“Honk!” in Boston and Providence

“Honk!,” the third-annual giant festival of international activist marching band awesomeness, returns to Boston (well, actually Somerville and Cambridge) today and tomorrow. The don’t-miss-it main event is Sunday's “Parade to Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes and Feet,” which features 24 brass bands and various community organizations marching and making beautiful music together from Davis Square to Harvard Square beginning at noon. Among the many bands performing is Providence’s What Cheer? Brigade, pictured above at last year’s parade. (More photos from last year are here.)

The festival moves to Providence with “Brass Bands Conquer the New World” beginning at 5 p.m. Monday in Kennedy Plaza and then marching down Washington Street to AS220 on Empire Street (where admission is $10).

Pixilerations ends tomorrow

Pixilerations, the big “festival of digital media and interactive performance” in Providence, runs through tomorrow. Pictured here is Abby Donovan’s "the Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on: Trying to Read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” which is part of the festival’s group exhibition. Also in the exhibit is Martina Mrongovius’s “We’re all looking,” a project “to create holographic images from choreographed photography.” (Here’s a link to a video of it.) And tonight at 10 p.m. is the free “Pixilerated: Concert Performance II,” featuring Jon Christopher Nelson, Brian Knoth, Steven Kemper, Alessandro Cipriani and Christopher Biggs at URI’s Shepard Building Auditorium, 80 Washington St.

Artists organize “Bike Write for Obama”

There are the usual ways of spelling out your support for a candidate, and then there’s this weekend’s “Bike Write for Obama.”

Sarah Sandman, 28, is organizing a group “typographic bike ride” across Providence on Sunday to signal support for Barack Obama for president and to promote alternative forms of transportation.

The idea is that the eight-mile pedal, which begins at 2 pm outside the Providence Center, at Hope and Cypress streets, and ends at Broad and Saratoga streets, will spell out Obama’s slogan “Yes we can” — you know, if you could see the route from the air. ...

Read the rest here.

P.S. If you know of pro-McCain-Palin art by New England artists, please let me know.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies

Over the summer I wrote about Boston graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies’ broadsides about in his native Zimbabwe – and in particular the turmoil after disputed elections there in March. With the U.S. presidential election approaching, he has joined a group of graphic designers in “30 Reasons,” a 30-day e-mail and internet campaign to rustle up votes for Barack Obama. The project features a new poster by a different artist each day between Oct. 5 and the November election. Maviyane-Davies went first. The message of his poster (pictured here) ain’t subtle.

P.S. If you know of pro-McCain-Palin art by New England artists, please let me know.

Lynda Barry speaks

Wisconsin artist Lynda Barry spoke at Brookline Booksmith on Oct. 2, 2008. Below are excerpts from her talk:

• “One of the things I’ve finally learned is that you can’t just walk up to kids and ask them about that object that they’re playing with. I’ve tried, because I got really interested in it. So I’d just go up to them when I’d see one. And I saw this girl in an airport and she had this little dolly. She was 9. A little bit too old. Her mom was kind of embarrassed about it. It had a shut eye. And it had Bic pen on it. And it went up to her and I said, ‘That looks like a very good friend of yours.’ And she took it and put it behind her back and backed up. And I realized it would be like somebody coming up to me and saying, ‘That looks like a good bra you’re wearing.’ It’s a private thing.
  
  “I figured it out that what I could do though if I wanted to talk to kids was to just start drawing in front of them. If you start drawing in front of a kid or an adult or anybody they’ll come up and talk to you. So I was sitting on an airplane. You know everybody’s like ‘I hope you don’t mind that my kid’s in the middle.’ Not at all. There’s your kid. She puts on her headphones and goes to sleep. He’s looking at his ‘Jumanji’ book. He’s like 8. And I start drawing. So he gets interested and I tell him I’m a cartoonist. And then I play this game with him, which you all have played, which is you make a scribble and you pass it to the other person and they turn it into something. Then they make a scribble and they pass it to you and you turn it turn it into something. Well it turns out if you play this with a kid you’re going to get a story. I had read that from a really smart child psychologist. So I said I’ll give it a try. So then I did it. I passed it around two passes and all of a sudden this kid, he goes, ‘Oh, I have a story. I have a story and you can make it into a comic strip.’ And you could tell all he knew was he had was the feeling of having a story. And I said, ‘Okay, I got it, we’ll write it down.’ He said, ‘The story’s called’ – this kid was named Jack – ‘The story’s called “Chicken Attack” by Jack.’ And I said, ‘Alright, let’s go.’ Okay, so this is it verbatim from Jack: ‘One morning a chicken was eaten by a man. The man went to work. His stomach felt funny. He went to the Port-O-Let. And then he went. The chicken came out. The man was surprised. The chicken was also surprised. The chicken ran from the Port-O-Let. To the construction site. They made the chicken boss. And from then on the chicken was in charge.’ Isn’t that an oddly satisfying story?”


• “The one thing almost every human being knows, all around the world, is that if you have a little kid, you have this little baby, and you say, ‘I’m going to raise this baby, this baby is going to get everything that it wants but this child will not be allowed to play at all until that person is 21 years old.’ Everyone around the world can tell you what that kid’s going to be like by the time he’s 21. He’s going to crazy, right. That’s the kid that tells you, ‘I smell clams through the dirt. That’s why I’m a shoot you.’ And everybody knows that around the world. Which means that we have some tacit understanding of the connection between play and mental health. And in fact if you think about when you started to go crazy it’s about the time that play and art became an elective, about middle school. That’s when people started to loose their minds. It’s also interestingly a time when music becomes this huge, huge thing, the radio becomes this huge thing.”


• “Then you might have this feeling – I remember hearing stuff like this and it would really bum me out – you start hearing it about the time you’re 10. The radio will be on and some guy will say, ‘You know if you want to be a ballerina, you have to begin when you’re 3. You must begin when you’re 3.’ And you’re like, dang, I guess I can’t be a ballerina, it’s too late. Then you hear somebody say, ‘If you want to play the violin, you should have started by age 5.’ And you’re like, dang, it’s too late for me now. And then you hear some novelist say, ‘I began writing novels when I was in the first grade.’ Dang. So by the time you’re 12, it’s all too late and you get this feeling that it’s best left to professionals – like Jessica Simpson. … And that is the situation that most of us are in right now as adults. We gave up at some point, thinking that the only way we could do this stuff is if we are professionals. And the only singing that’s left is the saddest, singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ … The only movement that’s left for us is exercise, the saddest movement of all time. In fact, you need an outfit or nobody knows what the hell you’re doing. … The only sculpture that’s left to most of us is peeling labels off beer bottles while somebody else is telling us about a dream.”


• “A lot of times if you’re writing, you’re thinking ‘Oh where is this getting me? This is dumb.’ I still have that and what I do is I imagine I’m in a bar writing and it’s a guy coming up to me going, ‘That’s stupid. That’s dumb.’ You’d know he’s an ass, right. That guy’s an ass. But if it’s in your head, it’s the voice of reason.”


• “You all know what phantom limb pain is? That’s that thing where you lose part of your limb but you still have the sensation that it’s still there. There was a guy who had a particularly intractable case of it. He had lost his hand from here down. But his sensation was that his hand not only there, but it was in a really painfully clenched fist. He was in misery, the pain was constant. His life was really deteriorating. They didn’t know what to do for him. And there’s this brilliant neurologist named V.S. Ramachandran who has done a lot of amazing work with imagery on the brain. And he had this idea, and his idea was, well, let’s make a box and we’re going to put a mirror in that’s slanted this way and there’s a hole on this side so that the guy can put his hand into the hole on this side, and then when he looks down it’s going to be the illusion of seeing two hands. You follow me on that? And so the guy did it. So he sees two hands. And Ramachandran says, ‘Open your hand.’ And he did. And he saw the other one open. And the pain went away. And I believe that’s what images do. That there’s something about – whether it’s in another book, or it’s something that we make – there’s something about seeing something – and I don’t mean literally, necessarily, although with art that’s true – there’s something about working with images that can unclench something that we have no other way to get to.”

Greg Cook is “subtly disturbing,” also “alarming”

Some more write-ups of my show with my Boston pal Kari Percival (that’s her mobile pictured above) at Chicago’s Green Lantern gallery:

• ArtSlant praises my penmanship: “Cook’s neatly rendered, hyper-serifed typography perfectly accompanies the imagery of his illustrations.”
• Blogger Regan Golden says it was “a sweet, impeccable, subtly disturbing show.”
• These mentions come after the Chicago newspaper NewCity called my artwork “alarming.”

Yes!

Joel Sternfeld photographs Northampton

I’m always fascinated when artists from elsewhere make work in New England. So I took interest in New York photographer Joel Sternfeld’s “Oxbow Archive” at New York’s Luhring Augustine gallery, which features landscape photos he shot in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 2005 to 2007. The gallery says the series “documents weather and atmospheric effects in a field in central Massachusetts over the course of a cycle of seasons. Sternfeld's new work represents a break with painterly notions of the Picturesque and the Sublime.” True. In reproduction, the large (5 by 7 feet) deadpan photos are kinda bland.

“Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive,” Luhring Augustine, New York, Sept. 6 to Oct. 4, 2008.

Pictured: Joel Sternfeld, "March 13, 2006, The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts” and “August 19, 2006, The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts.” Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

New owner for Harvard Bookstore

Jeff Mayersohn and Linda Seamonson, a married couple from Wellesley, are the new owners of the landmark Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, the business announced today. Mayersohn, who will serve as president, takes over from Frank Kramer, who has owned the store for 46 years. The shop had been in his family since his father opened it in 1932.

The announcement explains: “Originally from New York City, Jeff Mayersohn has been a resident of New England for nearly four decades. He graduated from Harvard College in 1973 and received an M.Phil. in physics from Yale in 1977. He has worked at several high-tech companies in the region, including internet pioneer Bolt, Beranek and Newman. For the last ten years, Mr. Mayersohn has been an executive at Sonus Networks, a market leader in IP communications infrastructure. Mr. Mayersohn and Ms. Seamonson are married and have three children: Andrew, a sophomore at Yale, and Rebecca and Anna, who attend the Wellesley public schools.”

Today, Kramer wrote in an email to customers: “I look forward to remaining a prominent member of the Cambridge business community, steering the Cambridge Local First campaign, and working as an industry consultant. I also plan to travel and, when time permits, learn Italian.”

Related:
A previous report.

Boston Children’s Museum chief to leave

Louis Casagrande, the president and CEO of Boston Children’s Museum, plans to step down on June 30, 2009, the institution announced today. He has lead the museum for 15 years, including during its lauded “green” renovation and expansion, which opened in April 2007.

Chris Frost

Somerville sculptor Chris Frost’s applies grown-up rumination to childhood play in his show at Boston Sculptors Gallery. “Fort,” 2008 (pictured above), is a jury-rigged plywood tree rising to the gallery ceiling. Aluminum “planks” form a ladder up the trunk to aluminum “boards” that create a shelf fort between branches. On the floor nearby is “Trap,” 2008 (pictured below), which resembles one of those traps seen in old cartoons. A boulder is held up by a stick, which can be yanked away by a rope when someone takes the bait – in this case a sandwich, the perfect lure for hungry guys or Yogi Bear. There’s a jaunty playful charm to these pieces, but Frost gets serious with his craftsmanship and materials, which often masquerade as something else.

In “Trap,” the stone is actually stone, but everything else is bronze. The effect is to make manifest boyhood dreams and pranks, but give them an adult twist via the more sophisticated materials that slow us down enough to think about what we’re really playing at. And I think what we’re playing is war.

“Chris Frost: New Work,” Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., Boston, Sept. 3 to Oct. 5, 2008.

“Black Womanhood” at Davis Museum

From my review of “Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body”:

“Black Womanhood,” the exhibit at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, must have seemed like a sharp idea when it was being put together. It examines the ways in which “contemporary artists are challenging historic and often stereotypical images that present black women as the alluringly beautiful Other, the erotic fantasy, or the super-maternal mammy.” By now this is familiar, if still urgent, stuff; what makes this outing special is that it gathers more than 100 objects — traditional African art, Western colonial photos and postcards, and contemporary art — that connect today’s dissectors with the origins of the ugly stereotypes they’re working to take apart.

Barbara Thompson, who organized the show for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire, does a good job of mapping the territory. But it’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

Read the rest here.

“Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body,” Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 106 Central St.., Wellesley, Massachusetts, Sept. 17 to Dec. 14, 2008.

Pictured: Wangechi Mutu, “Double Fuse,” 2003, courtesy of Hood Museum of Art.

Lynda Barry speaks in Brookline Thursday

Lynda Barry of Wisconsin, who is speaking at Brookline Booksmith Thursday, is one of our greatest artists. Her comics describe the thrills and loves, the silliness and yearning and loneliness of growing up better than practically anyone else. Maybe only E.B. White’s pitch-perfect, heartbreaking 1952 novel “Charlotte’s Web” surpasses her.

Barry favors the short form – usually comic strips a single poetic page in length. And even when she’s told longer tales they’ve rarely been as long 20 pages. But these pieces accumulate into an expansive story. The place to begin with her work is her 2000 collection “The Greatest of Marlys!” (I’ve reproduced a couple strips here – click on the images to enlarge.) It selects out some of the best of her epic serial tale – told over three decades and hundreds of pages – and like all great serial fiction, part of the attraction is returning to characters you’ve followed for years and come to love.

Her comics of the late 1970s had a prickly patterned style that recalled Chicago’s Hairy Who gang. But by the early 1980s, she found her great subject: growing up. And her style shifted accordingly – her writing looking and reading more like a (fictional) diary, her drawings appearing more childlike. This careful balance of form and content made her art feel more true, more intimate, more alive.

Though her comics were widely published in alternative papers in the 1980s and ‘90s, the comics world only began to accept her in the past decade or so. (The art world has yet to really even notice her.) Many misread her drawing as cruddy and unsophisticated, and complained that her words too often overwhelmed her pictures. It didn’t help that she was one of the lone ladies in what is still a boys’ (and the emphasis is on boys) club. One of the major curatorial disgraces of recent years was when she was left out of the 2005 “Masters of American Comics” traveling exhibit (in fact, the curators didn’t include any women). And she’s one of the many contemporary cartoonists who could have (should have) spiced up the DeCordova Museum’s current “Drawn to Detail” show.

Barry is in town to promote her latest book “What It Is,” which is part memoir, part scrapbook and part how-to workbook, explaining her art/writing process. The overture of the book is a melancholy story about Barry and her husband going for a walk and ruminating on the worries and humiliations that play endlessly in their heads – and ultimately are the wellspring of memory from which her greatness flows.

“There’s a kind of K-Tel collection of my 25 greatest screw-ups of all time. I play that one a lot,” her husband says. “Man, I know,” Barry replies. “I’m still cringing about stuff I said when I was nine.”

Lynda Barry speaks at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline, Massachusetts, 7 p.m. Oct. 2, 2008.

Related:
A profile of Barry in The New York Times in May.