October, 2023 |  | settled grace, 2022 Hand woven fabric, embroidery, gouache, and canvas, 24 x 22 inches Currently on view in OFF/GRID at 377 Main St, Catskill |
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| September started as an inferno in New York and ended with Noah’s Ark style flooding. Thankfully I was unscathed from the waters. Some, but not everyone knows I’m an artist who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy eleven years ago this month. I was fresh out of grad school, all my art and belongings were in storage (a basement unit) while I went off to a MacDowell Colony, a prestigious artist residency in New Hampshire. When I got back to Brooklyn I got a studio and put my new work in it. My friends hosted me on their couches with my two suitcases in tow while I searched for a new home. The hurricane happened on a super full moon during this small window of my life and the storage unit completely flooded. So I lost everything, like everything: my artistic history, my books, every card my parents gave me, my clothes, everything but what was in my new studio and those two suitcases.
I didn’t expect to tell this story in my newsletter, but the writing is the writing. Too finish…a handful of arts organizations really stepped up to help artists. The Pollock Krasner Foundation supported artists by funding residencies the following summer at Byrdcliffe Artist Residency in Woodstock. I ended up meeting my husband there, the only residency romance I ever gambled on. So the joke became that I had to lose everything to find him. It felt worth the price. But then our son Cyrus came and the joke grew to really I had to lose everything to get him! Also thoroughly worth the price.
Those experiences just teach you. Plain and simple. How to deal, how to mourn, how to let go, how to receive help, who steps up to help and care for you, and how hindsight is always generous so try to have grace in the moment. A friend reminded me recently of advise I gave her during big upheaval in her own life: the story is never done being written.
My newsletter is by no means meant to be me waxing on about life lessons. Something about the fall speaks to reflection: getting ready to put the garden to rest, carry on with your life’s work, and see what comes of it all.
| | New Me currently exhibited in Raise the Roof: The Home in Art at The Heckscher Museum of Art |
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|  | “Exploring the spaces we inhabit, this exhibition encompasses more than 50 artworks from the Museum’s Collection that reflect the many meanings of home. The house is a site where daily life unfolds, work takes place, identities cohere and shift, memories form, and imagination takes flight. The art on view demonstrates the central role that domestic space plays in our lives and in art.
Raise the Roof: The Home in Art debuts significant recent additions to the Collection by contemporary artists including Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, Courtney M. Leonard, Kenji Nakahashi, Pat Ralph, Becky Suss, Adam Straus, Amanda Valdez, Claire Watson, and Stella Waitzkin. Never-before-exhibited photographs by Larry Fink and prints by Robert Dash are featured, as are artworks by Romare Bearden, Salvador Dali, Miriam Schapiro, and Esphyr Slobodkina, among others.”
On view till March 2024 The Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, New York |
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| | Niki de Saint Phalle at New York Film Festival |
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|  | My appetite for the New York Film Festival is much larger than the realities of my life and studio demand. However, this rare offering of a film, Un rêve plus long que la nuit, by Niki de Saint Phalle spoke to me. I have spent the last year studying the Tarot Garden, her sculptural masterpiece outside of Rome, and reading her extensive writings. I feel especially primed to enter a cinematic universe of her unique, exuberant, and psychologically charged world. (I highly recommend What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle if you want more Niki but aren’t in NY for the film!)
“In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.”
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| | | Book of the Month On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
I’ve never been a Stephen King reader, having a zero horror policy in my life and carrying frightening memories of watching It at a sleepover in the 90’s, but his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft kept coming up in conversations. The brass tacts of his advise are couched between two compelling autobiographical sections: one sketching out his childhood writing obsession, the complete poverty before his first book sold, and getting sober, and the second shares his life threatening experience of being hit by a van on the side of a Maine country road while going on his daily four mile walk. Hearing his voice in this 23 year old book is at times like the quintessential uncle at the party, maybe saying some things that sound dated, but his advise has all the tenants of a great pep talk: you can do it, but you have to work really hard it. His generosity in sharing the germination of his ideas makes this a read for any creative person. He takes you through how the idea of Carrie started as a seed, how he twists his ideas around, adds, morphs, and then gets to writing to find out how it will all unfold is so enlightening. |
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| | |  | Dusk Love, 2021 Hand woven tapestry, embroidery, and canvas, 36 x 32 inches. |
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