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Chapter & Verse / Poems Of Jewish Identity

By Tikkun | February 17, 2011

Two things just brought this new collection to my attention. Our friend the poet Adam David Miller came by with a review of it, and two of the poets, Rose Black and Melanie Meyer, let us know that the first San Francisco reading from it will take place next Tuesday evening, February 22nd, at Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco (details here). “Five Bay Area writers, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier, Susan Terris, and Sim Warkov, all published poets, invited five additional published poets, Dan Bellm, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Jackie Kudler, and Murray Silverstein, to contribute to this collection of poems of Jewish identity.” Chapter & Verse: Some notes and observations
By Adam David Miller
When Rose Black handed me a promo sheet for Chapter&Verse I read “Five Bay Area…poets, invited five additional…poets…to contribute to this collection…,” I wondered what manner of work was this. With the thin-skinned, fragile, ego-driven, fractious nature of many poets I wondered how they even got the book together.

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God, Seed: Poetry and Art About the Natural World

By Guest | February 13, 2011

by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never. As Lorna showed me photos of what now remains of this remarkable creature–stuffed specimens, Victorian hats and brooches fashioned with plumes and beaks–I felt a terrible sadness. But I also marveled at how Lorna had managed through her art to recall the bird in a way that its relics, stored in their musty museum cases, could not.

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Connecting the Dots of History

By Lorenzo Estébanez | February 11, 2011

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In this struggle for justice, Massachusetts-based artist Pamela Chatterton-Purdy sees godliness made manifest. Godliness is reflected in the actions of individuals who protect the weak from the strong, who maintain innocence in an evil world, or who fight for the dignity of being a human being. The arc is bent through the struggle and sacrifice of innumerable individuals, only some of whom will be named in a place of honor in the pages of history. Chatterton-Purdy has devoted the last seven years to a project called “Icons of the Civil Rights Movement …

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Invitation to Join In Some Political Theater on the Subway

By Dave Belden | February 7, 2011

Harriet Fraad forwarded us this beautiful email from someone she knows in New York this week:
I experimented yesterday with a Steve Colbert-like agitprop stunt, the purpose of which was to mock the absurdity of Bloomberg’s and Cuomo’s refusal to tax the rich and their preference for budget cuts that penalize working people and ordinary citizens in the city and the state. I wrote up a text, which I attach, which I then performed three times in subway cars. The results were quite encouraging. People laughed, and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, was impressed by people’s receptiveness, their attention, and the fact that they accepted and carefully read the text of the speech, which I distributed after I was done. The text is a bit long, so my performance usually omitted the middle paragraphs.

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Tests of Courage – Who Did and Who Didn’t

By Miki Kashtan | February 6, 2011

“If I were there [meaning in Germany, during WWII, I would likely be one of those who would go along without asking questions until it was too late.” So began an extraordinary conversation with a woman I recently met when I was in England. I had never imagined hearing anyone say this, so I had nothing but respect for her. “How can you know this about yourself?” I continued.

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From Fleeting to Permanent: The Art of Short-Term Memory

By Tikkun Intern -- Mia Sullivan | January 19, 2011

Why and at what point do certain short-term memories survive as long-term memories? Are the ones that stick with us and fade into the recesses of our minds significantly more important than the ones that dissipate, or does the brain randomly latch onto specific moments for no apparent reason? And if we lose our ability to retain short-term memories do we, as a result, lose ourselves? These are a few of the questions that Marcie Paper’s art investigates. For the past eight years Paper has been working on a series of paintings that illustrate the details of her daily life as she experiences them.

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Raw Form and Beauty: Communing with Allah in the Natural World

By Guest | January 12, 2011

by Akile Kabir

To see more of Davi Barker’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and the artist’s website. The clarity of composition and richness of color in Davi Barker’s work were what struck me first. Then, as I began to reflect on his art, I noticed the serenity of his paintings, which juxtapose Islamic calligraphy and sites with beautiful, surreal panoramas. The paintings featured in Barker’s exhibit on Tikkun Daily are products of his experimentation with a combination of digital and fine art mediums. The scenes of nature or Islamic architecture may appear to be realistic landscapes or still lifes, but they also have a supernatural quality. Take for instance, the onion-shaped domes that dramatically emerge against cloudy skies, or the pristine smoothness of sand dunes, warmly bathed in sunlight.

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Bittersweet

By Guest | January 8, 2011

By Barbara Bash from her blog True Nature today:
Sitting in this quiet studio
(husband and son off on their adventures in the world)
as snow falls steadily outside. Hours spent this morning on the phone and computer,
attending to – caring for – relationships. Now I turn to the strand of bittersweet,
clipped and unwound from the rose brambles,
waiting for me . . .

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What can we learn from the world’s oldest art?

By Guest | December 14, 2010

For Alex Shaland’s accompanying photographs of South African rock paintings by the indigenous San people on our art gallery – click here. Secrets Hidden in the Rocks: The Spirituality of the South African Pre-Historic Paintings
by Irene Shaland

Rocks as canvas: the world’s largest open art gallery
A few hours of scenic driving from bustling Cape Town (and seventeen endless hours of flight from the US) will transport you into an other-worldly realm: the South African Cederberg Mountains, a massive rock wilderness where wind and rain have sculpted giant sandstone boulders, piled one upon the other, into bizarre shapes and towering surreal creations in every shade of rust red, brown, yellow, orange and white. The Cederberg is the canvas for some of the oldest and most spiritual art ever created, and the mountains – home to the highest number of painted images per square kilometer – are one of the richest areas of rock art in South Africa – indeed the world. And, unlike France or Spain, where the well-known Stone Age paintings of the Lascaux and Altamira caves are located, in South Africa deep caverns are rare, so most paintings are in small shelters or rock overhangs. This means that most South African paintings are easily viewed, but they have also been exposed to merciless sun and rain for many centuries.