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I’m privileged to be in a show at the Illinois State Museum, Chicago Gallery, this summer called FOCUS 4 — a beautiful show featuring the work of four Chicago area artists: Katie Kahn, Rita Lehrer, Ellen Roth Deutch and me! The show is running June 1 to August 7, 2009.

As part of FOCUS 4, I am presenting new work from my on-going, long-term image/text project, Dream of Water. Curated by Jennifer Jaskowiak of the Illinois State Museum-Lockport Gallery, Dream of Water includes Dark Waters, a nine-piece series of works on paper with poems; the installation Cloud Bags with Price Tag Poems; Cloud Cabinet showcasing embroidered silk photographs within a five-drawer, hand-built cabinet; and Thesaurus for Ceasing War, a triptych of embroidered silk banners with accompanying poetry. In this series, I am addressing a range of philosophical and emotional questions about the Buddhist concept of mutual ascendancy and destruction, and the interrelatedness of all matter. I examine issues of war, ecological destruction, commodification, the acts of destruction and reparation, and our response to these issues.

Here are some installation images from the show:

Thesaurus for Ceasing War: three silk banners with poem

This is an installation view of Thesaurus for Ceasing War. The banners are approximately 7′ x 7′ installed. The poem on the right is approx. 6′ x 4′ installed. The banners are silk embroidery on digital photographs printed on habotai silk, hanging from aluminum tubes with wire.

Cloud Cabinet: hand-built wood cabinet with embroidered silk photographs.

Installation view of Cloud Cabinet.

Gerry Adams built this beautiful cabinet especially for this show. Inside the cabinet’s drawers are five embroidered silk photographs of clouds. The cabinet is approx. 44″ high by 25″ wide and 25″ deep.

Third drawer of Cloud Cabinet.

The third drawer of Cloud Cabinet opened. The images are pinned to silk pillows and covered in glass.

Dark Waters and Cloud Bags with Price Tag Poems.

Installation view of Dark Waters (nine tankas), in memory of Michael D., a series of nine works on archival paper (with poems distressed into the paper), with Cloud Bags with Price Tag Poems on the far wall.

The poem Dark Waters was published in my chapbook, Dream of Water, last year by the Poetry Society of America. You can purchase a copy along with chapbooks by the other 2007 winners here.

detail of the installation, Cloud Bags with Price Tag Poems.

Cloud Bags with Price Tag Poems is an installation of fifteen ‘Cloud Bags’. The bags are plastic produce bags stuffed with organic cotton that I’ve pulled from the bags with tweezers. The poem acts as a “price tag” on the bag. The “price tag” cards were beautifully letterpressed by Rubypress.

View of Thesaurus from the Cloud Bags, with Dark Waters on the right.

This is an installation view of Thesaurus, looking in from the Cloud Bags installation with Dark Waters on the right.

The ninth image from Dark Waters.

This is the final image in Dark Waters. This is an archival digital print that I’ve sewn into with metal wire and distressed with metal tools. The poem, a 31 syllable tanka, has been distressed into the paper.

Please come see the show and let me know what you think.

Really interesting interview with artist Kehinde Wiley. And he talks about cooking! Right on.

In just a year, the Queens County Farm Museum has become a working farm. Beautiful!

I read Mark Bittman’s blog nearly every day for the recipes, of course, but also for the articles he links to. They are often thought-provoking, if not always thoughtful, and the discussions they prompt in the comments section are generally intelligent and productive. His posting of an article by Tom Lee about school lunches (in answer to Alice Waters’ call for a robust school lunch program built around organic, locally grown produce) was no different.

Lee argues that it is elitist, pretentious, and expensive, to demand organic, locally grown produce and locally prepared food at public schools. His argument reminds me of the anti-intellectualism of the past ten years and that just pisses me off. Let’s be clear: public school kids are deserving of local, organic produce.

The argument that eating ‘organic’ and ‘locally produced’ produce makes you a snob is another example of how we default to some crappy war between the classes instead of the real heart of the matter: corporations are in charge and that’s the problem. It’s too expensive, Lee argues, to localize school lunches and demand that they be made of fresh produce rather than frozen vegetables, or worse, frozen ‘food product’. We have to redefine our notion of ‘expensive.’ It’s far more expensive to our society to continue funneling money to Aramark to make crappy, unhealthful lunches for our kids.

School lunches are an easy buck for the giant corporations in charge of supplying them and are a way to make the excess crap from corporate ag business profitable. Corn and soy products and by-products are molded into so-called meals. Who benefits? The subsidized mega-farms that grow it and the processing plants that turn it into “food”.

But instead of having this discussion we’ll argue about whether or not it is elitist to eat locally grown vegetables and fruits. What a joke.

Sonny and I had the opportunity to spend summer 2006 in Juchitán, the steamy, difficult city in the Istmus of Tehuantapec. The city is a true Zapotec city, with most of the residents speaking Zapotec as their primary language. Fans of Frida Kahlo will know the traditional dress of the Istmus — velvet huipiles and matching skirts covered in embroidered flowers and that fabulous lace trim along the bottom of the skirt. They eat iguana, drink bupu, and swing to the most infectious Afro-Carribean-Oaxacan music imaginable. Like the Oaxaca Valley, the Istmus loves to party, and this article about the fall muxe velas shows a bit of it. While the people of Juchitán are quite suspect of outsiders (and downright hostile sometimes), they are, by and large, accepting of their third gender relatives, the muxes.

Make sure to look at the slide show. We’ve met many Zapotec families like those featured, though none of our friends in the valley have muxe sons. Mexico has a reputation of being intolerant of homosexuality. Still, I was not surprised to read how accepting these families are of their sons who dress as women, given the loving attitude our Zapotec friends have toward their family members.

¡Viva Oaxaca!

Go visit my friend Jean’s new blog:

http://thegreatkiskadee.wordpress.com/

Jean is a musician and a photographer and an artist of many persuasions. Sonny and I were fortunate to meet Jean and his companion Amee, an incredibly talented professional photographer, in Oaxaca last year. They had left their home and their jobs in Toronto to live in south central Mexico for a year and just make art. How cool is that! Check out more of Jean’s music at Crestview Trust. Their album is top notch.

From the Washington Post in honor of World AIDS Day.

Beautiful. Bruce Lee, nunchuku, and ping pong. Even if it is a CGI commercial for a cell phone!

Check these out:

Anna Lappe’s Take a Bite out of Climate Change, and her writing partner Bryant Terry’s blog.

Don’t forget to sign up to get Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen download at the beginning of next year.

It’s time to make lunch!

My good friend, poet Gabe Gomez, is in town for a few days to participate in a panel about artists as refugees (he runs the Santa Fe Art Institute’s residency program which hosts artists who have been made homeless by political persecution, environmental catastrophe, etc). Fortunately for me, he has a bit of time to hang out and hunt for nifty art.

Banksy, the nearly-anonymous British graffiti and ‘fine’ artist, snuck into New Orleans for the third anniversary of Katrina, just days before we all evacuated for Gustav. Across the city he stenciled and painted a dozen mostly-political pieces. Many of them have been destroyed by the notorious Grey Ghost, an anti-graffiti vigilante who has been painting over graffiti of all stripes (including commissioned murals) since 1997. We went looking for the few Banksy pieces that remain and found two:

Bansky painting partly destroyed

The Bansky painting in context

Bansky painting of girl and raining umbrella

The top image originally showed two national guard soldiers looting from the building, carrying a TV out to the shopping cart behind them that already holds a boom box. The soldiers and the television have been blotted out with white paint (spray paint, so perhaps not work of the Grey Ghost?) and now appear as shadows or ghosts themselves. To see the image as it was painted, along with the other New Orleans pieces, visit Bansky’s website.

I was particularly sad to hear the refrigerator-as-kite piece was painted over. Also gone is the brass band in gas masks painting. Vandalism or public art? An ingenious political statement and way to encourage visits to the essentially abandoned areas of the city, or a sorry addition to the blight? Unfortunately the dialogue was ended as soon as the paintings were destroyed. Gag order or full-on execution, the result is the same in this case.

We’re heading back out tomorrow to look for Lincoln. I’ll post more photos if we find him, or even his wistful ghost.