Category: art

Viva, Frida, born July 6, 1907

On By ©️K.T. 2026In art, art criticism, artists, Frida Kahlo, july, Kahlo, womenLeave a comment

On July 12, 2021, I experienced the Frida Kahlo TIMELESS exhibit at the Cleve Carney Museum at the College of DuPage in Wheaton, Illinois — an exhibition which was originally scheduled for July 2020 and titled “Frida 2020”, but postponed because of the global COVID-19 Pandemic. My original ticket was specifically chosen for the anniversary of her death — July 13th, 2020 [1954] and for the exhibition events CCMA had planned for that day.

I spent more than three hours in the exhibit — entering the gallery anew three times during my visit in order to re-experience and fully drink in her work for the first-time ever — her paintings, her drawings, her fotos, her possessions — from the collection entrusted to Dolores Olmedo; I walked the galleries in reverse once to shift my experience and perspective.

be your own muse

The accompanying exhibit of the historical timeline and personal narrative of Kahlo’s life before and with, without, and reunited with her beloved/beloathed (depending) — husband, artist Diego Rivera, and the archive — including reproductions of her fotos, bed, treasured objects and clothing was comprehensive, wondrous and satisfying.

Continue reading “Viva, Frida, born July 6, 1907” →

“[S]he floats like a butterfly …”

On By ©️K.T. 2026In art, art criticism, artists, Black Artists, Black Women, Crone, Lajuana Lampkins, Mother, Muhammad Ali, Narrative, outsider art, Poem, poet, Reverence, street art, true things, women, WomenfolkLeave a comment
Muhammad Ali diptych
marker, paint, glue and chunky gold glitter
on 12”x12” square
gold metallic cardstock

These two gorgeous, requested works by the most gorgeous and extraordinary artist and person Mz. Lajuana Lampkins of Chicago.

You might find her making her art in the late night scene of her favorite spots in the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods of Chicago — or reach out to her on Instagram at Lajuana.Lampkins1 and peruse her art, her process and her community.

Lajuana Lampkins has had her art exhibited to great praise; she is a prolific and widely collected street artist; and she has edited and published a book of her late son’s essays, poetry and letters: The Collected Works of Prince Akbar AKA Jus Rhymz.

She is also a sister, aunt, friend, poet, community member and activist, writer, rapper, historian, archivist, fashionista, paralegal, social commentarian and modern philosopher — but most proudly, a mother, grandmother and great grandmother

— and to me, she epitomizes the Crone.


Champions aren’t made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.

Muhammad Ali

Mz. Lampkins works may be exhibited again in autumn 2023 in a community art show that she is hoping to create and develop —-and she aspires to publish her next non-fiction book in the nearer future.

She is also the subject of the forthcoming documentary “My Mother is An Artist” which follows Mz. Lampkins’s journey from 2019, eight years post-release from a 30 year incarceration as a wrongfully prosecuted and convicted young woman and mother —to 2023, as a working, locally-renown and yet-still-struggling artist living in these American systems of modern oppression and exploitation.

Continue reading ““[S]he floats like a butterfly …”” →

creation stories : “a nation is a massacre”

On By ©️K.T. 2026In america, art, Creation Story, Fourth of July, Genocide, Independence, Indigenous Land, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, patriotism, Poem, the homestead actLeave a comment

&

“every american flag is a warning sign”

– Demian DinéYazhi’

“This is the way settler-colonial trauma settles into the body of the colonized We unconsciously re-live the genocides and brutalities inflicted against our ancestors

The shame the rape the beatings the enslavement The white bodies with their killing machines and unholy structures of

torture and discipline

The distrust the disease the disgust the deceit the miseducation and

immoral fixations

The flamboyant uniforms

My ancestors will not let me forget this and every american flag is a warning sign

Even the one my grandfather was given as a Code Talker.”

-excerpt, “An Infected Sunrise”

by Demian DinéYazhi’

In addition to a career in visual arts, DinéYazhi' is a spoken word poet, who in the fourth grade, fell in love with writing. Exhibited at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, my ancestors will not let me forget this, references Diné Yazhi''s childhood hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, which is less than twenty miles from Church Rock, New Mexico. United Nuclear Corporation milled uranium in Church Rock, which borders Navajo reservation trust-lands. In July 1979, its disposal pond for tailings breached its dam, causing at least eleven hundred tons of mill waste to spill into Puerco River. Today, Church Rock is the largest recorded radioactive spill in U.S. history and is an EPA Superfund site.

ai | nature | crone collaboration

On By ©️K.T. 2026In AI, art, Arte Agraria, Arte Bucolia, Arte Digitora, Arte Ruralia, photograph, photography, Tree, TreesLeave a comment

the macro-and-microcosmic exterior environment is suffused with art

“tree of knowledge”

local, aged, regal & lone giant oak,
surgically pruned for utility lines
foto 6.27.2023
art application AI generated image
directive input: “woman in profile with afro”
image in process
Continue reading “ai | nature | crone collaboration” →

american Beauty : attention is reverence

On By ©️K.T. 2026In art, Arte Agraria, Arte Bucolia, Arte Ruralia, conceptual artLeave a comment



the macro and micro cosmic exterior environment is imbued with art


— if you just fucking look —


art is everywhere

art is more than cities, than galleries, statues, murals, landscaped botanical gardens, paintings, commissioned installations, fountains, graffiti, sculptures, museums, fashion, prints, architecture and the built environment

attention is reverence

arte ruralia

air

arte agraria

earth

arte voyeura

water

arte bucolia

fire

holy ghost: a statement

On By ©️K.T. 2026In art, exposition, memo, Narrative, poemo, Spiritive, Spirrative, velveteenLeave a comment

“The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”

Frida Kahlo

in the end, we are all just holy ghosts,

ghosts who sometimes want to feel, or be seen, or be felt by others who may also be seeking, whether they know it or not — and whether they become known forever after or become, forever unknown — to us.

if anyone were to speculate — or attempt to draw definitions or executive summaries about me — as one particular, ambitionless, ghostly being,






and, as a mother, poet, crone and Earthling — or about my collection of words, opinions, ideas, poems, photos, ephemera, art, beliefs and altars — now, or when i’m dead and gone,





— in the end, and at the beginning,
this is and was, always a place for me to fundamentally 
better understand





my Self — for my self & by my self.





for me,





to try to understand my relationship to Others, to the World, to the Earth;





and also,





for me,





to try to understand my relationship to my creativity – the conception, process and act of creating





and finally,





to try to understand this strange existence, in and of itself.










no one else has ever been essential to experience, interact with, interpret, interrogate or validate any of it, ever — yet, they are welcomed to do so — if they happen upon me




 Continue reading “holy ghost: a statement” →
			
					

	




			
				


			
				


			

		

			
The Song of The Lark

						

				On  By ©️K.T. 2026In art, art criticism, Beauty, Golden Hour, Magic Hour, mystery, Poem, Sunrise, SunsetLeave a comment			

					


		

			






The Song of the Lark has always been one of my very favorite works of the French naturalists – the gorgeous, day-glo, corally-salmon Sun and the woman’s arrested and reverent attention — her ear-witness to the birdsong — she reminds me of myself on any given day at golden hour — dawn or dusk //





while most criticism — almost all criticism of this work agrees that this painting depicts a woman at dawn — at Sun’s rise: i’m not wholly convinced.





i have experienced Jules Breton’s “The Song of The Lark” twice in two separate exhibits — at its home in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago; and most recently, in 2015, at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art for “Visual Cather: The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination” — where i was able to linger a mere foot away from the painting, studying it, for as long as i wanted — i stayed there for a reverent half hour in its glow.





Visual Cather:
 The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination 





Author Willa Cather spent her formative years in Nebraska and was an alumnus of the University of Nebraska; her third novel, published in 1915, was named for Breton’s painting — The Sheldon was a natural recipient for a loan of this magnetic artwork ///





while viewing the painting at The Sheldon, i conversed and queried with the fellow-Chicago-born docent — the only other person in the gallery: 





will the lark sing their song most sweetly or urgently at sunrise or sunset?





does this work actually depict a neon sunset in the west; or is it, in fact, a day-glo sunrise in the east?





DayGlo color, pigment, paint would not be invented and commercially available until the 1930s — yet, Breton painted his glorious Sun in 1884 — he had already figured out the recipe ///





and, is the woman’s fatigue residual — from yesterday — she, a worker rising so very early, again, — or, might it be fatigue from a just-completed long and hard day’s work under the Sun?





i asked the docent the rhetorical questions i had been silently asking myself.





is it both? it’s both? it’s both.





let the mystery be*




 Continue reading “The Song of The Lark” →