Five artists

Was it six months ago that I saw this challenge on Twitter?

Maybe so; I just clipped it and dumped it, because I was in the middle of the work day and couldn’t go fishing for examples. But it was very easy for me to come up with five women artists.

The first one that came to mind was Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593-1643. In an age where women painters were rarer than hens’ teeth, Gentileschi kicked ass. It didn’t come without cost—at age 19 she was raped by one of her father’s art students, and underwent a seven-month trial during which her rapist her not only accused of having been a slut before he had her, but also sniffed that she was without talent.

Take a look at the power of Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” and see if you think she’s lacking in talent.

P.S. He was eventually convicted, but served less than a year. Some things are eternal.

My second thought was Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), one of the most powerful figures in 20^th Century American art. O’Keeffe’s journey from commercial illustrator to creator of modernist dreamscapes of New York City and New Mexico was an extraordinary transformation. Many of her paintings have elements of female sexuality—they have to make a lot of men as nervous as Gentileschi’s Judith.

Back in the last century I bought two posters of O’Keeffe studies—one a red poppy and the other this:

I took the poppy into work to hang in my office.

My third artist is Judy Chicago (1939- ), whose “The Dinner Party” was electrifying back in the day of the second wave of feminism. Chicago’s art—which encompasses painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, fireworks and more—continually explores her relationship to herself, to society and to the universe.

“The Dinner Party” is an installation of 39 (13 times three) dinner place settings at a triangular table, with each setting—linen, dish, glass, utensils—unique to the woman sitting there. The table stands over a floor inscribed with the names of 999 other women. The dinner guests include saints, goddesses, queens, warriors, writers and artists. O’Keeffe is there, along with Gentileschi, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Saint Bridget and Christine de Pisan. Chicago enlisted many women to help in its creation—you might say, a coven of women. I saw it in Los Angeles; it’s permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum

Chicago’s next effort was called “The Birth Project”, and it explored women’s journeys through motherhood. The one after that was “The Holocaust Project”.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) and Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) were artists of the camera, who turned their lenses on (among other things) the Second World War.

Bourke-White cut her teeth on architectural and industrial photography where she experimented with the available technologies to capture steel smelters at night. She was one of Henry Luce’s first pho-jos, joining Fortune in 1929.

While Bourke-White was exposing plates in steel mills, Miller was in France, exploring the world of surrealism (one of my favorite movements) with her lover, Man Ray. The architecture she recorded was fashion, as she worked for French Vogue and other publications.

During the war, both Miller and Bourke-White became accredited war correspondents. Bourke-White happened to be in Moscow during the first days of the Nazi invasion; forced to go to her hotel’s bomb shelter in the basement, she set up her cameras in her room to capture spectacular shots of the bombings. Miller spent most of the war in London.

With the Normandy landings, both Miller and Bourke-White moved back to the Continent. As it happens, they were both in Leipzig when it was discovered that the Bürgermeister, his wife and his daughter had committed suicide in emulation of their Führer. Their approaches to documenting the scene were quite different.

Miller got up close and level with the dead:

Bourke-White took a more clinical—architectural, if you will—view:

If you saw the 1982 biopic Gandhi, Bourke-White was played by Candice Bergen.)

I’ll end with Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), an artist of extraordinary fire, whose personal physical (her body was shattered in a traffic accident; she spent months in a body cast and lived in pain for the rest of her life) and mental (her pelvis was crushed in the accident, leaving her unable to carry a fetus) pain drove the passion in her paintings. Amongst other things, she—like Miller—was a surrealist.

She painted herself again and again, exploring her relationship with her womanhood. This is perhaps one of the most famous.

Those are my fivesix; I could easily come up with more. What are yours?

Regrets, I've had a few...

Saw this on one of my walks around the People’s Republic.

Aside from the defacing of public property, I can’t help but wonder about the story behind it. So many possibilities.

Down for the count

While we’ve been distracted by disgusting displays of hateful rhetoric at rallies that are only missing tiki torches to achieve full effect, and unhinged tweets from golf courses and gold-plated toilets, the Secretary of Commerce (who—as documented in a story in Forbes—has a history of theft that ranges from pilfering artificial sweetener from restaurants to defrauding colleagues and investors to the tune of hundreds of millions in his various financial management jobs) has been perverting the 2020 Census by adding new questions that not only have no bearing on its Constitutional purpose, they are downright terrifying.

You’ll no doubt have heard of the one demanding to know whether the respondent is a citizen. That’s the one that allegedly originated in what is pleased to call itself the Department of Justice, but Ross entered his office with the idea in mind. We’re told that this is in aid of counteracting “voter fraud”, even though it will clearly have no effect whatsoever on the only actual industrial-scale election fraud perpetrated in the United States. That came (and will come again) from the Russians, but since it solidified the GOP hold on the federal government, the Kleptocrat Syndicate (both the Executive and Legislative branches; Judicial is as yet not entirely affected by kompromat) is not interested.

No, asking about citizenship is clearly aimed at intimidating non-citizens (I was about to say “regardless of whether they’re here legally” because legalities do not matter a whit to this lot). It may also help in GOP gerrymandering efforts, although that would be a secondary benefit to Congress.

However, take a look at the question:

It’s not just a binary—are you or aren’t you; it’s got layers of “how many ways can we invalidate your right to be here” embedded in response options 2 and 3. What the everloving does it matter where you were born if you are a citizen by right of birth?

But then we come to naturalization—that’s the chilling one. Well, it wouldn’t be particularly problematic in any other administration. But the present government has quietly been revoking naturalized citizenship and deporting people as a tool of political intimidation. This response is a way of identifying targets for these activities.

And here’s another kicker—if you tick a box under race claiming to be either white or black, you’re required to elaborate on your country of origin.

What on earth has where your (in many cases) distant ancestors came from got to do with anything? And how do you pick a country? If great-great-great-grandpa came from Vilnius, for example, do you put down Russia, Germany, Poland or Lithuania, all of which claimed the city at one time or another? What if the family hung out in Spain, then moved to Italy and on to Libya—which one do you choose? (You know what would be super fun? Say you’re white and then name countries in Africa or Asia, because generations of your ancestors were adventurers or colonists.)

They give you 16 spaces for letters; that’s a joke. What conceivably valid information could be gained by someone whose forebears from Bohemia, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Morocco, Wales and Lichtenstein mixed and mingled in Pittsburgh or Chicago picking any single one of those points of origin to put in those 16 spaces?

Maybe they’d prefer that we all just send in DNA samples. Yeah, that would be swell. Except that—so far—you can’t be forced to cough up one of those until you’ve been arrested on a felony charge.

I dunno—it’s possible that this crowd of white supremacists may declare US residency a felony and move toward mandatory DNA collection as a way of identifying “undesirables” so they can be culled, whether by deportation or mass graves probably wouldn’t matter to them.

Meanwhile, I left my opinion on these despicable questions on the government comments site, for all the good that will do. And I’m considering how I’ll respond when the time comes. Because I’ll have to cram “You can kiss my [none of your fucking business] ass” into those 16 spaces.

On the trail of art

I noticed recently that the W&OD trail has been yarn bombed.

At least—one of the mile markers has been:

I checked a mile in each direction. This is the only one.

So far.

Gratitude Monday: supporting others

A few weeks ago my Gratitude Monday post was about being thankful that I could afford to support the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington. They’d been temporarily beset by MAGAts threatening violence for having dared to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the premises (on account of her lying on behalf of an administration that—among other high crimes and misdemeanors—is hell-bent on removing Constitutional protections for large swathes of the population, some of whom work at the eatery).

It wasn’t a huge thing—a few bucks to buy gift certificates, which I asked be sent to a nearby center that supports victims of domestic violence. But I was grateful that having a job enabled me to make the gesture. Which I thought about this past week, as I signed up for a monthly contribution to the ACLU, an organization that is leading most of the challenges to administration policies.

And as I prepare to make a donation to the Jewish Family Services of the Silicon Valley, for their work with refugees—another group this regime would like to wipe from the face of the earth. A mentor and his wife are throwing a fundraiser later this month in San Francisco; I can’t attend, but I can certainly give.

And this fills my soul with joy.