Gallery Representation

I have been busy with self-promotion lately. I am happy to report success! One gallery replied immediatly with interest in carrying some of my work. I will announce it when I have the paperwork complete. Somehow it is not real to me yet. This is a Twin City gallery that will be moving to a new location in May. They want the work and the papers after the move. Petronella Ytsma , of St. Paul, photographed my work in time to submit for this gallery's deadline. I waited for her to return from overseas. She is wonderful at seeing the best way to photograph textured work. The way my work reacts to space is sometimes difficult to shoot. She seems to get right to the heart of the dilemna with each piece.

Photopages

I took some advice about applying to galleries from my friend, Rebecca Crowell. I used her directions for creating photo pages (February 7, 2007 entry on her blog) to send to galleries. However, I could not get them to print well. The first one I printed never dried. I tried other settings, but the colors were not satisfactory. Finally, I put them on a CD and printed some at Kinko's. A laser printer was the answer. Another friend converted it to a jpeg that I printed through snapfish. But I like the 8x11 pages better.

Feminism in the Press

Feminism and art is getting press lately. First the Brooklyn Museum gave Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party a permanent museum home.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution”, a poorly named exhibit of early feminist work. Holland Carter of the New York Times concludes his review of the exhibit with this claim. “Feminist art…is the formative art of the last four decades. …Without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.”

Ana Finel Honigman of the Guardian’s arts blog gives a good rundown of this recent interest in feminism. Follow the many links in her blog for some good information. The shocking revelations are the statistics compiled by the Guerilla Girls and others. When I saw Nancy Pelosi behind Bush during his State of the Union address, I cried. I remembered the thrill of a woman running for vice President in the late 70’s. Now, almost 30 years later, a woman was finally in a position of high power in our federal government. The Guerilla Girls have been pointing out inequities in the art world for decades as well. And yet, from 2000-2004, women artists accounted for only 11% of the solo exhibitions held at the Guggenheim Museum. Between 2000 and 2005, only 2% of the solo exhibitions held at Tate Britain were for women artists.

The Spell of the Sensuous

I started to read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams. The first chapter was poetically written as he describes his experiences in heightened sensitivity to his environment while in Nepal and Indonesia. His experiences with shamans in those oral traditions lead him to several conclusions. One is that we have lost the sensitivity to our nonhuman surroundings that is more potent in cultures that do not have writing. He concludes that shamans live on the edge of communities in order to have an even higher sensitivity to the web of life. They must sense any inbalance in the web in order to heal without upsetting the balance further.

The next chapter goes into the history and philosophy of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to understand this philosophy that blurs the distinctions between the perciever and the perceived. but the reading is slow going.