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.

Crime in the 'hood

Let’s close out the week with one more bit of drollery from the People’s Republic, spotted on one of my walks:

I mean, littering is truly bad. But there’s no camera anywhere in the vicinity. So, nice try.

Compensation issues

Welcome to Virginia, y’all.

I just wonder that no one’s let the air out of this guy’s tires.

Goldilocks goes SoMe

I see that Facebook is flapping its corporate hands in shock—shock, I say—at discovering a “coordinated disinformation campaign” (per WaPo) in the run-up to this year’s elections. They claim they can’t find any link to Russia in the pages they’ve shut down, so I suppose that means their “ad” checks are still clearing the bank.

Here’s the thing—everything about Facebook is geared around them producing data that will support whatever they choose to do. And if having all those Russian trolls create pages and engage in activity so that it makes their user numbers look good, they’re going to find data that backs them up.

Every single time they pretend to solicit feedback, it’s in the form of “you want us to do this, right?” not a real attempt to collect our opinions, much less act on them.

A case in point is a survey they fielded a few weeks ago. It was page after page of multiple choice questions that were utterly meaningless. (And don’t even think about a verbatim option.) Here’s one utterly idiotic example:

What does this even mean? It makes me think of Goldilocks and the three bears. If I say I have “too many FB friends”, what are they going to do about it? Bring out the guillotine? And If I say I want more, are they going to cook some up for me? (No, no—I know: they’re going to demand access to my email contacts list and start soliciting people to join up. After all, they need to replace all the fake account they’ve purged.)

But aside from that, I'm pretty sure that Facebook gathered no meaningful information from it. It was a Potemkin survey.

Property is theft

Right until about ten or 15 years ago, the vast preponderance of the People’s Republic was what you might call communal. The whole point of this particular planned community design was to maximize commonly-held ground (and social sharing) and to minimize private property.

But now that The Developers have arrived, there are a lot of No Trespassing and Private Property signs around.

However, long-time residents of the People’s Republic don’t give a toss about such things, as you can plainly see by this path that’s been worn by scores of feet right next to one:

Power to the people, baby!

Gratitude Monday: Grace

The term “grace” covers a lot of territory. It can mean anything from an elegance of movement—poise—to a state of permanent godly sanctification. (The latter concept has always manifested itself in my imagination as a kind of shower of light. Which, now that I consider it, may be what all those Medieval and Renaissance painters were getting at with the halos they attached to the heads of angels and saints.) But today I’m thinking of something somewhere between the two endpoints of the spectrum.

I’ve been grappling with the notion of grace for a while. And by “a while” I mean “years”. Grace lies at the heart of my gratitude practice—my conscious effort to actively seek out people and things in my life that spark joy in ways both large and small. If you click on the “Giving thanks” label to the right of the blog, you’ll find my weekly devotion to gratitude. Sometimes it’s something glorious, like the Women’s March, or the Supreme Court striking down laws prohibiting same-sex marriage; occasionally it’s a reflection on a friend. But most often it’s me stopping to notice and appreciate small beauties, like sunsets and flowers and rabbits and birds; or even latte art.

The latter category—small beauties—is the one I draw upon on days when I feel the absolute crappiest. When I have to make myself cast about for something—anything—that doesn’t suck to the max, and that therefore might constitute some indication that there might be a reason to want to wake up tomorrow.

So this post from a local Unitarian-Universalist church on grace definitely resonated with me. The writer speaks of the grace that I seek—the small, unexpected splashes of light in a life that seems almost entirely in the shade, if not in darkness. This is the part that struck deep within me:

“I don’t get to choose when grace is given to me, so I must be gracious in my life.”

And this is where I struggle. I get so wrapped up in fears large and small—from what’s going on in the world and the nation to what’s going on at work—that I fail to be aware of grace, which also exists alongside the fear. With eyes focused on the pavement, I walk past the flower that peeks out between bricks in a wall. My brain replays last week’s conversations on continuous loop, so I fail to hear the birds singing around me. The scowl on my face as I gird myself for another frustration at work, on the commute, wherever…prevents someone from greeting me with a smile.

And thus my own lack of graciousness thwarts the very thing I seek from manifesting itself in my life. I fail, in Caine’s words, to recognize the subtle blessings in life—in my life. This is a fearful realization.

The corollary to this—something I also frequently fail to recognize—is that I can be a grace in the lives of those around me, by being kind, by being attentive, by showing recognition and appreciation. By picking up the litter someone else has tossed. By making room for the baby stroller on a crowded Metro car. By letting someone merge into traffic.

When you feel you have little to contribute, it’s heartening to think that you can give grace. It doesn’t require great wealth or grand gestures; it only needs awareness and willingness. I don’t get to choose when to receive grace, but I can choose when to give it. And by giving it, I can choose to be it. That is within my power.