Released into the Wild: Sketchbooks on Tour!

Unbelieveably, the Sketchbook Project folks at the Brooklyn Art Library have cataloged just under 10,000 sketchbooks, including mine,  and are ready to take them on tour around the country.  They are now "released into the wild", as they say, but organized, digitized, and bar-coded. I will be getting an email every time someone looks at it in person or on-line.  This will be a kick!  If you browse at http://arthousecoop.com/submissions  you can get a sense of the range and variety of the participating artists from all over the world.  

"Visitor Discretion is Advised"

Combining SEX with "Visitor Discretion is Advised" usually gets people's attention. I'm glad I saw this provocative show at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery today. You can see more about these audacious artists at http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/sexdrive.

I was especially glad that there was a powerful 4 x 6 foot piece by David Wojnarowicz, in light of his recent censorship by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. As the curator of SEX DRIVE, Stuart Horodner, notes "its inclusion aligns the exhibition with the many arts professionals, institutions, and funding agencies who issued swift and strong responses denouncing the Smithsonian's troubling curatorial decision."  He is being both professional and polite to call their decision merely 'troubling.'

Here's their blurb:
Sex Drive presents contemporary artworks that address sexuality across a panoply of forms. Using photography, drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, 22 artists bring their own pleasures and political dispositions to bear on identity and gender, romance and lust, religious and legal strictures, and private and public scandals. Sex Drive asks us to consider the conventions that govern sexuality, as well as its unruly power.

Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, developed the exhibition in conjunction with the Haverford College humanities seminar, “Sex, State, and Society in the Early Modern World,” which offers an historical perspective for understanding why sex and sexuality remain such volatile issues in contemporary politics around the globe.

Meredith Monk - a Force of Nature

music by Meredith Monk

It was a rare treat to watch a screening last night at Bryn Mawr College of Meredith Monk: INNER VOICE, a film that celebrates Monk's life and work, and illuminates the role that her Buddhist practice has had in her creative life. She has been called a 'pan-artist': working in so many genres, interweaving them, defying categorization, and creating a transcendence beyond all of them. Best of all, Meredith Monk was there in person!

It was a small intimate group. The discussion after the film was spellbinding. I had gone to experience a performance artist, an avant-garde luminary of the generation following Fluxus. I didn't know she would convey profound teaching about impermanence, time, loss, beauty, joy, and love.

I'm glad I braved driving through the slush to be there. Today I ordered her album "Impermanence."

To find out more: http://www.meredithmonk.org