Kara Walker in San Francisco

 

 

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art  I saw  an intense  installation by Kara May Walker with robotic movement and frightening arms and bodies going up and down .

The title is

 

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) A recipe for the Weary Time Traveler Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence  carried out by The Gardeners toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Species

 

 

 

IMG_6750

 

That’s the whole installaton from afar. When it was first created it had eight robots, now some of them no longer move, but the installation is still riveting

THis is Fortuna herself, a prophetess who orignally spit out fortunes to people.

“The paradox of Being Black is the condition of Not-being,” one read.

“Your last shred of dignity is often your best.”

“Loss is a heady thing our hearts cannot comprehend.”

Now she stands silently.

Here is a good article about the installation

this figure is near the window,  invoking a homeless man.

perhaps addicted to fentanyl.-

just ouside my door in Seattle in a park, I see many men and woman hanging in suspended  animation like this after  they take a dose  of  fentanyl

 

 

THis child and her puppet gaze around.  It echoes Walker’s Covid  experience, when she sought out an old doll for comfort.

 

 

 

This amazing work with its moving parts both fascinates and horrifies mre.

Walker speaks of dolls as “I thought about dolls as empathy machines, providing a service, and as some kind of magic object.”

 

“Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)” could be seen as a diorama of tomorrow, looking back at Black life in America “from the institution of slavery through the eviction of Black populations from inner cities like San Francisco,”

 

 

Kara Walker has also co curated the Monuments  exhibition  in Los Angeles, in  which artists repurposeConfederate bronze monuments.Her own piece is here using  part of a Stonewall  Jackson  equestrian monument.

Nour Ahmed Mhanna Artist in Gaza

 

 

Nuor’s art:  Colors from the Rubble

I am Nour Muhanna age 20, an artist and top ranking business student at Gaza university. Every painting carries a story. Since childhood art has been my refuge, a way to express my feelings . With our home now destroyed I have only colors and paper to rebuild my memories I paint nature because it gives me peace and I paint war because it dwells within me with all its pain

As the eldest daughter I carry deep family responsibilities especially during wartime. After losing our home my family now lives in a tent where daily life is a challenge. I help my father cook over fire, my aunt and mother bake bread and I wash clothes by hand.My siblings fetch water and we all support my grandmother who struggles to move in the harsh conditions. We all suffer from famine sand and insect allergies. Despite everything I remain committed to my studies, my ar,t and my hope for a better future. We in Gaza say we dream we create we live despite the challenges but it gets harder every day and still we are here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humaira Abid

 

 

Humaira Abid, a Pakistani artist who lives in Seattle, created an exhibition (seen at Greg Kucera gallery) focusing on children from Gaza17 , Israel 2 and Ukraine 4

who have died in war.

 

Her installation “The Shape of War” consists of twenty-four children’s desks (she plans on creating many more). On the desk is a “Rehal,” that would hold a Quran.

 

 

In this case they have prayer beads and a flower- a primrose symbolizes innocence or a petunia symbolizing hope.

 

Each desk has a drawer. When you pull it out you see photographs of a child and a text. Each text details stories from the  child’s life, how they were killed, and many photos of the child.

 

This exhibition is heartbreaking.  As we look at the photographs of the happy child with her family, and read the texts, it is almost unbearably sad. I

 

t is hard to imagine how the artist could create this work.  But Humaira has been a socially engaged artist for a long time, so this is only an intensification of her deep commitments. This sense of art for social justice began whem she was an art student in Pakistan and saw the discrimination that female artists faced in Pakistan.

 

She worked directly with families for their stories

She has 17 from Gaza, 2 from Israel, and 4 from Ukraine

Healing and Hope in War Zones

CHildren’s Art from Gaza and Ukraine

 

There is less art from Ukraine and I did not have an explanation as to  how it arrived in Seattle, but this strong image is on the cover of the brochure as an emblematic image from Ukraine. I  include more at the end of the post

 

 

 

Drawings by Children of Gaza

 

 

 

 

Brought to Seattle by D’vorah Kost  Shown at St. Marks Cathedral Seattle

as a series of events called “Sacred  Spaces.”

 

The small drawings were easy to overlook in the corner of the huge cathedral, but once you looked closely, you could not look away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of these children have experienced what they draw first-hand. Each child has a unique style, but all of them are vividly depicting attacks by Israelis

 

 

 

 

 

These works are by three triplets, watching their house burn, finding their father dead. and being pursued by a tank

 

 

 

 

a Home destroyed The We are not numbers book mentioned at the end of this column has esssays by youth writers who describe the constant destruction, and fleeing

 

 

Food Drop

The food drops are chaotic and often turn violent

 

They are not numbers They are Human Beings

 

 

 

 

One of the few labels

Ahmed Abu Abed. 13, wants to be a soccer player and an engineer. He loves to construct things out of recycled material and has made 100 kites from plastic bags. He gives them away. His art contains many images he recalls from war, including the destruction of his bicycle. He loves to Imagine peaceful times.

 

 

A collage by a Fouab Diad father of the children with actual rocks from Gaza

 

I highly recommend the book We Are Not Numbers (WANN), The Voices of Gaza Youth. WANN is a group of 385 Palestinian young adults. https://wearenotnumbers.org/. The website has recent posts and a way to buy the book.

The book is a selection of short articles by young adult writers describing their life in Gaza. It spans from 2016 to 2024. Many speak of participating in the Great March of Return that began in 2016. One of going to the beach, another of studying the stars (he is now studying astronomy in Russia), “The Betrayal of Wonder Woman,” “The Donkey Carts of Gaza” and much more. Four of the writers and one mentor/teacher have already been killed.

 

Some have escaped Gaza with fellowships, and some are helping with the WANN project inside and outside Gaza. Others received fellowships that they couldn’t take because the border is closed.

And of ocurse the situation is worse everyday. The Israelis are systematicly obliterating Gaza and its inhabitants

 

The book We are Not Numbers is available at Eilliott Bay Bookshops://www.elliottbaybook.com/

 

The blog posts come up to the present. I urge you to take a look at them. https://wearenotnumbers.org/

 

Here are four more images froom children in Ukraine. I am awaiting more information on what they say.

 

 

 

 

 

The last word from Gaza

 

James W. Washington Jr, and the Artists in Residence Program

As you walk from the ferry toward the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, you will see a  large photograph of James J. Washington, Jr. holding a chisel in the window. It announces his exhibition “Many Hats, One Spirit” at the museum until Sept 17.

 

Once inside the museum, climb the staircase, so you first view a life size bronze statue of Washington by Barry Johnson, a replica of the piece at Union and 24^th street.

 

 

The statue is set in a re-creation of his living room with two enormous chairs and a table with books and a masonic hat .

 

In the same space is an evocation of his studio with tools and stones.

 

Passing through glass doors, we are immersed in Washington’s works, as well as the contemporary artists whom he inspired. The  exhibition is beautifully installed.

 

 

A concentration of Washington’s works in the exhibition include early watercolors of intensely colored images of churches and streets from Mississippi, Arkansas and Seattle (Needless to say even in Seattle, as a Black man, he had to be careful about what and where he painted.)

In the earliest carving, a small block of wood with the title The Chaotic Half (1946), a hand reaches out to vote as a hooded character holds him back, ( what has changed since then?) Also from the 1940s (at the other end of the gallery), two paintings comment on the status of African Americans.

 

In the Making of the UN Charter (1945 a horrified black man is relegated to the lower right hand corner;

Democracy Lynched (1946), depicts unbalanced scales of Justice with a black family on one side being lynched.

Washington was involved in Civil Rights actions from early in his career, so these two paintings represent important statements in that trajectory. His archives give us a great many documents on Civil rights actions in Little Rock, Arkansas and Seattle.

 

In 1944 he moved to Seattle to work as an electrician in Bremerton with the civil service.  A few years later he moved to Seattle and was permitted to set up a Shoe Repair Shop at Fort Lawton (1950).

At the same time he was also becoming known as an artist among the soon to be famous Northwest artists , especially Mark Tobey. Tobey and Washington shared an interest in spirituality.

 

After a trip to Mexico in 1951 when he met Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he picked up a small lava stone at Teotihuacan that was to lead to a decisive change in his art.

Four years later he sculpted Young Boy From Athens, (on the right) from that rock , leading to his long career of sculpting stone. In the exhibition we see several examples of his bird sculptures, as well as portraits and spiritual symbolism.

One of the strongest portraits is Jomo Kenyatta(1962), not yet President of Kenya. We see here an inspiration for Charles Parrish’ small bronze portraits Desmond Tutu, and Veteran shown nearby.

One of Washington’s most important commissions was a set of famous black men created in 1969  Here we see him carving one of them  Frederick Douglass

Theu were installed in Philadelphia in a  Rotunda of Achievement    but they were vandalized the next day and removed. I found them in a storage locker in 2009. It is very sad that they have never been restored.

 

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The Artist in Residence Program includes 25 former Artist in Residence .

Carletta Carrington Wilson and Christian French showed work made during the residency.

 

Carletta’s wonderful layers of fabric collage include a page from Harpers Weekly during the Civil War depicting African Americans performing various duties.

 

 

Christian French explained how he created his totem “from Polaroids I took onsite of stones around the studio and yard. Those were then scanned digitally and printed out larger on transparent material for the lightboxes, which I also assembled onsite.”

 

Mary Coss’ salt eroded metal suitcases suggest endless travel. Long dangling wires made words referring to migration and memory and speaking about  her own family’s experiences.

 

 

Marita Dingus made shoes on Washington’s sewing machine during the residency, exhibited a small spiritual collage figure Contemplation.

 

In one corner a group of hanging mirrors called Shaded by Christina Reed had one word on each  side: “Unfounded/ Suspicion  Deliberate/Ignorance

Fear/Ful, Evade/Truth,  Constant/ Vigilance, Deny/Access, Intended/ Disregard.” As they turned on a wire, the  message came through gradually.

 

 

On the Fence, an evocation of love and danger by Ursula Stuart, featured a heart shaped motif studded with nails and hung against a fence. Ursula also created a group of protective amulets, including a witch and a queen. She connects to Washington’s belief in the spirit.

 

Lift Every Vice and Sing a portrait of King by Christen Meisel was made with hymnals. I found it very moving.

There are many other works to enjoy, but primarily what we experience is Washington’s spirituality. Much of that spirit emanates from the materials used for the art, his own stone sculpture or the artists discovering everything from nails and rounded stones  in the garden to a model of a slave ship in his historic home on 26^th st in the Central District.

 

“Many Hats, One Spirit” is a landmark event perfectly curated to provide a provocative dialog between Washington and the Artist Residents.

 

 

Ruth Asawa Sculptor of Space in three books

 

Ruth Asawa: Sculptor of Space

Ruth Asawa had an extraordinary childhood. In her early years she grew up on a farm with her immigrant parents, sharing in the hard work.

 

That idea of hard work stayed with her throughout her career as an artist. In April 1942, when she was sixteen her family was sent to a detention camp, first at Sant Anita racetrack, then Rohwer Camp in Arkansas.  At the Santa Anita camp she had the fortune of learning from three Asian American artists for Disney.

 

After she graduated from high school in the Rohwer camp in August 1943, she was allowed to leave as long as she stayed away from the West Coast. She went to Milwaukee State Teachers College,

 

After learning she could not teach, she  had the opportunity to go to Black Mountain College the experimental interdisciplinary arts school. It changed the course of her life.

These are some of the details with which Marilyn Chase begins her book , Everything She Touched, The Life of Ruth Asawa..

 

Chase carefully describes the artist’s unusual education at Black Mountain College, her study with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, her love affair with Alfred Lanier, and her move to San Francisco to start her family and her career. She was life long friends with Albers and Fuller.

Chase’s book is an easy read and it includes a continuous narrative that focuses on her professional activity and her personal life, much of it based on letters.

 

Asawa’s woven wire sculpture were embedded in her home. In the current retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photograph of her living room in front of a partial recreation of  the space. We see her sculpture hanging from the ceiling throughout the huge space.

 

She welcomed her children to be part of the creativity,: a baby sitting in a wire basket as Asawa wove around him, and her other children pursued their own creative endeavors as she worked. Shw was photographed by Imogen Cunningham, her dear friend, many times.

 

 

 

Jordan Troeller  Ruth Asawa and The Artist-Mother at Midcentury emphasizes the ways in which Asawa, together with other what she calls “artist-mothers” managed to produce extraordinary art as they were raising  children.  Troeller’s focus is to combine motherhood and creativity (she leads a research group on “The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art,”).

 

Ruth Asawa raised six children, defying the idea that having children prevents woman from making creative art.  Various Asawa techniques such as weaving and knitting, connect to female traditions, Troeller suggests, because they enable the artist to start and stop as is necessary with children. Actually Asawa’s incorporation of her children into her art process defies that logic. Asawa’s work ethic and ability to embrace creativity as a generous gift, meant that she worked almost nonstop, with her children helping as they grew older.

 

Other chapters in Troeller’s bookfocus on flowers, folding, or

pregnancy, to name only a few, themes, integrating them with aspects of her work.

The best known image of pregnancy is the “Andrea” cast bronze public sculpture in San Francisco. I found the book a bit overboard in connecting everything to a feminist analysis- if she had not been so focused on motherhood, as metaphor and literally, her analysis would have been more useful. It is clearly, though, a feminist answer to patriarchal tropes and the parameters of making art as a woman.

 

 

As an art historian, I have to say that the large book accompanying her major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art is comprehensive and invaluable. Janet Bishop, editor, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, includes essay after essay that clearly follow a theme such as “From Tool to Ornament, Ruth’s Intricate Refusals,” and “What Cannot Be Produced Alone : Ruth Asawa’s Public Art.”

The exhibition follows all the stages of her art career, from single woven wire baskets to complex hanging sculptures enclosing one orb inside another. Then a new technique of tying wire, electroplating it,

 

 

and much more. These dazzling hanging works are her best known work.

 

The complete discussion of her public art is also represented in the catalog and the exhibition, where we saw studies and photographs.  The installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art even included a sample of her garden.

For Asawa, as we learn in this thorough study, Zen Buddhism was part of her world view, as well as nature itself. Her drawings of leaves and plants show her understanding  of the intricacies of the natural world.

 

In the chapter on public art, bronze casting is a major departure, as well as the scale of the works she took on, a huge low relief of the Japanese Internments camps, a wall called San Francisco Fountain, with many small reliefs of life in San Franciso, and many more..

 

Her creativity also extended to schoolchildren, teaching innovative ways to make art with materials such as milk cartons, and “bakers clay” (flour, salt and water.)

 

 

Last, Asawa  engaged with civic affairs, founding an art school, now called the “Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts,” and lobbying for more art education in the public schools.

 

 

The magnificent sculptures that Ruth Asawa created hang in space, and surround space. They embrace interior and exterior, the delicate and the strong, the idea of growth and the idea of stasis. It is hard to overstate her contribution: her wire-based art, at first seen as simply decorative, is now understood as major accomplishments of twentieth century sculpture

 

 

 

 

Arpita Singh : Remembering – at the Serpentine Gallery, London

 

Arpita Singh’s retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London gives us her career from the early 1970s to the present. It includes huge narrative oil paintings and small abstract watercolors.

 

 

I could feel the intensity in each work no matter what the style or size. Each viewer can find a different story here. I found a trajectory from calm but eccentric domesticity to political chaos.

 

Munna Apa’s Garden 1989

 

As Munna Apa waters her garden, we see a dead man covered by a white sheet behind her and another figure fearfully peeking through a curtain on the right. Other people in the car and upper part of the painging seem oblivious, but in the center of the bottom we barely see a policeman- harbinger of things to come.

 

 

 

This painting “Devi Pistol Wali ” 1990 gives us a transition. A pistol in one hand and fruit in two others, this goddess is standing on a sleeping? man held  up by three others. Small figures suggest a man with a sword, a car, a worshipping person, an airplane, a bird, and various other details.

The Devi ( Goddess) is dressed in white as a widow and pointing a gun at the small man with a sword? or just self protection.

It is easy to make a narrative out of these details

 

Only three years later she painted her iconic picture of her mother

Following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992, the mood of this painting is entirely different. Her mother stands stoic in the right hand corner, but there are dead people near her. Across a road is a lot of small figures : policemen, more dead people, chairs, cars and much more. So her mother stands against the chaos.

 

My lolliipop city: Gemini Rising 2005

this painting is hard to interpret. Gemini Rising suggests something positive as we see the couple in the sky, but the gathering crowd may point to something more ominous

 

Moving forward to increasing chaos

 

 

 

 

detail

 

 

Whatever is Here, 2006 has a somber praying figure in the center surrounded  by white praying men, but above him are two groups of aggressive fighters in dark red and light brown with a cavalcade of gray horses between them. Some of the red men are spilling into the praying figures

 

 

 

 

 

Searching Sita through Torn Paper Strips, Paper Strips and Labels, 2015

Sita is the wife of Rama who is kidnapped by Ravana, King of Lanka.  In this extraodinary painying we see red deer in the center amidst a landscape of torn up letters. In the Ramayana  golden deer distracted Rama as his wife was kidnapped.

Here we see an entire herd of red deer at the center

 

 

and a repeated image of capture with black covered people

Also note the use of words in the backgoundL Sita repeated with other incomplete words

 

 

Homeward 2020

She has written boat over and over in a boat shaped white image

The date suggests wishful thinking in 2020, the year of the Covid shutdown, but this beautiful image is comforting if a little desolate

 

 

The Exile 2011 really states the deep problem: she names countries that led to refugees around the edge 1939 Poland  1947 India and Pakistan, 1948 Palestine,1979 Afghanistan , Iraq 1991, Africa 1990

 

 

My Lily Pond 2009

This huge painting shows the soldiers overruning the water and a few desparate people raise thei hands as they drown.

 

What we see is an increasing move away from myth and towards reality. Although passages across the sea can be seen as allegorical, here the figures are very specific as is the writing.In the image of exile an even more heartfelt image suggests the tragedy of Forced departure. With the specific dates around the border we recognize that this is a global condition. I wonder if she is going to address the tragedy of Gaza.

Arpita Singh is a soothsayer and a truthteller embedded in complex and deeply felt images of our human condition.

Hanaa Malallah : Ruins and Research

 

 

 

I first met Hanaa Malallah in 2007 just after she came to London from  war torn Iraq. .  Above you see her applying burned and shredded  canvas to one of  her works  The burning of her canvas was her response to the  nightmare of destruction she faced in Baghdad every time she walked  down the street

 

 

In 2007 we went to the British Museum and visited the art from Mesopotamia

Here Hanaa explains  how the Royal Game  of Ur was  played

I returned to the British Museum on my recent trip

 

Games are a theme in Hanaa’s work. She is also knowlegable about mathematics and semiotics. So nothing is simple in experiencing her art. She speaks of the historical study of other symbolic systems. “Logic is elaborated by philosophy to examine ancient art”

In this statement she is thinking about Shakir Hassan al Said whom she studied with in Baghdad. He wrote her a series of letters in the late 1990s when he was living in Jordan and Hanaa was experiencing the severe sanctions in Iraq. She answered him in 2004 in the depths of the American attacks on Baghdad published in This Green is not Green,2021.

 

Both of the paintings below are complex references to those ideas

 

Let us move to  the present!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our recent visit to her studio she showed us her new work. Above she stands in front of a lion of Babylon made of cardboard and labelled “My Museum” In the middle printed on a brick shaped form is the word looted .” We saw another replica of this lion  in  the British Museum, the label said the original had been moved to Berlin.

 

 

That is where the Ishtar Gate  and other artifacts  from Babylon were taken after being stolen  from  Babylon by the 19th century archeologists. In the 20 th century American archeologists  built a structure on top of Nufur using mudbrick slabs from the site with cuneiform inscriptions!

 

They painted the walls with a crude mural of current archologistts at the site mixed with goddesses.

 

 

 

Another project based on archeology is “Co-Existent Ruins “Exploring Iraq’s Mesopotamian past through contemporary art.”

She invited seveal contemporary artists to go to Ur, Nirud

and Nufur and interact with them in various ways

 

 

assuming pose honoring the famous ruler Gudea of Lagash

 

 

At Nimrud, destroyed by ISIS, locating a remnant ( a hand) of original Assyrian monument. (video still) These intersections with contemporary artists explore

“the critical question of how contemporary collaborative art projects can enable a renewed engaaagement with this ancient heritage and history”( Quote from brochure “Co-existent ruins, Exploring Iraq’s Mesopotamian past through Contemporary art”

 

She wrote for another exhibition brochure

 

“My practice addresses the difference between the remains of a Civilization (Ruins) in contrast with the remains that are precipitated by human destruction and armed conflict  ( (Rubble)

My work reflects upon my own experiences in Iraq, I postulate that the region embraces both Ruins and Rubble. Ruins of the remnants of Mesopotamian archaeological sites, that position themselves as  a constant “time travel”, the physical evidence of a  society long past, yet still holding deep connections to our present and future. By contrast “Rubble” that is the palpable outcome of lethal effects of  war chaos and human destruction indicating a loss of culture and identity.

These small objects of mine will suggest I am concerned with tackling the possibilities for addressing ruins and rubble as a new aesthetic that attends to this history, the latent power of ruins in the present as that which might provide for a new relation between past and present”

 

 

Another long term  project is about the ruthless U.S.  bombing of the Public Shelter 25 in the Al Amiryia region of  Baghdad in 1991. 400 people were killed;in a book about the disaster only 100 people were identified with photographs. She/He Has No  Picture is Hanaa’s response

 

She went to visit the shelter  “A toxic smell of smoke and charerd bodies permeated the air”. Many years later she has been able to create faces for the victims with layers of burnt  canvas.

 

 

 

 

A  current project is exploring the legacy of Gertrude Bell. Bell was hired by the British to  demarcate borders in the Middle East. Hanaa is pulling quotes from Bell’s letters that reveal how terribly colonial she was.

 

A quote froom Lawrence of Arabia

 

…it’s shocking how the East has wound  itself around my heart till don’t know which is me and which is it. I never lose the sense of it. I’m acutely conscious always of its charm and grace which do not seem to wear thin with familiarity. I ‘m more a citizen of Bagdad (Sic) than many a Bagdadi born, and I’ll wager that no Bagdadi cares more, or half so much, for the beauty of the river or the palm gardens or cling more closely to the right of citizenship which I have acquired. . .”Gertrude Bell

 

Hanaa has been appointed artist in Residence at the British Museum this year. She is now included in major exhibitions in many contries.She is an artist of extraordinarily rich intellectual interests as she works with the materiality of art . She explores her relationship betwwn human and natural worlds and between the material and the virtual, the organic and the symbolic.

 

 

“Stones” Our Ancestors” Dove = Drone

UK is still a great place to visit

 

 

 

 

This cake is a replica of Henry’s house on Amorgos in the Cyclades

It was the star of his 90th birthday party in Ufford Suffolk hosted by his niece Tig. More on that soon

We went from the airport

directly to Saffron Walden where Henry’s sister lives in a small 16th century house.

 

We stayed nearby in a 16th century hotel the Cross Keys

It has quite a steep staircase that goes around two corners,but Henry managed it beautifully.

we went to beautiful public garden  near  Imogen’s house

 

 

and learned about the Bardfield painters.  Eric Ravilous who died during world War II  and Edward  Bawden are the best known.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saffron Walden has two weekly markets in the town square

They also included deonstrators against the  genocide in Gaza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

we also went to the circus!

We saw Morris Dancers in a nearby town

and  ate pizza in a strange  pub  filled with animal heads

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the home of  Tom Turpin, a famous highwayman in England

 

We also went to Cambridge, Henry’s alma mater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just ouside of Cambridge we visited an incredible collection of women’s art.

https://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/womens-art-collection/explore-collection This is only one example, the others don’t  want  to load, but the collection ranged fromfamous international artists like Faith Ringgold to local artists

 

 

We also had a lot of wonderful meals especially the  Sunday dinner by his niece Lucy McKinzie

 

 

 

We visited Charlie’s “Alottment) land  given out for growing since World War II

 

 

 

From Saffron Walden we went on to  visit his niece Tig in Suffolk. She lives in the country. that’s where we had the birthday party!

with the cake

 

We  had a contest drawing a portrait of Henry

This is mine

Tig had amazing pets torotises and a python

 

And here is the whole party

 

 

and the miraculous Tig who makes honey from her own bees

Tig  took us to Sutton Hoo, the Saxon burial site. These are images from  the British Museum. The fragments and  the reconstruction of  the famous helmet

 

 

 

From Ufford in Suffolk we went on to Haleworth  which is further  North into Suffolk to Halesworth a charming lttle town.

 

 

We met this lovely artist and her son. Susan and Harry Knox

 

 

I loved her paintings of Halesworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dear friend  Cynthia and her husband took us to Southwold a seaside town  with an amazing fish restaurant and a beautiful church

 

 

 

Zodiacs by Ai Weiwei coming to Seattle in the fall

 

 

 

The larger than life Zodiac heads by Ai Weiwei that are coming to Volunteer Park  this fall( too bad not there for the summer) represent the following animals in the usual order: Pig, Dog, Rooster, Monkey, Goat, Horse, Snake, Dragon, Rabbit, Tiger, Ox, Rat.  Each of these Zodiac animals have specific traits which you have if you were born under their sign. My (1945) sign is the rooster : it says “Those born under the rooster are profound thinkers. Talented and capable they can also be eccentric and may have difficulties in their relationships with others. Highly observant and analytical they are strong decision makers who speak their minds freely.” How about that. You can look up your year online in 12 year cycles.

 

 

These heads, which I saw in London and can therefore offer a photograph of them, have a long story. In the exhibition of smaller heads inside the Seattle Art Museum they are displayed in a different order in two parts Dog Monkey Horse Dragon Tiger Rat/Ox Rabbit, Snake, Ram, Rooster, Boar. I asked the curator Foong Ping why and he said the answer would be revealed when the large heads arrive. He called it a “an easter egg.”

 

The story of the zodiac heads is worth telling. The original zodiac heads were attached to seated draped torsos that were part of an elaborate water clock fountain created by an Italian artist. They combine sculpture, hydraulics, and Chinese and European aesthetics.

The location was called the Garden of Perfect Brightness or Yuanming Yuan where originally there was a complex of European style palaces gardens and fountains. It began in the mid 17^th century and was greatly expanded by the Quianlong Emperor (1736 – 1795).

 

In 1860 the Yuanming Yuan was looted and burned by, guess who, the British and French troops at the end of the Opium wars. “It was retaliation for kidnap and torture of a group of British diplomats and in part to force the Chinese to comply with the 1858 Treaty of Tiensin- one of a series of trade agreements imposed on China by more powerful nations and collectively referred to as the “Unequal treaties.” Sound familiar?

 

This was part of the Opium Wars that began in 1845 to 1945 “ the century of humiliation”

 

As the Chinese have become a world power they are reclaiming national treasures like the bronze heads of the zodiac fountain clock which are now looked on as “symbols of the cultural achievements of the Qing dynasty, the losses of 1860 and the humiliations that followed.” Seven heads turned up at an auction. Five have not reappeared.

 

Enter Ai Weiwei: Ai Weiwei thinks about China’s history and its relationship to history.  He collects artifacts of which there are several collections in the Seattle Art Museum exhibition such as the feet of Buddha statues.

 

As young man he returned from exile in Xinjiang province where he had been with his family since 1958. When he returned to Beijing after the death of  Mao in 1976 ,  he wandered the ruins of Yuanming Yuan. He also went to art school and founded several early avant garde groups.

 

Fast forward to 2010.  He recreated all twelve Zodiac heads from the fountain! He sees it as playing with history and the idea that they are national treasures because  of course they are fakes of a pastiche: the heads were made by Italian artists!

 

But the zodiac signs have long been significant in Chinese culture: Here is the information online

“These animals, along with their associated traits, are deeply intertwined with Chinese culture and influence beliefs about personality, relationships, and fortune. The Chinese zodiac is also known as Sheng Xiao, which literally translates to “birth resemblance:  it is a part of a broader system called Four Pillars of Destiny, which is used in Chinese astrology to understand an individual’s life path and personality.”(Wikipedia)

 

But the literal representations at Yuanming Ying is more European than Chinese.

 

So when we get to see these larger than life zodiacs in our Olympic Park, keep all of this in mind. Ai Weiwei has  placed them not as heads on a stone body as in the original fountain, but on a thin column of metal. To quote Ai Weiwei ”( The Circle) is pointing to all the people who would question whether the work is valuable or not valuable, real or not real, or better than real, or not as good as real.”

The quotes, except for Wikipedia, are from Ai Weiwei Circle of Animals, Zodiac Heads, Somerset House London 2011.