Ronald Brooks Kitaj

Ronald Brooks Kitaj, “Novella in Terre Verte”, 1992, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 60 Inches

Ronald Brooks Kitaj was an American artist who spent much of his life in England. He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter when he was seventeen. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. After serving in the US Army for two years, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and then the Royal College of Art in London.

Kitaj had a significant impact on British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright color, economic use of line and overlapping planes which resemble collages. His more complex compositions built on his line work using a montage practice, which he called ‘agitational usage’. Kitaj often depicted disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumed a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives.

Calendar: June 9

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of June

Visualizing the Source of the Sea

On June 9, 1909. twenty-two year old Alice Huyler Ramsey leaves home to drive across the United States coast to coast.

Alice Taylor Huyler was the daughter of John Huyler, a lumber dealer, and Ada Mumford Farr. She attended Vassar College from 1903-1905. In 1906 she married congressman John Ramsey of Hackensack, New Jersey and settled in that town. They had two children; John Jr. born in 1907 and Alice born in 1910.

After receiving a new Maxwell runabout as a gift from her husband in 1908, Alice Ramsey became an avid driver and entered the 1908 American Automobile Association’s endurance race, being one of only two women to participate. During that event, Carl Kelsey, who was a publicity man for the Maxwell-Briscoe company, proposed that Alice Ramsey attempt a  transcontinental journey with the company’s backing. It was to be a publicity stunt with the company providing a new 1909 Maxwell touring car for the journey and all parts and assistance as needed. This journey was part of a marketing strategy to encourage women to drive cars.

On June 9th, Alice Ramsey, twenty-two years old and now a mother of one, began the journey from Hell Gate in Manhattan, New York to San Francisco in a green Maxwell 30. She was accompanied by 16-year old Hermine Jahns and two older sisters-in-laws, none of whom could drive. They used maps from the AAA for guidance in their journey. Only 152 miles of the 3,600 mile trip were paved. The women mostly navigated by following telephone poles, using the poles with the most wires as the guide to where they hoped would be a town.

Over the course of the journey, Alice Ramsey cleaned spark plugs, repaired a broken brake pedal, changed eleven flat tires, and slept with the others in the car when stuck in the mud, a common occurrence. The journey took 59 days to drive coast to coast across the United States at that time in history. They arrived in San Francisco amid great crowds on August 7, 1909, about three weeks later than originally planned.

Alice Huyler Ramsey was named the “Woman Motorist of the Century” by the American Automobile Association in 1960. In her later years, she lived in California, where in 1961 she wrote and published her book “Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron”, the tale of her transcontinental adventure. Always an enthusiastic driver, Ramsey drove across country more than thirty times between 1909 and 1975, by which time she was 79 years old. She became, on October 17, 2000, the first woman inducted into the Automobile Hall of Fame.

“Good driving has nothing to do with sex. It’s all above the collar.”- Alice Huyler Ramsey, Ms. Magazine, February 1975

Arnald Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace”

Armand Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace” from the Album “Bab’Aziz”

Armand Amar is a French composer who grew up in Morocco. He plays congas, the tabla and the zarb. His works are focused particularly on Eastern music. He is the author of several ballets and soundtrack films such as “The Trail”, “Days of Glory”, “Earth from Above”, and “Home’. In 1994 he founded the label Long Distance with his partners Alain Weber and Peter Gabriel.

Victor Hugo: ” A Certain Amount of Reverie is Good”

The Sources of Reverie

“A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas… Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it’s pleasure.”

―Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Calendar: June 8

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of June

Decorative Art

June 8, 1933 was the birthdate of American actress and comedian, Joan Rivers.

Joan Rivers was one of America’s first successful female stand-up comics in an aggressive tradition that had been almost exclusively the province of men. She would take the stage in a demure black sheath dress and ladylike pearls, a tiny bouffant blonde with a genteel air of sorority decorum. Then her biting and edgy stream-of-consciousness take on national heroes and sacrosanct cultural idols would begin.

Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1933, to immigrants from Russia. Her father, a doctor, did comic impersonations of patients. Her mother insisted on piano lessons and private schools for Joan and her sister, Barbara, who grew up in Brooklyn and Larchmont. Joan attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, Connecticut College for Women and Barnard College. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated in 1954 with a degree in English.

Joan Rivers struggled for years, taking small parts off Off-Broadway and working in grimy cafes and small clubs. She made her breakthrough as a guest in 1965 on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”. Over the next two decades she became a regular guest host on the show, a Las Vegas headliner and a television star. In 1986, Rivers hit the big time with a $10 million contract as host of the new Fox network’s weeknight entry, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” competing directly with Carson, her old benefactor. After less than a year on the air, she was fired by Fox when her ratings slumped.

For years Joan Rivers marketed her lines of jewelry and fashion on shopping channels. In the mid-1990s, she turned up at the Grammys, Golden Globes and Academy Awards, first for E! Entertainment network and then for the TV Guide Channel, poking a microphone into the faces of the stars on red carpets. In 2010 she became star of the E! show “Fashion Police,” where she and a panel gleefully critiqued celebrities’ wardrobes.

Joan Rivers weathered 50 years in show business, appeared in thousands of TV shows, more than a dozen films and many nightclubs; written twelve books; raised millions for causes including AIDS, Guide Dogs for the Blind and cystic fibrosis; and amassed about $290 million. She won a Daytime Emmy for her talk show “The Joan Rivers Show” and was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the title role of Lenny Bruce’s mother in “Sally Marr …and Her Escorts”. She died in 2014 at Mount Sinai Hospital after going into cardiac arrest; she was 81.

Well of Chand Baori

Photographer Unknown, Well of Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India

The Well of Chand Baori is situated in the village of Abhaneri in the state of Rajasthan, India.. There are 3500 narrow steps extending for a height of thirteen stories. It extends approximately one hundred feet into the ground making it one of the deepest and largest stepwells in India. It was built by King Chanda of the Nikumbh dynasty between 800-900 CE and was dedicate to Hashat Mata, Goddess of Joy and Happiness upon completion.

The well was designed to conserve as much water as possible in the extremely dry area of Rajasthan. At the bottom of the well, the air remains about 6 degrees cooler than the temperature at ground level. it is used as a gathering place for locals during intense heat of the day. The site has been used as a filming location for the movies “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”.

Katsuhiro Otomo

Katsuhiro Otomo, “Akira”, Volume 5, March 2011, Cover Illustration, Published by Kodansha Comics

“In the 21st century, the once glittering Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin, leveled in minutes by the infinite power of the child psychic Akira. From the flooded wasteland of rubble and anarchy rises the Great Tokyo Empire, populated by a ragtag army of zealots and crazies who worship and fear Akria and his mad prime minister, Tetsuo, an angry teen with immense powers of his own– and equally immense, twisted ambitions. The world at large is not taking the threat lying down, and the military strength of the planet is massing to take on the empire, but will technology’s most advanced weaponry be enough to destroy Akira? And are Tetsuo’s rapidly growing paranormal abilities a potentially greater threat?” Stay tuned for more… .

Julian Jordanov

Julian Jordanov, “Poetic Library”, Aquatint Bookplate, 2002, Printed on Fabriano Rosaspina 220 Paper

Julian Jordanov was born in Lovech, Bulgaria. He has continued to live and work there, after receiving his Masters in Fine Art from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. His prints are strongly influence by both surrealism and symbolism, and he is highly sought after for the specialized medium of creating ex libris prints. These smaller prints are almost always accomplished in etching and aquatint, and show a superb level of detail and skill hard to find outside eastern Europe. He also works in lithography for larger, more surrealistic prints.

More of his work can be found through Largo Art Gallery located in Varna, Bulgaria. Their site is https://www.largogallery.com

Calendar: June 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of June

The Toss of a Shirt

The Day of the Tiles occurs on June 7, 1788 in the town of Grenoble, France.

Grenoble was the scene of popular unrest due to financial hardship from the economic crises. The causes of the French Revolution affected all of France, but matters came to a head first in Grenoble. Cardinal Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne attempted to abolish the provincial appellate courts in order to enact a new tax upon the people. Tensions caused by poor harvests and high costs of food increased when the privileged classes insisted on retaining the right to collect feudal royalties from their peasants and landholders.

A meeting was held prior to the 7th of June in 1788 calling together at Grenoble the judges of the old Estates to discuss reforms. The government responded by sending troops to the area to put down the movement. In the morning of June 7th, merchants closed their shops; groups of 300-400 men and women formed, armed with stones, sticks and axes. They rushed the city gates to prevent the judges at the Grenoble meeting from leaving the city. The cathedral was seized and the bells rung, calling neighboring peasants into the city.

The Regiment of the Royal Navy was the first to respond to the growing crowds, and was given the order to quell the rioting without the use of arms. However, as the mob stormed the hotel entrance, the situation escalated. Soldiers sent to quell the disturbances forced the townspeople off the streets. During an attack, Royal Navy soldiers injured a 75 year old man with a bayonet.

At the sight of blood, the people became angry and started to tear up the streets. Townspeople climbed onto the roofs of buildings around the Jesuit College to hurl down a rain of roof tiles on the soldiers in the streets below, hence the “Day of the Tiles”. Many soldiers took refuge in a building to shoot through the windows, while the crowd continued to rush inside and ravage everything.

A noncommissioned officer of the Royal Navy, commanding a patrol of four soldiers, gave the order to open fire into the mob. One civilian was killed and a boy of 12 wounded. To the east of the city, the Royal Navy soldiers were forced to open fire in order to protect the city’s arsenal, fearing that the rioters would seize the weapons and ammunition.

Meanwhile, Colonel Count Chabord began deploying his regiment of Australasia troops to aid and relieve the Royal Navy soldiers. At six o’clock in the evening, a shouting crowd estimated at ten thousand people forced the judges to return to the Palace of the Parliament of Dauphine.  It wasn’t until the 14th of July that order was fully restored.

The Day of the Tiles was one of the first disturbances which preceded the French Revolution. Some historians have used that day to demonstrate the worsening situation in France in the buildup to the Revolution of 1789. Others have credited it with being the beginning of the revolution itself. Six outbreaks of rioting occurred in the city that day, leading to the Assembly of Vizille, which passed resolutions demanding reforms be made by the king.

Do Ho Suh

Fabric Installations by Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh’s immersive architectural installations—unexpectedly crafted with ethereal fabric—are spaces that are at once deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Suh is internationally renowned for his “fabric architecture” sculptures that explore the global nature of contemporary identity as well as memory, migration, and our ideas of home.

The large-scale installations of the artist’s brightly hued “Hub” sculptures—intricately detailed, hand-sewn fabric recreations of homes where Suh has lived from around the world. The Hubs comprise a series of conjoined rooms and passageways that visitors can enter and experience from the inside.

Suh was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 29 in 1991, and he currently lives between New York, London, and Seoul. He crafts his works using traditional Korean sewing techniques combined with 3-D modeling and mapping technologies. Suh sees these works as “suitcase homes,” so lightweight and portable they can be installed almost anywhere.