of London. The first major Dickens exhibition in the United Kingdom in more than 40 years, the show includes paintings, photographs, costumes, and objects illustrative of Dickens themes. Also on display are rarely seen manuscripts (e.g., Bleak House, David Copperfield) in Dickens's own hand. Highlights include an audiovisual experience in which the desk and chair Dickens used is "brought to life" and a showing of a specially commissioned film, The Houseless Shadow, by documentary filmmaker William Raban (see trailer below). An iPhone/iPad app allows you to "journey through the darker side of Charles Dickens's London." Tickets are required for the exhibition.

Exhibition Leaflet

Dickens 2012, Celebrating the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens (This site will keep you busy browsing.)

Charles Dickens on SoundCloud (Record your favorite lines and passages.)

Museum of London on FaceBook and Twitter

Errol Morris on the Questions of Photography

2012-01-05T06:30:00.137-05:00

You can never see the absence

of something in a photograph.

~ Errol Morris

Award-winning documentary filmmaker and writer Errol Morris, author of a new book of essays, Believing Is Seeing:Observations on the Mysteries of Photography* (Penguin Press HC, 2011), recently spoke with The Guardian about what we see, or cannot see, in a photograph; what makes a photograph iconic, gives it power; and why photographs "do not obviate the need for further investigation." Curiosity, even a tiny bit, he makes clear, is essential to begin to understand what it is we are looking at and to link what we are seeing to our physical world. When we look, Morris explains, we need to focus on the little details in an image before we can appreciate the larger questions — about the nature of posing, about truth, for example — that a photograph raises.

In the brief eight-minute video immediately below, Morris speaks to issues of truth, propaganda, and art in photography, illustrating his points with images, such as the notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib, that are known to us all. (To play, click the right arrow symbol just above the word "Link".)

Also Of Interest

* An excerpt is available here. Many of the essays in Morris's book have appeared in Morris's Opinionator column for The New York Times. He's written some wonderful essays for that column. One of his most interesting is "The Umbrella Man", published November 21, 2011.

Errol Morris Website (You'll find here an accounting of Morris's films, commercials, and television work; his lectures, editorials, opinion pieces, and reviews for The New York Times, Salon, New York Magazine, and other publications; interviews; online store; and an archive comprising various resources.)

Errol Morris, "Photo-Op: Believing Is Seeing", Opinion, The New York Times, July 13, 2008

"Errol Morris Looks for Truth Outside Photographs", All Things Considered, NPR, September 17, 2011

Interview with Scott Tobias at A.V. Club, July 14, 2011

Video, "Recovering Reality: A Conversation with Errol Morris", Columbia Journalism Review, 2008

We're All Liars

2012-01-04T06:30:00.005-05:00

Lying is a cooperative act.

. . . Its power emerges when someone else

agrees to believe the lie.

~ Pamela Meyer

In 2011, social media expert Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception (St. Martin's Press, 2010), gave a short (18:51 minutes) but fascinating TED Talk about lying: how often we do it, what its very real consequences are, what it looks and sounds like.

On any day, Meyer says, we get lied to as many as 200 times, and while some of our lies are not harmful, others have dramatic costs. "Deception," Meyer stresses, "is serious business"; not only is it highly prevalent, it's complex, part of our history and culture. "We're against lying. . . but we're covertly for it," Meyers points out.

Some highlights from Meyer's talk, which is provided below:

✦ Lying attempts to bridge a gap between who we are and what we wish or want to be. If you don't know what it is you hunger for, you can be deceived.

✦ We lie more often to strangers than to those we know. Men lie more to protect themselves while women generally lie to protect others.

✦ There are two patterns of deception that a person trained to spot lies can uncover. One is speech (e.g., distancing from subject) and the other is body language (e.g., fake smile).

✦ Knowledge of "hot spots", the discrepancies between words and actions, helps in liespotting.

✦ Liespotting is both science and art. Various technologies — for example, eye tracking devices, infrared brain scans, MRIs — can help uncover "red flags" or "hot spots" but these have no value in themselves. Successful liespotters rely on human tools, make an art of looking and listening to get at the truth.

Meyer is the owner of Simpatico Networks, a social networking company, and Manhattan Studios, a consulting company. She also is a Certified Fraud Examiner who trains negotiators and CEOs in verbal and nonverbal cues to deception, facial interpretation, advanced interrogation techniques, and information elicitation. Meyer holds a MBA from Harvard Business School and a MA from Claremont Graduate University.

Also Of Interest

Liespotting Website (You'll find here information about Meyer's book, a section titled "Liespotting Basics", and a list of workshops Meyer conducts on the subject of lies and truth-telling. The Archive also has a series of interesting posts and videos about lying.)

Meyer's YouTube Video About Liespotting (The YouTube channel for Liespotting has a number of other videos that reveal various individuals' uses of common deception techniques.)

Podcasts with Meyer (A number of interesting interviews are found here.)

Meyer and Liespotting on FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Excerpt from Liespotting at BusinessWeek

Liespotting on GoogleBooks

Association of Certified Fraud Examiners

"Who Lies More to Get Ahead? Men or Women?", Women at the Top Blog, December 6, 2011

Higgs Hides Still (Poem)

2012-01-03T06:30:00.004-05:00

Example of Simulated Data

Modeled on Large Hadron Collider at CERN*

CERN-EX-9710002

Higgs Hides Still

What do they matter,
        these quarks and electrons?

Higgs hides, still, holding
        the one key to the hole

in our understanding
        of the universe,

giving our search for it
        a mass we cannot

move through the space
        we occupy without falling

into darkness. It's been ages
        and nobody's found it,

yet, the world keeps spinning.
        Underground, at CERN, protons

collide with themselves
        at greatest speed and particles

now smaller are sifted for signs
        the scientists are on the right

track. God, they will tell you,
        never enters their equations.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
_____________________________

* Explanation here.

Last fall, the quest to find Higgs boson was all over the news, following experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, in Geneva, Switzerland; it was reported that those tests offered clues to the so-called "God particle" that would explain the existence of mass. (See, for example: "Q&A: The Higgs boson" at BBC, December 13, 2011; "What is the Higgs boson and why is it important?" at CNN, December 14, 2011;"Higgs Boson: One Page Explanation"; and "Physicists find 'tantalizing hints' of Higgs Boson 'God particle'" at Los Angeles Times. In addition to a video, the latter references in a sidebar an additional noteworthy resource that explains how the collider works. Another video containing CERN animations is here.) I found fascinating this need to explain, and tried to reduce to poetic form a bit of the search for the elusive.

CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research

CERN Photo Selection

Higgs Boson (Dedicated Website)

Live Science Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson (A model in LEGOS of the Large Hadron Collider is shown in photo 5.)

Monday Muse Reads Collin Kelley's 'Slow to Burn'

2012-01-02T06:30:00.338-05:00

It is not often that publishers reprint chapbooks. An exception is Seven Kitchens Press, which in 2011 released, through its ReBound Series, a limited second edition of Collin Kelley's 20-poem Slow to Burn. (The first edition of Kelley's collection, published in 2006 by MetroMania Press, is out of print.)

Limited to 125 copies, the 29-page second edition, hand-trimmed and hand-tied, is lovely to hold in the hand, the black type set off beautifully against brilliant red covers. It includes a new introduction by Karen Head, Ph.D., a poet and an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Those new to Kelley's work, as I was, will find much to like in this small gem of a collection: the authentic voice with which the poet speaks, the selection and combination of marvelous contemporary detail and cultural references that create a strong sense of time and place, the universality of themes — childhood experimentation, alienation, exclusion, death and loss, growing up, self-identity. The writing is clear, the cadence well-controlled, the subject-matter real life, the opening lines lures that hook you and keep you reading to a rewarding end, to wit:

The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in

G.I. Jose for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. [. . .]

~ from "Wonder Woman"

Before you made me a witch,

got forced into the basement to pray,

your mother stripping you, [. . . ]

~ from "Ian"

Mary pops up in the strangest places,

usually as a window stain or sandwich,

but yesterday she dripped down the wall [. . . .]

~ from "The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass"

Kelley's is a chapbook of vivid and tightly written stories in poetic form. The narratives not only are about the "I" who addresses us; they also introduce us to a cast of believable people, at least some of whom we might have heard about or known when we were growing up. We meet "Ian" who "kissed me once in the backseat, / crouched low, out of my dad's line of sight"; "Aimee", who "built a shrine to John Lennon" and "could reel off the rapes and molestation / like a documentarian"; "Laura Brown", who "packed one morning, / caught the Toronto bus, / [and] disappeared like a chalk mark / in a rain storm"; "Tina", who makes the poet-narrator "her project, / to be reshaped and reformatted".

The narrator of these poems is very much a part of his world, remembering, recalling, ruminating, commenting on, questioning, provoking. Despite a catalogue of experiences in which violence (of suicide especially) grips, the narrator is not without humor, as these lines demonstrate: "I was jumping off beds like the Bionic Woman, / besotted with Farrah's red bathing suit" (from "Freedom Train"); "I'm no spring chicken, not even a rooster, / but I've been called a cock a time or two." (from "Ash Wednesday"); "I say, cut the parlor tricks, Mary. / If you want a little respect, come flaming / out of the sky on a thundercloud" (from "The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass"). Nor is he at a loss for self-understanding that comes with maturity:

[. . .] I am already in halves, have always been,

will always be. [. . .]

~ from "Duality"

[. . . ] I have dissected my past into little pieces

and put them in their proper places.

I have begun the process of growing up

and older, of stripping down memories

to their essence and casting off the extraneous. [. . .]

~ from "The Clarity of Loss"

I am slow to burn, waiting for a match strike,

the long drag against me, catching sparks. [. . .]

[. . .] I am the flame laid bare by desire. Put fire in my hands.

~ from "Slow to Burn"

[. . .] We are those people in an alternate world,

where hallway voices hold no sway. [. . .]

~ from "What Remains"

Kelley, it is clear, is a poet who means "to say something real, / something that puts that one moment / in perspective, strips it to non-fiction" (from "Put Yourself In My Place"). In Slow Burn, he not only "sings back" into his poems his "old muses"—the subjects of his estimable poems; he shows us his own "soul singing to itself" (from "Muses Are Never Quiet") with authority, putting down and leaving "a marker for future reference" (from "Underneath"). We'll all want to pay attention to how far that marker moves.

_________________________________

Slow to Burn is available directly from Seven Kitchens Press; go here for ordering information.

Atlanta, Georgia, resident Collin Kelley is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His debut novel Conquering Venus (Vanilla Heart Publishing) was issued in 2009; his second, Remain in Light (Vanilla Heart Publishing), the second in Kelley's Venus Trilogy, was published last September. Both are available in e-book versions. Kelley, whose work has appeared in a number of anthologies and in many literary magazines and journals, including Atlanta Review, Blue Fifth Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and MiPOesias, also is the author of After the Poison: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2008; available through resellers) and Better to Travel (iUniverse, 2003), for which Kelley was named Georgia Author of the Year. He blogs at Modern Confessional and is a tireless but highly effective user of social media.

Collin Kelley Poetry Online

Collin Kelley on FaceBook and Twitter, Goodreads, and YouTube

Thought for the Day

2012-01-01T06:30:00.063-05:00

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where

you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning...

a place where you can simply experience and bring forth

what you are and what you might be.

~ Joseph Campbell*

____________________________

* Quoted from "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, With Bill Moyers" (This is a widely available interview, available on YouTube and on DVD, and as a book. The PBS link is "Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason".)

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

Joseph Campbell Foundation

* * * * *

Take a look at this Tree of Contemplative Practices (click on image to enlarge) and then go here to learn how to begin finding what's within. May you enjoy deep peace of mind and spirit throughout the New Year!

The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society also offers a free download of a blank tree that you may customize to include your own practice(s).

CCMS on FaceBook

Also Of Interest

The InterDependence Project

The Open Heart Project, Susan Piver

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

2011-12-31T06:30:00.109-05:00

Today's final edition of Saturday Sharing for 2011 offers an animation of a John Siddique poem and a video feature on choreographer Bill T. Jones, plus links to Eric Fischer's beautiful maps of Twitter's language communities, Wave Book's Erasures poetry project, the Library of Congress's wonderful new ViewShare platform, and two sites where you can pin poems to Google maps.

✭ My friend the poet John Siddique has now completed his animated series "year of full moons" with the release of "Yew Moon - We Are Russian Dolls to Ourselves", from his collection Recital, which I reviewed here. Enjoy!

Yew Moon from John Siddique on Vimeo.

See all the moon animations here.

✭ Eric Fischer has posted on Flickr his beautiful mappings of the language communities of Twitter; the map colors correspond to languages typed on Twitter. The Big Think posted a feature about the maps and what they tell us.

✭ Introduce yourself to the erasure process at Wave Books, an independent poetry press in Seattle, Washington. As conceived, the online project allows you to select a source text and, through a process of "disappearing" words or punctuation marks, create a new "sculpted text" or poem. You may save the program to the project archive, or print or e-mail it. Currently, there are more than 3,000 erasure poems available to view.

Wave Poetry Catalogue

✭ The Library of Congress has launched a wonderful new site: ViewShare: Interfaces to Our Heritage, described as "a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets like a search box, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections." The site's facilities work with spreadsheets and other record types, allow you to import and upload your own collections, and also copy-paste and embed interfaces in any Web page. For an introduction to how ViewShare works, view the Screencast.

✭ Don't let your poems go unmapped. With Google maps in place, you can now pin poems to place at Poetry Atlas or Poetry4U. The former site boasts "thousands" of poems about places (browse by poet name and poem title or first line, or search by location), while the latter allows you to post your own Twitter-length inspirations to a Google map. (My thanks to Harriet the Blog for the links.)

✭ I was privileged to see the premiere of choreographer Bill T. Jones's "Fondly Do We Hope. . . Fervently Do We Pray", which honors the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln. I found it an engrossing piece of dance-theatre. Last month, American Masters broadcast Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, a chronicle of Jones's creation of this and other work. In the following video interview, Jones talks briefly about his creative process and inspiration. For screening information, go here.

Watch Interview with Bill T. Jones on PBS. See more from American Masters.

Additional videos, a biographical essay and tribute, interviews, and related information are found in the sidebar here.

Jeffrey Brown of the PBS News Hour Art Beat program talked with Jones in 2009 about the choreography.

Here's the official trailer for the documentary:

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company on FaceBook (Videos on FaceBook)

Bill's Blog

A Good Man on FaceBook

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!