March and Arts

On Friday night, "The Fantastic Egg Show" is opening at Incarnate Word.  Joy Hein and other artists will be exhibiting art works, the theme of which is, of course, eggs!  I'll be there with Joy and others to celebrate the fantastic.  

If you haven't heard Agarita, please check out this site and learn more about this amazing chamber music group: Agarita

All concerts are free and open to the public, but their concerts are very popular and well-attended, so plan to be there early.  You can sign up for their free newsletter and know when and where upcoming concerts will be. The next concert is also Friday night, March 1st. 

Scraps, hard candies, flowers and strips

Near Selma, Alabama, there's a community of African American quilters.  I haven't been there, but plan to go on my next road trip to Georgia. 

Quilts of Gee's Bend

The company, Galison, has produced a beautiful 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring forty of the quilts at Gee's Bend, and I have finally unboxed this one given to me as a gift.  I'm going to take it on!

Jigsaw puzzling can be a form of meditation for me.  First, I look for all straight-edged pieces and make the border.  Then I put the pieces in a bowl according to color.  The beauty of this grid of quilts puzzle is that every quilt is its own mini-puzzle, a museum in a box as it were. 

The more you look at puzzle pieces, the more you see nuances of colors.  Some look like pieces of candy, others flowers.  It's very satisfying to click two or more pieces together, then search for others by color family and shapes.  

I started a puzzle of rainbow tigers last week--also 1000 pieces--but gave up on it.  After I got the tigers in place, the rest was a numbing exercise in putting trees together. 

This one takes me online to research the people and the place where African Americans, in hard times, expressed themselves in the art of scraps.  If it's satisfying to click cardboard shapes into place, I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to turn strips and squares of outgrown clothes into beautiful quilts.  

Fever in the Heartland

I'm reading a disturbing book called Fever In The Heartland--the story of the birth and rise of the KKK. Prize-winning author Timothy Egan takes the reader to Indiana of all places where Klan groups spewed hate toward anyone who wasn't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  

White Supremacy infiltrated churches, schools, politics, and business.  While making a big show of charity toward poor (white) orphans by day,  Klansmen donned their robes and pointy hats and committed atrocities at night.  They hated Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics, Mexicans, and, well, all immigrants from anywhere. 

While many of the leaders were womanizers, alcoholics, woman beaters, and generally sleazy by any standards, they pretended to be all about morality--no drinking, no card playing, no dancing to immoral jazz.  They were often church members of large Protestant churches, pious, angry, hate-filled good ole boys

The seeds of the Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy we see today were planted by the Klan a hundred years ago in Indiana--the largest Klan membership in the country.  To the leaders, truth never mattered; if a lie were told often enough people would believe it.  

Even then, a hundred years ago, the goals of White Supremacists were to fill congress, courts, and law enforcement with KKK members.  Klan judges and police  looked the other way if anyone bothered to report hangings or beatings.  One judge said, after a particular cruel torture of a man who'd done nothing wrong: "He probably deserved it."

Meanwhile, Klan leaders became rich and powerful.

I'm not even to the middle of the book yet, but I'm intrigued by the subtitle:  "The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them." 

"Our Little Rock star rodeo girl"

That's what Jocelyn called Elena after watching the live feed of yesterday's rodeo.

The family camps out on the ground along with other families of riders.  At night, the stands are filled with fans of music and rodeo, but the afternoon events are all for kids.

Freda and I went yesterday and saw the barrel race and I watched the pole event online afterwards.  In poles, Elena placed 2nd out of 50 riders!  Between events, we watched an adorable dog show, the dogs trained to jump through hoops and weave around barrels.

The question before the house

At Middle Georgia College--where I attended for two quarters before my wedding--we had a political science professor who began every lecture with these words: "The question before the house is...."

After his memorable opening lines, he droned on and on for fifty minutes. I remember nothing but his opening lines.

As I work on house and home, the voice of Professor Uruquart often comes to mind:

One question before the house is: to what extent will these changes affect how I live in the house?  Will having a dining table that seats eight transform me into a person who invites people over for dinner?  Will I recapture my lost love of cooking? 

Does what's in a house determine what one does in a house?  

Will these colorful Kantha quilts I ordered from Etsy have the desired effect when I sew them into curtains and tablecloths?

Sir Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." 

Fantasies of who we will be when....(when we settle, when we finish, when we move, when we marry or stop being married)...are like creating a stage set for a play.  But who knows?  Maybe I'll never write the play.  Maybe I'll continue working on the stage set just for my own amusement.  

I used to use the word, artist, sparingly.  A real artist was one who exhibited paintings and sculptures in galleries.  At that time I was influenced by the man I married.  I was young, I didn't know better.  "Sunday painters" and "dilettantes" and "crafters" were disparaged.

When I look around now at so many of my friends and acquaintances, I see artists everywhere.  Some are professional visual artists, photographers, and illustrators of books.  Others are artists of home decor, gardens, cooking, and design.   

I'm a passionate devoted dabbler.  An amateur--a word that literally means one who "loves to do." I love to do.  Sometimes I order three rugs and send two back.  I spend hours choosing the right chairs for the new David Marsh dining table I ordered this week.  Rearranging what I have and finding replacements for the pieces I sell on Facebook Marketplace has taken up my blog writing time. 

While I've made a few collages (and intend to make more) I realize that my most enjoyable and sustained efforts involve playing house.

Flipping through my digital photos, I see my house in all its iterations over the past twenty five years.  When I found the house, it had an orange and avocado kitchen.  The walls looked like they'd been painted by stoned teenagers.  Brown carpet covered all the floors, and the entire house smelled of bottled cherry intended to mask the smell of made by numerous cats owned by the previous renter. 

I loved it even then.  I loved the leafy neighborhood and I didn't mind the concrete block exterior of the ugliest house on the street--mine.  What I loved most were the prospects of change, a project that would engage me for decades.  I needed the palette of a downtrodden house and my house desperately needed some artistry.  

So that's what I've been doing the last two weeks, polishing up the 2024 iteration of the happy little house I live in.