Šuŋkawakaŋ Day.

[My] Tomorrow (Saturday, 8th Oct.) will most likely see Affinity closed for the day, I absolutely have to work. I have a beautiful, 200 count, white muslin, 90″ x 108″, arriving soon, which I’ll be painting, then freehand quilting, so it can be quickly done and donated to Standing Rock for winter. I spent time on horse sketching, then pulled out my test fabric, which is most definitely not 200 count, it’s cheap muslin. Even so, I haven’t played with all the various fabric paints I’ve come by, and now’s the time, so that I don’t fuck up that lovely fabric on the way. I didn’t even get the first bloody horse finished today, and I managed to completely forget what hours bent over a table do to my spine. (Insert scream here.) The first horse is roughly 26″ x 14″. I have to finish the first horse, then get eight more done. (I also need to do this, not just for testing various media, I need to work out colours, patterns, all that jazz.) I really hate to disappoint people, and if I can get a few things posted, I will, but don’t worry if I don’t show at all. I’ll definitely be back on Sunday.

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© C. Ford.

Hehaka Tȟahá.

I keep forgetting, I got a beautiful elk hide at wačipi. It’s back to being safely tucked away for when I have time to work on it. Roughly 70something inches x 50something inches. No, I don’t know yet. Well, I know what I’m going to do with part of it, not all, and it’s something for us, so it won’t be for sale.

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© C. Ford.

Christa Resurrected.

The artist Edwina Sandys with her sculpture “Christa,” the centerpiece of an exhibition of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.

The artist Edwina Sandys with her sculpture “Christa,” the centerpiece of an exhibition of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.

Edwina Sandys had seen this before: the 250-pound bronze statue of a bare-breasted woman on a translucent acrylic cross being installed in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

This time around, however, she does not expect to see something else she had seen before: the statue being packed up after a call from a ranking church official telling her it had to go.

That happened the first time “Christa,” Ms. Sandys’s sculpture of a crucified woman, was shown at the cathedral in Manhattan during Holy Week in 1984.

A controversy erupted, complete with hate mail attacking it as blasphemous. Overruling the dean of the cathedral at the time, the suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York called the statue “theologically and historically indefensible” and ordered Ms. Sandys to take it away.

This time, it is being installed on the altar in the Chapel of St. Saviour as the centerpiece of “The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies,” an exhibition of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret — or reinterpret — the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus.

[…]

She came to know the Very Rev. James Park Morton, the dean of the cathedral for 25 years until 1996. “I said, ‘How brave are you?’” in 1984, she recalled. “He may not have said ‘try me,’ but words to that effect. I said, ‘How would you like to exhibit “Christa,” the female Christ?’ He said, ‘I’d be delighted.’ I took a deep breath, and that was that.”

Except with that, as Ms. Sandys put it, “all hell broke loose.” Angry letters arrived (the cathedral preserved them in its archives) and, according to Ms. Sandys, the suffragan bishop, Walter Dennis, “said he didn’t want it, and I had to come and get ‘Christa.’”

The full story of Christa is here.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Embroidery Artist Weaves Memes with Modern Feminism.

Images courtesy the artist.

Images courtesy the artist.

Leather Landscapes as Self-Portraits of Fetish and Devotion.

Tamara Santibañez - Landscape II (Massif) - 40" x 60" Oil on canvas, 2016. Image courtesy of Slow Culture Gallery.

Tamara Santibañez – Landscape II (Massif) – 40″ x 60″ Oil on canvas, 2016. Image courtesy of Slow Culture Gallery.

 

Tamara Santibañez studio, image courtesy of CJ Parel.

Tamara Santibañez studio, image courtesy of CJ Parel.

[I really, really want to own that.]

Bacteria-Inspired Art Infects a Chelsea Gallery.

Bomb Ayran, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.

Bomb Ayran, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.

 

Make Mongolia Great Again, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.

Make Mongolia Great Again, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.

The Miniature Beehive Nightclub Is for City Bees Only.

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All via The Creators Project.

Now It’s A Coaster.

Thomas Chung in his workplace. Photo by Kyle Clayton.

Thomas Chung in his workplace. Photo by Kyle Clayton.

There’s a terrific article about North Anchorage, Alaska artist Thomas Chung, who will be exhibiting tomorrow at Becky Gallery October 7, reception 5 – 8 p.m.

With a background in cultural anthropology, Chung combines symbols from various myths and stories along with contemporary brands like Coke and Jägermeister
“There’s something kind of funny about Jägermeister,” Chung said as he held a rubber circle mat with the deer and cross logo. “He’s that saint who was a hunter and ran into a deer and this glowing, crazy cross appeared and that’s how he found God. Now it’s a coaster.”

The full article is here. You can see more of Professor Chung’s work here.

The Box.

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Ron Amato has a kickstarter for his project, a book called The Box.

Focused on themes of isolation, desire, conflict and empowerment, Ron Amato’s photographic series and upcoming book, The Box, speaks to human experiences of self-discovery and community building. Using a series of boxes to create visual metaphors, Ron echoes his development from adolescence to adulthood through over 100 color, and black and white photographs. Evoking first his youth in Brooklyn, New York during the 1960s and 1970s, moving through his coming out as a gay man and to his present position as a respected professional photographer and teacher, Ron creates a vivid portrait of struggle and triumph.

Individually the photographs evoke powerful responses. However, they achieve the scope of their power only in relation to each other.

Reflecting the square of the boxes in the photographs, this 96-page book is designed in a 10-inch square format. It has a hard cover and dust jacket. It is available with an embossed, cloth covered slipcase at specific pledge levels. The printing will be of the highest quality from a renowned Italian printing house.

You can read and see more here. Ron Amato’s website: http://www.ronamato.com/

Les Diners de Gala.

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Published only once in 1973, Les Diners de Gala was a dream fulfilled for surrealist artist Salvador Dali who claimed at the age of 6 that he wanted to be a chef. The  cookbook pairs 136 recipes over 12 chapters (the 10th of which is dedicated to aphrodisiacs) with the his exceptionally strange illustrations and collages created especially for the publication. The artworks depict towering mountains of crayfish, an unusual meeting of a swan and a toothbrush in a pastry case, and portraits of Dali himself mingling with chefs against decadent place settings. Recipes include such delicacies as “Thousand Year Old Eggs”, “Veal Cutlets Stuffed With Snails”, “Frog Pasties”, and “Toffee with Pine Cones”.

…Despite the unusual ingredients and preparation methods, many of the old school recipes in Les Diners de Gala originated in some of the top restaurants in Paris at the time including Lasserre, La Tour d’Argent, Maxim’s, and Le Train Bleu. Lest you think anything in the book might be remotely healthy, it offers a cautionary disclaimer at the outset:

We would like to state clearly that, beginning with the very first recipes, Les Diners de Gala, with its precepts and its illustrations, is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here.

We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.

…Only around 400 copies of Les Diners de Gala are known to survive, most of which sell for hundreds of dollars. However Taschen has finally made this rare book available for the first time in 43 years as a new reprint currently available for pre-order.

Via Colossal Art.

A Look at the U.S. Claim to Oceti Sakowin.

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© Marty Two Bulls.

Steven Newcomb has an excellent column up at ICTMN, examining the claim to Očeti Sakowiŋ.

We are able to think back to a time when our ancestors were living entirely free from and independent of ideas developed across the Atlantic Ocean in a place called Christendom. We know that our Native ancestors were in no way subject to Christian ideas before the Christians sailed across that ocean to our part of the world, which many of us know as Turtle Island. Because the Christian Europeans were not physically here on Turtle Island, their concepts, ideas, and arguments were not here either. This leaves us with a mystery. On what basis did the invading colonizers first assume that our free nations and our ancestors were subject to the ideas and arguments of the Christian world? To what extent are those ideas still being used today centuries later by the United States?

In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, published in 1833, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story asked a related question. He asked how the British Colonies got title to the soil of the North American continent. His question not only assumed that the British colonies had title to the soil of the continent, it also assumed, as Story said, that the colonizing powers obtained a “title” by their own “assertion” that they had a “complete title” to and “absolute dominion” over the soil of what from our ancestors’ perspective was the soil of our national territories. Story traced those ideas back to a papal bull of the fifteenth century and to royal charters of England and Great Britain.

Most people fail to realize that men such as Joseph Story and John Marshall spent a great deal of their time thinking about such matters. They did so because they had to develop a rationale for asserting that the Christian colonizers from Europe had a right to the soil of the continent that was superior to whatever right our original nations and our ancestors thought they had. Men of ideas such as Story and Marshall, whose job it was to persuade, undoubtedly knew there was a slight chance that someday in the distant future, we, the descendants of our Native ancestors, might try to go back through the record of the ideas of the colonizers and trace their mental “steps.”

A few of us have been working for decades on that retrospective with the goal in mind of not only understanding but of also now at long last directly challenging the ideas and arguments that were “laid down” by the ancestors of the colonizing society who sailed to Turtle Island from Western Christendom.

Based on decades of intensive and diligent research, we now know that the Christian European thinkers dreamed up out of their heads the idea that the representatives of Christendom could enter someone else’s country and mentally, verbally, and ceremonially make the assertion that the monarch they represented had an “absolute dominion” over the country they had located by ship. They further assumed that their mental, verbal, and ceremonial assertion would become “true” because the Christian thinkers dreamed it up in their minds and treated it as “true” thereby sustaining it over time.

The idea that they as colonizers had a complete title to and absolute dominion over the soil of the territories of our Original Nations, a point that Story, Marshall, and other white men claimed on behalf of the United States, became “true” and a “reality” for the colonizers and for the United States simply because those ideas were collectively treated as “true” and as a “reality.” Since this was all happening in the colonizers’ own language at the time, when such assertions were initially made, our ancestors had no understanding of the specific nature of the colonizers’ bizarre views. Some of our ancestors such as Tecumseh did try to challenge the colonizers’ thinking based on the original free existence of our nations.

The recent controversy over the Dakota Access Pipeline traces back to that process of reality-construction and the ability of the United States government to simply declare a given reality into existence. But there is something rather surprising in the historical record that most people know nothing about. It is surprising because it is language that still ought to be benefiting Native nations. …

The full column is here, and it’s excellent reading.

Dickhead.

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This wonderful piece of artwork was brought to my attention by Daz, and I’m so grateful. This was done in 1536. Makes you want to smile, doesn’t it? Makes me laugh, because I think we’ve all had at least one “OGNI HOMO ME GUARDA COME FOSSE UNA TESTA DE CAZI (Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead)” moment in our lives.

Artists, no matter when they were active, never cease to delight me. If there’s one thing to be sorry about in having a relatively short life, it’s that I won’t be around to see all the delightful artwork which will abound in the future. The importance of art cannot be underestimated, this is vital to us, to our humanity. It’s often quite good for fostering and embracing rebellion, too, even the tiny ones.

Sunday Facepalm: Piss Christ, Still Pissing Off Priests.

Immersion, Andres Serrano.

Immersion, Andres Serrano.

“Christ immersed in urine”  “To depict Christ in a bucket of urine”

Before we get anywhere at all here, I just need to yell a bit about the above idiocy. That’s manufacturing hysterical drama. No one went back in time, found out whether or not Christ actually existed, then kidnapped him, dunked him in a person sized bucket of urine, took his photo, then sailed back to the current time. It’s a cheap plastic crucifix in a glass of urine. Encouraging cheaper and cheaper versions of religious icons wasn’t Serrano’s idea, that belongs to the church. It’s also on the church that it was some sort of good idea for people to carry and wear a miniature execution device. Dunking a bit of plastic gimcrack into a glass of piss is not at all the same thing as dunking an actual person or god (if you can find one) into a bucket of piss without their consent. Okay, on to the outrage:

Now the American’s most infamous image – P*** Christ [sic] – will be shown at a politically-charged exhibition called Torture at the Void Gallery on October 8.

The exhibition also features images depicting the Hooded Men – a group of 14 men arrested at the height of the Troubles and, according to the European Court of Human Rights, subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. In 1987, Serrano received international attention for P*** Christ, igniting heated debate on the freedom of artistic expression and the public financing of controversial artworks. The image will go on show in Derry along with a second piece from the Immersion series, Black Supper, a dark re-imagining of da Vinci’s Last Supper.

A photo from the exhibition entitled 'Torture' by Andres Serrano.

A photo from the exhibition entitled ‘Torture’ by Andres Serrano.

Rev Roger Higginson of Coleraine Free Presbyterian Church said the artist’s desire to shock could be his way of hiding a lack of talent.

Oh lord. Here we go.

He added: “Men like these artists are actually quite cowardly because they make a mockery of Christ in a way that they wouldn’t if it was Mohammed or the Muslim faith because that would put them in danger.

Oh for fuck’s sake, not this bullshit again. Is this idiocy never going to die? As for Immersion (Piss Christ) being a mockery, it wasn’t intended that way by the artist, it actually had to do with the cheapening of religious icons. A great many people didn’t perceive of it as mockery, either. If the Muslim faith encouraged followers to festoon themselves with a cheap plastic instrument of execution, with someone hanging on it, I’d be happy to dunk it in some piss and photograph it. We’re once again faced with the particular idiocy of pretending that we’re talking about a different religious belief, too. Same basic story, same basic beliefs, same god, so please, shut up.

“It is easy for people like him to take a cheap shot and mock Christ, mock Christian people and mock the Bible.

Really? Like you’re making it easy? People who actually take the time to mock Christianity often find themselves in danger, subjected to death threats and massive harassment from the so-called faithful flock. You don’t even need to indulge in actual mockery. Just saying something Christians don’t like is often sufficient. It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

“His depiction of the Lord is offensive, not just to me as a man but it offends me greatly because this is how he portrays the Lord who gave up his life for all of us and this artist has thrown that sacrifice back.

Sigh. The sacrifice was thrown back. I’ve heard that before. How? Exactly how does it do that? It sounds suitably dramatic, but I suspect it doesn’t actually mean one damn thing. It’s true enough that El Shaddai is a nasty, mean, petty minded asshole of a god, but y’know, his kid is supposed to be a tad better on that stuff. So maybe Jesus wouldn’t be all that concerned. Also, this sort of isht coming from a religion which openly states someone who did truly horrible things would get the standard “get out of hell free” card makes this outrage as sturdy as wet paper.

“If you consider artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt, they didn’t set out to shock people or be controversial because they had real talent and their work spoke for itself. Perhaps if, as an artist you need to shock and cause offence and outrage to get your work noticed, it may be because of a lack of real talent.”

Hahahahahaha. Oh my. Someone doesn’t know a gosh darn thing about art or artists. If we must talk about a lack of talent, the priesthood seems to be a profession for people remarkably lacking in any meaningful talent. How about we have that chat? There’s a good deal more outrage and asterisked spelling here, I’ve had my fill. The exhibition launches on October 8 at 7.30pm and runs until December 17, at Void Gallery in Derry.

Indigenous News Round-up.

plastic

The Immortal Mr. Plastic.

Excerpts only, click links for full articles.

barack_obama On My Final White House Tribal Nations Conference, by President Barack Obama:

This week, I hosted my eighth and final White House Tribal Nations Conference as President, a tradition we started in 2009 to create a platform for people across many tribes to be heard. It was a remarkable testament to how far we’ve come.

It was just eight years ago when I visited the Crow Nation in Montana and made a promise to Indian country to be a partner in a true nation-to-nation relationship, so that we could give all of our children the future they deserve.

winonaladuke-e1336873224811  Slow, Clean, Good Food, by Winona LaDuke:

In an impressive fossil fuels travel day, I left the Standing Rock reservation and flew to Italy for the International Slow Food gathering known as Terra Madre. A world congress of harvesters, farmers, chefs and political leaders, this is basically the World Food Olympics. This is my fifth trip to Italy for Slow Food. I first went with Margaret Smith, when the White Earth Land Recovery Project won the Slow Food Award for Biodiversity in 2003, for our work to protect wild rice from genetic engineering. This year, I went as a part of the Turtle Island Slow Food Association- the first Indigenous Slow Food members in the world, a delegation over 30 representing Indigenous people from North American and the Pacific. We have some remarkable leaders, they are young and committed.

It is a moment in history for food, as we watch the largest corporate merger in history- Bayer Chemical’s purchase of Monsanto for $66 billion; with “crop protection chemicals” that kill weeds, bugs and fungus, seeds, and (likely to be banned in Europe) glyphosate, aka Roundup. Sometimes I just have to ask: ‘Just how big do you all need to be, to be happy?’

tribal_chairman_jeff_l-_grubbe_agua_caliente_band_of_cahuilla_indians_main_0  Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Donates $250,000 to Standing Rock Legal Fund:

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians is donating $250,000 to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s legal fund, citing the need to keep pushing for proper consultation even after the Dakota Access oil pipeline issue is decided.

“We support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s effort to ensure the United States Army Corps of Engineers, or any other agency or department of the United States, strictly adheres to federal environmental review and tribal consultation requirements prior to authorizing any projects that may damage the environment or any sites that are of historic, religious, and cultural significance to any Indian tribe,” said Agua Caliente Chairman Jeff L. Grubbe in a statement on September 27, calling on President Barack Obama to make sure consultation is thorough.

3-fiesta-protest-woman-with-sign_dsc0508_widea  Natives Speak Out Against the Santa Fe Fiesta – The Bloodless Reconquest:

A loud group of about 50 mostly Native protesters disrupted the Entrada kickoff event of the Fiestas de Santa Fe. This is the annual reenactment of Don Diego de Vargas’s “peaceful reconquest” of Santa Fe in 1692 as produced by Caballeros de Vargas, a group which is a member of the Fiesta Council, and several current and past City of Santa Fe Councilors are members of the Fiesta Council or played parts in the Entrada over the years. So these are layers you must wade through when people ask questions and protesters demand changes. And changes or outright abolishment of The Entrada are what the groups “The Red Nation” and “In The Spirit of Popay” are asking for.

climate_news_network-binoculars-flickr-aniket_suryavanshi  Dire Climate Impacts Go Unheeded:

The social and economic impacts of climate change have already begun to take their toll—but most people do not yet know this.

Politicians and economists have yet to work out how and when it would be best to adapt to change. And biologists say they cannot even begin to measure climate change’s effect on biodiversity because there is not enough information.

Two studies in Science journal address the future. The first points out that historical temperature increases depress maize crop yields in the U.S. by 48 percent and have already driven up the rates of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa by 11 percent.

big-pix-rick-bartow-counting-the-hours ‘Counting the Hours’ By Rick Bartow:

Rick Bartow, a member of the Mad River Band of Wiyot, walked on April 2, 2016, and had suffered two strokes before he passed. The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts reports that those events affected his work, and it can be seen in his collection as “exciting examples of Bartow’s production since his stroke… that evidence a new freedom of scale and expression.”

Born in Oregon in 1946, Bartow was never formally trained in the arts, though his artistic nature was encouraged and he did graduate from Western Oregon University with a degree in secondary arts education in 1969. Right after that he served in Vietnam from 1969-1971, and it was demons from that war that he spent his early years in art exorcising. He says he was “twisted” after Vietnam and his art can be described as disturbing, surreal, intense, and visionary; even transformative.

harney_peak_renamed_black_hills_peak_-_ap_photo  Celebration of Forgiveness at Black Elk Peak:

On a recent Autumn Saturday in the Black Hills, a handful of men and women gathered at around 9 a.m. at the Sylvan Lake trailhead just below Black Elk Peak. By 10 a.m., they numbered close to 80.

“The focal point of our gathering was to have family members of General Harney have an opportunity to apologize to members of the Little Thunder family,” said Basil Brave Heart, Oglala Lakota, an organizer of the event. Brave Heart initiated and led the effort to change the name of this highest peak east of the Rocky Mountains from Harney Peak to Black Elk Peak.

Among those standing in a circle that morning was Paul Stover Soderman, a seventh-generation descendant of General William Harney, known as The Butcher of Ash Hollow, and to the Lakota as the architect of the same conflict, known to them as the Massacre at Blue Water Creek. Soderman had come to apologize to Sicangu descendants of Chief Little Thunder, the Brule leader of those murdered in that conflict, and to seek forgiveness and healing.

All this and much more at ICTMN.