Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday. Walk, run… enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives!
 

Nobody puts baby in a corner. Not even Boston Marathon race director Jock Semple, seen here trying to rip off Kathrine Switzer's race bib during the 1967 race. Thanks to a screening oversight, Switzer had successfully obtained an official bib into the male-only competition after being told she was "too fragile" to complete the 26.2-mile course. Moments after this image was taken, her boyfriend (in dark shorts, far right) pushed Semple to the ground; Switzer then "ran like hell" to become the first female with a bib to finish the world's most famous marathon, 4 hours and 20 minutes after she'd started. (She'd drop that time to 2:51:37 seven years later—about an hour and a half faster than the current average male time.) Even still, it took five more years for women to be officially allowed to run in the event. Nowadays, they make up nearly half of the Boston Marathon's participants. On the 50th anniversary of her landmark performance in 2017, 70-year-old Switzer ran Boston again for the first time in four decades. As an additional commemoration, the Boston Athletic Association announced they would officially be retiring her iconic bib number, #261.

 
Below: Switzer and Semple, who made peace with having women entrants to the event, posing before the 1973 Boston Marathon.
 

 
Image credit & copyright: WBUR/Runner's World
 

It's Flashback Friday. Walk, run… enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives!
 

Title: HyBird
Artist: Aya Feldman
Created: 2016
Medium: high heel shoes, mixed media
Current location: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel
 

Eating like a bird is one thing; but walking like one takes a whole lot of skill and talent—or should we say, talons? Designer Aya Feldman created a series of avian-inspired HyBird shoes for her final project at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Israel. Her flashy shoes are just a few on display in the traveling exhibit A Walk of Art: Visionary Shoes, which collects 60 pairs of footwear created by Bezalel students and alumni. Many of the pieces—which range from jenga-like woodwork, to slingshot-shaped heels, to Cinderella-like glass slippers—are one-of-a-kind works of art. Though Feldman's metallic heels are fierce wearable fashion items, many of the other pieces are not; often, the artists will begin with the concept of the shoe to create works that are visually compelling but structurally unsound—a fact that makes our feet breathe a sigh of relief. The shoes on exhibit are meant to blur the lines between "conceptual, artistic, [and] extreme footwear." And that's nothing to squawk at!

 

Below: other works from Walk of Art: Always Midnight by Boris Shpeizman, Lip Gloss Shoe by Gal Souvia, and Slingshot Shoe by Kobi Levi.
 

Image credit & copyright: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
 

However poignant the above scene may be, it wasn't intended to serve as social commentary. African-American photographer Roy DeCarava snapped Graduation to simply capture a moment of beauty: a Harlem Cinderella, if you will, hoisting her dress as she maneuvers a disadvantaged life in 1949. Unlike the photographer's black contemporaries, who found themselves pigeonholed by white critics as documentarians of ghettos and suffering, DeCarava championed subjective beauty and creative expression as rebuttals to dominant European perceptions of beauty. Through this lens, DeCarava freed himself to approach his art in the way many white photographers do: with aesthetic appreciation free of societal constraints and expectations. The resulting Graduation shows that a black woman raised in poverty can be just as stunning as a woman born and raised with a storied pedigree, ensconced in comforts and luxury.
 

Below: more photos by DeCarava, including Coltrane on soprano (1963).
 

Image credit & copyright: The Estate of Roy DeCarava / David Zwirner
 

Title: I Have Special Reservations
Artist: Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)
Created: 1946
Medium: linoleum cut
Dimensions: 6.31 x 6.15 in (16.1 x 15.8 cm)
Current location: Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York

Nearly a decade before the Montgomery bus boycotts, Elizabeth Catlett was making art that highlighted the need for a Civil Rights Movement. As an art student, Catlett became the first African-American woman to graduate with an MFA from the University of Iowa; as a professional artist, she spent most of her life teaching both in the class and through her body of work. "I have always wanted my art to service my people—to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential," Catlett once said. Her stoic figures in I Have Special Reservations highlight the black working class who would later come to realize their organizing power when nearly 45,000 of them boycotted and desegregated public Alabama buses in 1956. Catlett also took influences from cubism's play on perspectives, as well as influences from geometric African art. The linoleum cut process—which uses a block covered in linseed oil, and powdered cork in the place of a pearwood relief—was a method Catlett came to experiment with when she earned a fellowship to travel to Mexico City and engage in their political art. The form also highlights the hard lines in the black-and-white world from which Catlett's characters strive to break free.

 

Below: another of Catlett's prints from this era entitled Sharecropper.
 

Image credit & copyright: Museum of Modern Art
 

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