Studio Update: May and June, 2024

Dear friends and supporters,

After deleting Instagram this past month, I am feeling a little adrift in the void! Ultimately, I think it is good for me to have some distance from the platform, but I miss the connections I had situated there. In light of that, I want to say thank you for checking out my newsletter, which is now a digital tether of sorts. It means a lot.

May and June marked the closure of another rewarding academic year at MSU and the start of my gardening season. This year, in addition to the usual backyard veggie garden with tomatoes, okra, cucumber, watermelon, beans, etc, we have ventured into some flowers and landscaping projects. It has been so restorative to attune my rhythms and routines to the garden. Thank you Ricky and Kat for contributing to and supporting my obsession :)

At the end of May, the sculpture crew and I headed up to Memphis for the annual FIRE conference at the Metal Museum. It was a joy, as always! While there, I had the privilege of taking a finishing and chasing workshop with a truly amazing metal artist, Sherri Jaudés.

Finally, Ricky and I just got back from a trip to Little Rock for the opening reception of the Delta Triennial at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art - more on that show below!

NEWS & EVENTS //

Delta Triennial at Arkansas Museum of Fine Art

My work, Once and Future Forest, is now on view at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art as part of the Delta Triennial exhibition. We had a great time at the opening reception last Thursday. The show includes a diverse range of very strong works —ambitious in conceptual scope, technique, and scale. Thank you again to the jurors Amy Kligman, Alexis McGrigg, and Takako Tanabe for selecting my work. The show is open through August 25, 2024.

“For more than 60 years, the Delta exhibition has elevated and promoted awareness of artists born in or working in Arkansas and its surrounding states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

Founded by AMFA in 1958 as a juried exhibition, the Delta is named after the fertile floodplains surrounding the Mississippi River and seeks to amplify artistic voices in the Mid-South as they reflect complex histories and shifts in the cultural landscape. Since establishing the Delta exhibition, AMFA has consistently collected art produced by artists from the Mid-South and displayed it in context with our nationally and internationally recognized collection. In so doing, AMFA elevates awareness of the artistic diversity of the region and illustrates that American art is not monolithic but comprised of many voices.”

RECENT READING //

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

I approached this book with reluctance but felt it would be a good starting point for my research on the Anderson response piece. I expected it to be dated and boring, and while the former is true, I was pleasantly surprised to find it totally engrossing (once I got past the odd grammar and spelling of 18th-century English.) I can see why it's often referred to as a point of origin for realistic fiction. The writing is observational, descriptive, and direct. Despite unfortunate notes of cruelty, racism, and colonial bias, there are spiritual and psychological dimensions that humanize the story. It seemed to me that Defoe was aware of these faults and wrote around them at times and through them at other times. However, the novel's major theme of the will to live — to utilize the human quality of industriousness to make a life for oneself — gives it a universal resonance. Perhaps this aspiration is the connection Walter Anderson felt when making Robinson Crusoe on Horn Island? I'm curious to explore how and why he related to this character. So far, I've noticed a word that frequents the logs of both Crusoe and Anderson: "providence."

Get a copy here.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

Climate fiction teetering on the edge of horror, this one made my stomach turn a bit. Through love and sacrifice, a family finds themselves living in the so-called “wilderness state” as part of an experiment, sometime in our speculative future. Though only vaguely, it is implied that the world is overpopulated, impoverished, and polluted, save for this last stretch of protected wilderness. The plot begins simply enough: there is struggle and suffering as a group of people learn to live with nature. Yet, deception and mystery creep in as their way of life becomes untenable. Cook asks us, rather point blank, how we will continue to hold together the most sacred (most human) aspects of ourselves in the face of a world that is coming undone. 

Get a copy here.

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I stumbled across this short story collection by Le Guin. I haven’t seen (or read) this collection before, so I guess there is a benefit to randomly perusing the library shelves. With life beyond earth, storytelling across time, and archetypes that extend into worlds otherwise totally strange, Le Guin is at her best here. While the stories are independent, some are sequential and linked. I’d like to hunt down a copy of this!

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Overall, I recommend it, but wow, Butler has a meticulous writing style I would describe as sauntering. I guess I was eager to get to the instructive parts, which eventually arrived, but not until after the first 2/3rds of the book analyzed several dimensions of what Butler labels the “anti-gender movement” (TERFs, Evangelicals, Trump, etc.). With that, they laid thorough groundwork for their assertion that the term gender has become an ambiguous boogeyman, a “phantasm," on which the fears, panic, hate, and reactionary politics of the “anti-gender” movement have been placed. Intersectionality is threaded throughout the book as Butler identifies commonalities between seemingly distinct struggles for freedom as well as relationships between various expressions of authoritarianism that could be called anything but incidental. Maybe the pacing was necessary to make that point, to wade through the chaos and carefully draw elements together.

Get a copy here.

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

Otherworldly, but so familiar and sweet, this novel was spooky and enchanting. Though it was technically a murder mystery (not my typical interest), the magical Appalachian mountain on which the story unfolds provided a context I adored. Animals, plants, food, caves, and forests are all employed metaphorically to move through a violent narrative. The random murder of a pair of hikers on the Appalachian Trail becomes a point of departure for two sisters. As the murderer continues to evade authorities, the oldest sister moves deeper into a destructive, loathsome relationship with herself, while the younger dreams of wielding justice with their deer antler knife. Alering brings the fantastical to the visceral through the folksy-occult underpinnings of Appalachian culture. 

Get a copy here.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

Goodness. I’ve either read bits and pieces of this book before, or encountered it cited in other texts, or maybe it was just familiar and resonant. Either way, I read this at the perfect moment, while feeling especially burned out after this semester. It reminded me of the transformative power of education for both students and teachers. Taking a critical look at how authority and domination manifest in the classroom, bell hooks offers a vision for creating learning communities that challenge these paradigms. This is such a tender and caring book, it left me feeling hopeful and resolved. If you’re involved in education, I can’t recommend it enough!

Get a copy here.

Feedback and questions welcome!