OLD NEWS

AMPHIBIANS ON THE MOVE by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/5d8uhk54>
Every spring, frog, toad and salamander lovers await the first warm, rainy night in early spring in hopes of observing hoards of amphibians awakening from their winter hibernation and migrating from their upland hibernacula to wetlands to breed. For many in the Northeast the start of this migration began this week. Monday evening temperatures hovered around 60°F. in the Champlain Valley Basin in Vermont and it was raining lightly. Hundreds of Blue-spotted Salamanders, Spotted Salamanders, Wood Frogs, Four-toed Salamanders, Eastern Red-backed Salamanders, Spring Peepers, and Eastern Newts were rescued from moving cars as they crossed roads in order to get to their breeding grounds. _NaturallyCurious

>>>

BIG
<https://tinyurl.com/4myh4z9t>

>>>

6 AMERICAN LAND-ART SITES THAT CHALLENGE OUR VIEW OF NATURE AND ART
<https://tinyurl.com/f2zj42hb>
In the 1960s, American artists began turning their backs on painting and sculpture, turning to a new material of choice: the land underfoot. Today, the movement known as land art continues to be a quintessential American art form—and has more to say than ever.
The closest thing land art has to an origin story is a dusty road trip three of its early protagonists, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, made to the Nevada desert in the late 1960s. Wearing white cowboy hats and sunburns, they were there to scout sites for future artwork, which they would go on to build, blast out and assemble on an epic scale over the next decade. What began as a bit of a middle finger to the art establishment—few of whom put on sensible shoes and trekked out to view land art in real life—quickly became a global genre, an outgrowth of minimalism and conceptualism that shifted focus away from commerce and, at its unpackageable best, toward a kind of universal awe.
This land art—also known as earthwork—was nothing new, of course. Prehistoric burial mounds, monoliths and ceremonial sites had long inspired wonder. But during a time of social friction, war abroad and growing ecological awareness at home, artists’ aims expanded, and land art matched the moment. Today, it’s inspiring a new generation of creators and viewers. Many recent examples—and reappraisals of earlier earthworks—suggest it’s time for a fresh look at the genre.
Here are six projects that have made generations of Americans think differently about land, art, their country and the world.
---
‘Spiral Jetty,’ Robert Smithson, Box Elder County, Utah (1970)
<https://tinyurl.com/ynmnm622>
When Robert Smithson piled basalt rocks into a widening gyre on the soggy bed of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the result—which drew on the artist’s fascinations with geology, astronomy, mythology, early civilizations and, not least, sci-fi—was hailed as heroic in scale and ambition, a message from art’s unbounded future. Six years later it was submerged, only to come and go with drought cycles that have left it increasingly embalmed in salt. These days, the transience of “Spiral Jetty” reads like an early warning of climate chaos. For his part, Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, thought of permanence as the biggest myth of all, according to Lisa LeFeuvre, director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. “In every article Robert wrote, he talked about entropy,” she says. “Ultimately, everything turns to dust.”
---
‘City,’ Michael Heizer, Lincoln County, Nev. (1970-2022)
<https://tinyurl.com/3eduswh5>
All land art is performance art to some extent, and Michael Heizer spent more than 50 years shaping “City.” In that time, he has brought to life a megasculpture 1.5 miles long by a half-mile wide—informed, he has said, by ritual sites and monuments of the pre-Columbian age. “City” is meant to outlast civilization, like the sandworms of “Dune.” “Mike started the idea that you can go out in this landscape and make work that is sublime,” Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, told the New Yorker in 2016. “There is nothing more powerful, romantic, and American than these gestures that in Mike’s case have taken his whole life.” Indigenous tribes whose ancestral home includes Nevada’s high desert have derided “City,” which includes a land acknowledgment on its website.
---
‘Grass Breathing,’ Ana Mendieta, Iowa City, Iowa (1974)
<https://tinyurl.com/kvyv65nd>
If you were looking to cast the role of a land artist in the early 1970s, Ana Mendieta might have been your last choice. Female, Cuban-born and barely 5 feet tall, Mendieta was no cowboy. Nonetheless, she made pioneering installation art, film and photography, much of which she called “earth-body” work. In “Grass Breathing,” Mendieta, hidden beneath squares of sod, uses her own respiration to animate the earth above. The result is intimate, funny and deeply human, says Leigh Arnold, a curator at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, whose 2022 land-art exhibition, “Groundswell,” featured Mendieta’s short film of the work. “It makes you think about the connections that female artists have made for millennia with the earth—and it reminds us that we’re part of a living ecosystem,” Arnold says. “We’re all dependent on one another.”
---
‘Wheatfield—A Confrontation,’ Agnes Denes, Manhattan (1982)
Wheat field in front of the New York City skyline with the Twin Towers visible.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdf2fsmv>
In 1982, Agnes Denes planted 2 acres of wheat seed into a thin layer of topsoil she’d spread over lower Manhattan’s Battery Park landfill. A crop rose that summer in the shadow of the Twin Towers, an ephemeral symbol of plenty beside the perpetually hungry wolves of Wall Street. “Wheatfield” was a rare kind of land art: urban, accessible and socially engaged. It attracted bankers, tourists and street vendors, who could stroll through the stalks before they were harvested. “It was insane. It was impossible. But it did call people’s attention to having to rethink their priorities and realize that, unless human values were reassessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger,” Denes later wrote.
---
‘Madre,’ Delcy Morelos (2025)
<https://tinyurl.com/2tm4w3x9>
More artists are shaping earthworks within gallery and museum walls. Some, like Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, have devised powerful sculpture from disarmingly unstable ingredients. “Madre,” which was recently on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, looks obdurate and unyielding from 10 feet away, but a closer view reveals pillowy soil mixed with buckwheat, hay, cinnamon, cloves, honey and chia seeds: the fecund stuff of life. Morelos has said her aim is “to draw viewers into close proximity” with nature and “to restore the spiritual bond between humans and the earth.”
---
‘Orisons,’ Marguerite Humeau, Alamosa County, Colo. (2023-25)
<https://tinyurl.com/ntzh5t78>
French artist Marguerite Humeau chose an unusual site for her 2023 earthwork “Orisons.” The 160-acre parcel, in the parched, south-central San Luis Valley of Colorado, had been decimated by drought and overdrawn water rights and was no longer viable for farming crops or livestock. But Humeau came for this bleak narrative. Granted two-year use of the land by its owners, she researched its history and ecosystems, mapped its terrain, and made 84 small kinetic sculptures animated by the relentless wind, replacing absence with presence and reminding visitors that place in itself has value _Sarah Medford_WallStreetJournal

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yn8vpa4e> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

56. STOP SIGN by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4h8kwda7>
It may be the most recognizable command object in American life. In a country whose very foundation is the suspicion of authority, we all—mostly—obey that metal octagon.
The first one appeared around 1914 in Detroit, a hand-lettered sign placed at a busy intersection. Motorists obeyed! The idea spread quickly, and by 1922 the octagonal shape became the standard, a device built for strangers who must cooperate without speaking.
And yet the stop sign isn’t all that successful. Over the past 40 years, American drivers have been recorded obeying stop signs less often. Why? It’s tempting to assume we’re becoming ruder, that stop-sign scofflawism is a symptom of declining civility.
But perhaps Americans are well-meaning drivers navigating an increasingly flawed signage system. What’s meant to make us safer paradoxically makes us less so—we’re less attentive to the road because we’re following a forest of signs among trees and parked cars. If there’s a problem, we think: add more. Add lights. Add another sign that says ALL WAY. Add a flag! But improving signage to fix driver behavior is like fighting illiteracy with better fonts.
No, despite the stop sign’s charm as a stage for folk performance—people steal it, shoot at it, hijack its command into jokes and political messages—our red-blooded American stop signs don’t work as well as roundabouts. At roundabouts, crashes drop 40% and fatal crashes drop 90%. Rather than telling us what to do and hoping we comply, the roundabout ensures we do it. _TheImpatientReader

>>>

RUTH ASAWA, "SPRING," 1965
<https://tinyurl.com/mpbwzvj9> _MichaelLobel

>>>

CALVIN TOMKINS, WHO CHRONICLED GENERATIONS OF VANGUARD ARTISTS, DIES AT 100
<https://tinyurl.com/47kbwkcc>
Calvin Tomkins, who wrote defining profiles of scores of leading artists, bringing their work to a broad public in crystalline prose that was insightful, generous, and witty, died on Friday. He was 100,
For more than 60 years, Tomkins immersed himself in the contemporary art world, meeting with his subjects over many months to report stories for the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1960. The body of work that he assembled amounts to an unrivaled history of the art of his era—a time of seismic aesthetic changes and the explosive growth of the art market.
Identifying a true peer to Tomkins requires going back half a millennium, to Giorgio Vasari, the famed Italian chronicler of artists in the 16th century. Remnick compared the two in an introduction for a six-volume, 1,640-page compilation of the writer’s work that was published in 2019, and termed Tomkins “our patient, better-educated, non-patronizing friend.”
As art took one radical new form after another in the decades following World War II, Tomkins was always eager to make sense of it, striving to render even the most esoteric artistic practices in an accessible manner. “What I came to believe, and still believe, is that the kind of profile I had in mind was a collaboration between the writer and the subject,” he wrote in the preface to the 2019 anthology.
Astonishingly, Tomkins came to his specialty by chance. While he was working in the foreign news department for Newsweek in 1959, an editor assigned him to interview Marcel Duchamp—a comparatively obscure figure at the time—because the first monograph of his work was about to be published. The two met at the King Cole Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “I would ask him an innocuous, irrelevant, or inaccurate question, and he would, without correcting me, turn it into something strange,” Tomkins told in 2019. “As a result, I felt this was the most interesting person I’d ever met.”
“The interview,” he wrote in his 2019 preface, “became a conversation, and that conversation has continued, with Duchamp and many other artists, for six decades.”
Tomkins’s first long piece for the magazine was a 1962 profile of the Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely. Stories followed on other vanguard figures, like composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and choreographer Merce Cunningham—and they just kept coming, charting the rise of Pop art, Minimalism, Land art, and so much more.
Few of the pivotal artists of postwar America eluded Tomkins, but when asked about that topic, he would mention people like Eva Hesse (who died in 1970, just 34) or Cy Twombly, the only person to reject him completely. Jasper Johns apparently acquiesced after turning him down a couple times, and even the elusive David Hammons eventually agreed to meet with Tomkins, along with his wife and frequent collaborator, writer Dodie Kazanjian, but he asked not to be recorded. For much of his career, Tomkins focused on white, male artists, mirroring the preferences of most museums and galleries of the time, but in later years, he covered a more diverse array of figures. _Andrew Russeth _ARTnews

>>>

PLAYGROUND BUSSEY, IA
<https://tinyurl.com/ysz6s8rj> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

HUGE YEAR FOR ART IN L.A.
This year marks a veritable museum-palooza as Los Angeles debuts four new major arts complexes,
Immerse yourself in a psychedelic explosion at Meow Wolf, plan an afternoon liaison with Van Gogh at LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries, inhale the scent of nature inside Refik Anadol’s AI arts museum, Dataland, or simply geek out over George Lucas’ jaw-dropping collection of “Star Wars” memorabilia.
Whatever your arts craving may be, this astoundingly rich new lineup of new local museums has you covered. _LATimes

>>>

CANDLELIGHT MASTER (TROPHIME BIGOT?), SINGER WITH A CANDLE, 1620S(?)
<https://tinyurl.com/2dfn7d3k> _JesseLocker

>>>

OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER IS TAKING A BIG SWING AT CONTEMPORARY ART
When you think about presidential libraries, you probably don’t picture fine art. Among the 13 institutions in the United States dedicated to a more recent slate of presidents, only one features a notable commission: an expansive mural created in 1960-61 by regionalist Thomas Hart Benton for the lobby of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri.
Chicago will be the exception, keeping with President Barack Obama’s vision for a center that veers far from the conventional approach to presidential libraries. Obama and his wife, Michelle, envisioned art as being a fundamental part of the $800 million Obama Presidential Center when it opens on Juneteenth after 10 years of planning and construction.
With the couple’s love of art as impetus, 30 famous and not-so-famous artists (including two duos) have been commissioned to create 28 large-scale works for the four-building complex on 19.3 acres on Chicago’s South Side. The Jackson Park site, intended as a vehicle for youth engagement and community revitalization, will not hold Oval Office archives. Rather, it will function as a hub for Chicagoans to get together — whether it’s through the campus athletic center, its library branch or its art gallery.
Setting it even further apart from its predecessors, this presidential center has its own curator who has zeroed in on a varied mix of artists from up-and-comers to contemporary masters. Her list includes some of Chicago’s most prominent Black artists, including multimedia artist Theaster Gates, welded-steel sculptor Richard Hunt and sculptor/installation artist Nick Cave (in collaboration with in Portland, Oregon, indigenous textile artist Marie Watt).
The arts and humanities were an essential feature of the Obama White House and continue to be a major part of the couple’s work today, said Virginia Shore, the Obama Center’s curator of commissions.
“It is a belief in art being reflective of our national soul,” she said. “Those are the president’s words — that art opens minds and nourishes souls — and we know this to be true.”
All but a handful of the chosen artists have been announced. The list also includes such art world heavy hitters as abstract painter Mark Bradford; Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu; and graphic artist Jenny Holzer, whose public works have popped up on everything from billboards and LED tickers to T-shirts.
Commissioned, too, are such influential figures as multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith and sociopolitical photographer Carrie Mae Weems as well as emerging artists like Tyanna Buie, an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Obama Center officials declined to say how much money is being spent on the art, including production, transportation and installation, but it is clearly in the millions of dollars. Whatever the exact size of the art budget, it dwarfs that of any previous presidential library or museum, according to Benjamin Hufbauer, author of the book, “Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory.” _WBEZ

>>>

YOU NEED THIS GORGEOUSNESS, YOU DO.
Hayami, Gyoshu : Tea Bowl and Fruits (1921) color on silk hanging scroll
<https://tinyurl.com/39m3xvk4> _RabihAlameddine

>>>

RUSSIA’S PAVILION AT VENICE BIENNALE WILL BE CLOSED IF IT FEATURES PROPAGANDA MAYOR SAYS
Russia’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be shut down if it engages in propaganda, the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, said on Thursday (19 March). Brugnaro added, however, that the city should remain a forum for dialogue.
The Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, and Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, have been at odds since the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s international cultural envoy, Mikhail Shvydkoy, announced on 3 March
that Russia was participating with a musical program of folklore and world music. It will mark Russia’s first appearance at the Biennale since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
After the European Union threatened to pull funding from the Biennale if Russia participates, Giuli called for the resignation of Tamara Gregoretti, the ministry of culture’s representative to the event. He also demanded full documentation
of plans for the Russian pavilion and any potential violations of sanctions on Russia.
The Biennale said on Tuesday: "No regulations have been violated and sanctions against the Russian Federation have been fully complied with, as is our duty.”
The feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, meanwhile, has reacted to the news of the dissident pavilion. In a statement, the group said:
“Accommodating official state representation while curating ‘dissent’ risks turning the latter into a performative gesture and virtue-signaling rather than a position. Still, if you are serious about welcoming artists who do not align with state narratives, we are ready to take you at your word. _ArtNewspaper

>>>

WALK OFF
<https://tinyurl.com/4wjayx9p> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

>>>

MEXICO’S CULTURE MINISTRY URGES EBAY TO HALT SALES OF PRE-HISPANIC ARTEFACTS
Mexico's cultural ministry has identified 195 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects listed for sale on eBay by a user based in the US. The ministry has called on the internet auction platform to remove the listings and return the items to Mexico, arguing that their sale is illegal.
The case came to light last month in a post by Mexico’s secretary of culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, who said that experts from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) had reviewed the listings associated with the eBay seller Coins Artifacts (based in Orlando, Florida) and determined that the objects form part of Mexico’s cultural heritage.
Curiel de Icaza also shared on social media the formal letter sent to eBay, urging the company to “immediately suspend the sale and return the items to the Mexican government”. She added that the export of these items has been prohibited since 1827 and that their presence outside the country “results from illicit extraction”.
The letter also states that legal action has been initiated with the relevant authorities in relation to the sale with the aim of securing the repatriation of the artefacts through diplomatic and legal channels. It describes the objects as an “invaluable legacy of ancestral cultures and national history”.
INAH—the Mexican government agency responsible for researching, preserving and protecting the country’s heritage—confirmed that its legal department had filed a complaint with the the office of Mexico’s Attorney General and notified its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Interpol and US authorities including Homeland Security Investigations in an effort to halt the sale. A spokesperson for INAH added that the agency “maintains a policy of confidentiality regarding certain details of the investigation so as not to hinder the legal repatriation process”.
The Coins Artifacts account has sold more than 230,000 items on eBay, has around 7,800 followers and holds a 100% positive-feedback rating. Active since 2010, it is designated by the platform as a “top-rated seller”.
Contacted, the seller gave his first name as Tom but declined to provide his surname. He said he was unaware of the case and asked for a translation of the Mexican government’s statement. In later messages, he defended the legality of the sales, stating that all items had been acquired from a private collection in Nevada, previously owned by David Harner of Arkansas in the 1950s and 60s. “It’s all legal,” he said.
“All of these items were purchased legally with full provenance from Arte Primitivo,” he added, referring to the gallery in Manhattan. “They are all legal to buy and sell in the United States. If you have not done so already, I suggest you research the laws regarding items that entered the United States before international treaties were signed. None of these treaties or agreements are retroactive.”\
He also said: “The Mexican government is trying to intimidate and shame people on social media into returning items they have no legal right to repatriate.”
An eBay spokesperson told that the platform “does not allow the listing or sale of antiques and artefacts that cannot be legally sold” and that it works with government agencies to identify and remove suspicious listings. The company's spokesperson added that it is “working with relevant authorities” to investigate the listings flagged by Mexico’s secretary of culture and that it will take action if they are found to violate its policies, including removing listings and suspending seller accounts.
However, when the seller was asked whether he had been contacted by eBay following the letter, he suggested otherwise, saying that “they get these letters all the time”.
According to eBay’s policies, listings of artefacts, fossils and antiquities must comply with all applicable laws, while “looted or stolen goods” are explicitly prohibited. Listings of antiquities are also required to include provenance information. However, the company states that it cannot independently assess the authenticity of items or the legality of their sale, placing responsibility on sellers to ensure compliance. (In what is perhaps the most famous and glaring example of stolen art trading hands on eBay, in 2023 it was discovered that a longtime curator at the British Museum had stolen thousands of objects from museum storage and sold them via the website since 2016.) _ArtNewspaper

>>>

SEX AND SCIENCE IN ROBERT THORNTON’S TEMPLE OF FLORA
Bridal beds, blushing captives, and swollen trunks -
<https://tinyurl.com/9dyzwpzr>
Carl Linnaeus' taxonomy of plants heralded a whole new era in 18th-century Europe of plants being spoken of in sexualised terms.
<https://tinyurl.com/24a9sym9>
This association between the floral and erotic reached its visual zenith in Robert Thornton's exquisitely illustrated Temple of Flora.
<https://tinyurl.com/3pa3zxpa> _PublicDomainReview