OLD NEWS

LIMESTONE-LOVING FERNS by Mary Holland
There are certain species of ferns which thrive on limestone rock outcrops. They require alkaline, calcium-rich soils and are commonly found growing in rock crevices. Because these areas are quick-draining, these ferns commonly feature shallow creeping rhizomes for anchoring in rock crevices, drought-resistant waxy coatings, and smaller, divided fronds to prevent excess water loss. Among them are Wall-rue (Asplenium ruta-muraria), Purple-stem Cliffbrake (Pellaea atropurpurea), Walking Fern (Asplenium rhizophyllum) and Maidenhair Spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes).
WALL-RUE: heavily divided bluish-green fronds
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PURPLE-STEM CLIFFBRAKE: wiry, dark purple-black stems and leathery, blue-green fronds
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WALKING FERN: undivided fronds with long, narrow tips
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MAIDENHAIR SPLEENWORT: fronds of small, rounded pinnae are long and narrow, gradually tapering towards the tip
<https://tinyurl.com/45xwe52a> _NaturallyCurious

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SORT
<https://tinyurl.com/6upxvp59> _DavidShrigley

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‘A POEM TO THE PRAIRIE’: NEW LIFE FOR ARCHITECTURE AS SCULPTURE by Allison C. Meier
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While cities across the United States were being transformed by sleek glass towers in the mid-20th century, on the Great Plains a more fantastic vision of Modern architecture was being built. Now known as the American School, this rebellious strain of design had no boundaries in style, form or materials. Two architects who taught at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in the 1950s and 60s, Bruce Goff and Herb Greene, led this approach to organic shapes that responded directly to their environments. Goff was recently pulled off the sidelines of architectural history with a major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. Greene, who is now in his 90s, remains less known.
In Norman, Greene’s Prairie House is being revived following years of deterioration. After it was completed as the Greene family’s residence in 1961, the architectural photographer Julius Shulman published images of it in Life. The magazine described its shape as “bird- and beast-like” for how it swooped low, as if camouflaging itself in the grass. Both inside and out, its curved walls are covered with unfinished cedar planks and shingles in layers resembling feathers or scales. Communal spaces in the two-storey interior face the sunrise. The narrowest side of the amorphous house faces west to buffer against the winds and storms, with one large half-circle window opening like an eye to let in the colours of the sunset.
“You feel like you’re inside something that’s living,” says Lila Cohen, the president of the Prairie House Preservation Society (PHPS), Greene’s great-niece and an architect in her own right. “Uncle Herb is a strong believer in the way that we learn as human organisms is through the sense of touch. That’s why there’s so much texture everywhere. And then the warm colour and the cedar smell – it’s just this whole experience that you can only have when you’re there in person.”
Demolition dread
After the longtime owner who bought the house from Greene in 1968 died in 2016, the Prairie House’s future was in peril. Its wooden exterior had decayed and its futuristic aluminium carport had weathered. That same year, Goff’s nearby Bavinger House, celebrated for its spiralling form, was abruptly demolished. “That really set off a big alarm amongst the architectural community that these places don’t last forever,” says Beau Jennings, PHPS’s interim executive director.
Formed in 2022, PHPS is a nonprofit that now manages the Prairie House as one of the rare surviving American School homes in the area. Its team of volunteers is working to restore the home for regular public access while raising awareness of the history it represents. The New York-born Greene had moved to Oklahoma to study with Goff before becoming a faculty member alongside his mentor in 1958. Together, they taught that every work of architecture should respond to its context. Even in Oklahoma, far from the country’s architectural urban centres, there could be bold statements created with what was available.
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“I don’t know that Prairie House happens elsewhere,” Jennings says. “Things like it and the Bavinger House are products of the environment, where there are not always resources and you’re forced to be a little more industrious and find your own way and use the materials you have because you may not have the funds to get the materials you might want. There’s an ethos there that Prairie House embodies; it’s really hyper-specific and unique to the place.”
Because the Prairie House was in private ownership for so many years and is not visible from the road, even locals mainly know of it from the Life photographs. In the initial years of its stewardship, PHPS has offered the first-ever public tours, education programmes and sketching events, while working on long-term stabilisation and restoration. This year, the group is focusing on fundraising to support a new master plan for preserving the building as a community-oriented space with more regular access.
“The Prairie House is a poem to the prairie,” Cohen says. “It was built to reflect the prairie, to understand the prairie and to celebrate the prairie. It doesn’t look like a house. It’s really a sculpture.” _ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/y57mwh86> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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CAN ART COST YOU ASYLUM? ASK PYOTR PAVLENSKY
The international press first picked up on Pyotr Pavlensky when he nailed his scrotum to Moscow’s Red Square in 2013.
The Russian performance artist was protesting political repression. In 2015, he set fire to the doors of the Federal Security Service (FSB) HQ in Moscow. He spent seven months in prison for his trouble and was fined the equivalent of $8,500.
In 2016, Pavlensky and his partner, Oksana Shalygina, were also accused of sexually abusing the actress Anastasia Slonina, charges they deny. As the case was ongoing, the couple fled Russia with their two children, claiming the charges against them were politically motivated. They landed in France and were granted refugee status in 2017.
It now appears France may have had enough of Pavlensky’s destructive performance art, and that status could soon be revoked.
France’s Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA) told Pavlensky in May that it was considering terminating his refugee status, citing two criminal convictions linked to his France-based works Lighting (2017) and Pornopolitics (2020).
“I was granted asylum as an artist persecuted in Russia because of my artistic practice, and now, because of that very same artistic practice, France intends to deprive me of that asylum,” Pavlensky wrote in his response to OFPRA.
In an interview, Pavlensky says: "Unfortunately, everything that is happening to me is, though sad, entirely inevitable. Because when and where have artists ever been treated differently?"
For Lighting, Pavlensky set fire to the windows of a Banque de France branch at Place de la Bastille. He said the performance piece was criticising financial power and the transformation of revolutionary symbols into institutions of authority. In 2019, the Paris Criminal Court convicted him of destroying property belonging to another person by means dangerous to individuals. He was handed a three-year sentence with two years suspended.
In Pornopolitics, Pavlensky published an intimate video involving Benjamin Griveaux, then a candidate in the 2020 Paris mayoral election. The artist argued that the work exposed what he called political hypocrisy, and he called it the first “porn website” involving politicians.
French prosecutors instead treated the publication as a violation of privacy and sexual-image laws, leading to Pavlensky’s 2023 conviction. This time, he was given a six-month suspended sentence.
The case also involved Alexandra de Taddeo, who had received the video of Griveaux, who was prosecuted alongside Pavlensky. De Taddeo was convicted of privacy-related offences and given a suspended sentence.
Pavlensky argues that his actions are part of what he calls “subject–object art,” a theory in which an initial event develops into an artwork through the responses it generates from institutions of power. Under this framework, he considers police investigations, court proceedings and judicial decisions to become part of his performance.
In May, OFPRA invited Pavlensky to submit information about his personal circumstances, family situation, employment, integration in France and any medical, social or judicial support. However, he chose to respond “on artistic grounds.”
“I do not wish to gather certificates, humble myself, or attempt to prove that I am a good resident of France,” he wrote to OFPRA. “I am an artist, and that alone is what matters.”
His response included two books examining his practice. The first, titled Subject–Object Art Theory, was published by Seagull Books in 2025, and Une œuvre d’art face au tribunal: Sur Pornopolitique de Piotr Pavlenski, published by Au diable vauvert in 2024. The publications explore his ideas about the relationship between artistic action, institutions and authority.
OFPRA’s reassessment does not itself terminate Pavlensky’s refugee status or require him to leave France. Should it issue a final decision withdrawing protection, the artist can appeal the decision in France’s National Court of Asylum (CNDA).
"Look at history: artists have always been persecuted, imprisoned, declared insane, and expelled from countries," Pavlensky says. "Whether we like it or not, this is our unchanging reality. This is the true price of artistic freedom". _TheArtJournal

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A SELF-PORTRAIT FROM AROUND 1930 BY BERENICE ABBOTT,
one of the great twentieth-century American photographers,
who was born this day in 1898
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Berenice Abbott, Nightview, New York, 1932
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Berenice Abbott, James Joyce, Paris, 1926
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Berenice Abbott's photo of her long-term partner, critic, writer & historian Elizabeth McCausland.
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Berenice Abbott, Statue of Liberty, c. 1932
<https://tinyurl.com/m5tujpbn> _MichaelLobel

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WHERE IS LUIS MANUEL OTERO ALCÁNTARA? by Coco Fusco
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Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara’s unjust five-year sentence ended on July 9, but he is not yet free. His whereabouts are unknown. State Security agents removed him from Guanajay Prison on Tuesday, July 7, and whisked him off to an undisclosed location. His relatives say they have not been notified. Human Rights organizations have determined his current status to be a forced disappearance. Cuban activist Anamely Ramos received a phone call from an unidentified number on July 9 and heard Otero Alcántara on a speakerphone, presumably surrounded by security agents, inquiring about the status of his request to enter the United States. When she asked where he was, he told her he could not say.
The artist was arrested in July 2021 on trumped-up charges after joining historic demonstrations across the island. Cuban authorities are under pressure to release Otero Alcántara, not only from activists but also from US government officials, who regularly invoke his name as evidence of the regime’s human rights violations. On Monday, July 6, US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Walz held up a photo of the artist as he confronted Cuban officials during a debate about the US embargo against Cuba. The island is experiencing its worst humanitarian crisis in decades, due to the Trump Administration’s current “maximum pressure” campaign against the Cuban government and years of economic mismanagement by the regime. Power outages lasting days are common, public transportation is virtually non-existent, mountains of garbage line the streets, hospitals are collapsing, and food prices have skyrocketed.
The Cuban government appears to have no intention of allowing Otero Alcántara to remain on the island, likely fearing that he could easily rally supporters to stage more protests against a beleaguered government on the verge of collapse. Since the July 2021 protests, when Otero Alcántara was arrested, the Cuban government has also increased its persecution of influencers who criticize their government on social media.
What remains unclear is where Otero Alcántara could be expelled to. The artist has made his willingness to accept exile in the US public since 2024. An application for humanitarian parole, which I helped prepare, was submitted to the US Embassy several weeks ago. Scores of articles about him have appeared in foreign press in the weeks leading up to the end of his sentence. Nonetheless, there is no answer yet from the United States. In the meantime, it seems that Otero Alcántara is going to remain a hostage of the Cuban government.
According to former political prisoner Hamlet Lavastida, the regime is employing the same tactic they used on him. He has told me that Otero Alcántara is probably being held in one of State Security’s “protocol houses,” where they prepare political prisoners for departure and escort them to foreign embassies to pick up their visas prior to putting them on planes. Both Lavastida and Cuban activists point to Otero Alcántara’s extreme vulnerability in his current situation, suggesting that he could be subject to psychological manipulation and threats while he remains in captivity.
While incarcerated, Otero Alcántara had the support of fellow prisoners. He could make phone calls to family and friends to inform them of happenings inside the prison. He now awaits his release in limbo, cut off from the rest of the world. His many supporters in the US and Europe continue to stage public protests calling for his release, but Otero Alcántara’s fate, and that of Cuba’s more than 800 political prisoners, remain up in the air for the time being. _Hyperallergic

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THEATER FOWLER, IN
<https://tinyurl.com/mv6899be> _RuralIndexingProject

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135. MICKEY MOUSE EARS by Rainey Knudson
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Disney had long been a savvy merchandising company; witness the Depression-era Mickey Mouse watch. But when the company launched the TV show Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter in late 1954, nobody could have predicted the craze they were about to ignite in coonskin caps—or the fortune to be made from that single piece of merchandise.
But the following year, when The Mickey Mouse Club debuted, Disney was ready. Cartoonist Roy Williams, a company veteran who appeared on the show as the “Big Mooseketeer,” was tasked with designing a uniform for the Mouseketeers, the new act that appeared the same week that Disneyland opened. He remembered a gag from the 1929 black-and-white cartoon The Karnival Kid, when Mickey tips his hat to Minnie, except he has no hat—the whole top of his head, including his two round ears, comes off like a cap.
The iconic mouse-ear beanie has been sold at Disney theme parks ever since. Yellow embroidered names were added in the 1980s, making the personalized cap the parks’ single most iconic souvenir. Still, like Hawaiian leis, nobody wears Mickey Mouse ears except at that place. There’s an old line about the Mona Lisa: you don’t go to see it, but to have seen it. Mickey Mouse ears are the same, proof of pilgrimage. Today, the silhouette has escaped Mickey himself and become a folk object that Disney projects anything onto: characters from other movies, bride and groom, graduation, holidays. They’ve sold upwards of 100 million of them.
<https://tinyurl.com/57efx8zs> _TheImpatientReader

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WAIT, THE STATUE OF VENUS THAT INSPIRED BOTTICELLI'S PAINTING DIED OF A TUMOR??
<https://tinyurl.com/3n8kahm3> _JesseLocker

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REPRESENTATIVES INTRODUCE BILL TO PROTECT PUBLIC ARTWORKS IN GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS
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On July 14, two Congressional representatives—Dina Titus (D-Nevada) and Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) proposed a bill that would protect public artworks commissioned by the U.S. government.
The PRESERVE Act (“Protecting Resources and Ensuring Stewardship of Enduring Records of Visual Expression Act”) would require the General Services Administration, which manages federal agencies, to identify any artworks contained within government buildings deemed “surplus property” and form a committee to oversee the future of said artworks.
“Publicly commissioned art should never become collateral damage when federal buildings are sold or otherwise disposed of” said Titus, a co-sponsor of the bill, in a statement. “It is critical that we establish a process to protect these national treasures and ensure the public has full access to the 26,000 works of art exhibited in museums and federal buildings around the country, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. Art commissioned by the federal government is a vital part of our national heritage and deserves to be preserved for future generations.”
While the language of the PRESERVE Act does not specifically mention any government buildings, Titus and Doggett’s statement calls out the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building. For the past nine months, preservationists, artists, and senators have been advocating to save the Cohen building, known as the “Sistine Chapel of New Deal Art.”
The landmark building designed by Charles Z. Klauder opened in 1940 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and was originally home to the Social Security Administration. Its walls are decorated with sweeping murals by Philip Guston, Ben Shahn, and twin sisters Ethel and Jenne Magafan. Despite this, President Trump has threatened to demolish the Cohen building, along with three others. _ARTnews

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PHOTOGRAPH BY RUBÉN ORTIZ TORRES, 1994,
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LEGIONELLA DETECTED IN COOLING TOWERS AT THE MET, COOPER HEWITT AND JEWISH MUSEUM
Cooling towers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York recently tested positive for Legionella, the bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease.
The three institutions join a list of more than 70 buildings—including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—affected by a recent outbreak on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Addresses associated with the museums appear on a document released by the city on Tuesday (14 July)
of locations where the bacteria has been found. All four museums have already cleaned their cooling towers, and their buildings remain safe for visitors and workers.
Legionnaire’s disease, a severe form of pneumonia, is spread by breathing in fine water droplets that contain the bacteria Legionella. It is not contagious through person-to-person contact. Cooling towers act as vents for a building’s air-conditioning system, pushing the hot air outdoors; they do not interact with its water supply. Outbreaks of the disease are common during New York’s hot and humid summers—Legionella thrives in the stagnant warm water that collects in cooling towers—but this appears to be the first time museums in the ritzy Upper East Side neighbourhood have been affected.
The New York City Health Department has confirmed 64 cases, 13 hospitalisations and 40 discharged hospitalisations linked to Legionnaire’s disease
. No deaths have been reported. City inspectors continue to sweep the Upper East Side, checking hundreds of cooling towers in order to mitigate the issue. _ArtNewspaper

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LOOKING AROUND 3
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For the past decade I have been searching for places
where I can see 360 degrees to the horizon
and not see or hear any sign of a human presence. _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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WHY THE ART TRADE SHOULD FEAR BLUE DOT FEVER
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Anyone in North America with a self-preservation instinct is now spooked about Cyclosporiasis, the punishing gastrointestinal illness induced by a still-unsourced parasite outbreak in our regional produce supply. But anyone in the art industry with a self-preservation instinct should also be monitoring the new threat posed by Blue Dot Fever, whose consequences are less revolting but far scarier for the business’s future.
The good news—thank all that is still good and right in this increasingly slime-drenched existence—is that Blue Dot Fever isn’t an actual illness. Instead, it’s internet slang for what plenty of observers feel is the real reason that a slew of mid-major pop and hip hop stars have downsized or outright cancelled their summer 2026 tours: the waves of unsold seats that show up as blue dots in the arena diagrams on Ticketmaster’s marketplace. The afflicted include everyone from Post Malone and Kid Cudi to Zayn Malik and the Pussycat Dolls.
It’s no surprise that some of these artist have unspooled less embarrassing justifications for pulling back. They range from a burning desire to focus on making new music to the most suspect and transparent bailout of them all: suddenly wanting to spend more time with their family.1 But after looking at the seat maps to those artists’ shows, a lot of fans and industry analysts just aren’t buying it (literally and figuratively).
I’m breathing Blue Dot Fever all over the art world because it’s an important twist in the story of the allegedly all-powerful experience economy. Don’t get me wrong, the attraction of live events and participatory adventures is real in our increasingly atomized and automated lifestyles. It’s just that the reality of the trend is more nuanced than the fast food version that so many people in so many industries (including art) have wolfed down so eagerly in the post-Covid era. And if art sellers, artists, and event businesses don’t stop to reflect on the assumptions now churning through their digestive system via the typical experience economy talking points—well, Blue Dot Fever will clear out their bank accounts as violently as Cyclosporiasis would clear out their colons.
A forensic analysis of Blue Dot Fever reveals that its root causes have already been wreaking havoc on the art business for years. First and foremost is inflation, which has shrunk the profit margins for touring musicians as unforgivingly as it has for dealers and artists.
Michael Kaminsky, a founder of the music management business KMGMT, Inc., told the LA Times that some expenses in this realm have literally tripled in the past few years. Soaring prices at the pump are only the start of the problem for music’s road warriors. “It’s not just gas. A [tour] bus used to be $1,000 per day to rent, now it’s $3,000 per day,” Kaminsky said. “If you take one night off, for a midsized band, that’s very difficult to absorb now.”
Art dealers and event organizers have been walloped by the escalation of their own behind-the-scenes costs. The same forces pushing up the price of a tour bus are also pushing up the price of art shipping. The same factors blowing out the budget for your favorite pop star’s elaborate summer stage designs are also blowing out the budget for your favorite gallery’s next exhibition build-out. These and more pressures on the traditional concert economy are parallel to those in the traditional art-sales economy; only the end product is different. _Tim Schneider_TheGrayMarket

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JOANNE'S GARDEN
Mid late July
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<https://tinyurl.com/34wahrkn> _JoanneCarson