In 1848, the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, ending the Mexican-American War and establishing a border between the two nations. Trazando la Línea/Tracing the Line: Past, Present and Future of Cross-border Communities, an exhibit at the Centro Estatal de las Artes y Culturas (CEART) in Mexicali, Baja California, examines the historical development of this border region that began without the current physical barriers that separate the two countries and, despite the walls, remains a place of continuity and connection — a ‘third nation’ of bi-national values and shared experiences.
Co-curated by Michael Dear, professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and Hector Lucero, head of the Cultural Heritage Department for the State of Baja California, the exhibition is a commentary on building and breaking boundaries. It highlights history, tensions and transformation through multimedia sources including painting, sculpture, photography, video, maps and historical documents. Dear’s current research focuses on comparative urbanism and the future of the US — Mexico borderlands. Michelle Shofet (B.A. Art History 2001) was the curatorial assistant on the project.
Exhibition co-curator Michael Dear with contributing artist Norma Iglesias, in front of a work by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, entitled La Reconquista/The Reconquest.
Among works by artists from both sides of the border are pieces by Berkeley alumni including paintings by David Aipperspach (B.A. Landscape Architecture, Visual Studies 2010) and a video by Claire Evans (B.Sc., B.A., Society & Environment, Urban Studies 2011) that follows the borderline from the Pacific coast to Gulf via Google Earth. The show also features an installation piece by Melissa Corro: La Moda de Cruzar, historical research by Salvador Gutierrez, and works by Nicholas Almquist: lotería cards and the exhibition poster.
“The border region is thought of as a place of violence, poverty, trafficking and pollution — sometimes and in some places it is — but it is also place of everyday life where both sides work together, shop, get married; it’s a third nation,” explains Michael Dear. “Tracing the Line is important because the exhibit begins to tell the history of this third nation — past, present and future. But ‘what future’? I think I know; the third nation will be here when the walls have fallen, exactly in this place where it already lives.”
“Reporter: Would the White House care to comment on the expected contrast between the high degree of organization and discipline in the Republican Convention and the Democrats’ anticipated free-for-all? Annabeth Schott: I believe the American people will be the beneficiaries, in that they will be presented with a clear choice: do they want to be governed by people who are animated, or animatronic?”
— From the television show, The West Wing
Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee. Consistent with President Obama’s commitment to transparency, this report is being publicly disclosed on our website as it is transmitted to Congress. In addition, this report also contains the title and salary details of administration officials who work at the Office of Policy Development, including the Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council — along with White House Office employees.
The updated National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summertime Booklist appears below. NEH has published a summer reading list for children since 1988. The criterion for inclusion is that a book have “lasting value.” This year the list has been updated with 90 new books recommended by the American Library Association (ALA) and vetted by NEH staff and other readers:
KINDERGARTEN TO GRADE 3
Recommended for K-3, either for reading by children or for reading to them.
Aardema, Verna and Leo & Diane Dillon
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Tale
How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties brings together for the first time the work of more than 60 painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity — qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords.
Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Youth and Beauty with more than 130 works by artists including Ansel Adams, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Aaron Douglas, Walker Evans, Edward Hopper, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood.
Organized and presented by the Brooklyn Museum, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from July 1 through September 16, 2012. Cleveland is the final venue to present Youth and Beauty, which traveled previously to the Brooklyn Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art.
The 1920s are often remembered as a raucous, even uproarious decade, one in which a Victorian past was replaced by a distinctly modern present. It is striking that American artists of the period responded to their rapidly changing world by creating works that conversely evoked clarity, order, and stillness. Confronted with situations and environments altered fundamentally by mechanization and urbanization, as well as shifts in attitudes toward the human body and behavior, artists adopted a distilled realism in order to seek out organization amid turmoil. Some looked to Old Master art for inspiration, while others took cues from recent avant-garde developments, as well as motion pictures and advertisements. Most Jazz Age artists were united in their drive to idealize modern existence, and the art in this exhibition highlights human and natural beauty, and captures the youthful potency of America’s emerging industrial landscape.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Self-Portrait with Rita, 1922 oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jack H. Moone National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, NY, USA
80 … is an activist number. That’s how many years it’s been since the Supreme Court voted as conservatively as it does now, according to a recent study. But upholding Obamacare makes them liberals if you believe anything invented after electricity is unconstitutional.
23% … is a divided number. That’s how many of the Roberts Court’s rulings have split 5 — 4. It really helps make your decisions seem unbiased and binding when nearly a quarter of them could be changed by one guy flipping a coin.
67% … is an individualist number. That’s how many Americans support repealing the individual mandate. Large majorities favor the rest of the bill, but Americans are still uncomfortable with mandates despite growing support for gay marriage.
6% … is a mandatory number. That’s how many people will actually be affected by the individual mandate. And if they really don’t want health care, the IRS promises not to send agents to coat their medicine in peanut butter and feed it to them.
17 million … is an expansive number. That’s how many Americans the law’s Medicaid expansion will cover. But yesterday’s ruling makes it easier for Republican governors to reject those funds if they feel politics is literally more important than life itself.
*With the permission Tim Price, Deputy Editor of the Next New Deal, Blog of the Roosevelt Institute
“Welcome to the liveblog. Thursday is the day. Here is our schedule, all times EDT. 8:45a – liveblog begins with introductory explanation. 9a-10a – answers to your questions. 10a-1045a (appx) – decision announcements. We expect the health care decision to be announced at roughly 10:15a. 1045a-1p – live coverage and analysis.”
“Thanks very much for coming, and once you enter the liveblog below please, please DO NOT refresh your browser; updates will appear automatically.”
*SCOTUSblog is a law blog written by lawyers and law professors about the Supreme Court of the United States (sometimes abbreviated “SCOTUS”). The blog is sponsored by Bloomberg Law. Lyle Denniston is the blog’s reporter at the Court. The site tracks cases before the Court from the certiorari stage through the merits stage. The site live blogs as the Court announces opinions and grants cases, and has information on the Court’s actions published before the either Court or any other news source does. The site frequently hosts symposiums with leading experts on the cases before the Court. The site comprehensively covers all of the cases argued before the Court and maintains an archive of the briefing and other documents in each case. (From Wikipedia)
Nevada Senator Harry Reid tells Congress that a Republican’s proposed amendment regarding “when life begins” does not belong on a bill to reauthorize flood insurance programs.
It’s official. I’ve lost it. I just tried dialing a telephone number and couldn’t understand why the call wasn’t connecting, and the channels on my TV kept changing. I finally figured out it was because I was trying to dial a phone number on my TV remote. Doesn’t work. Neither does using the phone to try to change TV channels, which I also do often.
Actually, merely finding a remote control or a phone in the first place is a plus for me. I have too many of each. First, the remotes: I have one for each of my two TVs, two separate ones for each of both DVD players, remotes for dimmers of lights in four rooms, more for three overhead fans… It’s ridiculous. All these gadgets that are supposed to simplify our lives actually make them more complicated — more things to keep track of. But in a way that’s good. Searching for the correct remote, for instance, at least gets me off the couch and moving. It’s not exactly an aerobic workout, but it’s better than nothing.
My cordless phones provide a similar opportunity for exercise. I have three, in addition to my cell phone, all of which invariably end up in the same room — and, of course, never the room I’m in when they ring. Since I have to run to answer a call before Voicemail picks it up, the fitness benefits in this case are greater than those provided by my remote control hunts.
The latest things to hide from me are my reading glasses, which are relatively new to me. I used to be seriously nearsighted. I could read the Declaration of Independence engraved on the head of a pin without glasses. (At least, I could have if such an engraving existed.) However, unless I was wearing my glasses, anything more than a foot away was an indistinguishable blur. (Is that my car or an elephant that escaped from the local zoo?). Consequently, I wore my glasses constantly. If I had to read any fine print (like the Declaration of Independence on the head of a pin), hem a skirt, or clip a hangnail, I simply slid the glasses down my nose and peered over them. They were never off my face, from the moment I woke up every morning until I went to bed; so I never misplaced them. They were either on my face or on my nightstand.
Recently, however, I had cataract surgery; and since I opted for distance vision cataract lenses, I can now be glasses-free for most activities. It’s wonderful! But there’s a catch. Now I need glasses for reading and other close work. It’s no big deal financially. I buy them at my local Dollar Store and own at least a dozen pairs, none of which I can ever find.
I also used to have a problem keeping track of books. And since I often read two or three at a time, and they’re scattered throughout the house, I had a hard time remembering which one I was currently reading and where they were. Now, though, I have a Nook — my electronic reader — which stores hundreds of books in its memory (which — no surprise — is far superior to mine). Furthermore, this wonderful device even remembers which book I was reading last and what page I was on. No more losing bookmarks. Instead, I keep misplacing my Nook.
And when I finally find it, it invariably needs to be charged — which brings up a whole new category of items I can never find: chargers — for my Nook, my camera battery, my laptop computer (which also keeps disappearing), and two (home and car) for my cell phone and GPS — a life-saving travel navigation device without which I’d never reach any destination or find my way home again. Of course, as you may have guessed, the GPS is usually in my house (but where?) when I’m in my car and need it desperately — or it’s in my car (in the parking lot, three flights down) when I’m home and want to plan my next day’s journey.
“It was here a minute ago” is a phrase I use constantly. I could be sitting at my desk holding something in my hand — a magazine, for example — and a few minutes later, though I haven’t moved from the desk, when I look for that same magazine, it is gone. It didn’t have feet. How could it have walked away? No one else is in the room who could have taken in. No one human, that is. And I don’t have a pet that might have snatched it when I wasn’t looking. An invisible gremlin maybe? That would explain a lot — maybe the same gremlin hides my remotes, my phones, my glasses, my books, my Nook, my GPS, my chargers…
Almost a quarter of a century ago (we tend to round up numbers) we made the first of many visits to the National Building Museum — and its shop — in Washington, DC. Today we eat daily on flatware designed by Robert Venturi for Swid Powell that we acquired on a sale at the shop. A number of building block sets based on well-known structures still grace our grandchildren’s playroom in our house.
If you’re a sock fan as we are, there are Ozone striped pairs with three different patterns and colors to choose from at $16 (or less, if you’re a member). For the academic (teacher or student) there’s the 2012-2013 August to August Calendar Organizer in six colors. Or perhaps during this election year, the 1887 Map of Washington DC Journal would be appropriate ($18). The historic map was prepared by Axel Silversparre under the direction of the Engineer Commissioner of the District and using records from the office of the Surveyor of the District.
In the Toys and Games department, the Architecture Crossword Puzzle book ($3.95) is an ideal gift for architects, architecture aficionados and those who can’t get enough of the classic puzzle form.
And for the ultimate jigsaw puzzle, consider this, the Berlin 4D Cityscape Puzzle ($39.99) with which you can build Berlin from 1292 through the present. You first build the base puzzle which consists of regular jigsaw pieces. Then you refer to the 4D Time Poster to identify and place each building on the map in sequence according to the year it was built. Experience and rebuild the past, present and future. You can find other 4D Citypuzzles here which include the cities of London, New York, Chicago, Paris and Washington.
Finally, we must recommend the Kapla 280 piece Box and Book. We first encountered the Kapla experience at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkely which set aside a large room for space to create many structures for this ‘toy’.
The ‘blocks’ introduce kids and parents to designing, stacking, building, engineering and cool construction. The lid of the box is a book with 24 pages of building suggestion. It’s $125, not a cheap ‘toy’ but one that would be worth the investment for visitors and your own children and grandchildren.
This summer, the Portland Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition The Draw of the Normandy Coast, 1860-1960, on view through September 3, 2012. This exhibition will focus on the impressive Normandy coast which proved to be an artistic crucible for European and American artists during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Geographically convenient to Paris, accessible by train, with dramatic cliffs and rock formations, and picturesque and active ports, Normandy was an attractive haven. Realists, Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, Fauves, Cubists, and Surrealists all gravitated to the area, including Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Camille Pissarro, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Featuring more than 40 works, mostly paintings and works on paper, The Draw of the Normandy Coast, 1860-1960 will chart the coast’s significance and showcase the ways in which the landscape was rendered by a spectrum of artists.
The Draw of the Normandy Coast, 1860-1960 was inspired by the masterful painting by Claude Monet, La Manneporte Vue en Aval (The Manneporte Seen from Below) (ca. 1884). This powerful landscape is part of the Isabelle and Scott Black Collection and is currently on long-term loan to the Portland Museum of Art. The Manneporte, the dramatic arch at Étretat, was the focus of one of Monet’s most significant painting campaigns in Normandy. Monet’s painting is one of several works from the Isabelle and Scott Black Collection that will be showcased in the exhibition. The exhibition will also include a carefully selected group of masterworks by European and American artists from the Museum’s permanent holdings, including Samuel Colman’s Cliffs at Étretat (ca. 1873), a work on paper acquired by the Museum in 2009 with the support of the Friends of the Collection.
Claude Monet (France, 1840-1926), La Manneporte Vue en Aval (The Manneporte Seen from Below) , circa 1884. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Isabelle and Scott Black Collection. Photo by meyersphoto.com
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1834 – 1903, Gray and Gold – Belle Island, undated watercolor and paper on board. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Anonymous Gift. Photo by Meyersphoto.com.
