Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Pedal into the weekend with this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Please, no—the bikes, they just keep coming! In 2017, startups all over China pounced on the lucrative bike sharing trend, where pedestrians pay a small amount of money to rent a bicycle for a set amount of time. All the consumer has to do is unlock a GPS-enabled bike with a purchase, ride, and abandon their aluminum mount anywhere they like, be it against a building or in a bush. But there was a major problem: the startups flooded the market with bikes at a pace that far—far—surpassed demand. There are now so many bikes in China that spokes, pedals, and handlebars are clogging the streets. Shown above, a man pedals past a humongous pile of them. By the end of last year, Shanghai alone had 1.5 million bikes (compare that to London's 11,000). Eventually, city legislators had to move in and cap production. Although the treaded tide seems to have passed, there's still a lot of work to be done—countless bikes to be heaped and sent off to graveyards. We're not yanking anyone's chain: look below to see the damage!
 

Below: more shots of China's insane bike surplus, including: a man untangling rope from a heap of bikes; a 10,000-bike pile; and tens of thousands of unridden bikes collecting rust in a field.
 

Image credit & copyright: Reuters / TPG / Getty / Yibo Wang / Shutterstock
 

It's Flashback Friday! Pedal into the weekend with this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: The Cyclist (Велосипедист)
Artist: Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962)
Created: 1913
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 41.3 x 30.7 in (78 x 105 cm)
Current location: State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian
 
A decade before the U.S. established women's suffrage, Natalia Goncharova was being hailed the "suffragist of Russian painting." The nickname had nothing to do with voting and everything to do with the painter's wild success; in 1913 at the age of 32, she became the first avant-garde artist to have a retrospective in a Moscow gallery. That year, Goncharova also painted The Cyclist. Her subject's body has been multiplied and his backdrop spliced, emphasizing his motion. With its repetition, dislocated contours, and references to a bustling urban environment, the painting has all the hallmarks of Cubo-Futurism—just one of styles influenced and developed by Goncharova. The artist didn't have time for neat labels, and her advice to female artists then is still salient today: "Believe in yourself more, in your strengths and rights before mankind and God. There are no limits to the human will and mind."
 

As one of the 19th century's greatest poets, Walt Whitman once wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." It was no secret that Whitman was also a tall and gregarious figure in life, which makes these images of his last years in Camden, New Jersey, all the more poignant. Whitman spent years in and out of newspaper rooms in New York and New Orleans, with a role as a hospital caretaker during the Civil War. He first published his seminal work Leaves of Grass in 1855 and revised at least nine editions. Like many aspects of his life, Whitman's poetry in Leaves of Grass ignored rules about rhyme and meter, subjecting readers to a vibrant and affectionate view of the world (the erotic texts cost Whitman a job in the Boston, Massachusetts, District Attorney's office). After suffering a paralytic stroke in 1873, Whitman once again took to revising Leaves of Grass, noting it would be his final edition. He felt that the work encapsulated all things great and small: "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old."

 

Below: another view of Whitman in his house at Camden, New Jersey.
 

Image credit & copyright: Library of Congress
 

Title: I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
Artist: Charles Demuth (1883 - 1935)
Created: 1928
Medium: oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard (Upson board)
Dimensions: 35.5 x 30 in. (90.2 x 76.2 cm)
Current location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
 

For artist Charles Demuth, friends are there through good times, through bad times, and through artistic times. Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is an homage to the great imagist (heavy focus on sensory experiences) poet William Carlos Williams. The numbers and central color scheme are derived from Williams' poem The Great Figure: "Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded," he wrote. Demuth employs a precisionist style and geometric objects like the gold 5, the red truck, and the city lights to echo the loud and disorienting experiences in Williams' poem. To further cement the ekphrastic friendship, Demuth added his initials in red in the bottom left corner of the painting; WCW for William Carlos Williams is in the bottom middle, with a big "BILL" at the top. As far as gestures of friendship go, this one probably ranks up there with a high five and secret handshake greeting!

 

Image credit & copyright: Metropolitan Museum of Art
 

The new spring has arrived, and Lake Michigan is breaking the ice. Shown above are tens of thousands of jagged ice shards lining the water-body's southwestern coast, piled up by this year's vernal melt. They were created by the recent polar vortex that terrorized the Midwest last winter; when the warmer temperatures of March arrived, Lake Michigan's 22,404 square miles of water remained so frozen that they didn't thaw in the heat. Instead the resilient panes shattered into these elegant, if not threatening, scales. But as beautiful as the formations are, the U.S. Coast Guard remains sobersided. "No ice is safe ice especially this time of year… [it's] certainly deteriorating and breaking up," says U.S. Coast Guard BMC Grant Heffner. While he seems more worried about potential icefalls, we're just glad no daredevils have inadvertently nicked themselves!
 

Below: more shots of Lake Michigan's ice shards.
 

Image credit & copyright: Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette - MLive.com via AP
 

Title: Market Scene
Artist: Ablade Glover (b. 1934)
Created: 2012
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 48 x 59.5 in (122 x 151.5 cm)
 

Foot traffic never looked so pleasing! By painting the radiant scenes of his native Ghana, modernist artist and professor Ablade Glover has drawn international attention to his home country's flourishing art scene. Using the wet-on-wet technique, Glover crafts vivid landscapes like Market Scene with controlled slathers of burnt oranges, bold blues, and brilliant yellows. The final products are incoherent when viewed up close, but when beheld a few steps back, they coalesce in a manner similar to pointillism, only as fluid mosaics. The looseness in which Glover applies brushstrokes and the way he ties them all together testify to his intuitive passion and experience. Glover has attended art schools in Ghana, the U.S., as well as London's prestigious School of Art and Design and, having witnessed Ghana's independence from Great Britain in 1957, played an integral role in redefining a free Ghana's aesthetics in the modern world. For these reasons, art critics call him the "grandfather of modern Ghanaian art." Marveling at Glover's congested paintings, it's plain to see why he stands out from the rest!
 

Below: more of Glover's mirific paintings, including Yellow Forest (2015), Troto Station Scene (2015), and City Carnival II (2014).
 

Image credit & copyright: Ablade Glover / Sotheby's / October Gallery