Looking Back: The American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore

Self once served on a selection panel for an artists grant.  The granting organization was in Baltimore, and they flew her over for one night.  Self supposes there must be crazier things than that, but she is still amazed every time she thinks of herself flying clear across the country, staying one night, attending a day-long meeting, and then taking a late flight back to California.  And teaching a full load, the very next day.

In Baltimore, she was put up in a Hilton which was close to the seaport.  Her shoulders and neck flared with accumulated tension but she was determined to see as much of the city as she could.  As soon as she was done with her committee duties, and in the few hours of daylight left before she had to head to the airport, she decided to visit the American Visionary Art Museum.  The museum was the brainchild of a man named James Rouse, who happens to be the grandfather of the actor Edward Norton.

The museum is a commemmoration of “outsider art,” art created by people who have no artistic training, who created out of a deep need to express themselves (Just so you know how committed the museum’s curators are to its vision, there is a whole gallery devoted to finger paintings made by one Betsy the Chimp, whose dates of birth and death are very carefully recorded:  1951- 1960)

She remembers another artwork, a sculpture of a gigantic man, caught in mid-stride.  The image seems to radiate vitality and power.  You have to go close to see:  the figure was constructed entirely out of matchsticks.

In another gallery, she saw a series of intensely colorful paintings, all the work of a woman who was a maid for a rich family somewhere in the south.  All the paintings were done in her spare time.

The main exhibit, at the time self visited, was called “Home & Beast”  and featured the paintings of Christine Sefolosha, born 1955 in the Swiss town of Montreux.  Her father was a fruit and vegetable merchant.  From the museum catalogue:  “During a period of her childhood when she experienced unusual insomnia, her mother took some of her drawings to a psychologist.  One of these depicted a huge crocodile devouring a dark-skinned man.”

After reading that, self looked at the paintings, and all of them depicted a dark-skinned man being devoured by a crocodile.  Clearly this image was an obsession for Ms. Sefolosha.  It turns out that she did marry a “dark-skinned man” from Africa (self forgets which country), followed him back to his home country and bore him two children.  Then, the man left her.  Sometime afterwards, Sefolosha began “painting and drawing again, working mostly on the floor with new pigments and watercolors and often with such materials as dripped tar and earth.”  And all she could paint were images of a dark-skinned man being devoured by a crocodile.  Holy Eerie Coincidence!

At the time, self had just finished writing a story called “Dumpster,” which she chose to set in Baltimore.  The story made one of her brothers want to puke.  Its central image was a severed hand.

Why did self choose Baltimore?  As Negrenses might say, “Ambot!”  (“I forget!” or “I don’t know!”)  At the time that she finished the story, she’d never even been to Baltimore.

After seeing the American Visionary Art Museum, however, self could never forget Baltimore.  And, eventually, after not too long, “Dumpster” was picked up by Mark Fitten, then-editor of The Chattahoochee Review.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Cool Filipino Dude, Circa 1976

What do you think of this picture, dear blog readers ?!!

It’s a photograph of the artist Carlos Villa in a pool hall, circa 1976.  To borrow words from Prof. Gonzalves:  “What a stylish cat he was, and still is!”

Come to the launch of the book Carlos Villa and the Integrity of Spaces, edited by Theodore S. Gonzalves, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland.

Here’s from the press release issued by the book’s publisher:

Meritage Press is delighted to announce the release of Carlos Villa and the Integrity of Spaces, edited by Theodore S. Gonzalves.  This long-overdue book takes a critical look at the life and work of one of the most celebrated Filipino American artists of our time and a leading light in the San Francisco Bay Area’s rich history of creative arts.  This book contains essays and poetry by Bill Berkson, Theodore S. Gonzalves, David A. M. Goldberg, Mark Dean Johnson, Margo Machida, Moira Roth, and Carlos Villa himself.  In addition, it features a gallery of 77 color and black-and-white images from Villa’s career.

Book Launch Events:

At Mission Cultural Center for Latino Life (MCCLA):  an exhibit, Carlos Villa:  Manongs, Some Doors, and a Bouquet of Crates,  (Aug. 13 – Oct. 5), a survey exhibition of Villa’s work ranging from 1970 to 2011

“An Evening with Carlos Villa,” Sept. 17, 6:30 – 9:30 pm, FREE ADMISSION:  Join Carlos Villa and distinguished guests for a night of story-telling and dialogue to celebrate the release of the monograph, Carlos Villa and the Integrity of Spaces. RSVP by Sept. 13:  415-643-2775 to galleryasst@missionculturalcenter.org

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The Troll on the San Francisco Bay Bridge

The San Francisco Giants are leading the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Score so far, 6th inning:  4 to 2 (YAAAAY!!  You go, Giants!)

Self mosied over to Whole Foods and bought a copy of today’s New York Times.  Already (and she’s still only in Section A), she’s read many many articles that give her more news on the Bay Area than the copy of the San Francisco Chronicle she read just yesterday.

For instance, this fascinating tidbit (with accompanying visual) on a “small iron squatter” on the San Francisco Bay Bridge (Article was written by Shoshana Walter):

The Bay Bridge troll, a 14-inch-high, snarling iron sculpture, has lived beneath the upper deck of the eastern span of the bridge since workers completed repairs after the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

The quake caused a 50-foot section of the bridge to collapse, resulting in one death and forcing construction of a massive, new eastern span, which is expected to be completed in 2013.

Now, many Bay Area residents wonder what will become of the troll, whose powers are said to have protected the bridge, and the 280,000 cars that cross it daily, from further troubles.

*     *     *     *     *

The troll moved in without the permission of bridge authorities 22 years ago.  Construction crews were working around the clock to repair the bridge when the ironworkers forging the replacement section thought to ask Bill Roan, an artist and fellow ironworker, to create a commemmorative sculpture.

Mr. Roan went to the library to find an appropriate candidate.

In “Billy Goats Gruff,” there was a troll that lived under the bridge, and he was really mean and nasty to everyone,” Mr. Roan said.  “But he took really good care of his bridge.”

As workers raced to complete the repairs, Mr. Roan worked for three nights straight to turn a piece of the collapsed bridge into the dark iron sculpture.  Assuming that Caltrans would reject the idea, the group took Mr. Roan’s creation straight to the construction site.

Workers welded it into place, the troll’s long tongue snaking past a long spud wrench grasped by the troll’s webbed hands.  The wrench was affixed to a bridge bolt.  By the time officials in Sacramento heard of the action, it was too late.

Commuters cannot see the troll from their cars; it is underneath the deck on the northern side of the span.

But self highly recommends googling for a visual.  It is a really cool piece of art.

(Here are more close-ups of the thing, from a blog self stumbled on, just today:  Melancholia Imaginativa)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

From The New Yorker “Briefly Noted” of 27 June 2011: New Books by David McCullough and Ann Patchett

Books self is interested in reading after perusing the “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker (27 June 2011):

• Ann Patchett’s new novel,  State of Wonder:  ” …  Marina Singh, a scientific researcher, travels to the Amazonian jungle to find out how a friend and colleague died there.  She must also complete her dead colleague’s assignment:  persuade Annick Swenson, a brilliant scientist and Singh’s medical school mentor, to yield up a fertility drug that she has been developing, derived from a tree whose bark allows women of an indigenous tribe to bear children into old age.” (What woman in her right mind would want to bear children “into old age”?  Is any woman that crazy ??? But, anyhoo, for those blog readers in the Stanford vicinity, Patchett is one of three visitors to the Stanford University Creative Writing Series, which kicks off Oct. 10 with a reading by poet Mary Oliver.  Patchett’s reading follows in the winter.  Martin Amis comes in the spring)

• David McCullough’s history of nineteenth century American painters who came under the spell of Paris, The Greater Journey:   “McCullough’s story is driven by mood rather than by drama.  Yet heroes do emerge:  the foreign minister Elihu Washburne, who protected civilians during the Franco-Prussian War, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the star of the book’s final chapters, whose best work was created in Paris and, marking the book’s principal theme, lives on in the public spaces of America.”  (Sold!  Even before reading about the book’s subject, self was sold.  She loves reading anything by historian David McCullough, one of the finest American writers)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The Best Review Self Has Read (So Far) Abt Molly Peacock’s THE PAPER GARDEN

The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany (Begins Her Life’s Work) at 72, by Molly Peacock, was reviewed in The Economist of 11 June 2011:

Mary Delany  —  aristocrat, gardener, prodigious letter-writer, woman of fashion and friend to George Frederic Handel, Jonathan Swift and King George III, died childless more than 220 years ago.  Yet she left a multitude of vivid, vital offspring:  985 botanically accurate and startlingly beautiful portraits of flowers in bloom, collectively known as the “Flora Delanica.”

Delany started this project as a widow in her eighth decade.  Despite grief, ageing hands and eventually failing eyesight, she invented a new method for creating her flower “mosaicks” :  collaging layers of cut, painted paper onto a dense black background, matching her materials to the papery fineness of a flower’s petal.  In Molly Peacock’s illustrated biography, the results leap out of the darkness of the past, pulsating with life.

Ms. Peacock is a noted American poet, and it shows in her approach:  she repeatedly uses the mosaicks as a simile for the rich and varied life of her subject, which she describes as “so shapely that it feels like a complete work of art, cut and pasted.”  Certainly parts of the narrative read like an 18th century novel:  at 17, Delany was married by her wicked uncle to a 60-year-old drunken squire, who tore her away from her family to live in a rotting Cornish castle.  After he died

Sun-Struck June Sunday: at the de Young Museum

The front courtyard of the de Young Museum

Today, went with hubby and son to see the Picasso Exhibit which opened last week at the de Young Museum.  Self thinks this is the first time she fully understood why the word “genius” is often appended to the painter’s name.

This is also the first time self has ever heard the word “vampiric” associated with anyone who was not actually a vampire or a character in a book.  That word was on the audio-tour that accompanies the exhibit, and was used by a friend of the painter’s to describe how the already 90-year-old Picasso derived energy from his guests and would use it to feed his art, often going straight from the dinner table to his studio, where he would paint with furious abandon, sometimes for the entire night.

Self had bought tickets for the Picasso exhibit, but for mid-July.  Nevertheless, she wasn’t sure son would be visiting then, so she insisted we go today.  And it turned out the tickets for July could not be switched, self had to buy a whole new set of tickets.  But son had his student ID, and self had her museum membership card, so for hubby, self, and son the tab came out to $51.  Which she was all too willing to pay, since son isn’t home very often.  (Self had a hard time understanding why son’s student ticket cost more than hers and hubby’s, but the young Filipina who issued the tickets insisted that the membership discounts and the student discounts had been applied.  And since she was very sweet, and started addressing self in Tagalog, self decided to forbear further argument)

Then, self paid for three audio-tours.  It was such a good tour that self kept stopping to replay certain portions.  Self (she thought), at the rate you’re going, you will never get out of here!  It was also curious because now and then, hubby or son, who self presumed were now way ahead of her, would periodically surface by her side.  So, presumably, they were stopping and re-playing portions of the tour as well.

Then self thought to whip out her little red notebook and jot down things she found particularly salient from the tour.  And she noticed that whenever she did so, hubby would be hovering.  So then, self began backing away every time she caught a glimpse of hubby.  (It is very very hard to  live with a writer —  they develop sensitivities.  Such as —  self really grits her teeth when someone tries to strike up a conversation with her, while she is writing in her notebook.  She wondered if hubby realized this and was hovering on purpose.  She managed to elude him for a couple of paintings and then he surfaced again towards the end.  At which point, self simply gave up and decided it was time to re-join the world of the normal)

It was a gorgeous day:  Still, upon leaving the musuem, walking in the shade by the Japanese Tea Garden, self needed to don her hoodie.

In Stow Lake, where we parked the car, self saw, in addition to the usual mallards and sharp-beaked white birds:  five turtles lined up in a row, on a rock in the middle of the lake.

In the exhibit, there was a sculpture of a head, and this one was called “Le Fou” (Jester).

How strange:  the piece self just had accepted by Used Furniture Review is called “Jesters.”

She’s gone years, perhaps even decades, never once encountering this word, and now she has encountered it twice, in the space of a month.

She also discovers, today, that son’s research topic for his Ph.D. in Social Psychology is something about how to foster creativity.  Which she thinks is a very good topic for a dissertation.  At least, it is enormously interesting to self.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

NYTBR, May 15 & May 22, 2011: Biographies, New Story Collections from Barnes, Packer

6:10 pm on the last Sunday in May, Redwood City, California:

Self is perusing back issues of The New York Times Book Review.  After reading the 15 May 2011 issue, she decides she will keep the following reviews for future reference:

1. Andrea Wulf’s review of Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden:  An Artist (Begins Her Life Work) at 72.  The book is a biography of the flower painter Mary Delany.  Any book that focuses on an artist whose creative output began at

Third Friday of May (2011): Sunny, Finally; Penny’s Play; Still Checking Submishmash

It is a spectacular day, dear blog readers.  Self spent some time watering, hauling around the old green bucket.  All (or nearly all) of her roses are profusely blooming.  Finally!  Last year, she was ready to give up.  She single-handedly dug holes for each of her almost 20 roses —  the Betty Boop, the Chihuly, the climbing New Dawn, the climbing Don Juan, the Fourth of July, the Sheila’s Perfume, the Sunflare, the Winsome, and so forth and so on  —   nursed them through their early stages with lavish applications of water and fertilizer, and still, her garden refused to reward her efforts.  This year, she decided that she would not worry about her garden any longer.  And as soon as she made that decision, everything bloomed, all at once.

Tonight is the start of the second (and closing) weekend of Penny’s play, “Booze in the Boroughs.”  Did self impart to dear blog readers how, as she sat in the audience exactly a week ago (the space was SRO), she relished every minute, and wished she’d succeeded in getting her nephew to come along?  (But, Friday night in New York, of course young men have plans!)  The action of the play begins in Central Park, winds through the Bronx, the Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn, and Queens.  Various characters meet, share, ignite.  Here are the play particulars:  It is showing on Joria Mainstage, at 260 West 36th Street, on the 3rd Floor.  It is showing tonight, Saturday and Sunday.  Penny mentioned it might be taken to other places, one of these others being Seattle.

Self was sorry that, during her last trip, she did not get to see:

• Drew
• the Metropolitan Museum  (She only got as far as the front steps, where she sat and listened to a band sing “Under the Boardwalk.”  But the day was simply too beautiful, self thought, to spend inside a museum.  She remained outside, and indulged in a peanut butter and fudge cupcake from a vendor called “Cakes and Shakes” —  to die for.  That was her lunch)
• Minette
• the Whitney (She usually makes it a point to visit this museum, every time she is in New York.  She actually likes it better than the Metropolitan.  It feels less overwhelming.  They had a fantastic Cy Twombly retrospective, a couple of years ago)

She made an effort to contact Paolo Javier, who she read with years ago, at the Asian American Writers Workshop.  She e-mailed his publisher.  The man was so nice, he answered right away, and said he personally hadn’t seen Paolo in many years.  How do people lose each other?  Time is really a river …

But, here she is, and tomorrow she and hubby are meeting up with son in Monterey, at a pet cemetery where we will finally lay poor Gracie to rest.

Self decides she will e-mail that literary journal, the one that supposedly accepted her piece without a formal notification (She only found out when she logged into Submishmash and saw —  Green!  Her first green in a year!)

She sent out a novella this morning (Deep breath)

Zack is in New Orleans.  She promised him a lengua burrito from the place at the corner of Jefferson and El Camino, next time he is in her neck of the woods.  In the meantime, here’s something about his book from The Wily Filipino.  (Zack’s going to be in Europe and Morocco in June.  Self is of course dying of jealousy)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Vodounon at the Cantor Arts Center

Self has now before her a copy of an article from The Stanford Daily about the Vodounon exhibit at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.  Apparently, self missed it because she didn’t realize there were two separate exhibits and the one she saw was:

Mami Wata:  Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas

The Stanford Daily article is about the photography exhibit

Vodoun/Vodounon:  Portraits of Initiates

Sample sentence:  “It is through one of these wall labels that we come to understand the significance of Mawu-Lisa as the god of the Vodoun religion, comprised of the Mawu female principle and Lisa male principle.”

Now, what the heck was that which self just read?  What is a Lisa male principle?

Self reads further:  “From these wall labels, we also learn about important figures of the Vodoun religion, such as Sakpata, Shango, Dan and Ogou.”

Hmmm.  Unfortunately, self didn’t realize the article continued on another page, and she’s already trashed the issue of the Daily that the article was from.  Not to be so easily deterred, however, self traipses to the Cantor Arts Center webpage and discovers that the exhibit continues through March 20.  Which means that self will have ample opportunity to visit it after she gets back from the Philippines.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Ye Olde Stomping Grounds

Self to (hapless) Stanford student at Information Desk, Stanford Bookstore: I am a Stanford grad! Why don’t you carry my book in your “Stanford Authors” section!

(They used to carry it, you know. Way back when!)

Stanford student: Oh, sorry, Ma’am! I’ll let the Buyer know!

Oh, self, you are just so incorrigible! Why harass complete strangers, presenting them with your complete and stunning un-reknown?

Self noticed in her peregrinations around the Bookstore that there were T-shirts very prominently displayed next to the cashiers, proclaiming: FEAR THE TREE.

Oh my Goodness!

Later, when self made a shortcut through the Stanford Shopping Center to get home, she saw a huge crowd snaking out of one of the stores. She assumed it was Pinkberry, but when she was closer she took a good look and saw: The line was issuing forth from the Giants store.

BWAH. HA. HA!!!

If only self hadn’t been in so much of a rush to get home, she would have pulled over and taken a picture.

Anyhoo, here are some pictures self took at the Cantor Arts Center this afternoon:

Main Entrance, Cantor Arts Center

Cool. Sculpture in a Courtyard, Cantor Arts Center

Rodin Sculpture Garden, Stanford

The current exhibit is “Mami Wata:  Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas” (Definitely got self’s creative juices flowing!)

On her way out, self picked up a flyer for “Ayiti Pap Mouri!”, a Haitian Dance, Music and Art Festival coming up Nov. 18 – 21 in San Francisco’s Dolores Park.  For more info:  djenane_saintjuste@hotmail.com

Stay tuned.