Need help from Canada!

I've written before about my ongoing volunteer work to help catalog the International Honor Quilt project, organized by artist Judy Chicago, in which hundreds of panels were made to commemorate women and women's organizations.  Part of my job is to document what the panels look like, and to accurately transcribe any lettering.

I've had to learn how to type characters with diacritical marks (ä, ç, ê, etc.) and in non-Roman alphabets (θ Σ Δ Ω π).  It took me four emails back and forth with my Hebrew advisor to get this one right -- הדסה -- because the type-Hebrew keyboard I found on the internet didn't have names on the letters and I had to find something that looked like the one on the panel, except in a different font so the letters didn't look exactly alike.

Today I need help!  Here's a panel, made in Povuknituk, Québec, (aren't you impressed by that accent mark?) depicting Inuit culture with Inuit words around the edges.  I don't even know which way is up with the characters.

Who knows somebody who could help me (a) translate and (b) type in this lettering for our database?  Many thanks, much glory and maybe even a bit of loot if you can solve my problem du jour.

And while we're here, check out the beautiful embroidery on the central figure!

The four-year-old critic

A couple of weeks ago, Isaac was visiting while I was working on my daily collage, and wanted to know what it was about.



I said she's probably thinking about when she was a little girl.  He contemplated that for a while and decided that was OK.

He looked at the previous day's and when I asked him what it was about, he said the children are thinking about living in a paper house.



Here he said the children are thinking about the map.



And here he said the man is thinking about turning into a sea monster with a curly tail.



I was intrigued that he so quickly accepted the idea that the people in the scene are thinking about something else in the scene, and indeed decided that was the model for all the collages.  It often pays to run your art past a four-year-old mind and see what response you get!

P.S.  When he saw this one, he didn't have an interpretation.  All he could say was "She doesn't have any underwear!!!!!"



Check out all my daily collages here.

The Mending Project 9

I promise this will be the last time I write about The Mending Project.  Faithful readers will recall that I've been dithering since Day 1 about whether it was worthwhile, not to mention about whether it was art.  I mentioned the other day that the concept of art being the making of objects is a definition way too restrictive for the postmodernists, and that includes a lot of museum directors and curators.

That's why you'll see museums all over the place, not just here, trying to become places for encounters. While I was on duty mending, I observed a poetry slam as well as three different "family fun" days on which special activities were offered.  Our museum has converted a bunch of prime real estate into a "maker space" where kids can make stuff.  (Oh wait, making stuff is so nonpostmodern.... I guess it's OK for kids, if not for artists.)

The curators of our show say they were thrilled at all the conversations between menders and visitors, and think they might want to do something similar in the future.

That's all fine, and I guess any society benefits when strangers are able to have pleasant conversations with one another.  But is this supposed to happen in a museum as opposed to a church, library or community center?  A big part of me thinks that facilitation of conversation is too trivial, too universal, to undifferentiated, too generic to warrant rewriting the mission of a museum.  There should be some qualitative difference between being a volunteer at a museum and being a volunteer at a nursing home, for instance.

I enjoy and take pride in the various occasions where I can spend some pleasant time with a stranger, especially if the conversation can go beyond the most superficial level.  But I don't call it art.  I am a maker, always have been, always will be as long as I can hold a needle or a paintbrush or a scissors or a glue gun.  When I can't make things I don't think I qualify as an artist.

It's oh so trendy for the hipsters and the critics and the curators to call it art when "artists" hang out with other people or invite some people over for dinner or set out paper for people to write letters on or tell the museum guards to shout out headlines from the newspaper.  I'm usually pretty open to offbeat and weird things being defined as art, but my tolerance stops before this point.

So my bottom line on The Mending Project is that first, the installation -- the beautiful walls of thread and the (small) piles of mended garments -- is probably art.  It belongs in a museum; it was nice to look at.  Maybe not the strongest work you'll ever see in a museum, but I've seen worse.

OK, this is art

Second, when the menders stitched onto garments, either the ones that got piled on the table or the ones that were worn out the door, it might or might not be art.  Even though I would not define it as art when I mend my son's shorts, I guess I'll give our production a grudging pass, because it was done while sitting in the real-art installation.

maybe art, if you're feeling charitable

definitely not art

Third, having nice conversations with people is not art, even if it's done while sitting in the real-art installation.

By these definitions, of the 30 hours I spent on duty in the museum, I was probably making art for less than 10, and most of them were spent on things that I had brought in myself, unrelated to mending.  The project did prompt me to do a lot of serious thinking and questioning about what is art and what I think is valid for me do do as an artist.  But on balance I think the project stacks up as a waste of my time, not to mention a wasted opportunity for the museum in general.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  What do you think?  Was I nuts to spend so much of my summer on this project?

Photo suite 196 -- angels in the yard

Sign of the week

The Mending Project 8

Volunteers at the Mending Project kept a log of what we did, and one of the first things I would do when arriving for a shift would be to read the log and see what happened since I was there last.  One afternoon I read the following:

"This is such a strange log of people sitting in the same chair doing nothing.  There may not be any mending, but what IS happening?"

Great question.  As I was thinking about it, I noticed that somebody had brought in a bunch of upholstery swatches; in fact, I used one to patch a pair of jeans that had been left on the table.

I had an idea: I detached one of the small swatches and started to stitch on it, and left it with a challenge to the other volunteers:

"To my fellow menders:  I read Evan's log entry for 6-4-15 where he asks "What IS happening?"  I think we are building a community -- not with people in torn pants, but among ourselves!  If you're not mending, would you add some stitches to my swatch and make collaborative art?  Thanks!"

And over the next three months, they did, turning the busy but drab swatch into an explosion of color from the shiny mending threads.  By the time the show closed early this month, the swatch looked pretty flashy.

I want to mount it and keep it as a -- gasp -- object!!!! even though that isn't very post-modern of me.  It will take a little work to make it lie flat (that isn't very post-modern either, worrying about craftsmanship) so maybe I'll stretch it a bit and stitch it to a canvas.