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Repository 214: The Business of Beds and Banks | Slow Thinking on the Immigration Investment
On the top of my to do list every day I write “kind, honest, necessary, urgent” – if it’s not any of those things, it’s not on my list and I’m not doing it. I’ve been writing a lot privately about art (more to come publicly), and I have been slow to the draw on my blog. Some urgent matters are occurring in the media, so much so that I’m finally feeling pushed to dissect. For me it’s urgent because…
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Repository 209: This is Not a Gun | Smart and Urgent Work by Cara Levine
“The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” – Tennessee Williams Everyday I write on the top of…
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Repository 208: An Art Game Inspired by Tolerance and the Five Senses | Interview with Sally Taylor
Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton Before diving in and presenting you with a project by and conversation with the visionary artist and musician Sally Taylor, it’s important to be precise and set the tone about the current nature of art whether in schools or our culture. Basically let’s widen our idea of art. The Western world currently associates art with status, high culture,…
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Repository 198: Art is the Highest Form of Hope
Today and yesterday I’ve received some of the most gracious, inspiring and hopeful notes from fellow artists. We are all inspired to focus on creativity, to focus on flux, to stay open, to keep breathing, to cry if you need to. We’ve reminded each other that it’s not about running away, but to sitting deeply in the situation we are confronted with and to our work on change through and with our art. The root problem in our society is…
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Repository 194: 50 Days 50 Choices | The Art of Repetition
Art must help to show the world as changeable and help to change it. – Ernst Fischer Today I completed a self imposed exercise to make 50 choices for 50 days in reverence to those that died in Orlando, Florida nightclub killing on June 12. I Made 50 choices on their behalf, every day after the event because 49 of them did not have a choice that day. I included the assailant because we are all born with angry star…
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Repository 152: Perception and Dialog | Language creates thought, thought forms create reality
What you see depends on what you think – David Bohm As much as we’d like to pigeon language as something that is descriptive and separate from the real thing, it is actually much more than that – words create reality, we hide behind words, and we move mountains with words. A quarter of a century ago (!!) I started listening to public radio – aligned with my time of being a new driver, and therefore having utter freedom…
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Repository 150: Artist Maira Kalman on the Importance of Children Meditating
Below is a lovely reminder from Maira Kalman of why children, now more than ever, should find space and time at school to meditate. Found in the August issue of “Mindful”. Enjoy (click on it and it will enlarge so you can read it;-):
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Repository 149: Art and Empathy | Artists Exploring the Horrific
Art deals with things forever incapable of definition and that belong to love, beauty, joy and worship. The shapes, power and glory of which are ever building and unbuilding and rebuilding in each man’s soul and in the soul of the whole world. – quote by Victor Hugo carved on the facade of the Nelson Atkins Museum erected in 1930 Does anyone ever wonder where to turn the art spigot when things happening in the world seem beyond comprehension, beyond…
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Repository 141: Domestic Departures | Art and the Homeless
Two words that rarely go together are homeless and art. Strangely they have been bubbling up in the mainstream with questions of ethics and taste. When you are homeless you are missing the very primal aspect of our humanness – safety. Art is about 3 or 4 rungs up the ladder in terms of usefulness. In 2006, while in San Francisco and running a gallery, one of my favorite causes was the Hospitality House – a resource and community arts…
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Repository 128: Black Sun | Ways of Not Seeing
If you find a way to dance with people, to dance with life, nothing wrong can happen to you. – Hugues de Montalembert In 1978 a French painter and filmmaker, Hugues de Montalembert, living in the Washington Square neighborhood of New York was viciously attacked in his apartment. The assailants were looking for money, and when they didn’t find that they beat him up for sport. One of the men poured a chemical in his eyes blinding him completely within…
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