Art for art's sake

 

237 Collective on opening night

Welcome to the neighborhood! The 237 Collective has opened at 111 13th Street SE, near the Coe College campus at the edge of the Wellington Heights neighborhood. Owners Paxton Williams and Abby Long-Williams anticipate the space being used for art exhibits, sales of artwork and handmade clothing, and a "third place" style hangout.

Paxton Williams, whose artistic name is EBISU, kicked things off September 15 with a show called "Momentum."

 

Artist's statement

EBISU combined graffiti-style drawing with found objects. Where on earth was this one found?!

 The crowd on opening night was young and hip, at least when compared to your humble blogger.

Here's what the gallery looks like in daylight, in this more ordinary week. 

View from the front door

Additional artists' works are now displayed. There are thirteen artists in the collective, with two more immediate prospects.

The small (1800 square feet) building dates from 1920, and has been many things over the years, including vacant. It's been vacant a lot.

February 2022

It shares the lot with Cafe Allez, which is anticipated to open early in 2024 in the building occupied 2000-2020 by Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse. Abby Long-Williams told Little Village that she hoped to spread the young entrepreneurial spirit from trendy neighborhoods like New Bo and Czech Village throughout the city.

Ideally they will be able to draw energy from the cafe, Coe College, and nearby churches and medical facilities. In any case, it's good to have such a creative and aesthetically pleasing venture nearby!

The gallery is open 11-5 Thursday, 11-6 Friday and Saturday, and 11-5 Sunday, with possibly additional hours in time. They plan a Parking Lot Market in October.

Mural on the alley side

SEE ALSO: Malcolm MacDougall, "237 Collective's New Hub for Local Fashion, Vendors and 'Underrepresented Artists' Opens in Cedar Rapids Friday," Little Village, 14 September 2023

Retro restroom, in the basement

E prayeribus unum

How one responds to "Prayer," the installation by artist James Webb currently at the Chicago Art Institute, depends a lot on what you bring to the exhibit. At first the different recordings coming from twelve speakers at the same time are pure cacophony. But what kind of cacophony: chaotic? joyous? competitive? coordinated? futile? 

Then, as one moves around the exhibit, individual voices can be distinguished: some speaking, some chanting, some singing, some in English, some not. A religious studies scholar might be able to identify all of the traditions represented; I am not that scholar, but I can tell you, because I read the curation (see picture at left), Webb records people from multiple traditions at prayer in the city where his art is exhibited. This is the 10th time the work has been exhibited, beginning in his native South Africa in 2000, and the first time in the United States. All those voices you hear at once were recorded in Chicago.

I came to the exhibit with a strong belief that diversity of all kinds can make a community stronger, and that no individual or group can contain all the knowledge the community needs going forward. (This has been one the core principles of this blog project all along.) I have always worshiped in the Christian tradition, and am quite comfortable there, but I have learned lessons and drawn inspiration from other traditions as well. I also think a lot of people have religious feelings that they themselves don't consider religious because they've been taught a more narrow definition of religion.

So when I hear the many voices raised to God (or however they refer to the ultimate reality), I hear pieces of the beautiful human mosaic that is Chicago--or any complex community, really. I hear their yearnings and their hopes and their fears, and I think I hear something of myself in each one. As long as we recognize our common humanity--a big if, given the depressing number of religious wars over the eons--the various bits that each tradition brings to the table adds to the wisdom of the whole community.

We were invited to kneel by the speakers to listen more closely to each prayer, but I found I could hear the chants and the singing just fine. I found myself listening more closely and critically to words spoken in English; I do have a rather hyper-verbal way of relating to the world. The Christian prayers asked, "through Jesus Christ our Lord and savior," for blessings on the whole city, and for peace (and in one case for attendees of the exhibit). I admit to hoping, rather than knowing, that's what the non-English speakers were praying for as well.

All of us can be particular at times, and can see other identities as rivals rather than fellow builders of community. But where each prays for all, the cacophony is productive, joyous, and beautiful. I thus found Webb's piece profoundly moving.

"Prayer" continues at the Art Institute through December 31, 2018.

SEE ALSO: Cynthia G. Lindner, "The Art of Prayer Meets the Prayer of Art," Sightings, 18 October 2018

Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

--EXODUS 3:5 (RSV)

The struggle for justice

National Portrait Gallery (Wikimedia commons)

When Jane and I were in Washington last weekend we visited the National Portrait Gallery on the mall. Among their permanent and traveling exhibitions I was particularly moved by "The Struggle for Justice," an ongoing exhibition that 

...showcases the determined men and women--from key nineteenth-century historical figures to contemporary leaders--who struggled to achieve civil rights for disadvantaged or marginalized groups. (from the webpage).

The presentation implies, with some justification, that America's perennial effort to live up to its own ideals has been largely focused on inclusion of excluded groups of people. The premise is that the Framers of our Constitution got a lot right when they designed a political system "of the people, by the people, for the people" (quoting the Gettysburg Address). Injustice happened because they, and many Americans over the years, have had a crabbed understanding of who counts as people.

The stories of abolition, black civil rights and women's rights have been often told, and justly so. What is so moving is to see representatives of each movement here. mixed in with advocates for gays, the mentally handicapped, farm labor and Native Americans. It's quite a gathering--check the slide show on the museum's web page and imagine the whole bunch at the same bar--and to these could be added advocates for prisoners, survivors of violent crime, Catholics, religious minorities, transgendered, the physically handicapped and the mentally ill. Each of them stood up at one time or another to shout "We count, too!" They are truly American heroes. The tragedy is that the shouts needed to be made at all, not to mention how long it took for them to be heard over the steady drone of ignorance and prejudice.

"By Parties Unknown" by Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC

Inclusion isn't the promised land where all our social problems are solved. Inclusion is the baseline for national conversations over how our society will manage its common life. Without everyone having the opportunity to participate in that conversation, we create issues of legitimacy as well as effectiveness. Furthermore, I believe we are at a time in history where we don't have the option of living in separate spheres. The economy, the budget and the environment are forcing us together, whether we like it or not. We need to get used to that idea, and when we do, we'll find it is good for our souls, too.

Although the principle of inclusion is straightforward, it doesn't always provide clear decision rules on, for example, what to do about the class of immigrants known as the Dreamers. Moreover, it can be complicated or co-opted in practice. The week I saw the exhibit, the Trump administration issued a rule change allowing businesses not to provide female birth control coverage in employer-provided health insurance. Vice President Pence walked out of an NFL game in a surely-orchestrated protest against protesting players. In both cases, the officials sought to avoid the issue of inclusion either by claiming greater victimhood (do employers have a right-to-decide employees' health coverage that the government is violating?) or by simply changing the subject (respect the flag!). Meanwhile, a Seattle coffee house owner evicted some customers because prior to coming there they had been distributing anti-abortion pamphlets (Bollinger 2017). Not everyone is covered by the provisions of the Civil Rights Act, but the same principle of inclusion means we can have deeply-held disagreements without being enemies. According to the article, which is written from the hard-to-swallow perspective that the eviction was justified, the coffee house owner is gay, and surely has known exclusion I never have experienced. Still, we all have to live together. All of us.

The Smithsonian exhibit is optimistic, depicting an America living ever truer to its ideals--"striving upward towards perfection," to take one of my favorite John Wesley quotations somewhat out of context. May it be so.

SEE ALSO: "Strength Through Diversity," 1 March 2014

Book review: "The Lonely City"

Olivia Laing is a British writer who found herself isolated in New York City a few years ago, and this book is the result. The title suggests personal essays on loneliness in an urban context, and in a way that's what the book delivers, albeit with a twist. Laing addressed her personal situation by studying the theme of loneliness in the lives and work of four American artists: Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Henry Darger (1892-1973) and David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). Her writing is clear and without jargon, her discussion of artwork accessible even to this dilettante.

She achieves some insights as she studies them, in the way of random personal epiphanies, any of which is an invitation to a conversation.

Loneliness is difficult to confess, difficult to to categorise. (p. 4)

I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. (p. 253)

Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that's moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. (p. 261) 

 I think [the cure is] about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. (p. 279)

The hook on which I'll bite speaks directly to the urbanist movement.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. (p. 3)

The biographical approach she takes to the phenomenon of urban loneliness is at once both illuminating and unhelpful. Each of the artists lived to some degree in isolation from those around them, usually for multiple reasons: artistic sensibility itself, homosexuality, mental illness or the presumption of it, poverty, social anxiety, fame, childhood abuse. Loneliness in their cases seems to me to be merely a symptom of other, deep problems.

What interests me about loneliness is not the experience of exceptional people, but its very ordinariness. As such, it is a psychological puzzle, or perhaps series of puzzles.

It could be a social puzzle as well. Does the way we construct our societies--their values, their design, their economies--affect people's abilities to connect with others? Urbanism has since the work of Jane Jacobs noted the distances and barriers between people created by suburban sprawl. And "it gets lonely in a small town," sings Greg Brown. But everyone knows it is possible to be lonely in a crowd, and certainly, as Laing points out at the beginning of her book, possible to be lonely in a crowded city as well.

Is the answer more traditional urban design? Third places? Churches? Social media--or staying off social media?

Note that there is a difference between urbanism and urban areas as they exist today (which are largely the by-product of several decades of suburban sprawl). We are not, in other words, limited in our choices to what already exists. In an essay on shareable.net that was recently re-posted on Strong Towns, writer Jay Walljasper (cited below) notes design movements not only at the city level...

[New Urbanism seeks] to build new communities (and revitalize existing ones) by maximizing opportunities for social exchange: public plazas, front porches, corner stores, coffee shops, neighborhood schools, narrow streets and, yes, sidewalks.... [In Minneapolis] I marvel at the choices I have to mingle with the neighbors over a cappuccino, Pabst Blue Ribbon, juevos rancheros, artwork at a gallery opening or head of lettuce at the farmer's market.

...but at the neighborhood level as well. Walljasper highlights the work of Ross Chapin, a Seattle author and architect who has designed "pocket neighborhoods" of four to twelve households "where meaningful 'neighborly' relationships are fostered." This builds social capital, and from an example from Walljasper's own life, political capital as well.

I've used loneliness for years in introductory public policy classes as an example of a problem (defined as a situation with broad effects most people see as unacceptable) that is nonetheless not a public problem (defined as a problem where the public expects government to become involved). Ironically, loneliness may be a public problem. Government can't, of course, cure anyone's personal loneliness, but can design cities that facilitate interactions instead of isolation, and can facilitate access to mental health care for those who need it.

CITED:
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016)

Jay Walljasper, "How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness," Shareable, 25 March 2011, http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-design-a-neighborhood-for-happiness?utm_content=bufferb6d1d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Urban images in art: Gustave Caillebotte

from nga.org

This image of pedestrians on a Paris street is taken from one of the most beloved works of art ever, "Paris Street, Rainy Day" by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). As testimony to its place in the pantheon, quite the crowd turned out to see it on the final weekend of an exhibition of Caillebotte's work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., "Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye."

Entrance to the Caillebotte show, Saturday 10/3/15

It's not hard to imagine why Caillebotte's best-known work has such appeal: Even in the rain, Paris is Paris, and very few of us are currently in positions where we wouldn't rather be strolling in Paris. [Point of irrelevant information: I used to have an umbrella with this scene on it.] There are people, ordinary people like you and me, they look good, they're active, and the scene is very accessible. Like another mega-famous Impressionist work, George Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," you feel like you could very comfortably pop into the scene yourself.

Yet Caillebotte's own attitude to the scene is marked by ambivalence, which becomes clear upon viewing five other Paris street scenes he painted during the same time period, between 1876 and 1880. He depicts a new Paris, produced in large part by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman, a local official during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. Haussman's public works program assaulted the medieval city with brio, smashing old structures and widening streets. He was Robert Moses a century before Moses would remake New York City, except that the technology of Haussman's day prevented him from building expressways. Whatever the value of cleaning up the "dirty, crowded and unhealthy" old city (Rice, quoted in "Haussman," cited below), it also removed places of meeting... which may have been Napoleon III's idea to begin with.

Caillebotte's Paris paintings show people who are disconnected from each other, walking wide streets by buildings large and unfriendly enough to draw the ire of a 19th century James Howard Kunstler. (Come to think of it, Kunstler's favored word for this kind of design, "despotic," is precisely what Napoleon III was.) The city is not human-scaled, and the people are alienated.

"The Rue Halevy Seen from a Balcony," from wikigallery.org

The painter's vantage point, an upper-story window, means he (and by extension us) aren't connected to the people in the painting either. In none of the six paintings is anyone making eye contact with anyone else. Even the couple in "Paris Street, Rainy Day" isn't, upon a closer look, particularly connecting with each other. In "The Pont de l'Europe" I thought I saw someone looking at a dog, but despite Gracen Johnson's eloquent tribute to dogs' contributions to urbanism, I think he's actually looking between the dog and its owner.

from wikiart.org

A few days later, by something of a coincidence, I attended an exhibit of watercolors at the Waterloo Center for the Arts by local retired architect Michael Broshar. Broshar's cityscapes are cozy and human-scaled.

"Venice 1"

"Chicago Street"

Broshar paints places he enjoys, and it's easy to see why. Clearly he's making a different point than Caillebotte was.

Caillebotte's ambivalence is underscored by his suburban and rural landscapes included in the exhibition. (See, for example, "The Bridge over the Seine at Argenteuil," painted in 1885.) There is still no socializing, but the colors are brighter and the skies clearer. Thanks to the commentary accompanying the exhibit, I can also tell you his brushstrokes were bolder.

The Paris we know and love today evolved out of Haussman's overhaul. Somehow over time urbanism and complexity reasserted itself. Maybe in an America beset by suburban sprawl our frame of reference is different, too.

SEE ALSO: "Physical Design Issues Illustrated" (on Hale Woodruff), 15 April 2013

SOURCES:
Holland Carter, "Painting Paris in a New, Natural Light," New York Times, 10 July 2015, C17 & 19
"Haussman and New Paris," https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/Haussmann.html
Mary Morton and George Shackleford, Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye (Chicago, 2015)

Muddy but sociable: "The Halt at the Inn" by Isack van Ostade, c. 1645
National Gallery of Art

Labor Day weekend

With little thanks to the weather, civic life was hopping this weekend in Cedar Rapids.

Friday night Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders brought his presidential campaign to the Coe College campus. Sanders is far from the only candidate in the race, but has been generating the largest crowds and the most excitement.

A week-long heat-and-humidity wave continued:

 

A substantial crowd gathered nonetheless.

Sanders spoke for nearly an hour, from notes. He didn't take questions.

 

The crowd reaction was enthusiastic anyhow.

The New Bo Arts Fest was Saturday and Sunday. Pictures are from Sunday afternoon, when crowds were down. (They were larger on Saturday evening.) Music was provided by the Fabulous Yahoo Drummers at the little amphitheater by the New Bo Market.

They inspired some dancing among the young and heat-impervious.

Artists sold their works from booths along 3rd Street.

Meanwhile in the wonderful old Cherry Building on 10th Avenue...

...which is ebulliently decorated...

...the shops had open houses (here, Black Earth Arts):

Monday, Labor Day, began with a light rain and a weather forecast calling for periodic thunderstorms throughout the day. Those undeterred by that were blessed with sunshine, cooler temperatures--a perfect day for the Mayors' Bike Ride. They gathered at Ellis Park...

I was stationed, for the third year in a row, at 3rd Avenue and 10th Street SE. One more year and I think they award me the corner. Either that or I'll have to start tithing to Immaculate Conception.

Speaking of which, Immaculate Conception added to the Labor Day weekend festivities with a special mass at 9:00 in honor Jimmie Coutentos, who died one year ago today at the age of 83.

A little past 10, the riders' approached...

No accidents, but a close call when the driver waiting to turn left onto 10th Street suddenly hurtled his SUV into the line of bikers (who were fortuitously skilled in evasion).

A holiday weekend is an opportunity to enjoy what the city has to offer, and the energy brought to the city by hundreds (thousands?) of our fellow residents, as well as a reminder that we also need to make room for each other.

EARLIER LABOR DAY POSTS:
"Mayors' Bike Ride," September 3, 2013
"Indulging in Urban Fantasy," September 6, 2014

Physical Design Issues Illustrated

Chicago's downtown Cultural Center (1893), on Washington St, besides being a physically stunning building, is hosting an exhibition of paintings by Hale Woodruff (1900-1980). An Illinois native, Woodruff spent much of his working life in Alabama and Georgia. His work has a common theme of black empowerment. That he was also sensitive to issues of physical design is shown in these two murals painted in the 1940s.

"Results of Poor Housing"

"Results of Good Housing"