Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Celebrate fall with this autumnal favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Photographer Ja Soo Kim is really making us reconsider our centerpieces for this upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. Fall Forage, pictured above, and other images of Kim's colorful collages were recently spotlighted by the World Photography Organization. Kim has lived and traveled all over the world, collecting bits of leaves, flowers, and grasses on her walks through locations like Honolulu, Paris, and her current home city, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Offering a somewhat decontextualized view through the use of a simple black background, Kim arranges her found objects to highlight the incredible variance of colors, shapes, and patterns in nature. Fall Forage shows off the rich oranges and reds that come with the loss of chlorophyll in the winter, and in the top left corner, the blues and greens of spruce and pine needles, which keep their color in the colder months. Kim has said the process of creating her photos is like a soothing "meditation" for her: a way to fondly remember her father's amateur studio setup from when she was younger. We're starting to see the leaves piling up in our yards in a new light!

 

Below: more of Ja Soon Kim's collages: the tropical Tahiti Jungle, and Dried Citrus.
 

Image credit & copyright: Ja Soon Kim
 

It's Flashback Friday! Celebrate fall with this autumnal favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: Apple Butter Making

Artist: Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961)
Created: 1947
Medium: oil on pressed wood
Dimensions: 23.1 x 16.5 in (58.75 x 41.9 cm)
Current location: private collection
 

Some apples ripen on time, while others take longer to reach their full potential! Landscape painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses, born September 1860, was one such late bloomer. A farm wife and embroidery master for most of her life, she took up painting at the age of 76 after she developed arthritis and could no longer embroider. Grandma Moses, as she came to be known, depicted rural scenes from her experience farming in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and upstate New York. This painting shows each step of making apple butter, from women peeling apples to a man cooking the fruit in a hot kettle. We're getting excited for autumn apple-picking just looking at it. Moses viewed rural life through a nostalgic lens, consciously omitting tractors, telephone poles, and other signs of industrialization from her work. Her paintings struck a chord; by the early 1950s, they were shown in over 160 exhibitions at venues like New York's Museum of Modern Art and galleries in Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Sounds like this grandma's homegrown art went international.
 

Image credit: Grandma Moses
 

Jack-o-lantern be nimble! If this image seems like it could be straight out of a late-night horror film, then photographers Francisco Diaz and Deb Young have achieved their goal. The two manipulated dozens of pictures to arrive at the above scene of children amid a background of dense fog and ominous birds. To create this photomontage, called Jumping Over Pumpkins (from The Playground Series), Diaz and Young collaborated across 8,000 miles and two countries: the U.S. and New Zealand, respectively. Gray surroundings or not, the kids are deeply engaged in their play: they leap and swing with carefree abandon, in what Diaz and Young describe as the schoolyard version of "fast and hard [lessons] in how social structure works." Because it's all fun and games taking turns hopping and skipping over pumpkins—until one of them reaches out and grabs you!

 

Below: more images from The Playground Series: Follow the Leader, Hoops, and The Light.
 

Image credit & copyright: Francisco Diaz and Deb Young
 

Title: Notice - Forest (Autumn)
Artist: Yuken Teruya (b. 1973)
Created: 2002
Medium: McDonald's Neverland paper bag and colored pencil
Dimensions: 3.5 x 5.75 x 11 in (8.9 × 14.6 × 27.9 cm)
Current location: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
 

Fall is a great time for harvesting apples—or for growing trees inside bags, if you're Yuken Teruya. The above Notice - Forest (Autumn) was created using a McDonald's paper bag that doubled as a Peter Pan coloring book. Teruya begins the sculpting process with a photo of the tree species he wants to recreate. From there, he meticulously cuts bits of the paper bag directly above the space where the final tree will stand, allowing dappled light into the squared space. From there, Teruya works his magic with tweezers and a bit of glue, creating the delicately-molded tree—which appears to stand alone but is actually part of the diorama-like structure. For the Japanese-American artist, repurposing one-time use bags is a way to merge the everyday with the extraordinary and to remind audiences about the environmental impact of consumerism on the natural world around them. Imagine how much better the world could be if Happy Meals grew trees inside them, instead of being made from countless trees.
 

Below: another view of Autumn, Teruya at work, and one of his golden trees from the Notice - Forest series.
 

Image credit & copyright: Yuken Teruya
 

Ooh, that might bruise. Born this week in 1878, photographer Percy Byron captured these unusual images showing women learning self defense around the turn of the 20th century. Held in New York, the self-help classes were revolutionary; at a time when physical exertion was still frowned upon, few women had access to ways to protect themselves while traversing the city's crowded streets. These images were taken at classes held by one Doctor William Latson, but he wasn't the only one encouraging women to take up arms... ahem, umbrellas. Coinciding with other feminist movements like suffrage, the women's self-defense movement spread to other cities, some classes even featuring boxing and jiu jitsu lessons. In the early 1900s, women still wore their heavy dresses while learning fight moves, but later images show them in looser, more comfortable clothing. Either way, it looks like these ladies weren't afraid to roll up their sleeves and get dirty!
 

Below: more of Percy Byron's images of a self-defense class; a woman performs jiu jitsu on a man in Berlin in 1924.
 

Image credit & copyright: Percy C. Byron / Museum of the City of New York and German Federal Archive
 

Title: Emancipation Approximation (Scene #18)
Artist: Kara Walker (b. 1969)
Created: 1999-2000
Medium: screenprint
Dimensions: 44 x 34 in (111.8 x 86.4 cm)
Current location: Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington
 

Artist Kara Walker's stark works from the Emancipation Approximation serves as a reminder that the end of slavery in the U.S. hasn't been such a black-and-white change from the past. The name of the series is a play on the executive order issued on September 22, 1862, which granted freedom to slaves in Confederate states, though didn't quite erase racialized tensions or the economies built on free labor in the areas. Walker came to cut-paper silhouettes in graduate school, after studying the Victorian-era work of artists like Auguste Edouart. The above Approximation image of a black woman holding an affluently-dressed aristocrat is part of a series of 27 paintings which engage narratives from the Antebellum South, using the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan. The myth follows themes of disparate power between male slave owners and their female slaves, as well as the anguish of family separation caused by slavery. Walker carefully weaves themes from the myth into her black-and-white silhouettes, whose specific identities have been erased by their social roles. What remains are images that force viewers to reflect on social roles, stereotypes, and other prejudices based on the pre-Civil War South—and the ways in which those concepts influence our contemporary discussions on race in America.

 

Image credit & copyright: Kara Walker
 

Online gossip really takes the long way around these days! Photographer Maggie Meiners has been thinking about what the iconic American painter Norman Rockwell's images would look like if they were created today, giving her the inspiration for a series called Revisiting Rockwell. In the above composite photo entitled It Went Viral, Meiners' pairs stare at their cell phones for the latest buzz, rather than at their companions—in contrast to the Rockwell original Gossip painting, which shows people animatedly playing a game of "telephone" by word of mouth and landline phones. When Meiners discovered that the artist painted from photos of his subjects, she decided to pay homage to pieces like Gossip by shining choice lighting on subjects and photographing them in side profiles. For Meiners, Rockwell's candor and idealism still lend themselves to contemporary discussions about what it means to live as an American in the early 21st century. "I have always had a fascination with the past and end up having a better understanding of the world if I look at the old in the context of the new," Meiners said. Now that's a quote that deserves 1,000 likes, if we've ever heard one!

 

Below: Rockwell's original Gossip painting, and more from Meiners, including Freedom from Want, Skin Deep, and Dream Act.
 

Image credit & copyright: Maggie Meiners, Norman Rockwell Museum
 

Houston, we have a rainbow. Alma Thomas' colorful composition Apollo 12 "Splash Down" portrays the successful return of one of the earliest manned missions that landed on the Moon; the space capsule touched down in the Pacific Ocean near American Samoa in November of 1969. Though Thomas herself never traveled to the Moon, she accomplished many "firsts" herself: Born this week in 1891, she became the first student to graduate with a fine arts degree from Howard University, and she would spend many years working as an art teacher before retiring and devoting herself to her own practice in her 60s. Thomas was influenced by pointillism (using dots to create a larger image). But most of her paintings, like the one above, rely on rectangles, sometimes layered in a patchwork reminiscent of a tiled garden path. Though Thomas was African American, her experiences of race inspired her work indirectly. "Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man's inhumanity to man," she said later in her career. Clearly she was onto something; by her late 80s, Thomas had become the first African-American woman to have a solo show at New York's Whitney Museum. Take that, astronauts!
 

Below: more of Thomas's paintings, including Scarlet Sage, and Cherry Blossom Symphony.
 

Image credit & copyright: Studio Museum Harlem
 

Si, se puede, or Yes, we can is the motto of the United Farm Workers Union; it was also the conviction that animated La Raza, a publication that covered the Latino and Chicano rights movements in Southern California from 1967 through 1977. La Raza was a spirited bilingual newspaper-turned-magazine that sent its reporters and photographers to the fields and streets to cover what was called "El Movimiento": strikes, demonstrations, and other actions in support of the United Farm Workers Movement, labor rights, and anti-discrimination efforts. In La Marcha por la Justica, Belvedere Park, Jan. 21, 1971 above, for example, photographer Luis Garza captured a group of students and young people demanding justice. But La Raza wasn't just about political activism; in candid portraits of families, neighborhoods, and street life, it chronicled the day-to-day experiences of communities that were not being covered by the mainstream media at that time. Garza and other La Raza photographers helped not only make that community visible, they gave it a voice.  

An exhibit of photos from the publication, La Raza, is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles through February 10, 2019.  

Below: young families join La Marcha de la Reconquista along a dusty highway through the farmland of Southern California, 1971; Little Chicanita protesting unfair labor practices at Mejian Chevrolet Car Dealership, East Los Angeles, circa 1972.
 

Image credit & copyright: top: Luis C. Garza; center: Danial Zapata; bottom: La Raza Staff Photographers, courtesy UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
 

Title: Mustache Hat (Schnurrhut)
Artist: Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966)
Created: 1923
Medium: lithograph
Dimensions: 17.75 x 13.75 (45.1 x 34.9 cm)
 

Some artists stare at a blank canvas for days, weeks—even months. Abstract art pioneer Jean Arp, not so much. The German-French Dadaist, born on September 16, 1886, purposefully created art without contemplation. Schnurrhut, or Mustache Hat, is a fitting example of his whimsicality. Part of his series 7 Arpaden, or "7 Arp things," the piece appears to be an amalgamation of a mustache and hat (or to our modern eyes, a Pac-man ghost). Published in the avant-garde journal Merz, the print absolutely baffled Arp's contemporaries. How could such a rudimentary—and frankly, silly—piece of art cause such a ripple in the art world? Arp, who was perhaps more of an intellectual than an artist, was always ahead of the curve. He first published a number of theories concerning the power of subconscious art while running with Zurich's Dada collective, a movement predominantly concerned with being anti-art. He eventually left the Dadaists to join the more like-minded Surrealists, who had already benefited from his theoretical essays on subconscious creation. Arp's art sure is simple, but it poses unique questions—like what exactly are Arp things, and where we can get one?
 

Below: more work by Arp, including: Birds in an Aquarium (1920), Shirt Front and Fork (1922), and Star (1939).
 

Image credit & copyright: Jean Arp / Artists Rights Society (ARS) / VG Bild-Kunst / David Lévy