Below is Cindy St. Onge's videopoem Generator. The remixed poem, nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and "Best of the Net" and a runner-up for an Atlantis Award, was first published at The Poet's Billow in December 2013.
I learned of St. Onge, an award-winning multi-media poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest, from filmmaker Paul Broderick (thank you, Paul!). St. Onge's excellent video work has been screened most recently at the 2016 Bath Fringe Festival; it's also been shown at poetry festivals in Athens, Greece; and in Ireland. In addition to being available on St. Onge's Vimeo site, her work is featured at Dave Bonta's Moving Poems and at VerseWrights.
Selections of St. Onge's poems, which have been published in many online and print journals, including Apeiron Review, Gravel, OpenMinds Quarterly, Right Hand Pointing, The Timberline Review, and Voice Catcher, can be found at St. Onge's Website, Exhibit A. St. Onge's chapbooks include Move Your Lips When You Read and Road to Damascus (both 2014).
On view through May 21, the Morgan's exhibition, which opened on Inauguration Day and was co-organized by Amherst College, aims to correct the common belief that Dickinson (1830-1886) was a recluse. To the contrary! By gathering for display nearly 100 rarely seen manuscripts and letters, and as well as some artifacts being shown for the first time, the exhibition makes the case that Dickinson's life was "filled with rich friendships and long-lasting relationships with mentors and editors."
Featured are 24 of Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, in various states of draft, that are complemented by audio descriptions. Hand-cut silhouettes, photographs, daguerreotypes, contemporary illustrations, and other visual materials are also available.
Cover Art
Emily Dickinson: Poems (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1890)
✦ The January 2017 cover of Poetry magazine, which bears the image of Fly Ampersand by Philadelphia's Armando Veve, sent me in search of the illustrator's Website. Enjoy exploring his art!
✦ The public now has online access to more than 250,000 objects in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. See the searchable Collections Online.
✦ Switzerland's Kunsthaus Zurich has digitized more than 400 of the artworks in its Dada collection. Read about the Dada Digital Project online and then browse the collection, which will be augmented with prints and drawings as the project continues (there are more than 700 artworks and historic documents in the collection).
✦ Following is an interview (2015) with Japanese sculptor Nobuo Sekine, who discusses how he aims to "convey the richness of nature" through his work. Considered one of Japan's most important contemporary artists, follower of the Mono-ha art movement, Sekine is Visiting Professor a Tama Art University and Kobe Design University.
✭ The installation "Materiality and Process", at Parish Art Museum, Water Mill, Long Island, looks at use of tactile materials in artmaking. Included in the exhibition are new acquisitions, including the Josh Tonsfeldt sculpture Untitled, which incorporates alligator hide, wood, acrylic, and glass; and Kim MacConnel's Jingle, a wall hanging comprising unprimed fabric that has been painted, cut into strips, and sewn together. Other pieces, including Louise Nevelson's Untitled and Alan Shields's Devil, Devil Love, are drawn from the Parrish collection. The show continues through October 30. A selection of installation views and other images is at the exhibition link.
✭ In Kansas City, Missouri, the Nelson-Atkins Museum is presenting "Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath". The exhibition, a major survey of 184 works, includes the black-and-white images by Heath (1931-2016), which date from 1949 to 1969; a sequence of 82 photographs, A Dialogue with Solitude, made in the early 1950s; and recent color images made between 2001 and 2007 in New York City and Toronto. The ticketed exhibition continues through March 19. A gallery talk with curator Keith F. Davis is scheduled for February 12, 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
✭ The KMAC Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, recently opened "Oscillates Wildly", a solo exhibition of the work of Chicago artist William J. O'Brien. Featuring ceramic and steel sculptures, textiles, drawings, and paintings, the exhibition examines O'Brien's use of color, form, pattern, and texture and the balance the artist achieves between abstraction and figuration. The show runs through April 9.
✭ A multidisciplinary installation of the work of Colombia-born Mateo Lopez, "Undo List", can be seen at New York City's Drawing Center. The exhibition, which continues through March 19, is the first solo museum show in the United States for Lopez. It includes Lopez's works on paper, sculpture, performance, and projected film. A selection of images is at the exhibition link.
Today's column offers a look at three very well-done animations.
✦ The Cat Piano ~ Directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson of Mechanical Apple, with narration by Nick Cave, The Cat Piano (2009) won a number of awards, among them the Australian Film Institute's "Best Short Animation" and APRA Screen Music's "Best Music in a Short Film".
(My thanks to Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel and Eddie White for the link.)
✦ Pidge ~ A thesis film by artist/animator and director Renee Zhan, Pidge was produced by Harvard University. The story of a suicidal pigeon whose dark thoughts ultimately turn positive, the animation, which has been shown at Telluride Film Festival, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Animfilm Greece, and Montclair Film Festival, comes to a surprising conclusion. Zhan spent 6 months creating the film. The backgrounds are watercolors.
. . . get a bowl of fresh snow / not to eat but just to admire /....
Cover Art for Ice Mountain
Artist Credit: Beth Adams
My friend Dave Bonta, a master erasure poet and the scion at Moving Poems, a compendium of videopoems I've featured in this space a number of times, has published a 132-page collection of spare, evocative, and linked poems, Ice Mountain: An Elegy (Phoenicia Publishing, 2017), due out tomorrow. I'm pleased to give this new collection a well-deserved shout-out and to include here the book's trailer, produced by the very talented Marc Neys aka Swoon.
Note: A naturalist and Pennsylvania resident, Dave is donating 10 percent of all sales proceeds to local and regional conservation efforts in central Pennsylvania.
Novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and social critic James Baldwin's manuscript for Remember This House, begun in 1979 and still unfinished when Baldwin died in 1987, was to have been the writer's own recollection of the lives and murders of three friends, a trio of men who made their names during America's Civil Rights Movement: Medgar Evers (1925-1963), Malcolm X (1925-1965), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).
Using the 30 completed pages Baldwin left behind*, Haitian filmmaker and director Raoul Peck brings to the screen, beginning February 3, the documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Magnolia Pictures, 2016). Supplementing Baldwin's original words with archival footage, Peck aims to establish the long line from the Civil Rights Era of the 20th Century to the current #BlackLivesMatter movement, and to address lingering questions about being black in America.
Actor Samuel L. Jackson narrates the movie, which was nominated for "Outstanding Documentary Film" at the NAACP Image Awards and, among a number of other honors, was the winner of "Best Documentary/Nonfiction" from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Roger Cohen, "McGraw-Hill Drops Baldwin Suit", The New York Times, May 19, 1990 (The suit was brought to try to recover Baldwin's advance for Remember This House.)
For artists, looking, remembering, and creating art
are themselves ways of recognizing the ambiguities
of the human and inhuman.
~ Viet Thanh Nguyen
____________________________
Quoted from Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 99.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer (for The Sympathizer); Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
Nguyen's forthcoming book is a short story collection, The Refugees (Grove Press, February 2017).
Today's short is Macrocosm, filmed with a Canon 5D and 100mm macro lens and incorporating space sounds NASA recorded. Those sounds, described as "singing", appear to have come from the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, discovered in 2014 by European Space Agency's Rosetta Plasma Consortium.
The visualization is by Susi Sie; the remix is by sound designer and musician Clemens Haas.
✦ Local figurative painter Judith Peck is the subject of much well-deserved attention. In December, Artists and Makers Studios 2, Rockville, Maryland, hosted her solo show "Judith Peck: The Reachable Shore", and Poets and Artists magazine featured Peck and her work in an end-of-year special, "Figurative Painters 2016". See Peck's free, downloadable 12-page catalogue. This month's issue (#135) of American Art Collector magazine includes an article by John O'Hern about Peck's solo exhibition. Next month, beginning February 24, the exhibition "Sight Unseen", curated by Alia El-Bermani, opens at Abend Gallery, Denver, Colorado; the show runs through March 25.
✦ Winner of the 2013 Benesse Prize, Albania-born Anri Sala has taken over a once-abandoned house in Teshima, Kegawa Prefecture, Japan, to create at Teshima Seawall House a visual and audio artwork he has named All of a Tremble (2016). In addition to drums and music boxes, Sala uses in his commissioned, site-specific installation, which opened this past October, video showing an improvising saxophone and a Japanese bamboo flute ("shakuhachi"). In a statement from curator Akiko Miki, visitors are invited "to reflect on the displacement and lives of human beings as well as to physically experience the meeting of two different worlds: outside and inside, eastern and western, ocean and sky, social and private." The house is open for the next three years.
✦ The 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the 1942 internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, is February 19. In observance, the Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, New York, is presenting two dozen works of the sculptor in "Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center". Noguchi voluntarily was imprisoned. The exhibition, which opened January 18, continues through January 7, 2018.
In addition, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, opens February 19 its exhibition, "Two Views: Photography by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank", featuring photographs of the internment and imprisonment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry. The exhibition, which runs through May 14, features 40 images by Adams and 26 by Frank.
✦ Australian painter and sculptor Shaun Tan, who is also a writer-illustrator and filmmaker, created for his latest book The Singing Bones (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016) a series of 75 miniature tableaux of clay that represent his reimagined takes on the Grimms fairytales. Short excerpts from the book are presented with photos of the figurines, which Tan made and photographed between 2012 and 2015. They are compelling, primal, even disturbing pieces, and nothing like the illustrations we've typically seen. (Tan provides extensive commentary about the work at his Website.)
✭ Artists and Makers Studios 1 and 2, Rockville, Maryland is presenting exhibitions this month at both its Parklawn Drive and Wilkins Avenue locations. You have just five more days to see them.
On Wilkins, A&M 2, visitors will find four separate shows: "Homage: respectful ridicule as art", featuring the wonderful work of caricaturist Mike Caplanis; "Life I knew, Life Anew", marking Nigerian sculptor Maduka Uduh's first exhibition in the United States; "Small Works", an exhibition of 30 of the Washington, D.C.-area's finest emerging and established realist artists; and a solo photography exhibition by Jazalyn Dukes from the Montgomery County (Maryland) Camera Club.
✭ Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York City, is host to Trine Bumiller's fifth solo exhibition in the gallery, "Interference". On view through February 11 are selections from Trine's newest series of paintings, which continue her explorations of landscape and memory. See images of Trine's work.
Also on view through February 11 is "Laura Fayer: Beyond Measure". For this second solo show at the gallery, the New York City-based Fayer is exhibiting multi-layered, abstract works that combine printmaking with collage and painting to evoke the themes of impermanence and imperfection. View images of Fayer's beautiful acrylics and Japanese papers on canvas.
✭ In the Photography Gallery at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, you'll fine "Kertesz", an exhibition of 30 images drawn from VFMA's collection that highlight the influential artist's early career in Hungary and seminal moments during 60 years in Paris and New York City. The exhibition continues through February 12.
✭ Tomorrow, January 21, marks the opening of "Rodin: The Human Experience" at Oregon's Portland Art Museum. Drawn from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections, the exhibition, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the French sculptor's death, showcases 52 bronzes, including The Burghers of Calais, The Night (Double Figure), Dance Movement D, and Monumental Torso of the Walking Man. Also featured are Rodin's portrait sculptures of writers Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac, composer Gustav Mahler, artist Claude Lorraine, and dancer Hanako. The exhibition concludes April 16.
Today's Artist Watch feature at the online arts magazine Escape Into Life presents the beautiful mixed-media work of Alexandra Eldridge.
Alexandra has had more than 40 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows throughout the United States and abroad. Her art has been used for the covers of 10 collections of poetry and appears in murals in the Place de Vosges in Paris, France.
In addition to eight images of Alexandra's recent work, my Artist Watch features includes Alexandra's Artist Statement, a brief biographical statement, galleries representing her work, and her social media sites.
In the video below, Gryphon Rue explains the details of Brown's composition, which was performed in New York City on January 9, 2016, by Talujon Percussion Quartet. Rue curated the performance.
Here's a shorter, TateShots video of the performing sculpture during its United Kingdom premiere in November 2015:
Heavily influenced by Calder's work, Brown (1926-2002), creator of a style of musical construction called "open form" (also called "mobile" compositions), composed his one-of-a-kind score for 100 percussion instruments. Four percussionists set the mobile in motion by striking it, and then they "play" the instruments variously as they "read" (that is, visualize or interpret) Chef d'orchestre'smovements. Pitch and rhythm are denoted by graphical symbols in the score. No two performances of the composition are ever the same.
The premiere performance of Calder Piece, commissioned by the Percussion Quartet of Paris, took place at Theatre de l'Atelier, Paris, in early 1967.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a French poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and art critic, is considered one of the early 20th Century's most important literary lights. Though he lived only 38 years, he not only influenced such artistic movements as Cubism (1907-1922), Futurism (1909-Late 1920s), Dadaism (1916-1924), Surrealism (1924-1966); he also is credited with creating calligrammes, or "poem pictures" (birds, clocks, etc.), in which he experimented with typeface and words' typographical arrangement to suggest or produce a visual image on the page. His calligrammes could be said to be a forerunner of concrete poetry — sometimes called "shape poetry" — of the 1950s and 1960s and of visual poetry today.
The charming and informative TED-Ed video below is an excellent introduction to Apollinaire and his innovations in poetry:
An exhibition of the word pictures from Calligrammes took place at Princeton University Art Museum in 2013. At the link is a 1913 recording of Apollinaire reading his poetry.
Apollinaire continues to inspire. Recently, I came across an inventive project, "Calligrammes — A Song Cycle of Visual Poetry", in which composer Albert Behar interpreted Apollinaire's calligrams as a visual music score for accordian and soprano Ariadne Greif. Designer Gretchen Vitamvas crafted costumes for Behar and Greif in which she "embedded" the poems. Behar and Greif gave a performance of the work in September 2015 at La Maison Francaise at New York University.
This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of writer Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862). Below is a selection from the many activities planned by educational, cultural, and community organizations to celebrate the bicentennial throughout the year. Be sure to check the resources in this post to keep up with events.
(See the planning toolkit page, where you'll find a toolkit for public libraries and a toolkit for high schools and colleges, and scroll to the bottom for other resources, including an application for 10 free copies of Walden and "Civil Disobedience".)
✭ Thoreau translators will present at the Concord Festival of Authors a panel on their motivations for translating Thoreau's work into different languages. (Details about the 2017 festival were not available when this post was written.)
✭ Youth ages 14-21 are invited to enter the "Live Deliberately Essay Contest" in which they respond to a selected Thoreau quotation. The deadline is March 15. One winner in each age group (14-16, 17-18, 19-21) will be awarded a cash prize and a special edition of Walden. The contest is open to youth anywhere in the world.
✭ The Thoreau Bicentennial Annual Gathering, scheduled for July 12 in Concord, will celebrate Thoreau's life, works, and legacy. Walking tours, musical and dramatic performances, and other activities are planned. The keynote speaker will be Terry Tempest Williams.
✭ The Concord Orchestra will perform a "Thoreau Bicentennial Concert" at 8:00 p.m. on March 31 and April 1, featuring guest pianist Randall Hodgkinson. The concert will include a Hoffer piano concerto inspired by Walden, Robert Schumann's Manfred Overture, Liszt's Les Preludes, which is based on the four elements, and the world premiere of composer Eric Sawyer's Civil Disobedience. David Gullette will narrate.
✭ Concord Museum is co-sponsor, with The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, of "This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal", the first major exhibition devoted to Thoreau's life. On view will be 100 items, including journals and personal correspondence, manuscripts, rare books, botanicals, and personal artifacts. The exhibition runs from June 2 to September 10 at The Morgan and then travels to Concord, where it will be on view from September 29, 2017, through January 21, 2018.
✭ On July 19, 8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m., NTQ (New Thread Quartet) will be at 51Walden Performing Arts Center, Concord, to perform David Morneau's new work Not Less Than the Good, described as "a secularized morning prayer service that uses Henry David Thoreau's Walden as the canticle text." The music features a sax quartet, live synthesizers, and recorded sounds, including from Walden Pond. Selected passages of Walden will be read.
✭ North Carolina's Lisa McCarty last year exhibited her photographs of Walden Pond in "Walden Pond in Four Seasons" at the Bull City Arts Collaborative's Upfront Gallery, Durham. Those images are part of McCarty's Transcendental Concord, documenting the sites and landscapes that inspired Transcendentalist philosophy and literature. A book on her project is to be released in July of this year.
✭ The Concord Free Public Library kicks off its celebration with the exhibition "'Concord, which is my Rome': Henry Thoreau and His Home Town", July 7 - October 30; and a series of lectures, beginning July 14. (See "Thoreau Bicentennial Offerings" for details.)
Henry David Thoreau Bicentennial: 1817-2017 on FaceBook and Twitter
Henry David Thoreau Bicentennial Resources Page ~ You'll find here additional links to information about Thoreau's life and writings, including a timeline and lists of misquotations and misattributed quotations.
Also see N.C. Wyeth's Men of Concord , the catalogue for an exhibition last fall at Wallace Kane Gallery, Concord Museum; and David F. Wood's An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum.
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