Study for a Flag

 

Study for a flag, version 2

Study for a Flag. A flag of resistance. 

Since early in the year, I've been looking for, and playing with options for displaying an American flag that communicates something about the current state of the country.

I remember first seeing an upside down American flag in the TV miniseries Amerika starring Kris Kristofferson. 

Promotional graphic for Amerika

This was in 1987, and I found it a powerful image. I think it was attached to a vehicle in a commercial I saw. I soon learned of its significance to communicate distress. This signal has been displayed much in recent years...and much in recent months by political partisans across the spectrum.

It's not the signal I'm interested in sending. I guess it's fitting, to flip the flag, but I worry it undercuts the significance of the intended gesture in the service of demonstrating displeasure. It's also lost that shocking impact I felt upon first seeing it. I will say that we are in a state of existential distress of the kind I've certainly not known. 

I first envisioned a shroud for the flag; something that signals something not quite right, something that has changed. The thought being the shroud is transparent, but slightly obscuring, but also protective; a covering that can be removed once sanity has been regained, and the threat of stain has receded. 

First version of the study.

My first question was what color would the shroud take. I chose black for the first parry, even though it evokes a sense of mourning that I want to avoid. It's not unfitting to acknowledge a sense of mourning, but I don't want to connote a sense of resignation or concession. White is another option, and I may try that too for another iteration to see for myself, but that option seemed to me to convey another level of. acquiescence.

Just in the last week or so, I happened upon the flag of the Sons of Liberty. An array of vertical stripes, five red, four white, known as the Rebellious Stripes, sometimes adorned with the segmented snake of the first colonies, sometimes plain. 

Those Rebellious Stripes are embedded in our American Flag and I knew they could be foregrounded. I'm now thinking of the version of the USS Enterprise in the Next Generation Series that in times of high conflict, would be separated, with the "saucer" of the ship holding the command deck would advance on it's own as a more nimble war vessel, preserving the extended crew and families in the section left behind. A tenuous comparison, but the point is that the signs for action, for rebellion, are embedded in the DNA of the image. 

With this alteration, I feel I've arrived at a point near completion. It brings what felt passive to something much more active. The contrast between the shrouded composition and the naked red and white stripes is stark and jarring. Front and center is the coursing blood and rigid bone of resistance that rests at the heart of what this corpus is intended to be made. It's an act of preserving the essence of the whole while showing one's intentionally Rebellious Stripes.

Time to scale up and play more with materials. I expect to have a large version ready to display on October 18th for the No Kings observance.

Study for a flag - Rebellious Stripes.

Raven Chacon's Tiguex in - really in - Albuquerue, NM

Cover of the Tiguex catalogue published by the Tamarind Institute.

The week I moved to ABQ, the Tamarind Institute hosted a talk by Hammersley Resident Artist, R. Luke Dubois, at the Special Collections Library on Central Ave. I attended that talk and realized - without a doubt the move to this place was the right one for me. 

That sense of being optimally located was reinforced for me while sitting in the ABQ Museum auditorium listening to Raven Chacon's Hammersley talk on Aug 24th. 

Raven Chacon on stage with Dr. Ana Alonso-Minutti at the 

Albuquerque Museum on the occasion of his Fredrick Hammersley Resident Artist talk.

Raven used his talk as an opportunity to announce and detail the components of his city wide, day-long composition Tiguex which will be performed on Saturday, Sept 27. Tiguex is a piece consisting of 20 distinct movements, in as many different locations, from the peak of the Sandias to the Three Sister volcanos on the West Mesa, hundreds of performers, with a duration from sunrise to sunset and beyond, all conducted throughout the day from the beacon of KUNM (while you're here, take a moment to donate to this (or any public radio station) that is on the front line of the Amer-fascist attach on free speech and free information.)) The performance will be livestreamed by the city on its One Media Youtube Channel.

Tiguex is the Tewa word that describes this land between the Pueblos of Sandia and Isleta upon which Albuquerque has developed. The piece features and celebrates the overlay of multiple histories that have converged, collided and coalesced in this valley.  Having grown up here, these histories are also those of Raven. 

Chacon's residency at Tamarind was devoted to developing a visual score in the form of a map that plots the progression of the Tiguex composition, adding to the history/heritage from which it draws.

Details of the lithograph map and visual score created during his residency at Tamarind:

To be in a community where these kinds of dreams can be realized and such interactions can develop is a boon, and I'm all here for it. 

Tamarind hosted an open house earlier this month and Raven was on hand discussing his time in residence and the development of his print which is a a map and visual score for the Tiguex piece. 

On a recent episode of Bad at Sports, the critic Ben Davis laid out the most salient description I've heard yet of the quagmire social media has laid at our feet salient manner (at about 52 mins): 

....What has happened to culture in the social media era is a dramatic rupture in community. So you have things that feel like culture but no longer function as culture in the sense that they attach you to any sort of human community. 

My sense is Tiguex is an antidote to the detachment of our current state. It's very connected to place and humanity. It occurred to my last night that the very performance itself is a map describing a terrain and the life it has spawned. It's also a map to be experienced rather than read. (Naturally, this had already ocurred to Raven long ago as on the project website he describes the piece as a "temporal map")

Guiding Mantras at the Tamarind Institute.

Happy Interdependence Day

Interdependence Day, 2025, watercolor and fabric.

The jingoistic concussions I'm hearing through the filter of my windows and walls right shake like signifiers of the toxic 'merikinity that has only grown more insipid, and inane with everyone of the 249 observations of the U.S. Independence Day. 

The original declaration of this new, very imperfect, but self-determined union was a global anomaly in 1776. Our inheritance ought to be the responsibility to make it the norm, throughout the world. Unfortunately, the fixation on that one great moment a quarter of a millennium past is a pass on reflecting on how we today are upholding the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence. 

To enjoy a right or freedom to the exclusion of another elevates one to the status of a middle management autocrat. It's a passive promotion, but one born of our privilege, and it's one we wear unquestioningly in our indifference to the billions of non lottery winners.

I'm no longer observing Independence Day for the freedom of one relies on the freedom of all. Freedom of the sort we celebrate has come to be seen as some inherent sign of the quality of our character. A right bestowed upon only the deserving....which is us, the chosen. And so a religion was formed and deformed in time into a cult. 

So now, I observe Interdependence Day, for the freedom of one is actually dependent on the freedom of all. For if not all are free, the freedom we assume, is actually a tyranny of which we are on the high side of. 

One of those imperfect men who kicked off this notion of self determination, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a letter, excerpted below to the Mayor of Washington as a response to an invitation to join the Independence Day celebration in that city 1826:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. The form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason, and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others—for ourselves let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

Pope Chump

 

A little mashup of Bacon's Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and the ai rendition shared by Pope wannabe chump.

Cake at Evoke Contemporary; Paintings by Lee Price

 

Self Portrait Eating a Hostess Cupcake, oil on linen

We enjoyed a mini Beacon, NY reunion at the opening of Lee Price's exhibit, Cake, at Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe on Friday night.  We briefly said hi to Lee, and caught up for a while Fritz, Lee's husband, and ran into Mei Ying So, owner of Artisan Wine Shop who came out West for the opening. I spent a month in 2011 imposing on the hospitality of the Artisan Wine Shop and Beacon Pilates working through my ]twenty-six Paces[ project for the Windows On Main St. exhibit that year. 

The works Lee is exhibiting here are suffused with rich patterns, both those of textiles, and those of living, represented by the symmetrical place settings of prepared tables. Those temporal patterns of the tabletop remain stolid, even as their elements are pushed and pulled by the indulgences they play host to. 

 

There are two basic viewpoints presented in the works here. The viewer standing in front, in close proximity looking directly at Lee as she consume her emotively frosted confections, and the overhead, "god's view" of table tops populated by the artist alone, her with companions, or simply by the leavings of the subjects after they've pushed away from their places.

Looking over the exhibition thumbnails on the Evoke website just now, the repeated central circle of table tops festooned with the signs of communion, my mind goes to Malevich, and more broadly, the use of the circle in Russian Constructivism.  

Spring, oil on linen

This is a stretch, but the mind does what it does. 

The presence of the circle in Malevich's work is a more rarified punctuation to the straight edged, corner wielding forms that predominate his works. 

Winter, oil on linen

Kasimir Malevich, Black Circle (motive 1915), 1924

Outside Evoke - A poster image of Summer

Kasimir Malevich, Mystic Suprematism (Red Cross on Black Circle),  1920-1922

Ali's Meal, oil on linen

All things in Harmony

Helen Molesworth, in her conversation with Harmony Hammond at Site Santa Fe on March 15th mixed up her approach to the two talking heads on a stage format with what she called Harmony Hammond in 3 Ways. 

Way #1 was a PowerPoint slideshow set to a Joan Armatrading song that illustrated Molesworth's experience alone in the gallery, highlighting the the exhibition elements that drew her in and the flights of recollection and affinity that they inspired. 

Way #2 was Harmony Hammond seen through the reviewers lens of Molesworth, special New Yorker reviewer.

Finally, Way #3 reverted to the conversational Q&A format between the Curator and the Artist. This is true entertainment for some of us. You can watch the event for yourself below. 

This talk followed talks that were held on the opening weekend of the exhibits by Hammond (Fringe) and Dakota Mace (Dahodiynii - Sacred Places) on March 1. Hammond was in conversation with writer/artist Jarrett Earnest and Mace was conversing with artist Porfirio Gutierrez. Heck. I'll just paste them in here too. 

Fringe is a great overview of Harmony Hammond's work. A great opportunity for me personally to see a significant amount of work by this artist I only really learned about after moving to New Mexico, and who has been having an elevated moment in these past few years. I'm just now remembering this was now my third time attending a talk by Hammond within a year. Last fall the Albuquerque Museum hosted a Tamarind talk with Hammond at the completion of her most recent residency at the Tamarind Institute.

A surprise perk I received in the mail a couple of weeks ago was a package from Tamarind that held a lovely publication documenting her collaboration with them. I've been now been several times over Hammond blessed recently. 

DESIRE - HARMONY HAMMOND, a publication of Tamarind Press

A few details from Fringe that drew me in:

Parked at the entrance of the museum that day was Axle Contemporary with a view into an exhibit of sculptures by Inga Hendrickson called These Cracks Weep.

 

In the Studio Today

Works in progress under the painting pavilion.

A new work in progress below and an old work in progress since 2014 above.

 

Hands off ABQ

 A milestone was reached last weekend. I attended my first political protest in earnest. Congregating en masse is not a typical yearning that I hold in my heart. However, my motivation to do so now is rooted in the need to show up and be present for those around me that are fearful, impacted and searching in this American moment of chaos and executively mandated cruelty and stupidity.

In fact there was such a sense of community and care, and cheer in seeing work colleagues and friends that just the act of gathering - and venting has much to offer. 

It is a way of holding space. An ever helpful and hopeful act. 

A few views of the scene at Albuquerque's Civic Plaza on April 5. 

This was my fav sign of the day. 

Here are Angelika and me with our signs. 

My Slum Lord sign features a still from a short video I made in 2019.

The Ides of Chump

 On Saturday, along with some number of others, I posted a couple of cards to the White House for the Ides of March. 

The tone of discourse in our current moment is lamentable indeed, and it must be said the tone of these missives will not sway that needle toward amicability, but there is hope yet to move in that direction.

Nous Sommes Françoise Gilot

We have all known what an unrepentant chauvinist prick Picasso was for his entire life, but only recently did I come around to reading Françoise Gilot's Life with Picasso and the full force of his asshatted fuckheadery struck my full attented awareness. 

In each episode that revealed his insecure man-baby character, I became acutely aware of the parallel with our current situation with the man-baby currently occupying the White House. In a way we now, on a near global scale, are positioned in the role of Françoise Gilot. 

In his Red Hand File #313 Nick Cave reflects on the question of separating the consideration of an artist with clearly objectionable and offensive characteristics from their art, with a focus on his fondness for the work of Kanye West. Cave considers the notion that such a separation can exist is absurd. It may well the the very asshole-ness of an artist that made them capable of creating the work that you find so moving. 

Françoise Gilot's youthful indiscretion will, for me, be forever known at Prickasshole. And though, he was able to create many groundbreaking and moving works, he was fundamentally trapped, perhaps by the most objectionable qualities of his personality under a ceiling clouded by the inventiveness of his youth. It may well be his behavior was rooted in the same source that prevented him from going beyond 70 years of solipsistic pastiche. It's very much an individual place to decide whether is possible to love the work but hate the maker. I may fall on either side of the equation depending on the situation. Did Carl Andre kill Ana Mendieta? Should he have faced punishment for that? Yes, I think he did, and he should have. Do I reject his work because its relationship to him? I don't. Have I stopped appreciating the work of Frank Stella who paid Andre's bail, or any of the other artists who likely used their power to circle the wagons to protect one of their own and denigrate the female victim and her supporters? No. I can object to them personally, and particularly their roles in shaping a world that secured their place while excluding worthy outsiders who were "other."

I think work can exist and have relevance even when the maker is rightfully rejected. I also think that the needed work of correcting the record and re-balance the field to give due to the worthy other that was excluded is happening - but not without intention and vigilance. 

The great news for us is that Françoise Gilot did kick her gremlin to the curve and had a whole other life beyond that one, reputation making, as it was, bump in the road. And so can we. 

Tamarind Institute 2024 Collector's Club Print Revealed

 I got a little bit of a kid's xmas thrill yesterday when I received an email that revealed the image of the print Jordan Ann Craig created for Tamarind Institute's Collector's Club for 2024.

Last Summer, I shelled over my money when the artist was announced. I didn't know her at the time, but since then, I've been seeing it pop up. The work she has created is titled Sharp Tongue, Soft Skies" and is a five colored lithograph in an edition of 50 and measures 21" x 21" 

This is an exciting program that I learned about when I first arrived in Abq in 2019 and immediately jumped on it, and wished I had been aware of it far sooner (even though the likelihood of being able to afford such a splurge was not a given.) 

At that time, both the artist and the image was a mystery, which I thought was exciting. The unknowing appealed to me greatly. A little taste of taste of danger, with no danger, aside from feeling I received something I in no way would have wanted to spend $700 on. 

Shortly thereafter, on a visit to Tamarind, I told the gallery director I enjoyed the unknowingness inherent in the set up. She said that most people don't like that uncertainty and they would likely be changing the format to accommodate that aversion. I found that a shame, since the purpose is really to give support to a really excellent institution - and an institution with a certain track record that one who is looking to give support, should trust in.  

In any case, starting in 2020 they've announced the name of the artist who would be creating the work. - Although that was interrupted during the Pandemic, at which point, club members would be able to choose a print from a selection of the back catalog. 2024 marked the return of the nascent prior model. 

So, ok, that's ok too. I certainly still thrilled at a bit of the unknown with this most recent iteration, and now, I'm really anticipating being able to see the work in person....!

A Shining Gem

This small untitled Kelly James Marshall piece from 2017 outshone much of what was on display at the Broad when I visited LA in October. 

Mine is an unfortunate photo of the painting, but it must serve to hold this piece in memory. In that memory, I believe the piece is in the 20" x 16" range. 

Another Advent Calendar Project: ChristmasK

After a hiatus of a couple of years, I'm back with another Advent Calendar. This one I'm calling ChrismasK. 

You can see a snapshot of the ChristMask Project on my website.

Dusting off this shoulder amidst the gathering of dust upon that very shoulder. And the other one too. High and Dry at the Jen Tough Gallery through Dec. 18, 2023

 An opening tonight at the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe features a bevy of NM artists, and I'm in that mix. 

H6 (vein) - or Harbor 6 from 2014 is my contribution to this group show. 

There have been many recent signals pointing to - or eliciting from inside me - a kind of urgency to reignite a dormant engine of production but even more so, of exploration. 

Even typing this post is another tickle on a comatose toe as I reflect on the source of these Harbor Paintings and ecosystem of thought and impulse in which I was immersed.

Don't get me wrong, I've continued my tinkerpassion, but my mind space has often been bent more toward problemsolving at the job - imagining possiblities at the job than on those activities back on the home/making machine front. Somehow I only this week, but a couple of pieces together upon waking from a dream. The blueprint exists.  It's now up to me to but on my big boy tool belt and get to hacking away.

Reflecting back on this body of work, I just had occasion to watch the trailer I created for the original exhibit for the first time in many years.  It's probably one of my 2 masterpieces.