Curio Cabinet

Birds of a feather flock beautifully together. Using state-of-the-art drone technology, recently-announced winners of the 2021 Drone Photo Awards captured aerial shots of everything from wildlife to weddings. In Pink-Footed Geese Meeting the Winter, an enormous flock of pink-footed geese flies over a snowy landscape while other geese stand below. The shot was taken level with the airborne geese, putting the viewer right in the middle of their flight. Captured by Norwegian photographer Terje Kolaas, the photo, which shows the wild birds on their way to their breeding grounds in Svalbard, won the contest’s overall Photo of the Year award. Soon, these wild birds will be at. Since pink-footed geese fly the same migratory paths year after year, Kolaas was able to wait for them, at a roosting spot in central Norway, with his drone positioned in just the right spot. It was a feat that took dedication, patience, and protective measures to keep his camera equipment safe from the cold. Talk about elevating photography to new heights.
 

[Image description: an aerial photo of a large flock of pink-footed geese flying over a snowy landscape.] Credit & copyright: 2021 Drone Photography Awards/Terje Kolaas/Sergei Poletaev/Matteo Originale
 

Below: the winner of the Urban category, Metaphorical Statement About City and Winter by Sergei Poletaev, and the winner of the Wedding category, Verso l'Infinito Insieme a Te by Matteo Originale.

You won’t feel any turbulence on this plane. Born this day in 1907, Leslie J. Payne was a folk artist from Lillian, VA, who made sculptures from scavenged materials.
The mixed-media piece above, “Sunrise, Sunset - Environmental Piece and Spirit of St Louis Plane,” features a model plane made from scrap metal and wood, with painted wings and a prominent radial engine behind the propeller. Text at the bottom reads, “Atlantic Ocean Lind Bergh Flyin 1927.” Payne became infatuated with airplanes after attending an airshow as a child in 1918, and much of his art focused around aviation. He even built full-sized “imitation planes,” as he called them, and would dress up as a pilot and invite guests to board his creations to admire the view of his property, which he had turned into an imitation airfield. There was even an air tower and hangars where he stored his planes. Payne passed away in 1980, and his creations stood undisturbed until 1987, when efforts began to restore them. Many of them now reside in the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington D.C. While his planes still can’t fly, they still allow viewers’ imaginations to take off.

 
Sunrise, Sunset- Environmental Piece and Spirit of St Louis Plane, Leslie Payne (1907-1981), 1974, Spark plugs, metal, sheet metal, painted wood, 10.4 x 8 in. (26.4 x 20.3 cm.)

 
Below: A detailed photo of the model plane in Sunrise, Sunset-Spirit of St Louis, and one of Payne’s model boats, G.H. McNeal This is Fish Boat Back in Year 1929 Run by Steam.
 

Sequins! Feathers! Opulence! The Met Gala, officially known as the Costume Institute Gala or the Costume Institute Benefit, is famous for all three and more. This year’s Gala took place on Monday, September 13, after being cancelled in 2020 due to the ongoing pandemic. As always, it was a night for celebrities to dress up in mind-boggling outfits, but “fashion’s biggest night” is also an important part of American art history; and it looked a lot different back when it first got started.
 
The Met Gala was the brainchild of American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, born in 1903. Known as the “Empress of Seventh Avenue” Lambert spent decades advocating for New York fashion designers and working to establish New York as an international fashion hub. At the time that Lambert’s career began, in the late 1920s, runway fashion was considered uniquely European. Lambert had an opportunity to change that in the 1940s, when bigwigs in the fashion industry suddenly found themselves unable to travel to France, due to World War II. In 1943, Lambert founded Press Week, which would later become New York Fashion Week. Fashion designers and journalists from around the world came to New York City for the first true showcase of American runway fashion, and the event was wildly successful. Lambert knew that in order to be taken seriously, American fashion needed to become part of the art world, which would mean being showcased in museums. In 1948, Lambert decided to fundraise for the recently established Costume Institute, a gallery showcasing American fashion designs which would later merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She created a charity dinner to benefit the Institute, fittingly called the Costume Institute Gala. Compared to today’s Met Gala, this first event was a humble affair. Decor was upscale but relatively modest, just about anyone could attend, and the cost was just 50 dollars per plate.
 
The event shifted gears in 1972, when Diana Vreeland became consultant to the Costume Institute and took over running the Gala. Rather than inviting only people involved in the fashion industry, Vreeland invited fashionable celebrities too, from Elizabeth Taylor to Elton John. Instead of holding the event in various venues around New York City, Vreeland showcased the space that the Gala was meant to benefit by holding it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To transform the museum into an event space worthy of her celebrity guests, Vreeland hired famed designers to decorate. To ensure that guests' outfits wouldn’t clash with the decor, and to highlight specific fashion collections being unveiled each year at the museum, Vreeland introduced themes to the Met Gala, in 1973. The first theme, The World of Balenciaga, featured bright colors and bold patterns associated with the famed Spanish fashion house. Over the years, the Gala’s themes moved away from highlighting specific brands or fashion houses and became more conceptual. For example, the 1986 theme was simply Dance. As the Gala became a more widely-publicized, celebrity-driven event, the Gala’s themes inspired fashion of its own, as designers created outfits for celebrity guests specifically to match them. Theme remains one of the most important aspects of the Modern Met Gala, though it sometimes causes controversy. The 2019 theme, Camp: Notes on Fashion left many designers disagreeing over what qualified as campy. For example, pop star Rhianna’s outfit, which included a pope-like hat and other Catholic imagery, was seen as campy by some but offensive by others.
 
Traditionally held on the first Monday in May, the Met Gala was pushed back by several months, in 2020, before being cancelled altogether due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its theme would have been About Time: Fashion and Duration to mark the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 100th year. For a while, it looked as if 2021’s Met Gala might suffer the same fate as 2020’s, as it was pushed back from May. However, the event was able to take place in September, albeit with a requirement that all guests be vaccinated against Covid-19. The 2021 theme was In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, to fit the museum’s newest fashion exhibition of the same name. Stars, stripes, and nods to old Hollywood were common sights. Hopefully, future Met Galas can continue sparkling their way into our hearts each May with no further pandemic setbacks.

 
[Image description: Met Gala organizer Diana Vreeland is surrounded by models in old-Hollywood-style gowns at the 1974 Gala. Each celebrity holds the paper face of an old Hollywood starlet in front of their own.] Credit & copyright: Francesco Scavullo

It's Flashback Friday! Soak up some pre-weekend inspiration with these curios about innovators who blazed trails and broke molds.
 

"Hold the camera still!" Director and cinematographer Tom Lowe had no need for those words during the filming of Awaken, his technologically pioneering time-lapse documentary spanning 30 countries. His innovations in gimbal technology, or pivoted supports, enabled Lowe to produce prolonged time-lapses that remain seamlessly steady through turbulence or storms. The shot above is from a meandering helicopter ride over Dubai; in it, fog drifts between skyrises, rolling over shorter buildings. But gimbals weren't all that Lowe tinkered with: Awaken also showcases cutting-edge underwater and aerial cinematography with amazing shots of diverse cultures, beautiful animals, and nature. According to Lowe, "Awaken is a celebration of the spirit of life, an exploration of the Earth, and an ode to the cosmos." Pretty ambitious for a single film!
 

Below: more shots from Awaken.
 

Image credit & copyright: Tom Lowe
 

It's Flashback Friday! Soak up some pre-weekend inspiration with these curios about innovators who blazed trails and broke molds.
 

Title: The Peak Leisure Club, Hong Kong
Artist: Zaha Hadid (1950-2016)
Created: 1982-83
 
The late architect Zaha Hadid is best remembered for her dimension-defying structures, from the Guangzhou Opera House and Jockey Club Innovation Tower. But she employed the same genius even in 2-D work, as her dazzling and complex paintings prove. Hadid's 1983 award-winning design painting for The Peak, a proposed leisure club on the hillside above Hong Kong, is celebrated in its own right, though the project was never built. It captures a slanted view of Victoria Peak overlooking Hong Kong Harbor, with the dense vertical peaks of the city beneath. But there's also abstraction in the image's shard-like shapes, dramatic angles, and geometric color planes—almost like we're seeing the landscape from multiple viewpoints at once. These features reveal the influence Russian Constructivism and Cubo-Futurism had on Hadid's work.
The image is also reminiscent of a computer simulation, though it was painted long before the digital age. All the more proof that Hadid was way ahead of her time.
 
Below: another painting showing more detail for The Peak
 

 
Image credit & copyright: Zaha Hadid