OLD NEWS
SKUNK CABBAGE & BLACK BEARS by Mary Holland
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When Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) pokes its head above the often snow-covered ground, spring has arrived. Our first flowering plant in the Northeast is not very popular with most wildlife – exceptions to this are Canada Geese, which have been seen eating its leaves, and squirrels, which are said to like the spadix, or flower-bearing structure within the hood, or spathe.
By far the biggest consumers of Skunk Cabbage are Black Bears, which feed almost exclusively on it upon emerging from hibernation. According to a Canadian research project, if the previous fall’s crop of acorns was large and many remain in the spring, Black Bears will seek them out, but even with an ample supply of acorns, more than half a Black Bear’s diet consisted of Skunk Cabbage, even though acorns contain up to 10% fat, compared with only .2% in Skunk Cabbage. _NaturallyCurious
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LOOK
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https://tinyurl.com/27wvptmd> _DavidShrigley
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MARCIA MARCUS, PAINTER WHO GAINED LATE-CAREER RAVES FOR HER PORTRAITS, DIES AT 97
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Marcia Marcus, a painter who spent decades making off-kilter portraits of herself and others in relative obscurity, only to gain positive notice during her final years, died at 97 on Thursday. Her passing was confirmed by her daughter, Kate Prendergast, who said she died of age-related complications.
Until very recently, Marcus was a little-known figure, even though her work was featured in group exhibitions by closely watched galleries such Stable and Dwan during the 1950s and ’60s. But recent shows have brought her art to a new audience, generating a small but growing following.
She was known for painting portraits of people ranging from the artist Red Grooms to the critic Jill Johnston, both of whom she knew personally. These are no traditional portraits: the Grooms one, a 1961 painting called Florentine Landscape
, features the semi-nude artist sprawled out on a blanket in a park-like setting. He adopts the guise of an odalisque, a female archetype that routinely has shown up in paintings by men. Many later works would also subvert traditional notions about gender and representation.
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Born in 1928 in New York, Marcus received her BA in art from NYU in 1947, then took classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League during the ’50s. She became friends with Allan Kaprow, collaborating with him on his Happenings, and showed in 1960 at Delancey Street Museum, an alternative space run by Grooms.
<https://tinyurl.com/24tvhxb3>
She became known early on for works with sharply delineated people that she thinly painted. “Hers is a most controlled and sublimated sensibility, which tends to reduce the solidity of natural things to an echo of their presence,” wrote critic Brian O’Doherty in a1961
In a series of paintings from the ’60s, she returned to her own image, representing herself variously as Medusa, Athena, a bourgeois tourist, a stately matron, and more. In depicting herself as so many different female types, she suggested that women like her were constantly shifting their appearance, depending on where they chose to present themselves.
Critic John Yau twice noted that her work preceded that of Cindy Sherman, whose famed photographs during the 1970s and ’80s explored that same theme. In his review of the Eric Firestone show, Yau wrote that it was “unaccountable” that she had not been canonized, noting that the “art world was not ready to accept” her during the ’60s.
<https://tinyurl.com/28njqdbr>
He also praised Marcus’s portraits of Black men, women, and children from the ’60s and ’70s, which he said could be seen as “a forerunner to the work of Kerry James Marshall and Barkley L. Hendricks.”
Although Marcus tends to be talked about in relation to gender, she had a funny way of resisting her work being pigeonholed.
<https://tinyurl.com/238omuau>
The curator Dorothy Seckler once pointed out to Marcus that she seemed particularly focused on the female figure, especially at a time when figurative painting wasn’t so widely accepted. Marcus responded: “No, I like to do men. They seem to be less available very often, although I have done, actually, quite a lot of figures. I think all you need is someone who is very patient and somewhat vain.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2bke6pwj> _ARTnews
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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/26of53mk> _LisaAnneAuerbach
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NONA FAUSTINE (1977–2025)
<https://tinyurl.com/2yvhlwts>
Artist and photographer Nona Faustine, who made Black womanhood and the attendant topics of identity, history, and representation her subjects in works of stunning visual power, died in New York on March 20. She was forty-eight Her death was announced by gallery which represented her; no cause was given. Photographing young mothers, her own family members, and herself, Faustine highlighted marginalized African American histories, the hidden trauma wrought by the transatlantic slave trade, and the exigencies of being born Black and female. She brought all these themes to bear at once in her visceral and widely acclaimed series “White Shoes” (2012–21), for which she photographed herself wearing little more than a pair of white high heels in New York City locations historically associated with the slave trade. “I watched as the people drove past me in their cars as if I, a Black woman, standing naked in the middle of the street, wasn’t even there at all.” _Artforum
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ARKANSAS BOLL WEEVIL ERADICATION PROGRAM PORTLAND, AR
<https://tinyurl.com/24gko5py> _RuralIndexingProject
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TO MARK THE BIRTHDAY OF VINCENT VAN GOGH—
iconic modern artist born today in 1853—
a thread of some of my favorite,
relatively lesser known works by him.
First up, the stunning multi-colored variegation
of his Tree Trunks in the Grass,
made in last months of his life
<https://tinyurl.com/24nazdvs>
Some of Van Gogh's strangest—
and least-discussed—works
are a series of drawings of an Egyptian head,
which he made in the last months of his life
and which sometimes includes other figures alongside them.
I haven't yet seen an adequate explanation
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of why he would have made these
<https://tinyurl.com/264hypzo> _MichaelLobel
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ELLSWORTH KELLY EXTRA SMALL
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While poking around the Gemini G.E.L. CR, I was surprised to find that River II (2005), one of Ellsworth Kelly’s superlong prints, was also his second to last print made with Gemini.
I’ll have to check the Kelly prints catalogue raisonné for details—the second edition was published in 2012, but Kelly sure seemed booked and busy right up to the end in 2015.
It’s also a surprise because the last print he made with Gemini was maybe his smallest ever. Red Curve (2006) is a single color lithograph, cropped so the shape goes right to the edges and the corners of the 12 x 6 3/4 inch sheet.
Red Curve was published for Kelly’s show at the Serpentine Gallery, a cheap, unframed edition of 100. I feel like it was easily under GBP1000, and at the time, it didn’t even seem real somehow. Now it is fascinating and formally intriguing, especially after the other full-bleed prints he’d just made, that resonate between print and object. Also it’s utterly adorable.
<https://tinyurl.com/25b6wlc8>
[OK, close to the smallest but not the last: Blue Gray Green Red (2008) was part of the Gemini-organized Artists for Obama portfolio. Here they both are installed at Joni Weyl in 2019.]
later this afternoon update: I went through the CR, published in 2012, but it does end in 2008. I feel like if there were more prints coming, they could have fit them in. So what seems like the last last print for Kelly was a large (48 x 130 in.) version of Blue Gray Green Red. He went big, then he went home.
<https://tinyurl.com/2cjvsdh7>
The only smaller edition, though, might be Red Curve (1999), which he made for Parkett, which is 10 x 7 in. And for the 1973 Works By Artists in The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio, Kelly made an untitled black on white screenprint that is 12 x 9 in. And while there are a couple of similarly sized Concorde etchings in the early 1980s, they’re on traditional, larger sheets.]
Rather than delve into why Kelly stopped, or what the very last prints mean, Richard Axsom, the prints CR editor, looked at what was there: a complete, ambitious, and exceptional project, and said, “River is a great summa to Kelly’s prints.” _greg.org
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LUCA CAMBIASO, SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST PAINTING HIS FATHER, C. 1570.
<https://tinyurl.com/22bex5vx> _JesseLocker
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HENRI MATISSE’S DAUGHTER MARGUERITE
<https://tinyurl.com/2227g58n>
If you thought Henri Matisse an art-world staple—a true incontournable—his work entering the public domain in 2025 is only set to cement that ubiquity. Now that you can use his works, free of copyright, to, as the British Library put it in January, “make Matisse your own”, he will soon be on every notebook, T-shirt, water bottle, silk scarf, key ring and ball-point pen out there. It suggests we will come to experience a certain fatigue, a feeling that we know the work of Matisse only too well.
However, an exhibition will, without question, upend that assumption. it will focus on the relationship between the painter and his daughter, Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse, who he had with his model Caroline Joblaud in 1894. He acknowledged the child when she was three and she thereafter lived with the artist and his wife, Amélie.
<https://tinyurl.com/2a3ptaoq>
The painted portraits, meanwhile, follow Matisse’s evolution. There is his Cubism-adjacent phase, with Tête blanche et rose (1914-15), and his Niçoise period, Fête des fleurs (1922) with all those scintillating colours, and Mediterranean light. “At one point, Matisse said to Marguerite: ‘I feel like this painting wants to take me elsewhere. Will you follow me in this new, slightly mad direction?’,” Barat-Mabille says. “The work becomes something very different to anything he’d done until then, with hard, harsh lines. And no doubt it was only with Marguerite that he could allow himself to explore in that way.”
<https://tinyurl.com/27alghh7>
Marguerite is the one person Matisse painted consistently, for decades. She starts out as a little girl wearing a black ribbon—Portrait de Marguerite (1906-07)—to hide the scar on her neck from a life-saving tracheotomy endured when she was seven. You may recognise her by that same ribbon as the woman in blue and white, in the foreground of Matisse’s masterpiece, Tea (1919). In Le Paravent mauresque (1921) she is the very picture of elegance, dressed all in white, leaning against the mantelpiece, framed by kaleidoscopic patterning.
Not long after this, in 1923, Marguerite married the Byzantine scholar Georges Duthuit, and for a long while no longer posed for her father. Instead, she became an agent, of sorts, wrangling collectors and dealers, hanging exhibitions and speaking her mind about her father’s work.
<https://tinyurl.com/2yuewqae>
“There is a moment, when Matisse is in the south of France, when she says to him, ‘I think papa’s used up the light of Nice’,” Marguerite clearly thought her father needed to come back home for a break.
By the time Matisse drew his daughter in Vence in 1945, a gentle charcoal on now ageing paper, he was 76 years old. Marguerite was in her 50s. “I adore Matisse, I love his work. But what makes you love him even more, is discovering him as a father, in what really was, for its time, a very modern family. He was attentive, anxious for his children and for Marguerite in particular who was of such fragile health. [He was] a father who listened and encouraged and supported, which, for the early 20th century, wasn’t necessarily a given.” _ArtNewspaper
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KIM JEONG-HUI, 'SEHANDO' (A WINTER SCENE), 1844.
<https://tinyurl.com/28d5bb87> _AndrewRusseth
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SHRINE SENT HOME.
After 120 years, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is returning an Indigenous shrine known as the Whalers’ Shrine to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation community in Canada, The wooden shrine features 88 carved wooden human figures, 4 carved whale figures, and 16 human skulls, and began its journey from the New York institution back to Vancouver Island last week. Locals there have been waiting for its return ever since it was sold secretly by two chiefs for $500 in the early 1900s and taken to the museum. Mowachaht epresentatives have repeatedly demanded that the shrine be repatriated, with no success until now, even as the shrine remained off view, in museum storage. “We’re ready for it to come home,” said Marsha Maquinna, an eighth-generation heir to a Mowachaht chief. “We, as a community, have lots to heal.” _ARTnews
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WIFE OF THE MASTER
<https://tinyurl.com/2crl6djt> _#WomensArt
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EXTENSIVE LOOTING FROM THE SUDAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
Reports of extensive looting from the Sudan National Museum are emerging after the Sudanese army retook parts of the capital, Khartoum, previously held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Speaking to the BBC World Service, Sudan’s director of museums, Ikhlas Abdel Latief, said that collections that had been packed away while the museum was being restored had been stolen and that a strong room containing archaeological gold had been raided. Concerns about looting at the museum – which houses the world’s oldest collection of Nubian artefacts – grew last September after the national broadcaster, the Sudan Broadcasting Corporation, said that it had satellite images of trucks smuggling artefacts out of the country. This prompted UNESCO to call for the art market to avoid ‘acquiring or taking part in the import, export or transfer of ownership of cultural property from Sudan’. Some 150,000 people have been killed and 12 million displaced since civil war broke out in April 2023. _ApolloMag
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VIRGINIA WOOLF — WHO DIED THIS DAY IN 1941 – BY ROGER FRY
<https://tinyurl.com/287hawe7> _PublicDomainReview
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LACMA TURNS 60 by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/il1f001>
A familiar cliché holds that Los Angeles is a young city that got a late start in building cultural infrastructure. Maybe it's time to rethink that as LACMA marks its 60th anniversary.
The milestone isn't getting much fanfare. All eyes are on the impending debut of Peter Zumthor's transformed campus. But at its March 31, 1965, opening, LACMA was touted as the first major U.S. art museum built since the National Gallery of Art (opened 1941). It is, I think, still fair to say that LACMA is the nation's youngest big civic art museum of general scope. While such important institutions as Fort Worth's Kimbell and Miami's Pérez are newer, the former is a masterpiece collection of a few hundred objects, and the latter is contemporary art only.
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LACMA's newness is pitched as an asset (think "unburdened by what has been.") It is equally handy as an excuse when Easterners complain about a spotty collection or a too-contemporary exhibition program. Yet LACMA is not so new as some suppose. It was spun off from the Exposition Park institution that opened its doors in 1913 as the Los Angeles Historical and Art Museum.
LACMA's origin story tends to write off the Exposition Park museum's art division. Prior to the Wilshire Blvd. museum, we're told, the paintings took a back seat to the dinosaurs and dioramas. Yet the Exposition Park museum managed to organize loan exhibitions devoted to Goya, Renoir, van Gogh, Rubens and van Dyck, and even, incredibly, Leonardo da Vinci <https://tinyurl.com/23ruy39m> . The Eurocentric focus aside, it's rare for today's bigger, better LACMA to do monographic shows of boldface art-historical names.
The Exposition Park museum attracted such astute and ambitious directors as William Valentiner and Richard F. Brown. It's true that Valentiner pronounced the collections "deplorable." He and his successors set about remedying that. Donations of art from William Randolph Hearst, "Buddy" DeSylva, and others justified building a museum just for art.
If you count its Exposition Park prehistory, LACMA is effectively 112 years old. That's not young—it's close to the median for big-city American art museums. It's time to admit that LACMA is a grown-up institution worthy of being judged alongside its peers.
<http://tiny.cc/3m1f001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire
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HOW LIFE WAS IN ANCIENT GREECE
<https://tinyurl.com/2der37cj> _DeanKissick
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WANT A LIMITED EDITION ARTWORK TATTOOED ON YOUR SKIN? BERLIN IS THE PLACE
It may be the oldest art form in the world, practised 5,000 years ago by Ötzi the iceman and his fellow copper age Europeans. But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets.
A new initiative in Berlin concedes that the tables have turned. With tattoo studios in the German capital booming but many artists struggling to make a living, the Works on Skin project specialises in selling works by established and emerging contemporary artists that are not to be hung on a wall but to be etched on the human body.
“The art market has frozen up and many studios are suffering,” said the scheme’s initiator, Holm Friebe. “So we tried to think about how we can unlock new fields for artistic practitioners and thus repair a broken market.”
Works on Skin sells artwork in numbered limited editions of 100, initially for €100 each but reaching up to €2,000 for the last remaining numbers.
With their purchase, buyers acquire a signed fine-art print of the artwork and a certificate that gives them the one-off right to have it tattooed on their skin, thus “realising” an artwork that until that point is considered “work in limbo”.
Instead of familiar designs such as swallows, butterflies or Samoan tribal patterns, customers can grace their skin with a drawing of the old sound system at the nightclub Berghain, or a faux-naïf neon doodle of a wine-drinking woman or a sketch of a female clown by concept art duo Eva & Adele.
While most works can be placed anywhere on the body at any size, others come with specific instructions.
Pop artist Jim’s cartoonish humanoid flame has to be placed in such a way as to ensure “that a muscle underneath moves the fire”, while Via’s planet-blue dot must be scaled to the buyer’s height to represent the size ratio of the sun to the Earth, thus highlighting “the marginality of human existence in the universe”.
The initiative is being received with a healthy degree of scepticism in the world of tattooing proper. “It’s quite funny to see how things change,” said Köker. “We were ignored by the art world for ages, and now they are trying to play at our game.” _GuardianUK
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ROCK ICON’S FREEWHEELING ART LANDS IN NEW YORK:
<https://tinyurl.com/24c2onhd>
For the next two weeks, the Nili Lotan menswear store in Lower Manhattan is getting an arty infusion. On its walls, where photographs once hung, are now displayed paintings and collages Some are small abstract works and photomontages; others are large text-based canvases. The effect, Lotan told me , is “just really free and bold.” _artnet
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IS MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ’S “LONGEVITY METHOD” A BUSINESS, OR A PERFORMANCE?
The artist pivots to longevity tonics and crystal sculptures.
Could Marina Abramović be the wellness guru we needed all along? It could have been Gwyneth Paltrow, she of the jade eggs and bone broths and chugging Mountain Valley water, who seemed, for a while, like the prophet we were promised. But her company, Goop, has become more of a place to buy $900 jersey dresses and titanium cooking pans. Anyway, Goop has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the past few months alone.
If Goop isn’t your thing and you’re in search of a more out-of-the-box approach, consider Abramović, who once told the New York Times “I like baby food.” Want to learn to live like her? The Marina Abramović Institute offers €2,450 (~$2,600) five-day Cleaning the House workshops in various locations—Brazil, Thailand—taught by people (not her) trained to lead guests “through a series of long durational exercises to improve individual focus, stamina, and concentration.” Their cell phones, laptops, watches, and electronic devices will be collected, and “during the workshop, participants should refrain from eating, speaking, and reading.” (Herbal tea and honey are permitted.)
For those wanting to micro-dose the longevity method, she even markets 99£ ($125) longevity drops with a Swiss doctor (one for immunity, one for allergy, one for energy) to achieve inside-out beauty via active ingredients such as pollen, cranberry, lemon, and garlic. They are packaged beautifully, not unlike similar tonics one can purchase at a health food store.
Her commitment to wellness courses through not only the products and experiences she offers, but through her art as well—although Abramović would surely say those are all the same thing. _ArtInAmerica
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CATERPILLAR ABSOLEM FEASTING ON OPIUM POPPY (PAPAVER SOMNIFERUM)
<https://tinyurl.com/2crl6djt> _RabihAlameddine