Tag: Art

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“Into the Woods”: a faculty retreat reading list

Jenifer K. Wofford’s “MacArthur’s Nurses” (2008)

Your Salonniere has organized the reading list for this summer’s Collegiate Seminar Faculty Retreat for Saint Mary’s College of California. The theme of this retreat, “Into the Woods,” focuses on perception and consciousness of the Unknown, the Other, and the Wild. Inspired by the advocacy work of poet and professor Barbara Jane Reyes, who also introduced me to Jenifer K. Wofford’s art, these selections, juxtaposed together, will hopefully reveal surprising similarities among artists who might otherwise seem disparate. I’m looking forward to seeing how the faculty respond to the works individually and as a collective.

Schedule for the Neville and Juanita Massa Institute

at Huntington Lake, Summer 2010

July 29- August 1

“Into the Woods”

Thursday, July 29

8:00 – 10:00pm, Session I:  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (poem), 1817.

Friday, July 30

10:00 am – noon, Session II:  Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Language of Nativism” (46-64) (essay excerpt), from Women Native Other, 1989 [facilitator TBD].

7:30 – 9:30pm, Session III:  E.M. Forster, “Introduction” and “Other Kingdom” (short story) from The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories, 1947 [facilitator TBD].

Saturday, July 31

10:00am – noon, Session IV:  Carlos Bulosan, “The Growth of Philippine Culture” (115-123), “My Education” (124-130), “Freedom from Want” (131-134) (essays) from On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings and Jenifer K. Wofford, “MacArthur Nurses” (painting) 2008, and MacArthur’s Leyte Landing, (photo) October 1944 [facilitator TBD]

7:30 – 9:00pm, Session V:  Louise Erdrich, “The Good Tears” from Love Medicine (novel excerpt) 1984.

Sunday, August 1

10:00am – noon, Session VI:  Slavoj Zizek, “The Communist Hypothesis” (111-125) (philosophy excerpt) from First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 2009.


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Munich & London Pilgrimmage

Returning from Munich & London with over eight hundred shots snapped on the camera. A quarter of them still need to be excised. Many of them require rotation and a little touching up.

Nymphenburg Palace-front ground statueNymphenburg Palace-front ground statue

Munich UndergroundMunich Underground

Trafalgar Square with Double Decker Bus in BackgroundTrafalgar Square with Double Decker Bus in Background

London EyeLondon Eye from Thames River Cruise

Going Under the Millenium BridgeGoing Under the Millenium Bridge

Shillings left in my shoes. I forgot to take the coins out after running the security gauntlet at Heathrow. Receipts transacted in German are scattered on my desk along with pages of notes to transcribe and archive. More musings on the literary pilgrimmage to come…

For more photos on Munich & London click here

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“What R U ???”

Thursday evening, April 9, 2009, NPR aired the show In the Mix: Conversations with Artists…Between Races. Spliced with sound bytes from 44th President Obama’s Inaugural Speech, producer and narrator, Dmae Roberts, raised all too familiar themes and experiences of confused identities, raising awareness, and the exasperating questions I’m habitually poked and prodded with by strangers and acquaintances. “What was she?” shall be written on my epitaph. But with the proliferation of mixed race people, like myself, according to the show, “Nearly 7 million Americans are of mixed race” and “by year 2020 half of the people will be of mixed race,” perhaps we won’t have to serve as Cultural Ambassadors and explain how babies are created, no matter the ethnic backgrounds.

Quotes from some of the artist interviews:

Thomas Lauderdale:

“Coming from no where and everywhere. Openness to everything different.”

“Identity is a puzzle that has to be solved.”

Demetra Pittman:

“Love complexity, revel in it. Life isn’t black and white.”

Velina Hasu Houston:

“Misidentities, made me curious about other cultures across the world.”

Robert Karimi:

“Create communities not just on race Life is a negotiation.

“Point of departure to intersections”

Mixed Race Vocabulary: inclusive, sensitivity, rainbow tribe, Heinz 57, cultural consciousness, melting pot.

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R904111300

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A Gen Xer’s Comeuppance

Excerpt from article posted on Ruelle Electrique:

Holland Cotter’s recent New York Times article, “Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters” on the Boston Museum’s latest exhibit “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice” is so brilliantly written, like a searing, soaring comet, we are urged to turn our gaze from our daily activities and pay closer attention to a specific corner of our artistic universe.

Titian first poked his head into our stunted and skewed Reality Bites in the 1990’s while we tripped through pseudo-scholarly undergraduate studies on the sun-beaten campus of UCLA. In Renaissance & Baroque Art, a survey class taken to fulfill our Humanities GEs, we snickered and yawned when our professor, whose name, unfortunately, is long-forgotten, tasked our ignorant Generation X for equating the great Renaissance artists with four ninja-fighting turtles. In a huge auditorium filled with some fifty to a hundred impatient and guileless students, over a scratchy microphone, she set us straight with a lecture about how Donatello pre-dated, by centuries, his supposed  contemporaries, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. And, if the TV execs really cared about the youth, they would have named Titian as the purple masked, bo-staff wielding, amphibian super-fighter.

To read more, click here:

“A Passion for All Time: A Generation Xer’s Comeuppance” | Other Bohemian Activities | Ruelle Electrique