Looking Along Broadway Towards Grace Church, 1981

Streetview, Cleveland, 2014

Red Grooms created this piece that now hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, a painting-like sculpture depicting the hustle and bustle of lower Manhattan as he experienced it.  At once crowded and colorful, noisy and diverse, there's a mastery in how he constructs the sense of depth and place.

The Eye In Its Wild State

Photogram, Cleveland, OH, 2014


Recently I viewed the Cleveland Museum of Art's Forbidden Games, their exhibition on modernist and surrealist photography.  They also have an interactive photogram display where you can create your own work and email it to yourself, which I did with the above image.  I find surrealist photography to be an exploration - an attempt - to understand how and why humanity is capable of such colossal inhumanity.  Think war, and how the public's view and understanding of war was forever altered with the advent of photography.  Mathew Brady's chronicling of the American Civil War, and then the horror in the trenches of World War I personalized the death and destruction.  It stripped away whatever 'noble cause' jingoism that someone might try to ascribe it.  Never have the dead spoken so loudly as when photographs of the corpses were published and the common person could see for themselves.  Reading about atrocities is one thing, seeing is believing.

Hipster Doofus, 1837

Portrait of Nathaniel Olds, 1837, by Industrialist Jeptha Homer Wade
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

I would like to state right from the start that admission to the Cleveland Museum of Art is free.  Their collection is varied with some first-rate pieces, and some of spurious worth and origin.  I view this portrait by industrialist and philanthropist Jeptha H. Wade to be in the latter category.   But then Wade donated the land on which the museum, along with the Museum of Natural History, Western Reserve Historical Society, and Cleveland Botanical Gardens, sits.  Perhaps someone felt like they 'owed' him something and hanging one of works would pay that debt.
All artistic talent aside, the best thing about this portrait is the subject, perhaps the earliest expression of the phenomenon of the Hipster.  Here N. Olds is wearing dark glasses to protect his eyes from the harsh light cast by whale oil lamps.  There is no mention made that he had a condition that demanded this, although one could assume that...if not for his hair, to say nothing of his open and upturned collar.  I need say nothing of the collar because the hair will suffice to bolster my argument.  That seemingly haphazardly tussled hair that took 45 minutes to get juuuuuust right.  There is no greater identifier of the Hipster than the hair, not even the clothes, though we have the clothes here as well.
I present you with the first rendering of a hipster doofus.  Thank you, Cleveland!

The Queer Part Of Germany

                                St. George and The Dragon, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014

The plaque that accompanies this sculpture indicates that this piece is from the early 16th century, made of wood and leather, and originated in either southern Germany or Austria.   Oh Lord, I thought after I'd read that last bit.  Like most Pennsylvanians, I have German ancestry, quite a lot, actually.  My paternal grandmother would loudly tell all and sundry that she was 100% German, and proud of it!  Her first husband, my father's father, was zero percent German and that marriage ended in tears when my father was but five years old.  Next my grandmother married a fellow German, but one that she always claimed cryptically was from 'the queer part of Germany'.  I had no idea what that meant and when we'd press her for clarification she'd yell that we (my siblings and I) didn't know nothin', and that the answer was somehow obvious.   We were blind idiots.
I suppose the answer was obvious, once I had the answer.  My grandfather, technically step-grandfather, but I grew up with him, so he was my real grandfather, for reasons relating to my father being something of a no-account swindler, left me in charge of his estate when he died.  While writing grandpa's obituary for the local newspaper, I discovered amongst his documents that his parents had immigrated from....Austria.  So, in my grandmother's thinking, this was the 'queer part of Germany'.  Austria.