OLD NEWS

RED-BELLIED WOODPECKERS EXCAVATING CAVITIES by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/2enyjm8z>
Approximately 20% of the songbirds in the Northeast are cavity nesters. Some, like woodpeckers, are primary cavity nesters – they create their own holes. Secondary cavity nesters, such as Eastern Bluebirds, use existing, empty holes. As a rule, most cavity nesters begin nesting earlier than open nesters, as cavities offer shelter, while open-nesting birds tend to wait for foliage coverage.
Red-bellied Woodpeckers have been extending their range north and west since the early 1900’s, and have reached southern New England and the Champlain Valley of Vermont and New York. They generally select dead trees or dead limbs in live trees and characteristically return to the same stub or limb to nest in successive years, excavating a new cavity beneath the previous year’s cavity. _NaturallyCurious

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ADMIT
<https://tinyurl.com/y2ew7j9p> _DavidShrigley

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MANITOBA ANISHINAABE ARTIST DESIGNS PATCH FOR CANADIAN ASTRONAUT AHEAD
<https://tinyurl.com/3ztd73t4>
A patch designed by an Anishinaabe artist from Manitoba is set to travel into deep space during the upcoming Artemis II mission as astronaut Jeremy Hansen prepares to become the first Canadian to orbit the moon.
Artist Henry Guimond, from Sagkeeng First Nation, about 100 kilometres north of Winnipeg, said it's "out of this world" to know his work will be travelling farther into space than any humans have gone before.
"That's a long way for my artwork to be going — totally amazing," Guimond told CBC News on Monday.
The Canadian Space Agency's Hansen will be embarking on a 10-day mission past the far side of the moon alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch. The team will be testing how crucial systems on the Orion spacecraft respond with astronauts aboard.
<https://tinyurl.com/5xe5yeb4>
The seven-sided patch features seven vibrant blue animals inspired by Anishinaabe teachings, including the Seven Sacred Laws that connect humans with their relationship to the Earth.
Each animal inside the silver heptagonal border, which represents the Orion spacecraft, carries a significant meaning: the buffalo represents respect; the eagle is love; the bear is courage; the sasquatch is honesty; the beaver is wisdom; the wolf is humility, and the turtle is truth.
The design also features a bow representing Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt with whom the mission shares its name. The arrow is shown being launched from Earth and around Grandmother Moon.
"It's good for everyone to learn those teachings, the seven laws for all humanity, not just for Indigenous people, but for all people," Guimond said.
Hansen asked Guimond to design a personal patch for his flight suit after participating in a vision quest at Turtle Lodge Centre of Excellence in Indigenous Education and Wellness in Sagkeeng First Nation in 2023.
Guimond created it with the guidance of knowledge keeper Dave Courchene III.
Hansen says it's meaningful to have these teachings guide him on his journey to the moon and back.
"It just represents some of the beauty of Indigenous culture and their perspective on the moon and the Seven Sacred Laws, and just the richness of doing something together," he said during a news conference on Sunday.
Guimond said designing the patch sent him on his own mission to unveil the patch at CSA headquarters near Montreal and to Regina.
Now, he said, it feels like "a piece of me is going with them" into space. _CBC.Ca

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4jhdp49v> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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CY TWOMBLY FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/ys7ezrcp>
I’ve had the tabs open so long I can’t remember where I heard or from whom, but someone had made a big point about visiting Cy Twombly and seeing a sculpture in a bedroom that had never been seen, in a style that didn’t fit his typical style. It was a tacky plastic flower, painted black, on a rusty rock, on a velvet-covered box, with a plaque like from a bowling trophy.
<https://tinyurl.com/4tjcns3d>
At first, I remember thinking, really? The 1998 sculpture on the cover of Twombly’s first monograph of photos, published in 2002? But that is a different experience. [Interesting, the sculpture is configured differently in photos inside.]
<https://tinyurl.com/454hbcs2>
And then it’s like, oh, the one which was exhibited for the first time in 2011, alongside the mausoleums of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where Twombly’s two-artist exhibition with Poussin <https://tinyurl.com/3tmr5htr> opened the week before his death? That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do <(1998)?
The title may be more atypical for Twombly than the sculpture itself, because it comes not from a poem but from another artwork. That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door), 1931-41, by Ivan Albright is a moody, funereal painting of a floral wreath wilting on a door <https://tinyurl.com/bdcpwvv9> , which has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1955. No idea what the connection might be.
<https://tinyurl.com/2avsmk7c>
But Twombly’s sculpture floods me with associations of Lexington and the family situations <https://tinyurl.com/4jsfamb2> he was dealing with there, and, frankly, the way Robert E. Lee’s memorial statue of him reclining on a draped lounger is the historic psychic center of town.
And then I wondered how awareness, or even familiarity, doesn’t diminish the mysteriousness of seeing a Twombly sculpture. Maybe they all kind of feel like things long unseen, unknown. Something we’re the first to come upon, and we don’t quite know what to make of it.
<https://tinyurl.com/4kx443at>
It make me think of another sculpture, Untitled (Lexington), 2001, which has a bouquet of scrunched up, paint-soaked paper towels on top of a truncated white pedestal. The towel flowers first felt like the studio, a verité portrait of a work table. Which may be because Sally Mann took that portrait in 2012, and it was published in her book and in Twombly Studios & Homes:
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3fckdd>
Writing this now they also reminded me of the wreath on Albright’s door. But I think I thought of it because there’s a picture somewhere of Untitled (Lexington) in a bedroom, the only thing on the night stand.
[remembered it update: WOW no, it is another work, and it is in Cy Dear, in the bedroom, probably in Gaeta, where Nicola Del Roscio’s Picasso is sitting on the floor. Oh no, my heart is breaking it looks like a wedding cake.]
<https://tinyurl.com/2pddpw2v> _greg.org

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PRELUDE 1 ORANGE
<https://tinyurl.com/4d5cek9u> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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Q – Quilting
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5hk7pc>
In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” (1973), a stylish young woman with newly adopted Black Power sympathies—she used to be Dee, and now goes by Wangero—visits her mama back home. She wants the family’s quilts, which were hand-stitched from used clothing. Growing up, she had found them hopelessly old-fashioned. Now she’s able to see their beauty, the way they embody her heritage. Mama has to disappoint her, though. The heirlooms are already promised to her sister. “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” cries Wangero. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use … But they’re priceless!”
Walker’s story was published in the ’70s, when the concept of a “generation gap” was very much in the air. But it was also topical in another way. Two years earlier, the Whitney Museum of American Art, needing an exhibition on short notice, had a surprise blockbuster with “Abstract Design in American Quilts.” The show took the art world by storm. Here were textiles with the compositional intelligence of hard-edge abstraction. Even Hilton Kramer, the famously conservative critic at The New York Times, was floored, writing that “the anonymous quilt‐makers of the American provinces created a remarkable succession of visual masterpieces that anticipated many of the forms that were later prized for their originality and courage.”
That sentiment has often been repeated (without much variation) in the years since, notably in response to “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which also came to the Whitney, in 2002. Yet the comparison to painting is doubly problematic: It implies that quilts are somehow elevated by the comparison, while also sweeping aside the real conditions and motivations of their production. Recently, the American Folk Art Museum reopened its newly renovated building with “An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles.” Co-curated by Emelie Gevalt and Austin Losada, the show aims to trace “an intricately woven web of environmental resources, craft and scientific knowledge, global movement, and creative collaboration.” In other words, it treats quilts not as art, but as material culture, in all its many dimensions.
Walker would probably have approved. When she has Wangero disdaining the idea that her sister Maggie might put the old quilts on her family’s beds rather than hanging them up on the wall, Mama replies like this: “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!”
—Glenn Adamson _ArtInAmerica

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HEADSHOT INSPO.
<https://tinyurl.com/mfdhnus9>
Otto Dix, "Hugo Erfurth with Dog," 1926. _CarolinaAMiranda

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66. PETOSKEY STONE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/bdd5v2ms>
When you start to look for them, hexagons are everywhere. There’s a utilitarian perfection to the shape. In nature, hexagons grouped together waste almost no space, using the least possible material with the greatest possible strength. Each one shares walls with its neighbors, so nothing is duplicated. That’s why the form appears across wildly different natural systems: honeycombs, snowflakes, tortoiseshell. Even on Saturn’s north pole, a storm structure thousands of miles across is a hexagon. The geometry is sublime.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the same mathematical perfection that compels bees and ice led a species of coral to grow in tightly-packed hexagons. Over time, the coral died, was buried, and was compressed into rock. Massive glaciers then tore the fossilized coral rocks from deep underground—the same glaciers that gouged out the Great Lakes from the surface of the Earth. A mile, maybe two miles of solid vertical ice, plowing up vast tracts of land.
Today, the winter ice at the edge of a lake pushes up rocks—a glacier in miniature—and when the spring melt occurs the shoreline is littered with unremarkable gray stones. When they are smoothed and polished by human hands, the hexagonal coral from hundreds of millions of years ago springs to life. There it is, just as it was in a shallow tropical sea near the equator, attached to the ocean floor in present-day Michigan. Ancient, tiny creatures held in your hand, their name tracing back to the Odawa word for sunrise. _TheImpatientReader

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NEIL JENNEY, "TRASH AND TRASHCAN," 1970
<https://tinyurl.com/2hwfr56e>
Pam Bondi’s portrait was taken down at DOJ
and tossed in a trash bin soon after her firing._MeidasTouch
<https://tinyurl.com/36fxjj7z>
Arman, "Poubelle" (Garbage Can), 1964
<https://tinyurl.com/yaa3vba6>
Andy Warhol, "Trash Cans," 1976-1986
<https://tinyurl.com/2x4htw64> _MichaelLobel

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“SPECTRUM OF DESIRE” IS A RAUNCHY AND ROMANTIC DIVINE REVELATION by Emily Colucci
<https://tinyurl.com/ywxhf994>
Can receiving the stigmata be a sex act? It is surely intimate and sensual, not to mention penetrative. This is a question that I’ve been musing on ever since fixating on Giovanni di Paolo’s shimmering, submissive 15th-century panel painting, Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata <https://tinyurl.com/327c8cbj> , on view in the Met Cloister’s heroically horny and holy exhibition, Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages. In di Paolo’s painting, Saint Cathy bottoms for Christ, her arms raised in supplication, while Christ hovers above her, still stuck to the cross above a lavish red and gold altar. While it’s hard to get past Saint Cath and Christ’s matching zombie-green skin tone, the most remarkable part of this panel painting is their intense, erotic eye contact, like two lovers. Instead of coitus, these ESP love birds get off through their identical wounds, with blood barely visible on Catherine’s right hand and a teeny-weeny nail pierced through her left palm. Don’t clutch your pearls! This isn’t stigmata sex outside of marriage. Saint Catherine of Siena was mystically married to Christ, like many other berserk saints. I guess Christ is poly! Saint Catherine stands out, though, among his saintly spouses because she claimed her wedding ring wasn’t made out of boring jewels or gold, but Jesus’s foreskin! Unique!
<https://tinyurl.com/58krahuu>
Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata instantly attracted me in Spectrum of Desire because, following the lead of Saint John Waters of Charm City, Saint Cathy is one of my favorite bugged-out saints. She’s rivaled only by the perfectly named Christina the Astonishing, who levitated above a congregation after returning from the dead, repulsed to the rafters by their sinful stench, and after her return, flung herself into fires for kicks. Saint Catherine could be just as astonishing. She eschewed all food except for the Eucharist, but made exceptions for liquids like pus, which she ladled from a woman’s cancerous sores. Why? “For God, I guess,” postulates Saint Waters in his book Role Models.
<https://tinyurl.com/459fjjnm>
Saint Catherine of Siena isn’t the only one in Spectrum of Desire who is into blood sports and ogling Christ’s cut abs. Her fellow saint, Francis, is a size queen, peering up at a ginormous frame-mogging Christ (Jesus clearly looksmaxxed before going in front of Pontius Pilate) in Michele Giambono’s Man of Sorrows. Like Saint Cath, Fran has been penetrated too, given the faint line of blood that connects his punctured hands with Christ. But the stigmata isn’t the sexy centerfold here. Though Saint Franky’s eyes stay chastely upturned, it’s hard not to follow the trail of blood from Jesus’s side wound that trickles down his flat stomach, curves over his shapely hips, and drips around his pelvis into his loincloth. Just try not to get turned on. People in the Middle Ages understood the risk of gawping at Christ’s figure. As Bryan C. Keene notes in the Spectrum of Desire exhibition catalogue, anti-fun grump, Saint Bernardino of Siena, who, when not being a cock-blocker, encouraged the burning of books and vanities, like high heels and locks of false hair, finger-wagged about jacking it to Jesus paintings. Saint Bern had a reason to fear faithful fapping, given Jean de Beaumetz’s nearby Crucifixion with a Carthusian Monk, <https://tinyurl.com/yh88r38s> another painting of pregnant gazes at Christ’s body. The central lookie-loo in this work is a Carthusian monk who genuflects so close to the base of the cross that it looks like he’s giving Christ’s feet a good whiff. And why shouldn’t he? Who could resist taking a closer look at Christ’s sheer underwear! The wall label explains that these types of works became a source of concern for later monks, who “warned fellow monks against looking at such images of the naked Christ for the impure thoughts they could arouse.” What neuters! Let those pent-up monks have a little joy!
<https://tinyurl.com/yh754fxd>
Joy is the exact feeling that coursed through my body in Spectrum of Desire, which is my favorite museum exhibition in recent memory. The show is a relief, as so many institutional exhibitions lately feel so staid. I wandered through the Whitney Biennial and, barring a few standouts, like Pat Oleszko’s deliriously silly video Footsi (more silly art, please!), Zach Blas’s overkill but still relevant demonic AI-worshipping installation, CULTUS, and Agosto Machado’s devotional archival/hoarder altar to Ethyl Eichelberger, which made me gasp as it, unbenownst to me, contained the exhibition card from my own co-curated Visual AIDS exhibition Party Out Of Bounds, I wondered if I even liked contemporary art anymore (I’ll admit the problem might be me). In contrast, the still-transgressive centuries-old mix of sacred and profane in Spectrum of Desire felt like a divine revelation.
<https://tinyurl.com/5bv6k9kk>
Curated by Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut, the packed show, crammed into the sanctum of the Fuentiduena Chapel at the Cloisters, is everything I want in an exhibition: off-putting demonstrations of religious excess, like nuns recalling their “handsome and comely” statues of baby Jesus, such as the one on display with his ruddy cheeks and genitalia, coming alive and demanding to be breastfed; the Virgin Mary opening her thighs; sweetly homoerotic sculptures of Jesus wrapping his arms around John the Beloved and Mary and her cousin Elizabeth touching palms; a serpent-like Eve and Lilith sucking on the juices of their sumptuous paradise lost apples; and, of course, the always gorgeous, perpetually suffering queer icon Saint Sebastian, here represented by a wooden sculpture painted with a very faint happy trail leading to his crotch.
<https://tinyurl.com/y2e43f5v>
And just in case you’re sick of my Christian iconography preferences, there are other fables and myths to choose from, like that self-pleasuring Narcissus gaping at his own reflection. Even more alarming is the fable of Febilla and poet Virgil, who, miffed at Febilla for rebuffing his advances, snuffs out all the lights in Rome and stuffs a hot coal up her hoohah, rendering Feb the only light source in the city. On one disturbing, sexually abusive painted goblet, the townspeople stick their torches into her puss for a light. If viewers squint hard enough, an intricate ivory writing tablet gives Febilla a tad more agency, squatting on all fours, offering light to her fellow citizens, after dangling Virgil in a basket in the adjacent frame.
<https://tinyurl.com/2z82e2r6>
Spectrum of Desire also explores themes that are a little more earthly, depicting the lives and loves of people in the Middle Ages—or at least the baubles, belts, and gewgaws they wore or carried, particularly related to marriage. Some of these works are chastely romantic, like the German oil on panel, A Bridal Couple, which features an ornate two-toned tights and fairy slippers-wearing man as he hands his rosy-cheeked wife a forget-me-not. Others are a tad more provocative, such as the erotically curved saddle, likely used in a wedding procession, emblazoned with couples trying out all sorts of seduction, from alluring serenades to desperate grabbing. While the saddle is a cavalcade of conquest, other wedding accoutrements contained thinly veiled threats. A faded purse used by a bride to dole out coins is embroidered with a scene featuring Patient Griselda, as the wall label describes, “a European folktale figure subjected by her husband to a series of terrible lessons to test her submissiveness.” Yikes!
<https://tinyurl.com/3x7nesjz>
Don’t worry, though. Women get theirs. Holcomb and Thebaut not only expose the marital traditions of the Middle Ages, but they also reveal how, despite the stringent understanding of sexuality and wedlock of the time, there was more fluidity and flexibility to be found than most of us judgmental contemporary viewers, convinced of our own progressivism, would assume. Take the filthy and festive gag gifts. A plate features a wife spanking her husband, who appears stunned by this gendered role reversal, his ass turned toward the viewer in a way that makes my back ache. A nearby amusing and absurdist aquamanile presents a similar power switcheroo, with Phyllis riding Aristotle side-saddle.
<https://tinyurl.com/2vkxa2se>
Not everyone in the Middle Ages was so saddled to the binary or their assigned gender. As usual, those crazy saints were the ones to shuffle off those gendered restrictions. A wall label offers that there were several examples of trans masculine saints, often transitioning so they could become monks (maybe they liked that hair halo). My most revered gender-fucking saint that appears in the exhibition is hirsute Saint Wilgefortis. Horrified at the prospect of marrying a pagan man, Wilgefortis tapped God and prayed for a beard. The Holy Father granted her hairy wish, but her bio dad was less enthused, overreacting by crucifying her. Nice one, Daddy! Saint Wilgefortis doesn’t look all that impressed by her father’s brutal and final punishment, though, as she dangles, bored, from a cross in a tiny illustration from a Book of Hours.
<https://tinyurl.com/2nyr8dn4>
Perhaps even more than the aesthetic qualities of the artwork on display, their corresponding bonko stories tickle my fancy. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few formal eye-poppers in Spectrum of Desire. In fact, the show features perhaps the biggest gasp-inducing shocker in all of art history: “The Wound of Christ” from The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy. A giant, swollen, reddened disembodied vulva hovers like a hallucination, wedged between a cross and a whipping post (very BDSM!). At the center of this yoni is a deep slit of black, a vaginal void. Above the vulva, a man with a ladder looks as if he’s ready to climb right in. What the hell?! While to anyone with eyes, this illustration appears pornographic, it’s intended to represent Jesus’s side wound. This vulvic imagery was not accidental. The wall label explains, “Medieval Christians were instructed to find refuge in Christ’s side as if it were a womb; some writings even compared his suffering on the cross to pangs of birth.” Jesus not only died for our sins but left us a warm womb to float in too! There’s also something delightfully radical here in terms of gender–lithe, loinclothed hunk Jesus also had a vulva. And those Christian conservatives dare hate anyone who isn’t cisgender!
<https://tinyurl.com/3nxa3v8d>
It’s taken me far too long to not only appreciate art from the Middle Ages, but just maybe love it more than any other kind of art nowadays. I know why. I read way too much Christopher Hitchens and listened to way too much Bill Hicks at a formative young age. For a long time, I, stupidly, associated Christian iconography, even in old-ass art, with conservative loonies. But within the past few years, my perspective has shifted significantly. Maybe it’s because in 2026 Christian conservatives are mostly focused on their own heretical acts, like attempting to bring about the end times through red heifers and nuclear war, dancing with pyrotechnics in the wake of a grisly public assassination, and laying hands on Donald Trump above his Diet Coke button on the Resolute Desk. Perhaps I’ve simply softened and become less of an edgelord. Or realized that work reaching for transcendence made in the throes of religious mania is probably the best there is. Or maybe, through exhibitions like Spectrum of Desire, I finally recognize that some of the most subversive art still lies hidden in the past. _FlthyDreams

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RED-BELLIED WOODPECKERS EXCAVATING CAVITIES by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/3jkbsuvr>
Initially a process of “mutual tapping” takes place, where the male taps the tree softly and shows his mate a prospective site or the beginnings of an excavation. If she approves, she joins him in tapping, giving him the green light. Both male and female then proceed to excavate a cavity roughly 9”-13” inches deep. After 20 minutes or so of excavating inside the tree, the woodpecker fills its beak with the miniscule wood chips it’s produced and appears at the entrance hole, opening its beak wide as it flicks the chips into the air. Quickly it disappears back into the hole and repeats the process until the wood chips are gone and it’s time to do some more excavating. Eventually its mate appears and there is a changing of the guard. Most cavities are completed within a week or two, and an average of four eggs are laid within the next week. _NaturallyCurious