Tag Archives: art

May 15, 2013 · 4:01 am

Lady Art

I’ve noticed a pattern. Now that I’ve noticed I can’t unnotice it, so I might as well embrace it. I like to buy art when I travel because it feels more substantial than jewelry (which I’ll lose), coffee (which I’ll drink), trinkets (which I have no use for and will eventually toss the next time I move), and clothing (which I will probably stain/shrink/rip).

Here’s my new wall hanging from Cusco:

You see this image everywhere in Cusco, the backs of female heads. Sometimes it’s more literal as they sit in a circle, the goings on of which we are not privy to, sometimes it’s more abstract, like my pattern. They’re backs are to us, because what they’re doing is not for us, the viewer, the outsider; it’s for themselves. They call it “la chismosa,” which means “the gossiping.” I loved it immediately.

So I bring this thing home and start looking for a place to hang it, and that’s when I notice this…

And this

The vast, vast majority of my art is depictions of women. I’m fascinated by the ways that different cultures and communities and artists choose to represent them (One of the many reason I use the Rosie icon for this blog). Have you ever seen that stat about how much of the art in major museums is by women (very little), how much of it is of women (a bit more) and how many of the naked people are ladies (a whopping 85%).

Not all of my art is created by women (though much of it is), but the common thread (if you can find one besides gender of the subjects) is that I like images of women that push back on the idea that they are objects against which someone else can project intent (lust, desire, protection, etc). La Chismosa is amazing because it’s such a desexualized (without being ungendered) way to portray women as having relationships completely separate from their interaction with men.

The flapper, the “garden buddha,” the image of Radha and Krishna (bought in Chennai, India), there’s a self-contained agency about these women. They are not waiting for the actions or reactions of anyone else. I didn’t pick them for that reason on purpose, but when they’re all lined up, it seems so obvious.

Now that I’ve noticed it, I should probably stick with the trend, don’t you think? Where to next, and what should I bring back?

Related Post: Art for your Saturday night

2 Comments

Filed under Art, Gender

Tagged as art, collage, Cusco, La Chismosa, paintings, Peru, sculpture, textiles

April 23, 2013 · 8:19 pm

Street Art in San Juan

Thanks to lightning storms in Chicago, my already brief trip to Puerto Rico became even briefer. In a grand total of 60 hours, I ate a lot of fried delicious things, swam with bioluminescent plankton, hiked to a secluded waterfall, did yoga on the walls of the forts of Old San Juan, imbibed a lot of tinto verano, sun bathed, salsa danced, heard live music and an applauded extremely talented 7-year-old dancer, ate fresh mangoes, and drank a lot of cafe con leche. Oh, and I saw a lot of amazing street art:

Related Post: Pretty things in Costa Rica

Rosie in the News: Alfred T. Palmer Edition

I can’t figure out why these photographs are suddenly showing up in my internet lap this week, but I’m not mad they’re here. Alfred T. Palmer was a photographer most famous for his WWII portraits, including these fabulous color prints of Rosies riveting:

Related Post: The whole Rosie in the News archive

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Filed under Art

Tagged as Alfred T. Palmer, art, history, photography, Rosie in the News, Rosie the Riveter, WWII

February 4, 2013 · 5:16 am

Sunday Scraps 92

1. CHICAGO: Love this story from Chicago Magazine about the millionaire founder of Land’s End’s financial and emotional commitment to personally reinvigorating the neighborhood he grew up in.

2. TINA: Blurgh! It’s over. At least the dearly departed 30 Rock has left us with some serious vocabulary, as catalogued by Slate.

3. TINA #2: More on 30 Rock, because it’s just that important, Wesley Morris for Grantland specifically focuses on the show’s portrayal of race.

4. ART: Photographer Paul Schneggenberger captures couples sleeping over a 6 hour period and creates sort of wierd, mostly awesome portraits of sleep.

5. GUNS: Illinois has super harsh gun laws and yet Chicago has a serious gun problem. What gives? NYT has a map showing where Chicago guns come from.

6. MARRIAGE EQUALITY: My new favorite NBA player, Kenneth Faried, introduces his two moms (who seem quite reluctant to be on camera) to lend his voice to the fight for marriage equality.

Related Post: Sunday 91 – McDonald’s and books, sci-fi gender swapping, celeb high school photos

Related Post: Sunday 90 – Lindsay Lohan, Frida, Tina + Amy Forever

2 Comments

Filed under Art, Chicago, Hollywood, Media, Politics, Really Good Writing by Other People, Sports

Tagged as 30 Rock, art, basketball, Chicago, Chicago Magazine, crime, Grantland, gun control, gun culture, guns, Hollywood, Kenneth Faried, Land's End, LGBTQ, marriage equality, nba, New York Times, Paul Schneggenberger, philanthropy, photography, Slate, television, Tina Fey, Wesley Morris

January 25, 2013 · 9:36 pm

Are You Laughing at the Right Jokes?

Do you ever feel like you’re laughing and other people are laughing but y’all aren’t laughing at the same thing?

Last week I saw a play called The Motherfucker with the Hat (starring my fake boyfriend Jimmy Smits aka Matt Santos). The play is set in New York and follows a guy named Jackie returning from a stint in prison and facing parole, a potentially cheating girlfriend and a whole lot of AA work ahead of him. In the staging we saw, all of the characters were Latino (though apparently Chris Rock has also done this show.)

I enjoyed the show, but I left feeling a little discomfited by the experience of sitting in white audience (mostly older people) who didn’t seem to get the jokes but did seem to find some of the language/accents/attitudes hilarious. Sometimes we would all laugh, and I thought we were laughing at a great line, and it felt like they were laughing at the sassy Latina snapping her fingers… I can’t prove that’s what was happening, but there were certainly moments where the line was NOT funny, and they were still laughing…

In the liner notes, the Artistic Director wrote:

“I think what Stephen (playwright) is up to in the play is that he is creating people who may seem different from the ones sitting next to us in the theater but who become, over the course of the play, deeply human, deeply familiar and deeply sympathetic. And the canny wisdom in that method is that we are able to recognize that the fundamental questions we all negotiate–most especially, our responsibility in love and the ethics of our relationships: how we carry ourselves in the world–are not exclusively to those of us with cultural capital.”

Man, I totally love that sentiment. I just finished two non-fiction books, Random Family by Adrien Nicole Leblanc and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, that really drove home this point. It sounds kitschy and sentimental, but stories about being human (loving, grieving, striving, wanting, hurting, believing, etc) are transferrable, and cultural differences only affect our ability to empathize as much as we let them. Both of these books are about folks with very little cultural capital and share very little tangible common ground with me (Puerto Rican drug-dealing teenagers and impoverished families in a Mumbai slum, respectively), but the stories were told so well, so empathetically told, so truthfully told, that I connected viscerally to the “characters.”

Unfortunately, I came out of this Motherfucker play feeling like the surface details (the accent, the swearing, the “Papi,” and the blowjob references) distracted the audience from the core story of these five people dealing with some shit. It’s not the writer’s fault; the shit was transferrable, I think, if the viewers had let it be. The questions the play was asking and answering were applicable to these characters, to Coco and Jessica in Random Family, to Asha and Manju in Beautiful Forevers, to Emily and the Steppenwolf audience in Chicago. It just didn’t seem like people were there looking for stories about human commonality as much as they were there to be titillated by a play with “fuck” in the title. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong, but the laughter in all the wrong places suggests I’m at least a little bit right, and that’s really too bad.

Related Post: Some facts about my reading habits.

Related Post: Don’t go see Cloud Atlas

So What Do You Do Exactly? T-Shirt Edition

This is my friend Jasmine Basci and she is the latest interview subject of my jobs series, So What Do You Do Exactly? She just launched her very own apparel company, TobyLou (named for her two cats), selling original screen printed t-shirts and bags.

How did you get started designing t-shirts? Well, it was sort of just grew from a Christmas gift for my brother. I used one of those online “build your own!” t-shirt websites to put a very specific image he wanted on a shirt and have it made. It was there that I started to play around with all the clipart they had, adding clip art on top of clip art, to create a whole design. I also really enjoy animal t-shirts, but had been finding it harder and harder to just find simple, uncomplicated designs, so that is when I thought “Maybe I can just do my own?”

How did you learn how to screen print? It was very “DIY”, printing using a sheer curtain, an embroidery loop, glue, paint, and a spatula—that’s a whole other story. After about a week of that I thought maybe it would be worth it to take a class, which I did at Spudnik Press.

How does a t-shirt get made? The process is actually quite simple, but it’s the little things that can trip you up. It all starts with getting a high-res image in black and white and then burning it, with light, onto a screen with dried photo emulsion on it. The parts of your design that are black will wash out with water and the rest of the emulsion will have dried onto the screen from the light. This process is what makes the stencil, which you then put on top of the shirt, plop some paint on there, and push it through with a squeegee. BAM! A shirt with a design on it.

It’s the little things like aligning your screen straight, little holes popping up in the screen where they aren’t supposed to, pulling the squeegee at the wrong angle, etc, that can cause tiny imperfections. I typically go to the studio for a 4 hour block, where I can get about 15-25 shirts done (but it also depends on how many colors are on the design). The longest part is setting up and preparing your screen, which takes about an hour or so.

Do you have your own studio? I currently became a member at Spudnik Press and they are amazing. For a reasonable price, I can go in and use their studio space, equipment, etc to print shirts. They have open studio hours, staff on hand to help you out if you run into any problems, and they also play some nice jams. It’s actually very relaxing to just go into the studio to create things while being surrounded by creative/talented people. On Thursday, December 6th, they are having an art sale, where I will be there selling TobyLou shirts alongside other artists.

Where do you find inspiration for your designs? Any animal really, but I love cats……like, love them. I have two (which the company is named after): Toby and Louie. Cats are just weird, odd, and mysterious creatures, which is why I like to use cats, more so than any other animal, as my main inspiration for any design. However, I will also incorporate some other aspect of life, objects, or ideas that I think look neat. I like to keep all designs simple and off-beat.

How’s business? Any success stories? Has Oprah worn your shirt yet? I think the greatest success I feel right now is just officially opening up for business and making some sales. The fact that someone wants to buy something you created is rewarding. On that note, Oprah has not rewarded me….get with it OPRAH. I actually have a design that I created called the Zooey Deschanmeow which slightly resembles the look of Zooey Deschanel. I’m going to send her a shirt soon in hopes that she may wear it one day.

If you dream big, what does TobyLou look like down the line? A store? A television channel? T-shirts for dogs? Down the line, I want to see TobyLou look like it does now, but everything is 100 times bigger. More designs, a bigger selection of different styles of shirts for all ages, and maybe a shirt for cats……maybe, MAYBE one for dogs, too.

Related Post: So What Do You Do Exactly? Mishmash Edition.

Related Post: So What Do You Exactly? Photography Edition.

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Filed under Art, Chicago, Guest Posts

Tagged as apparel, art, Clothing, Jasmine, jobs, screen printing, So What Do You Do Exactly?, t-shirts, TobyLou

November 25, 2012 · 10:01 pm

Sunday Scraps 84

1. GENDER: Watch this Time interview with Casey Legler, a woman who works as a male model, and try not to drool.

2. BOOKS: A new anthology, My Ideal Bookshelf, creates colorful portraits of authors’ and celebrities’ book collections, includes David Sedaris and James Franco.

3. SUFFRAGE: Great collection from Sociological Images of vintage anti-suffrage ads.

4. WRITING: Chicago author Megan Stielstra on the stresses of new motherhood and the surprising support from a stranger.

5. ASTRONAUTS: Super sweet letters from astronaut Jerry Linenger to his 1-year-old son while he spent three months at a space station.

6. CHILDHOOD: What does a child’s bedroom look like? Depends on where they live, and damn, the range is pretty intense. Mother Jones has some examples.

Related Post: Sunday 83: Stewart, language in the NYT, Mormons on the campaign trail

Related Post: Sunday 82: Kevin Durant, Maddow nails it, NYMag cover photos

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Filed under Books, Chicago, Gender, Media, Politics, Really Good Writing by Other People

Tagged as art, astronauts, bedrooms, Casey Legler, childhood, David Sedaris, gender, James Franco, Jerry Linenger, letters of note, male models, Megan Stielstra, modeling, Mother Jones, motherhood, My Ideal Bookshelf, parenting, politics, sociological images, suffrage, suffragette, The Rumpus, Time Magazine, vintage, voting, women, writing

October 11, 2012 · 1:52 am

Six Sides of “Identity”

It’s Chicago Ideas Week here in the Windy City, which means our fair and not-yet-frigid town is full of who’s whos and big wigs. We’ve got mayors and dignitaries, writers, artists, poets, scientists, actors and activists.

Today a coworker stopped by my desk and asked me about the panel I saw yesterday, “Identity,” and I couldn’t shut up even after it was quite clear he was done listening. There was just so much to discuss! What do I do when I can’t get people to listen to me talk? Write a blog post!

LZ Granderson at Chicago Ideas Week

The panel was about all of the ways we identify ourselves and each other, and through six different speakers I got this incredibly well-rounded view on that thorniest of thorny questions.

LZ Granderson kicked it off with a bit of theater. He’s an ESPN commentator who is a black, gay, Christian, single-dad, former gang member, and current country music devotee. He used a bit of theater (big building blocks with those labels) to physically knock around the idea of identity.

Hanna Rosin (editor of XX at Slate) was next, discussing her book The End of Men. Honestly, she was less crazy than I thought she’d be. As I’ve discovered over and over again on the internet, sometimes the value in an incendiary title weighs more than whether it accurately reflects the piece it titles. Rosin was sharp and funny, and her pitch wasn’t so much about the end of men (dramatic as that sounds), but about how this particular moment in history seems to favor (some) women professionally due to a perfect storm of social, political, and economic trends. In fact, contrary to the end of men, she sees an evolution of masculinity (she cited Chris on Up All Night as an example of a caregiving father who is allowed to maintain his sexual appeal).

I thought that the neuroscientist on the roster would be my snooze break, since scans of brains have never really got me going. Instead, James Fallon turned out to be my favorite presenter. He has spent his life researching brain scans of psychopathic killers, looking for commonalities, which he found. The twist, however, was that Fallon’s own brain shares these patterns. After a battery of psychological tests, it turns out that his own physiological profile is identical to the most famous psychopathic killers in history. How’s that for a nature/nurture argument?

There was an artist, Eric Daigh, that I enjoyed (mostly for how uncomfortable his F-bombs made the older members of the audience), and a forensic researcher (the one and only Brooke Magnanti, formerly known as sex blogger Belle du Jour). He talked about portraiture and the myriad of ways a list of characteristics can be illustrated and animated uniquely, and she discussed the history of forensic identification (did you know that finger prints are not actually unique?)

Related Post: Last year’s Chicago Ideas Week.

Related Post: A few hours at the Art Institute

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Filed under Art, Chicago, Gender

Tagged as art, Baratunde Thurston, Belle du Jour, Brooke Magnanti, Chicago, Chicago Ideas Week, crime, Cultivated Wit, Eric Daigh, ESPN, forensics, gay, gender, Hanna Rosin, How to Be Black, identity, identity politics, James Fallon, lectures, LGBTQ, LZ Granderson, masculinity, murder, neuroscience, psychology, race, The End of Men, voting, writer

September 17, 2012 · 12:27 am

Sunday Scraps 74

1. WRITING: Junot Diaz has a new book. The Atlantic wonders if Diaz, whose characters are consistently horrible to women, can write a sexist character without writing a sexist book.

2. SPORTS: With the Olympics being all about Missy, Gabby, Serena and the Fab 5, Grantland wonders if we’re past what he dubs “the Kournikova era”, when being hot matters more than being good.

3. DRUGS: Artist Bryan Lewis Sanders takes most drugs known to mankind and then draws self-portraits (Cultso).

4. ADVERTISING: Man, sometimes Google knows what’s up. Instead of doing the “dumb dad” routine in their latest Chrome campaign, they actually do a pretty cool portrait of a father-daughter relationship.

5. LIT: Literary archaeology is the coolest. For only the second time ever, a photo of Emily Dickinson has been found!

6. TRANS: DC launches its first ever transgender respect campaign with billboards featuring real members of the trans community and the (obvious) directive to treat everyone with respect and dignity.

Related Post: Sunday 73 – Joy of Sex illustration history, Philip Roth vs. Wikipedia, my new fave NFL player

Related Post: Sunday 72 – Zoe Smith vs. haters, Valerie Jarrett, Katherine Boo on Katrina

2 Comments

Filed under Advertising, Art, Books, Gender, Really Good Writing by Other People, Sex, Sports

Tagged as advertising, Anna Kournikova, art, authors, books, Bryan Lewis Sanders, chrome, Cultso, drugs, Emily Dickinson, female athletes, Gabby Douglas, google, Grantland, history, Junot Diaz, LGBTQ, literature, Missy Franklin, Olympics, poetry, Serena Williams, sexism, sexuality, sports, The Atlantic, transgender, Washington DC, women's sports, writersa

September 7, 2012 · 4:40 pm

Hushpuppy

I left the movie theater Wednesday night exhausted and a little weepy. I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about the movie we’d just seen, Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I knew I felt something. All I was certain of was that the star 6-year-old actress, Quevenzhane Wallis, is the most photogenic child on the planet.

The plot, if you are unfamiliar, is simple. Beasts follows a girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her father in an off-the-grid Louisiana community called the Bathtub. Sparse of dialogue, lush of scenery, the plot follows Hushpuppy and her father through a few short days surrounding a Katrina-like storm.

I think it’s a movie that grows on you, a movie that digs into the little pockets of your brain and takes root. Images from it keep springing up, unbidden, like Hushpuppy hiding under a cardboard box after setting her house on fire to spite her father. She draws with charcoal, marking her story for future excavators like the cave people she has just learned about. Another scene, in a hospital after the flood, shows the girl stripped of her usual dirty undershirt and shorts and forced into a pretty blue dress, her hair combed into braids.

At Salon (via LA Times), Kelly Candaele argues that Beasts presents this community of misfits with a sort of irresponsible glee, as if their poverty and disconnection facilitates joy and spontaneity that the rest of couldn’t achieve:

Viewers are asked to interpret a lack of work discipline, schooling, or steady institution building of any kind — the primary building blocks of any civilization — as the height of liberation. “Choice,” even the choice to live in squalor, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. There is no inkling of the economic and social history of the region that had limited these “choices.” We are left with a libertarian sandbox, with a rights-based life philosophy gone rancid.

The film does open up a whole bunch of cans of worms, none of which have I been able to re-close since I’ve been mulling it over. Lots of big questions about community building, about the right to live as you see fit, about parenting, about infrastructure, about nature, about education. There are big questions about the obligations of the state and how far it should go to “assist” marginalized populations. Should they evacuate people who don’t want to be evacuated? Should they force medical care on people who don’t want it? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the upbringing Hushpuppy has, so wrong that the state needs to intervene?

Education, for me, is the hinge on which all of these other questions are resting. Hushpuppy is precocious, inquisitive, imaginative and self-sufficient. She’s everything that most teachers would want in a student, but how much of her curiosity and creativity is fueled by the neglect she experienced and her subsequent self-sufficiency? With formal education and support, she could be anything, but the film portrays formalized assistance as stifling and intrusive. Surely there’s a middle ground, somewhere between turning her into the blue-dressed doll and letting her explore her surrounding for days on end, unsupervised and uncared for.

This is a self-indulgent post, so mad props to you if you’ve stuck with me. I didn’t know what to make of it in the immediate aftermath, but the next morning I chatted my movie buddy and said, “I think I liked that movie” and she said, “I think I did too.” And then we talked about it for a while, so that’s something. If you’ve seen it and can parse out this mess ‘o thoughts into more articulate questions or arguments, I’d love to hear your take.

Related Post: The last movie I loved, The Queen of Versailles.

Related Post: Why I think “higher order thinking skills” are important.

3 Comments

Filed under Art, Education, Hollywood

Tagged as art, Beasts of the Southern Wild, education, film, government, Louisiana, movies, Quevenzhane Wallis

Tag Archives: art

Lady Art

Street Art in San Juan

Rosie in the News: Alfred T. Palmer Edition

Sunday Scraps 92

Are You Laughing at the Right Jokes?

So What Do You Do Exactly? T-Shirt Edition

Sunday Scraps 84

Six Sides of “Identity”

Sunday Scraps 74

Hushpuppy

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