loveitallabove

It is impossible to seek out the face of Sitting Bull, and even more the knowing of Crazy Horse; for one, the photograph is never justice, nor his prime. The other never sat for a white man's camera machine. Rebecca Solnit wrote about the Ghost Dance and technology . I have to look that up. I've just come from Little Bighorn, and you cannot but cry and cry. Such nobility in its last. Ignoble.

In the Montana Triennial at the Missoula Art Museum there was a piece by an artist named Tom Foolery from Dillon, MT. Also some Richard Notkins and plexiglas assemblages by an artist with the last name Autio. Lela Autio. Rudy Autio's wife? Daughter? And eye-catching large soft pastel portrait drawings by a woman named Jennifer Pulchinski.

There was a brilliant installation of drawings and sculpture by an Indian (Lakota) artist named Dwayne Wilcox at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM). They were earnest and ironic; scathing, insightful, childish. Drawn on Ledger Paper, and so at once borrowed and repossessed; the material was also highly personal in feel like you'd discovered a trove of a) drawings of a self-taught skilled observer b) a refined, highly-stylized project by an agent provacateur or c) the working thoughts of a 21st c. Indian artist navigating a new language for his own erudition. I also couldn't not think of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith who means south to me.

Loving the Klosterman

What I'm Reading... I had tasked myself last month or so with reading three books that I then intend to synergize to answer all the questions about why museums are so important, broadly and to me especially. The first is Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure, and Human Evolution . The second is James Cuno's Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedia Museum . Cuno's was the first of these three that I read, and I was mildly troubled that Cuno appeared to be boxing his way out of a corner. The third book, which I just completed is Putting the Arts in the Picture , from Columbia College Chicago .  Putting the Arts in the Picture is a compelling work about integrative arts education practice in the schools. Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century , our book on arts education, makes a new argument for moving the arts, usually located on the margins of public education, to its center. By examining the role...

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