– In memory of my friend, Dutch-American painter Henk Pander. You are missed. –
Henk Pander Remembering Haarlem (1922) Painted a year before his death on April 7, 2023.
***
Walk with me, and you’ll get rewarded with a fun fair ride, or a gigantic ice cream cone or a wine tasting at 11:15 in the morning on a Monday – up to you. I, of course, had come to photograph the tulips and the never disappointing sartorial choices that people make when they visit the fields.
On my way to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm, I drove by one of those traffic control machines that flash speed numbers at impatient drivers. Mine said instead: Great Job! I must have been, for once, under the speed limit, but could not help be irritated by patronizing traffic machines that are now talking to me. But I digress. Let us leave quibbles behind and indulge in beauty.
Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm South of Portland, in March 2025.
Claude Monet Tulip Fields at Sassenheim (1886)
Vincent van Gogh Fields of Tulips (1883)
What used to be a farm with a small store where you could get cut flowers and order bulbs for next year’s planting, is now a consumer’s paradise, with a fun fair, hot air balloon rides, endless booths for food and trinkets.
You have to book tickets on line and decide on a fixed time slot for arrival, so that the acres of parking lots can be managed by the staff. But you know what: it’s fine! Let people have fun in a world that offers little of that, let the kids squeal and the adults delight in a whiff of spring and distraction from daily worries. I certainly had a blast and was grateful to hear so much laughter.
The fields were a bit behind, given the strange weather patterns of this winter, with field color concentrated only in one corner, but found in planters generously spread throughout. What was in bloom showed most frequently shapes that no longer resemble much the sultans’ turbans, etymologically the root of the word tulip, from the Turkish language.
Jacob Marrle Four Tulips: Butter Man, Nobleman, The Great Plumed One, and With the Wind. (1635)
Erkin Tulpen in blauwe Kom (2018) He is a contemporary Dutch realist painter who goes only by one name.
Yellow was definitely coming up, opening wide to a surprisingly warm morning.
Gerhard Richter Tulpen (1995)
Picked this painting despite the ongoing “let’s make them guess” style of this artist (I’m not a fan, as you know), with multiple options including a view from a moving train, fading of memories, or vision problems – which was what I thought about during my stroll. The farm had a sign out that suggested you could borrow glasses that would help overcome color blindness and help enjoy the full glory. I had to look it up, once back home, if these glasses really are able to keep what they promise – and wouldn’t you know it, only IF you have a mild version of the common red-green colorblindness (and not an absence of color receptors,) do they have an effect, enhancing contrast vision more so than color vision per se. (Ref.)
Lots of workers in the fields, picking flowers for sale, transporting goods, weeding, guarding against visitors flaunting the rules. Hard work on a still cold and damp ground.
Lots of appropriately themed garb.
But nothing beats the beauty of the blossoms – or, as a matter of fact, the breeding of new stem colors.
Max Beckmann Stillleben mit Ausblick aufs Meer (1938)
Paula Becker Modersohn Stillleben mit Tulpen in blauem Topf.
One tent housed a wood worker who made traditional Dutch Klompen out of poplar wood.
It made me think of the long history of Dutch colonialism, agricultural brilliance, and the 17th century tulip mania that ended in an economic crash. One thought about speculative bubbles led to another, and here I was wondering why so many young men are so attracted by crypto currency speculation, meme coins, and, for that matter, sports betting.
Anonymous The sale of tulip bulbs (17th Century)
For one, it is interesting to see that there are endless postings on the web where tulip mania and crypto speculation are compared and scathingly disentangled – the former bad, the latter good, in very LOUD voices… Of course, if you dig, you find opposing views and people quite worried about another bubble, eventually bursting and dragging the investments of young men down with them. The numbers are staggering – both in terms of how many young men are drawn to day trading, crypto and betting (relative to women and older populations,) how many of them consider themselves addicted in one form or another, and how much money they gain or loose in short amounts of time.
Roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto (when I can barely define what that actually is.) The new administration is helping, in terms of loosening banking restrictions, or active encouragement in investing in these kinds of currencies (Trump just yesterday introduced a new cryptocurrency, the Stablecoin.)
Listen to the expert (and this link leads to a smart, short piece on the psychology of crypto attraction):
Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.
Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.
Jan Brueghel the Younger Allégorie de la Tulipomanie (1640)
Oh, let’s just return to the beauty out there, and not fret, for five minutes.
Claude Monet Vase of Tulips (1850)
Emil Nolde Tulpen, (ca. 1940)
And one of my favorites:
François-Emile Barraud Parrot Tulips (1931)
***
I was not the only one who found joy.
And Easter around the corner.
The pug, on the other hand, was sort of done with it…
As was he.
Careful, Bigfoot, even the curbs have tulips…
Music today are variations on a famous composition by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt who died in 2012. The piece is called Canto Ostinato (1979). Here is a version for four pianos, recorded live in 1984 and here is one I really like from 2017 at a world music festival, with incredible singing.
Confession: I “borrowed” this title from a neuroscience research study that explored the interaction between aesthetic experience and personal relevance when looking at a work of art. I liked the title more than the study, which demonstrated with brain scans what my grandmother could have told you over dinner: different people react differently to different pieces of art, and their reactions are influenced by the rest of their lives….
What, though, if the “rest of our lives” is systematically exposing us to acceptable definitions of art, contrasting it with unacceptable ones, declared degenerate, or met with any other form of denigration?
Am I thinking here of societies where “good” art is defined from above, and cultural centers are taken over to start setting certain standards? Yes.
Am I thinking of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “In fascist aesthetics, the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” Yes.
Did these thoughts get triggered by looking at specific art? Yes!
I was interested in the juxtaposition of work of two photographers, and my spontaneous negative and positive reactions to each series, respectively. Both artists are women, both chose to photograph in specific locations historically meaningful to them, and both stage their images. This is where the similarities end. Maria Svarbova, born in 1988, hails from Slovakia, a country that is currently seeing massive anti-government demonstrations against the authoritarian and repressive government of Prime Minister Robert Fico who has become Putin’s new best friend and is head of a populist party accused of major corruption. Nona Faustine, on the other hand, was born a Black woman in the U.S., no need to spell out who is also best friends with whom in this country, at the moment. She died last week, heartbreakingly young at the age of 48. Rest in power.
Svarbova is quite in demand on the international circuit, with commissions by large corporations, and work shown in galleries as well as relevant publications like Vogue, Harpers’ Bazaar and so on. I am focusing on her Swimming Pools series that started in 2012 and is ongoing, often labeled as Nostalgic Futurism, or Retro Futurism.
She selects old buildings in Slovakia and abroad that house swimming pools, and stages models clad in precisely chosen garb and demanding color schemes, preparing the shoots and lighting of the halls with large teams of assistants, to get everything just right. There is no doubt the artist is extremely talented, and knows how to translate visual imagination into spatial and color-bound scenes that are striking.
My reaction? At best, these staged scenes remind me of kaleidoscopes, the thrill of my childhood, with masses of brightly colored pieces of plastic holding patterns in mirrored configurations. Eye candy. Except now “plastic dolls” instead of plastic confetti.
Or maybe they evoke synchronized swimming, albeit without the strength, skill of body control, and sense of perfect timing required by this sport. More like dead fish, sardines, to be precise, crammed into rigid positions in a jar. You realize that these flawlessly arranged, perfect bodies are devoid of individuality, and any hint of emotion.
But really, and here the goosebumps start to crop up, they make me think of the choreography of fascist displays of masses moving, whether the synchronicity of goose-stepping young men, or the gymnastic displays of youth in unison configurations.
I’ll get to that in a moment. Note again, that I describe my associations elicited by the photographs, not my speculation on what the artist intended. She certainly refers to the prominent display of a No Diving Allowed sign in multiple images as a reference to the restrictions upon women who should be allowed just to have fun in the pool.
But over the years, the work has become more technically accomplished, placed in more glamorous locations that had nothing to do with communist East-European brutalist architecture or oppressive rule (never mind that no diving is a safety measure found in pools around the world), and overall slicker.
***
Here is Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series in comparison. She was interested in how the past informs the present, and in creating images that would make us ask questions about and remembering the legacy of the slave trade. Her work has been widely praised and awarded, collected and presented in a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum just last summer.
Nona Faustine “Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn (Self-Portrait)” (2016) taken outside the Lefferts Historic House museum in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
The choice of locations for the series was premeditated, just like Svarbova’s, and guides us to relevant places or areas that were constructed from chattel slavery and used significantly to perpetuate white supremacy. She would pose in various stages of undress in these public places with life going on around her, with a few props and the symbol-rich, sensible white shoes.
The representation of a voluptuous, nude, female black body, in a fat-phobic society no less, makes her self-portrait particularly vulnerable. There she stands, props in hand, on the ground that holds the bodies of her ancestors, the buildings above representing the power that put slaves into graves in the first place. Whether you experience her as a symbol for those who were made invisible, or an avenging force who demands visibility, or a woman unafraid to challenge our stereotypes of what constitutes beauty, in each interpretation you find a core of individual agency so utterly lacking in the conventional beauties aligned at the pool.
Nona Faustine “They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes And Conquests,” (2013) (Outside the Tweed Courthouse in downtown New York, New York, USA)
Her use of self-portraiture urges us to acknowledge the impact of the past on the lived present, to recognize the ongoing consequences of historical injustices on Black communities today. The artist reconstructs a narrative of racist oppression, making us think of the body as commodity – to deliver unpaid work and future generations of workers then, or to be traded in a world suffused by imposed unreachable body ideals, now – traumatic, both. The courage alone produced respect in me; the series as a whole was an aesthetic experience that fed my brain and made me feel sad, more than anything else, particularly now when we incredulously stare at distinct attempts of re-segregating our society. (Exaggeration? Read here and here.)
Nona Faustine Dorothy Angola, Stay Free, In Land of the Blacks, (2021) (Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, New York, NY, USA.)
It is the juxtaposition, though, of the two series, that produces an affective aesthetic response colored by “the rest of my life,” informed by my links to German and Jewish history. I am thinking back to a book by Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics in which he talked about the role carefully choreographed spectacles and pageants played in the consolidation of his power. He suggests that Hitler’s “lack of feeling for humans… was already evident at the Nuremberg rallies and other spectacles when his ‘architecturalizing’ of the participants and his deployment of them in geometrical patterns reduced them to noctambulent creatures.” “What his monumental aesthetic would leave behind, therefore, was not the uniqueness of individual human experience or its messy heterogeneity, but monolithic forms that imposed singular meaning on disparate deeds, experiences and lives.” (Ref.)
15,000 people perform synchronized gymnastics at the Nuremberg Rally. Germany. 1938. Imagno/Getty Images
Bund Deutscher Mädchen at gymnastics exercise – 1941
A declaration of what is beautiful and which aesthetic should dominate public (or private) life did not exist in isolation, though, in fascist or other authoritarian regimes. If there is but one standard of beauty, then all that does not conform must be done away with – and here we come to the erasure of those deemed ugly. If you are fat, you need to fast. If you are wrinkly, you need cosmetic surgery.
If you are degenerate, art and human beings alike, you need to be eradicated.
The norms WERE applied not just to paintings, sculpture, music or architecture. They were used to create out-groups that would be convenient scapegoats, or could be killed to ease economic press during the years when fascists were in power. The T4 program, the very first to attack who was deemed ugly, was used to systematically euthanize the disabled. We know what followed.
During the 1930s Paul Schultze-Naumburg—an architect and scholar—traveled Germany, lecturing on mental illness and modern art, flashing slides of avant-garde paintings beside pictures of people living with disabilities.
Fascists “beautified” the world through violence and forced conformity, trying to reduce individuals to non-significance, uniting an entire people as “one,” eliminating any sense of or desire for individual agency when you felt psychologically embedded in the amorphous whole. If you remove differences from public display – all those who are Black or female, for example, you get a mass of White men who no longer draw your eye to distinct visual qualities: de-individuation achieved. Note that it is not just those who are excluded from public life who get hurt. It is also those who remain, who are forged into a whole that can be manipulated at the leaders’ whims, sleep-walking through their use as puppets or eventual cannon fodder.
We are in need of art that fights that notion, and I am wary of trends that hail imagery that homogenizes beauty, reminiscent of a past that unleashed horrors upon humanity.
Music today is about the kind of flood I wish would wash all the evil away…. Sister Rosetta Tharpe sings Didn’t it rain.(1964)
“It is the fundamental task of art to fight against alienation – to go to bat for authentic hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking against the stereotypes and societal patterns that are full of hostility towards being thoughtful and perceptive.” – Erich Fried in Rudolf Wolff (Hrsg.): Erich Fried. Gespräche und Kritiken, 1986. (My translation.)
***
If you look up the meaning of the word “authentic,” the Thesaurus suggests this: genuine, honest, true, real, original, unmistakable, historical. I cannot think of a better description of the art of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) a Roma artist, Holocaust survivor, and activist whose work is increasingly displayed by major venues, providing welcome contrast to so much of the inauthentic hokum out there.
Ceija Stojka The Mama (detail with gallery entrance reflected in the glass covering the painting.)
Across the last few years the artist’s paintings, drawings and journaling were on view at Gallery Christophe Gaillard in Brussels, the Museum of the City of Lodz in Poland, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, at Kassel’s Documenta 15 in Germany, among others. Opening in April, they are at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, in a group exhibition, Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow.
Luckily, we dont have to travel that far. Some of Stojka’s work is currently shown at the Vancouver, WA gallery Art at the Cave, together with exhibits by Daniel Baker and Sam Marroquin, and short videos about the artists by Erin Aquarian, in a show titled “Seeking Warmth.”
Stojka’s father was murdered by the Nazis even before the entire family was imprisoned in concentration camps. She, her mother and all siblings but one brother survived, despite being routed through Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and ultimately Bergen-Belsen. A miracle, given that out of 12 000 Austrian Roma, between 9000 and 10 000 perished during the Holocaust. After liberation, she attended school for a few years before she had her first child at age 15. She became a successful carpet merchant, and had two more children within the decade (two of whom preceded her in death, adding more tragedy.) It was only in her mid-fifties that she started to put her traumatic experiences into diverse forms of expression, music, self-taught visual art and journaling. It is no exaggeration to say her memories poured out, with over a thousand works of art and writing composed during the decades before her death at age 79 in 2013.
Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon in Forest)
Before I turn to her art, a grateful acknowledgement that individual people accompanied this artist to express herself and help bring about the prominence she has achieved. One of Austria’s most distinguished documentarian film makers, Karin Berger, was the first to engage with Stojka in the late eighties. A full documentary about the artist and her trauma, Ceija Stojka: Portrait of a Roma, was published in 1999. Lorely French, who taught German language and literature, as well as film and Roma writers, retiring this May after 39 years at Pacific University, was the artist’s friend. Importantly, she translated the first English version of the memoirs of Ceija Stojka, and is a founding member and member of the board of the Ceija Stojka International Association.
The art on display in the current exhibition is a small-scale version of Stojka’s oeuvre as a whole: there are the paintings that represent a “bright cycle” – scenes referencing life as the Romani people experienced it before the descent into the hell of the Holocaust. The acrylics are expressive, colorful, reminiscent of folk-art, and often quite sophisticated in their perspective for a self-taught artist. They report what was seen, but also communicate a sense of longing for a way of life that no longer exists. Wagons, streams, summer meadows, birds and flowers everywhere, and many people forming community around chores, more often seemingly idyllic than not. Exactly a way a child would experience her childhood, without the adult knowledge of how the Roma had to fight against prejudice and persecution long before the fascists arrived on the scene. It is a remarkable feat as an artist to be able to reproduce that experience from a memory store that by all means should have been overwritten by the horrors that followed.
Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon with people at stream)
These very horrors are captured in Stojka’s “dark cycle,” drawings in ink and some other materials that comprise the other half of her output. These drawings are often accompanied by text. For clarity, the English translations are repeating the meaning of the words, accurately conveying what was said (a choice I would have made as well.) What gets inevitably lost – and the part that makes her texts so indelibly authentic – is the orthography of the artist. Having had but a few years of school, after liberation and before she had her first child, Stojka writes how one hears the words, phonetically, and not according to our spelling and grammar rules. It gives the texts a texture of spontaneity and intensity, of words tumbling out of a mouth rather than a pen, providing the message with an amount of urgency that can simply not be captured in translation.
These two cycles, bright and dark, interact to magnify the void caused by evil, by offering us the memorial building blocs of a remembered childhood, catapulted into the abyss. The longing for the wholeness of life before is drawing us in, and then spitting us out into the agony of what came after, or the bitterness of the realization of what the artist had to endure. The yearning for the remembered ideal frames the depicted trauma caused by genocide, multiplying the horror exponentially.
Ceija Stojka They devoured us.
We find both, personal grief and political anger in Stojka’s drawings and texts. What makes her so effective as a messenger is the concreteness of her reporting. She did seek warmth by resting amongst the dead (hence the title of the exhibition), shielding her from the wind. She fought off starvation by chewing and swallowing little balls of wool her mother had unraveled from the sweaters still on the corpses, or by eating grass pried from under the floorboards of the barracks, or sap clawed from trees. She banned despair by clinging to hope, perceived by her to be what gave them strength.
Ceija Stojka Hope – that was what gave us strength 1944
***
“Was wir suchen ist schwer zu finden. Die Angst, die müssen wir nicht suchen. Die ist da.” “What we are searching for is hard to find. We don’t have to search for the fear. That is there.” (Translation by Lorely French.)
***
Stojka’s relationship to fear is more complex. On the one hand, she models for all of us an incomprehensible amount of fierceness and courage in poems like this.
On the other hand, she describes, again concretely, a typical behavior that is the result of her experience: “You can’t walk along the street without looking over your shoulder.” (This sentence was juxtaposed with a quote by the poet Erich Fried, an Austrian compatriot who fled into exile after the Nazis killed his father and who survived the war in England. “For I cannot think without remembering.”)
Fear permeates the past, her book titled: Even Death is terrified of Auschwitz. It seeps into the presence – already in the year 2000, she worries about next generations forgetting history, and the fact that a far-right party joins the government coalition.
She proclaims soon after: “Ich habe Angst, dass Europa seine Vergangenheit vergisst und das Auschwitz nur am Schlafen ist. Anti-ziganistische Bedrohnungen, Vorgänge und Taten beunruhigen mich und machen mich sehr traurig.” (“I fear that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only asleep. Anti-Romani threats, happenings and attacks worry me and make me quite sad.”) (Ref.)
The fear, however, seems to be one of the motors for her activism to educate Austrians and the world about the history and the plight of the Romani people, activism for which she received accolades and awards. To this day, Austria has not officially recognized the Holocaust or the Samudaripen/Porajmos – in Austria referred to as the Holocaust of the Roma – through any legislative act; the Holocaust of the Roma is instead recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust as such. (Ref.)The Romani people, assumed to have originated in Asia, most likely Punjab or Kashmir, and who have never identified themselves with a homeland, have been persecuted since the middle ages within the various countries where they traveled and traded. The Porajmos saw up to half a million Roma murdered. Like Jews, they were segregated into ghettos before transport to extermination camps. After the war they were forced to settle in various locations. In post-war Czechoslovakia, where they were considered a “socially degraded stratum”, Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. As recently as the 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of migrants to Central and Eastern Europe, with large percentages of the Romanians among them being Roma.
Postcard work of Ceija Stojka (which I consider some of her strongest communications.)
Fast forward to our own times, where for the first time ever since 1945, Austria saw this far-right party, the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party,) win the most seats in national elections with garnering almost 30% of the vote last September. (The centrist parties managed to form a governing coalition some many months later that excludes the extremists.) A member of the FPÖ had only a few years back distributed anti- Romani, hate-filled videos on social media, but could not be criminally indicted since he is protected by immunity as a member of congress.) Anti-Roma hate crimes are frequent occurrences across Europe, with assault and arson attacks against homes physically endangering people. Ethnic hatred and claims of “Gypsy criminality” are clearly making a comeback in tandem with rising anti-Semitic sentiments fostered by extremists movements and now parties.
Fear can be a tool. It can motivate us to (re)act and fight for justice, as the artist did. It can be both, exploited and imposed by draconian measures and persecution, as radical right ideologies have successfully discovered. Fear of others, of globalization and immigration, of status loss or “replacement,” can be turned into hatred of scapegoats, often ethnicities other than one’s own. Fear of consequences of protest or non-conformity can smooth the path of authoritarians who want to consolidate power.
Ceija Stojka knew that, expressed that, resisted that. In life and in art.
***
Daniel Baker is a Roma artist and theorist of renown who lives in the U.K. He uses metalised polyethelene rescue blankets, sometimes sculpted, sometimes crocheted, to combine conceptual issues related to survival strategies and practices with a visual aesthetic that echos Romani patterns. Part of his theoretical work concerns the (in)visibility of ethnic minorities, particularly those that are not geographically anchored. In a somewhat ironic turn, his work could have been displayed a bit more visibly in the gallery – you had to work to discover it.
Daniel Baker Emergency Artefacts.
Sam Marroquin shows her series The Madness of War in the upper parts of the gallery. An astonishingly large number of charcoal and acrylic paintings were fitted into the space without overcrowding. Kudos to whoever hung this, likely Sharon Svec, whose curation of this exhibition is splendid overall. The paintings are simplified reproductions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by those living through the hell that is contemporary Gaza. Put on paper with the artist’s non-dominant hand, they appear more like the drawing of a younger person, a lack of perfection and child-like approach that parallels what we see in the paintings of Stojka. Here, too, are concrete depictions of humans in existentially threatening situations, their bodies and spirits bombed into extinction, their grief more than a single life time can hold. Block letters introduce the artist’s suggestions of the emotions and thoughts likely experienced, all universal enough that they promise verisimilitude.
Sam Marroquin Paintings along the Gallery Wall from the series The Madness of War.
The work makes several strong points. For one, any claim that we have moved beyond atrocities imposed on any one group is moot. The indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, of rescue personnel and journalists/reporters is not a thing of the past, intentional starvation included. Secondly, the suffering depicted is universal, even if it is applied in this case to the particulars of the fate of Palestinians. We could as well be looking at Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo. And, importantly, Marroquin’s drawings reveal a humanity of the victims that will elicit empathy in all but the most hardened, allowing a sense of shared humanity across borders.
Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War
The issue, then, is the fact that all of these images were, as “originals,” available in public sources, live-reported during this conflict. They never made their way to those fixated on selective mass media or social media sources that are ideologically inclined to show some sides of suffering but not others. The polarization experienced in a country divided about our political future, is reflected in the visual diet that we consume, basically determined by what the powers that be put into the relevant “larders.” In some way, then, art that is not explicitly associated with media that we deem trustworthy or disreputable, respectively, might inform consumers whose minds can be opened if approaching artistic depictions without easily triggered prejudice. In theory. In practice, of course, we have to mourn the fact that the likely distribution of this important body of work pales in comparison to that of even the smallest partisan social media outlet.
Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War
Before we despair, and in honor of the remarkable resilience of Ceija Stojka and others exposed to existential threats, let me close with a poem (Ertrag is the German title) by Erich Fried, whose words introduced this review. (And yes, I’ve been a fan since my teens, when he was first published by the German publishing house Klaus Wagenbach, before anyone else took on his poetry.)
Dividend
Gathering hope from solvable problems from possibilities from all that which holds promise
Reserving strength for only that which truly requires action
Is the way to amass quietly a supply of despair never spent.
-by Erich Fried
SEEKING WARMTH
March 2025
ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660, UNITED STATES360-314-6506 GALLERY@ARTATTHECAVE.COM
HOURS: TUES-THURS 11-5PM, FRI AND SAT 11-6
For specific upcoming programs related to the exhibition, go here.
It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.
Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees.
Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.
And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.
March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens.)
Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man … war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.
No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.
Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.)
The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded the deployment of home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”
Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet, (ca. 1912)
During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens, soon recognized by the USDA.
Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.
Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women’s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “‘land girls’ central to the anti-fascist ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”
Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902)
By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack—in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”
The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.
The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women’s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew’s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by ‘female vandals’ are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order. (Ref.)
Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler, ca. 1908
Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.
She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.
Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. “She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) of1928).
Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (1878)
Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act, people!)?
What do you think I am saying?
Anna Ancher Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890)
Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.
“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette’s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”
smashing windows on private property and governmental buildings
disrupting the postal service
burning public buildings
attacking Church of England buildings
holding illegal demonstrations
burning politicians’ unoccupied homes
disrupting the 1911 census
ruining golf courses and male-only clubs
chaining themselves to buildings
disrupting political meetings
planting bombs
handcuffing themselves to railings
going on hunger strikes
Historians still argue whether or not the militant campaigns helped to further the women’s suffrage movement or whether it harmed it. But presumably they’ll agree, crocheting won’t do the job. And we did get the right to vote. For the time being.
Mary Cassatt Lydia Crocheting in the Garden (1880)
I’ll tackle that debate another day. For now, let’s enjoy the spring bloom!
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” – Friedrich Schiller (Schiller’s Werke, Nationalausgabe, Vol.20, pg.359.)
You don’t have to buy into the absolutism of Schiller’s proclamation to acknowledge that the 18th century poet, playwright and philosopher was on to something with his theories around a human play drive. He believed that play allows an escape from the rigid structures provided by societal expectations, and in some ways melds our sensual experience with rationality, providing a path to both, appreciation of aesthetics and critical thinking. Ultimately he saw play as an expression of freedom.
During the 200 years since, we have seen repeated waves of interest in the relationship between play, or playfulness, and the aesthetic experience as well as the production of art. Freud connected childhood play to creativity in ways that influenced generations:
“Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him ? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” (Ref.)
The Surrealists embraced both his notions about what drives child play and his concept of the “uncanny,” so often associated with dolls. The Expressionist artists of The Brücke proclaimed that you had to return to seeing the world through a child’s eyes. The movement towards “Primitivism” included not just a focus on cultures untouched by technology and modern civilization, but on childhood productions of art as well. In 1948 a group of French artists formed CoBrA, which publicly claimed the drawings of children as their inspiration. A child-like aesthetic was on the rise, although its content was very much about the existential sorrows of a post-war society. More recently, you have artists like Cy Twombley, Jean Tinguely, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few, whose creativity is informed by the processes, forms of expressions or materials involved in childhood play. And now we can engage with work by Ai Weiwei, whose most recent exhibition, Child’s Play,at Vito Schnabel Gallery in NYC ends this week. Using Lego Bricks exclusively, he translates art-historical canvases, famous portraits and political news images into the medium of play.
Play we shall. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU offers the opportunity to play while exploring art (or vice versa?) with its current exhibition Just Playing around.Lucky for us, and unsurprisingly, given the caliber of the curator duo Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin, the work on view provides much more than the opportunity to take a break from the real world. There are serious issues to be thought through, new insights to be gained, novel connections established – in other words, reality and critical thinking intrude on the unstructured spontaneity so desired. The show is thus something of an articulation of Schiller’s concept of play: a synthesizing, through contradiction, of the human experience of sense and reason.
The exhibition stretches across two floors, walls painted in saturated primary colors that echo kids’ rooms of yore before the current vibe of sad beige children (a fun meme that is mocking trendy design ideas for pastel environments reflecting parental rather than kids’ tastes.) Exhibits span a range of modes – sculpture, installation, video reels, paintings, and costumes, featuring the work of Derrick Adams, Calvin Chen, Jeremy Okai Davis, Latoya Lovely, Jillian Mayer, Takashi Murakami, Jeremy Rotsztain, Heidi Schwegler, Joshua Sin, Matthew Earl Williams, and Erwin Wurm. The displays are very clearly marked for presence or absence of interaction, with the signage continuing the bubbly graphics of the hand-outs and announcement posters. Playful, perhaps, space-saving for sure – the spatial arrangements allow for introduction of and extended commentary by the artists in tight construction.
Joshua Sin Power Up (2024)
The entrance hall displays two columns made out of furry toys which artist Joshua Sin found in the bins of Good Will stores. These are the kinds of soft companions embraced in the cribs and strollers of the younger set. They are the perfect metaphor for this exhibition, if you consider them transitional objects: a link to D.W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts. During childhood they form a bridge towards growth. The artist, however, reflects on what we loose in the transition: “innocence, imagination and unbridled joy.” Have to disagree – innocence lost, perhaps, but imagination and unbridled joy are available still, and in fact captured by quite a few items within this show, or the reaction of this viewer.
That said, I was quite taken by the other sculpture Sin created: a hundred or so of small, mass-produced Beanie Babies, tightly encased in acrylic boxes, forming columns. They reminded me of display cases in airports or department stores, where merchandise is aimed at customers, young and old; the collectible quality of these creatures lures kids into a mode of amassing toys rather than forming a relationship with a few individualized ones. Creating want, rather than protecting from a world of commerce, shaping future consumers, fixed on brand. A poignant reminder how even play can be devoured by market mechanisms.
Joshua Sin Boxed Dreams (2024)
And speaking of brand, that is how one of the, if not most, famous contemporary Austrian artists is sometimes labeled. Erwin Wurm is represented at PSU with two instantiations of his One Minute Sculptures. This is a series that integrates time into the art work, as well as interaction with the viewer, by offering basic materials, often casually collected as found objects, placed on a pedestal and provided with simple instructions: do this or that with it for a minute, or as long as you can. Photos can be taken and archived, prolonging the otherwise short-lived sculptural constellation of a toy dog hanging on your shoulders. He has been doing this for almost thirty years, restricting displays to galleries and museums for fear of it becoming a gimmick, and proudly announces that “only” 129 or so exist. Define gimmick again?
Erwin Wurm Theory of Hope (2016) (One minute sculpture)
An ongoing retrospective of his life’s work at the ALBERTINA in Vienna (which also shows other, equally identifiable series) at the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday, sees the artist expand. The One Minute Sculptures are now rid of pedestals, come without instructions and provide abstract sculptures we are supposed to interact with. It was “too clean” up until now, according to Wurm. Mostly, though, the idea is to undermine the pathos elicited by so many high-brow, serious works of art, and engage the viewer with whimsey, fostering connection by playful interaction.(Ref.) And to be perfectly honest, an installation of his, an upside down truck made into a platform inviting you to peruse the Mediterranean that I saw at an earlier Venice Biennale, was a striking commentary on the movement of goods and bodies across that body of water at a time where the refugee crisis changed political constellations in Europe. More thought, less play. For me, memorable.
***
A video screen spanning the entire back wall of the gallery displays a loop of an azure sky with little white clouds and some inverse sky-writing in child-like script, slowly fading into oblivion. Maybe you can’t access your inner child – but you surely can still be treated like one, with the reassuring message that you’ll be ok (where is the pat on the back?). The mirror-image distortion of the words questions said sentiment, of course. What can we trust in a world where up is down or left is right, truth made ephemeral? Where assurances disappear while we are still trying to decipher them? Clever and beautiful work by Jillian Mayer.
Jillian Mayer You’ll be okay (video 2013)
Speaking of inner child, it surely helps to get back into play mode if the appropriate environmental cues signal the possibility of immersion in child-oriented environments. Latoya Lovely provides an inviting installation that is dominated by color, geometric murals, familiar books and object, artificial trees that hold clothes for (encouraged) dress up, and supersized magnetic wall puzzles that multiple people tried to re-arrange during my visit. Environmental immersion is clearly en vogue, and people are willing to wait in line for hours to enter spectacular playgrounds that mix art and playfulness, like Meow Wolf in New Mexico (where I stood in said lines, dished out unspeakable sums of money, and still wonder why,) or now Hopscotch here in Portland. The small scale and appreciated calm of Lovely’s installation somehow made a much more important point than the circus-like atmospheres mentioned above, bent on sating our unquenchable yearning for spectacle: Play (just like art) consists of making, taking apart and crafting back together, transforming space, and improvising, and so on. All of these processes are enabled or fostered by appropriately child-friendly environments where the materials themselves speak of playfulness and encourage reorganization.
Latoya Lovely On a Lovely Sunday Morning(2025)
***
There is playfulness and then there is playing games, both an important aspect of experiencing the world through the lens of play. One is aimless, rule-free, independent. The other is often goal oriented, bound by rules, and certainly open to or even in need of repetitive, practiced sequences rather than spontaneous moves. (Practice those scales and those pitches! Memorize those opening gambits in chess!)
Think of board games, Mahjong or Back-Gammon, or playing a musical score, or competitive games in sport. Jeremy Okai Davis’ paintings on the lower gallery level offer depictions of sports figures who surmounted obstacles and succeeded in a racist world, intentionally questioning the rules of the (larger)game.
Jeremy Okai Davis Crown (Althea Gibson) (2023
His work is well rooted in a long line of art works that made the game, and the social structures surrounding it, itself a topic, starting with the preoccupation with card playing in the 16th/17th century. Lucas van Leyden’s The Card players, Carravagio’s The Cardsharps, LaTour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs are all examples where issues beyond play were slickly introduced: who wants to have fun, who is competitive who likes to take risks or is cautious, who is strategic, who is willing to cheat, and who is good or bad at losing the game. And who is, we can now add, included or excluded, by invisible rules reaching back to Jim Crow. Play and the fate of players as a metaphor, then, representing social conditions.
I am not a gamer, but the role that video games have come to play around the world cannot be underestimated. There are whole museums now dedicated to video game art, offering exhibitions concerned with all the questions I’ve raised so far, applied to the artificial screen. The British National Video Museum, for example, right now offers an exhibition, The Art of Play, that focuses on how artists create the mood and textures of the video scenes. Video games are the perfect template to create or enhance myths, through world building and often sly ideological influence. They can be a vehicle to allow people to tend to baser instincts without real life consequences, but they can also be the seed for incredible levels of creativity in the player who has options to design their path forward.
For me, the most intriguing and thought-provoking installation in the entire Just Playin’ Around exhibition tackles questions around the psychology of gaming. Matthew Earl Williams (Confederate Tribes of Grande Ronde) took stills of the game Red Dead Redemption 2, the successor of one of the most famous video games ever, Red Dead Redemption. Both have won critical acclaim and multiple awards, wildly successful commercially. Set in the late 1800s in the Wild West, with themes concerning cycles of violence, masculinity, redemption, and the American Dream, the role player can choose who to be and with whom to align (multi-player mode possible), making practical and moral choices that have various rewards and punishments attached. Williams created a series of tintypes, popular in the late 19th century, and got permission from various players to capture images of their avatars which they had imaginatively costumed to stay in character. He raised the question why some would wish to be Native Americans during a historical period of their extreme suffering, when most players chose to be cowboys. Alas, no answer to that, as far as I could detect.
Matthew Earl William Indians of the Uncanny Valley (2021)
But the transfer of a digital fantasy creation onto a historical medium, the tintype print, created an illusion of historicity, when it was all frictionless role play safely removed from real life massacres. Add to that the choice of framing: garish, elaborately detailed and carved gold frames, that I immediately associated with the Orientalist paintings you find in the Louvre, or other National museums. The exotic “other” is squeezed into frames representing the taste and status of an entirely different world, their brightness furthermore a visual contrast enhancement of the darkness of their subject. I have no idea if that was intended by Williams, but the association to framing of outsiders was riveting.
Alternatively, these frames could represent the high-brow art found in museum, now linked to the low-brow art of video games, which draw in millions and millions of people, something museums can only dream of. Active play, connected to aesthetic experience of the created fantasy worlds, seems to be an ingredient we should indeed have a closer look at.
***
“Art is a complete fairytale – art is an unending child’s birthday party (forever, and ever, and ever, like cookie monster.” – Jonathan Meese, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Diktatur der Kunst, Berlin, 2012, p.474. (My translation.)
The longing to live in a world of play, and the assumption that play, intent on breaking the chains of reason, will enhance creativity, often go hand in hand in the contemporary art world. There is nothing wrong to focus on escape, when life is overall hard and overwhelmingly complex. Floating 2 story-high yellow rubber duckies on European harbors, as Florentijn Hofman did, or building a pink castle inside a Danish museum, as Meese and associates were known to do, provided fun for most involved, levity that is perfectly acceptable once you relegate high-brow “art” to the background, at least for a stretch of time. Did it bring back a piece of childhood, though, as intended? Can you really reenter a child-like mode of playing, and does that have an actual effect on creativity? Is it not just appearance, a strategy, since the child-like aesthetic, and the juvenile, playful demeanor are a consciously developed style of the artist, one which they consistently extend to adulthood – or so asks art critic Larissa Kikol, who is an expert on the subject matter.
Contemporary psychologists have some answers to offer, although a core question remains unresolved. For one, try as you might, you cannot completely reenter the state of a young child that you left behind long ago. Even if I make it as easy as possible, leading you through age regression via hypnosis, for example, you will draw me a picture you think is that of a child, but which differs significantly from those drawn by actual children. We simply cannot erase all of what we have learned growing up.
In a limited way, however, play does enhance creativity. Research tells us that one of the prerequisites of creativity is to focus less on external rewards and pay offs, and to engage in activity just for the pleasure of it. A sense of play can help with this – after all you are chasing fun. Likewise, a prerequisite for creativity is a willingness to step away from patterns and customs, and explore the unknown and often ambiguous, a willingness to take risks, and free play can help here too. Note, though, that I refer to these as prerequisites. They set the table for the creative process, but there is no scientific consensus on what the process actually involves. It certainly aids creativity if you relax assumptions and ignore boundaries and let your thoughts go wherever they will. But research suggests that these steps give you more options, not necessarily better options. And the creative mind seems able to separate the jewels from the junk. It also makes someone more likely to move into the direction of the jewels. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Can play put you in the right mindset? Often yes. Is play the golden key that unlocks all doors? Likely not.
But for those of us experiencing art, rather than being called to produce it, an invitation to play is often the way to jump over barriers keeping us from enjoying something we fear we might not understand. The gallery attendants, singularly helpful, knowledgeable young people, reported that the rooms fill with students when there are larger breaks between classes. By these reports, they have not previously made much use of the gallery integrated into the PSU complex, and the nature of the exhibition clearly provides a draw. As it should, offering more than just playin’ around.
After all, we need adults in the room, now more than ever, and much of the presented work helps us to get there.
You know that feeling when you think about something and all of sudden almost everything you read or see somewhat points in that direction? It’s some sort of semantic priming, and mine has been all week around the notion of shelter. How can we find shelter against the onslaught of bad news, the overabundance of worry, the intensity of stress in our personal as well as public lives?
First thing this morning, then, was a videoclip sent from Germany. Someone declared that the current mood, across the world, is like the weather: dark, stormy, and definitely cold. He then argued we all have to be like hats, or jackets, or felt-lined boots used for exactly that weather, offering shelter against what surrounds us, providing warmth for those next to us, out in the cold. I took to that mental image – you’ll be my jacket, I’ll be your hat. Protection found in mutual caring for each other, shelter in loving kindness or chesed, as it is known as a concept in Judaism.
Next thing in my inbox was this week’s Meditation in an Emergency, focused on the need for big tents, another form of shelter. Solnit argues that during emergencies like real world catastrophes people come together to support and protect each other regardless of political or religious differences that usually keep them apart, unless they reside at the absolute extreme ends of the spectrum. The same should happen during political upheavals the likes of which we are currently experiencing. There is value in alliances, then, rather than isolation, protection through coalitions, not undermined by scorn or accusations for previous mistakes. )Although some will always barred from my tent: Republican Darren Beattie, for example, appointed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior role that represents American foreign policy to the world. Beattie has called for the mass sterilization of “low IQ trash” and feral populations. “Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.).” Nerd-Reich eugenics, anyone?)
Back to sheltering tents: Here is Solnit’s paragraph that registered most with me:
Many powerful forces–the rhetoric of mainstream politics, the framing of mainstream entertainment and news, the version of therapy that reinforces individualism as it tells us we’re here to care for ourselves, end of story–tell us we are consumers, not citizens (and here I mean citizens as members of civil society, regardless of legal citizenship status). That we are here just to meet our own needs and chase our personal desires, within the realms of private relationships and material comfort and security, and that we hardly exist beyond those small realms. It says on the one hand “go have all this stuff” while it quietly discourages us to have the other stuff that is public life, participation, and power. While pretending to point us toward abundance, it deprives us of the most expansive and idealistic versions of ourselves. And most of us really are that larger self, the version that cares about justice, human rights, democracy, equality (withering all that away is a clear part of the right’s agenda at least since Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”).
Chiharu Shiota The Network (2024) Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France. Photocredir Philippe Biolatto, Ville d’Aix-en-Provence
And then I came across a mention on ArtNet about two current exhibitions of work by an artist who is everyone’s darling these days – not mine, admittedly. Chiharu Shiota’s work has been basically repeating itself for the last 25 years, and some of her installations borrow quite a bit from other people’s ideas. But honor where honor is due: She was one of the early sculptors who integrated fiber into her work, before we saw the explosion of fiber art across the last years. And the theme of interconnectedness has been a red thread (quite literally) throughout her career. (She reserves the black threads she uses for associations to the cosmos, fate, or other intangible things that surround us.) The idea of all of us being invisibly bound together by these webs made out of thousands of threads, and the visual experience of tent-like installations hanging above our heads certainly fit into the associations that came up around the notion of “shelter.” For an introduction to her work, here is an interview with the artist, a good starting point.
Chiharu Shiota Uncertain Journey (2024) Le Grand Palais, Paris, France
Photo credit: Didier Plowy
Here are selective exhibitions still on view:
until 19.03.2025 The Soul Trembles, solo show, Le Grand Palais, Paris, France [touring exhibition]
until 20.04.2025 Between Worlds, solo show, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey
until 28.04.2025 The Unsettled Soul, solo show, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
until 27.06.2025 The Soul’s Journey, solo show, Fundacion Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico
As I said, she is surely en vogue. Lots of soul in the titles, lots of wool in the air. Clearly resonating with a large, international public. Maybe it is people’s fascination with the nature of webs, strong and fragile at once. Or the rudimentary desire for cocooning. Or respect for the tremendous amount of coordinated work going into these creations. Or humans’ insatiable desire for spectacle, the bigger the better. All not mutually exclusive.
I encountered her work for the first time at the Hammer museum in L.A., when she was the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s redesigned lobby, for the Hammer Projects 2023.
Here is an installation in a gallery in Brussels from 9 years ago, that somehow reminded me of a painting by George Tooker, the way my brain works…
Chiharu Shiota Sleeping is like Death (2016) Installation View, photo credit Gallery Daniel Templon
George Tooker Sleep II (1959)
Last year Shiota was invited to show at the Chapel of the Visitation during the Aix-en-Provence Biennial; her installation included letters from people asked to write about their experience with gratitude (does that remind you of Yoko Ono’s installations of trees and letters for peace?)
Maybe the idea of gratitude is another way to find shelter: a focus on what we have that is positive. It might just insulate us, if only for short moments, from the fear and disquiet instilled by the news.
We had a dusting of snow this week, lasting not even a day. Coincidentally, I was cleaning out some closets and found a number of calendars from the 1990s, beautiful, huge art reproductions on linen paper, sent to me as gifts from Germany. Most of them were intact – I had only ripped out a few of my favorite pages to put into thrift-store frames at a time when we did not have the funds to put original art on the walls. I went to look for the winter months, and there they were – impressionistic renditions of snowy scenery.
All of the calendars featured painters from an artist colony that was established in the late 19th century in the small hamlet of Worpswede. The village in the state of Lower Saxony, close to the wealthy and bourgeois Hanseatic league city of Bremen, was a haven for young, academically trained artists trying to escape urban centers and an increasingly industrialized society, longing for a return to nature and establishing a utopia of communal living. In a way, they withdrew from reality and any attempt to use art as a means of engagement with a new technology-driven society, changing at a rapid pace. Instead they expressed longing for an ideal, intact world (heile Welt), and pursued new aesthetic criteria to express their belonging to a Germanic world, their northern roots. They hoped to mutually sustain each other pragmatically and artistically, in a region that was cheap, in fact so poor that almost every single crop sharer had multiple children emigrate to the U.S. at the time, because the land could not feed large families.
Starting in 1889, the three founders, Fritz Mackensen, Hans Am Ende and Otto Modersohn first lived with farmers, then in an inn, and eventually started to build their own houses. They were soon joined by numerous other artists, all drawn to the stark landscape of the foggy country side, dominated by peat bogs, heather and moors, a river and canals that allowed small barges to transport the peat. It was close to the sea, windswept, with annually 200 days of rain, flat as a pancake, opening endless horizons, disrupted only by the occasional birch groves and conifers thriving on the sandy loam. In 1901, Rainer Maria Rilke started to visit – you can read about his impressions of the artists and the landscape here. He developed a crush on two young women, a painter, Paula Becker (these days famous in her own right), and a sculptor, Clara Westhoff, who he eventually married since Paula had chosen Otto Modersohn, then a widower and financially secure, instead. Rilke’s essay reads like a long fare-well to a shared vision, now abandoned, since the utopia had not worked out.
It took but ten years for the idyllic artist colony to break apart. Personal rivalries played a role, jealousy about sales, exhibitions and awards. The very first group show in Bremen that exhibited some 34 work of multiple painters, had been a flop. The wealthy burgers clung to their old-fashioned tastes for genre paintings and did not like, much less purchase, the new impressionist art. A fluke visit of this show by Eugen Stieler, president of the Munich Secession, led to an enthusiastic invitation to show at the Munich Glasspalace in 1895 – and they were a sensation. From then on they met with success at all the reputable art fairs and museum shows across the county.
More importantly, the dissolution of the artist group was caused by increasing conflicts around political and ideological issues. They all had read, and were influenced to varying degrees, by a book by Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, (Rembrandt as Educator) a basic, openly racist text of anti-positivist and anti-rationalist philosophy that was hugely popular at the time. It was about German art, blood and soil, rejection of science and technology (dangerously international, not “völkisch” enough!), an exhortation to any German individual to serve the German spirit and culture. (Ref.)
All should sound familiar to those who know how National Socialism coopted these positions. Several of the painters, foremost Mackensen and Am Ende, did eventually become flaming Nazis, while others withdrew, trying to stay neutral, and one courageous individual – Heinrich Vogeler – completely shifted gears, fighting the Nazi regime, changing his art from romantic Art Nouveau to political agitation prop. He paid for it with his life: he was captured and sent to a Russian penal colony when the Germans invaded Russia, to which he had fled. There he starved to death.
Heinrich Vogeler Barkenhof im Schnee (1910)
***
Heinrich Vogeler Frühling 1897
What strange paths this man trod, what encounters, experiences, shattering upheavals it took to free him from the rosy flower-chains of a romantic fairy-tale world and turn him into an uncompromising fighter in the ranks of class-conscious workers.] — Erich Weinert, Introduction to his edition Vogeler’s Erinnerungen (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1952), p. 14.
Why am I writing about this, rather than letting us all enjoy some pretty pictures? It comes down to the psychological question of what enables people to resist propaganda, while others adopt mind sets that are flamingly immoral. The obvious parallels to our contemporary horror show make an answer to that question ever more pressing.
We are currently facing a concerted attempt to reinstall forms of segregation, assert a hierarchy of value determined by race and gender, with White males on top of the hierarchy. Forget about issues of enrichment, corruption, influence peddling, colonial longings, political persecution, science denial, or all the other things having rained down on us in the last two weeks with the advent of the new administration.There is a basic, open, systematic assault on everything the civil rights movement worked for decades, a century, to achieve. Re-segregation is the order at the federal, state, and local level, not just some purging of DEI initiatives.
Let’s call a spade a spade – you can read in detail about it in the Washington Post here and the NYT here. It is not just about “meritocracy,” the new powers are suing about the very presence of Blacks in our institutions. The US Census Bureau has taken down the statistics for age, sex and race/ethnicity, numbers needed to pursue equality. Women and POC are supposed to be driven out of the workforce – just listen to the President’s comments on the causes for aviation disaster.
Ending all Cadet Clubs and activities for POC at the United States Military Academy, while all religious ones remain, is aimed at re-segregation and elevation of Christian Nationalism.
The introduction of school vouchers that allows schools to accept/reject applicants if they are private, and hollow out the available funds for the remaining public schools, is a tool of re-segregation. Don’t forget that Trump’s judicial nominees almost always demurred when asked in their confirmation hearings whether Brown v. Board was wrongly decided. Doesn’t that make you wonder what the Supreme Court is up to next? The DOGE posse has gotten access to Department of Education data on federal student aid, including the personal information for millions who receive student loans from the government, feeding it into AI to cut funds for the majority poor and POC constituency served by that aid, eliminating thus access to education.
So how does an individual resist the flood of rising racism? For Vogeler it was, I believe, the experience of serving in WW I and realizing what the causes of war were all about, for one. He developed a strong sense of empathy with those unjustly treated in their societies. He also was extremely widely traveled, learning about the nature of hierarchies no matter what nation you looked at, in Europe or Asia, the eternal division between up and down, us vs. them, as a means to protect stratified power.
Most Americans have not served in a war, or, for that matter, left this continent. Their perception of the world is singularly driven by what they learn at home and from the selective exposure to media that knows how to manipulate mindsets. Most importantly, as I have written about in detail already five years ago, we have to look at attitudes being transmitted in a direct connection to the history of slavery. I excerpt it here. (I know, it’s getting long, but it is SO important and you have all weekend thread it….)
“Scientific studies have shown this to be true nowhere more so than in the American South. In their book Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern PoliticsAvidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history.
In a nutshell: Southern Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose.
But there is another important mechanism at work, called behavioral path dependenceby the authors: Generation after generation passes down and reinforces beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learn from their parents and teach their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoe the value judgments and create spaces for segregation. After slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relies increasingly on cultural mechanisms.
“…things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, extrajudicial violence, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.
And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (or what’s left of it) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.
Education is key, and education is what they are going after.
Musik, fittingly for place and time, then, by Brahms.
Someone once called propaganda the art of selling lies. It’s a catchy summary but obscures the extent to which communication can be used to influence public opinion. Sure, our beliefs can be manipulated with lies, but also with truths, half-truth, loaded language or simple omission of facts. Propaganda seeks to influence us, persuade us, and often drags us into emotional rather than rational reactions.
Now why would I want to muse about propaganda on 1/20/2025, when we should be celebrating Martin Luther King and the lives of Black Americans like Thurgood Marshall, Booker T Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Travon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Kendrick Johnson, George Floyd Emmett, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery? Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Propaganda is, at its best, indeed an art, but it uses art as well. You may remember my recent writings about propaganda art which blossomed in the beginning of the 20th century before WW I and then surged to power in Russia and Germany in the years to come. The mass production capabilities of printing posters and the technical advances in the movie industry made it possible to reach millions of people.
Of course, visual propaganda had been around for centuries before that, with roughly two messages, still in action today:
“Be part of the struggle! Belong to those fighting for a better future! Join!”
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)
-or-
“Resistance is futile! Revolt and you’ll get crushed! Withdraw!”
Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Babylonian captive to grind bones of his family, 7th – 6th c. BCE. From Nineveh palace.
The topic called me again when I came across an enticing painting last week. It was posted on social media as Paul Klee’s An Allegory of Propaganda from 1939, obviously titled about propaganda, not propaganda itself. I was not familiar with it, and puzzled about the imagery in the context of the title. Ok, I thought, what can I make of it? (Screenshot of text and image below.)
Oranges and yellow dominate in a warm color scheme, a golden era upon us, preying on our need for hope? The person’s face looks rather androgynous, but is dressed and bejeweled like a woman. (“Propaganda” was actually a term for the most male of concepts: the name for a congregation of cardinals originally, established in 1622, charged with the management of missions. But in German, the word is female – perhaps because of the stereotypes of seduction and manipulative lying associated with the gender. Just speculating.) She holds a flower, often a symbol of magic (providing mystical powers in fairy tales). Or a symbol of innocence to be taken, the veritable deflowering. The woman’s dress is strangely configured. My first association was court jester costume shapes (they are hired to tell lies, amuse, distract, but ensure allegiance to the king.) Then I thought it could be a hint at rags, in German “Lumpen,” which immediately gave rise to the idea of Lumpenproletariat. The term, coined by Marx, can be roughly translated as the mob, a class of “outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers.” (Ref.) Well, mob and propaganda make a good pairing, as recipients of same, or, racketeers and propaganda, as seen in full view at the time of this writing.
OOPS.
Started to look at the date on the canvas. 1906, not 1939. Checked the title of the work on museum sites. Klee’s Allegory of Propaganda turns out to be an altogether different painting, created the year before he died, namely this:
Paul Klee An Allegory of Propaganda or Voice from the Ether,and you will eat your fill! (1939.)
(Some serious sleuthing revealed the 1906 painting as Klee’s Hesitation, which is a far better match between content and visual imagery. )
So here I was fooled into accepting false information, mentally elaborating on it in perfectly sensible ways to make it work (note, how you can make up an interpretative narrative out of thin air as guided by a presumed title…), and only rescued by an ingrained habit to look closely and to check the facts before I disseminate them to a larger circle of readers.
The true portrait’s subject is obviously salivating at the propaganda from the radio, words promising wealth and “Lebensraum,”( eat your fill!), as the Victoria and Albert Museum describes it, having purchased the painting in 1965. Alongside a matchstick that fronts fiery clouds in the back, his hair resembles barbed wire, his saliva could be mistaken for blood, his ears are open to the SS, and his cheeks flare pink in excitement of a new dawn, and a chilly palette overall, despite the prevalence of reds and browns.
***
The voice from the ether spills words, promising or threatening, dependent on the minute of the day and the target of manipulation. One of the most famous and most reproduced “art” works of the Nazi era, in itself propaganda but also about propaganda, was Hermann Otto Hoyer’s In the Beginning was the Word (1937).
Herman Otto Hoyer In the Beginning was the Word, (1937). United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The painter drew on two sources: the Gospel of John which reads: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Secondly, the word is by Hitler, found in Mein Kampf, “All great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word.”
Hitler, now as the god-like figure, uses oratorial magic that keeps the listeners enthralled. In real life as well, not just an imagined painting.
We will be flooded with words in the coming years from on high, in the form of administration pronouncements, threats, executive orders, legislative proposals, commission summaries, Supreme Court contortions, brown-shirt fashion advice and media reporting that is already bending to the will of the newly empowered (and paying into oligarchic coffers in the meantime).
Flooded with words arriving from social media that spread disinformation far faster, and in higher frequency, than any posters and art reproductions in the history of politics ever could. Words from bots that proliferate like mushrooms, for every blocked one another one popping up in the next dark, moist corner.
Words from a state that, in the wonderfully sarcastic voice of Catherine Rampell, “now owns the memes of production.” Loathsome AI will make it (near) impossible to distinguish the false from the real, creating a sense that reality can no longer be grasped, just as Hannah Arendt predicted in the words I posted at the entry of this blog.
Yet we do not have to surrender to words.
We do not have to buy into propaganda. We do not have to believe every lie, every threat, every hint, every bribe, a tsunami of misinformation to the point where we throw up our hands, withdraw in sheer exhaustion, give up the good fight and quit, walking away fearfully into a steadily hotter sunset.
We still have the power to think and judge, (and check our sources critically, I’ll add, having myself been duped not just once.)
They might win their battle to enshrine inequality and forsake justice, but at least they will have to fight, if we don’t capitulate in advance.
Music on this Martin Luther King Day is chosen to celebrate hope. Let’s be a chorus to Sam Cooke’s “Change is gonna come.”
Last blog for this year, looks like. I am defying the impulse to offer a balance sheet of a difficult year, or prepare a battle plan for the even more difficult one ahead. Instead, I will write about things that made me intensely happy at one point or another during the last 12 months, in hopes to get the transition into 2025 off to the right start.
Let’s begin with the fact that I am embedded in or adjacent to a ton of people who are highly creative. The range runs from (inter)nationally renowned artists, to successful local ones who can devote their life to making art. From published writers, painters, photographers, ceramicists who have shows, to all those people who pursue their urge to create regardless how unacknowledged their efforts will remain.
People who work 60 hour weeks and then come home to teach themselves how to make lace. People who lovingly and inventively design little flower fairy scenarios in their front rock gardens, enchanting the neighborhood with their creativity. People who make a house a home by determinedly finding the right way to paint the walls and hang the art. People who create native plant gardens that weave and flow from a dusty, dry cement desert. People who fabricate the most imaginative porcelain containers, dainty and elegant, with painted details. People who knit to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome, or embroider little creatures onto grandchildren’s crib blankets. People who weave, and those who quilt, adding new ideas to age-old crafts.
One of them is a friend who spends much of her time writing grants and breathing life into the finances of her organization, dealing with PR and recruiting advertisement, organizing membership drives and donor meetings, never mind keeping the books and making sure everyone gets paid.
Laura Grimes needed a retainer wall in front of her house and decided it had to be more than just cinder blocks. It has become a project that is creative on many levels – constructing themed mosaics from shards, remnants, beads, toys, thrift- and dollar store finds as well as generous donations from the community of the local Buy Nothing web site. I can just envision her sitting night after night in a basement experimenting with the right cement glue, the appropriately sized cinder blocks, the arrangement of a thousand trinkets and marbles, the groupings by shape and color and category membership.
It is not Art with a capital A, and I assume was never meant to be that. It is a desire to fashion something representing joy if not beauty from lots of circles and dots, or to tell a story or two, as all creative endeavors end up doing.
Maybe all these creatives convey the history of a craft, maybe they account for the requirements of a climate zone, maybe they refer to fables in their porcelain work, or maybe they speak of birds, or mermaids, or vegetables embedded in imaginary landscapes. Maybe they depict the hard truths of our time.
All of it, however, is directed at an “other,” the viewer, establishing a connection across time and/or space, letting us “read” what they have to say, or just feel gifted by the expressions they had to bestow. Art or craft engenders curiosity, instills pleasure, perhaps even admiration, linking two minds for a moment, a first step toward community. Giving one’s imagination a creative form is an act of reaching forward, outward, the possibility of forming a bond, no matter how playful or artful the base. Nothing more important in times where loneliness and division are dark clouds threatening to engulf so many. I am so happy to be surrounded by creativity offering connectedness in this way.
***
Fast forward from dotted mosaics to dotted paintings. I have always admired the defiance of African-American painter Howardena Pindell who set herself the life-long task to decry racial segregation by using dots and circles in her art – originating in her childhood experience of red dots glued to the bottom of glasses and silver ware in public restaurants, to be served Blacks only, keeping the unmarked ones for Whites.
But recently I have been completely taken in, without ever seeing it in real life, by the dot-dominated work of a painter who started in her late 70s and whose visions exploded onto the art world horizon soon thereafter. Emily Kam Kngwarray produced about 3000 paintings during the 8 years she still lived after taking up the craft, about one a day. Those of my readers lucky to live in Great Britain will be able to see a retrospective at the Tate Modern, starting July 10th, 2025. What stirs me is not just the movement and exuberance that makes these canvases come alive, but admittedly also the very notion of “late-blooming.”
Kam Kngwarray’s works on show. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia
Installation view of Kim Kngwarray’s Batiks
Kam Kngwarray grew up in a remote area of Australia, with little contact to the outside world until she was 80 years old. She was as Anmatyerre elder, and a lifelong custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.
“Whenever Emily was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of ‘dump dump’ dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same: Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), tingu (Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.” ( Interview with Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre.)”
Emily Kame Kngwarreye Summer Celebration (1991)
Kam Kngwarray Alhalkere – Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) Photograph: Courtesy of D’Lan Contemporary
The connection to place reveals itself even to the likes of me who are totally ignorant about Aborigine art. The abstracted vision, paralleling Modernism or styles found in Japanese calligraphy, grasps something universal, reverberating with many of us, lightyears removed from the artist’s existence. Universal: the concept that you can embrace place, the very part of the natural (or even built) world where you live, that informs and infuses you, providing a sense of belonging. It is there for all of us, even if Western culture during the last century has tried much to dull our sensitivity to its call.
***
From dotted paintings to pearly music: Y’Y, the new recording by pianist and jazz composer Amaro Freitas makes me goose-bump happy (here is the link). It, too, encapsulates a tribute to a place, a region, the forest and rivers of Northern Brazil, featuring legends, spirits and rhythms from the Amazon and Pernambuco, where the artist grew up. The piano score is ravishing and the way he manipulates the strings by inserting soft objects like seeds, produces a creative new sound, always echoing the water drops and rivulets of the subtropical environment.
For me the album registers on a different level as well, making it special – a link to personal history. As I have mentioned often before, I am not one to spend much time perusing the past and introspecting about how life unfolded. But occasionally some glorious moments deserve to be remembered, and the album delivers the impetus, with its compositions bearing resemblances to Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian, and Egberto Gismonti, the Brazilian musical giant.
I swear I survived adolescence only because I could bang out Khatchaturian’s Toccata (here is the music). And I mean bang out, paying no heed to differences in dynamics, just hitting the keys with rage. And one of the best experiences of my life was a backpacking trip along the Rio Negro in Ecuador, first (and, alas, last) visit to the Amazonian rainforest, captured so well in much of Gismonti’s work, and now Freitas’. Art linking to personal history, then, invites to remember the past, which in turn contains the implication of a future, where I intend to spend my energies to help connect the dots, as best I can. Just keep the creative output coming!
Happy New Year!
And speaking of connecting the dots (since this blog is dedicated to art, nature and politics, after all): I thought we might as well end 2024 on a combination of laughing, crying, screaming, and gasping at the theatre of the absurd upon us: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/eliot-weinberger/incoming – courtesy of the London Review of Books.)
Walk with me. You have the choice of pouring rain (Tuesday) or bright sun, unseasonably warm (Wednesday.) On both days, the highlight of the visual riches in the woods and marshlands was the color orange – in many variations, sometimes subdued, sometimes fiery, at all times enhancing the cooler hues in the landscape with a pleasing contrast effect. Ever up-lifting.
In the visual arts, orange has been around for a long time. The Egyptians used it for tomb paintings, despite the fact that the pigment they employed, realgar, was derived from monoclinic crystals and was highly toxic. Medieval monks colored their manuscripts with it as well, ignorant of its effects on health.
Orange really took off in the 18th and 19th century, after Louis Vauquelin, a French scientist, discovered the mineral crocoite, which led to the production of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. The Pre-Raphaelites paved the way, with the Impressionists not far behind. Van Gogh took it to extremes, and Expressionism pledged itself to this intensive hue. Abstract artists of our own time made good use of the color as well. Below are some of my favorite examples, paired with what nature has to offer, in every which way as visually rich as what sprang from painters’ imaginations.
John Constable The Hay Wain (1821)
Sunsets are, of course, a perennial favorite. Not to be found this week, alas.
Caspar David Friedrich Das Große Gehege (1832)
Reflections rule.
J. M. W. Turner, Fighting Temeraire (1839)
The most famous of the orange suns,
Claude Monet Impression, Sunrise (1872)
and vineyards echoing the color choice.
Vincent van Gogh Red Vineyards at Arles (1888)
Light, captured,
Emil Nolde Coastal Landscape Date unknown
landscape abstracted.
Richard Diebenkorn Berkeley No 46 (1955)
Color reduction.
Mark Rothko Orange and Yellow (1956)
The strangest of them all – the man’s head below the woman’s face detectable in her lap only with a bit of help, covered by orange tresses, that might be the burn of love or loss, who knows.
Edvard Munch Love and Pain (1893)
Music today is dedicated by me to this ill-fated couple….
In a season where light during the darkness takes on a certain symbolism, (Hanukkiahs and Christmas trees, I see you!) the brightness of orange is nature’s contribution – gratefully accepted. Even when drenched in rain.
Here is a Long Read, suggested for the weekend. Elad Nehorai, a former orthodox Jew who writes for the Guardian, The Forward and Times of Israel, asks us to think through the implications of how the American public reacted to the murder of the healthcare CEO. He offers thoughts on how we can bring about change with non-violence and what the civil rights movement had to say about the challenges with such an approach. I thought this is a worthwhile topic during a season where Christianity celebrates the arrival of someone who was supposed to bring peace on earth, no luck so far, and Judaism celebrates a miracle of sustainability during a violent civil war …. https://substack.com/home/post/p-153227333
