Tag: art

The story behind Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

A bunch of poets I follow on Twitter liked this Tweet today, so it magically showed up on my timeline, and it’s perfect:

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”

Georgia O’Keefe is famous for her flower paintings that look like, ahem, hoohas. That’s a reductionist distillation of her work, but it’s genpop-accurate because, whatever, we can only maintain so much info in our brains so it’s easier to identify her contributions to the art historical cannon by the most “memorable” thing about her work.

OK, Georgia!

Perhaps, though, with the following passage of her own writing, we can see beyond Georgia’s ~flower vaginas~, and remember why she picked flowers as a focus of some of her paintings in the first place. Because they’re freaking beautiful.

Georgia decided to zoom into the blooms and paint a magnified perspective of flowers after being drawn to a tiny flower in a still life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour.

Here’s what she wrote:

“A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they’ll be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

That the busy New Yorkers didn’t see flowers, necessarily, and instead mostly saw vaginas (or at least the art history did) is totally predictable and, like, what are we gonna to do? Georgia’s voluptuous flowers have caused celebration for the fornication-fueled folds of the most tender of lady parts, and so be it. Hell yeah. Let us toast the vaginas! Long live the labia! But also, as we cheer, may her idea of magnifying flowers as a means to share with the world what a pause to stop and look at the lilies can do for one’s, well, soul, hold meaning for us as well.

What can you take time to appreciate more closely this weekend? Might I suggest Ram’s Head with Hollyhock? Or your nearest adult, consenting vagina?

Roundup of Ruth Asawa stamps from the USPS

Ruth Asawa’s creative time management advice

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

Y’all. Ruth Asawa had six kids. Did you know that?

What an impressive human. To raise even one offspring and have an internationally successful and personally meaningful art practice seems like a near impossible achievement. Actually, having an internationally successful art practice AND/OR personally meaningful art practice child-free seems like a nearly impossible achievement.

Here she is with four of six. FOUR OF SIX.

I learned this fact about Ruth in ^this video promoting new USPS stamps featuring her work, intricate wire sculptures that explore how “the relation between outside and inside was interdependent, integral.”

How very relevant in a pandemic that has us all stuck inside and having sweaty pastoral dreams! Also relevant: Stamps, supporting the post office, sending care packages to all the people you miss, etc.

Also, also relevant: The following quote from the USPS video about how Ruth found time to meet her practice, continually pushing her process and forms (all while being, let me just say this one last time, a mom of six, in the mid 20th century).

“Use your little bits of time. Your five minutes here, your 10 minutes there. All those moments begin to add up. … Learn how to use time when it is given to you.”

Embroidery art on old polaroid photos, Show Your Work Series by Jackie Mantey

Show Your Work series at Slate Arts this December!

Jackie Mantey

The Show Your Work series considers the human tendency to impose our own narratives on another’s truth, as well as the layered and complicated process of rewriting the present by reconsidering the past. Each image in the Show Your Work series is a previously discarded photograph dug up at an antique store or on a found-photo resale site.

To determine what to embroider on each image, I Google-searched a question sparked by the original photograph, selected the most intriguing image that showed up in the Google results, and then embroidered that web-found image onto the original photograph. 

The framing methodology of double-sided glass frames encourages viewers to turn the frame around to see the back of each altered photograph—to see the work. The flip side of the photo can reveal the history of the photo, a pentimento of its years as a multi-purpose object, and hint at the many hands that have touched it. See the messy embroidery backside not often shown by artists and crafters, find the Googled question in my handwriting, and read any prior markings by previous owners of the photograph (including years, names, notes, and/or antique store sales information). 

In a time that’s all about content generation, what do we do with the “content” that’s already here? This work also engages contemporary culture’s historically profound ability to divine answers almost immediately, as well as the tension and confusion that results from our very mortal inability to find the answers we are most often in search of. 

This presumptuous layering work was partly inspired by photographer Cindy Sherman’s famous 1981 photograph “Untitled #93,” which, though technically not titled, she calls “The Black Sheets.” Sherman is purposefully ambiguous, leaving the viewer to make their own assumptions about the image—often vastly different from her own intent when staging the portrait. She says, “I think of that character as having just woken up from a night out on the town and she’s just gone to bed like five minutes before and the sun is waking her up and she’s got the worst hangover and she’s about to pull the sheets over her head or something and go to sleep. And other people look at that [photograph] and think she’s a rape victim.” Why do we see what we see? How does our perspective get it wrong? What does it get it right? Is there a space in between these extremes and, if so, how do we hold that space for ourselves and others?

Show Your Work

Art you should know: Robert Frank’s The Americans

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Capturing America’s inconsistencies and contrasts is practically a pastime now for the average artist. We owe a tip of our baseball hats, emblazoned in racist symbology, to those who developed this aesthetic with such originality that their historical influence is practically cliché. I’m thinking the hard-nosed, coked in empathy narratives of Dorothea Lange; the searingly lonely dream-scaping of Edward Hopper (#1 all-time fave). An artist who deserves to be part of this lineup of artists that the gen pop rattles off when considering Great American Artists Who America-ed America is Robert Frank.

Actually, Frank, a photographer, was Swiss-American, and his new-citizen status gave his work a non-sentimentality surrounding American Life. In the 1950s, this translated to an incredibly unique source of truth for what was happening behind the technicolor and catchy slogans of the post-war pop culture.

I am always looking outside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is constantly changing.

Robert Frank

In 1955, Frank got a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. For the assignment, he spent two years traveling the States with his family and taking photographs of everyday life in places like Detroit, Savannah, Miami Beach, LA, Salt Lake City, Butte (Montana), and (of course) Chicago. In those two years he took more than 25,000 photographs and 83 of them became The Americans, a book of images that “changed the nature of photography. What it could say and how it could say it,” wrote art critic Sean O’Hagan nearly six decades after the book’s publication in 1958. The Americans, he says, “remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century.”

Selections from The Americans was recently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Out of the Retina, Into the Brain: The Art Library of Aaron and Barbara Levine.”

Frank’s imagery was subtle but impactful because grandiosity took a backseat to themes of boredom, toil, and blind patriotism. These are everyday Americans who live under the spell of American lore with a sort of dumbfounded despair. (It feels achingly familiar to our social media age—ie. if I’m supposed to be happy here, why am I so sad/mad?)

Frank’s compositions depicting race in America are particularly powerful. Prescient, even, considering hindsight of social photography and the incredible civil and human rights upheavals on the country’s horizon. This theme is, again, where Frank’s individual experiences and characteristics gave him a honed eye for making these observations about our country’s racial cruelty. As a Jewish man, he experienced profiling while photographing in the South. He was put in jail in Arkansas. Told he had an hour to leave town by a deep-South sheriff. This racism indelibly shaped his view of the country, which indelibly shaped everyone else’s view of it too. Moreover, he gave brutalized communities a chance to show their strengths, despite all they faced in 1950s America.

There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was.

Robert Frank (in 2008)

Suggested reading:

“Connect” opening reception is Saturday!

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

Slate Arts + Performance proudly presents CONNECT, a new-media group exhibition featuring works by the following artists:

Joshua Eby
Robert Fowler
Erica Gressman
Joo Young Lee
X. A. Li
Sarah Leuchtner
Jackie Mantey
Sara Alexandra Pelaez
Christopher Riggs
Christopher Marc Ford
Andrew C. S.
Rui Sha

The opening reception is from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at Slate Arts in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood.

Dropping off my artwork!

Gallery statement

“Connecting requires at least two points in which a link or attachment of sorts can activate. As human beings, our livelihoods depend on how well we build and maintain connections. Relationships. Neural networks. Sound waves. Internet speed. Fibers of one’s clothing.”

Artist’s statement

I have three individual pieces in the show, a triptych entitled “Good Things And Death Come In Threes.” (Three embroidery and thread on historical imagery in 14″ x 17″ wooden and pink frames, one inch between each frame: “Red Line,” “Yellow Line,” and “Blue Line.”)

The images in “Good Things And Death Come In Threes” were sourced from the public domain of the New York Public Library’s digital archives and selected for their visual representation of tools Americans have used to send a message, themselves, or others from one place to another; interestingly, these are also tools we use to disconnect ourselves from wherever we’ve come.

The title is a nod to the folkloric connections we often make as we search for answers and try to connect our existence to something bigger than our individual selves. The finished embroidered work reminds the viewer of photography’s ability to connect us to people not of our time or place, as well as the working class inheritance of thread as a means to weave historical narrative into making a modern point. That each embroidery has similarities is a representation of how we are all connected, whether we are together or alone.

Art you should know: Genieve Figgis’ haunting paintings

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

The past few months I’ve been grooving to a morning routine that’s 100% helped me get 85% focused for each day. It involves some variation of tea (I’m that person now… tea drinkers are to blogging about being a tea drinker as marathon runners are to 26.2 bumper stickers), journaling, reading, and watching a meditation or an affirmation video. I know, affirmations seem so corny, but I swear to 20-something granola Jesus, they have helped me out of many a morning funk.

While I try to watch the meditation or affirmation videos ~mindfully~, I sometimes—almost all the time—end up getting distracted and, instead, mindlessly scroll through Pinterest (I figure my subconscious is picking up on whatever’s audibly streaming at me in the moment, so all is not lost). Pinterest is one of the few (two) social media platforms that don’t make my blood pressure rise (the other being Instagram). I end up pinning artwork the most. It’s such a visual platform and has helped me discover many artists whose work I really enjoy or feel inspired by. Or, the best, feel rapturously in awe of.

Genieve Figgis on being a mother, the challenges of being an artist, what she loves about painting, the darkness in her experimental work, and who she finds inspirational.

Genieve Figgis was one such morning scroll find.  

The Ireland-born and -based painter creates murky, dramatic scenes that are at once recognizable but elusive. They continuously capture my attention and then do something with said attention that’s increasingly impossible in an oversaturated visual culture—hold it.

“Not doing what was told would be my future, avoiding that, was just so fantastic”

Painter Genieve Figgis

Her work makes me feel like I’ve been in it before. Not just seen it; known it intimately. Like when you see, for a split second, a face on the street and you do a double-take because it kind of looks like a kid you used to know in high school. And that kid definitely died three years ago.

“The Swing After Fragonard,” by Genieve Figgis (A la, “The Happy Accidents of The Swing,” the 1767 oil painting Jean-Honore Fragonard.

The familiarity I feel toward her acrylic paintings is partly easy to explain: We’ve all seen some crisper version of it, as she often uses 18th century paintings of aristocratic life as her starting point. But her work also feels familiar because of its ability to evoke the kind of primal dread that is exciting and addictive. The kind of dread you can’t turn away from. The kind of dread where you don’t understand you’ve sauntered into something deadly until the teeth around you have already closed… you were just stunned by the beauty and sipping your Earl grey and then BOOM, you’re falling down the throat of the beast.

The dramatic danger, the warning, her paintings seem to emanate is made fully clear after you spend more than a scroll-click-Pin with it. In fact, the more I look at her paintings, the more they seem to melt before my very eyes. I find that darkly exciting too.

“If you’re really enjoying something you don’t need to see the end of the road, the finishing line. That’s not always going to be the ultimate triumph, you know? If you’re not enjoying the journey, the end result will be no good.”

Painter Genieve Figgis

Suggested reading:

Roundup: Five Saul Leiter photos to make you feel snow romantic

Jackie Mantey 2 Comments

Saul Leiter was a pioneer of American color photography. His painterly images of 1950s and 1960s city life are so wistful. His work makes me see bad weather, stinky streets, and the humans who inhabit it all — differently. Better. More lovingly.

“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.” 

Saul Leiter

^ Same.

Here are five of his most lovely snow-filled images that might make this seemingly never-ending winter snow a lot more bearable. At least more beautiful.

Postmen, 1952

Red Umbrella, 1957
Snow
Newspaper Kiosk, 1955
Parking, 1950

Read more about the artist’s life here. Also this: “Saul Leiter, the quiet genius who made the mundane beautiful.”

On writing: Radical acceptance’s role in creativity

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

On my recent interview with The Unruffled Podcast, I listed the “DBT Skills Training Manual” as one of my essential/most helpful tools for getting and staying sober while increasing creativity.

The skills in DBT, which stands for dialectical behavior therapy, are deceptively simple and designed to help you learn to cope with overwhelming emotions. Its creator, Marsha Lineham, compiled these skillsets to help patients with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I have found them really useful even though I don’t have BPD. In fact, I think they’d be helpful for any human, really. Especially humans who are deeply sensitive. And of that I can definitely be accused. 😉

The skills have helped me learn how to be more mindful of what I’m feeling and, from there, address that feeling immediately. Addressing it sometimes just means acknowledging it and letting it go. Sometimes it means reframing the emotion toward gratitude. And sometimes—most of the time—it means just admitting that it’s there.

I know. Eureka! But seriously, how many times have you experienced an uncomfortable emotion and just pushed it down and then wondered why you feel gross two hours later? What she prescribes after seeing that emotion rolling in is some good old radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is that totally unsexy thing in which all sexy solutions can be found.

In this video Lineham explains how, “Suppressing what you want is not the way to go. You have to radically accept that you want something you don’t have—and it’s not a catastrophe.” And once you get used to the fact that not having what you want is not a catastrophe, you’ll be better equipped to start a plan to get that thing you wanted OR get closer to being a peace with not having it.

“Radical acceptance would transform everyone if it’s a regular practice,” Lineham says.

In terms of creativity, I think that’s a really powerful tool. I’ve been struggling lately with taking the time I need to make new work. I feel like I’m not getting enough done quickly enough, and as deadlines I’ve set for myself just cruise on by undone, I feel worse and worse.

I know I’m not alone in this. Writer Anne Helen Petersen’s recent Buzzfeed article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” went viral for a reason. And it’s not just Millennials. We are all so used to moving so fast—for financial survival, social validation, “self-preservation,” and a million other reasons—we’ve never learned how to get used to taking things slow. Taking things slowly makes us uncomfortable. It seems misaligned with how we’ve always lived our lives, achievement- and extra-curricular and pleasure-chasing culture that we are.

Plus, for me at least, going slowly also seems to be a direct affront to how much we recognize we have. As we are exposed more than ever to the injustices of this world, we feel gratitude for the unfairness we do NOT face. With that knowledge constantly top of mind, it feels like a waste of all of this privilege if we don’t do a million and one things with it; to do “nothing” with the advantages we have feels disrespectful to those who don’t have them. On top of all that, when we feel so ultimately powerless to change the world, “getting shit done” seems the least we can do.

But what, truly, are we achieving by burning ourselves at both ends? What do we avoid accepting? What real or powerful change do we avoid making when we go for the quick hits instead?

Personally, I want to take more time this year taking my time. I want to practice acceptance. And accept that I need to practice. Practice is progress and progress is better than perfection.

Perfection might get shit done faster on the surface. But usually everything is burning underneath.

TLDR:

Art you should know: Sally Nixon’s 365 Insta challenge

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

Little Rock-based illustrator Sally Nixon illustrates colorful scenes from everyday life. Their bright colors pull you in, their keen observations of human movement make you stay a while, and their dynamic characters keep you coming back.

One of my first-favorite Sally Nixon illustrations (I now have too many to call it my favorite-favorite) was an illustration of a girl taking a shower and absentmindedly making shapes out of the strands of hair on her shower wall. I totally do that, too! I imagine a lot of us with long hair do. But it was the first time I had seen that private moment shown to me by someone else.

Observation and relentlessly relatable documentation is Sally’s art super power.

She draws all kinds of people but mostly women. Women eating. Peeing. Hanging out. Thinking. Not smiling, but not not-smiling. Women just being ordinarily ordinary people—which is exactly what makes her work so extraordinarily compelling.

Well, that and all the bright details in her backgrounds. I wish there was an Airbnb with rentals composed entirely of Sally Nixon apartments and rooms.

"Bri" by Sally Nixon
I’m also endlessly attracted to Bri, fab pizza-getting undercover spy queen. She’s got secrets and pepperoni up her sleeve! My kind of girl.

Check out Sally’s Etsy, her book “Houseplants and Hot Sauce: A Seek-and-Find Book for Grown-Ups,” or her Instagram, where it appears she’s doing the 365 day creative challenge and posting a new work every day. I can’t wait to see what mundane moment she makes feel like magic next.

On writing: How to survive the Taste Gap

Jackie Mantey Leave a comment

A goodie from the one and only Ira Glass.

Just. Keep. Working.

Even when your output sucks. Because it’s going to suck. For a long time.

I love this video by artist David Shiyang Liu.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish somebody had told this to me: all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s, like, this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good. But it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit. The thing I just would like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we want it to have. And, the thing I’ll say to you, is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you gotta know that’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

OK?”

Ira Glass