Impulse to Action

Friday, May 7, 2021

New York Museum Highlights - May 2021 - Part 2

Days On My Own - Part 2

Metropolitan Museum - Broken

Larry Wolf, Broken Met Museum (2021)

Metropolitan Museum - Alice Neel - People Come First

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/alice-neel

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel Met Museum (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Need Met Museum (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Still Life 1973 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Addiction 1931 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Futility of Effort 1930 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel (2021)

Interview

NIGHT: How would you describe yourself?

ALICE: I am a morbid person.

NIGHT: Did you ever participate in an unrequited love?

ALICE: No. I ruined more mens' illusions than anyone living.

NIGHT: Do you feel that the Earth is safe?

ALICE: We are sitting on a tornado. Man is not fit to have nuclear energy.

NIGHT: Have you always been fascinated with death?

ALICE: All my life I have wanted to commit suicide. I never look out a window without wanting to jump.

NIGHT: What were you thinking moments before you attempted suicide in 1930?

ALICE: I heard voices. I thought I heard my parents talking. I was at the point of a nervous breakdown. I thought that I had gone mad. I went downstairs and put my head in the oven and turned on the gas.

NIGHT: A comment on men and women:

ALICE: Men are like otters. They like to have fun. Women are the beavers. They keep the home fires burning.

NIGHT: What do you think about the quality and type of art being produced in the 1970's?

ALICE: This was the deadpan decade. The corporation decade.

NIGHT: Do you attempt something new everytime you paint?

ALICE: No. I don't give a damn.

NIGHT: Can you appreciate bad art?

ALICE: I am an intellectual. I am sick of trash.

NIGHT: What authors do you like?

ALICE: Thomas Mann, Hesse, Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald [he liked money too much], Hemingway [for what he was], Tennessee Williams and Auden.

NIGHT: What do you think of the beautiful people?

ALICE: I would hate to be one of the beautiful people. You have to smile all the time.

NIGHT: What is the most reckless thing you do?

ALICE: My paintings.

NIGHT: Through the years how has your work developed?

ALICE: I don't think it has changed.

NIGHT: Describe your seizures:

ALICE: Blackness comes from the sides of my head, I perspire and feel faint. I think they come from my subconscious. I have to take three phenobarbitals a day to prevent them.

NIGHT: What is death?

ALICE: Oblivion.

NIGHT: What is life?

ALICE: Life is a sentence of days and nights. There is no joy in ife. There are only a few minutes of happiness in any life.

Poem (Written in New York, Winter 1929)

Oh, the men, the men
they put all their troubles

into beautiful verses
But the women, poor fools
They grumbled and complained

and watched their breasts
grow flatter and more wrinkled
grey hair over a grey dishcloth

and no one loves their grumbling
Sad, sour, dry with red and shiny knuckles
Oh, for the words
separate from reality
Something to read, stretched out

In a little green book

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Synthesis of New York The Great Depression 1933 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Ninth Avenue El 1935 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Kenneth Fearing 1935 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Nazis Murder Jews 1936 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Save Willie McGee 1950 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Christopher Lazare 1932 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jose 1936 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - A Spanish Boy 1955 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Black Draftee James Hunter 1965 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - James Farmer 1964 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd 1970 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jackie Curtis as a Boy 1972 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Peggy 1945 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Kenneth Doolittle 1932 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - John Perreault 1972 (2021

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Margaret Evans Pregnant 1978 (2021)

Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Self Portrait 1980 (2021)

Metropolitan Museum - Open Space

Larry Wolf - Open Space Met Museum (2021)

A Statement 1960

Larry Wolf,
Alice Neel - A Statement 1960
(2021)

Being born I looked around and the world and its people terrified and fascinated me. I was attracted by the morbid and excessive and everything connected with death had a dark power over me. I was early taken to Sunday School where the tale of Christ nailed to the cross would send me into violent weeping and I'd have to be taken home. Also I remember a film they showed at the church of the horrors of delirium tremens that quite unnerved me and prevented my sleeping for many nights.

I decided to paint a human comedy - such as Balzac had done in literature. In the 30's I painted the beat of those days - Joe Gould, Sam Putnam, Ken Fearing, etc. I have painted "El Barrio" in Puerto Rican Harlem. I painted the neurotic, the mad and the miserable. Also I painted the others, including some squares. I once, many light years ago married a Cuban and lived in Havana where I had my first show. Then that all dissolved and in the thirties I was on the W.P.A. turning in a painting every six weeks. I had a show at the Pinacotheca Gallery during the war and later two shows at the A.C.A. Gallery. I never knew how to push myself and still don't know how. Like Chichikor I am a collector of souls. Now some of my subjects are beginning to die and they have an historic nostalgia: everyone somehow seems better and more important when they are dead. If I could I would make the world happy, the wretched faces in the subway sad and full of troubles worry me. I also hate the conformity of today - everything put into its box -

When I go to a show today of modern work I feel that my world has been swept away - and yet I do not think it can be so that the human creature will be forever verboten. Thou shalt make no graven images...

Alice Neel 1960

The Hasty Papers - A One-Shot Review

The New Colossus

Larry Wolf,
Bartholdi - Original Statue of Liberty
[bronze cast from plaster] (2021)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus 1883

Thursday, May 6, 2021

New York Museum Highlights - May 2021

Days On My Own - Part 1

There is something which draws me to big cities. To traveling light and alone. To the power of art when experienced in person. To using a camera and posting words and images.

Grand Central Station & Fifth Avenue

Larry Wolf, Grand Central Station (2021)

Larry Wolf,
Vincent Ballentine And Still They Rise - Octavia Butler
(2021)

Larry Wolf,
Vincent Ballentine And Still They Rise - Maya Angelou
(2021)

Larry Wolf, Prometheus and the Capitalists (2021)

Larry Wolf, Masked Atlas and the Cathedral (2021)

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance @ The Brooklyn Museum

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/john_edmonds

Larry Wolf, Brooklyn Museum (2021)

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - A Sidelong Glance - American Gods 2017 (2021)

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - A Sidelong Glance (2021)

Larry Wolf - John Edmonds - Whose Hands? 2019 - Poster (2021)

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Whose Hands? 2019 (2021)

PDF of John Edmonds - Whose Hands? 2019 - Poster

https://d1lfxha3ugu3d4.cloudfront.net/exhibitions/docs/Edmonds_Newsprint_Final.pdf

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Whose Hands? 2019 - Wall Text (2021)

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - American Gods 2017 (2021)

Here the pyramidal composition recalls the sacred geometry of Renaissance paintings, while the three du-rags correspond to the red, black, and green of the Pan-African flag. [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Female Nude 2018 (2021)

This photograph of a reclining nude woman recalls European Renaissance and Baroque representations of Venus and other idealized female figures, as well as modernist takes on this tradition. [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Tourist Items from Liberia 2019 (2021)

Many of the sculptures and masks that Edmonds has photographed were made for commercial purposes, as the title of this picture indicates. By collecting and then photographing these items alongside models, Edmonds addresses how and by whom value is determined over time. [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - A Guard for the Gods 2020 (2021)

... yet here the man's cap seems to suggest the authority of a museum guard, someone task with ensuring the safety of the work ... The artwork highlights, even if subtly, how property and possession are intimately linked to legacies of violence - state-sanctioned, colonial, or otherwise. [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Anotolli and Collection 2019 (2021)

Photography and the process of collecting are both expressions of possession and desire, which Edmonds explores in this photograph of a bare-chested man, Anatolli, contemplating the artist's own collection of African art. ... "It is essential to me to consider my role as a vessel for understanding these objects in a liminal space between their origins and the new space in which they exist." [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Two Spirits 2019 (2021)

This photograph is structured around doubling. ... For Edmonds, the picture "calls and echos the sentiments of Ibeji, which is an orisha or spirit representing a pair of twins in Yoruba religion." ... The twinning is reinforced by Edmonds's use of double exposure, a technique associated with European and American Surrealist photographers ... The title also evokes the model's own gender-fluidity ... [wall text]

Larry Wolf, John Edmonds - Young Man Looking at a Female Sculpture (from the Senufo) 2019
(2021)

Many of Edmonds's photographs, like this one, engage the legacy of work made by artists during the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s and 1930s, who reclaimed African artifacts and aesthetics as a source of inspiration and experimentation. [wall text]

Addendum - Ancient Egyptian Royalty at the Met

Larry Wolf, His Hair Is A Crown - Met Museum (2021)

Thursday, April 8, 2021

Contemplative Photography - Seven Part Workshop

Explore Your Mind and Art Making
May 8 - June 19, 2021

This seven-week workshop explores the making and viewing of photographs as a contemplative activity. It’s a mashup of classic teachings on mindfulness and photography plus the explosion of photos in the modern world; it invites us to see the sacred and profound in our lives.

Contemplation: thinking deeply, inner vision, to clear a sacred space

Photography: drawing with light, showing the visible surfaces of things and the artist’s inner state

Each two-hour session begins with contemplation: settling our mind-body and opening up to our experience in the current moment. We’ll then discuss some aspects of photography, bringing our collective knowledge and curiosity to the topic. We’ll end with a question to work with as we make photos during the week between sessions. After the first week, we will present and discuss the images we’ve created between sessions.

The workshop uses contemplation practices, from a mix of Buddhist and artistic traditions, which emphasize our experience of the present moment. Each week will use one technique, for example, a body scan of our current sensations as well as working with breath and thoughts as objects of meditation. We will also use slow looking techniques rooted in the arts, taking time to look and look again; to discuss what we’re seeing and then look some more, seeing more and more in the image; seeing more and more of the world. Learning by doing, participants will apply the contemplative practices to photography.

We’ll use whatever camera we have at hand and, over time, increase our ability to make images with the device. As we build familiarity and confidence in using the camera, it becomes an extension of our mind, an extension of our body. We will use photographic exercises that freshen our approach to the camera, that ask us to look more closely at what we’re seeing, what we’re photographing, and how we go about creating the photograph.

The workshop gives us several weeks to experience the interaction of seeing and creating. We will take contemplative techniques and apply them to photography. We will take photographic processes and treat them as contemplative activity, and treat photographs as objects of contemplation.

To register: The Chicago Shambhala Center https://chicago.shambhala.org/program-details/?id=478232