Reformation Day at the museum

Five hundred years ago today was the date we now commemorate as the start of the Protestant Reformation, and the Art Institute of Chicago put out this row of unassuming little prints of Martin Luther to mark the season.  None larger than about seven inches tall, they show the man in different stages of life.  Choose your favorite!

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as an Augustinian Friar, with Cap, 1521, engraving

Daniel Hopfer, After Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1523, etching

Heinrich Aldegrever, Martin Luther, 1540, engraving

Johann Michael Püchler, Martin Luther, engraving

Master I.B., Portrait of Martin Luther, 1530, engraving

Johann Gottfried Schadow, Luther's Statue in Wittenberg, 1822, lithograph

My favorite things 44

My mother acquired three old kitchen chairs that had belonged to her grandparents, but the caned seats were deteriorating.  Once my father's supremely handy aunt and uncle were visiting and the chairs came up in the conversation.  Well, heck, it's no big deal to recane a chair, they said, and took them home with them to Indiana.  Mom insisted on paying them, despite much argument.

In the fullness of time the chairs returned, beautifully recaned.  But Mom had a conniption when she realized that it was plastic "cane," not real.  That had not come up in the conversation.

Mom thought that plastic had defiled her grandparent's precious chairs, and indeed, their precious memories.  She berated herself for not having specified authentic cane for the job.  She couldn't stand to even look at the chairs and stashed them in the attic.  We talked about this one day and I said, I'm sorry you can't stand to even look at them; I think they're pretty nice.  If that's what you think, she said, you can have them.

So the chairs came home with me and have been making themselves beautifully useful for a long time.  One served as my sewing chair for many years.  After we bought elegant upholstered chairs for our dining room, and I realized the seat was too high for me to get my feet comfortably on the floor, I sat in a caned chair for a decade, even though it didn't match anything else in the room. 

Currently two of the chairs reside in our front hall, convenient for depositing the mail, the newspaper, a package on the way to the post office, or your hat and gloves. One lives in the dining room, ready to be slotted in when we need to squeeze three people along one side of the dining room table without putting in the extra leaf.  If we need one someplace else, they're light enough to be carried all over the house.

For a while I shared Mom's opinion of the plastic cane, even while welcoming the "ruined" chairs into my life.  Then I decided that plastic was probably an excellent choice for chairs that were going to be seriously used.  In 30-some years it hasn't faded, stretched or frayed.  It doesn't scratch your legs if you're wearing shorts.  It looks sharper than the rest of the chairs, whose carved ornamentation is starting to lose its veneer.

So Mom, you were wrong to disdain the fix-up job.  But you were right to let me have the chairs!

Southern Accent 3 -- quilt rising

Another look at the "Southern Accent" show that just closed at the Speed Museum in Louisville.

Forgive me for sounding jaded, but one of the cliches of our stereotyped vision of the South is the quilt (you know, everybody's grandma made them...) and one of the cliches of the quilt is that old Underground Railroad myth.  How romantic to think that people would hang quilts on the line to point the direction to freedom or to mark the place for a free supper or a bed in the corncrib.  How romantic, but how silly, upon further examination: how many poor people just happened to have a quilt in the appropriate secret-code pattern on hand, and how would they hang it on the line when it was raining, and wouldn't vigilant sheriffs and slavers notice that the same people had a quilt hanging out every day?

Sanford Biggers, Quilt #15, Harmonics 2 (details below)

Sure enough, the signage on one big work in the show tells us -- falsely -- "Some quilts were used as signposts for safe houses along the secret network of routes from southern slave states to northern free states and Canada."

I am so sick and tired of hearing this fake news.  Only a few weeks ago I griped about it in my blog, in response to a review of work by -- well, well -- the very same Sanford Biggers!  So I wonder -- does the fake news come from the ignorance of the reviewer, as I had thought while writing that post, or does the artist plant it in his statements, as you would infer from reading the sign?

Oh well, let's talk about the art, not the propaganda.  He's painted with metallic and day-glo colors onto a beautifully made Irish Chain quilt, which incidentally is in pretty fine condition.  The quilt wasn't stiffened or stretched, just hung against the wall.

It was a striking image, especially the central curvy five-pointed star rising above the mountain horizon like a beacon in the sky, except that I didn't understand what all the protruding orange tubes were supposed to be.  To me they looked like gun barrels rather than rays of light.  I was also confused about those areas of gold paint that were dripping out of the star (as in the detail shot).  The rest of the image was controlled, even meticulous, and then here's this accidental blob....

More art from the Southern Accent show next week.

Southern Accent 2 -- fiber

Whenever I go to an exhibit that's not specifically fiber art, I look for fiber, always intrigued at how a material that is often considered a second-class citizen takes on substance when used by a painter.  I found several pieces incorporating fiber in the "Southern Accent" exhibit that just closed at the Speed Museum in Louisville. 

The most amusing was this painting/collage:

Benny Andrews, Down the Road (details below)

Most of the painting is flat, including some fabric used in the dress.  But the artist has constructed a huge nose jutting out from the picture plane, almost two inches deep, apparently molded from fabric and stiffened with paint or medium.  The hat also comes out from the surface to shade the nose and brow.

The painting was hung along the right-hand wall as people entered the exhibit, so your first view was the nose shape protruding from a foreshortened surface that you could hardly decipher; it was strange and off-putting.  I wish the painting had been hung at the corner facing the flow of traffic, so the first view could have been the full image, and you could have discovered the 3-D effect only on closer examination.

Next, a huge wall hanging, made from a tarp painted in various indigenous southern substances including dirt and tobacco.

Radcliffe Bailey, Up From (details below)

The large expanse, barely interrupted by a few appendages (can't tell if they were original to the tarp or added by the artist) and hand stitched African and voudou symbols, presented a calm background that focused your attention on the small black head perched on a rock. 

More on the Southern Accent show in my next post.

My favorite things 43

We visited Italy in the winter of 2003. With the exception of two taxi rides, we did a whole month depending entirely on public transportation and our own two feet.  We packed light, washed out our clothes in hotel bathtubs and wore the same sweater every day. 

But in Sorrento we strolled through a market street and saw a kitchenware store with a table of sale items on the sidewalk.  We spotted some nice pasta bowls for an amazing 1.25 euros apiece -- at the time, about $1.15 -- and couldn't resist.  We bought four and shlepped them back to the hotel, a long enough walk that we traded off carrying the bag once or twice along the way.

Before we made it home for good we had carried those bowls about four miles, making our way between hotels and railroad stations and through airports.  With every step they got a little bit heavier, and we had to remind ourselves that the bowls were beautiful, a steal, and our only souvenirs of the trip.  We had invested not just the five bucks but a heck of a lot of sweat equity to bring them home.

But it was worth it!  They have become our default bowl for pasta, not to mention the occasional soup or other juicy entree.  I suspect they've been used at least once a week since we returned, and we never fail to think about our wonderful trip when we eat that last bit of food and reveal the red tomato.

Online frustration

Isn't technology wonderful?  With the Internet at our fingertips, we can find out anything we ever need to know in milliseconds.  Well, sometimes it works that way.

After shipping off a quilt to a show yesterday, I was reminded that I should let our local fiber art organization know so they can post the info in their "see our work" announcement page.  But I should also tell them the dates of the show.

Kathleen Loomis, Fading, selected for Mid-States Craft Exhibition, Evansville Museum

The hard copy acceptance letter from the museum was still in my shirt pocket from taking it to Fedex to read off the address.  But the acceptance letter did not say the dates of the show.  I looked up in my email for the notification message, but that did not say the dates of the show.  I typed "Evansville Museum events" in google and found no home page for the museum.  Instead I got a page from a trip planner website telling me that the museum's nice new facility will be opening January 2014, I should allow four hours and would I like to build an itinerary.  No, I wouldn't.  But there was a link to the museum website, which I clicked on. 

Oops.  Got the dreaded exclamation point in the red triangle: "Your connection is not private.  Attackers might be trying to steal your information from www.emuseum.org (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards.)"  Well, that's scary but I only want to know the dates of the show.  The web is so concerned about my safety that it won't even let me take the risk and see the site anyway -- my only choice is "Back to safety."  North Korean hackers can infiltrate the site of any place I do business with, steal my social security number, plant ransomware on my computer, but at least I'm not at risk at the Evansville Museum!  What a relief.

I googled Evansville Museum again and found a link to their facebook page.  Under the "events" tab it showed several events in October and November, plus one next March and one next August, but not the December 9 opening reception (they did mention that date in the acceptance email).  I scrolled through their posts, reading as far back as August, but no mention of the show.

Back to those emails.  They show the same website that I'm not allowed to go to, for my own safety.  Hmmm.  I googled "Mid-States Craft Exhibition" and aha -- toward the bottom of the page, founds a listing for "Art Museum, Movie Theater, Attractions: Evansville, IN" and it's the museum's own website!  Not the same URL as the one on their stationery, or the link in the emails, but an actual working SAFE website!

But no listing for my show in the revolving banner on the top of the page.  In a sidebar called "upcoming events,"  no show listed, but up in September was an entry called "Mid-States Call for Entries September 21 - February 16."  Clicked on that, and found a brief description, with the eligibility rules and name of the juror, but no show dates, and a link to the full prospectus on CaFE, which finally revealed the dates: December 10 through February 4.  (Well, actually December 9, since that's the opening reception.)

And it only took me 35 minutes to find it out (that's slightly less than one millimonth).

But anyhow, if you find yourself in the vicinity of Evansville over the winter, drop in and see my flag.