Sign of the week

We've just returned from three weeks at sea that took us a thousand miles up the Amazon River.  Our internet access was sorely limited, so I apologize for making no response to many of the comments left on the blog recently.  I'll try to catch up on any loose ends in future posts.

If you've ever taken a ship voyage, you know that the first order of business is lifeboat drill, in which everybody gets decked out in their warm clothing, life jackets and hats and assembles at their boat station.  Although many of the passengers ignore Mandatory Rule No. 1, go to the wrong place, fail to respond when their names are called, and obviously are thinking only about where cocktails will be served, experienced travelers always listen up.

We do so especially diligently in my family, because we can never forget what happened to my parents in 1997.  They boarded the Cunard Vistafjord in Florida headed for Portugal, went to dinner and sailed at sunset.  Late that evening a fire broke out in the kitchen and the crew did not perform as a well-oiled machine; instead they left their stations and passengers were left to fend for themselves as smoke filled the ship and confusion reigned.  I'm not sure whether the lifeboat drill had been held, but if it did, it hadn't accomplished much.

My parents, in their 80s, became disoriented in the smoky corridor but fortunately a high-ranking officer stopped to help and accompanied them on what seemed to be an endless climb to the deck.  Once everybody was in the open, things improved; it was warm enough for people to sit outside through the night in their nightclothes, and the fire was quickly put out.  The ship was diverted to the Bahamas, my folks got two nights in a luxury hotel (their cabin had been right above the fire and was uninhabitable) while the company dithered about cancelling the voyage, and eventually got a free trip to Europe on a later trip.

But the dining room steward who served my parents, and whom my mother had already become friends with, died of smoke inhalation.  Apparently many of the kitchen staff were not clear about what to do in the emergency; Mom's steward and another briefly argued over the best way to escape, and Mom's guy, who knew a shortcut, never made it.

Fortunately our voyage had neither fire nor death nor dereliction of duty.  Although many of us who got sick did occasionally consider the second alternative.  Ken and I both suffered from bad colds, which haven't yet left us after two weeks.  I began the voyage with enough Sudafed to start a meth lab, but we used it all and then some.

I'll have some pictures for you soon.  Meanwhile, it's not too late for a new year's resolution:  always pay attention at lifeboat drill.

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden 2

More about our visit to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

When we turned the corner into this section of the garden, walled off by tall hedges, I got the long view of this sculpture, just as in the photo below.  It had to be by Richard Serra, the master of rusted steel plates, I thought, but this was so SMALL!  And then I realized that I'm just spoiled.

Richard Serra,  Five Plates, Two Poles, 1971

Everything of Serra's that I've seen in the flesh has been on a monumental scale. His torqued ellipse pieces, for instance, which we've seen in New York and Los Angeles, are made from steel plates 16 feet tall. So the "little" sculpture here was a surprise and seemed a bit modest, quietly occupying a corner of the garden. I think I've read that Serra took a long time to figure out how to work with the steel in huge pieces, and this is a relatively early work.

It was fun to walk around the piece and peek at the back side.

Here's a life-size skeletal bronze horse by Deborah Butterfield, looking very much at home in the snow.  I've only seen her sculptures indoors before, where they command their space with height and attitude.  Outside, this one is just as big but less pent-up, probably because he could canter away towards the lake if he felt restless.

Deborah Butterfield, Woodrow, 1988

Butterfield started making horses out of sticks and mud.  Later on, she still made them that way, but had them cast in bronze.  I think the character changes as the material gets more noble, even though you can still see the wood grain and stick forms.

The entrance to the garden is marked by two huge stone pillars, cut from a single piece of granite.  I liked everything about them except the title -- Ampersand.  I thought if you wanted to name this work after punctuation you might better choose exclamation points, especially in Spanish where you write ¡Ole!

Martin Puryear, Ampersand, 1987-88

My favorite piece in the Sculpture Garden was made by somebody not generally considered as a sculptor -- the architect Frank Gehry. 

Frank Gehry, Standing Glass Fish, 1986


















Gehry explains:  "when I was very young, my grandmother and I used to go to a Jewish market on Thursday morning.  She would buy a carp for gefilte fish.  She'd put it in the bathtub and this big black carp -- two or three feet long -- would swim around and I would play with it.  I would watch it turn and twist... and then she'd kill it and make gefilte fish and that was always sad and awful and ugly."

The glass carp is anything but awful and ugly.  It's 22 feet tall, rearing out of a shallow pool in the conservatory's palm court, getting payback on Frank's grandma on behalf of its species.  Living large is the best revenge.

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden 1

A few weeks ago we got to spend a couple of days in Minnesota and managed to see a lot of art in a very short time.  Minneapolis has fine museums and I found lots of familiar artists on display.

Our visit to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden came after a bit of snow had fallen overnight.  Few people were out doing art that morning -- we could tell from the lack of footprints.

I'll start with the picture postcard shot, a sculpture commissioned for this spot.  The brochure says it's a fountain as well as a sculpture but there was no sign of running water that we could see.  Turned off for the winter?  This is one of those Pop Art crowd-pleasers that bring a smile to the lips of everybody but Scrooge and must be a big hit on school field trips.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-88

I was surprised to find a piece by Ellsworth Kelly, one of my favorite painters; I hadn't know that he did sculpture as well.  But once you find it's him, you can recognize the simple but elegant shapes "drawn" in exactly the perfect balance and relation to one another.

Ellsworth Kelly, Double Curve, 1988



















I'm not a huge fan of Henry Moore, having seen a lot of reclining nudes that I find difficult to tell apart.  If not for the snow adding a nice counterpoint, I might not even have shown you this picture.

Henry Moore, Reclining Mother and Child, 1960-61

I was more impressed by his upright figure.  It's aptly titled; the knife edge dividing the man from his sketchy lower parts is the focus of the composition.

Henry Moore, Standing Figure: Knife-Edge, 1961


















Here's a nice granite piece by Tony Smith that reminded me of a much bigger piece we saw last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Again, the snow lent a nice touch, emphasizing the edges.

Tony Smith, Amaryllis, 1965-68


















I'll write more about the sculpture garden in another post -- too much good stuff for one day!

Photo suite 2 -- riverfront

I had occasion to visit Evansville IN recently because I have a quilt in the 42nd Mid-States Craft Exhibit at the Museum of Arts, History and Science, through February 5.  Many nice scenes along the riverfront wharf, especially of the many stone spheres that make up the landscaping motif. 

Yes, that's exactly the way I found it.  And I left the glasses in case their owner returned.

Show tales

Don't you just love it when your quilts come home from a show packed wrong?

Most quilt and fiber venues know that quilts need to be rolled right side out, so the right side stays as flat as possible while any scrunching wrinkles the back layer.  But museums and galleries that focus on the more mainstream mediums often don't understand how fabric operates.

But this is not an essay of complaint.  The good news is that in practically every circumstance, you can revive your wrongly rolled quilt, just by laying it flat on the bed for a while with some other quilts on top.  If that fails, stretch it out on your clean rug or design wall, give it a good spritzing of water, and let it dry.

I've had some close calls with quilts away from home.  Once I sent off a quilt to a Mancuso show in California, but it never arrived.  I was upset, of course, but persuaded myself that it was a quilt I didn't particularly love.  Three months later, it resurfaced!  The show had been held at a hotel, and the quilt had somehow turned up in the back of a closet long after the Mancusos had departed.  We could never figure out exactly when or how it got there.

Curiously, some years later that same quilt had another show mishap, and again, I could never figure out exactly when or how it occurred.  I was getting ready to ship it off somewhere and when I hauled it out from the bottom of the pile on my guest bed, realized to my dismay that it had horrible stains on both front and back.

None of the other quilts on the bed had any problems, so I tried to think of where the quilt had been.  Realized that it had last been hanging in a show at a local university gallery, and surmised that a sprinkler head might have leaked over the quilt, as the stains seemed to spread downward. 

I never have gone back to see whether there is in fact any plumbing in that corner of the gallery (and haven't done business with that gallery again...).  Because the stains were less prominent on the front of the quilt, and I had taken it down in a hurry, it's conceivable that I had not noticed the stains.  But maybe the stains migrated to the surface later as the quilt aged??   I'll never know.

So what to do?  The quilt had to be on its way the next day.  I figured there was nothing to lose, and put it in the washing machine.  The stains disappeared.  I backed the cars out of the garage, laid a sheet on the floor, spread the quilt on the sheet as tautly as possible, covered it with another sheet and set some fans to blow over it.  By the next afternoon it was dry, flat, and ready to go out in public again.

This quilt has clearly gone through several of its allotted lives.  I realize that all I have are slides, which I have not converted into digital images, so I can't show you a picture.  But it's one extremely lucky quilt.

Photo suite 1 -- taking pictures

After two years of posting daily photos to this blog, I'm changing the rules for 2012.  This year I'll post a group of pictures each week, chosen by theme.  It seems appropriate to start off the year with photos of me taking photos.

a shiny panel in Untitled, by Anselm Reyle, 2006, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Stuttgart, with posters for the Color Improvisations quilt show, summer 2010 -- my quilt in the center panel

Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden