ARLIS/NA @ CDMX

I just got back from the Art Libraries Society of North America conference in Mexico City, our first conference in Mexico although we have been proudly North American all of our collective lives. We have already met a few times in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Banff). Mexico City is a gritty city, like I like 'em. Gritty, busy, noisy, diverse, full of architectural treasures, good and interesting art, food (fancy and plain).

On our last afternoon, after the business meeting, Bill and I walked over to see the murals in the Secretariat of Public Education building. Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and others. We meandered on the way back, partly on the Calle de la República de Cuba. In addition to bridal shops and gay bars, we saw this building that could use some attention and maintenance. I think a third-floor deck would be just fine through those open arches.

That evening, we went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes for a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. The program included an overture by Louise Farrenc (Opus 23), a double bass concerto by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (KR 172), and the Third ("Organ") Symphony by Camille Saint-Saëns. The music was lovely. The conductor was a joy to watch. The hall has a Tiffany dome as well as a Tiffany (glass) stage curtain. The first and third works were played on the full stage. The Ditters von Dittersdorf only uses a chamber orchestra so they put some chairs on the front of the proscenium and lowered the Tiffany glass curtain for that portion of the concert. We were physically as well as musically in heaven. Bill had purposely chosen seats in the top of the house (más alta, por favor) so we were close to the Tiffany dome.

Now back home and last night was the dance showing by choreography students at Alfred University. Pretty glorious too. Stendhal much?

(view from exhibit hall at the conference, Hilton Reforma)

(my CDMX picture album on Flickr)

Radio Girls, before and after their time

There are all sorts of reasons why you buy and/or read a book. Sometimes it's the stack of books on the new releases table in the bookstore. Sometimes it's a review. Sometimes a friend recommends the book. Maybe the book is just in the social air. And sometimes the daughter of a friend and colleague is the author. It was this last circumstance that put Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford on my to-read shelf.

(image from Penguin-Random House webpage for the book)

Sarah-Jane Stratford is the daughter of my longtime art cataloging colleague Nancy Norris, now retired from UCLA. It took me a little while to get into the story but I'm awfully glad I got past that. The story is set in London, between the wars, as the fascist threat grows and people become more and more aware of the seriousness of the threat. The "radio girls" are working at BBC which is in its infancy.

The first printing of the New American Library paperback edition was in June 2016. It is amazing and terrifying how the story resonates with the situation in the United States from 2016 when Trump was running and then serving as president. Suppression of news. Officious bosses. Male date assumptions. Stratford must have had her fore-seeing glasses on.

Always looking for parallels, I was amused that one of the bad guys was a Mr Grigson. Not quite the same name as Michael Gregson, from Downton Abbey, but our heroine Maisie Musgrave's fiancé Simon does go to Germany on family business and get involved with Grigson on some corporate shenanigans related to making deals with the Nazi government. By the way, librarians are mentioned a couple times as being good with facts.

teardowns

I have been watching the 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited. Lady Marchmain has died and the London house has been sold by Lord Marchmain. Bridey has asked Charles to paint some views of the house before it is torn down, to be replaced by flats. But don't worry. The house will be saved and the flats will not be built. Charles will find his painting career with the success of the paintings. I know the house will be saved because it is also Grantham House, the London residence of the Crawleys from Downton Abbey.

This photo of the actual Bridgewater House, on the site of Cleveland House, is on Flickr, taken by jupiter1953.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/b1953/7616519714

I first watched the 1981 Brideshead at Judith Holliday's apartment in the Dewitt Mall Apartments in Ithaca. My then boyfriend Randy and I went over every Sunday night while it was on Great Performances on PBS. I had not had a television and bought a modest black-and-white television so we could watch the series. Randy also did not have a television. Judith had a color TV and it beat out my B&W model. I took along my copy of the book and it was amazing (and surprising) how much of the dialogue in the book made it into the telescript.

meta credits

So you may know that I watch film credits pretty voraciously. I love the loopy rhyme of Loop Group as well as the name of such a post-production sound group that I have seen credited a number of times: Sync or Swim. Sometimes, the folks responsible are called Crowd ADR or just ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement). I just watched Going Down in LA-LA Land and was amused by the credit for Expendables. Those responsible for expendables were Studio Depot, The Expendables Recycler, Bulbtronics, and Expendable. I glanced over the YouTube comments and someone noted that they really enjoyed watching the credits because "The ADR then is hilarious." Here's the two leads getting to know each other:

P.S. Emma Kantor also reads the end credits: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/magazine/closing-credits-movies.html

at hand, just six feet away

I occasionally think that I should find an institution that could use the books on art and architecture that I've been buying for decades. I used to worry about the appraisal for tax deduction purposes and decided that was just an impediment. Still, it is satisfying to have my book collection when I am at an Unboxed Lunch sponsored by the Archives of American Art. Josh Franco talked today about new accessions to the Lucy Lippard archive. He happened to pick out the folder on her book Overlay. It was glorious to stand up, take a couple steps, and take Overlay off the shelf and look at it as he spoke.

separated at birth: BIG

VIA 57 West

New York City

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), architect

https://big.dk/

BIBFRAME Implementation Group (BIG)

photo above:

David.Clay.Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

stormy weather

I was in Meridian, Mississippi, last night, on my southern road trip. The hotel was on a rise so, in the morning, I had a nice view of downtown. I probably would have preferred being downtown but El Norte Authentic Mexican Restaurant was a short (if not particularly pleasant) walk from the hotel. Today's goal was heading to Montgomery so I read a bit of Meridian history and took off for Alabama. I stopped at the Alabama Welcome Center and got the official state map, a brochure on Montgomery with map, and a brochure on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail (National Park Service).

Map reading had indicated that U.S. 80 goes across Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma. The map seemed to have both a through-town and a bypass route for 80. Somehow I missed the through-town route and found myself on the eastern side of Selma. I carried on.

Midway between Selma and Montgomery is the Lowndes Interpretive Center which has various materials on the Trail as well as a shop and restrooms. As I was leaving, a local storm alert came across the wires to the various rangers at the site. What I heard is that the local tornado watch was for the next hour and would be lifted at 12:30. I got my book and tried to read but got restless after a while, especially after hearing that the state alerts would last until 5 pm. Another couple folks had decided to keep pressing on to Montgomery and a young woman headed out toward Selma. One of the other rangers suggested we were still pretty well ahead of the storm so I took off for Montgomery.

When I got to Montgomery, I was having trouble finding the National Memorial for Peace and Justice so I parked to check the map and online, just as it started to rain ... and hail and blow and lightning and a bit of thunder. Not much hail (or maybe it was twigs) but the rain was pelting. The car was shaking in the wind. When it seemed to let up a bit, I drove the few blocks to the memorial. When I got there, they had closed the memorial until the storm passed but the nearby Equal Justice Institute interpretive center was open.

I have now seen pictures of the tornado damage in Selma. A little too close for comfort. I think I had heard of the Selma tornado by the time they reopened the memorial. The still stormy sky and the wet ground added drama to the visit. The memorial is familiarly known as "the lynching museum." There are weathering steel (aka COR-TEN) blocks hanging from the ceiling of the open-air structure. The blocks have a county name and a list of the persons who were lynched in that county. Along the side walls are plaques that have short narratives on the cause of a person's lynching. I don't mean to sound too matter-of-fact about this description. The memorial is powerful and provoking, another of the compelling designs of MASS Design Group. There are also plaques describing truth and reconciliation measures by various jurisdictions.

Pictures from when they reopened the memorial after the storm had mostly passed and later as I left the memorial and the skies had cleared in the west.

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.