I love when there is a confluence of ideas that merge together within a short period of time. Such was the case last week for me when starlings emerged from the ether and became front and center of my focus. It started with reading an op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times about how the brain works, and comparing it to the murmurations of starlings. Then just a couple of days later, I saw a flock of them flying together above the farm behind my house, during a snow storm. It took a few tries to capture them on video, because they disappeared out of view a couple of times before I could get outside with...
So happy to have seen the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA before it closed. February 7th will be the last day, so if you can make it over there before then I highly recommend seeing it. I was taken by so many things: her talent, her resilience, her ability to share her work and knowledge with young people (and old people too!), her foresight to get a patent for her unique wire construction, and her ability to produce an abundance of work in a multitude of mediums. When she was 16 she was sent to an internment camp in Santa Anita, California, along with her mother and siblings, a punishment for simply being of Japanese descent, and then later moved...
I made this years ago, inspired by a woman on the NYC subway who had a super chic punk rock style. She was covered with piercings and tattoos, but the thing that caught my attention the most was the peace sign that she had made out of safety pins on the back of her denim jacket. I remember thinking about how artful it looked and also thinking how symbolic the image was...how fragile peace is and how this strong young woman spun it into something edgy and even rebellious just by the way she wore it. Her message seemed to be that peace, however tenuous, is worth fighting for. Couldn't agree more! The past year has not exactly felt calm...
Resilience has been my mantra for a long time. Recently, more than ever, it's something that I have been spending a lot of mental energy on -- if not on an hourly basis, then at least a daily one. Reminding myself that I have lived through many challenging experiences throughout my life and managed to weather through them without allowing them to knock me down for too long. I've got to say that the pandemic is something that I never thought that I would witness in my lifetime; Its scope is far bigger than most imagined and it appears that it will be with us for some time in the foreseeable future. If I can offer you any words of encouragement, they would be...
