artists – the limineen | earthling, poet & crone

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.

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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*

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the limineen | earthling, poet & crone

Tag: artists

“[S]he floats like a butterfly …”

The Song of The Lark