rediscovered

Alma Thomas 1973 Red Rose Cantata

Thomas  was little-known until her work was suggested (by my boss!) to decorate the interior of the Obamas' living quarters in the White House. Now she's all the rage. This painting hangs in the NGA and another is situated prominently in the Philips. Oh, art market, how fickle you are.

Her work reminds me of Yayoi Kusama, of repetition, of a scarf that K owns... Her rectangles look like torn, delicate fragments, and I love how things begin to come apart when they are repeated over and over.

digesting the art

Tony Cragg 1991 Subcommittee

Subcommittee is a large outdoor sculpture in the area immediately surrounding the HMSG. When I first approached it I was reminded of wooden doll heads, but actually it is an enlarged rubber stamp set. The title conjures ideas of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and slow moving mechanisms: appropriate for the National Mall? It also reminds me of gossiping heads, huddled in a mass. I feel like the stamps have been forgotten in the bustle, as if to comment on the irrelevance of old systems, or the inevitability of younger generations replacing older ones.

Also, I eat my lunch here. 

I like to watch people interact with the sculpture, especially because this one in particular is not so abstract and people generally relate to it or at least finding it aesthetically pleasing. Today a precocious preteen approached me in the middle of my potato salad and asked me to take a picture of her and her friends as they 'like, just did some crazy pose or something.'

I am for an art...

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a staring point of zero.

Claes Oldenburg, 1961