My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.
I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.
I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.
The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.
The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods
are shuttered I don't know why.
"Try," say the good people who bring me my food,
"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon.
Otherwise, your immortality will be
an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."
But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a “surfeit of aliveness.” In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.
“When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional.”
Elvan Zabunyan, Réunir les bouts du monde. Art, histoire, esclavage en mémoire, Le Crédac. B42.
Roots to Fruits, Nº3 Congada, 2024. Memórias Congadeiras. Over the course of five decades, self-taught musician and ethnomusicologist Spirito Santo (1947) has produced hundreds of hours of audio recordings containing music, reports and interviews, many meters of black & white negatives and colored slides using amateur photographic equipment, such as polaroids, point-and-shoot cameras and K7 recorders, capturing unique moments of the cultural history of the Central African diaspora in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
“Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.
We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.
[…]
[Hermann] Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art.
[…]
Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”
Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places celebrates its 50 year anniversary.
Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, a program of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, is one of the first public art programs in the country. The program was established in 1973 with the passage of an ordinance allocating 1.5% of capital costs of new local government buildings for the purchase or commission of artworks, educational programs and collection maintenance. The Art Trust Fund is administered by a County Commission-appointed citizens board, the Art in Public Places Trust, in consultation with its Professional Advisory Committee.
The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council develop cultural excellence, diversity, access and participation throughout Miami-Dade County by strategically creating and promoting equitable opportunities for artists and cultural organizations, and our residents and visitors who are their audiences. Through staff, board and programmatic resources, the Department, the Council and the Trust promote, coordinate and support Miami-Dade County’s more than 1,000 not-for-profit cultural organizations as well as thousands of resident artists through grants, technical assistance, public information and interactive community planning. The Department directs the Art in Public Places program and serves its board, the Art in Public Places Trust, commissioning, curating, maintaining and promoting the County’s art collection. The Department receives funding through the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, The Children’s Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, the State of Florida through the Florida Department of State, Florida Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation, and the Taft Foundation. Other support and services are provided by TicketWeb for the Culture Shock Miami program, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, the South Florida Cultural Consortium and the Tourist Development Council.
The City of Miami Beach, in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA) and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau (GMCVB), is pleased to announce the return of No Vacancy, Miami Beach — a juried art competition that supports and celebrates local artists, provokes critical discourse and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as art destinations. For the fifth edition of the competition, No Vacancy, Miami Beach 2024will include 12 participating artists and collectives that will present site-specific works at 12 different hotels around Miami Beach. The works will be displayed from November 14 to December 12, 2024.
Credit Line: Presented by the City of Miami Beach and with the support of the Miami Beach Visitor Convention Authority
My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals On the side of me which you in the village could see. From the dust I lift a voice of protest: My flowering side you never saw! Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed Who do not know the ways of the wind And the unseen forces That govern the processes of life.
