The year in art and architecture

If you read with interest, as I did, the article by Mary Louise Schumacher in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, it's worth double checking online as that version is longer and even more interesting! Here, for example, is what I consider one of the more trenchant questions she poses:
"Is Milwaukee investing in the aura of art rather than actual art"

Read the article: The year in art and architecture

Merry Christmas!

Paraguay's "Landfillharmonic" Orchestra

According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, the village of Cateura is a section of the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion that is built "practically on top of the city's main landfill." That misfortune has been turned into opportunity by Favio Chavez, who is "a local ecologist and musician."

Using instruments created from recycled trash Cateura now has a "Landfillharmonic" orchestra. What a fantastic idea!

Photo by Jorge Saenz, Associated Press

I first read about this story in an article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, however a search of their website turned up only a photo essay, not the article. The story originated in the Associated Press, though, and I found it on NBC World News.

A documentary film is being produced about Favio Chavez and the Landfillharmonic. I recommend checking out the 3-minute trailer for it on You-Tube. Reading the articles was fascinating, but actually listening to even this brief sample of the music itself, was quite moving.

Someone was quoted in the trailer saying that a violin is worth more than the typical house in Cateura, Paraguay. It says volumes about what the society values, doesn't it? And here in the most privileged society on earth all we can think about is cutting taxes by (among other things) cutting the arts from our public schools!

(Having said that, there is at least a smidgeon of good news--unrelated to the arts but related to taxes and funding--about MPS in today's Journal Sentinel: "Residents blame parents, students for MPS failures.")

Fiction vs. nonfiction: a false dichotomy

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“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

So declared Holden Caulfield, one of the most memorable in a long cast of characters that has taken up residence in my own personality, consciously or not.

When I was young I was an insatiable reader of novels, short stories, poetry – anything except nonfiction. Many a tortured soul lingers in the catacombs of my neural networks, like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment). A fair number are villains, just plain creepy, or both. In my mind, Dicken’s immortal Uriah Heep rises to the top of these unforgettable characters like foetid cream, a testament not only to that incomparable author’s ability to sculpt believability from his imagination and love of language, but also to the fact that the most compelling characters aren’t always the protagonists.

They don’t have to be human, either. In what was my favorite book during my middle school years – I reread it 18 times – Cruella de Vil, that eponymously evil antagonist, played one hundred and second fiddle to 101 delightful Dalmatians. And of course, we mustn’t forget that ever-humble hobbit, Frodo, reluctant hero of Middle Earth.

Tragedy also looms large in my remembrances: Are George and Lennie mice or men? Heroism and transformation in the face of tragedy has special power: think Scarlett O’Hara. Or my favorite character of all, Yossarian, the haunted, tragicomic survivor of Catch 22.

The one thing all these characters have in common, aside from lingering in my otherwise spotty memory, is that they are fictional. The stuff of literature.

My riff on memorable fictive characters was inspired by Alan Borsuk’s editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel entitled “Shift to nonfiction in schools becoming reality.” Borsuk’s regular beat is education. In today’s article he observes, “A broad shift is under way from fiction to nonfiction, propelled by the Common Core English and language arts standards that are being implemented in 46 states and the District of Columbia. It almost certainly will mean fewer classics, more historical documents, fewer personal essays, more analytical writing.”

Yet another assault on creativity and imagination. As an artist and art educator I long ago got used to having to defend the value of my discipline. Art, music, dance – all the creative and expressive arts – are defensible on many grounds but I never thought it would come to this. Not literature. It’s axiomatic that every student takes English every year, while “the Arts” suffer second-class status as elective, or worse, are dispensable. But now literature, too?

The importance of English has always been unassailable, or so I believed.

“Why?” asks Borsuk rhetorically. “In general, advocates say, nonfiction gives students better preparation for college and careers by developing such things as analytical skills.”

Ridiculous!

I learned how to write an expository essay in freshman English under the profound tutelage of Mrs. Wiggenhorn, one of few high school teachers whose name remains in my mental catacombs along with a library full of imaginary ones. She delivered without sacrificing Romeo and Juliet, as the new Common Core Standards do.

Today I read and write far more nonfiction than fiction. I have no ambition to be a novelist despite my admiration for those who do. But I wonder how I would feel about writing today if I’d been forced in high school to read “FedViews,” written by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, or “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences” instead of Hamlet or The Little Prince. (I didn’t make those nonfiction titles up; they are on the official Common Core Standards list.)

Great literature, like great art, is more than an educational tool. Reading fiction does far more than provide lessons in vocabulary, grammar, style, and content. To paraphrase author Lloyd Alexander, fiction is not an escape from reality but a way of understanding it. Fictional characters and stories are memorable because they insinuate themselves into our psyches. They express emotions, debate moral dilemmas, suffer consequences. They live in us. They help us figure out how to be human.

Borsuk assures us that there is still room in the English curriculum for fiction; however, the balance will be shifted. As much as 70% of all reading in the 12^th grade is destined to be nonfiction.

James Piatt, principal of Brown Deer High School, is quoted as saying "I believe it's a strong disservice to kids to spend too much time on fiction when they don't have good nonfiction skills." Borsuk continues, “Nonfiction prepares kids better for the real world, he said.”

Nonsense.

I believe in a more nuanced reality, one expressed well by author Yann Martel, who famously imagined a riveting and philosophical narrative of a boy trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in Life of Pi. He wrote, “Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.”

The value of fiction is not confined to writers themselves, however. The arts have been recognized for their unquantifiable but demonstrable role in increasing the bottom line in the corporate world, too. Annette Byrd of GlaxoSmithKline says “We need people who think with the creative side of their brains—people who have played in a band, who have painted…it enhances symbiotic thinking capabilities, not always thinking in the same paradigm, learning how to kick-start a new idea, or how to get a job done better, less expensively.”

My world would be so much poorer without all those characters in my head. I know it would. I possess analytical skills but they have not helped me weather the news these past few days. It is a comfort, however, to have Atticus Finch ruminating up there – and Scout, too.

And even Boo Radley. Maybe especially Boo Radley.

CoPA at Walker's Point Center for the Arts

Milwaukee's Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA) organizes an annual juried show that is open to photographers from throughout Wisconsin and several surrounding states. The current show is at Walker's Point Center for the Arts. Juror's Graeme Reid and Annemarie Sawkins picked a diverse selection of 40 images from 266 submitted. The work ranged in style from photojournalistic to abstract.

Onrush by Bernard Newman

At the reception last night Graeme Reid, saying he spoke for both jurors, extolled the overall quality of the work as well as the quality of presentation. I agree. While many of the photographers and some of the images represented in the show were familiar, it also was good to discover a few who were not.

Although I enjoyed many of the works in the exhibit, my personal favorites were a pair of prints from a series called "Duplex" by Madisonian Ken Oppriecht. I am attracted to them on several levels. Technically masterful and conceptually intriguing, they take their mundane subjects into creative and metaphorical directions that suggest a critique of contemporary culture.

from Duplex by Ken Oppriecht

(Full disclosure: I am both a founding member and a current member of CoPA. However, I am not included in the exhibit.)

Seeing Peru: New book available

It took me over a year to get around to it, but I've just completed a book based on my solo exhibit at Mount Mary College in 2011. It is entitled Seeing Peru: Layered Realities. At 11" x 13" it is my first large scale book project to date. The entire book can be previewed (and purchased) at Blurb.com.

The following is adapted from the introduction:

"In popular imagination Peru conjures up images of an ancient Incan civilization that lingers in jungles and atop mountains in noble defiance of the colonial conquest that led to its ruin. Despite a period of relative peace, contemporary Peru, like many of its South American neighbors, also suggests political unrest born of extreme social and economic stratifications. Most Peruvians, however, live simple lives from day to day, eking out a subsistence in one of the harshest landscapes on earth.

Seeing Peru: Layered Realities emphasizes the contrasts I’ve witnessed in a land both mythical and humble. The terrain rises almost vertically from the vast Pacific, reaching heights over 20,000 feet before falling just as precipitously into one of the most remote jungles in the world. Where it isn’t jungle, it is mostly desert. Amidst a largely barren landscape, irrigation in fertile volcanic soil makes possible the cultivation of a rich diversity of crops. Most tourists visit Cusco and the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba River, where the individual human is dwarfed by the colossal stonework of the Inca. But as impressive as these fabulous structures can be, they are themselves dwarfed by the sheer scale of the mountainous landscape."

"I was in Peru in conjunction with a Mount Mary College cross-cultural art therapy program. The program included a pilgrimage to Cusco, Machu Picchu, and other sites in the Sacred Valley, as well as an excursion to the Colca Canyon. But the primary focus was on service learning, working with the poor, and cultural understanding.

The goal of this book is to convey a sense of the “layered realities” I experienced. Along with the realities of geography, climate, and culture, I was particularly struck by the contrast between the typical views a traveler might bring back from Peru and the lives of ordinary Peruvians. The book is divided into two sections. The first provides a glimpse of the expected: the monuments and the colorful characters who appeal to tourists. The larger second section focuses on the conditions in a community that is hidden from the view of a typical tourist (as well as many urban Peruvians): the lives of the people who live in Alto Cayma."

In Memoriam: Carol Rowan

When our bodies return to the earth the flowers that grow there signify eternity. Carol Rowan was a lover of flowers. She painted them endlessly, perhaps in anticipation of that eternity. The lives of her many students as well as her paintings testify to her impact on the world, which was great.

Everywhere she looked she saw beauty and in her art she captured beauty and shared it. While there are other reasons to paint, there are none better.

I feel privileged and honored to be able to have called Carol a colleague.

To read her obituary in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, click here.

photo by Angela Peterson