My granddaughter Siena drawing in the Rothko room at the newly opened East Building of the National Gallery, Washington DC (Photo: Mona Wilcox) We have to help each other. That may sound trite, but it has come to mean a lot more to me over the last dark weeks. When my spirits flagged, I have […]
Bring on the Counter-Narratives
Fingersmith, at A.R.T. (Photo: A.R.T.) Counter-narratives become much needed palliatives when the storyline of daily life becomes poisonous. Watching the transition to a new regime of power in Washington is like a flashback to the most addled aspects of the 1950’s. As Thomas Friedman recently wrote in the New York Times, “There is actually something […]
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The Private and the Political
From Doris Salcedo’s Disremembered series. These sculptures are made with raw silk threads interspersed with more than 12,000 tiny, blackened needles. “Handwoven thread by thread and needle by needle, each delicately beautiful but menacing garment embodies a painstaking gesture of mourning.” (Detail) I’m not the only one stymied. Many of us are struggling with we […]
What We Can See, and What We Can’t
Earth rising as seen from the lunar surface via Apollo 8 (Photo: NASA/Bill Anders) Lessons learned from the last U.S. election cycle are still being processed and discussed. A big theme for me is just plain epistemological: How do you know what you know? The strange and the unreal took over somewhere in this process, […]
The Optimism of Uncertainty
Howard Zinn (Photo: History is a Weapon) What is left to be said? Ten days in, I have read hundreds of opinions about the outcome of the election, conversed with sympathetic friends and family, sought for ways to stay grounded in this increasingly surreal landscape we now share in the United States. For all the […]
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Benedictions
Sally Mann (Photo: Liz Liguori) Finding fully immersive distractions to defend against the relentlessly ugly political news has become a daily ritual. Like so many others, I go out each day in search of sustenance in a landscape that has been ravaged by the locusts of lies, hatred and distrust. Protecting the inner landscape and […]
Pfaffability
Judy Pfaff at Wheaton College Judy Pfaff is an artist’s artist. Perhaps I should be more specific and say she is my kind of artist’s artist. And “my kind of artist” is a much bigger category than me and my friends. Legions of us have followed her for years, and we keep being compelled, enthralled, […]
Touchability
Edmund de Waal, detail, Princeton Museum Continuing with themes inspired by Edmund de Waal in his latest book, The White Road… In a profile of de Waal that appeared in the New York Times, Sam Anderson describes de Waal as an evangelist of touch. “Thinking is through the hands as well as the head,” de […]
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When a Stack of Bowls is a Chord
Edmund de Waal installation currently on view at the Princeton Museum With the publication and international success of his family memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal became a literary sensation before many knew he was, first and foremost, an artist whose specialty is ceramics. Notoriety tends to spills over, and soon his […]
Memory’s Truth: Three Memoirs
Family diary of Florentine merchant Pepo d’Antonio di Lando degli Albizzi from the 14th century (Photo: The Newberry Library) Memoirs have been around for a long time, but their occurrence increased significantly around 1990. Interest in that literary category has continued, growing 400 percent between 2004 and 2008 alone, which has led many to call […]