jens lekman

saw a great show on Saturday night at the Pabst... Jens Lekman.
He closed with this... one of my favorites.

Cold Swedish Winter...

Solnit in March

"The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once."

Rebecca Solnit ended with this quote today. It was a wonderful reading at Woodland Pattern on a drab Sunday in Milwaukee. Solnit read from her new book Storming the Gates of Paradise

a milliliter of water, 2004

happy

friday... happy to see the end of a busy week.

windy city...

I unfortunately can not get to Chicago this weekend but there are two must attend events happening this Saturday, March 29!!!!

First - (h(om)e) will be at

4:00 – 8:00pm Main doors open to all ticket holders
Great Hall at Union Station
210 South Canal Street
(Entrance on Jackson)
Chicago, IL

Second - one of my former students David Robert Elliott will be showing in good company in this show curated by Brad Troemel...

acknowledged

Thanks to Jim Johnson - from (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography - for posting about my oil series, crude here

new lecture series in Mil-Town

I look forward to this new art lecture series in Milwaukee... just another sign that Milwaukee's art scene is ever growing even if it has to be connected to the bar scene! I look forward to a martini with my art education!

The Portrait Society Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 526, now has a "brother bar," the Lemon Lounge, 2846 N. Oakland Ave. Both share the status of being the smallest of their kind in the city, measuring a mere 300 square feet each.
The gallery and bar have organized the "Lectures at Lemon Lounge" series, a mini "art historical-ish" lecture each month co-hosted by gallery owners Debra Brehmer and Kat Murrell (known about town as the "art history chicks") and Lemon's proprietor Michael Sottile.

The lectures begin April 11 with a talk at 7:30 p.m. by Graeme Reid, assistant director of the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. The title of his lecture, which is tongue in cheek, is "A short discourse on Mr. Edward Hopper's Mammary Fixation."

May's lecturer will be painter Fred Stonehouse, and June's will be Milwaukee Art Museum associate curator of photographs Lisa Hostetler.
Hostetler will talk about an upcoming MAM exhibit of portrait work by Wisconsin photographers Julie Lindemann and Johnnie Shimon.

Lectures are free, but donations will be accepted.

- Mary Louise Schumacher

Rebecca Solnit in Milwaukee!!!!

One of my favorite writers to visit Milwaukee this weekend!

On Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 2pm at Woodland Pattern, San Francisco writer, historian,
and activist Rebecca Solnit will be reading from her latest book,
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Storming
the Gates, an anthology of Solnit's essential essays from the past
ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican
border, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery
struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests.
Solnit has made a vocation out of journeying into difficult
territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist,
antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual.

She is the best-selling author of ten books-among them, Wanderlust,
Savage Dreams, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West. She writes regularly about landscape,
cities, and other geographies, the environment, politics, and visual
culture. In 2003 she won the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Also
in 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for River of
Shadows. Solnit will visit Woodland Pattern to read as part of the
Seeing Green: Art, Ecology, and Activism in Milwaukee art exhibit,
which opens April 12.

Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212
phone 414.263.5001

in Houston... FOTOFEST

Visiting Houston to see my friend Rachel Hewlett who is the Education Coordinator at HCP and to check out the FOTOfest events...

HCP has three interesting shows up right now; Habitat 7 - Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Native Land- Houston Chinese Photographic Society, Mined in China. I am really interested in Jeff Liao's work in the first gallery - Habitat 7.

Four of the earliest major civilizations were formed in river valleys. The fertile lands provided surpluses of food that allowed for the growth of populations, development of cities, and thus civilizations were created.
Though we now live in an industrial and technological era, where the survival of our existence no longer simply depends on the availability of food, the pattern of our quest for living space still resembles that of the ancient river valley civilizations. Such is the premise of the 7 Train, the seven-mile-long subway line that connects New York City´s Times Square with seven communities in northwest Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the country.

There is a 12 minute video running in the space in which Anne Wilkes Tucker interviews Jeff Liao about his process and the ideas about his work. He is shooting with the 8 x 10 camera and compositing the urban landscapes.

LIRR, Hunter´s Point, 2004, 40 x 96 inches, pigment ink print

on Thursday March 13...crappy iphone pictures...
Off to the George Krause opening at the Harris Gallery...


Then to the Dawoud Bey opening at the CAM

Kevin, digital C-print, 40 x 30 in., © Dawoud Bey

Then to Lawndale Art Center to see Chuy Benitez. His exhibition Houston Cultura was interesting. I had seen some of the work in the HCP publication SPOT earlier this year.

Rachel and Chuy

some images from SPUR projects exhibition...

SPUR Projects in Portola Valley CA surrounded by redwoods.


my Oil Self Portrait and Michelle Mansour's paintings on back wall ...


Crude # 1 and 6 framed...


Jessalyn Haggenjos' paintings on left



Miror Bomb by Jeremiah Jenkins

Michael Ashkin

I had the opportunity to meet Michael Ashkin during his visit to MIAD in February. I unfortunately missed his lecture as I was teaching an evening class... #@!# schedule! I am really interested in his work and have an affinity to his representations of waters.

in response to Mark Silva

Harley and Jens, Arizona 2007

spr in ter

According to Heather Hambrect of (h(om)e) - sprinter is the "wombo combo of spring overcoming winter." I think the 4 feet of solid ice sprinkled with fresh snow has made a permanent impact on our psyche here in Wisconsin...

Let me tell you about Heather... Her/(h(om)e) handmade leather bags are amazing! I have two and recommend them to all... she makes beautiful messenger bags, laptop bags, purses, clutches, wallets... the list goes on and on. She is incredibly talented and her bags are as much about function as they are about fashion. You can find (h(om)e) bags in Chicago at City Soles, in Milwaukee at shoo or by visiting the (h(om)e) studio.

Mark Silva

I was so lucky to catch up with my buddy Mark Silva today. Mark lives in Portland,OR "with his beautiful fiance, a weiner dog (who is on ebay for free) and is desperately in search of a new boxer." These are a few of Mark's pictures he has shared with me... I love the dalmation/pit bull... eye contact!