OLD NEWS

TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/y9bce8z2> _trailcam

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WITNESSING CEAL FLOYER’S FINAL WORK OF ART by Tacita Dean
<https://tinyurl.com/56h7a96r>
It is very hard to describe a work by the British conceptual artist Ceal Floyer because description overburdens it. Her practice was so finely wrought that it existed only in the experience between a work’s idea and its absorption. Ceal handled this equation deftly and with perfect poise, but it was a perilous and naked process with little or no place to hide, or none.
Resolving the relationship between an idea’s inception and its manifestation became increasingly fraught for her and many works never made it to fruition. Therein lay her courage. This is why I wanted to add something to last month’s obituary of her by Jonathan Watkins.
Ceal was exceptional and brave. Her work laid her bare to the vicissitudes of existence because that’s what it was made from. Her practice was so embedded in her life that living with a brain tumour for 23 years took a toll on it, despite her continued defiance and disregard for the time limits allotted to her by her prognosis. Her brain/work nexus was so unusual that her brain surgeon took an exceptional diagnostic interest in her art. But this same brilliance meant that she could not bear to be seen to lose control and therefore preferred to isolate herself than reveal any cracks. She continued to incubate ideas but often failed to realise them and over time this began to frustrate and disappoint her.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdef5f64>
But in her last month, in the palliative care unit in a hospital dedicated to Saint Francis near Zoo station in Berlin, she was freed from this burden and, in the face of death, became briefly once more the artist she had been. Despite the terrible attrition in her body, she was purely and unequivocally Ceal, strangely vital and resolute. Many people visited her, which encouraged the dormant performative aspect of her practice.
On the wall was a wooden crucifix. She kept pointing at it and it was clear that it represented death, though she was still alive and present. She told us, as she tried to grab a glass of water, that she no longer knew if she were very old or very young. Then we watched her as she formed an idea: could we get her some colouring-in books? Adding later that she would only need black crayons. I bought her the books and the crayons, but they remained untouched; the idea was the point.
She became increasingly inaudible over her longer than anticipated hospital stay. On what would become her last full day, she raised herself up from sleep when we arrived, reached for, and clung on to, the triangular bar above her bed, holding on to it for what felt like an unbearably long time. It was clear it meant life in the way the crucifix on the wall meant death. Occasionally, Ceal shook the bar, as if willing it beyond its inert capabilities. Eventually, she let her hand drop and signalled to us to get her a nurse and, more clearly and audibly than had been possible for a long while, she answered to the doctor’s offer of morphine, “Yes please.”
And in the while they took to go and get it, as I stood beside her bed, she lifted her hand and gave the middle finger to the cross on the wall. The gesture was unambiguous, audacious and courageous: I was her audience and her viewer, and she was giving death the middle finger with me as her witness. Aware and pleased by my reaction (I was both shocked and impressed), and with the slightest of feline smiles on her face, she allowed the nurse to give her the morphine and did not, to my knowledge, really resurface. _GuardianUK

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CHOICE
<https://tinyurl.com/5c9fw72z> _DavidShrigley

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‘I HAVE TO KEEP GOING’
A woman in Vermont is celebrating her 103rd birthday by knitting hats for kids in her neighborhood.
On a cold winter’s day, Ruby Greenwood sits snuggled in her home, where sub-freezing temperatures are no concern.
Just a couple of days after Christmas, Greenwood will turn 103. “I never drank or smoked. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it,” she said. “I tried something once, when I was younger. But I was smart, I didn’t like it.”
Greenwood’s story is one of hard work from a young age. She lived on a farm in Rumford, Maine.
She made it through the 8th grade and then went to work at a restaurant.
“I couldn’t serve the liquor because I wasn’t old enough,” she said. “That’s where I met my husband, Chet. I used to ask the girls, ‘Can I wait on him?’”
The couple moved to Vermont, raised two children, and ran a lumber and building material company in Newport. For a time, she ran the school’s hot lunch program in Newport.
Chet died years ago. Now, Greenwood’s days are spent mostly knitting. From morning into evening, the needles are in motion.
“I do knit two, pearl two for about eight, nine rows,” Greenwood explained. “And then I go into these solid colors.”
She creates colorful caps that are handed out to kids in the area. She’s made about 226 hats, about a pair every other day.
<https://tinyurl.com/ewhuew62>
Many of those hats have landed at the Derby Community Church, where Greenwood has been a member for 70 years.
On this day, she braved the elements for a church chat. She warms up seeing the kids wearing her creations, including Johnny, who’s just six months old, a century-plus age difference between them.
“Is your hat nice and warm?” Greenwood asks one child. “She’s got hers on backwards,” she notes about another.
Every child has a homemade hat. The extras will be sent to others who are in need. “I’m glad somebody can wear ‘em,” Greenwood said.
When asked why she does this, she says that she “has to keep going.”
The hats serve as an early Christmas present for the kids. In return, they sang “Happy Birthday” to Greenwood.
Back at her home, Greenwood reflects on her long life, citing the classic children’s bedtime prayer: “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
She’s a woman who’s not afraid of dying but is living her life to the fullest. “I don’t like to give up,” Greenwood said. _ Joe Carroll & Akim Powell_GrayNews_DerbyVt.

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3yej2twp> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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‘WHISTLER’S MOTHER’
<https://tinyurl.com/mnbtkuk6>
Why do we love the 1871 painting known as Whistler’s Mother so much? Is it because of James McNeill Whistler’s masterful ability to render an entire composition in a limited palette of black, gray, and white (leading him to actually title the painting Arrangement in Grey and Black, No.1)?
No, that’s not it. At least, not according to beloved British sitcom and film character Mr. Bean (played by Rowan Atkinson), who was responsible for safeguarding Whistler’s Mother in the 1997 movie Bean, and tells it like it is. “Even though Mr. Whistler was perfectly aware that his mother was a hideous old bat who looked like she’d had a cactus lodged up her backside, he stuck with her, and even took the time to paint this amazing picture of her. It’s not just a painting. It’s a picture of a mad old cow who he thought the world of,” Bean explains. “And that’s marvelous.”
Whether you side with Whistler or Bean as to what makes this portrait great, the painting is considered one of the most famous works by an American artist held outside the United States. Created by an expatriate painter living in Europe, and depicting his no-nonsense North Carolina-born mother, it was bought by the French state in 1891 and later became the first American painting to join the Musée du Louvre collection. Today you can see it at the Musée d’Orsay.
<https://tinyurl.com/5zyytjbe>
Yes, we know her as the mother of the artist, but Whistler’s cherished subject might have introduced herself as Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler. So, who was this severe-looking lady?
After she was widowed in 1849, Anna wore mourning clothes for the 31 remaining years of her life. She also kept wearing her gold wedding ring, as seen in the painting.
When she decided to relocate from Massachusetts to London in 1864 and live with her son, “Jemmie,” she left behind family members impacted by the Civil War raging at the time. One of her uncles was a slave owner, for example, and Anna had nine mixed-race cousins by him. As for Anna’s two sons, one was living the life of an artist in Europe, and the other was serving as a Confederate Army doctor.
Upon arriving in London, Anna insisted on moving in with Whistler and promptly ousted his mistress, Joanna Heffernan. The Whistlers lived together for the next 11 years, until Anna transferred to a nursing home in 1875. Among other things, their arrangement meant that when one of Whistler’s models failed to show up for a sitting in 1871, his mom was available to pose instead.
Anna was a diligent house manager who kept track of dishes she prepared such as puddings, soups, gingerbreads, and a peach cordial that required a whopping 300 peach pits and three quarts of brandy that had to sit for a month. Of her surviving recipes, one was for a dessert called Floating Island:
2 1/2 cups heavy or double cream
1 tablespoon sugar
3 egg whites
1 cup red currant jelly
1 tablespoon rose water
Whip the cream with the sugar until it stands up in peaks. Put it into a large serving dish and smooth the top. Stiffly whip the egg whites and whisk in the red currant jelly 1 tablespoon at a time. Beat in the rose water. Spoon the mixture in 8 peaks on top of the cream. Serve as soon as possible after making or the peaks will gradually subside. Serves 8.
<https://tinyurl.com/ypbdhfcj>
When Whistler first moved to London in 1859, he lived in the docklands near the Thames and south of Tower Bridge. He made a few etchings of river scenes, capturing part of London’s working-class maritime community before it became filled with luxury housing. This included an etching titled Black Lion Wharf, which he published in 1871 (the same year that he painted Whistler’s Mother). A sign on the building along the wharf in the background reads: Old Shipping Clippers to Let Everyday.
A version of the etching can be seen in the painting, hanging on the wall above Anna. Echoing the monochromatic painting, the etching is rendered in modulated tones of gray and black. Whistler apparently did have a framed copy of Black Lion Wharf in his London home at No. 2 Lindsey Row (present-day 96 Cheyne Walk), meaning he was painting a real interior and not an imaginary space. He lived in that particular home between 1867 and 1879—at first with his mother, and then alone.
<https://tinyurl.com/28bwd2ch>
Whistler’s Mother became famous stateside in 1933, when the Louvre lent it to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for display in New York. Her sudden American celebrity status helped inspire a U.S. postage stamp. MoMA had originally asked to include the painting in a group exhibition, but then demanded to send it on a cross-country tour, and arrangements were made to keep it in the U.S. for roughly one year. Whistler’s Mother went on a whistlestop tour, with showings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis, Columbus, and at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933.
In the wake of her popularity, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked Anna’s likeness for a three-cent U.S. postage stamp commemorating Mother’s Day, released in May 1934 with a total printing of 200 million stamps. (The National Postal Museum has the original design sketch, signed by FDR.) The stamp designer took creative liberties, however, and made what some artists felt were unforgivable changes: the painting was cropped, a flower vase was added in the lower left, and instead of Whistler’s Black Lion Wharf reproduction were the words: “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America.”
The artistic community, among them MoMA director Alfred Barr (who had helped organize the painting’s American tour and felt protective of it), was up in arms. Three days after the stamp was released, a New York Times article covered the postal controversy and quoted a telegram sent by the chairman of the national executive committee of the American Artists Professional League to the Postmaster General. “Such liberties have been taken in the reproduction that it amounts to a mutilation of the artist’s original picture, thereby robbing it of much of its charm and totally changing its composition,” the letter argued. “This is a serious transgression of professional ethics and one which damages the reputation of the artist.”
_Karen Chernick _artnet

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THE "SCARE-FOX", 1910.
A mechanical device, designed to keep foxes away from pheasants:
<https://tinyurl.com/ms3z5cr9> _PublicDomainReview

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1. LOWER PECOS ROCK ART by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4whexnxk>
We’re not sure exactly when people first came here, or even how. Scholars debate about archaeological records going back 20,000 years, although a few speculate it was even earlier. What we know for sure is that people came, venturing into the territory we now call America.
We tend to think of our species’ impulse to push into new land as something European, tainted by colonialism. But humans have always needed to explore, fulfilling a deep longing to know the unknown. One wonders about those earliest Americans, many generations of them over centuries, if not millennia. Did they have an inkling of the vastness of the land? As they pushed into the interior of the continent, into what we now call the United States, discovering ever-warmer winters and countless animals and plants to sustain them, isn’t it possible that they felt—as we still feel when we encounter the landscape—a sense of glorious, expansive possibility? A sense even of the divine?
When we think of those prehistoric people, who lived long before our familiar Native American tribes, we assume they scratched out a pathetic and meager existence. But then we encounter their art: huge, spectacular, shamanistic paintings in riverside caves. These 6,000-year-old narrative murals, a pictorial form of writing perhaps, belie a culture rich in storytelling and imaginative explanations for the world and existence itself. These are vision quests, yearning for meaning well beyond some basic impulse to survive. And they were here. Right here, all over the great land.
<https://tinyurl.com/2vhn3x6z>
And there is prehistoric rock art all over the country! <https://tinyurl.com/2rjfte48>
---
This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
_TheImpatientReader

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RAMON CASAS, YOUNG WOMAN AFTER THE BALL, 1899
<https://tinyurl.com/zr8pxehy> _JesseLocker

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FIRST AMERICANS MAY HAVE SAILED FROM NORTH-EAST ASIA, NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS
<https://tinyurl.com/4sk5kcy2>
The first people to migrate to North America may have sailed from north-east Asia around 20,000 years ago. Experts have argued that prehistoric people in Hokkaido, Japan, used similar stone tools to those later found in North America, and suggest that seafarers may have travelled to the continent during the last ice age, bringing this stone technology with them. This adds weight to the theory that the first Americans arrived much earlier than previously thought.
“We can now explain not only that the first Americans came from north-east Asia, but also how they travelled, what they carried and what ideas they brought with them,” Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, said in a statement <https://tinyurl.com/2y322989> “It’s a powerful reminder that migration, innovation and cultural sharing have always been part of what it means to be human.”
Archaeologists have long debated when the first humans arrived in North America. Previously, the main theory was that people travelled by foot, around 13,500 years ago, crossing a now-submerged land bridge from eastern Russia, and then moving south along an ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered Alaska and Canada.
But in recent decades, experts have uncovered increasing evidence for earlier migration. The most dramatic finds come from White Sands, New Mexico, where 61 human footprints preserved on the edge of a dried-up prehistoric lake have been dated to between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Not all scholars agree with this dating, however, and some remain unconvinced by the other evidence for earlier migration.
To look deeper into this problem, Davis and his colleagues studied stone tools—mainly sharp projectile points used for hunting—excavated at prehistoric sites across the United States, primarily in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas and Idaho. After studying the tools’ production methods and appearance—factors that can help experts differentiate between cultural groups and time periods—the team searched for similar examples from outside the Americas.
<https://tinyurl.com/5f68urxp>
Their research, along with genetic evidence indicating an Asian origin for the earliest Americans’ ancestors, led them to investigate artefacts from Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. From excavated prehistoric sites on the island, they identified stone tools dated to around 20,000 years ago that represent an early form of the projectile points later found in North America, both in certain aspects of their design and their production techniques.
“This marks a paradigm shift. For the first time, we can say the first Americans belonged to a broader Palaeolithic world—one that connects North America to north-east Asia,” Davis says.
None if by land, who if by sea?
Reconstructing how these early people travelled to North America remains difficult. One option is that they migrated rapidly by sea.
“By [around 30,000 years ago], Upper Palaeolithic seafarers were using sea-going vessels to access some of the outer islands in the Japanese archipelago ... and were capable of negotiating the Kuroshio Current, one of the fastest in the world,” Davis and his colleagues write in their paper, published <https://tinyurl.com/4rssz86m>
in October in the journal Science Advances. “This suggests that such experienced seafarers may also have been capable of handling adverse Pacific coastal currents.”
Nonetheless, the team also suggest that the journey could have happened at a much slower pace. In this reconstruction, the prehistoric seafarers gradually followed a route along the Pacific coast.
“This migration may have taken place over the course of a thousand years or more, lasting 40 to 50 generations and involving a series of movements of people from one place to another relatively nearby location,” the authors write. “This wave of advance population movement may easily have used short coastal voyages in waters between off-shore currents and the wave breaker zone and could have enabled such migrants to access coastal refugia, which became differentially available through time.”
More evidence for these early voyages may lie underwater in the eastern Pacific rim, submerged when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. Only further archaeological excavation and research, across both North America and north-east Asia, will help to solve the mystery of America’s first arrivals.
“This study puts the first Americans back into the global story of the Palaeolithic—not as outliers—but as participants in a shared technological legacy,” Davis says. _Garry Shaw_ArtNewspaper

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SHORTY’S WATSEKA, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/5f2yd8tz> _RuralIndexingProject

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JOHN CAGE DOESN’T DO WINDOWS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/4a7ayv89>
For many years I couldn’t find this quote from John Cage anywhere; it only existed on the t-shirt I bought from Rolywholyover: A Circus, a 1993 show I saw in all its venues, and which continues to live in my head. When it was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995, there was a period when I went to see it every day.
<https://tinyurl.com/4f3p7ycv>
Anyway, the quote is, “Indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.”
As I remembered it, Cage’s point was that Music was like Nature, and extended beyond the frame of the window, the device which defined a landscape. But reading it now/again, I see that it’s not the window he was talking about, but the looking, or rather, the turning away. That Music exists independent of our experience of it.
With the exact text, it’s easy enough to turn up the source of Cage’s quote, which was a lecture in Boston, delivered on December 8, 1965, and recorded by WGBH. <https://tinyurl.com/4um5hy24> It’s archived as part of a show called, Pantechnicon, but Cage said his lecture was titled, “Rhythm, &c.,” and that he’d created it for a six-volume series of texts collected by György Kepes called, Vision + Value. [Alice Rawsthorn’s account <https://tinyurl.com/ymbch98h> of the architecture-heavy Vision + Value gives better context than Cage does for why Le Corbusier is so relevant.]
Cage’s buildup to this quote is a critique of the structures—musical and otherwise—we inherited, adopted, moved into without thinking, like furnished apartments:
The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made—and this was what kept us breathing—was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was: a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting changes in consciousness etc. to go outside where breathing is child’s play. No walls not even the glass ones which though we could see through them killed the birds while they were flying.
Even in the case of object, the boundaries are not clear. I see through what you made. If, that is, the reflections don’t send me back where I am.
I’m going to need to sit with this a bit, and it probably won’t be right now. _greg.org

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PAUL SIGNAC THE BONAVENTURE PINE IN SAINT-TROPEZ, OPUS 239 1893
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2fv79c> _RabihAlameddine

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ON ART, POLITICS, AND TODAY’S EVOLVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPE.-- MIKE PEPI
“I think we need to return to a sort of community-based institution… radically rethinking both the kind of rabbit-holing that we’ve done on the left in terms of prioritizing these ever more niche causes and creating this ever more winnowing kind of self-referential, as I say, redecoration of the past. I believe that vision does include technology. I just think that what it doesn’t include is the Silicon Valley platform’s view of technology, which is essentially a venture capitalist idea. I’d say [the new institution we need] is a kind of human-first, community-based organization that is both obviously less sclerotic than the institutions are that we left behind, but also not nearly as digital utopian or techno-determinist as I think what’s being proposed.” _artnet

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TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/485a3amt> _trailcam