Monthly Archives: November 2011

Catching Up

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I’ve been away a long time now. On vacation, seeing family and old friends, but not, as it happens seeing much art. I’m catching up on my google reader now and coming across all kinds of good things though:

  • I would like my holiday decorations to somehow channel this.
  • An always funny literary agent blog. Writers, take note of what not to do.
  • Theory: great male artists have more sex.
  • My [awesome] [wonderful] donation-based yoga studio, Yoga To the People, is being sued by Bikram for teaching hot yoga. This is ridiculous. Sign the petition.
  • More gorgeous, luminescent Chinese illustrations like the one above.

And, now, tis the holiday season and New York remains an almost balmy 55 degrees and sunny. Pandora is set on the Christmas station, I’ve already done all my holiday shopping, and now if I can just catch up on my reading, art viewing, blogging, and writing, I’ll be all set until the New Year.

It is Margaret you mourn for.

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William Blake, from For Children: The Gates of Paradise

Spring and Fall
to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh


Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:    
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series

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The Art Institute’s room of Ana Mendieta works in the Contemporary section were striking (plus, how fantastic that they organize the rooms by artist). Mostly showing the Silueta Series, the performances and the images taken of them show the contours of the artist’s body against the earth in different settings. Often, this image is created with organic material although the artist frequently uses her own body in her work, like in this Untitled (Grass on Woman) from 1972:


Called earth-body art in a hybrid of two 1960s art movements, Mendieta used her body or a female outline in her performances. The show her interjecting the female form into nature, often evoking a sense of ancestral and prototypical female goddess worship.

More information about the artist’s background and untimely death.