Even in Kyoto

I remember reading something about the quilts donated to BAMPFA, either because maybe one of my aunts who is a quilter wound up visiting the show, or because of a Bay Area fiber arts friend. Or maybe annikusrex visited? Not sure.

In any case, BAMPFA did not disappoint. The full title of the quilt show drawn from the collection is, "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African-American Quilts in California," and the quilts come from among over 3000 quilts donated to the museum in 2019 by an Oakland-based collector. I don't know about you, but it's hard for me to even imagine what a collection of 3000 quilts looks like!

In any case, it was a wonderful show, often in surprising ways. For instance, on many of the descriptions for each quilt, there was information included about the "keeper of the quilt" in addition to other details about the quilt's creation or design elements. To me that highlighted how these handcrafted items take on a different role in life as compared to many other art objects. (although I could see parallels with other indigenous art traditions).

The fabrics and the construction also tell all sorts of stories, ranging from all sorts of hand-stitched quilts made from salvaged fabric scraps, where not a ton is known about the quilt, to some contemporary quilts created to tell very specific stories important to members of the Bay Area African American community. There was also a lot of discussion about specific design motifs, and cases where those design motifs were reimagined.

And there were cases where someone made a quilt top, but either the quilt top remained unfinished, or it was finished decades later by someone else. (so I feel better now about how long it took me to finish the Grandma quilt!).

I took a lot of photos, most of which are over on Flickr.

But take a moment and just look at this hand-stitching and hand-quilting:




The sign conjectures that this quilt was made by someone working at a tailored suit shop where they would have access to wool fabric scraps:



Some were very simple, made from old scrap, demonstrating how people with few resources except small snatches of time can still put sewing skills to work to make the world a little better and gentler.



In addition to the quilts, a video piece called "Sunflower Siege Engine" was also on display. I watched through the whole thing 2.5 times. It gave me a new appreciation for the role of the occupation of Alcatraz as part of the American Indian Movement.

This post is mostly for cmcmck's benefit, but I think there are many other people who will appreciate it, too, especially as myka just asked me to clarify which mural alley in San Francisco we visited and I've now learned even more new things!

So, murals. What I didn't know is that there's an alley in the Mission District called Balmy Alley that has featured murals since 1972, mostly dealing with topics related to Chicano displacement and marginalization (source: Wikipedia).

That is not the alley that we happened across on Saturday. Instead, we encountered Clarion Alley (Wikipedia; Mural Project Website is here), which was inspired by Balmy Alley. This SF Mural Arts Directory has photos of the Clarion Alley murals, too, although this sign suggests some of the murals we saw are quite new:



We were moving through the alley rather quickly, so I did not attempt to take photos of all of the murals. Instead, here are just a couple of photos to give you a sense of the space. It was incredibly moving.

My sister walking down the alley:








I rather especially want to know more about this one:








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There are a number of murals along the Ohlone Greenway bike path in the East Bay, too. It has been interesting to be back here and think, "Oh yeah, hello again, mural" when seeing many of them.

But some of them are newer.

2019:




These ones are beautifully done, if way less political:


Out here, the thing is, if you do not buy paint and pay artists a fair wage for murals, you will find yourself buying paint for upkeep anyway. The resulting effect is quite different.

I recently learned that one of my favorite artists, Nikki McClure, has a show up at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, except that it's coming down on Friday. So it was time to play hooky from work and go over to Bainbridge Island.

It has probably been about 25 years since the last time I went over to Bainbridge Island, as part of one of the Chilly Hilly rides done with my dad.

I don't think my dad would have approved of the bike route Google came up with for me for getting to the ferry terminal. Yesler is steep. But I did make it there in time to catch the ferry I intended to catch, anyway.



I guess the terminal just got rebuilt recently, and they are still putting on the finishing touches. I was pleased to learn I could boop my Orca card to pay the ferry fee.

If you take a bike on the ferry, you get to board first and then you get a front row seat to watch the docking process. As it all should be.



It was good to spend time with McClure's art in person. There was also a video where she talked about her work and the importance of a connection to place. That point sure brought up a lot of feelings for me. She has worked with paper and an X-acto knife as her medium for a long time, but for her most recent work she also experimented with painting sumi ink onto Japanese washi paper for the image backgrounds, with beautiful results.



I took far too many pictures, so you'll have to click on any of these to go to my photostream on Flickr if you want to see more. There were a couple of other quirky exhibits as well, although much of the museum was in transition between exhibits. An excuse to go back, I suppose.

I wasn't sure about other things I might want to do on Bainbridge Island, but did identify Pegasus Coffee as a potential lunch/coffee destination.

It did not disappoint.


Then I walked along the Charles Schmid Waterfront Trail back towards the ferry terminal.


It took me right by the Bainbridge Island Rowing Club boathouse, where I noticed that they had an 8+ moored out in the water??


On closer inspection, it looks more like a double-wide training barge, which makes far more sense. This also appears to be where the Washington State Ferries stow their extra ferries. An eclectic mix of boats.

Then back to Seattle.


The skyline has changed so much, but I'd have to go look at old photos to really pinpoint all the changes.

While on the ferry, it is interesting to contemplate what route one might take if traveling in a small, human-powered boat.

I took a different and better bike route home. It was raining lightly, so I got damp and covered in grime because this bike doesn't really have any fenders.

But I'm glad I went.

I went to another art supply store today, and noticed that all of the Arches watercolor blocks have black edges. After talking with a worker, I went home and removed the top page from the block, to confirm...



So yeah, now I feel very silly, but also glad I checked before buying even more watercolor paper!

I was supposed to go on a long bike ride with friends this morning, but at 2 am I woke up to the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning. Monsoon! There was a large, brightly colored patch hovering over the entirety of Phoenix when I checked the radar at 4 am, the hour when I was supposed to head out. So we canceled and I tried to sleep for another hour or two.

When I got up, it was a blissful 80 degrees outside, and still overcast and raining lightly. A nice morning to meander around the yard and take Art Photos.

( clicky for many photos )

I can't remember how I found this social media account, but I am deeply struck by the emotional responses of the people in this post, when something they own and wear has been repaired and returned to them:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4SxP7gOura/?img_index=5

This artist's work looks pretty amazing: https://www.amymeissner.com/

Right this moment I should be prepping for tomorrow's lab, but I'm kind of tired so I'm going to sit here for another minute first. I'm kind of in the doldrums right now, with teaching. Lots to do and not too many deeply thoughtful blog posts queued up. Instead, how about some frivolity?

On Friday or Saturday, a small package for something I'd ordered showed up in the mail: stamp pads with temporary tattoo ink!

Naturally, I had to test them out on myself, so on Sunday morning, I did. Here's how they looked several hours and a bike ride later:



I have to say, I greatly prefer these aesthetics over the other type of temporary tattoo, even if these are more temporary.

George says hello:


He is such an adorable little purrball. Volume up for maximal enjoyment.

...The freezing rain mostly stayed on the outside of everything. In contrast, in the evening, the liquid rain got EVERYWHERE. I had cleaned most of the grime from Frodo yesterday morning, only to have a fresh, gritty layer deposit itself on the ride home from the pottery studio. All over my bike, all over my panniers, all over my rain pants.

Speaking of the pottery studio, it was our last class of the session, a bittersweet moment. I got about half of my glazing tasks done, so I plan to head back Sunday afternoon to finish the other half. It sounds like all of the classes are full now until the summer, which is just as well, as I should probably not immediately sign up for more pottery right now. I've got my hands full with teaching, and I do have other creative projects at home that I should work on.

In the big scheme of things, this class was helpful, for the sake of learning more about my pottery options, both in terms of where I can go, and how I might incorporate it into my life and schedule.

I learned that one of the other students in the class had a 20-year hiatus between his last pottery experiences and our Beginning Wheel class. He said that when he was younger, he took every pottery class that he could. I seem to recall having a similar desire, when I was younger. Are there just people with certain personalities who are more drawn to the medium?

Well, that art supply place was a nice little shop, but the expedition to get there unavoidably took me through some of my least favorite places to ride a bike. Although it had a reasonable range of supplies, it will take some extenuating circumstances for me to ever want to go back out there again.

Now if they were located somewhere in Albany's core, for instance, on Lark Street, that would be a different story. I would patronize them much more readily. But no, they're tucked in among some of the worst of the suburban malls, strip malls, and roads on the western edge of Albany. It's an area that most people wind up frequenting to conduct their various Middle America errands by car, which means it's full of infrastructure that's incredibly hostile to people on foot or on a bicycle.

I don't have a great mental inventory of the kinds of things the Albany Art Room carries, but I need to remember that they DO have some art supplies, and that they are within (quite pleasant!) easy walking distance of the house.

On the other claw, I was able to get a couple of pens, tubes of watercolor paint, and paintbrushes, so it wasn't a complete waste of a trip.

I am getting ready to engage in that seasonal habit of sending physical greeting cards to friends and family, and it feels as though the act may create a tailspin, because the time is coinciding with one of those points where I simultaneously agonize, "I have too much STUFF" and then go on an eBay ordering frenzy for certain specific miscellaneous things, then decide on yet another craft project to attempt.

I want to be thoughtful about what I create. I am currently trying to design a greeting card for the rowing club. Another rower gave me a fantastic photo to work off of, so I started out trying to turn it into a drawing as a starting point for puzzling out the medium I'd like to use. Then I wanted to start adding color to it, so I dug around and pulled out my colored pencils. And wasn't that a total trip down memory lane.



I haven't really used these colored pencils in probably 20 years. I should probably just get rid of them, but I can't convince myself to part with them just yet. Most of them are Prismacolors, but there are a couple of Staedtlers in the mix as well. The colored pencils symbolize some sort of adolescent artistic aspiration, never fully realized. I took drawing classes in high school and college, but we never used colored pencils in those classes, just graphite, charcoal, and conte crayons, so I can't say I've ever really learned how to use colored pencils. It might sound strange to feel like I need to learn how to use colored pencils, but there you have it. I am pretty sure that Berol is fully aware of how compelling the huge, bright rainbow sets of pencils are for many young people. They are exciting to buy. Less exciting is when the soft lead within some of the pencils crumbles so much that it's next to impossible to keep them anywhere near pointed. Or when the colors just don't behave on paper the way one might wish they would.

Ultimately I don't think colored pencils will be my final medium of choice for this project.

In the time since I worked with those colored pencils, I took oil painting classes, where I learned so much more about colors and the mixing thereof, about texture, about composition. I've returned to both oil painting and watercolors more often than I've been back to see these pencils. In the big picture I still prefer ceramics over these other media, but the space requirements and costs for ceramics mean I'm still in a holding pattern on that front for right now.

I suppose if I get desperate I can just resort to googly eyes again, for everyone, for everything.

I also think I generally prefer artistic expression tied to everyday objects intended to be interacted with, as opposed to items intended to be displayed or hung up on a wall somewhere.

This is a little hard to reconcile with the act of creating holiday greetings.

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Thinking about holiday greetings also gets me thinking about the year in review, as many family members and friends take this as an opportunity to share what they've been up to over the past year. That is making me think about the subject line for this post. It is less compelling to read about grading papers.

Instead, my thoughts turn to some of the big adventures of the year: that snowy, cold Bays and Bridges 200k; the Portland Daytrip 400k; traveling to San Diego for the social insect meeting, then returning to do that ride to Niagara Falls with S, and beyond. And also our first kayak camping trip, finally. That solo bike ride up Mount Graylock. The sweltering summer days on the river, but also the daily ins and outs, watching the foliage change, the tides come up and go down.

I'm reminded of hiking to the top of Fan Mountain with my dad, the year we finally reached the summit. He taught me that there are often summit logs at the tops of mountains such as Fan. I believe the summit log at that time was tucked inside a plastic peanut butter jar for safekeeping. He observed how arriving at the summit of a mountain seems to cause a lot of people to get really philosophical, as evidenced by the things they wrote in their log entries. He wasn't inclined to attempt to write anything profound. I don't remember if we even recorded our presence and arrival in the log.

It was also a different log from the previous time he'd summited Fan, 40 years prior. There's no telling what happened to that prior log. Most likely the log we encountered is gone by now, too.

Maybe I should just buy something chintzy from Hallmark and call it a day.