part 2 :: long weekend in berlin :: hamburger bahnhof

there was an open house at the hamburger bahnhof, which is the national art gallery, on the weekend we were there. that meant free admission! yay!

the bones of the old train station were visible and it made for some great spaces. there was lots of interactive art going on and gertraude even called her daughter to bring her grandson, who they knew would love it. they spent the rest of the afternoon there, after emmy and i went off to find some lunch.

eva fábregas made these enormous, tactile sculptural pieces that were in the main hall when you came in, but they were somehow cool and a little bit disturbing at the same time.

lots of little side rooms had interactive projects, where you could contribute. these bits of yarn made visual the connections and entanglements between people. 

american artist christina quarles was featured upstairs. she had curated the exhibition as well and there were all these cool elements involving screens and art on top of art that lent a cool and fresh perspective.

her own works were very bold and colorful and the orange vinyl laid over was really interesting, expanding the work beyond the border of the canvas.

the works behind the screens were part of the museum's collection and were chosen by christina to complement her work and all displayed behind these screens.

i hadn't seen her work before and found it quite thought-provoking.

there was an amazing exhibition of the work of fred sandback in the other wing and this picture by no means does it justice. it consisted of very simple lengths of yarn discreetly strung. you could walk into the middle of the works and it was weirdly moving in its simplicity. 

loved these giant flowers in the entrance to the "a collection for the 21st century" part of the exhibition. my brain had taken in a lot by then and i'll admit i didn't appreciate it as much as i maybe should have.

but this enormous ombre cloth was cool. but by then, i was getting "museum legs" and just needed to leave and sit down and let all of the visual impressions simmer in my mind. 

stitched stories

this is the text i wrote to go with the exhibition of my great grandmother's quilts.

these quilts and quilt tops were made by annie barnhart (1863-1946) of salem, south dakota. she was my maternal great-grandmother. i think she would be amazed to know that her rather prolific handiwork found its way to denmark with her great-granddaughter. 

 

my mother told a story from her childhood, of her grandmother, ill and bound to her bed at her daughter’s home in sergeant bluff, iowa, sewing away on these quilts. she had stacks of squares of different colors and she just spent her days, sewing them together. mom even said her eyesight wasn’t so great anymore, so the color combinations and the designs are even more amazing considering that fact. and i can’t even begin to count the number of hours that went into them. 

mom was born in 1939 and if her grandmother died in 1946, she must have been a small girl. she told me that she got to help do some of the stitching, so she had very fond memories of her grandmother working on them. i’m so glad that i know that and that she shared it before she lost those memories to alzheimer’s in her later years. 

i look at these quilts and i think of all the memories that are stitched into them that i don’t have access to. the stories behind all the old dresses and flour sacks that were cut into squares and sewn together by hand. some of the fabrics are surely 100 years old. i wish they could talk and tell of the occasions they were worn to – dances, parties, church, everyday life. i wish i could access those stories. 

sometimes, i feel like if i sit very still and i’m quiet enough, i will be able to hear them whisper their stories to me. i think one of the magical things about quilts is that they are very representative of their times – the fabrics used, the way they are stitched. they are quite literally the very fabric of their time. and they tell us a story even if we can’t necessarily hear the stories they tell. 

i feel privileged to share them all with you in this very magical place, across an ocean and a world away from where they were made. i hope that great grandmother annie is looking down and smiling. 

and i hope she likes the small mini-quilts that i made, using fabrics gifted to me by two friends, each with their own stories – mini quilts that i feel are a dialogue between me and those amazing women, continuing the tradition of telling stories through quilting in our family.

museums :: the new selfie central

the wonderful louisiana museum of modern art is open 'til 10 p.m. on week nights. so, after work today, i decided to pop up there and see the kusama exhibition that's on at the moment. polka dot explosion and precisely what i needed after starting my day with a rather nasty email from that infamous deficit person i've mentioned before (more fodder for that novel that i need to get to writing). kusama and a solitary, but not lonely, dinner at the museum was precisely what i needed to shake it off.

in the kusama exhibition, there are several places where there are mirrors and which invite one to partake in today's selfie culture.

ok, it was kind of a lot of places. lots of mirrors and many, many polka dots. kusama is an amazing woman. i sat for a long time and watched a film with her. she's got quite the ego, actually, but i suppose at this point in her life, she's earned it. and she does, after all, live in an insane asylum and has for many years, of her own choice. you may think it's all just polka dots, but it's much more than that...a kind of search for but obliteration of the self in endless repetition. much deeper than it may appear on the surface. and she has enviably lived her art as a way of life.

and it got me thinking about these endless selfies we take these days. are we also searching for who we are? or are we obliterating ourselves in the repetition?

and what does it mean that we see our own reflection (quite literally) in the art we obsessively photograph as we go around the museum - like me in this rothko?

or the ghost of me against william burroughs in this mappelthorpe? maybe it doesn't mean anything other than that i really should put away my phone and just be there with the art. but those polka dots do make an excellent screen background on my phone(s).

silent stories, waiting to be told

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

when i read about the photography triennial that's on right now in hamburg, i remembered another photography exhibition i saw at hamburg's deichtorhallen back in april. it was an exhibition of young european photographers and while much of it looked like trying-too-hard thesis projects that got barely passing grades, there were two young photographers who were doing something that got my attention. one was ukrainian kirill golovchenko. his large piece, composed of smaller photos, out of the blue, photographed on a black sea beach through a bathing ring, was whimsical and touching and with its vintagey treatment, felt like it tapped into something of the instagram-y pulse of our times, while saying something deeper about the culture of leisure time.

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

it was the first piece you saw as you came into the amazing cathedral-like exhibition space and it warranted a longer look. the girls liked it and stood before it, pointing out various whimsies to one another, for quite some time. i liked it too - plenty of whimsy and a healthy dose of strange-making ostranenie on the typical beach scene, making us see it anew. and what was a panda doing on the beach?

collection by jan brykczynski

the other photographer's work that spoke to me was jan brykczynski from poland. he photographed everyday objects in what once were grand surroundings of a palatial home that had been in his family for years. the obvious grandeur was a bit worn and shabby and the photos evoked those tropes of memory and forgetting that so often speak to me. who knows why these particular objects were collected? the stories behind them are surely long forgotten, but there's something poetic about them photographed individually on the ledge. as an object photographer myself, they spoke to me.

collection by jan brykczynski

collection by jan brykczynski

a number of the works juxtaposed the grand setting to the mundane realities of everyday life in the 21st century. ironing would undoubtedly once have been done by servants and now one must do it oneself, albeit still in the grand surroundings. and while it's not necessarily a photograph i'd like to own, it made me think of the great, sweeping swaths of history blowing through europe (and the world, for that matter), leaving everything changed.

collection by jan brykczynski

i think his work spoke to my inner collector as well. there's just something comforting about the act of gathering like objects and displaying them. the documentation of it. the gathering. the collection of memories. the silent stories, waiting to be told.

100 happy days :: day 33

two cool exhibition spaces. two engaged, interested teenagers. 

community building takes passion and hard work

i think a lot about community-building these days - both in a work and a volunteer context. this summer, when we were visiting the little town where i grew up, we had a chance to visit the local museum that volunteers are setting up there.

it's housed in a building at the north end of main street. i can't really remember what used to be in there - perhaps it was a garage that belonged to a car dealership? (it's been awhile and my memory is increasingly like a sieve). but that doesn't really matter.

what matters is that the community has come together to create a little museum, showing mostly what the town used to be like (as museums are wont to do). there are beds from the local hospital, mailboxes from the old post office, uniforms from hometown boys (and girls?) who have served in the military over the years, tools, machinery...

there are areas which replicate the local drug store, a local grocery store - which was still open when i was a kid, a home, the local newspaper (which i know a little something about) and they had just begun putting together an exhibit featuring the local jail.

there are all kinds of things which make you feel nostalgic, from bicycles to a horse-drawn carriage, to machinery, tools and even a lovely doll collection that a local family has curated and shared.

local artists have done murals depicting rural life across the decades. the town itself became a town in 1900 when the railroad came. a number of buildings were moved to the end of the railroad line from little towns in the area and platte was incorporated.

i can remember from my childhood that this linotype was still in use. i can picture my mom sitting at it, typing away. not too long after, they updated to some compugraphic machines that she had at the house in a back room. there were two of them (they're not at the museum) - one where she typed everything in, creating a long, yellow punch tape, which was then fed into the other machine, which created the set newspaper columns, which were then waxed and stuck to the page to be burned as plates and then printed into newspapers.

but the old-fashioned way, with type cases and heavy boxes of letters, was still the way it was done within my own lifetime and even my memory.

i do wish i'd learned now to run this press, because people are making beautiful things these days with such machinery (not that i'd be able to check it on a plane and get it to denmark very easily). i can actually still hear the sound this press made, just looking at it, and smell the smell of the ink. all kinds of posters, letterhead, cards, etc. were printed on it when i was a kid. it still works and could be used. if i lived back there, i'd learn how to do use it and do demos at the museum.

here's dad standing next to some of the machinery at the museum. i have a clear picture of him in my head from my childhood, standing up inside the press, fiddling with something or other, covered in ink. it must have been pretty frustrating for him when things weren't working, because he's not really much of a mechanic, but oddly i don't remember much swearing.

that big heavy, marble-topped wooden block table in the middle, i clearly remember standing at, stuffing inserts into the paper, the smell of ink in the air.  i rode countless times in the stationwagon as a kid when my mom drove every wednesday to nebraska to have the paper printed in o'neill before a cooperative printing plant was built closer to home. all those miles on winding roads with bags of freshly-printed newspapers in the back, bring back memories of being carsick and even today, if i take a deep breath of newsprint and ink, i still feel a bit carsick.

another display is of the local pharmacy - eastman drug. it was open when i was a child and the owner was the one who never let me live down calling myself snow white at the random bible school that time. i always dreaded seeing him because he could never forget that.  best about eastman's was that it had an old-fashioned soda fountain, with stools and ice cream and malt machines. that was awesome. there should be more of those around.

for me, eastman's was far more the soda fountain and far less about medicines, tho' looking at the bottles and boxes on the shelves in the museum is fun to see how far we've come. i wish packaging was still romantic and simple like it was, instead of how it is today with so much waste.

i also clearly remember little graff's grocery, run by mr. and mrs. graff. my grandmother liked shopping there best, because it was sweet, small and personal. grocery stores today don't feel very personal and you feel like you have to rush in and out as fast as you can, with your cart loaded to the gills. there was no room for carts in the aisles of graff's.

everything i love from antique stores was reflected in the model home - with an icebox and a big retro stove, wooden ironing board, hurricane lamp, nostalgic dishes. tho' i feel nostalgic when i see these things, i am grateful we have the kind of washing machines we have today.

so as i work on building communities around a new school and a new culture house, i think a lot about what it is that makes communities function. and every time it comes back to the people who are involved. danish has a great word for them - ildsjæl (fire souls) - people who are passionate, driven and care to get things up and running and keep them going. they're hard working, but they are driven by a sense of really caring. every community project needs a number of those.

scenes from frilandsmuseet: take 2 or it's the light, silly

i found myself being especially observant of the light in all of the old farmhouses at frilandsmuseet. we're pondering quite a lot about how to redo the bits of our farmhouse that won't be torn down and windows are a big issue. we've collected a lot of old, traditional metal-framed windows, thinking we wanted to use them, but they are actually quite small and we're worried it will be quite dark inside. and in these northern latitudes, light is everything. so i looked for how the light fell at frilandsmuseet...

the right windows mean everything

this little geranium is clearly getting enough light.

a rather dark hearth in a house from småland in sweden.

if only my old kitchen were THIS old - that i could live with.

i love, love, love the idea of a step-up pantry

an axe by the door - looks like they're ready for blog camp! ;-)

there were many cobblestone floors. we might experiment with that in one of the rooms of the part of our house that was once a barn. i love how some leaves had found their way in on the autumn winds.

one of the things we're generally really rubbish at is lighting, so it's really important that our coming remodel enables us to take as much advantage of natural light as possible. there's so much inspiration to be had by visiting museums, don't you think?