IT'S ALL ABOUT THE NEEDLE

Hello Kitty/Virgin Mary

I never heard of Elsa Hansen Oldham but there she is, standing tall at 30 years old, in today’s special New York Times Style Magazine. I want to scream HOW DID SHE RATE THIS?  I’m pretty sure she’s very nice, very sweet and probably, most deserving of special NATION WIDE coverage for her talented…cross-stitching?   Says right here on page 82, “ her work… is gaining attention in the art world.” So they must know something. 

Ms. Oldham lives in Louisville, Kentucky, so there goes that theory, namely: anybody who lives and works in New York City has an unfair advantage on the path to art fame. She is, however, married to a musician and that may score a few extra points.  

Oscars

Enough of that. About her art: Ms. Oldham makes cross stitch pictures of famous people, sometimes surrounded by tiny Atari-like characters, and other times, surrounded by super-significant figures from the personality’s life and experience. Apparently it matters who is paired with whom…Jimmy Buffett partnering with Hunter S. Thompson, Shelley Duvall and Coco Chanel, and Daniel Day-Lewis bedded into peopled scenes from productions he’s starred in. Some pairings - I confess - are pretty funny while others are simply head-scratchers.

Elsa has not one but TWO exhibits opening in New York in September which must be really stressful for her and all I can advise is “ Take an Advil. You’ll survive.”

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Lucia LaVilla-Havelin, various stitchery techniques/antique postcard

It isn’t as though I don’t respect needlework. I do! And here are two artists I brag about with pride.

Lucia LaVilla-Havelin is one of Rochester’s own. Her husband Jim, a poet, worked in the education department of our art museum in the early 1980’s when I first opened Dawson Gallery. Lucia was one of the first artist whose work we “showcased” and I’m delighted to own one of those very early impossibly tiny stitched petit point broaches.  

stitchery and antique postcard on linen

She and Jim left Rochester over thirty years ago and live in Texas now but I keep up with Lucia and her changing work and am pleased to report that I still think she has something special going on in that artistic head of hers.  The newest pieces combining antique postcards and a combination of stitchery are full of nostalgia and humor and clever use of technical know-how. Here are a few illustrations.

antique postcard "Campsite"

I fell head-over-heels with Kathryn Clark’s “foreclosure quilts” the minute I saw them a few years back and when I read her back story, I was even more smitten.  Kathryn was educated as a civic planner and architect and turned to fabric as her art medium of choice.  I’m not the only one who recognized the foreclosure quilts as something special; the Smithsonian now owns one of these pieces installed in its permanent collection at the Renwick.

Disappearing Aquifer

Now Kathryn is embroiled in the tradegy of migrants and war-torn refugees of the middle east. These new fiber pieces have grown in size but then, they are tackling a global catastrophy which requires some space. Her committment to her art is commendable; her commiseration with the issues of the voiceless is more than that. I bow to her courage and her talent. 

(detail/stitchery on Tyvek)

Idiom Series (an older piece but I love its minimalism)

MY BROTHER DIED LAST WEEK

My beloved brother died last week.  We were born nearly four years apart and even after both our parents died, Tom stayed close to his Oklahoma roots while I radically pruned, discarded and moved away from that place and sad history.

After adulthood, with two thousand miles separating us, we rarely saw one another but I am grateful for the late-night hours of conversational therapy we had on rare face-to-face visits and that he found Cindy, the perfect foil for his curmudgeonly facade.

Mostly, I am grateful for the computer age that allowed us to continue sharing: reviews of books, movies, music sometimes and always politics! How will I keep up with the insane goings on in Oklahoma without his wry reports? And which books to read next? Whom can I ask “Remember the neighbor down the street who gave us popcorn balls at Halloween? Remember that actor who was in that play we saw that one time when you were visiting? Remember when we rode the train from Montana to Texas and I was 13 and in charge and you were 9 and didn’t listen to me?…” 

“Remember?”  That’s the question I can never ask anybody again because nobody was there besides Tom.

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“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Kindness”

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Spring! Greenery and flowers and sunshine…and elderly men in Washington D.C. making decisions to curtail medical care for women here and abroad. What’s wrong with this picture?

I grimace to think of the options left to women when professional medical care is beyond reach but it’s nothing new. Women since the time of Eve turned to plants for remedies for menstral pain, barenness, abortion.

New Zealand photographer Ann Shelton, after reading extensively about the organic world of female medicine, co-ordinated efforts with ikebana masters who used medicinal plants in beautiful floral arrangements which Ms. Shelton then photographed.  These are lush with color, elegant in every respect and sometimes, as deadly as a direct knife to an unborn embryo.  The exhibition is titled “Jane Says.” I don’t know exactly what the title means.  More research required?  We may need to know more - a lot more!

I am leaving plants unnamed for your own protection.

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Meanwhile, half way around the world in Dallas, Texas, Norm Diamond goes to household sales.  (Doesn’t everybody?) And just like the rest of us sale-goers, he was struck by the intimate objects left for strangers to paw through, consider and take away as their own regardless of the meaning or history embued by the former - and rightful? - owner.

Mr. Diamond began taking photographs (leaving behind the flotsam and only taking away the photographs - there’s a deep moral message here!). The results are in an exhibition and book titled “What Is Left Behind.”

(Again…I consider photography to be a truly democratic art form.)

(Doesn't this picture break your heart?)

YEAR OF THE ROOSTER

"I", 2011, mixed media sculpture by African-AmericanBrenna Youngblood

My brother is sick. As teen agers, we were orphaned but I, the older, escaped into academics and an early marriage while he, four years younger, was left to swim out the other side without much of a life jacket.A dear friend is recovering from serious surgery. Another is threading through the process of self re-acquaintance after surviving a debilitating stroke. Me? There are days like today when arthritis in my shoulders make combing my hair an olympic event.

I’m soaking up episodes of “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix - a series featuring two women in their 70s with a basketful of troubles and unplanned for situations who confront all with charm and wit. In the episode I just finished, Frankie has a mild stroke and discovers it isn’t her first. She laments that the knowledge changes everything - her life, how those around her respond, how she herself responds! She begs the question that we all ask sometimes. When is intimate information helpful and when are we best left in the dark?

We are all rusting like old cars. Now what? Diagnosed with a fatal illness? Isn’t everybody?  You just have more information than the rest of us. Sure -  eat well, exercise lots, sleep soundly, love truly. And while the body says “no,” the spirit says “what the f…! I will if I want to.” (But I’m giving away the hair dryer and curling iron.)

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A painting by abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn

Troubling times.  No ordinary President. Where did statesmanship go?Remember those Bible verses? “Care for the least of these…” When did we get so mean - so stingy?  So today when I read:

To sin by silence when we should protest, makes cowards out of 

men. (Elda Wheeler Wilcox, 1914)

and: My silences had not protected me.  Your silence will not  protect 

you.  (Rachael Carson)

and: Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion and you can say ‘I don’t 

know.’ (Richard Diebenkorn

The words seemed especially relevant. I pass them along.

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This is the Chinese Year of the Rooster.  (Just thought you should know.) 

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A parklet is often an adorable public gathering/resting area typically carved from parking spaces or under-utilized parts of streetscapes.

The idea began as an experiment in 2005 in SanFrancisco with a single parking space.

This photograph of the newest public art park is sitting outside the Mighty-O-Donuts shop in Seattle; it’s the 9th parklet in Seattle. It was paid for through “crowdsourcing funds” which I hardly understand but I guess it’s a “thing” these days - with some additional funds from a grant from the Department of Neighborhoods.  While this parklet clearly has a history on the water (it’s an old boat - get it?), the design was helped along by architect David Squires.  

Parklet, the Mighty-O, Seattle, Washington