Curio Cabinet

Life on the prairie in the late 19th century was not easy. There was no Amazon or UPS to deliver life's necessities. What provisions could not be bartered or grown had to be ordered in advance, in bulk. A season's worth of flour, sugar, seed, and animal feed would arrive via wagon in giant cotton cloth sacks. The leftover sacks soon served another purpose: cloth for making clothes. Women would turn the plain sacks into garments like dresses, aprons, and underwear. Eventually, the companies noticed. In 1925, the Gingham Girl flour company began making their sacks out of dress-quality fabric with floral patterns. When the Great Depression came a few years later, other bulk good companies followed suit. By the mid-1930s, companies saw their sacks as a key differentiator and even sponsored sack-made fashion shows and contests. In 1933, the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association published a booklet, Sewing with Cotton Bags, which included tips like how to get the company logos out (soak the sack overnight in lard). The self-taught seamstresses went to other extremes to conceal their fabric sources. They cut, dyed, embroidered, and embellished the sacks until they looked like the store bought clothing of the times. It wasn't until well after World War II that cotton sack clothing took its place in the vintage aisle. In 1946, a Pillsbury Flour Company manager fondly remembered the days "when the wind blew across the South and you could see our name on all the girls' underpants." It was the original viral marketing!
 

Image credit & copyright: Life Magazine
 

Paramount Theater and chill? The grandiloquent Oakland, California, art deco theater is just one of dozens of locations recalling Hollywood nostalgia in Stephan Zaubitzer's Cinémas series. In 2003, Zaubitzer began photographing the big and beautiful, the small locales, and the unfinished parking lots that function as movie cinemas around the world. With the advent of internet streaming services at home, Zaubitzer says people are losing these community locations of the last century, and some of the magic of gathering to watch the latest and greatest of Hollywood (or Bollywood) storytelling. "I started the project in West Africa where, with the exception of Burkina Faso, nearly every country has seen its cinemas close down one after the other." Many of Zaubitzer's photos were taken using large format view cameras—adding to the nostalgic look and feel of these old places. We know there's nothing quite like a cozy chair and the convenience of watching movies at home, but maybe getting dressed to go to the theater could become the newest Oscar party craze?

 

Below: more from Zaubitzer's Cinémas series, including Liberty, Mumbai, India, the Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, California, and an outdoor theater in Rio, Alexandria, Egypt.
 

Image credit & copyright: Stephan Zaubitzer
 

An art exhibition opens in New York City and redefines American perceptions of beauty.

Yeah, yeah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The platitude is a given in our day and age; but for Americans living at the beginning of the 20th century, not so much. Art critics of the era insisted upon strict adherence to classical values and aesthetics, until a group of rebellious artists called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors orchestrated the legendary Armory Show. The exhibition, which radically transformed American perceptions of art, took place on today's date in 1913.
 

At the turn of the century, New York City's harbors teemed with steel ships and its towers rose to unprecedented heights. But the modernization of its art scene remained stagnant. Most of the Big Apple's galleries catered to the Old Masters, holding up classical depictions of beauty alongside 19th-century realism. As European galleries clamored over the emerging Fauvist, Cubist, and Futurist styles, those in the U.S. remained out of touch with the times.
 

Then, in 1911, a group of progressive artists met at the Madison Gallery in New York’s Upper East Side. Dubbing themselves the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), they conspired to revolt against conservative art institutions by launching an avant-garde exhibition, with Arthur Bowen Davies acting as its principal organizer. Davies, alongside fellow members, scoured Europe in search of any forward-thinking artists they could find for the exhibition. Meanwhile, other members corralled American artists who had thus far been shunned by conservative institutions, namely the National Academy of Design.
 

Throughout 1912, Davies and AAPS member Walt Kuhn amassed an arsenal of modernist paintings in Europe, which included Henri Matisse's Blue Nude (1907), Picasso's Standing Female Nude (1911), and other masterpieces. Back home, AAPS members wrangled paintings, sculptures, and sketches from a couple hundred American artists, like landscape abstractionists Albert Pinkham Ryder and Leon Dabo. Finally, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, aka the Armory Exhibit, was ready after a year of furious efforts.
 

On Feb. 17, 1913, the exhibit opened to a tempest of reactions. Critics balked at the "primitive" work of European modernists and compared the show to an insane asylum. In regards to the violently abstracted paintings, one connoisseur remarked, "It makes me fear for the world…. Something must be wrong with an age which can put those things in a gallery and call them art." American artists at large, however, were enraptured. Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase, in particular, resonated with those wary of classical styles. The piece, which was described as "an explosion in a shingle factory," depicts not a woman, but the motion of a woman clearing steps—a truly revolutionary concept at the time.
 

Some 87,000 people visited the Armory Exhibit in New York, with many of them walking away realizing, for the first time, the limitless potential of art. For centuries, artists had been expected to perfect form by way of raw technical skill; suddenly, the potential of art as a mode of expression was unleashed on the U.S., making way for the abstract expressionists of the '50s and the pop artists of the '60s. Critic Harriet Monroe of the Sunday Tribune wrote of the freshly exposed modernists: "These radical artists are right. They represent a search for new beauty... [and] a longing for new versions of truth observed."
 

Below: pieces from the 1913 Armory Show, including Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 2012; Paul Gauguin's Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil), 1892; and Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), 1912.
 

Image credit & copyright: Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art / Philadelphia Museum of Art/Copyright succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2013 / National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives in honor of Presidents’ Day Weekend.
 

Former President Barack Obama once described this moment as the "longest 40 minutes of my life." Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza recognized it as a moment that would change the world. The Situation Room, taken by Souza on May 1, 2011, marked the end of a decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden. It instantly became a historically-defining photograph and, in true internet-age form, meme fodder. It isn't hard to see how Souza, who also held the same position under President Reagan, gained the trust of the national security staff; he portrayed the off-the-cuff reactions of his extraordinary subjects with the same fine eye he took to more formal affairs. Among the two million images Souza snapped during the Obama administration are moments like the former president caught in Spider-Man's web, jogging with First Dog Bo, and playfully tipping the scales during a visit to the University of Texas in Austin. During his tenure, Souza's motto could have easily been "ask not what your country can do for you, but what your camera can do for your country!"
 

Below: more photos from Pete Souza's tenure as Chief Official White House Photographer to President Obama.
 

Image credit & copyright: Pete Souza
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives in honor of Presidents’ Day Weekend.
 

Title: John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Artist: Aaron Shikler (1922–2015)
Created: 1970
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 34 x 50 in (86.4 x 127 cm)
Current location: The White House, Washington, D.C.
 

Why is John F. Kennedy looking down? In honor of this upcoming Presidents' Day, we take a look at one of the most unusual White House presidential portraits. The 35th president's official painting looks nothing like those of other presidents, whose subjects are posed in a stately manner, often square with the viewer. It was Jackie Kennedy who commissioned painter Aaron Shikler for the job in 1970, seven years after John's assassination. She didn't know exactly what she wanted, but she knew what she didn't want: for "him to look the way everybody else makes him look, with the bags under his eyes and that penetrating gaze. I’m tired of that image." Without a live model, Shikler used reference photographs. He was particularly struck by two. The first was an image from a New York Times article where the late president is deep in conversation with his brother Robert, and the second was of his other brother, Ted, mourning during John's funeral with his head bowed. In seeing these moments, Shikler knew he had to capture one of President Kennedy's most noble traits: his thoughtfulness. "I wanted to show him as a president who was a thinker," said Shikler. "A thinking president is a rare thing."
 

For many people, Valentine's Day will be celebrated with flowers, cards, and candies; for those in Ghana, February 14th will be a day to celebrate their main export on Chocolate Day. In the above picture, the bisected cacao fruit shows off the raw cocoa beans which, when fermented and dried, are the source of chocolate for candies, drinks, and other cocoa-related products. Cacao plants were originally brought to Ghana in the 19th century by Dutch missionaries, though it was agriculturalist Tetteh Quarshie in 1879 who was responsible for the widespread cultivation of the plant. Several different regions in Ghana now grow and harvest the plant, with the government establishing a Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) in 1947 as the agency overseeing the industry's development. Chocolate Day was established in 2005 to honor the crop's legacy in the country, with local chocolatiers taking part in competitions and educational events taking place across the nation, including tourist trips to Quarshie's original cacao farm in Eastern Ghana. The U.S. may not have as rich of history with cacao crops, but that isn't stopping us from celebrating Chocolate Day in our own way!  

Image credit & copyright: Business Recorder
 

Title: Love
Artist: Ana Tzarev (b. 1937)
Created: ca. 2013
Medium: fiberglass
Dimensions: 137.75 x 118 x 102.25 in (349.89 x 299.72 x 259.72 cm)
 

Love is in the air and on the sidewalks. Croatian-born sculptor and painter Ana Tzarev builds giant fiberglass poppies as part of her Love & Peace project. Tzarev began the project with small bronze sculptures of poppies, which she later amplified into larger fiberglass works. The 15-foot flowers have gone on display in cities like London, Rome, and Singapore. This particular iteration of Love was on display at New York's Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for six months, just a few blocks away from the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. While some might opt for a… rosier flower to represent love and other positive feelings, Tzarev is recalling the poppy's history as a symbol of remembrance after World War II. From a personal stance, the red poppy was also a crop Tzarev felt "bloomed under the worst of circumstances," as her father's fallow fields overran with them when she was young. Whatever her reasoning, she makes a convincing case for picking up a dozen red poppies instead of roses for this Valentine's Day!

 

Below: a photo of Tzarev with one of her sculptures, and a video of the artist speaking on her Love & Peace series.
 

Image credit & copyright: New York City Parks, Arts Republic