On Memorial Day The Past Is Present | Carrie Mae Weems and the 54th Regiment

In honor of #MemorialDay, artist Carrie Mae Weems (

@WEEMSCarrie

) and Carl J. Cruz, descendant of the first Black soldier to win the Medal of Honor, reflect on the connections between The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and ongoing struggles today.

The Painter of the World

Gregg Chadwick

The Painter of the World ( Seol-min) 

12"x9"oil on panel 2021

At the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years ago, I watched the Korean Buddhist Nun artist Seol-min paint a gorgeous artwork of the Water Moon Avalokiteshvara, also known as Guanyin. Her canvas was laid flat on the floor and she painted on top of it as if she was bodysurfing a gentle wave with brushes in hand. The large hall where Seol-min painted was quiet. The gentle sound of her brushes created a kind of music that echoed off the marble walls. My oil on panel painting "The Painter of the World" is my latest artwork inspired by this experience with the artist Seol-min.

The Asian Art Museum has created a video of Seol-min at the museum. I am in the background, off camera, watching the events.
Video Below. Link at: https://education.asianart.org/resources/korean-buddhist-art/

Featured at Saatchi Art's The Other Art Fair Los Angeles at Barker Hangar from September 23-26, 2021.

Thanks again to everyone who enjoyed my paintings at @theotherartfair Many of the paintings are available for purchase on my @saatchiart page. Link at: https://www.saatchiart.com/greggchadwick

#theotherartfair #theotherartfairla #art #artshow #la #losangeles #laartshow #laart #collectart #artcollector #artfair #santamonica #buddhism #buddha #saffron #light #SanFrancisco #AsianArtMuseum #CityOfLove #Korea #KoreanArt

 

The Modern Art Notes Podcast by Tyler Green featuring artist Julie Mehretu

This week's The Modern Art Notes Podcast by Tyler Green features artist Julie Mehretu and curator Jane Aspinwall. Tyler's podcast is timed with the new Julie Mehretu mid-career survey that opens at LACMA on November 3, 2019.
More info from LACMA here: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/julie-mehretu

From LACMA:

Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Julie Mehretu is a mid-career survey that will unite nearly 40 works on paper with 35 paintings dating from 1996 to the present by Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). The first-ever comprehensive retrospective of Mehretu’s career, it covers over two decades of her examination of history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, global uprising, diaspora, and displacement through the artistic strategies of abstraction, architecture, landscape, movement, and, most recently, figuration. Mehretu’s play with scale, as evident in her intimate drawings and large canvases and complex techniques in printmaking, will be explored in depth. Mehretu received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and, among many awards and honors, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” (2005) and a U.S. State Department National Medal of Arts (2015).

November 3, 2019–March 22, 2020 (BCAM, Level 1)

Tyler writes,  "After closing at LACMA on March 22, 2020, “Mehretu” will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center. The exhibition was curated by LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim and the Whitney’s Rujeko Hockley. The handsome exhibition catalogue was published by DelMonico Prestel. Amazon offers it for $65.

An exhibition of six new Mehretu aquatints opens at Los Angeles’s Gemini G.E.L. on November 1. It will remain on view through January 10, 2020."

Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Lari Pittman

Wonderful podcast by Tyler Green featuring artist Lari Pittman.
The Hammer Museum at UCLA is featuring the exhibition “Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence,” a retrospective of Pittman’s nearly forty-year career. 

Tyler writes:

The exhibition reveals Pittman’s engagements with America’s history and with issues and subjects that have been core to our history and identity, including landscape, violence, citizenship, belonging and more. The exhibition was curated by Hammer chief curator Connie Butler. It is on view through January 5, 2020. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by DelMonico Prestel. Amazon offers it for $51.

Scenes From the Border Crisis: Sketches by the Artist Molly Crabapple

Must Watch: Scenes From the Border Crisis: Sketches by the Artist Molly Crabapple – Rolling Stone

Einstein's Taxidermy: Julia Elliott's "The New and Improved Romie Futch"

by Gregg Chadwick

Julia Elliott's new novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, takes us on a Southern adventure that seems inspired by the absurdly picaresque world of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the cyber/ historic cosmography of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the dangerous science of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the obsessive hunt of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and the eerily foreboding scape of Don De Lillo's White Noise, blended with the environmental warning of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, all played to a soundtrack by the pioneering electronica musician Delia Derbyshire. 

Romie Futch lives in an alternative yet still contemporary South Carolina, where hipsters seem to have swarmed South from Brooklyn and East from Portland to mingle and clash with characters that still haven't moved far from their High School glory days. Romie Futch is one of these down at the heels locals.  Romie's ex-wife haunts his dreams and waking memories while creditors are poised to seize his house. Romie has become an expert at avoiding his less than booming taxidermy business with a daily regimen of internet distractions and it must be 5 o'clock somewhere beverage choices. Challenged in pecuniary matters, Romie decides to answer an ad searching for well paid research subjects for the mysterious Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Elliott's novel shifts locales here in a Tardis like fashion as Romie finds himself in an eerie world of lab coats and human experiments. Memories, always untrustworthy, erupt at inopportune times as Romie and  his fellow test subjects gather nightly at dinner to spar with their new neuroscience-enhanced cognitive abilities and burgeoning artistic powers. The neurally enhanced taxidermist, vows to return to his hometown and finally pursue his long dormant dream of becoming an artist. Life and the lingering effects of the neural experiments on him and his fellow guinea pigs intervene as well as the shadowy form of a seemingly mythical thousand-pound feral hog that has been terrorizing Romie's home county. 

Julia Elliott's language is rich and well played - at times darkly humorous, but also poignantly life affirming. Elliott's story is deftly crafted like Delia Derbyshire's haunting theme song for Doctor Who, originally composed by Ron Grainer, but transformed by Derbyshire into a futuristic swirl of spliced snippets of sound. Julia Elliott's The New and Improved Romie Futch is a literary swirl of Southern Gothic and dystopian Science Fiction that helps us laugh at our own foibles even as we try to create a better future. Highly recommended.




Julia Elliott’s The New and Improved Romie Futch goes on sale on October 19, 2015.
Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, Best American Fantasy, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. Her short story collection, The Wilds, was published by Tin House Books in 2014, and she is currently working on a novel about Hamadryas baboons, a species that she has studied as an amateur primatologist. She teaches English and women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she lives with her daughter and husband. She and her spouse, John Dennis, are founding members of Grey Egg, an experimental music collective.

Please Support Lori Compas for the Wisconsin State Senate!

For my friends and family in Wisconsin and across the United States.
Please support Lori Compas in her May 8, 2012 election for Wisconsin State Senate in Wisconsin's 13th Senate District!


 Find out how Lori plans to restore honesty and integrity to Wisconsin's political system.


Much more info here:
Lori Compas for Wisconsin!

A message from Lori about the upcoming primary election on May:

Lori Compas for State Senate

Don't fall for Scott Fitzgerald's tricks: The person running against me in the primary is a FAKE DEMOCRAT. His name is Gary Ellerman and he's a Fitzgerald supporter. This photo of him with Scott Fitzgerald is all over the internet -- it was taken at the 2012 Jefferson County Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner. As you can see he has the GOP elephants on his nametag. And yet his name will be on the primary ballot with a D after it -- this is a lie, plain and simple. Please tell your friends.

Link to Fake Democrat Photo Here

Breath of Allah: Jamil Ahmad's "The Wandering Falcon"

by Gregg Chadwick

In his first work of fiction, The Wandering Falcon, Jamil Ahmad depicts a world caught between timeless paths of migration and geo-political modernity. Ahmad knits together a series of short stories that cover the life arc of one young man, Tor Baz - the wandering falcon of the title, as he journeys from infancy to manhood.

Inspired by his time as a civil service worker in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Ahmad writes of a world governed by clan and custom. During his time as a powerful emissary of the Pakistani government under the tribal region's frontier governing system, Jamil Ahmad simultaneously served as politician, police chief, judge, jury and executioner. Bits of this personal history are woven within the stories, including hints of Jamil's wife's German heritage. Environmentalist and activist Helga Ahmad was instrumental in encouraging her husband Jamil to move from  halting first attempts at poetry to richly crafted stories of people, place and borders.

The bleak landscapes in the book evoke a world of nomadic treks where human contact is brief and often violent, and where far western desert winds blows clouds of sand so thick that breath is priceless. The environment is unforgiving as is the justice doled out by tribe and government.

Jamil Ahmad finished The Wandering Falcon in 1973-74 but the stories did not find a publisher until this year. Penguin Books' decision to at last publish Jamil's stories is timely. Ahmad  believes that his stories evoke a vanishing world of tribes that the modern world must resonate and harmonize with: "Because frankly speaking, I still think that each one of us has a tribal gene inside, embedded inside. I really think that way."

                                                                         Jamil Ahmad

Jamil Ahmad hopes that deeper understanding of the tribes that once roamed freely between the far borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran could help end the wars that stain their mountains and valleys with blood. Reading The Wandering Falcon can help begin a process of understanding between the timeless nomadic life and the fragmenting borders of our post-modern society.

Our contemporary world has much to learn from the rhythms of the nomadic trail. I highly recommend Jamil Ahmad's magnificent book The Wandering Falcon.


Gregg Chadwick
Breath of Allah
30"x22" monotype on paper 2011

More at:
The Wandering Falcon's Site on Penguin.com