OLD NEWS

EASTERN COYOTES MATING by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/yubf75tn>
For several weeks Eastern Coyotes have been engaged in courtship behavior – mutual scent marking, chasing each other, wrestling and traveling together. They become increasingly vocal during this time, with lone females using “invitation howls” to attract mates and pairs engaging in howling duets.
Sometime between late January and March, peaking in mid-to late February, mating takes place. This is the only time when male coyotes are capable of producing sperm. Female coyotes have a two-to-five-day receptive period when they will allow mating to take place. Mated pairs become nearly inseparable during this time, traveling and sleeping closely together.
Look carefully if you happen to be following coyote tracks at this time of year. Throughout courtship and the breeding season females often leave spots of blood in their urine or beds, which can be visible in the snow _NaturallyCurious

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YOU
<https://tinyurl.com/47h4s6h3> _DavidShrigley

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HENRIKE NAUMANN, SCULPTOR WHO EXHUMED EAST GERMANY’S TROUBLED PAST, DIES AT 41
<https://tinyurl.com/2wevbct6>
Henrike Naumann, a sculptor whose installations composed of furniture and design objects associated with East Germany’s troubled past made her a star of the German art scene, died on Saturday at 41.
Her death preceded one of her biggest projects to date: the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where the Berlin-based artist is set to represent the nation alongside Sung Tieu this year. The Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), the organization that facilitates the German Pavilion, said in a statement that she died of a “short, serious illness.”
“With Henrike Naumann’s passing, we have lost not only a significant figure in contemporary German art, but also a warm-hearted, insightful, and highly committed individual,” ifa said. “Her legacy lives on – in her works, in the numerous international collaborations she initiated, and in the many people who were inspired by her thinking and work.”
Naumann’s art was by turns disturbing, intriguing, and heartfelt, attesting to a Germany that remains unsettled well after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Often working with ready-made objects that she acquired and assembled to form installations, she produced art that seemed ordinary, perhaps even a little banal, which was by design. Her “aesthetic of reunification,” as she termed it, was intended to feel eerily familiar.
She sourced many of the objects through eBay Kleinanzeigen, a website through which Germans can sell their goods to one another. “I read and research a lot as part of my process, but I really start to create the language to express a certain idea in an installation by looking at what people do, at how they post their furniture—usually on my phone,” she told in 2022.
In another interview conducted that same year, she said, “I love to look for things that I think cannot exist. And then it often turns out they do exist. And then I need to get them.”
The objects she acquired sometimes had histories that seemed impossibly rich. For one 2018 show she featured a painted portrait of the conservative politician Birgit Breuel, who served as president of the controversial Treuhandanstalt, a holding firm that supervised East German assets following reunification. Naumann discovered the painting in the archives for Expo 2000, a World Expo held in Hanover that Breuel helped lead. Critic Kito Nedo reported that the painting had been gifted by the United Arab Emirates to the German Pavilion at that event. “In this weird, telling picture, the capitalist manager is depicted as a force in the ‘wilderness’ of an empty, postsocialist landscape,” Nedo wrote.
<https://tinyurl.com/3x2864ku>
Another memorable installation from 2018, titled 14 Words, involved the acquisition of the entire interior of a flower shop. Shown that year, the installation may have seemed innocent to those unfamiliar with the history surrounding it, which was decidedly dark. The piece’s title obliquely referred to the slogan used by a neo-Nazi; Naumann connected that white supremacist to the National Socialist Underground, a German group whose racist killings targeted such people as Enver Şimşek, a Turkish-born German who operated a flower shop in Nuremberg when he was murdered in 2000.
Yet the vast majority of the objects Naumann’s installations did not appear to contain objects imbued with narratives like that one. Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft), from 2019, featured a carpet, a couch, a rotary phone, and other objects that would have been familiar to most residents in the GDR. Naumann placed these objects on the wall of gallery, where items that normally might have appeared on a wall—framed portraits and the like—were exhibited on the floor. With this exhibition, Naumann created “spaces that mixed Nazi lineages and ecstatic rave culture, the Stone Age and the GDR, to refute simplistic characterizations of the East before and after reunification,”
Henrike Naumann was born in 1984 in Zwickau, East Germany. She spent much of her early years with her grandparents while her parents continued their studies. Her grandfather, Karl Heinz Jakob, worked in the GDR and so, she told “my early art education was impacted by a socialist understanding of art and education as things that should be accessible for everyone in society.”
<https://tinyurl.com/xsdr9wcs>
Rather than studying painting or sculpture, as artists tend to do, she instead enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden’s program for costume and stage design. Then, at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg, she studied set design for film and television productions, graduating in 2012. She attributed her artistic approach to her education. “I want to make sense of every angle, conceptually and literally,” she told
One of her earliest mature works was an installation about the National Socialist Underground, the group that killed Şimşek, the subject of 14 Words. Some of the NSU’s members lived in Zwickau, the city where Naumann was born, though this didn’t come to light until 2011. The year afterward, Naumann produced Triangular Stories (2012), an installation containing what purported to be home videos belonging to NSU members. In fact, even though they seemed to have been shot in 1992, these videos had been newly produced by Naumann.
_Alex Greenberger _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/y2jb5mta> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF BAUHAUS WOMEN:
It doesn’t take too long a look at the almost surrealistically clean-lined buildings of Walter Gropius to get the impression that the man wanted to usher in a new world, especially when you consider that many of them went up before World War II. Take the Bauhaus Dessau building, which, though completed exactly a century ago, looks like a concrete transmission from the future that never arrived, or one that may indeed still be on the way. It once housed the German art school turned political and cultural engine he founded in 1919, whose principles included absolute equality between male and female participants — or they did at first, at any rate.
Soon deciding that the new institution wouldn’t be taken seriously with too high a proportion of women, Gropius limited their enrollment to one-third of the student body. That episode, among others that underscore the ways in which Gropius and the Bauhaus’ ostensible commitment to the advancement of women wasn’t all it could be, figures into Susanne Radelhof’s documentary The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women.
Yet whatever the shortcomings in that department one might identify from a twenty-first century vantage, the fact remains that the Bauhaus made possible — or at least encouraged — more enduring and influential work by female artists and designers than almost any art school in early twentieth-century Europe.
Among the almost 500 women who studied at the Bauhaus, the film profiles figures like Alma Buscher, “who created prototypes of avant-garde furniture and toys”; “visionary metalsmith and designer” Marianne Brandt; Gunta Stölzl, whose “weaving revolutionized modern textile design” (weaving eventually being the main program to which women were admitted); Friedl Dicker, a “multitalented artist” dedicated to the Bauhaus; and Lucia Moholy, whose “exceptional photographs still influence how we view Bauhaus design today.” The school itself may have shut down in 1933, owing to the conflict between its aesthetic and political ends and those of the rising Nazi Party, but the forward-looking nature and worldwide cultural influence of the Bauhaus have ensured that we still feel the influence of its alumni, male and female alike.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7fdtx8> _OpenCulture

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/5ffvypma>
Female Figure, c. 3500-2400 BCE, from southern Egypt _CarolinaAMiranda

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A NECESSARY CLARIFICATION:
Jean-Michel Basquiat was not a Bohemian in the nineteenth-century sense, nor did he emerge from poverty or cultural deprivation. He attended St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, an elite progressive private school with a strong emphasis on the arts and intellectual freedom, at a time when its tuition was already well beyond public-school reach. His father, Gérard Basquiat, was a professionally employed accountant; his mother, Matilde Basquiat, worked in fashion and was deeply invested in culture, regularly taking him to museums and deliberately nurturing his artistic development. Basquiat was early-identified, institutionally supported, and culturally fluent long before SAMO or the mythology of the East Village took hold.
This does not negate the psychic exposure, volatility, or pressure under which his work was later made, but it does complicate the idea of Basquiat as a feral outsider who broke in by accident. He was not formed by prolonged economic deprivation in the way earlier Bohemians were. Rather, he represents a transitional figure: someone with early cultural access and education who later entered precarity and visibility at extraordinary speed. His tragedy lies less in exclusion than in acceleration, the market absorbed him faster than formation could stabilize. In that sense, Basquiat does not exemplify classical Bohemia; he marks the moment when Bohemia became untenable under late capitalism.
<https://tinyurl.com/ufp4m9t5> _ModernAgePainting

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ON PRESIDENTS' DAY,
Andy Warhol with a painted cast-iron stove modeled as a figure of George Washington, 1970s.
This was just one of many such objects owned by Warhol, an avid collector of American folk art
<https://tinyurl.com/28rcsbt7>
Sherrie Levine, Presidents
<https://tinyurl.com/9fduyjvt>
(various),
<https://tinyurl.com/mwb3v45x>
1979
<https://tinyurl.com/4hxmv554> _MichaelLobel

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32. ROBERT INDIANA, LOVE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4xce893d>
For all its frivolity, Valentine’s Day speaks to genuine human longing, which itself speaks to how hard it is in practice to truly love—and how nearly impossible to love our neighbors as ourselves. And yet we know how urgent that work is. Little else matters.
When William Penn named Philadelphia after the ancient city whose name meant “brotherly love,” it announced a radical experiment in governance—primarily religious tolerance, unlike other English colonies. Penn himself had spent eight months in the Tower of London for his Quaker faith. He believed a better society was possible.
But throughout its history, Philadelphia has demonstrated how difficult brotherly love is to achieve; the city almost immediately fell short of its mission. Still, it kept the name. That might seem naïve or Pollyannaish, but it’s probably something stranger and more honest—keeping the name despite the record. Refusing to rename it “City of Trying to Love But Mostly Failing.”
Philadelphia was not the first city to get a Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture (that was Indianapolis), but the famous three-dimensional text is most closely associated with Philly. The statue is beloved in the city partly because it’s sentimental, but also because it is a monumental, public reminder of the wager embedded in Philadelphia’s name. Tourists line up to pose with the four stacked letters, performing belief in an ancient idea: if we look at people attentively and without judgement, we see our own lives and struggles mirrored in their faces. Our neighbors as ourselves. _TheImpatientReader

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HEAVEN SCENT LAUNDROMAT TULIA, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/385eh5b3> _RuralIndexingProject

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LOOK AT THIS: BLUE POSTCARD by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/5dhnjz62>
When Derek Jarman’s Blue premiered in the UK in September 1993, it was broadcast simultaneously on TV (Channel 4), and radio (BBC 3). Channel 4 produced a booklet of the film’s text in a letterpress edition of 2,000 [plus, perhaps, a limited edition with a signed monochrome screen print? <https://tinyurl.com/48kvuxww> ], which was available for £3. Radio listeners could request a blue postcard to stare at during the broadcast.
The beautiful booklet is everywhere all the time. The postcard, not so much. Examples have been included in various Jarman-related exhibitions, but I suspect very few ever made it into the wild. There could be a swag closet at Basilisk Productions absolutely stuffed with unsent Blue postcards, or maybe they were used to take phone messages with a silver Sharpie. Anyway, I got one, and it’s sweet. A little glossy.
Though I once agonized over the correct aspect ratio for a Blue print, I never considered the postcard. It is A5, 148 x 210 mm, or √2:1, a ratio that has absolutely nothing to do with any screen, and everything to do with the ISO216 paper size standard. Whatever the original aspect ratio might be, it seems the correct ratio is whatever the format demands, whether film, video, radio, or print. _greg.org

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JOHN SINGER SARGENT, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, 1885,
<https://tinyurl.com/5xpfdecs> _JesseLocker

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WOODY GUTHRIE'S ANTI-FASCIST AMERICA by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/1k1z001>
The Trump administration has been pressuring the Smithsonian museums to mark the nation's 250th anniversary with exhibitions of "unifying" history. One of the few museums outside of DC to venture a large 250th anniversary show is the Huntington, with "This Land Is…," a sprawling survey of American history. It comes with a twist, featuring in title and content the American folk singer—and earliest Trump critic?—Woody Guthrie.
The singer's beef was with the Trump patriarch, Fred Trump. From 1950 to 1953 Guthrie and family lived in Beach Haven Place, a Brooklyn apartment owned by the elder Trump. In letters Guthrie complained about the apartment and its policy of not renting to Blacks. This led to a song, "Beach Haven Place Hate" ("I suppose Old Man Trump knows/Just how much racial hate he stirred up/In the bloodspot of human hearts.") Donald Trump first came to media attention defending his father's exclusionary policies in a 1973 suit filed by the Department of Justice.
<http://tiny.cc/4k1z001>
The title of the Huntington show, "This Land Is…", alludes of course to Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land" (1940). The exhibition's Guthrie material is sourced from the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, and the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle. On view will be the only surviving Guthrie guitar inscribed with his trademark incantation, "This Machine Kills Facists." Carved into the back of the instrument, the inscription is barely visible. Another of Guthrie's guitars had the words painted on the front in large letters. That guitar ended up in a Greenwich Village repair shop, where the owner refurbished the instrument and sanded off the words.
Guthrie was a self-taught painter, and the exhibition will have his portrait of George Washington.
Also on view at the Huntington will be two annotated copies of the July 1776 Declaration of Independence broadside; Washington's survey of Mount Vernon; documents of the Walking Purchase, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Japanese-American internment; literary material relating to land by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon, and Octavia Butler.
<http://tiny.cc/2m1z001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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I HAVE THE SAME DREAM EVERY NIGHT
<https://tinyurl.com/2p8u7wt> _DeanKissick

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ARUNDHATI ROY QUITS BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL OVER ‘STAY OUT OF POLITICS’ COMMENT
<https://tinyurl.com/y54x6f7f>
The author Arundhati Roy has withdrawn from the Berlinale after the film festival’s chief juror said film-makers must stay out of politics.
The festival got off to a shaky start on Thursday after the competition jury, led by the German film-maker Wim Wenders, fielded questions about the conflict in Gaza. Asked if films can affect political change, Wenders said that “movies can change the world” but “not in a political way”.
He added that film-makers “have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”
In a statement on Friday announcing her withdrawal, Roy, who had been planning to attend a screening of her recently restored 1989 film In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, called the comments “unconscionable” and feared they had reached “millions of people across the world”.
The Booker prize-winning Indian author said: “To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and film-makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
She added: “Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza.”
Wenders is the serving president of this year’s Berlinale jury, which includes the American director-producer Reinaldo Marcus Green, the Japanese film-maker Hikari, the Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bham, the South Korean actor Bae Doona, the Indian director-producer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, and Ewa Puszczyńska – who produced Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, about the idyllic home life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family.
The jury was questioned about the support the German government, which funds much of the festival, has shown for Israel. Puszczyńska called the question “complicated” and “a bit unfair”.
“Of course, we are trying to talk to people – every single viewer – to make them think, but we cannot be responsible for what their decision would be to support Israel or the decision to support Palestine,” she said. “There are many other wars where genocide is committed and we do not talk about that.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3wzcwszb> _GuardianUK

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THE MET AND LEGO REIMAGINE MONET’
_artnet

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BACKLASH ERUPTS AFTER BRITISH MUSEUM REMOVES ‘PALESTINE’ FROM MIDDLE EAST DISPLAYS
<https://tinyurl.com/59sasr5b>
The British Museum has altered its labeling of ancient Middle Eastern artifacts, removing references to “Palestine” after critics argued the term was being used inaccurately to describe civilizations that existed centuries before it was coined.
The revisions came to light following recent complaints from the advocacy group U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which argued that describing the ancient southern Levant as “Palestine” risks projecting a modern political identity onto earlier civilizations and obscuring the later emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. While the museum said the updates stem from audience feedback and reflect a recognition that the term is no longer historically neutral, the decision has prompted backlash, including a petition signed by more than 5,000 people accusing the institution of contributing to the erasure of Palestinian history.
In an emailed statement, the British Museum said that the review of labels in its Levant gallery and some of its Egypt displays “has been underway for well over a year.” The updates were made by the museum independently, according to the institution, and were not a response to UKLFI’s letter, which reached the museum only last week.
The region in question has had many names over the course of history, depending on the historical period. While the term “Palestine” has been considered a neutral geographical description since the later 19th century, the museum recognized that such neutrality no longer holds today because of contemporary political context involving the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine since October 7, 2023.
A museum spokesperson said that for maps showing ancient cultural regions in the later second millennium BCE, the term “Canaan” is relevant for the southern Levant, the geographical region that corresponds approximately to present-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan (some definitions also include southern Lebanon and Syria). “We use the United Nations terminology on maps that show modern boundaries, for example Gaza, West Bank, Israel, Jordan, and refer to ‘Palestinian’ as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate,” the spokesperson said, adding that the museum will continue to review these labels as part of the plans for refurbishing the relevant spaces.
The changes have been met by criticism from scholars and activists. Historian, author, and podcaster William Dalrymple called the British Museum’s decision on the label change “ridiculous” in a post on social media, arguing that the first reference to Palestine could be traced to 1186 BCE on the Egyptian monument of Medinet Habu.
Marchella Ward, a lecturer in classical studies at the Open University in the U.K., told the Middle East Monitor that she frequently used “ancient Palestine” in her research. The claim of the term’s usage since late 19th century was a “lie” in a bid to erase Palestinian history, she added. _artnet

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AKITAKA 'MOON RABBIT'
<https://tinyurl.com/3tvzac8e> _RabihAlameddine

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A WOLF CAME TO L.A. LOOKING FOR LOVE.
<https://tinyurl.com/4dkk6666>
A wolf made history last Saturday when she wandered into the mountains of Los Angeles County, where her kind hadn’t been documented in more than a century.
She had come seeking a mate. Mid-to-late winter marks breeding season for wolves. The broad-muzzled canids are only fertile once a year — right around Valentine’s Day.
But the 3-year-old wolf — known as BEY03F — is spending the romantic holiday in Kern County. She kept her time in L.A. brief, having traveled north over the county line by Monday morning, per a state-run tracker of GPS-collared wolves.
Now, time is of the essence.
“Unlike dogs who can mate a couple times a year, come into heat a couple times a year, wolves aren’t that way, So it’s really important for them to find a mate before this window of time. She’s really kind of on the border here. It’s possible she could find a mate still within the next, like, two weeks or so and still be fertile. But time is slipping away and the clock is ticking.”
<https://tinyurl.com/66jbr3ef>
BEY03F, affectionately called “bae” by some, hails from far northeastern California, in Plumas County, where she was born into the Beyem Seyo pack in 2023.
Last year, that pack made headlines for an unprecedented number of livestock attacks — leading state wildlife officials to euthanize several members.
But BEY03F left her family before that happened
She spent time with the Yowlumni pack, the state’s southernmost group of wolves in Tulare County, where she was collared in May
She came a long way looking for love. To get from her birthplace to the mountains north of Santa Clarita, she traveled more than 370 miles and walked the length of the Sierra Nevada.
As of Saturday morning, she was just south of State Route 58, the dividing line between the Tehachapi and Sierra Nevada mountains
<https://tinyurl.com/473vm6y9> _LATimes