“I’m interested in cultural phenomena that symbolize oddness and excess. Currently I’m looking at competitive table-setting competitions, home decorating in the era of Reaganomics, and Louise Linton’s infamous Instagram post full of designer goods and hurt feelings.” So answered Katherine Vetne when asked about the sources of inspiration and influence for her metal art.

http://katherinevetne.com

This was one of five question posed to many of the women artists in a show currently on view at the National Museum for Women Artists in Washington, D.C., titled Heavy Metal.

It is another show I’m not able to visit, but that caught my interest for a number of reasons. For one, the exhibit is the 5th installment of a Women to Watch series, where artists are found through collaboration between outreach committees and museum curators, thus widening the circle of potential participants that might otherwise escape curators’ attention.

Secondly, I really like the project of giving the same questions to almost all of the artists and then putting their answers on the website. Beyond asking what they like best about working with metal and how the current work emerges from their overall body of work, what their favorite tool is, and the above mentioned query about inspiration, they are also asked which recent exhibit they saw made the biggest impression. In combination you really learn something about each artist that could never be conveyed through a simple artist statement alone, and the comparison between the participating artists is enlightening and helps to reflect on their work.

https://blog.nmwa.org/tag/heavy-metal/

Third, the title of the show caught my attention.  Too cutesy by far, I thought first. But when you are told this show is touching on gender discrimination with metal work being a male domain, it elicits some curiosity, particularly when viewing the lightness, almost ephemeral quality of many of the displayed object. More importantly, though, the title could perhaps refer to the heavy topics tackled by many of the works, from environmental destruction to the Syrian war.

Here is a video of one of the participating artists, whose work Palmyra captures the grief over the war in Syria in ways that are palpable even if you just see a photograph of the artwork.

Overall, a show of women working in notably diverse ways with metal, from process to size of the artworks is enlightening. Give it  look. https://nmwa.org/exhibitions/heavy-metal 

Photographs today are of metal details caught on camera in my walk abouts.

“My art focusses on the power of women – to remind myself I have power.” I heard this sentence in an interview with Hend al-Mansour, a Saudi-Arabian artist working with screen printing and installation, who emigrated to the US in 1997 at age 41. The oldest of 12 siblings, born in the small town of Al-Hasa in Saudi-Arabia, she seems quite powerful to me. She went to medical school in Egypt, practiced cardiology for decades, engaged in her art that was quite controversial in her Islamic environment, and took the harsh step of leaving for work at the Mayo Clinic. Upon arrival she was diagnosed with cancer, and treated throughout her 2 years of internship, working all the while.

The forced recognition of how short life might be led to a decision to engage fully in the arts – promptly working towards a an MFA from MCAD in 2002 and an MA in Art History at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul in 2013. Al-Mansour received a Jerome Fellowship of Printmaking in 2013/14 and the Juror’s Award of the Contemporary Islamic Art exhibition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2012. This year she received a McKnight fellowship and has a solo show at the Arab American National Museum in Michigan.

http://www.arabamericanmuseum.org/About-the-Museum.id.3.htm

Her Mihrab project combines her passions: a focus on women, on (in)equality in the Islamic world, on introducing Western viewers to modern Arab art which is often figural in contrast to the traditional calligraphy of Islamic art.

She installs portraits of several women in prayer niches in the style of traditional mosques called Mihrab (usually unavailable to women,) made out of paper and assorted ephemeral materials. Prayer rugs display some relevant symbols for each woman and they hold, in their portraits, objects of value to them that squarely place them either in the places they lost and long for, or the places where they have arrived.

https://www.hendalmansour.com/mihrab-project.html

Another exhibition I wish I could see for myself instead of reading about. What I did see can be found in the photographs from this weekend’s Arab Festival in PDX. Lots of strong and successful women in the picture, including some of the lawyers who organize this annual event. Vibrant colors, too, just like in al-Mansours art.

With the current heatwave I have the impression nobody is up for anything, including reading.

Save my review for a cool or rainy day, then. After reading it, you might just want to go to the museum and look for yourself. It’s air-conditioned, just a thought….

A Diasporist, etc.,etc.

In the meantime, bring out the shorts…

The last artists for this week are Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane. She does expressive, lush and simultaneously elegant illustrations for the words written, in spellbinding fashion, by him.  I am willing to make an exception and include a man in this week devoted to women artist, because the book they produced together is a treasure.

I am talking about The Last Words, a compilation of poems based on words that are all linked to nature and have been omitted from the Oxford Junior English Dictionary. Blackberry had to make room for BlackBerry; acorn, bluebell, buttercup, heron and nectar are gone and replaced  with words such as attachment, blog, chatroom and voicemail.

As it turns out, British children spend less time outside than prisoners. Urbanization, difficult access, technological developments that keep the entertainment-hungry in thrall all contribute to a loss of knowledge about nature. Kids, and adults as well, are increasingly unable to define things in nature, much less identify them.  And what you can’t name you often don’t see; what you aren’t familiar with will not be loved. And the absence of love will make it unlikely for you to fight when nature is under attack, given the increasing threats to environmental protection and the exploitation of what little is left of nature.

Morris’s watercolors capture both a sense of awe and a sense of dread, teach about details with care and are utterly devoid of patronizing. They make the words come to life and create potentially more lasting memories, particularly for young readers. However, if you read the attached article below, Macfarlane got the primary attention, when the book became an overnight success. What else is new.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-the-loss-of-vivid-exacting-language-diminishes-our-world/2017/12/08/4630e920-c265-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html?utm_term=.50e6dcbe6c21

I ventured out into a meadow yesterday, to provide my own illustrations for what is waiting for us out there. Wandering through clouds of chamomile scent, whole fields of it in bloom, surrounded by flitting swallows, I felt uplifted from this rotten week.I have certainly been trained well to be able to name most of what I saw, at least for flora. I wonder if I gave that gift sufficiently to my own offspring, or if they belong to the 2/3 of the population who cannot identify a Hawthorne tree…much less a barn owl.

Here is to feeding the young, their minds as much as their bellies….

In my time I have been known to be a drama queen.  My fits pale, though, when compared to one of the greats: Dora Maar, known, for the most part, as one of Picasso’s muses. That role has always overshadowed her own artistic career. If you take a closer look, you find that she was a brilliant photographer, much involved in developing surrealism, until she gave up photography to heed Picasso’s incitement to turn to painting, (less stellar in its results.) Her photographic documentation of Picasso’s weeks of painting Guernica is revelatory.

Having previously failed, she finally managed to get his attention and his affection by stabbing her gloved hand with a knife drawing blood while seated in a cafe at a neighboring table. The soiled artifact found place of honor in Picasso’s studio, and she found a place in his bed – alas to be shared by not one but eventually two other mistresses.

Detailed bio can be found here:https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-surrealist-photographer-picassos-muse

For many years there was nothing but drama, and she was painted by the master exclusively depicting negative emotions and tears. (Do we really want to call someone a master who publicly declared that for him women were either doormats or goddesses? You decide.) When her scenes became violent, and she cracked under the strain of the end-of-war years, she was committed to hospital, forced under electro shock therapy and eventually put by her lover into psychoanalysis with Lacan, his close friend.

(If you want to read a short, incisive, brilliantly funny essay on jocular Jaques, go here. The book review of Lacan’s last lover’s reminiscence is a treat! (In fact it was the only thing that made me laugh on a day where Kennedy’s retirement brought the future of constitutional law up for grabs. But I digress into politics. Must not.)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/the-selfish-shrink-life-with-jacques-lacan/

Back to Maar.  I am attaching a link that shows a number of her photographs, some famous, many less familiar.  It is strong work, here and there dotted with humor. It also shows someone perceptively in tune with the social conflicts of their era.

After two years of analysis, Maar regained her poise and for some time re-entered her Paris circles. More and more drawn to mysticism and then the Catholic Church, she eventually became a devout recluse, living in her house in Provence, focusing on painting and religious services. She died, almost 90 years old, in 1997.  I wonder how different her life could have been, and her photography make an impact, had it not been for the fateful alliance with a cruel and abusive man.

http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/maar1.html

Photographs are from Paris, selected for what I believe might have suited her sensibilities.

Maar’s Surrealist work is on display at SFMOMA and will be featured at Paris’ Centre Pompidou and L.A.’s Getty Center in 2019.

No more pink ribbons

It was today a long time ago that I took the first step to rid my body of cancer. Between the knives on 6/27 and the subsequent poison(s) for many years, it all worked out. The physical remnants are manageable, the psychological ones something you live with, as people do with any other chronic disease. For now, I and so many others I know, are prime examples of the miracles of modern medicine. Grateful, if wary.

Chemo-Brain Freeze

Shortly after treatment I spent some time photographing myself in all kinds of Portland windows that contained some elements I associated with the experience, and wrote short bits about it, getting it out of my head onto a page.  Emerging from Departure Mode was a small-scale attempt to package a long and frightening process into something that signaled creativity over despondence. My first venture into photography, too, long before I started montage work.

Radiation Target

This week a friend sent me the article below about Prune Nourry and her own approach to control the inevitable process of getting your life back after a threatening crisis.  Her’s is large-scale pay-back to an adversary that should bite the dust just looking at the sheer force emanating from her sculpture. A catharsis sculpture, indeed.

Waves of Grief

I have reported on Nourry before here: https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=6793

I will leave it to the article below, to describe her new work in detail, a sculpture modeled on classic Amazon depictions, and then studded with a twist……

Do open the link to see the photographs of her work – the power of it will rub off on all of us!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/arts/design/prune-nourry-amazon-metropolitan-museum-of-art-sculpture.html

June 24, 2018

Prune Nourry working on her sculpture “The Amazon” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She created it in response to her treatment for breast cancer.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

For the last two years or so, the artist Prune Nourry has thought of herself as a sculpture. Ms. Nourry, who is French and splits her time between Brooklyn and Paris, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. As she went through treatment, including chemotherapy and reconstructive surgery, she thought of her doctors as the sculptors and herself as the material they were fashioning. Now, Ms. Nourry, 33, has created her own work in response to that experience, as a tribute to breast cancer survivors everywhere.

“The Amazon” is a 13-foot-tall cement sculpture of a female warrior, with bared breasts, her torso and head pierced by thousands of joss sticks, jutting out like arrow shafts. It was modeled after the life-size marble statue of a wounded Amazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Nourry’s version weighs nearly two tons, and has lifelike hazel-brown eyes, crafted from handblown glass. It made a public debut last week, in a plaza outside the Standard Hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, where it will be on view into July. (The hotel owns the space and offers it to artists; the painter José Parla and the pop artist KAWS have exhibited there before.) In a private performance, Ms. Nourry will eventually chisel away one of the Amazon’s breasts.

Thirteen feel tall, the sculpture weighs nearly two tons and has lifelike hazel-brown eyes, crafted from handblown glass.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

“It’s really, for me, a catharsis sculpture,” she said, in a recent interview at a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she and a few helpers created the work. She added that the artwork, and the medical process that led to it, also re-contextualized all her projects that came before, among them “Terracotta Daughters,” a riff on the famous sculpted Chinese army from the 3rd century B.C. In Ms. Nourry’s 2012 version, her 108 clay soldiers are girls, based on real-life orphans, as a commentary on the gender imbalance in China’s culture, where boys are traditionally more prized. It has been exhibited in North America, Europe and China.

Ms. Nourry, a multimedia artist who often works in sculpture and performance, frequently deals with gender, reproduction and bioethics; an early piece, “The Spermbar,” repurposed a New York food cart, and allowed visitors to create a beverage by choosing the traits they would want in a sperm donor, questioning the pre-selection of human embryos. In The New York Times, the critic Gia Kourlas called it “a witty, disturbing project.”

This life-size marble statue of a wounded Amazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art served as a model for Ms. Nourry’s work.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ms. Nourry had planned to remove one of her Amazon’s breasts in public, but at the last moment decided that was best done in a more intimate setting. She also wanted to extend the timeline of the project, because “healing is a long process too,” she said. So when her sculpture first went on display, she focused on another performance that connected both her earlier work and her life as a patient: She covered her statue with about 6,000 red Chinese incense sticks, symbolic of the acupuncture treatment she underwent as part of her medical care. (Her series “Imbalance,” which she prepared and exhibited while undergoing chemo, also uses acupuncture needles.)

Ms. Nourry, who is now in remission, managed to keep up her exhibition schedule, which included a show at Musée National des Arts Asiatiques in Paris, through her hospital stays. “I felt lucky that I had all the work that I was passionate about,” she said. “I didn’t want to stop. But also the fact of being able to create something out of it is helpful, too.”

Ms. Nourry covered her statue with about 6,000 red Chinese incense sticks, symbolic of the acupuncture treatment she underwent as part of her medical care.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

On the summer solstice, June 21, as the sky flicked from hot pink to lavender to dusk, a small, fashionable crowd surrounded the Amazon. Among them were boldfaced names, friends of Ms. Nourry and her husband, the artist JR, including Jennifer Lawrence, Grace Hightower De Niro, the director David O. Russell and the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman. Jon Batiste, the musician and bandleader for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” began the event by improvising on a melodica.

As he sat down to play keys, Ms. Nourry’s assistants, clad in medical white, joined the artist, who was in a lab coat. Slowly, methodically, they lit the incense; soon the sturdy warrior, with her sheath of protective quills, had a halo of wispy, fragrant smoke. Ash began to cover the ground as Mr. Batiste played his closing song, requested by Ms. Nourry, called “Don’t Stop.” “It’s a very uplifting song, but it’s also a song about death and mortality,” he said.

Ms. Nourry and her assistants lit the incense on the summer solstice; soon the sturdy warrior had a halo of wispy, fragrant smoke.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

“She really knows how to tap into the human experience in the most immediate way,” Mr. Batiste added of Ms. Nourry, a longtime friend and, more recently, a collaborator on projects that unite his music and her visuals. “It’s like a musician who knows how to play one note to make you cry,” he said. “And you can’t explain why. It’s just when you look at the sculpture, you feel something, whoever you are.”

The story of Amazon women — that they were a tribe of powerful and skilled fighters who, it was sometimes said, cut off their right breasts to better their archery — remains mostly the domain of Greek myth, although some research by Jeannine Davis-Kimball, an archaeologist from the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence of a class of warrior women in the Eurasian steppe. Ms. Nourry did not delve deeply into what was fact or legend. “I like this gray area,” she said.

As the incense on her sculpture burned, it left in its place seeping red dots. “It looks like she is bleeding,” Ms. Nourry said, contentedly. Passers-by snapped photos from atop the Highline. The sculpture will remain on view for several weeks, at least, and will later be sold, with some proceeds going to cancer charities.

“The sculpture is not especially for me only,” Ms. Nourry said. It was meant to honor all sorts of female warriors, she said. She will replace the incense, but, she added, “I would love if women can come and light their own, as a symbolic gesture for themselves.”

The sculpture made its public debut last week, in a plaza outside the Standard Hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, where it will be on view into July.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

Here’s to healing.