Visitors to the Denver Art Museum can currently see 120 different paintings by Claude Monet from all over the world. But how did they get there — like, literally get there?
To find out, I talked with Sarah Cucinella-McDaniel, chief registrar at the Denver Art Museum. She’s sort of like a travel agent for art — and for this exhibition she booked the itineraries for artworks from more than 70 lenders around the world: museums, as well as private collectors. (One of her recent days started unexpectedly, around 1:45 a.m., when one of her nine Monet shipments for the day arrived at the museum hours ahead of schedule.)
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air – An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds – A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river? And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?
Memory sits at the core of both literature and lives. Yet forgetting is also a part of our brains’ daily working, bringing its own human truths and a necessary path for moving forward. Lewis Hyde’s new _A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past_, provides inspiration for a deep-dive discussion of memory’s other side, with this august panel of writers and neuroscientists: poets Jane Hirshfield and Margaret Gibson, author Lewis Hyde, and UCSF neuroscientists Aimee Kao, Bruce Miller, and Virginia Sturm.
Co-hosted by Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival
Jane Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, Ledger (Knopf), appears in 2020. Chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets and recently elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she works frequently at the intersection of poetry and science. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry, et al.
Listen to Poet and Professor Margaret Gibson below:
Margaret Gibson, current Connecticut Poet Laureate, is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Not Hearing the Wood Thrush (2018) and Broken Cup (2014), centered on memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease and the gifts of sustaining presence through lament, acceptance, and love. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut.
Listen to author Lewis Hyde below:
Lewis Hyde’s recent book, A Primer for Forgetting (FSG, 2019), explores the many situations in which forgetfulness is more useful than memory—in myth, personal psychology, politics, art and spiritual life. A MacArthur Fellow, Hyde taught for many years at Kenyon College.
Aztec art drew on the Mesoamerican past, citing works from the ancient cities of Teotihuacan and Tula to lend authority and legitimacy to the new empire. But this engagement with the past also provoked reflection on the inevitable end of empire and the cyclicality of time, themes that resonate as the five hundredth anniversary of the Spanish invasion of Mexico unfolds this year. In this illustrated lecture, Claudia Brittenham, University of Chicago, discusses how Aztec art reflects this engagement with this historical past. This lecture delivered on October 31, 2019, was generously sponsored by the Boshell Foundation Lecture Fund.
Excerpts from The Revolutionary Seymour, By Steven Heller:
Seymour’s art was postmodern long before the term was coined. Yet it was resolutely modern in its rejection of the nostalgic and romantic representation, as in the acolytes of Norman Rockwell, that had been popular in mainstream advertising magazines at the time. Instead of prosaic or melodramatic tableau, Seymour emphasized clever concept. What makes the very best of his art so arresting, and so identifiable, is the tenacity of his ideas—simple, complex, rational, and even absurd ideas.
The illustrations for magazines, posters, advertisements, book jackets, record covers, product packages, and children’s books that he created after founding Push Pin Studios with Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel in 1954 directly influenced two generations (statistical fact) and indirectly inspired another two (educated conjecture) of international illustrators and designers to explore an eclectic range of stylistic an conceptual methods.
“People want to see photography and right now there are not a lot of places to do that,” he says. Showing “the best photography in the world” remains Fotografiska’s core mission, Broman says.
The global expansion of Fotografiska is finally taking shape. The Stockholm-based photography hub, founded in 2010 by brothers Jan and Per Broman, will open its New York outpost on 14 December, almost two months later than previously announced.
This follows a venue launched in June in Tallinn, Estonia, and anticipates the arrival in late 2020 of Fotografiska London, billed as the world’s largest photography gallery by the British Journal of Photography.
Thankfully, Willem Dafoe and Willem Dafoe’s face have used this innate recognisability to their joint advantage. To date, the actor has appeared in well over 100 films, and his prolific career can be charted through the cracks and comments — some nice, some not so nice — that those in the industry have made about his looks.
In fact, in the intervening decades, Hollywood has called many, many times — as have independent filmmakers, foreign studios, animation houses, video game developers and scores of theatres. On the big screen, Dafoe has taken roles in Platoon, Mississippi Burning, Born on the Fourth of July, The English Patient, American Psycho and Shadow of the Vampire. He flew into The Aviator for a cameo, swung into the Spider-Man trilogy as the villainous Green Goblin and dipped his toe in voiceover work with Finding Nemo. He’s taken on John Carter, John Wick and narrated films from Vox Lux to The Great Wall. He’s been Oscar-nominated several times, for playing characters as wild and disparate as hammy vampires, Floridian motel managers and Vincent van Gogh. The man is a chameleon — and has managed to become one despite having Willem Dafoe’s face.