Venice Biennale, Collateral Exhibition from Ukraine

Going through my photographs, trying to get organized, I found the image of another work by Wilfredo Prieto, the subject of the Cuba Pavilion. This was in a special pavilion from Ukraine - not the Ukraine Pavilion - sponsored by the Viktor Pinchuck Foundation and housed in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in the Dorsoduro district.  The exhibition is titled "Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear," and the blurb for the show characterizes the works not as specifically relating to Ukraine and the war there, but more universal: "We are at a crucial moment where the future is hidden while fundamental changes are on the horizon."

The Wilfredo Prieto, which amused me at first, is Untitled (Globe of the World), 2002 (Collection of Jesus Villasante) and consists of a dried chickpea drawn with an ink map of the world, attached to a yellow/gold wall.  This small-world image first reminded me of all the artist miniaturizations that have amazed viewers for centuries, but the chickpea, a grain that is common virtually throughout the world, can refer to both the universal need for food and to globalization in a world of global warming.

A few other works in this large exhibition caught my interest. Yarema Malaschuk and Roman Khimei, You Shouldn't Have to See This, 2024 is a group of six videos of children sleeping. They are among the estimated

20,000 to one million Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia during the war, and among the few who have been  able to return. 

Yana Kononova's Izyum Forest, 2022 is one long composite black and white photograph of the exhumation process of mass graves found in the city of Izyum after the Russians were driven out. Most of the dead were civilians and there was evidence of torture.

In the articles about the Biennale, I remembered the image of Fatma Bucak's Damascus Rose, 2016 ongoing, a pile of soil with green plants emerging from it, somehow a hopeful image. The artist acquired Damascus rose cuttines from Syria (where they are a symbol of the threatened city of Damascus), grafts them onto other rose plants, and plants the seedlings in other countries, as in Venice. If they survive, the plants remain in the country of the exhibition  Apparently, in Venice they didn't.

Toward the end of the exhibition, there's a large room with blossoms strewn across the floor. This installation is by Allora and Calzadilla, artists based in Puerto Rico who represented the United States in the 2011 Venice Biennale and had shown in the Biennale exhibition earlier. I remember getting money from the musical cash machine in that installation. 

The blossoms are actually made of handpainted recycled polyvinyl chloride, depicted in various stages of decomposition. The flowers depicted are from the Baobab tree, which is sacred in Africa, and called 'the Tree of Life," because it can sustain entire ecosystems. The trees can live up to 2000 years but apparently 9 of the oldest and largest 13 trees have perished due to climate change. The flowers also trace colonial trade routes that brought the trees from Africa to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.  Visitors are encouraged to walk carefully through the installation, which I did. 

This last installation, with its multiple elements of lovely but low value items and colonial ramifications, seemed related in meaning to the Venetian beads of the Canada pavilion I described earlier. Similarly, connections across the multiple venues in Venice make a full explanation of the richness of the experience there difficult to transmit. One never knows which venue will offer some new revelation.

The online description of the exhibition offers photographs and discussion of all the various offerings there.

Venice Biennale: Three Favorite Pavilions in the Giardini

Founded in 1895, at first the Biennale occupied what is now the Central Pavilion. Individual national pavilions date from 1907 (Belgium) to 1995 (Korea) and the development of the layout of the Biennale spans the twentieth century. Since each country chooses the artist or artists who represent it, and each country has its own system for making the choice, the pavilions, each a unique building designed by an architect, host diverse exhibitions, 29 in all. For more information on the Biennale history click here.

Most of the exhibitions are one-person shows, but a few include artist groups or multiple artists. This year the Netherlands gave its pavilion to an artists' collective of Congolese plantation workers from a plantation formerly owned by Unilever. They sell their art for funds to buy back their ancestral lands. The Israeli pavilion remained closed for the duration of the war in Gaza and the Russian pavilion was given to a group of artists from Bolivia. We did not visit that pavilion and I think we missed Switzerland.

Amid all the densely installed installations, videos, and complex concepts, the Canada pavilion was a relief, a simple, clean installation of geometric forms and subtly changing colors, both minimal sculptures and colored walls. Before we visited it, we had a snack in a new outdoor cafe next door, and I noticed that the exterior walls were covered in a dark blue textured substance. Upon closer examination we found that the walls were all covered with strings of Venetian seed beads, the artist using media from the host country to create the exhibition. I watched a visitor finger one of the strings, confirming that they were beads. 

The introductory label, and the booklet that we were given, address the use of glass beads as trade items throughout the world. For us their use by Native American artists was particularly meaningful, but African and Asian cultures used them as well. The artist of this installation, titled Trinket, is Kapwani Kiwanga, a Canadian who lives and works in Paris and whose work, according to Wikipedia, deals with issues of colonialism, gender, and the African diaspora. The booklet includes an essay about the history of trade beads and their use in exchange for ivory, gold, furs and slaves, casting a dark light on perhaps the most beautiful installation of the Biennale, and certainly the best one I have seen from Canada in the forty years I have been attending.

Even the outside walls were covered with strings of beads, in this case all blue beads, a color that was especially valued in many cultures to which the beads were traded.
 

The second pavilion that impressed us was Austria, across a bridge in a kind of secondary section of pavilions. The building was designed by Josef Hoffman in 1934.

The artist is Anna Jermolaewa, who was born in Leningrad, USSR, and has lived in Vienna since 1989, having come to Austria as a refugee. Among the items in her installation was a 2006 video titled "Research for Sleeping Positions," depicting her trying to sleep on a bench in the Westbahnhof in Vienna, the train station where she arrived seventeen years before and where she slept for her first week in Austria. Since then the station has added armrests to prevent people from sleeping there.

A second object is six pay phone booths from the refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria. The label says that the most international calls made in Austria came from these phone booths. They are the ones the artist used to contact her family when she arrived in Austria. The phone booths work.

Finally, another video shows four dancers rehearsing to perform Swan Lake, a project in collaboration with the Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva. Apparently at times of political unrest, especially at the death of the head of state, Soviet television replaced their regular broadcast with a loop of Swan Lake, sometimes for days. Tchaikovsky's ballet became a code for a change in power. So rather than a tool of censorship it had been traditionally, the artists transform Swan Lake into a hopeful rehearsal for regime change in Russia.

We've seen a lot of displays addressing issues of migration, oppression, colonialism, and injustice and often they generalize, use multiple adjectives, and seem to be charging the viewer with evil. By connecting the objects with her specific biography, describing the events clearly, and not expressing an opinion, Jermolaewa made it possible to empathize with her as a refugee and a migrant.

Our third favorite pavilion also involved video, a surprise since in general we do not embrace video installations. This was Egypt, and the artist is Wael Shawky. The video is titled Drama 1882 and stages the Urabi revolution of 1879 to 1882, a relatively unknown event in which a cafe fight results in riots that inspired the British forces to bomb Alexandria in the Battle of Tel El Kebir. In response to the riots, the British ordered the Egyptians to disarm and when they didn't the British bombarded Alexandria and drove the Egyptian troops from the city.  As a result, the British occupied Egypt until 1956. 

We did not photograph the video, but it is available online. The video in six sections is a sort of operatic rendering of the conflict, composed and staged by Shawky in a mesmerizing, stylized performance. With the subject of the Biennale being "Foreigners Everywhere," it was unusual for the foreigners to be British, rather than migrants from non-European continents. Through the staging, Shawky calls attention to this important and under-recognized event, and to an aspect of the history of colonialism. 

Venice Biennale, Cuban Pavilion

 We spent a week in Venice in July, just to see the Biennale.  This year, even with all the previous articles in art publications and newspapers, it was more difficult than usual to locate the sites, on account of inadequate maps. We were able to plan by using three different maps, each listing different exhibitions and attractions at varied locations. The Giardini and Arsenale are easy, as are the major museums, but the off-site national pavilions and other exhibitions occupy spaces around the city in sundry offices, shops, palaces, and apartments. Of course, in a week it's impossible to see everything, or even most of what's on view. I estimate that we went to about 75 national pavilions, collateral events, and other exhibitions, from a total of 244, according to one map. In addition, it was a particularly hot July, not life-threatening, but certainly tiring. 

My plan is to write about various aspects of the city-wide event. Of course, other writers have discussed virtually every exhibition, often listing "the best," and those they consider of greatest interest. 

 I begin with the Cuban Pavilion a simple installation by the artist Wilfredo Prieto, titled "Curtain." It was located on the Fondamenta Nuove, the side of Venice that faces Murano and the San Michele cemetery island, a relatively quiet quay. A young intern welcomed us and we walked into the very dark room and saw this spotlighted rock. We looked at it for a minute and walked out.

 

The young woman said, "Did you see one rock or two?" and we realized that we needed to go back into the pavilion and let our eyes adjust to the dark. After a few minutes, we saw this:

You can just barely make out the second rock diagonally back to the left of the spotlighted one. We spent a few minutes looking at the two rocks and thinking about how important it is not to assume you know everything just from what you first see, how taking some time can offer different perspectives and more information. How things you might need to know can be hidden if you don't give them time. It seemed much more profound than just two rocks.

When we left, we picked up the information sheet offered by the pavilion. In addition to information about Wilfredo Prieto's history, other exhibitions, and poetic practice, it included this paragraph about the work:

"The installation highlights, with a poetic gesture, the weight of identity, the significance of identity and the complexities surrounding integration and belonging. It challenges the notion of luck and its implications within the context of evolution and natural selection, represented by the changes, diversity, social, racial, ethnic, political and economic differences. In his exploration of reality, Prieto proposes an analysis that revolves around the interplay of opposites, and varying levels of sensitivity: the tangible physical realm and the realm of representation, which serves as a metaphorical reflection of ourselves. It is an introspection of human thought, for despite the many ways in which individuals think, feel and behave, we are part of the same thing."

I struggle to see how that paragraph connects to the two rocks, one in the spotlight and one in the dark, that we saw, and wonder if other viewers could make a connection. Is it because one rock is included and the other is left out? If someone can explain it to me, please do.

Morgantina and Selinunte in Sicily, June 2022

 In June 2022 I was with 16 others in Sicily on a tour I had organized in conjunction with Sicily Tour, an excellent travel company in Siracusa. I had requested that we visit Morgantina, an archeological site not far from the more famous Roman villa of Casale near the town of Piazza Armerina. I didn't expect that we would first visit the small museum in Aidone, near Morgantina, which displays artifacts excavated from the site. After passing an array of huge urns, we came to a gorgeous terracotta head of Hades, which the guide explained had been returned to the museum from the Getty in Los Angeles. The head was illegally excavated in the 1970s, sold by Robyn Symes, a London antiquities dealer (now known to have traded in illegally excavated and exported antiquities) to Maurice Templesmann, who sold it to the Getty in 1985. Proof that it came from Morgantina came when a bit of the blue beard was found in the San Francesco Bisconti section of the Morgantina archeological site. Morgantina was dedicated to the goddess Demeter and Demeter, her daughter Persephone and her daughter's abductor Hades were depicted there in several versions. I believe this label was the first one I have ever seen in a museum that states that the object had been illegally excavated and subsequently acquired by a museum.

Displayed behind the head of Hades is a pair of acroliths, the heads and feet or two goddesses, probably Demeter and Persephone, whose bodies would have been wood that decayed away. These were returned to Morgantina in 2008 from the collection of Maurice Tempelsman, after spending 5 years at the University of Virginia Art Museum. Tempelsman had purchased them for reportedly $1 million in 1980, from Robyn Symes. 

Further on in the museum is a room dedicated to a monumental stone sculpture, the Goddess of Morgantina, which had been called the Getty Aphrodite, but is probably of Demeter, her daughter, or Persephone, or Hera, queen of the gods. Here again the label states, "The statue of a female deity from Morgantina, excavated clandestinely and exported illegally, was repatriated in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Malibu..." The label does not address the decades-long attempts by the Italians to retrieve the sculpture from the Getty, a story that is recounted along with substantial information about the practices of museums and the Getty specifically to acquire illegally excavated and exported antiquities, in the book Chasing Aphrodite. The label goes on to describe the sculpture as a "pseudo-acrolith," meaning that it is made of different materials - the body of limestone the head, hands and feet of marble, and the lost hair probably of bronze. 

Wandering farther through the museum, I found a small group of spectacular silver vessels, the Morgantina silver, which the Metropolitan Museum purchased in 1981 or 1982 from Robert Hecht, another dealer who was charged with illegal trafficking in Italy. The Met fought to keep the silver for decades, finally agreeing to return it in 2011. 

It's interesting to note the changes in value as looted items moved through the market. This route of the Morgantina silver is from Lucy Thomas, Morgantina Silver, on the Trafficking Culture website:

“The route was as follows: Vincenzo Bossi and Filippo Baviera, tombaroli in Enna, sold the silver for 110 million lire ($27,000) to Orazio Di Simone, a Sicilian middleman based in Lugano in Switzerland, who sold it for $875,000 to Robert Hecht, who sold the silver to the Metropolitan Museum for $3 million[1].”

A major figure in the fight to retrieve artifacts from Morgantina has been Malcolm Bell, director of the excavations at Morgantina for many years and it was writings by him that inspired me to want to visit Morgantina in the first place. 

These objects are spectacular. They were treasures in the major collections that had acquired them for huge amounts of money. Now they are on view in a small museum with beautifully designed spaces, near the site for which they were created and where they represent the ancient culture of the place. In this home they make more sense to me than they would have in the American museums that held on to them for so long. While thousands more people might pass by them in the Getty or the Met, here they stand out as singular objects and the viewer can feel their connection to their sources. They are worth a pilgrimage.

A few days later, we visited the huge site of Selinunte, with several temple remains and a very large residential and commercial ruin as well. Scattered on the site were triglyphs, fallen from the entablature of the temples. I thought about triglyphs and metopes and wondered about the narrative sculptural reliefs that would have been in the metopes. A couple of days later, in the Archeological Museum in Palermo, I saw some of the metopes, as well as a large selection of other objects from Selinunte, many excavated from nearby burial grounds. 

Triglyphs and metopes from Temple C, Selinunte, ca. 550 BC

Triglyphs and metopes from Temple E, Selinunte, 460-450 BC

Having just been at Selinunte, I could feel where these objects might have been and even have a sense of them as part of the ancient culture of the place. I realized that the Parthenon marble sculptures would have a similar power if they were seen in sunny Athens, near their original home, as opposed to the British Museum, in often cloudy and grey London. In December 2022 I was in London and looked at them there. I believe I would have a better chance of understanding where they were placed and how they functioned if they were closer to their original site.

detail, Temple E metope, depicting Artemis's dogs attacking Actaeon in punishment for having seen Artemis naked. Note that her head, arms and feet are marble and the rest is limestone. 460-450 BC

Doing a bit of research for this essay, I discovered that the metopes from Temple C were excavated in 1823 by two British architects, Samuel Angell and William Harris, who tried to ship them to the British Museum. But with the lesson of the Parthenon, the Italians were able to stop the transport and divert the sculptures to Palermo. 

New Mexico Transcendentalist Painting Group

In late August 2021 we went to Santa Fe for Indian Market. I had heard about an exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum titled Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, which included work by Agnes Pelton, whose paintings I find wonderful after seeing one at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas about ten years ago. The exhibition also includes work by Raymond Jonson, whom I remembered from a work at the University of Texas, and Emil Bisttram, the co-founder of the Transcendental Painting Group. I was not familiar with the other eight painters in the exhibition, nor had I heard of the group, which existed only from 1938 to 1941 or ’42.

These were artists who came to Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, New Mexico in the early 20th century and were dedicated to expressing spirituality in their abstract paintings, often influenced, like many artists of their time, by Theosophy the esoteric religious movement established in the United States in the late 19th century by the Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky. The essays in the exhibition catalogue emphasize this spirituality and say that abstraction with spiritual or expressive content was not accepted in the larger art world at that time. (Oddly, I had always thought that early 20th-century abstract art was supposed to be expressive.) 

The two women artists in the exhibition, Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller Pierce, were my favorites. Their paintings show basically geometric shapes that suggest the sky and forms of nature in veils of light-infused color, usually shades of blue and purple. For me they are both inspiring and calming.

Agnes Pelton, Birthday, oil on canvas, 1943.
Collection of Rick Silver and Robert Hayden III

Agnes Pelton, Alchemy, oil on canvas, 1937-39
The Buck Collection at the UCI Institute and Museum of California Art

Florence Miller Pierce, Rising Red, oil on canvas, 1942
Collection of the McNay Art Museum
Purchase with the Ralph A. Anderson, Jr. Memorial Fund
 and the Helen and Everett H. Jones Purchase Fund, 1999.21

Florence Miller Pierce, Blue Forms, oil on canvas, 1942
Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon

Some of the paintings by Stuart Walker, who sadly died in 1940 at age 35, are translucent abstractions of intertwined forms that suggest movement. 

Stuart Walker, Composition 3A, oil on canvas, 1939
Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi Collection

Raymond Jonson uses harder edged abstraction, still suggesting landscapes or cityscapes. 

Raymond Jonson, Oil No. 10, oil on canvas, 1939
Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon

I liked this one:

Raymond Jonson, Eclipse (from the Universe series), oil on canvas, 1935
Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM

Emil Bisttram’s paintings are busier, with stronger geometry. 

Emil Bisttram, Oversoul, oil on Masonite, c. 1941
Private Collection

The distinguished Canadian painter Lauren Harris moved to Santa Fe in 1938, met Raymond Jonson there, helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, and had to return to Canada in 1940 after World War II broke out. His works, derived from landscapes, often have monumental dynamic forms with strong color and dramatic contrasts of light and dark that suggest phenomena of weather.

Lauren Harris, Mountain Experience, oil on canvas, c. 1936
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Collection of the School of Art

 I was also taken by the bright geometry of the work of Ed Garman.

Ed Garman, Abstract No. 276, oil on Masonite, 1942
Collection of Shane Quails, Cincinnati, Ohio

The exhibition had informative labels in English and Spanish, and there is an excellent catalogue with essays and biographies of all eleven artists in the group. The title of the exhibition seems particularly apropos, since New Mexico is another world in the United States, the artists were aiming toward a transcendent world derived from Theosophy and spiritualism, and many of the paintings themselves present another way of seeing the world. According to the catalog, the exhibition opens at the Crocker on August 28, 2022 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on December 18, 2022.

 Coincidentally, before I started writing this, I began reading Mabel Dodge Luhan’s book Winter in Taos. Mabel Dodge was instrumental in bringing Agnes Pelton to Taos and was very active in the arts community there. She also was inspired by arcane philosophy. Winter in Taos seems to represent how the painters in the exhibition might have thought. Here's a section: "All human utterance is an effort to crash the gate between consciousness and unconsciousness, to open a channel between the single sealed atom and the vast sea in which it exists, and to let a part of the undisclosed flow upwards to the outer racial life of air. All sound comes from another world, a world we cannot know but only dimly suspect; it is breathed forth and dies in the unfamiliar element: dying, it deposits its essence in our memories. Thus, little by little, we absorb and take into ourselves life from somewhere else, from somewhere so inconceivably remote to us that we have only negative names for it, like "the unconscious." What we know is positive but useless to us once it is ours. We care nothing for the crystals of knowledge, but only for the flow of light -- and we hanker for the experience of translation -- for the moment when we are channels, bridges, mediums between the unformulated and the dead limitations of the Known." (Winter in Taos, originally published 1935, reprint Las Palomas de Taos, 1982, pp. 140-141)

Agnolo Bronzino and Dawoud Bey, New York, August 2021

 Working through the past year, in order to get to what's on my mind now.....

I was determined to go to New York to see the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570. so we took the chance and went to New York when Covid was still a concern, but we had been vaccinated. I understood that the exhibition was dominated by portraits by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and his circle, with a few additions by other artists (several works by Francesco Salviati (1510-1563), a less-known contemporary of Bronzino, and single portraits by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, plus sculpted portraits by Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli, and Giambologna). It refers to just a segment of the Medici family, including neither the fifteenth-century profoundly important Cosimo Il Vecchio, Piero, and Lorenzo, nor the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Medici dukes who led the declining city. 

Both Tom and I were disappointed by the exhibition, For Tom it did not do what it advertised: "Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time..." He wanted to understand how Cosimo de' Medici used art to promote his agenda and increase his power and international standing, but for Tom the various portraits, many unidentified and many of people not engaged in power building, did not advance his understanding of that mission adequately.

I wanted to see the Bronzino paintings. Looking at my photographs from the exhibition, I'm struck by how wonderful the are, but I also remember having doubts about whether several, which I did not photograph, were actually by Bronzino, I didn't see much about how he employed assistants to make multiple versions of some portraits, and found some of the works by other artists, especially Bronzino's teacher Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1556), especially wonderful. I was particularly troubled by a portrait of Cosimo from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The label says there are almost 30 versions of this portrait and this one, autograph, was given to Paolo Giovio, a physician, writer, and art collector. I wanted to know how many of the portraits are autograph and who else received them, and why giving it to Paolo Giovio mattered, since the label didn't mention Paolo Giovio's influence at the Papal Court, particularly with the Medici Pope Clement VII or the reputation of his collection of portraits. The idea of Bronzino having a sort of portrait factory seemed worth discussion.

photographed at an angle to avoid reflections from glazing

I was doubtful about the authenticity of a small number of the portraits, which looked like Bronzino's work but without the subtlety of his handling of paint. Perhaps they were significantly restored or products of studio assistants. 

There were several portraits of unidentified people who suggest the hauteur of rulers, but add little to the narrative of the exhibition. A wonderful example is the Woman with a Lapdog from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, which we were fortunate to see again in its home institution in June, 2022.

If you're going to show so many portraits by Bronzino, it would help to give more indication of his other paintings patronized by the Medici, for example the monumental fresco of the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo in the Medici church of the same name in Florence, or the renowned and infinitely reproduced Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time allegory in the National Gallery in London. Bronzino's people seem to be made of something hard, the light that molds their faces and hands is bright and cold, and their expressions are reserved, proud, and distant. 

Finally, the Pontormo portraits were wonderful, softer than Bronzino's very marble-like figures and strange in their own way. This example of a Man with a Book, also indicates the wide-ranging sources of loans for the exhibition; it was not an easy show to organize. This painting is from the Collezione Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l'Arts, on long-term loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Rivoli, Turin (CC.3P.PON.1534.A195). 

Drawn to New York by the Medici show, we stayed for several days and visited other museums, as well as the new little island on the West Side near the Whitney. We saw fabulous Cezanne drawings and Automania at MOMA, the Frick Collection's installation at the old Whitney, Bibiena stage designs at the Morgan Library, the art at the new Penn Station, Craft in Art 1950-2019 at the Whitney, and the Maya Lin installation at Madison Square Park.

A year later, I'm particularly struck by the exhibition we saw at the Whitney, Dawoud Bey: An American Project. Bey is a photographer whose work has captured my attention since the first time I saw it quite a few years ago. The Whitney's labels aptly describe Bey's purposes and interests, and I'm copying a bit of the text referring to Harlem U.S.A., an early series: "Drawn to the neighborhood as both a symbol of and a wellspring for Black American culture, Bey wanted to portray its residents as complex individuals in images free of stereotype...it was critical to Bey that the work be shown in the community where they were made, allowing the people he was representing to have access to the work they inspired." Bey's large photographs give power to his subjects, in a completely different context and medium, that seems to me somehow still a version of what Bronzino was doing in the 16th century. My photographs are inadequate, so I'm hoping links to the NY Times review of the exhibition, the Whitney announcement of the exhibition provide some images, as well as information. I was especially drawn to the large-format Polaroid image of Kerry James Marshall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, 1993, titled Kerry and Cheryl I. 

One series in the exhibition, shown in its own gallery, was particularly moving. As the label reminds us, on September 15, 1963 the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four girls and two boys were killed. For the 50th anniversary of the bombing, Bey made paired portraits of Birmingham residents, one the age the victim of the attack died and one the age he or she would have been in 2012. He made the photographs in the Bethel Baptist Church, an early civil rights headquarters, and the Birmingham Art Museum, which in 1963 admitted Black visitors only one day a week. Here's one of the images:

Betty Selvage and Faith Speights, from The Birmingham Project, 2012
Rennie Collection, Vancouver

 Des Moines in July 2021

The Des Moines Opera, our reason for going to Iowa, is located south of Des Moines in Indianola. Looking at the map, we discovered that Winterset, Iowa is west of Indianola. We had just seen the play Leaving Iowa at Theatre Lawrence; it is set in Winterset, and Winterset is the county seat of Madison County, known for its Bridges, so we wandered over there. We skipped the John Wayne museum, but did visit three of the six famous bridges. Here's the Holliwell Covered Bridge, built in 1880 to replace an earlier bridge. It is the longest covered bridge, and the longest timber bridge in Iowa. 

H. P. Jones and G. K. Foster, Holliwell Covered Bridge, 1880

All the bridges are accompanied by very helpful historic bronze labels. 

Downtown we noticed the Iowa Quilt Museum and stopped there, where the exhibition was 40x40@40: Celebrating 40 Years of the Manhattan Quilters Guild, You know you've been in Kansas a long time when you ask if the quilts are from Kansas and are told, "No, they're from New York." Each 40 by 40 inches, they were stunning works of art. Here are three:

Daphne Taylor, Quilt Drawing #21, 2017

Diana Goulston Robinson, Eye Catcher, 2019

Beth Carney, Movement 3, 2019

We continued to the Des Moines Art Center, known for its three iconic architects: Eliel Saarinen (1948 building), I.M.Pei (1968 expansion), and Richard Meier (1985 expansion), and for its sometimes daring and creative contemporary collecting. The exhibition there was Central America, work by Justin Favela, who refers both to his Central American heritage and to Iowa's Central American location. In the paper material used for pinatas he created an huge installation depicting works in the Art Center collection and images from Central America. The central object is a gigantic paper pizza. In the background of the photograph below you can see Favela's copy with a mirror image, of the Grant Wood painting in the Center's collection. The installation, obviously labor-intensive, was also exceptionally joyful, showing harvests, landscapes, palm trees, and scenes from life in the two Central Americas.

Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931

The Des Moines collection challenges me to think about a wide range of mostly recent art, some familiar, some not. A few objects that caught my eye, beyond my favorite Anselm Kiefer, Fred Wilson, and Graciela Iturbide were this gorgeous Henry Ossawa Tanner of Christ Learning to Read, ca. 1911,

Nick Cave, Rescue, 2013, celebrating a ceramic dog surrounded by glass, metal and porcelain birds, flowers and beads.

In an overwhelming installation by Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson, AMONG THE BLADES BETWEEN THE FLOWERS...WHILE THE HORSE WATCHES...FOR THOSE WHO BEAR/BARE WITNESS, 2018, exuberant materials commemorate Jamaicans lost to slavery and racism.

As always, the opera production of Queen of Spades was well done. Joyce Castle was a triumph, looking appropriately frail and and singing absolutely beautifully.