I recently completed a three-month artist residency in the lovely Chicago neighborhood of Pullman. After considering a number of ideas of what I planned to do during my stay, I landed on contemplating the idea of leisure in area known for labor. This was not …
Onion Dip for Breakfast turns two and the journey just gets better every day. We’ve explored the nooks and crannies of life, clinked our glasses, tasted everything, and taken off for parts unknown. Happy anniversary, ODB!
This statue, which has adorned our deck for over a decade now, has brought me joy season after season. I call her… My Lady. I remember the day that we bought her at an estate sale and us hauling her up the steps to our deck. I thought that she was beautiful and couldn’t imagine her being mine. Every season, as the leaves fall or when they reappear and when the annuals previously placed around fade, she gets a makeover and becomes so fresh and so new.
My Lady Over the Years
I’ve been planning to revisit a particular show for months! The little and big things of life delayed my fuzzy plans. Poking my head back into the Art Institute’s galleries recently, I was struck by the opening text of this lovely show: “It took millions …
June closed with an explosion of fruit and flowers in the Black Garden. July promises even more.
Recently, I had the opportunity to meet the 2023 James Beard Award Best Chef Southeast winner, Terry Koval. Just a few days before connecting with him at his Decatur, Georgia restaurant, The Deer and the Dove, I had been sitting in the Lyric Opera of …
We were celebrating my parents’ marriage the last time we saw “Sweet Life” with a garden cake, sparkling flutes, joy, and a flashback to their wedding day. We’ve returned to the theme in all of its goodness. I find that as much as I’m present …
We’ve had the pleasure of spending time in a number of galleries lately and we’re happier for it. Long ago we dismissed the notion that when we enter a museum, we must see everything. Who wants to run by works of art as if we’ve entered an obstacle course?
Here are two shows featuring artists and their contemporary portraits. One in Chicago and the other in New York. I’d long to see attention for Juan de Pareja since I first learned of his existence back in the 80s. A quick trip for love to NYC made the show at the Met the icing on the cake. This exquisite show draws from the well of research by the extraordinary Arturo Schomburg in the 1920s. More of his story in a future post.
Enslaved by Velázquez and a painter himself, Juan de Pareja was rumored to be responsible for some of the more well-known works attributed to the famous artist. Newer research seems to bear that out. Time will tell.
The Met’s show highlights the period and contextualizes what life might have been like for this enslaved artist who traveled everywhere Velázquez went including to the Vatican. One heart-wrenching gallery includes both the central portrait of Juan de Pareja with Velázquez‘s signed document “freeing” him and his progeny (on the condition that he remained enslaved four additional years) inside a fading book positioned squarely in front of his portrait. Hauntingly sad doesn’t begin to describe how I felt standing there.
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And then we return to Chicago for Patric McCoy’s show of 80s Black gay life downtown through photographs thoughtfully curated by Juarez Hawkins at Wrightwood 659.
