Silhouettes Exhibit at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (May 11, 2018 - March 17, 2019)

Visiting Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now helped me appreciate the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery a lot more. What especially drew me to it was this silhouette, cut into paper, of an enslaved women, Flora, created by tracing her shadow cast by a candle. I procrastinated going to the exhibit but finally went there twice in March. Interesting article about this: "An Enslaved Woman's Candlelit Shadow Is the Most Compelling Image in the US National Portrait Gallery" https://qz.com/quartzy/1471019/an-enslaved-womans-candlelit-shadow-is-the-most-compelling-image-in-the-us-national-portrait-gallery/

 You can see in the picture below that this was cut into paper.

Another reason I liked this exhibit was that many of the silhouettes were of interesting women in the 1800s.

Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant--Early 1800s same-sex couple. More on them at the museum that owns this silhouette:
https://henrysheldonmuseum.org/exhibits/charity-sylvia-a-weybridge-couple/

Laura Bridgman--more about her at Perkins School for the Blind website:
https://www.perkins.org/history/people/laura-bridgman

I was already familiar with current-day silhouettes by Kara Walker, so I'm glad the exhibit included these really neat ones by Kumi Yamashita in which she uses various objects and light to cast shadows that are silhouettes.

Kristi Malakoff

Kara Walker

Some other silhouettes from the 1800s. Pieces in which the silhouettes are doing something were among my favorites.

Lydia Maria Child--She deserves more attention in US history lessons.

Some sights while walking

In Baltimore I often walk between downtown and Charles Village or Mt. Vernon Square along Charles Street. One reason is to see the current quote at the First Unitarian Church at Charles and Franklin Streets. I don't remember ever reading anything by Joseph Joubert. This quote is 261 in his Pensées. Maybe I should look more through these kinds of books for discussion topics to assign my students.

For the unit on media in my Contemporary American Society class, I assign a poem by Emily Dickinson and some quotes.

"I'm Nobody! Who Are you?' (260)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

One of the quotes:
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut Mother Night page vi

Below is a picture I took late last summer in DC along the Mall near the Smithsonian Castle. There were a lot more butterflies, but I couldn't get a good picture of a large group of them. One of my favorite walks anywhere is along that side of the Mall at sunset, so I wish I could find one of my pictures of red skies while looking toward the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

This was recently on a sidewalk in Madison along Midvale Boulevard, the route I often walk between my Madison apartment and the Sequoya Library. 

Frida Kahlo: "Still Life: Pitahayas" (1938) at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

"It is fuchsia on the outside and hides the subtlety of a whitish-gray pulp flecked with little black spots that are its seeds inside. This is a wonder! Fruits are like flowers: they speak to us in provocative language and teach us things that are hidden.” Frida Kahlo on this painting

"Still Life: Pitahayas" was back on display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art until February 3, 2019. I think fewer than 20 US museums have her art in their collections. The museum lacks galleries to permanently display art that it owns, which disappoints me. I wonder what pitahayas taste like.

 About "Still Life: Pitahayas":
"Pitahayas: more than a still life–a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo"
https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/TwJCvMnyaXG2LQ

This recent episode of the BBC's The Forum--"Frida Kahlo: A Life in Colour"--is a helpful discussion among leading experts on Kahlo.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/w3cswpsl [44 minutes]

Website with images of paintings mentioned in this show:
https://www.fridakahlo.org/

I took the above pictures this past winter. Last month I visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which is in DC. Frida Kahlo's self-portrait there:

The note in her hand reminds of Chinese paintings that have calligraphy by the artist. I think it would be interesting if more current artists would sometimes include writings like poems with or in their paintings.

By the way, an interesting quotation floating online seems to be incorrectly attributed to Frida Kahlo:
"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. 
I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.
well, I hope that if you are out there you read this and know that yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you."

Someone asked Quote Investigator about the source. What possibly happened was that someone wrote this on a postcard with Kahlo's image. The card got posted online, and some assumed that the image of Kahlo meant she said it.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/frida-kahlo/

Mildred Thompson and Abstract Art

A few years ago, I became interested in abstract expressionist art by women after I learned of an exhibit organized by the Denver Art Museum: Women of Abstract Expressionism, held there June 12, 2016 - September  25, 2016. A lot of the paintings appeal to me more than ones done by the more famous men. In March 2017 I was lucky to see a small exhibit of paintings by Mary Abbott at McCormick Gallery, her official gallery in Chicago. I very much like the variety of colors she chooses. Because she's still alive at 97, I'm thinking of writing her to let her know how much I appreciate her paintings.

While Mildred Thompson was alive, she didn't get as much appreciation as she deserved. According to a tour guide yesterday at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, someone once suggested to her to recruit a white woman to stand in her place so as to increase the chances of selling her art.

Her official website: 

http://mildredthompson.org/

Her art contributed the name of an exhibit held at the museum from October 13, 2017 through January 21, 2018--Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960 to Today. I wish I'd seen it.  

She also worked with wood:

Colorful tables at National Gallery of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art

Whenever I enter or exit the National Gallery of Art's main building, I sometimes walk by this table near the west entrance. I very much like the colorful marbles on the top. I think it would be neat to try to make something like the top but with more affordable materials.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has the other one of this pair.

In March 2017 I got a message that someone replied to one of my comments on another person's blog. The reply was this: "I wish that you'd update more." At first I thought it was from a third person and meant for the one who created that blog. But then I wondered if it was actually from the blog writer and meant for me because the person replied to my comment. 

I very much hope that she'll contact me, maybe by email or a comment to this or another post. I loved getting to know about her by reading her blog and looking at her website before she took them down.  I'm very unhappy with myself for not doing things differently.

Judith Leyster "Self Portrait" at the National Gallery of Art in DC

Whenever I visit the National Gallery of Art, I usually try to look at my favorites. One of them is Judith Leyster's "Self Portrait," from about 1630, because I like her relaxed mood.

I learned from a video about this painting [4 min 34 sec] that underneath the fiddler is probably another self-portrait. The clothing in this is too unsuitable for her to wear while painting, so I think it would have been neat if the painting within the painting was of her wearing what she'd normally have on while painting. Something like the reverse of what Norman Rockwell created with his "Triple Self-Portrait."

Wikipedia entry on Judith Leyster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Leyster

--------------------------
Added on November 29, 2018. This is a closer view, taken where the painting is usually hung with the other Dutch paintings on wood wall panneling. I think the colors in this picture are closer to what I see in person.

Baltimore--Part I

During recent months I've been reading up on Baltimore to prepare for moving there, such as Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, The Hero's Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State, and Coming of Age in the Other America. For too long I've neglected the city in favor of DC, but the teaching opportunities seem to fit me better in Baltimore, and, although the cost of living isn't cheap there, at least it's not as expensive as DC. For instance, a large studio apartment that I rented in 1996 near the Rosslyn Metro station in Arlington, VA, for under $450/month now costs over $1,300/month.

My parents met in DC when my mom was in nursing school and my father at a trade school. Even though my mom's side of my family in the Salisbury area has tended to focus on Baltimore--the male sailors seemed to have often laid over from the 1800s through the mid-1900s--until recently I'd spent little time there, mainly stopping over before my mom's cousin or brother drove us to the Eastern Shore. At least I did have the chance to eat at Haussner's Restaurant, famous for the art that covered its walls. Because of the tourist spots, federal government, National Mall, Metro, etc., DC seemed much more attractive to me.

Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens in Druid Hill Park, opened in 1888. The architectural style of this time period, such as the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building (opened in 1881), is among my favorites.

In some ways Baltimore reminds me of some Chinese cities of the 1990s--lots of problems, though not necessarily the same, but many nice people.

George Peabody Library, part of the Johns Hopkins University

Too common sight in West Baltimore (See "A Tale of Two Cities" Baltimore Magazine, April 2016) In the future I should post a photo that portrays a more positive side.