from the collection of Jacob Tierney

Heated Rivalry, episode 3

(created by Jacob Tierney)

Kip and Scott go to a gallery

to see a show by an artist that Kip likes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heated_Rivalry

"Jacob Tierney Honored with the Showrunner Award"

Critics Choice Celebration of LGBTQ+ Cinema & Television

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHthSyVploM

Same painting in an episode of Heated Rivalry (probably filmed mid 2025) and in a video about creator/writer/director Jacob Tierney winning an award in mid 2026. I guess it could be a prop in both situations but I prefer to think of it as a work in Tierney's art collection.

brutalism to industrial

After several inspiring, friendly, and collegial days at the 54th annual ARLIS/NA conference, I took off this morning from the Hôtel Bonaventure in Montreal toward New York State. The Bonaventure is at the top (10th floor plus) of a brutalist masterwork built for Expo 67. I am fond of brutalism but the hotel is very much closed off from the outside world. There are courtyards (with ducks) as well as the swimming pool area. It was hard to know what was North or South when you were on the conference floor. Our hotel room looked out onto the city but other folks had courtyard views.

Since I drove to Montreal, it was possible to switch out the traveling a little bit. I went up to Montreal via Syracuse, crossing into Canada at Alexandria Bay. The flatness of the Ontario and Quebec landscape on the North side of the Saint Lawrence River was a surprise to me. I headed home straight South from Montreal, into the Adirondacks toward Albany in order to head over to Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts, for visits to the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA respectively.

MASS MoCA's shorter-term exhibitions for this year do not open until later in May but the spread out spaces of the industrial buildings with plenty of windows and a variety of things to view through them were an elixir for a tired brain. I had already seen the Jeffrey Gibson show but it was more compelling to just let it wash over me this time. Immersive, they say. I had seen the "New York State of Mind" show but the 1975 picture with Patti Smith at a political protest where the sign next to her says "Stop U.S. arming the shah's fascist regime" resounded quite differently than it did a year ago. One of the pieces in Zora J Murff's show was "Bully Pulpit" from which her recorded voice includes text inspired by Black radical activist and political prisoner George Jackson who was killed by guards in 1971. "When my people receive justice, I am sure I will receive it too." The text of Jimena Sarno's two-channel video installation "Las Tres Gracias" draws on creation legends and Third World literature. One of the days (ninth?) of creation "marked the nether world for those who have poison in their souls."

The picture is an aerial view of the industrial buildings that have been converted into the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams, Massachusetts, a few miles East of Williamstown.

anybody got $170 million?

When I lived in New York City from 1995 until 2009, there was a significant coalescing of art galleries in West Chelsea. Primarily in the blocks east and west of Tenth Avenue, from West 17th to West 29th. Galleries that had been in SoHo were pushed out by rising rents. It was massive fun to go galleryhopping in those days and one of my favorite buildings was 526 West 26th Street.

(James Estrin / New York Times)

I sometimes would walk up and down the stairs as well as back and forth on several of the floors. Other times, I might take the elevator up to the top floor with galleries and walk down. The elevator was operated by a person and had one of those gate doors.

By the time I moved upstate in 2009, the smaller galleries were being pushed out of West Chelsea as gentrification in general and specifically development around the High Line forced up rents and sale prices. Crowds and monster tall buildings proliferated. Even the Whitney Museum of American Art built its new building in the southern reaches of the arts district.

Now, Deb has sent me an article from the NY Times about the listing of 526 West 26th for sale and how the sale could displace many artists and art spaces. (The picture above is from the article.) The building is being sold by the estate of Gloria Naftali, one of the early galleriests that opened in the building in 1995. Her husband had originally bought the building as a warehouse for his garment business. The Greene Naftali Gallery is still operating and has spaces on the eighth floor and now also on the ground floor. I remember how the upper floor space was significantly renovated and enlarged several times. In the picture, I see "LEVENBETTS" on a window. They are one of the smaller architectural firms that I encounter in my Avery indexing.

The building is included in the West Chelsea Historic District so there's probably little danger of it being demolished. Still, it has played, and continues to play, a significant role in the art life and life of artists in New York City.

stops along the way on my southern road trip

It may be mostly for my own memory aid, but I thought I would do a post with the overnight and other significant stops along my southern road trip loop from Alfred down to Orlando and then over to Biloxi before heading back North.

• Washington, D.C.: Sargent & Spain exhibition at the National Gallery (including chat with curator Sarah Cash and talking with NGA catalogers), This Present Moment at the Renwick, Giuseppe de Nittis at the Phillips, MASS Design Group at the National Building Museum, plus SAAM, NPG, Hirshhorn
• Richmond, Va.: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, Valentine Museum, VCU Institute of Contemporary Art (the building designed by Steven Holl, the museum was closed on New Year's Eve)
• Durham, N.C.: drop off some magazines for USModernist, shop for Sunday Times at The Streets at Southpoint (a new mall pretending to be a good old Main Street and doing a decent job of it)
• Florence, S.C.: Florence County Museum (art and history), visit Jeanette and Wanda
• Charleston, S.C.: Gibbes Museum of Art (including Bo Bartlett show on the top floor)
• Beaufort, S.C.
• Savannah, Ga.: Telfair Academy (with plaster casts of Laocoön and other classical works)
• St Augustine, Fla.: the old fortifications (17th century)
• Orlando, Fla.: visit Elizabeth G, Florida Polytechnic University (new building by Santiago Calatrava), Florida Southern College (buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright including a Usonian house), Orlando Museum of Art (exhibition Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and good selection of older and newer works from their American collections), Mennello  Museum of American Art (exhibition In Conversation: Will Wilson & Edward S. Curtis)
• Fanning Springs, Fla.: ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee meeting via Zoom
• Apalachicola, Fla.: overnight spot, just love saying the word
• Lillian, Ala.: Johnny B's Front Porch for Taco Tuesdays
• Foley, Ala.: Book Exchange (the clerk very nicely helped me with the $100 bill that came out of the ATM without sufficient warning)
• Biloxi, Miss.: Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art (one of the major impetuses for this road trip and totally met expectations, museum designed by Frank Gehry)
• Meridian, Miss.: mostly overnight stop but now I wish I'd checked it out a little more
• Montgomery, Ala.: drove around Selma on my way to Montgomery (the tornado struck a few hours later), Lowndes County Interpretive Center of the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail between the two cities, National Memorial to Peace and Justice (designed by MASS Design Group), Legacy Museum, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald House Museum
• Tuskegee, Ala.: Tuskegee University with a chapel by Paul Rudolph and other buildings either by Rudolph or showing his strong influence (Fry and Welch, former Tuskegee architecture professors, collaborated on the chapel)
  

From Tuskegee, I started taking mostly interstate highways and was seriously headed toward home in Alfred, New York. I whizzed past Atlanta, Charlotte, Roanoke, Staunton, Harrisburg, and Corning. A couple days of driving most of the daylight hours. Not my favorite way to go from one place to another but when it's time to head home, the interstates do a pretty good (if jarring) job of it.

A couple miscellaneous observations: raptors love to fly over the interstates (must be the road kill), lightly traveled U.S. highways are generally in better shape than the heavily traveled interstates (well, duh).

My Flickr photostream has a picture album from the road. Here's a picture of the trailhead parking area where I attended the CAC meeting in Fanning Springs, Florida.

Southern road trip dream

For years, ever since I heard about it, I have wanted to visit the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi. It finally came together when I got excited about seeing the "Sargent and Spain" show at the National Gallery of Art, curated by Sarah Cash, erstwhile colleague at the Amon Carter, and collaborators. I realized these were a couple push pins in the map of a road trip in the southern United States. As I started to formulate the trip and talk to friends about it, they'd squirm at the thought of traveling in the Deep South. What about homophobia? What about Trumpism? What about ...?

Now two weeks into the trip, I have been to a wonderful selection of museums, some for the first time ever, some for the first time in years, others oft visited. I started in Washington with the National Gallery where I got a chance to talk with Sarah for a half hour or so and several NGA Library colleagues and friends for about an hour. There was a wonderful craft show at the Renwick. The Obama portraits were back at the National Portrait Gallery after a tour. The National Building Museum had an overview show of the work of MASS Design Group whose National Memorial for Peace and Justice is still coming up (tomorrow) in Montgomery, Alabama. I got to the Smithsonian American Art Museum which is always a delight. The Giuseppe de Nittis show at the Phillips was really interesting and enlightening.

Amusingly, I got to valet park my own car at the hotel I was staying at (Normandy Hotel, near Connecticut Avenue and the Washington Hilton). The clerk on duty couldn't manage a stick shift. After not driving for several days, I couldn't either, as I tried to get out of the garage under the building with a steep driveway where you had to stop after tripping the device that opened the garage door. I only stalled twice.

I started this post to describe how much I was enjoying the Alabama and Mississippi portions of the road trip and, so far, have gotten distracted by the bigger narrative. More on all that later.

My first view of Alabama was the bright blue waters of Perdido Bay from the bridge/causeway between Florida and Alabama. I was about ready for lunch and there was The Front Porch. There's a bit of a name authority issue: the sign said Lillian's Front Porch, the menu said Johnny B's Front Porch. Lillian is the town. The sign out front said it was Taco Tuesdays. The tacos were fine, the setting was comfortable as you can see from this picture. The waitress was pleasant and teased me about doing my homework as I wrote in my journal.

I made it to Moss Point, Mississippi (about 25 miles from Biloxi) for my overnight hotel. Darkness was descending and there was a discussion group Zoom to get ready for. Next morning, I got off toward Biloxi with some compensation for the museum not opening until 10 am. That is, I dawdled over Artle and Wordle and went into Ocean Springs to check out the Walter Anderson Museum of Art which didn't open until 11 am and didn't call to me. It was foggy and lovely over the Gulf of Mexico as I drove along the beach highway.

And, then, there was the Ohr-O'Keefe. It was a few minutes before 10 am and I walked around to get a sense of the exterior. The museum was designed by Frank Gehry. It consists of several buildings and some of the buildings are pods. One of the pods is not finished inside and the museum is now using it as a display space with its raw guts showing. George Ohr called himself "The Mad Potter of Biloxi." His work is pretty rich and complex. There were plenty of his pots on display but not so many that you were ready to scream "Enough!"

My expectations of the museum were very high but the museum and collection (and even the lunch at the museum café) were fulfilling and deeply satisfying.

There are more pictures in my Flickr album:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/albums/72177720304864649

Sonya Clark's truce flag

At last night's discussion group, the topic was Ukraine: when did the war begin? is "war" the term you'd use? why did it start? how much money has the U.S. spent in support of Ukraine in the last nine months? is that amount reasonable? organizations that funnel donations to the Ukrainian cause? to Ukrainians? would you send money? specific support for Ukrainian relief or to organizations that work in many situations, e.g., International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders, American Friends Service Committee (or other service committees)? how has your opinion changed over the course of the year? can the U.N. or the international courts play a role in ending the Ukrainian conflict?

Most of the people in the discussion supported aid for Ukraine, including military aid. I mentioned in an email before the discussion (which was online rather than in-person) that I was torn by the whole thing. I'm an adamant pacifist but I couldn't explain what that meant in this context. I do believe strongly that war is generally (always?) a result of earlier war or conflict. How do you get to peace? Is it just utopian and totally unachievable? Quakers and Mennonites and others have been trying for centuries to achieve peace. Martin Luther King said that "true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

I'm in Washington at the moment and visited the "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World" at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. Lots of powerful work but one work that seemed to me to address my dilemma about explaining pacifism. The wall text near Monumental by Sonya Clark read "What if this flag of truce was the flag we knew, instead of the Confederate battle flag?"

The large textile work is based on the piece of cloth flown at Appomattox Court House in 1865 to indicate the surrender of the Confederate army. The cloth is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian. This large version was made by Sonya Clark in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. It was shown in a 2019 exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. For more information on the project: https://americanart.si.edu/blog/sonya-clark-art

Conflicts and wars involve two or more parties. We need justice but, mostly, we just need to all be willing to say "no" to resolving our conflicts through violence. I am discouraged by the situation in Ukraine but I know that peace is impossible when military response is honored.

separated at birth: goats and antiquities

The Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University currently has an exhibition of "Lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt by David Roberts, Royal Academician." I know I recataloged a bunch of large portfolios, including like Roberts if not Roberts himself, when I was in the reclass section at Cornell between 1969 and 1971. Here's one of the lithographs that especially caught my eye in the exhibition.

"Goats at the entrance to the caves of Beni Hassan"

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)

Part of the reason it really caught my eye is that we had seen sheep and goats at the ruins of Solunto. We heard their bells before we saw them. We were heading along the northern coast of Sicily, about to return our rental car and spend a last couple days in Palermo before heading to Rome and home.

We also have seen goats being used for grass and shrub control in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It's a fairly old park but not antique.

Zoe Leonard, Danh Vo, and Adrian Piper

The Zoe Leonard and Danh Vo exhibitions were on my list for the two NYC days I spent after three weeks in Italy. I had seen a good number of the works in the Zoe Leonard show at the Whitney and it was great to see the Fae Richards Photo Archive again. I really like the pieces that combine everyday objects and demographics/popularity. For example, the Niagara Falls postcards were stacked by viewpoint. Some viewpoints were only evident on one postcard, others on many postcards. Niagara Falls cards were also spread out on a gallery wall.

Another work had editions of How to Make Good Pictures arranged in stacks of copies of a particular edition. This was displayed in a gallery with a window wall looking out over the Hudson River. There was construction going on across the West Side Highway, where the piers used to be. I was thinking about the wonderful arch, remnants of a warehouse, that is off-and-on threatened for demolition but it's actually got a website now: http://pier54.com/ -- so maybe the threats are in abeyance.

The Danh Vo show was very interesting too. The Guggenheim was jammed on Friday, April 6th, when I was there. I mean jammed. The fellow in the Aye Simon Reading Room said it had been jammed for about a week. Easter rush? Lots of people speaking other than English. European spring break? Vo's work is complex and occasionally rambunctious. Folks seemed to be there for the Frank Lloyd Wright and were making comments like "Oh, look, a chandelier." Vo's chandeliers are from spaces of historical importance like the hotel conference room where the Paris Peace Accords were signed. It was actually difficult at first to be there but I worked at getting over that and wrapped myself in a visual and auditory bubble. Having just been traveling internationally, I was quite amused by the slices of a fruitwood Saint Joseph in carry-on bags. Christie and I often stopped on the street in Italy when we saw a stationery or pen shop. Another of Vo's works was Esterbrook fountain pen points used for signing the nuclear test ban treaty.

As much as I enjoyed these two shows, it was a late addition -- the Adrian Piper show at MoMA -- that really knocked my socks off. I was fairly familiar with her work but had never seen a comprehensive show. She is just a bit younger than I am. She was doing traditional work in high school and found the conceptual and minimal artists when she came to New York City to study art. I'm not a practicing artist but I similarly evolved in what I wanted to look at at about the same time, the mid-late 1960s and into the 1970s, when Lucy Lippard was writing Six Years and the next generation of artists was succeeding the Abstract Expressionists (to massively overgeneralize). The political overtones are strong here as they are in both Zoe Leonard and Danh Vo.

I did do a bit of other gallery hopping and saw some friends for meals but it was a real rich couple days after three weeks of wonderment in Italy.

Nervi, on Good Friday

We headed out to Nervi today, at the eastern edge of the public transit system of Genoa. It's €1.50 for 100 minutes from validation on the Genoa buses, funiculars, elevators (yes, for up the hills), and other public transit. The Parchi Nervi includes several villas with art collections as well as the gardens which are currently closed for improvements. We also went out there for a bit of seaside. Rain was forecast and threatened now and again but we only felt drops a couple times all day.

We were thrilled by objects in the Wolfsoniana such as the Autarca by Angelo Fasce which holds all the stuff you'd need for quite a sumptuous but self-contained dining experience.

After lunch by the sea, I went to the Galleria d'arte moderna and discovered the work of Nicolò Barabino, among others. Lots of good 19th-century paintings. The 20th-century stuff didn't grab me so much. This is Barabino's Abyssinian.

Cbristie decided to sit by the sea while I went to GAM. We had a gelato when I was done with GAM and took the bus back to the center of Genoa. Then up the funicular to Antica Farmacia dei Frati Carmelitani Scalzi where Christie looked for some herbal remedies. It was a lovely space and a modest church. We walked back to the funicular and encountered yet another Liberty villino on the square at the top of the Funicolare Sant'Anna.

I don't know the architect and wonder if it's another Coppedè.

More pictures on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/albums/72157694674348325

elegies

February was a busy month with three of my regular conferences occurring between the 8th and 28th. The American Library Association conference was in Denver; the CAA: Advancing Art & Design (formerly known as College Art Association) conference was in Los Angeles; the Art Libraries Society of North America conference was in New York City. Each was good and enjoyable in the normal ways: meetings, seeing friends, visiting cities. This year, I was able to see a number of friends in the various cities beyond the normal crowd. It was really wonderful. And of course there was art to see in each city.

This arrangement was part of the Jorge Otero: Elegies exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Three of the works are by Otero, the other three are Elegies to the Spanish Republic by Robert Motherwell. I had gone to the Bronx Museum to see the Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect exhibition and was delighted to also find the Otero. The Matta-Clark show included a video taken during the making of the Conical Intersect in Paris and showing the folks walking or driving past as they watch the crazy guys cutting holes in the abandoned building near the construction site of the Centre Pompidou.

completing the circle

On Friday, I went up to Buffalo to hear one of the FLW 150 lectures at the Darwin Martin House, being held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright. This one was by Michael Desmond of LSU on "Shifting Perspectives of Form: Frank Lloyd Wright's Circular Houses." Circular houses would get me every time. It seems so central, so utopian, so right, so Palladio. Desmond talked more, however, about how Wright broke the circle to pull our eye toward a view or through the house. Desmond lyrically traced Wright's career, starting with the Blossom House, the plan of which uses the 9-square grid which comes from Palladio and the Villa Rotunda. But the 9-square is easy to encircle. It tames nature. It gives order. I really enjoyed the lecture and it was evocative. Many of the circular houses that Desmond talked about are relatively late works and not many were built. Desmond noted that Wright left more than 700 unbuilt projects.

In the question-and-answer period after the talk, Desmond paraphrased Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying that if we see an arc, we fill in the circle. And that is what Wright was doing, except when he was purposefully playing with the circles or arcs to disrupt the circle. It was then I realized that I'd experienced a similar relationship to incomplete circles earlier in the day.

One of the exhibitions on view at the Albright-Knox was "Drawing: The Beginning of Everything" and one of the works in the exhibition was Untitled (2011) by Jacob Kassay. On the left is a shaped canvas with an slightly curved right edge. On the right are two small panels with a line drawn in graphite on the wall, also slightly arced. Together, the arc shapes could form a circle but you have to complete the circle with your eyes.

Jacob Kassay

Untitled, 2011

Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2011, 2011:49a-d

https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/201149a-d-untitled

As I drove home in the rainy darkness, I kept myself company by singing "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" as Joan Baez sings it on David's Album.

walking and eating

The day before yesterday, I was meandering (walking) around the website for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a museum in Lincoln, Mass., that I have visited several times. I was lucky enough to meet DeWitt Godfrey's work there before I met him on the CAA trip to Cuba in 2015.

This work was on display in the summer of 2014. I came across the listing on the deCordova website for a summer 2015 exhibition entitled "Walking Sculpture 1967-2015."

Sorry I missed it, particularly because I am fond of the art of Francis Alÿs among others. And I really like to walk so why not make art of it? The show included Bruce Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-1968 (illustration on the exhibition webpage, linked above).

My supper reading today included "Bruce Nauman, art provocateur, returns. Are you ready?" by Randy Kennedy from the New York Times last September 11, a review of shows opening soon after that at Sperone Westwater and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The principal work was "Contrapposto Studies" which revisits a 1968 video work entitled "Walk with Contrapposto." Circling around, always.

Randy Kennedy reports that during his interview with Nauman at his home in Galisteo, N.M., Nauman served a lunch of supermarket rotisserie chicken with cheese, bread, and apples. I happened to be eating bread, cheese, and apple as I read. My bread was probably more mundane than Nauman's (Wegmans multi-grain with peanut butter).

Klimt Schiele Timberlake Wertenbaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZU4Cwrri8

The Ash Girl

by

Timberlake Wertenbaker

(a retelling of the Cinderella story)

production at Alfred University

"Klimt • Schiele: Judith en Edith"

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

12-MRT-2016 t/m 19-JUN-2016

http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/tentoonstellingen/klimt-%E2%99%A6-schiele

corrugated metal

After seeing Rachel Whiteread's cabin on Governors Island on Saturday, with its corrugated metal bits of wall covering, it was fun to see Cornelia Parker's "Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)" with its corrugated metal roofing shingles on Sunday in the Met Roof Garden:

Buffalo for the day

It had been too long since I'd been to Buffalo and one of the shows at the Albright-Knox was closing this coming weekend: "Shade: Clyfford Still and Mark Bradford." Bradford (born 1961) selected a couple dozen paintings by Still (1904-1980) from the Albright-Knox collection. He then did several paintings in response. The works played off each other in interesting ways. Well, Bradford played off the abstract expressionism of Still. I perused the catalog and, in the interview with Michael Auping, Bradford said he saw his first Still in Europe. The show will go to Denver after closing in Buffalo. There, the Stills will be at the Clyfford Still Museum and the Bradfords at the Denver Art Museum. Too bad they won't be in the same building. The two museums are close to each other. I was delighted to visit the Still Museum in the spring of 2015 when VRA met in Denver. It's a great neo-brutalist building designed by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture.

The reading room in the "Shade" show included iPads with the Art21 video of "Mark Bradford in Paradox" where I learned that he considers his beginnings not as an artist but as a maker in his mother's beauty shop where he did the signage. Also, "endpapers" aren't just in books; that term is also used to refer to the papers used when doing a perm.

Another show at the Albright-Knox was entitled "Defining Sculpture" and included works from the collection, from Pop Art by Marisol to a floor piece by Polly Apfelbaum, and a piece by Janet Cargill and George Bures Miller with a recording on a phone at a desk. A couple of the guards were doing a re-creation of "Imponderabilia" by Marina Abramovic and Ulay ...

... but I'm not sure it is very convincing.

In the funky underground gallery that also serves as a passageway from the main building to Clifton Hall was "Joan Linder: Operation Sunshine" which addressed waste sites in the Buffalo area, including Love Canal. Wonderful sketchbooks with long accordion-fold drawings, and hand-lettered recreations of brochures, reports, posters, and ephemera about the sites.

 (image from the Albright-Knox website, courtesy of the artist)

Walden on the harbor

How would Thoreau have dealt with a grand view of New York harbor from his cottage?

A group of us art librarians (and a few hangers on) went on a tour of Governors Island today. The Hills opened this year and the southern end of the island is taking shape as a park looking out into the harbor and back at the skylines of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. The Hills are part of the landscape plan by West 8, a Dutch urban design and landscape architecture firm, who have also done proposals for helping NYC handle the rise of sea level.

Hiding in the Hills, well, not really hiding, is the Cabin by Rachel Whiteread. It's similar to some of her other ghost, inside-out, memorial projects. A conglomeration of bits and pieces from several buildings, including some corrugated metal bits.

So I'm thinking how different Thoreau's writings might have been if he had walked out of the front door of his cottage and looked out over the expansive view of New York harbor. Or maybe it's just that I went over to the NY Art Book Fair after our tour of Governors Island. There, I ran into a couple books by Elisabeth Tonnard which played with biographical re-creation. One was a collection of events from the lives of American Renaissance writers called Song of Myself and another was a collection of sentences on death and dying from different books printed on successive pages of a book, turning into a new narrative. The dealing with death reminded me of my current book -- Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope. It took the dean about 200 pages after his apoplexy to finally die. And when I was looking for a link to Elisabeth Tonnard's work, I mistakenly typed "elizabeth tunnard" into Google and got obituary notices for a person of that similar name.

After the tour and lunch, and before we returned to Manhattan on the ferry, we visited the "Michael Richards: Winged" show, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Richards had a studio in vacant space in the World Trade Center in September 2001 and was working all night on his upcoming show. He died in the morning's attack. A good friend of mine at NYU was a dear friend of his and that made his death especially poignant. His work dealt with the Tuskegee airmen, and airplanes and flight were recurring themes. Eerie and moving.

Madame X

There was plenty of interesting art during my driving trip to Maine to see CDS and Boston to see Bill: "This Is A Portrait If I Say So" at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; open studios at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts out on Deer Isle (and saying hello to Jason Green and Stephanie McMahon of Alfred who were there because Jason was teaching ceramics); Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland; "Off the Wall" at the Gardner (masterpieces up close as they renovate the villa); all kinds of stuff at the MFA. This painting -- "Black Duck" by Marsden Hartley -- stopped me in my tracks. I could only see Sargent's "Madame X" ... in the nicest way.

Dessert was a few hours at MASS MoCA on the drive back to Alfred. Plenty of good stuff in "Explore Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder" including a video recreation of the "Recarcassing Ceremony" by Nina Katchadourian, "Silk Poems" by Jen Bervin, and works by Laurent Grasso and Jonathan Allen.

"Essays" per Rebecca Solnit

Genres and forms of library resources have been much in mind for some years now as the art project slowly works its way toward proposals for the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT). The latest flurry for non-art headings involved whether or not "Essays" was a narrower term of Creative nonfiction and whether the word "creative" was perhaps too narrow. I'm a generalist so I think "Essays" should be used broadly as a genre/form term for short prose pieces without too much consideration of creativity. It's rather like "is it art?" I'm generally willing to accept something as art if it's presented as art.

My current reading is The encyclopedia of trouble and spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit. She's an incredible and creative writer, a leftie rabble rouser. The introduction includes her thoughts about "essays":

"As nonfiction -- that leftover term apotheosizing fiction -- gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I've wanted to open it up again, to claim everything else. Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn't be more spacious, and I couldn't be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses. And maybe the variety of forms here is part of the book's breadth along with its geographical range. Calling this anthology an encyclopedia was a way to call attention to its range and maybe imagine these almost thirty essays as entries in an extremely incomplete encyclopedia. Essays explore; they also define, every essay is an entry in the author's personal encyclopedia."

Not only is there resonance in Solnit in regard to genre/form. I was reading the chapter on "cults, creeps [and] California in the 1970s" and she mentioned how Jess and Bruce Conner went their own way rather than play along with the East Coast avant-garde critics. I was reading that on the subway and then I was walking toward MoMA and there was a Bruce Conner banner on the streetlight post on 54th Street. Small world, great world, interesting retrospective of Conner's work.

That was yesterday. Today I was in McNally Jackson Books on Prince Street on Soho. The section of books on the landing on the stairs to the basement is labelled "Essays & Creative Nonfiction." Sigh. Then off to the new space for the International Center of Photography, now called the ICP Museum. The main show is "Public, Private, Secret" with plenty of gleanings from internet sites. Then cross the street to the New Museum for the Keeper show about collections. Quite a few of the collections were obsessive and reminded me of the art and autism show I saw at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent in fall 2014. The collection of teddy bear pictures seemed rather like an analog internet collection of images.

Christiaan in China

One of the more amusing moments (insert emoji of your choice) on my Dutch trip was in Utrecht at the "Hair: Human Hair in Fashion and Art" show at the Centraal Museum. One of the galleries was devoted to stylist Christiaan who accompanied Nancy Kissinger on the 1972 trip to China with Nixon. There was a vitrine with his snapshots taken during that trip, at a time when travel to China by Americans was heavily restricted. The show also included hair drawings, fabrics made of hair, mourning pictures, etc. The photo above was just one of the responses to a Google image search on "christiaan hairdresser" but the tangle is somewhat evocative of some of the works in the exhibition.

piles of clocks and chairs

clocks in the Amsterdam School exhibition

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

April-August 2016

Rietveld chairs and animated children

Centraal Museum, Utrecht

10 May 2016