Coyotes

February 05, 2018

From a trip through the Mississippi Delta.

“Painting, for me, is not just about creating an illusion. I don’t paint to present an image of something. I paint only when I have received an apparition, a shock, when I want to ‘transform’ something. Something that possesses me, and from which I have to deliver myself. Something I need to transform, to metabolize, and which gives me a reason to paint.”

— Anselm Kiefer describing his own artistic process as stimulated by Beuys’s philosophies.

February 01, 2018

Legal / Illegal

January 26, 2018

A few years back, I got interested in the similarities between the official markings made on sidewalks and roadways by utility companies and graffiti – same materials, similar methods, often the same public spaces, both employing symbols and visual expressions that hold greater or more specific meaning for that community. And yet one is completely legal and done during daylight, work-day hours as part of a sanctioned job. The other is illegal and often done under cover of night, anonymously (except to those in the community) and is regarded, or can be, as artful personal expression. Which? And why?

Dog Dump

January 22, 2018

Be forewarned: The photo below is not for the squeamish.

For the last couple of years, I've been regularly visiting a stretch of land – actually railroad right of way – under an I-630 overpass. It's now part of the master plan for a bike and walking trail that will connect the Central High area with the capitol, and I was originally drawn to it as an abandoned wild space within the city, but what has kept me going back is what I found there. The stretch has become a dumping ground for dead dogs. In fact, what first drew my attention to the area was a circling of buzzards one warm spring day. I walked back to find several dog remains – given sizes, breeds, and injuries, most appeared to be fighting dogs – wrapped in plastic garbage bags and dumped away from any roads. And this wasn't a one-time thing. Each time I have checked back, I have found new carcasses and new skeletons, including this past weekend. I have begun collecting some of the bones and processing them for a future project.

"Ethical Redevelopment" from the University of Chicago

January 18, 2018

Every once in a while, you run across something that you immediately recognize as important and unifying and influential for your own work and those you collaborate with. For me, most recently, it was stumbling across Ethical Redevelopment, a set of emerging principles for "mindful city-building" from the University of Chicago's Place Lab (a Theaster Gates-led initiative, of course).

It sets forth nine principles:

repurpose + re-propose
engaged participation
pedagogical moments
the indeterminate
design
place over time
stack, leverage + access
constellations
platforms

An excerpt from "repurpose + re-propose":

"Take stock of what is around you. Use what you have or what is available at the time. If a thing is discarded because it no longer has value or use to its previous owner, accept and receive it. Make it work for you. Compel yourself to have deep engagement with discarded things. Make resources work for you in new and unintended ways. Repurposing is an act of redemption, an act of imagination. Artistry is alchemy – it allows one thing to become another. Be an alchemist in your community. In new hands, there is renewed possibility for the discarded and overlooked."

You can download the full PDF on the Place Lab website.

Vestigial Delta: Arkansas

January 11, 2018

There was a time, oh, 200 years ago or so, when the whole of the Delta (yes, yes – it's actually an alluvial floodplain, not a delta) was one giant hardwood swamp, snaking through Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and beyond. Then it was logged and the swamps drained for farmland, to raise cotton, then soybeans and corn, later still catfish, and now rice – or more accurately, all of these and more, all the time.

The hardwood swamps are largely gone, but here and there are vestiges of the Delta's past – tiny pockets of trees in the middle of fields, low spots that could never be drained, parts of oxbow lakes that didn't get filled in.

All images from Google Maps 2018.

Eviction Quilt #6

January 06, 2018

I finished a new quilt in the Eviction series this week. This is the largest one to date – almost 8 ft. x. 10 ft. – and two sided. It came from an eviction of someone who obviously sewed, because I found a box of fabric yardage. Rather than piece it out, I decided to leave the fabric in the largest sections possible.

Full photos of both sides to come soon.