Trying to be in the world

Though I felt safe in Korea running all over the place, I didn't when I returned home. But I've attempted to get out a little more this fall, a lot of that facilitated by people around me being willing to accompany. Here is the show at Praxis where teams of two spent a year making an outfit locally.

I went to see Charity's collaboration and was delighted to see her felted wool balls in another guise (I had seen them pre-pandemic as jewelry and enjoyed that iteration as well).

This was the info on their process. Jessica was kind enough to open up on a closed day because Mattie was visiting from Baltimore via Cincinnati. A friend of another friend, she was so kind to drive hours to meet me on a classically cold, grey, windy day to do grunt work in the studio and then see some art. It's amazing to have that kind of help appear, because then I could set up two big shelving units: one entirely for moulds, sugetas, and bal teul!

Then we swung by the museum. While I was sad that the Chinese rubbings exhibit was already down, seeing this Peng Wei piece made me think about a performance I did in the mid aughts where I was supposed to get 100 Steinway pianos but then about a week or so before the show, the showroom reneged. I got about 88 black music stands instead. The paper here was made from flax.

I don't often go into the Americas gallery but was happy to find this "Female Figurine, 1500–500 BC: Ceramic, pigment, Mesoamerica, Guerrero, Xalitla?, Xochipala style" that felt like a powerful talisman + real lady proportions!

Yuko joined me to see the new Pivot Center and an opening at Future Ink Graphics, a new printshop on the west side. This hallway holds the new show along with info on a dance company that shares the space.

I loved these floors. I know the polished concrete is the industrial look that every single place goes for but this is much warmer.

The Cleveland Museum of Art clearly invested a ton into their giant space here, for their community arts. It's huge and makes me wonder where they stored all these Parade the Circle stuff before they moved.

Every classroom has colorful murals and clearly have not been used because they are all immaculate.

This is just a fraction of past art over the years and I wonder how big their off-site storage was to hold it all before.

I'm sure they look more lively when animated but this is about how I feel during winter.

Meanwhile, this is the space that I have to worry about: the studio! I was outside yesterday in the less cold weather to measure so that I can talk to friends about designing murals, gardens, etc., which then have to go thru the city approval process. Don't even ask about indoor progress as my beater is still unfinished. Even if it puts me in the red, I have to hire someone to help me. I can't do this alone, as much as I'd love to. I want this space to be welcoming and tolerant, but not of things like cruelty, which Herb just wrote incisively about. I was texting a friend last night about how hard it is to be a kind person with manners, and how easy it seems to be to be a person who does not care. Or is it? How can it be easy if it feels so bad to be uncivil, unkind, and cruel? As much as I want to do it by myself, I have to be in conversation with other people to make this new place work.