OLD NEWS

MUSKRATS GATHERING & GROOMING by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/44t9vpmr>
Muskrats remain active all winter, although they, like beavers, are restricted in their movements once the water freezes in the ponds or marshes where they reside. Winter is spent resting and grooming themselves in their lodges, swimming under the ice to procure food such as cattail roots, and feeding in their roofed platforms or“push-ups.”
Once ponds and marshes begin to melt in early spring, muskrats are quick to be out on the ice or their lodge in the sunshine and fresh air. If you should happen upon a muskrat at this time of year, you are likely to see it grooming itself or its litter mates. Muskrats are fastidious groomers — they use their paws and teeth to comb through their fur, distributing water-repellent oils from scent glands.
Grooming not only makes their fur water repellent, but also functions to trap the air within it, thus providing good insulation. Clean, waterproof fur allows them to remain in cold water for up to half an hour. To stay well-groomed, they will conduct a thorough grooming before entering the water and again after they leave it. (The grooming activity also generates some body heat.) _NaturallyCurious

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ART
<https://tinyurl.com/s9pcbzw3> _DavidShrigley

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PEDRO FRIEDEBERG DIES AT 90 by Alex Greenberger
<https://tinyurl.com/fzrxx8nt>
Pedro Friedeberg, an artist affiliated with the Mexican offshoot of the Surrealist movement and who is now best known for his absurdist designs, including the iconic Hand-Chair, died on Thursday in San Miguel de Allende. He was 90
Friedeberg’s diverse practice included paintings dense with dreamy imagery and design objects that looked like body parts and animals. Though commonly labeled a Surrealist, he bristled against being associated with that movement.
When a W magazine journalist made the error of claiming that he was the last of the Surrealists in 2024, Friedeberg said, “That’s a terrible mistake. I’m neither a Surrealist nor the last of anything.” He also didn’t like being labeled an artist—“a horrible word,” he once told an interviewer—and said that, if his career took a different turn, he would have become “a spiritualist or a gigolo.”
He is most fondly remembered for the Hand-Chair, a seat resembling a large palm that he designed during the early 1960s. He had been assigned to provide work to a carpenter of a friend of Friedeberg’s knew, and the artist told that carpenter to go sculpt a hand. “I thought that would be funny,” Friedeberg recalled in a 2017 interview
The sculpture ended up becoming popular in Mexico. “Everyone had a Friedeberg at home,” the writer Déborah Holtz said in Pedro, a 2022 Netflix documentary about him. “Everyone had a Hand-Chair.”
While he remains best known for his design objects, he also produced paintings that feature arrays of birds and mind-bending architectural spaces whose walls and floors are depicted with zigzag patterns.
Pedro Friedeberg was born in Florence in 1936. His parents were Jewish, and so, amid the threat posed by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, the family fled for Mexico in 1940. He would later reflect on a culture shock that continued to influence his taste for absurdism. “I was born in Italy during the era of Mussolini, who made all trains run on time,” he once said. “Immediately thereafter, I moved to México, where the trains are never on time, but where once they start moving, they pass pyramids.”
His father, an engineer, inspired him to study architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. After graduation, he worked with Mathias Goeritz, an artist who had likewise fled Europe for Mexico. Having closely observed the work of modernist artists in his native Germany, Goeritz brought an experimental spirit to Mexico City’s art scene that influenced Friedeberg.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8umz68>
Through Goeritz, Friedeberg went on to meet many European and American expatriates living in Mexico City, among them Surrealist painters such as Alice Rahon and Leonora Carrington, as well as the photographer Kati Horna.
“I was telling my parents I was studying architecture, which was a big lie,” Friedeberg told W. “I was just hanging around other people’s houses. That’s how I met Leonora and Kati and all these fascinating people.”
He worked prolifically and actively well into the later stages of his career. On the occasion of his 2009 retrospective, he told the New York Times, “I never relax. My art is my therapy, my medication.”
<https://tinyurl.com/5cwp7svz> _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3sepzmm4> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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MICHELANGE-EERRRR-NO...REDISCOVERED?
<https://tinyurl.com/37pyfpyx>
Michelangelo rediscoveries are coming in thick and fast these days. Social media has been awash with news from Belgium that a Michelangelo, which is clearly not a Michelangelo, has been 'rediscovered' in the country. The work was purchased by a collector in an Italian auction who has since discovered 'monogram' potentially by the artist. The attribution was purportedly revealed to the press by Michel Draguet, former director and CEO of The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. _ArtHistoryNews

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THE WAY JAN MOLENAER FINISHED OFF THE HAIR IN HIS C. 1637 SELF-PORTRAIT
<https://tinyurl.com/pxevcm2w>
by scraping with the end of his brush, a potentially ruinous final step:
<https://tinyurl.com/4uurk755> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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SHIV ROY, RASHID. RASHID, SHIV ROY by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/mtkwpud>
I was sure that by now Bravin Lee could not shake me with its awesome artist rugs. And to be fair, it is not the Rashid Johnson limited-edition, ethically hand-knotted wool Anxious Rug that shook me here: it is the setting.
<https://tinyurl.com/34em9bfx>
Because Johnson’s rug is in what I can only assume to be Shiv Roy’s rebound loft, under the buck wild Rubens she inherited at some point after Season 4. The wide angle lens distortion of the painting’s dimensions is also unsettling, but the punch of ditching the frame and rawdawging an Old Master like that more than makes up for it. _greg.org

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46. PEANUT BUTTER by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/mutb3e73>
Is it hyperbole to say that peanut butter is the stuff that binds us together as a nation? More than abstract ideas in old handwritten documents, more than our uniquely formed sense of possibility, our belief that anything can be accomplished—is it nonsensical to acknowledge and dignify the sublime nut paste that touches every one of us, in every corner and grouplet of the country, throughout our lives?
Surely not. Let us enshrine this emulsion, this nutritious ambrosia of ground-up nuts—not our invention, true, that was the Incas thousands of years ago, then the Portuguese took it to Africa, then Africans brought it to North America, yes yes, fine, we may have only the slightest ancestral claim to it.
But the alchemy! The partially hydrogenated oil that holds it in suspension, shelf stable for months, the industrial processes that produce 1.4 billion pounds a year, such bounty!—surely that is our own, profoundly American, invention. This global hybrid we adopted and refined, sold back to the world and to ourselves as quintessentially American, this protein-rich, inexpensive food we colonized psychologically, is ours.
People from other countries may shake their heads in nonplussed wonder—those poor people! Not to know in their bones, in the deepest recesses of childhood memories, the untold PB&J sandwiches, the knife scraped against the edge of the jar, the spoonfuls of exquisite deliciousness as a snack to stave off hunger before dinner. Not to know our passion for our paste. We must pity them. _TheImpatientReader

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IF I WERE TO RECOMMEND ONLY A SINGLE EXHIBITION IN NYC RIGHT NOW
it wouldn't be a big, splashy museum presentation
but rather a small, ravishing show of Édouard Vuillard's early interiors
Absolutely stupendous.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrykvt8y>
Pointillism gone wild:
Édouard Vuillard, "Grandmother at the Sink," c. 1890
<https://tinyurl.com/27wx2bwv>
Characteristically, one of my favorite works in the show
is also one of the smallest & simplest:
Édouard Vuillard, "Woman in Front of a Glass-Partitioned Door," c. 1891
<https://tinyurl.com/2345jnrc> _MichaelLobel

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IS IT FINALLY TIME FOR THE GUERRILLA GIRLS TO REMOVE THEIR MASKS? by Jori Finkel
<https://tinyurl.com/34kw3kr7>
Just five years after the original Guerrilla Girls put on their first set of gorilla masks, each choosing the name of a deceased woman artist as an alias, they decided to unmask themselves. They designed a poster that blared in all caps like a National Enquirer headline: “GUERRILLA GIRLS’ IDENTITIES EXPOSED!” Underneath ran a list of nearly 500 artists’ names, including Eleanor Antin, Rochelle Feinstein, Jenny Holzer, Faith Ringgold, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, Amy Sillman, Annie Sprinkle, Kay WalkingStick and Hannah Wilke.
Only this poster, made in 1990, was an artful dodge or strategic tease, which might (or might not) have contained the names of some (or all) of the actual Guerrilla Girls. A real roster would have numbered in the dozens, not hundreds, and the poster’s smaller print explained: “We’ve signed up to fight discrimination in the art world. Call us Guerrilla Girls.”
This poster is now on display in the gutsy and engaging Getty exhibition How to Be a Guerrilla Girl
the institution’s first show drawn from its 2008 acquisition of 96 boxes, plus portfolios and flat files, of art and archival material. But the Getty is not spilling the beans either. After 40 years of fighting misogyny with “facts, humour and fake fur”, the identity of the Guerrilla Girls ranks as one of the art world’s best-kept secrets, with remarkably few public or published leaks.
<https://tinyurl.com/fdvwdy3u>
“Kathë Kollwitz” and “Frida Kahlo”, the founding Guerrilla Girls who participated most actively in this show, say they have long used anonymity as a strategy because it was protective. “Early on, some of our members were afraid that if their involvement with Guerrilla Girls got out, their galleries or critics would use it against them,” Kahlo says. What’s more, both say, anonymity was a way to maintain focus on widespread social conditions instead of personal situations, so nobody could dismiss their concerns as the whining of a particular woman.
Yet the undercover nature of their operations makes for an interesting tension or contradiction in the Getty show. The exhibition sets out to explore the Guerrilla Girls’ legacy in feminism and activism, but it is not clear whose legacy is being shored up. The show tells the story, per the Getty press release, “of their collaborative process” in developing posters and campaigns, but it does not differentiate the collaborators, their skill sets or contributions.
For example, take the wickedly pointed 1988 poster The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, which touts such benefits as “working without the pressure of success” and “knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80”. The Getty exhibition showcases the early drafts of this list, starting with a longer and wordier litany of the advantages of being a male artist.
<https://tinyurl.com/4yhvn6d4>
Who flipped the script to focus so brilliantly and acerbically on women? And who put a gorilla mask on Ingres’s Grand Odalisque in the memorable 1989 campaign Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Or, more generally, who brought the mad Madison Avenue copywriting skills and the powerful graphic punch to the table?
The Getty is not telling. The six-member curatorial team at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) decided from the outset to protect individual identities. They have redacted names and phone numbers that might be incriminating. And they have not even opened two redacted boxes of archival material, which contain unmasked photographs, according to the lead curators Zanna Gilbert and Kristin Juarez, and will not be accessible until the deaths of the relevant artists.
Secret histories
The preservation of anonymity also, conveniently, allows the curators to gloss over conflicts between personalities in the group and omit two unauthorised offshoots developed in the 1990s: Guerrilla Girls on Tour! and Guerrilla Girls BroadBand. (Since the Getty archive ends in 2003, the show does not cover the lawsuits filed by the original Guerrilla Girls against these entities either.)
As for whether we can understand the creation of art without knowing the creator, the curators credit the feminist collective with forcing exactly these kinds of questions. “It’s part of the Guerrilla Girls’ project to question this kind of notion of the single genius artist,” says Juarez. “You don’t get a sense of the individual, because they’re working against the way art history has always favoured that at the expense of what we know to be true—there are always many people involved.”
<https://tinyurl.com/38dt83d5>
“We don’t think the Guerrilla Girls have been given enough credit beyond their feminist campaigning. The light they shed on the mechanisms of the art world has also been a major project throughout their 40 years,” Gilbert adds. “We may all be trained in this idea of biography and interested in the people who are behind a project, but their strategy of anonymity is very clever: it really did enable their work to be focused on the issues.”
Summarising the way anonymity shapes the Getty exhibition, Gilbert says: “We like to think that our show can tell us who they were—not what their names were, but what their concerns were.”
Group dynamics
Juarez and Gilbert’s own working approach was also inspired by the Guerrilla Girls’ ethos. The show originated with the GRI research group Expanding the Study of Performance in Women Artists’ Archives. From there, GRI staffers with different specialities joined forces to develop the content for the show, dividing up boxes of material to comb through. These curatorial team members—Thisbe Gensler, Alex Jones, Daniela Ruano Orantes and Megan Sallabedra—are credited alongside Gilbert and Juarez in the exhibition wall text.
The GRI’s interim director, Andrew Perchuk, calls it “likely the largest curatorial team in GRI’s history”. Gilbert says that even if it is not actually the largest team, it could be the largest to be fully named and credited. “Since we were very interested in showing the labour behind the Guerrilla Girls work, it made sense also to try to underline the labour that was put in by members.” (Labour takes on a double meaning here, as three of the curators had children during the making of the show, and they stepped up to cover for each other while on maternity leave.)
<https://tinyurl.com/yumcnpv4>
By this same token, though, there is an argument to be made for acknowledging individual Guerrilla Girls. And as they reach their 70s, 80s or older, it must be tempting for artists involved to come forward and claim credit for particular work—as Lorraine O’Grady, who died in 2024, did more than a decade ago. She revealed herself to be the Guerrilla Girl known as “Alma Thomas”, in part to establish her authorship of an important “anonymous” essay on Flannery O’Connor.
What about founding members like Kahlo and Kollwitz? Don’t their gorilla masks feel especially heavy or hot these days? An audience member at their recent talk with the Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay at the Getty asked a similar question. They joked that their masks are equipped with fans or worked as facials. They also answered more directly.
“We’re stuck with our anonymity. I don’t think it matters anymore, because the work is really the thing,” Kollwitz said. “That’s what people respond to, that’s what people see all over the world. It seemed hugely important at the beginning, because we felt we would be attacked, our careers would be over, that kind of thing. But now, it just makes us a little bit more delicious.”
Kahlo offered a different take. “I think that if we took our masks off, it would be over,” she said. “I work really well with this mask, because it’s a mask. It allows me to speak truth to power.” _ArtNewspaper

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ROYAL RUMMAGE MANSFIELD, SD
<https://tinyurl.com/bjaef24w> _RuralIndexingProject

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FRANCIS NAUMANN: IMPOSSIBLE: THE LOVE AFFAIR BETWEEN MARCEL DUCHAMP & MARIA MARTINS
A statement by artist Maria Martins was written into the Congressional Record in 1947. Here’s an excerpt from his book, beginning with Martins:
“It was by the destruction of works of art . . . that Hitler began his nihilistic drive of conquest, domination and destruction,” she wrote. “Art is liberation and construction; it is by art that we must rebuild this shattered world.” She believed that art offered a universal panacea, a means by which to counter the destructive aspects of war. “Art is eternal not in its styles, not in its schools, not in its technique, not in its conceptions, nor in its subjects, but in its ideal, in its definition, in its aims, in its consequences. Art is the most solid basis of peace.”
Amen. _Kenny Schachter _artnet

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GIOVANNA GARZONI, OLD MAN FROM ARTIMINO, 1648-51,
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5avrun> _JesseLocker

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PATRIK SCHUMACHER WINS RIGHT TO RENAME ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS
Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher has won a legal battle with the Zaha Hadid Foundation over the use of the late Zaha Hadid's name.
Last week, the Court of Appeal overruled a High Court judgement from 2024 over a licensing agreement that required the architecture studio to retain Hadid's name and pay a fee to use it.
Justice Colin Birss ruled that the licensing agreement, which requires Zaha Hadid Architects to pay the foundation six per cent of its revenue each year, could be ended as it could not have been intended to be in place indefinitely.
Until now, the studio was locked into the agreement. The ruling opens the door for Schumacher to change the name of the studio or to renegotiate the contract.
"As a matter of principle and logic, and absent any other factors, it necessarily follows from a conclusion that the true construction of the parties' intentions is that an agreement is to be of indefinite duration as opposed to perpetual, that a power to terminate on reasonable notice forms part of those intentions," the ruling stated.
In his ruling, Birss stated that potential issues with a building designed by Hadid or changes in architectural style, which would make the brand a negative, meant that the contract could not have been intended to be in place forever.
"Many things might happen or emerge over the decades or centuries following the date of the agreement which might be so detrimental to the brand as to make it seriously disadvantageous to the company to be obliged to continue to promote the marks, for example if an iconic Zaha Hadid building was beset with structural problems," he said.
"Further, architectural styles change with changes in technology and taste," he continued. _Dezeen

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I'M IN SANTIAGO AND I MADE IT TO SOUTH AMERICA'S GUGGENHEIM.
(It was on the life list.)
<https://tinyurl.com/tch3fun4>
Really, it's a spiral mall, or caracol, an architectural type typical of Chile that came about in the '70s.
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4ff5pw>
In this one, you can get your cell phone fixed, get your nails done and buy dildos.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc3p8tc3> _CarolinaAMiranda

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VANITY FAIR LAUNCHES REVAMP OF NEWSLETTER WITH MICHAEL GOVAN INTERVIEW
Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan is speaking publicly for the first time about the museum’s long-awaited David Geffen Galleries.
The interview, which went live today, appears in the relaunch of T Vanity Fair’s art-world newsletter written by Nate Freeman.
The debut edition features Govan discussing the museum’s controversial new building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, a $720 million structure set to open to the public next month after years of construction, debate, and rising costs.
In the interview, Govan framed the project as an attempt to rethink the role of the museum in the 21st century:
The project has been one of the most closely watched museum construction efforts in the US in recent years. Critics have questioned both the demolition of several earlier LACMA buildings and the design of the new structure, which spans Wilshire Boulevard and introduces a single-floor layout of 347,500 square feet of gallery space.
For Govan, the project represents a rare opportunity to rethink how encyclopedic museums present the story of art.
The design aims to move away from traditional museum hierarchies that separate artworks strictly by geography or chronology, encouraging visitors instead to encounter objects from different cultures and eras in closer proximity.
The building has also required extensive engineering to account for Los Angeles’s seismic conditions.
The massive concrete structure sits on base isolators designed to allow it to move during earthquakes, a feature intended to help protect both the architecture and the museum’s collection.
Govan has faced years of criticism over the project, particularly regarding the demolition of existing buildings and the rising cost of construction. The design itself has drawn pointed commentary from critics, some of whom likened the undulating structure to everything from an airport terminal to an amoeba.
But Govan suggested that strong reactions are inevitable when cultural institutions undertake projects of this scale.
He also indicated that the museum chose not to aggressively counter criticism as the project developed.
“No, no, let people get invested,” Govan said, recalling discussions with the museum’s public relations team about how to respond to the controversy and the idea that “everyone should be on [the museum’s] side.
Elsewhere in the interview, Govan emphasized that the building was conceived specifically for Los Angeles and its cultural landscape.
“LA’s the place to try it, I don’t think you could have done this in, even, Chigaco, or Cincinatti.” he said of the experimental design approach behind the museum.
When the David Geffen Galleries open next month, the museum will host a series of events including galas and concerts, as well as large-scale installations featuring works from LACMA’s collection that had been off view during construction. _Daniel Cassady _ARTnews

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1-2-3
3000yrs-14yrs-29mins
<https://tinyurl.com/y9fc33n8> _ON&ON / Jefrf Weiss