Endless Knots

The Rat cheated: Duke Riley restages the race for the Chinese Zodiac #elizastamps

It's a little hard to headline this one. Last year, Duke Riley, the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based artist, with degrees from RISD and Pratt, decided to right a 5000 (or so)-year-old wrong. According to legend, when the race was staged to determine the order of animals in the Chinese Zodiac, the rat cheated and thus secured its place at the head of the pack.

Named as one of the US State Department's visual-artists-as-cultural-ambassadors in 2011, Duke and a few artist-colleagues traveled to a small village outside Shanghai in 2012 to restage that race. "The Rematch" took place on April 15, with a gondola bearing each animal of the zodiac. 

The group was able to secure a real animal for each of the 12 signs (ok, the dragon was an iguana or a lizard or something reptilian) except for a tiger...which is how I know about this imaginative project.

Eliza Stamps, artist and tiger-impersonator, filled the gap. In addition to being a life-long tiger lover, she is my daughter. Eliza and Duke became friends when both were getting their master's in art from Pratt, which is also how I first became aware of Duke's work. At the very first Open Studios at Pratt, we went to Duke's studio where he had, among other things, a book that he had collaborated on with artists around the world. (A quick search is not producing its name but I do recall that artists each added to the book then sent it on. Talk about collaboration!) The cutline for this picture on Duke's site says, "For ethical reasons, instead of transporting a tiger from Guangxi we transported a performance artist."

Just a few minutes ago, I watched documentary filmmaker Kitty Joe Sainte-Marie's film about The Rematch ("Duke Riley // China // smARTpower"). Check out the tiger (Eliza) and you too can eagerly cheer on your favorite animal. 

 

The astounding Mona Golabek

Are you in or near Boston? Can you get here by Sunday night? You must.**

"The Pianist of Willesden Lane" is theatre like you've never seen it, music you've never heard played this way, a story that will turn you inside out -- and perhaps give you clues to solving intractable problems of your own (it did for me). And I haven't even mentioned that it's a one-woman performance. One woman. Ninety minutes. A monologue. A concert. The story of one child, one very talented child, who survives the Holocaust because she was told by her mother to "hold on to her music."

Mona Golabek is the performer, the (in real life concert) pianist, author of the book, The Children of Willesden Lane (written with Lee Cohen), and the daughter of that very talented child, Lisa Jura.

As one of the people I went with tonight said, "It's possibly the best play I've ever been to." I agree. And I wouldn't have known about it had I not read this piece in the Boston Globe. A daughter telling a mother's story is power enough but when the story itself speaks to the horror and the glory and the transcendence of humanity all at once, that is art, that is beauty, and that is reason to be alive.

Go. And if you're lucky, you'll witness it in the kind of theatre that we did, merely 100 people, few enough that everyone was virtually in the front row, eye-to-eye with this extraordinary talent. Not to mention the post-performance conversation, tonight with the star speaking with an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor and the local head of the Anti-Defamation League.

Thank you, Mona Golabek, and thank you, Hershey Felder, for your collaboration (he's the director) in bringing Mona's idea to fruition.

**Why do you have to see this by Sunday night? The Boston show at the Paramount closes then, headed next for Chicago, then on to Berkeley apparently, and hopefully one day to New York, London, and the silver screen. I can't imagine that all this won't happen.

Life -- and art -- after genocide: Arn Chorn-Pond

Joe Kahn has a great piece in today's Boston Globe about Cambodian Arn Chorn-Pond and the "thinly fictionalized" biography about him by Patricia McCormick. Never Fall Down is Chorn-Pond's story surviving the Khmer Rouge. A single sentence from Kahn's article captures it: "Taken to a work camp, where his talent for playing the flute helped keep him alive, Chorn-Pond witnessed torture, starvation, mass murder, and cannibalism." (Chorn-Pond's flute playing also was featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary, The Flute Player.)

So this might have been just another article that I skimmed, winced at, and filed the book name of for later. But as it happens, Daughter #2, Artist Eliza Stamps, who's traveled to Cambodia twice in the past two years, is now working with Season of Cambodia, "a unique initiative" of Chorn-Pond's nonprofit, Cambodia Living Arts. Season of Cambodia kicks off in NY on April 6 and runs through the end of May. Here's a bit from its website:

Over 125 Cambodian performing and visual artists will fill New York City’s stages, screens, galleries, and public spaces with traditional and contemporary art as part of Season of Cambodia, a multi disciplinary festival produced by Phnom Penh-based non-profit organization Cambodian Living Arts in partnership with vibrant cultural and academic institutions from New York and Cambodia. Season of Cambodia is a program partner of the Clinton Global Initiative, and is made possible by lead grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund, the Ford Foundation and fiscal sponsorship by New York Foundation for the Arts.

I've thought many times of something Eliza said just after she started working with Chorn-Pond's group. "I've been reading the book [Never Fall Down] on the subway and when I get off, I think how much I wish I could do something about this. And then I remember that I am!" Artist helping artists in endeavor started by an artist. Perhaps art will save us after all.

!And congrats to all involved: Chorn-Pond, McCormick, and Eliza and her colleagues!

 

Danny Hauben's Beautiful Bronx

Yesterday's New York Times profiles Daniel (to those lucky enough to know and love him, Danny) Hauben, the realist/muralist/"touched with whimsy" (Times description) painter who won the commission to create the art for the new Bronx Community College Library. Stupendous.

The Times interactive page shows four of Danny's works with the ability to mouse over and see them in more detail. Click-worthy, for sure.

This photo, from Danny's website, says what words cannot, him painting, what he's painting, and how he paints it.

 

It was my good luck to meet Danny when he was a teenager. His brother, Eddie Hauben, and his wife Jan (Ward) Hauben, were our first friends in Boston, whom we met in the context of bringing Bucky Fuller to Boston to stage World Game here in the summer of 1970. The story, of course, has many twists to it -- Eddie worked for Bucky; Jan worked for Gus Jaccaci, a futurist who had previously been a Harvard admission's office who had tried to recruit my late husband, Jeff Stamps, to Harvard so that he would ski with the Harvard team. (FTR, he chose Dartmouth instead, where he lasted for less than a year--it was all-male then and far too conservative for him--before transferring to University of New Hampshire.) Gus was working at Boston College at the time and in his role as Arts Assistant to the President was able to sponsor World Game.

And it was evident from first meeting Danny that he was a major talent. Most people (everyone?) in our lifelong network of friends who grew out of that 1970 confluence of interests own Danny's pieces, including one of our house, a pastel from the perspective of the back yard, that has hung in the dining room since 1985 when I asked Danny to do it. Just superb.

Which all of this is.

Jazz/Art/NOLA via Ralston Crawford

My high school friend, Neelon Crawford, passed through recently on his way from South Pole-sium, a gathering of Antarctic "veterans of the ice, historians, authors, artists of various kinds, descendants of those who had staked their lives on the pursuit of science and exploration" (see David Hirzel's post) to New Orleans for the opening of "Ralston Crawford and Jazz," his father's show at the New Orleans Museum of Art (through Oct 14, 2012).

Neelon and his brother John Crawford, both fine artists in their own right, were there for the opening and surrounding festivities and did this NPR interview with Diane Mack explaining their father's love for and connection with New Orleans.

Here's a snippet from NOMA's page on the show, along with one of the photos.

Though he is often remembered for his pre-World-War II precisionist paintings of urban and industrial subjects, Ralston Crawford produced a significant body of work after 1949 inspired by the culture of New Orleans. This summer, NOMA will present Ralston Crawford and Jazz, an exhibition that considers the relationships between music, photography, painting, drawing and film as they intersect in Crawford’s work in New Orleans. Organized by the Sheldon Art Galleries, in Saint Louis, MO, the exhibition includes over 150 photographs, prints, paintings, drawings and films, many never before published.

Different aspects of New Orleans have inspired many artists and writers, but for Crawford, New Orleans jazz music had the most profound effect. In his work, Crawford imported the elements of jazz—syncopation, polyphony, and improvisation—and transformed them into visual strategies. Thinking along these lines, Crawford produced photographs of jazz musicians that are as punchy and rhythmic as the music that his subjects played. He made equally strong, graphic photographs of the cemeteries, weathered buildings, signage, and boats at dock. Always inventive, Crawford also interpreted these same scenes in lithographs, paintings, and films. This exhibition brings together works in all of these media and, in some cases, displays the painting, lithograph, or drawing, next to the photograph that inspired it.

 

Extremely connected and incredibly creative

Thanks to Robin Chase, the extremely insightful founder of Buzzcar (and cofounder of Zipcar), whom I got to know when we both participated in Springboard, please enjoy this metaphor of how one thing can lead to another in the hands of an artist, in this case (see NY Times, "Turning a Page, the Joseph Herscher Way," "[who] builds Rube Goldberg machines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."

 

 

 

 

 

Dance your PhD

Enough of those dry defenses. Science, the esteemed journal of AAAS, the weekly (or is it a daily) which I, for one, don't normally associate with modern dance (or rap), sponsors an annual "Dance your PhD" contest and I'm rooting for my friend, Mount Sinai Medical School PhD-candidate Kate Collins (scroll down for her bio).

Here's how the brilliant Kate (the lead dancer/cell of the basal nucleus of the amygdala!) explains her submission to the contest (I just like the moves, never mind that my nephew, James Murrough, plays the only male role in the video): 

When first encountering a fear-eliciting stimulus, animals evince innate defensive behaviors, such as freezing. With time, most are able to overcome their automatic fear reactions and regain the capacity for organized, goal-directed action. Rodent research suggests that activity in the central nucleus of the amygdala drives stereotyped, automatic fear responses. Activity in the basal nucleus of the amygdala, conversely, appears to enable flexible and adaptive fear responses. Evidence suggests that the central and basal nuclei compete for dominance during fear, with the "winning" (more active) nucleus determining the behavior expressed.

Do similar patterns of neural activity subsume these behaviors in humans? In Kate Collins' dissertation, she is exploring the neural substrates of both automatic and goal-directed fear responses, and the transition between the two opposing states.

And now, for your enjoyment, neural substrates performing to Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" and Young MC's "Bust A Move."

Dance Your PhD - Bust A Move: Taking Action in the Face of Fear from Alex Susse on Vimeo.

 

 

"Bucky and [really] Me" - and Ed Hauben and Jeff Stamps on Feb 2

Unless we're blizzard-ed out on Wed, Feb 2, Jeff, Ed, and I will be the post-performance discussion folks following "R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE" at the A.R.T. in Cambridge.

Specific focus is Margaret Fuller's influence on Bucky - but I would never have met Bucky had it not been for Ed, who worked with Bucky in New York and Carbondale, and Jeff (who introduced me to Ed), whose work, like that of so many others, has been profoundly influenced by the man whose self-description included this very sensible idea: "I Seem to Be a Verb."

Annie DiMario, production dramaturg, will lead the discussion.

Eliza Stamps at Edgewater Gallery

 

 
It's Knot Serious, ink on paper, 6" x 5" (11" x 9" framed)

Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, VT
Here.

In knots at Spattered Columns

Lover of (endless) knots that we are, a must-post.

New show in NY including the "Forget-Me-Knot Neuftych (We're Knot Alone)" by Eliza. "Structured at Spattered Columns, 491 Broadway (near Broome), 5th Floor, NYC, April 14th through May 13th.

This image, Knot In My Town, from the Forget-Me-Knot series but (k)not in this show.