The short below, The Awakening (Maya Pictures, 2014), is a cinematic treatment of Rumi's poem "The Awakening", filmed, directed, and edited by Ivan Maria Friedman.
The actress, who also provides the voiceover, is Elena Samuylova. The music is Wagner's Das Rheingold, Scene I: Vorspiel.
The poem's text can be found in The Love Poems of Rumi(Harmony, 1998), edited by Deepak Chopra.
Today's post spotlights two noteworthy volumes of protest poems that I've read and highly recommend.
✭ Poems for Political Disaster (2017) ~ Edited by Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer, Stefania Heim, and Matt Lord, the Boston Review's chapbook Poems for Political Disaster is the first in an intended series of responses to the November 2016 presidential election in the United States. U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera provides the Foreword, as well as the concluding poem "the experiment". Among the 35 other well-known contributing poets are Mary Jo Bang, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Stephen Burt, Carolyn Forche, Peter Gizzi, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Amy King, Solmaz Sharif, and Matthew Zapruder. Their voices, while they collectively question, implore, provoke, and call out for resistance, remain as distinctive as they are necessary. Some remark on loss, others foreshadow dystopia, not a few look to hope, many affirm, as does Dara Wier in her poem "In Which Rising Inequality Eventually Triggers Countervailing Social Dislocations",
Anyone who feels good about any of this never wakes up again.
✭ Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton, 2016) ~ Compiled and edited by Philip Cushway, who conceived the two-years-long project, and Michael Warr, the poetry editor, this substantial and impressive, "unapologetically political" anthology offers work by a Who's Who of African American poets, including Amiri Baraka, Kwame Dawes, Nikkey Finney, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Douglas Kearney, Ishmael Reed, Frank X Walker, and Pulitzer Prize-winners Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey.
In addition to the poems by the 43 contributors, the beautifully produced 224-page book includes candid photographs by Victoria Smith of all the poets, as well as brief biographical statements and personal, often moving essays in which the poets trace their paths into poetry and what poetry means to them. Quotes and images of seminal figures, events, and posters that endow the highly relevant poetry with important historical and cultural context, from the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement to the current #BlackLivesMatter movement, also are included. To bring together in a single, cohesive volume so many remarkable bearers of witness — poets who, Warr points out, "are collectively joined through the transformative work of truth-telling" — is a laudable achievement.
This is not a volume to read only once and put away on a shelf, though Warr writes that his hope is "that one day this book is a relic", for the urgency of its words attest to the considerable work remaining to all of us to do, if we are ever to realize what The Rev. Dr. William Barber II says in the Epilogue is "a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls."
Today's short is Dear Mr. Shakespeare, from the British Council's Shakespeare Lives 2016 project. It is inspired by Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. The film's director is Shola Amoo.
✦ The American Craft Council is observing its 75th anniversary this year. To celebrate, it's enclosing in each issue of its American Craft magazine a poster from a collectible series of nine that only subscriber-members will receive. (The magazine publishes six times a year.) The first poster, which appeared in the February/March issue, is the wonderful makers' vision statement.
Note: The ACC's annual Baltimore, Maryland, Craft Show began February 22 and continues through this weekend.
✦ Illustrator and author Christoph Niemann has published a new book: Sunday Sketching (Abrams, October 2016); a German edition is available. Among Nieman's many other books are WORDS (Greenwillow Books, October 2016 ), a visual dictionary for children.
✦ South Africa-born sculptor Estella Fransbergen concentrates her attention of "the expression of human form"; in particular, the female torso. In addition to working with clay and bronze, the primary media for her torsos, Fransbergen uses such materials as crochet wire, glass, twigs, shells, feathers, Swarovski crystals, and pearls, quartz, and coral, to give the torsos both a fuller bodily shape and sense of movement. Her gorgeous creations combine the aspects of strength with the seemingly ethereal. The artist, who lives in the U.S., will be showing her work this weekend at the American Craft Council's Craft Show in Baltimore, Maryland. Visit her Website to view Fransbergen's portfolio.
✭ The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, is presenting "Poets and Painters" through October 30. Among work on view: Darragh Park's painting Oriane (c. 1982) with an autograph poem by James Schuyler; Jennifer Bartlett's painting At Sands Point #16 (1985-1986); Alex Katz's photoengraving Portrait of Frank O'Hara (2009); and Ray Johnson's collage Marianne Moore's Hat (1973).
✭ Work by New Mexico-based multidisciplinary artist and educator Paula Wilson is on view through April 29 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska. Featuring Wilson's paintings, videos, black-and-white prints, and prints on fabric, the solo exhibition, "Paula Wilson: The Backward Glance", addresses themes of race, identity, and objectification of the female body in the context of reimagined historic heroines — the Athenian Acropolis's caryatids — whose narratives Wilson reconstructs to represent the reclaiming of feminine and multicultural power. Several photographs from the installation are at the exhibition link.
✭ Continuing through March 26 at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts, is "John Bisbee: Material Obsession", comprising the site-specific installation of welded spikes, Out of the Garden, including the sculptures Viper (2016) and Fruit of My Roots (2016), and Text (2016). Adhering to his manta, "Only Nails, Always Different", Bisbee crafts his work from the single medium he has used for almost three decades. See Bisbee's recent work for views of the remarkable installation.
✭ Like John Bisbee, sculptor Al Farrow also works with limited material: second-hand guns and ammunition that he repurposes to create extraordinary objects, including reliquaries, mosques, cathedrals, and a variety of other devotional pieces such as menorahs. Farrow's talents as showcased in the exhibition "Divine Ammunition: The Sculpture of Al Farrow", at Washington's Bellevue Arts Museum through May 7, will leave you amazed. A generous selection of Farrow's architectural structures can be seen at the exhibition link above and on Farrow's Website (see Reliquaries).
Here's a 2009 video with Farrow at his Marin, California, studio (the video runs approximately 28 minutes):
Today, Thursday's Three spotlights a trio of noteworthy art titles.
✦ The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels (Other Press, January 31, 2017) ~ Historian and writer Anka Muhlstein, winner of the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie and two-time recipient of the French Academy's History Prize, has written biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, and Astolphe de Custine, among others; with her husband, Louis Begley, she co-wrote Venice for Lovers (2005). Her new book, The Pen and the Brush, focuses on such writers as Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Guy de Maupassant and the role of painters, such as Cezanne and Delacroix, as characters in their novels.
On March 23, 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m., Muhlstein will give a lecture, answer questions, and sign copies of her book at the Alliance Francaise of Greenwich, Greenwich, Connecticut.
✦ Provoke: Photography in Japan Between Protest and Performance 1960 - 1975 (Steidl, 2016) ~ Accompanying the traveling exhibition "Provoke", at the Art Institute of Chicago through April 30, the 680-page, scholarly catalogue focuses on the short-lived, experimental Japanese magazine Provoke — its creators, its historical context, and its post-war influence on photography. The book is in English and includes 600 images.
✦ The Materiality of Mourning (Harvard Art Museums, January 2017) ~ Harvard Art Museums curator Mary Schneider Enriquez examines the past 15 years (2001 to present) of the sculptor and installation artist's work on political violence and oppression, with particular attention given to the development and evolution of her approach, her artistic practice, and her use of organic and nontraditional materials. Also including an essay by conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar and a contribution from Salcedo, the illustrated book accompanies the exhibition "Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning" at Harvard Art Museums through April 9.
Chinese artist Jiang Zhi, a graduate of the China Academy of Fine Arts, practiced journalism from 1995 to 2005, work that exposed him continually to important sociocultural issues — for example, issues about the body and gender; materialism and mass consumerism; isolation and estrangement; fate, change, and transformation — that he addresses in his art using video, which he favors, and other contemporary media. His use of light, color, and cloth lends an often deeply expressive feeling to Jiang's art that sometimes can seem strikingly at odds with the narrative of the subject matter, especially where Jiang incorporates materials from social events, social media, and public figures such as Mao Zadong and Deng Xiaoping. (See Dun Dongdong's article "Binary System".) Reviewers of his work frequently reference the metaphorical and poetic qualities of Jiang's art (see Jiang's Cornerand Above the white), the latter particularly effective in pointing up the contrasting realities the art underscores, as in, for example, Black Sentences, I am your poetry No. 1 and No. 6, and Jiang's video Fly, Fly, which depicts a hand miming a bird in flight (escaping?), or at least flapping its wings, even though the reality is that it's confined to a cramped space. Some work, such as I am your poetry No. 4, are as unsettling as they are dramatic.
One photographic series that I am particularly drawn to is Jiang's multidisciplinary Love Letters,(2011-2014), in which he contrasts the symbolism of fire and flowers (he used orchids, lilies, roses, sunflowers, and peonies), the real and the illusory, violence and beauty, life and death, the temporal and the ever-lasting. Learning subsequently that Jiang created the series after the 2010 death of his wife, who was just 37, and that his wife's Chinese name meant "Orchid" upsets pre-conceived notions about that symbolism and artistic intent. (Six images from Love Letters are at White Rabbit; click on Portfolio. Additional images may be seen online at M97 Gallery, White Cube, Artsy, My Modern Met, Visual Sundae, and Trendhunter.)
Jiang Zhi Website (Note: The Website is in Chinese, although there are in Criticism a number of very interesting critical articles or notes about Jiang's art that appear in both Chinese and English.)
The short below, Hoosier Quilt (ThinkAhead Studios, 2017), directed by Jason Drake and Lexi Hiland, features 2016-2017 Indiana Poet Laureate Shari Wagner's poem of the same name. Showcasing local artists' creativity, it was created for the Indiana Arts Commission in celebration of the IAC's 50th Anniversary.
The music is by Timothy Carlos and is performed by Natalie Cole, Logan Jones, Kim Busic, and Carol Weirich. Featured are Jerry Karwowski (Painter), Frank Steans (Guitarist), Lexi Hiland (Pianist), Matt McMahon (Wanderer), Emilia Floody (Dancer), and Daren Redman (Quilter). Grace Milligan provides narration. Some footage is from the Indiana Department of Tourism Development.
One of Vassar College's many famous alumnae is the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (aka "Vincent") (February 22, 1892 - October 19, 1950), who was a student at the college from 1913 to 1917; she published her poem "Renascence" in 1912 and was already known before her arrival on campus. Her legacy at the college is "significant," says Special Collections Librarian Ronald Patkus.* That legacy is now the subject of the exhibition "Edna St. Vincent Millay: Treasures from Steepletop", on view in Vassar's Thompson Memorial Library and the Art Library through June 11. (Now a museum open from May through October, Steepletop, in Austerlitz, New York, was Millay's home. Formerly, it was a berry farm. Vassar College is in Poughkeepsie, New York.)
The free, open-to-the-public exhibition, organized by Patkus and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, commemorates the 125th anniversary of Millay's birth, focusing on the importance to the poet of both Vassar and Steepletop. Interestingly, the exhibition is organized by season. On display are photos of Millay at Steepletop; excerpts from letters, first-edition books, and poems that complement each seasonal section of the exhibit; and such personal items as Millay's hunting rifle, the typewriter that traveled with Millay, and Millay's china, crystal, and jewelry. The artifacts, says Millay literary executor and scholar Holly Peppe, reflect the Bohemian lifestyle Millay and her friends enjoyed on the Steepletop hill, from swimming au naturel in a spring-fed pool to partying at an outdoor bar. . . ."*
The curator of the Vassar exhibition is Mark O'Berski, vice president of the Millay Society.
A smaller exhibition, "Millay at Vassar", opens at Steepletop in May. Drawn from the college's archives and curated by Gretchen Lieb, Vassar's reference librarian, the exhibition will bring together originals and facsimiles of works by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
In addition, in the Photo Gallery of Vassar's art center is "A Certain Zest: Artists' Portraits of Edna St. Vincent Millay" (referenced above). It runs in conjunction with "Treasures from Steepletop".
_________________________________
* Quoted from Office of Communications's exhibition announcement, which is also the principal source of information for this post. A number of images accompany the announcement.
The Library of Congress also is the repository for portrait photographs of Millay by Berenice Abbott, Arnold Genthe, and Carl Van Vechten. Also see American Treasures of the Library of Congress, A Voice of Her Generation, where you'll find an image of a pencil holograph of the unfinished original draft (c. 1912) of the poem "Renascence".
Today's short is the trailer for the critically acclaimed In the Last Days of the City (2016), the first feature-length film from Egyptian director Tamer El Said. Written by El Said and Rasha Salti, the screenplay, about a filmmaker, Khalid, in Cairo in 2009 who is trying to make a movie about the city even as he struggles to deal with loss in his life. To motivate Khalid, his friends send him footage about their lives in Beirut, Baghdad, and Berlin.
The elegiac, 118-minute film, described as "docu-fiction", has been screened at numerous film festivals (it premiered at Berlin International Film Festival last year) and has received a number of awards.
✦ Belgium's Jeanne Opgenhaffen uses natural (white) and colored porcelain, as well as printed porcelain, to create her gorgeous pieces. Widely exhibited, Opgenhaffen's work can be found in museum and private collections throughout the world, and has been the subject of numerous articles in art periodicals.
✦ The nonprofit Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, has created an interactive Website unlike any you've seen before. Part of the California College of the Arts, it is both an exhibition space and a research center. The institute, by the way, sells limited-edition artworks.
✦ The new artbook Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital (Karma, January 2017) publishes for the first time a series of drawings that Applebroog made while institutionalized in 1969. Sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, the drawings are in graphite, India ink, and watercolors and were created following Applebroog's breakdown, a period when she "withdrew from the world entirely." The book's text is by Jo Applin.
Cover Art
Applebroog is the subject of Call Her Applebroog(2016), a documentary by Beth B. Here's the trailer:
✦ In the video below, artist and filmmaker Lamia Joreige of Lebanon discusses her multi-media installation Under-Writing Beirut, an exploration of the city's history of conflict. Joreige is one of six artists (of more than 700 nominated) shortlisted for Artes Mundi 7, a major international art prize and exhibition at National Museum Cardiff and Chapter Gallery, in Cardiff, Wales, continuing through February 26.
✭ The Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, is host to the multidimensional "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation", featuring collaborating artists Deborah Barlow (painter), Todd Hearon (poet), Jung Mi Lee (pianist; transdisciplinary artist), and Jon Sakata (concert pianist; transdisciplinary artist). A shout-out to gallery director Lauren O'Neal is well-deserved. The show runs through April 15.
Deborah Barlow, Nadiki 3
Mixed Media on Wood
Image Courtesy of Artist
For a detailed description of the project, see Deborah Barlow's Slow Muse post, "Clew: A Collaboration". Installation shots can be found at "Clew: In Process". Additional information and images can be found at the exhibition link.
✭ At the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, flood, fire, earthquake, drought, and other disasters, natural and human-made, are the focus of "Art of Disaster", continuing through April 23. On view are works by Washington Allston, Leonard Baskin, Harrison Bird Brown, Augustus Buhler, Jonathan Fisher, Winslow Homer, James Hope, Waldo Pierce, and N.C. and Andrew Wyeth. Several images are available at the exhibition link.
✭ Santa Fe's New Mexico Museum of Art is presenting "Conversations in Painting, Early 20th Century to Post-War American Art" through April 30. The exhibition, drawn from the museum's collection, encompasses such painting movements as the Depression Era, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Featured is work by Robert Henri, John Sloan, Gene Kloss, Florence Pierce, Raymond Jonson, Agnes Pelton, Frederick Hammersley, Agnes Martin, Hans Hoffman, and Mala Breuer.
✭ Photographer Lee Friedlander's series Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom is the subject of "Let Us March On" at Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey. On view through July 9, the exhibition commemorates the 60th anniversary of the series, displaying it publicly for the first time. The series is Friedlander's only work specific to the Civil Rights Movement.
On March 9, 5:30 p.m., the museum is host to "Documenting the African American Liberation Struggle Today: Artists in Conversation", with exhibition organizer La Tanya S. Autry and others. On April 26, 12:30 p.m., a gallery talk, "Memory's Reflections: Some Thoughts on the Photography of the Civil Rights Marches", is scheduled with Laura Wexler, a Yale University professor. Additional exhibition-related events are included in the exhibition press release (pdf).
The Providence-based artist's photographic imagery is especially notable. Many of her florals are exquisite; in particular, see in the photography section of her online portfolio her landscapes inspired by Chinese paintings and her Scholars Rock series, which are extraordinary.
Here's a 2012 video introduction to Blacklock and her work:
I'm delighted to present the work of photographer Kelle ("Kelly") Sauer in today's Artist Watch column at the online arts magazine Escape Into Life.
Entirely self-taught, Kelle, who describes herself as "a poet-photographer", is known for her wedding and lifestyle imagery. Her beautiful, light-filled work has been featured in a wide variety of online and print publications, including French Wedding Style, Style Me Pretty, and Elizabeth Ann Designs.
Today's Artist Watch column showcases eight of Kelle's digital photographs, an Artist Statement, a brief biographical statement, and Kelle's social media sites.
Van der Meijs writes in his Artist Statement, "Each work is a metaphorical and conceptual treatment of sound, space, time and material [that] lend a narrative quality to the machine-like character of the work, causing [it] to transcend [the] merely technological nature and raise the question to what extent our actions and expectations are conditioned."
✦ "A Thousand Mornings in New Bedford" ~ Located at New Bedford City Hall through March 3, this exhibition of the work of six local artists — Marissa Bolton, Jacob Gina, Gregg Harper, Heather Hobler, Dudley Moor, and Ruth Rego — takes as its theme Cape Cod poet Mary Oliver's "I Go Down to the Shore". In interpreting the nautical theme, the artists created collages, photographs, paintings, and sculpture. Sponsored by New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks!, New Bedford, Massachusetts, the show marks a new partnership between the mayor's office and NBAM/ArtWorks!
✦ "Jun Fujita: Oblivion" ~ On view through April 21 at the Poetry Foundation's Chicago headquarters, this exhibition features the lesser-known landscape photography of poet Jun Fujita (1888-1963), as well as ephemera from his life and photojournalism.
✦ "21 Etchings and Poems" ~ Curated by Courtney Spencer Eppel, a museum studies graduate student, this exhibition at Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, New York, features the landmark pairing of 21 artists and authors and the unique artworks that resulted. On view through May 14, the exhibition brings together the pairings of such artists and poets as Peter Grippe and Dylan Thomas; Willem de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg; Letterio Calapai and William Carlos Williams; and Franz Kline and Frank O'Hara. A selection of five images is available at the exhibition link above.
The 21 etchings and poems project was conceived by Peter Grippe (1912-2002), a sculptor and printmaker, in 1951; 50 numbered copies of the portfolio and 12 sets of artist proofs resulted (one is in the Library of Congress). A complete portfolio was exhibited at Woodward Gallery in 2012.
✦ "Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space" ~ Opening March 28 at the Getty Research Institute, Gallery I, Los Angeles, the exhibition brings together prints, artist books, journals, and archives documenting the concrete poetry movement. Work by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), Augusto de Campos and his Brazilian colleagues, Eugen Gomringer, and key contemporary figures who have led the movement in new directions is showcased. Running through July 30, the exhibition also examines how Finlay and de Campos invented such new poetic forms as "poster poems" and "standing poems" and reproduced their work across media to render poems into 3-D objects and digital animations.
Anise Koltz, Poet; Vice President, European Academy of Poetry; Member, Mallarme Academy (Paris) and Grand-Ducal Institute of Arts and Letters (Luxembourg)
Today's short is the sensitively made Last Letters (Contented Productions, 2016), directed by Nils Clauss. Made in South Korea, this moving documentary is about the April 16, 2014, Sewol ferry accident in which 304 of 476 persons, most of them teenagers, perished. Much of the film, which has English subtitles, comprises interviews with families of eight of the victims.
✦ Botanical documentation of rare and endangered species of prairie wildflowers is a specialty of Heeyoung Kim, recently the subject of a WTTW Chicago PBS feature. See her exemplary portfolios.
✦ Michael John Goodman has launched the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, comprising 3,000 illustrations from the 19th Century Complete Works. The archive is searchable. (My thanks to BBC Arts for the link.)
✦ Another source of original, limited-edition prints is The Drawing Center, New York City. Among the artists whose prints are available are Sean Scully, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, and Martin Wilner.
✦ In the Louisiana Channel video below, Yayoi Kusama is interviewed in her Tokyo studio:
The video was produced and edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Laerkesen. The interview took place in June 2015.
The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., opens "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors" on February 23. Advance timed passes, available beginning February 13, are required for the immersive exhibition, which will continue through May 14. Also on view in the museum's Sculpture Garden is Kusama's Pumpkin (2016).
✭ If you're on a lunch break near the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, stop in anytime through June 4 to see David Ellis's Animal, a nine-and-a-half-minute animated video installation comprising 75,000 still images. Ellis's collaborators were cinematographer Chris Keohane and composer Roberto Lange. The piece was commissioned in 2010 by the University of Texas at Austin.
✭ Continuing through February 26 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, is the biennial "Young Tennessee Artists", a juried exhibition showcasing two-dimensional art by high school students. The sixth edition includes drawings, paintings, photographs, digital prints, and mixed-media work by 30 students, all enrolled in AP and IB studio arts programs in the 2015-2016 academic year. The participating youths' work was selected from more than 800 entries.
✭ In Greenwich, Connecticut, the Bruce Museum has mounted "Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master", the first retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years of Sisley's art. On view through May 21, the exhibition spotlights approximately 50 of Sisley's paintings, loaned by private collectors and major museums in Europe and North America. The Bruce Museum is the only venue in the U.S.; following its closing at the museum, the show will travel to Hotel de Caumont, Centre d'Art, Aix-en-Provence, France, where it will be on view through October 2017.
An illustrated catalogue (Editions Hazan, Paris, February 28, 2017) is available. A "Monday Morning Lecture" series and a film series, The Great Artists: Their Lives, Times and Works — The Impressionists, are among the exhibition-related programs. (Check the museum's Website for details.)
✭ Tonight, in Noyes Gallery I, Stockton University's Noyes Museum of Art in New Jersey hosts the opening reception for "A Dark Wood", which takes as its theme "being lost in the darkness of our fears, doubts and negativity." The exhibition, which continues through April 23, includes a range of media, including sculptural drawings and other paper art with 3-D aspects (raised designs, embossed images, cast paper pulp).
✭ Paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Isabelle and Scott Black Collection can be seen through June 4 at Maine's Portland Museum of Art. A critical survey of figurative art from the last quarter of the 19th Century through the first half of the 20th Century, "The Mistress and the Muse" examines the relationship between portraiture and figure studies and the various artistic approaches to depictions of specific individuals and portrayals of figures in genre or allegorical scenes.
Posts
