thelmasmith

It’s time to get Published. J. Mercury & Maxed Art present: The Plume Zine: [bicycle] Conversations. The new theme is: anything relating to Bicycles or Conversations. All submissions must touch on this theme. Submit written work (poems, prose, micro fiction). Must be under two pages, double spaced. All written work is subject to a selection process. Submit images (drawing, collage, photography) no larger than 8×10. If emailing your image, it must be saved at 300dpi. Artwork will be proportionally formatted to fit the ‘zine. Submit all work by April 3. The Plume Zine is: art for people. Our debut zine, God & Love, a hand-bound, double pamphlet stitch, in an edition of 50, was distributed at select locations in Tucson and just about flew off the shelves. God & Love had 11 contributors and debuted with a reading at Dinnerware Artspace gallery. [bicycle] Conversations will have a special debut party TBA — don’t miss out! (view blog for images) Email submissions to MaxedArt@gmail.com or call 245-2681. The future awaits you at maxedart.blogspot.com

Join ArtCorps and use your creative talents to strengthen international development in Central America in 2009.  Through community arts projects, artists educate and inspire people to participate actively in improving the environmental, health, and social conditions in their communities. Work as a volunteer with a host nonprofit development organization that is an expert in its field. All volunteers will receive a personal stipend of approximately $1,000 to reduce personal costs, in addition to receiving airfare, room and board, and medical insurance. Both 1-year and 2-year opportunities are available. Candidates must be proficient in Spanish. Deadlines are April 4 and May 2. For application visit http://www.artcorp.org/artist_placements.html

I was at the University of Arizona Museum of Art today. This is from a new installation by
El Anatsui.

These works are copyright of the artist and are shown here under the doctrine of fair use for educational purposes. The work above uses the rims of screw on caps of cheap liquor that the anglo world has exported to Africa for the last several centuries. It references that societal problem, the problem of garbage, and also the West African textile tradition.

Not to mention that it is lusciously gorgeous and cries out to be carressed.

More societal commentary. Aluminum printing plates used in their most maleable form to comment on waste and waste paper in particular.

If you are traveling or happen to be around Tucson, Arizona, do yourself a favor and go to the University of Arizona. There is the Museum, two galleries, the Center for Creative Photography, the Flanrau Observatory, the Arizona Historical museum and much more.

My dear, Scots friend, Marion, has tagged me with these instructions:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

So, seven facts about myself.

• Frank Herbert lived in Port Townsend.
  As he aged he worked with a colleague. They picked my maiden name,
  Scudi, out of the phone book. The character, Scudi Wang, in the novel
  The Lazurus Effect so spooked me for years (1983). Many years later I
  went and got the autographed copy he had left at the local bookstore
  for me.
• I was born in Indiana and grew up on a farm.
• I came from a very non standard family.
• I love to drive. I use “doing miles” to air out my mind and my spirit.
• I love the surf of the Pacific Ocean; I miss it very much. Like “doing miles” I miss that help.
• One spring when I was a child we had nineteen kittens; five of them were pure white.

• I’m much more restrained now. I have only six cats.

Now, who shall I tag?

1. lauralyn sciretta
2. rayna gillman
3. pam rubert
4. susie monday
5. sabrina zarco
6. natalia aikens
7. denise aumick

Whew! That was an unexpected amount of work. All those tagged are artists who’s work and thoughts I admire.

The image, is one of the Las Madres with artist, Valarie James, as it was being unpacked at the Tubac Center of the Arts in February, 2006.  It was a portion of the exhibition Changing the World one Thread at a Time.

Still, people are dying. Valarie James has produced one of the most professional and lyrical laments and memorials to this sad process. Las Madres, No Mas Lagrimas YouTube is well used and the subject matter is well served in this short film.

The back story on the journey of Las Madres is on Valarie’s blog.  Fortunately, the monsoon has come to the Sonoran Desert. It brings vicious squall lines, torrents of water, thunder, lightening, and flash floods. It also brings us much needed water, humidity, and a cooling of the intense heats of June and early July. A thunder storm can lower the temperature thirty degrees in a matter of minutes.

Here is a photo of my colleague, Tanya Watanabe. Although she lives in Japan she is one of those citizens of the world.

When I come back from a trip I empty the suitcases first. I put the art supplies and the dirty laundry in their place. That’s after sleeping for about twenty hours.

Today was my day for opening the mail from the last ten days. I paid the bills and shredded all the sucker bait mail including all the blank checks with my name on them. Then I got to the large, nicely wrapped package that I knew was from Tanya. I had saved it and savored it as the reward for getting all the boring work done.

I am totally blown away ! ! ! Look at the treasure trove that came out of that small box.

I folded each in half and pinned them up over other things on the pinning wall. The two shorter ones may be - - - oh, rats, I cannot find the John Marshall book on Kimono that gives the proper names. The orange has a lovely lining.

And look at the hand painting on the sleeve. The back has a much larger hand painted mountain scene. The front has a similar painting on each side of the front.

The lavender kimono in the back of the first picture is a lovely brocade. This floral pattern is either hand painted or print in an overall design. Although it has relatively short sleeves it is a much more formal kimono as the long length indicates it is designed to be worn with an obi that will take up some of the length.

This last detail is from the middle kimono. The color in the photo does not do it justice; it is a rich café au lait with delicate, restrained hand painted motifs.

Tanya, I do not know how to thank you enough. These kimono are magnificent. There is no way I can cut them to use in textile art; they are much too gorgeous. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Several things today. Do go and see this YouTube video.

This one called Elektro.

This image is compliments of Google.

The following is a request from the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Please take time, make time, to continue each day by voting for this project with the American Express Member’s Project.
URGENT REQUEST to help NMWA:
June 17th is the DEADLINE to RATE our project!
NMWA / American Express Members Project : ID: 04062

WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!

The winning American Express Members Project will receive up to $5 million in funding and visibility with millions of people and the media.

Please go to www.membersproject.com for complete details and clear, simple instructions on how to REGISTER and RATE our project (it takes less than ten minutes).

Please register ASAP and give a FIVE STAR RATING to:

Project # 04062: WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!
Help us attract funding and gain UNPRECEDENTED visibility for NMWA through a program that American Express estimates could attract 5 million of their cardholders and countless more through media coverage.

The DEADLINE is June 17th, but please REGISTER and RATE us with 5 STARS TODAY, so we stay high on the list, have a greater chance to become known by more people, attract their support and rank in the top 50 project finalists. The Top 50 Projects will be announced July 3rd, the VOTING begins then, and the winning project will be announced August 7th. Please forward this to your friends! Thank you.

Contact:
Howard White, hwhite@nmwa.org 202.783.7983

National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20005
202.783.5000

My friend, the Spider, has been working for months with me. He has created Planet Textile Threads. With his help and a lot of Google work and hot links followed, we have peopled PTT with some of the most fascinating people from around the world in the field of textile arts.

Planet.textilethreads is a privately owned, invitational restricted, RSS feed. The members are requested to post to their blogs a few times a week. It is limited to a total of twenty four artists.

Here are a few figures to help visualize the traffic. The figures are not exact for April as we had server crash last week of April. In January, 2007, we had 129 unique visitors and 990 hits. February had 241 unique visitors and 898 hits. March had 501 unique visitors and 5232 hits. April, in spite of some lost data has grown spectacularly: 1800 unique visitors and 15,400 hits. Bandwidth usage has grown from less than twenty mega bytes to more than 720 mega bytes.

All this growth has happened without any notices on the lists on the net. Word of mouth referrals tell us that this sort of growth will continue.

Since PTT is about at it’s limit we have created a more broad based blog aggregation service.

Quilt Voices is a new, subscription based, blog aggregation service. Various other textile artists and people who have businesses who support our work will be included. Both people who provide web based supplies and those who run brick and mortar stores are welcome to membership in Quilt Voices.

You can see the beginnings of Quilt Voices at the hotlink above. Selling directly on these blogs is not allowed. There are no restrictions on post content so long as they are in good taste. We expect quiltvoices to bring you the sort of interested volume, and growth of volume, to your own websites that we are experiencing on PTT.

Subscriptions will be $1US per month, payable annually via PayPal. Those people who have textile related web only businesses (less than $50,000 gross, annually) may subscribe at $7 per month, payable annually. Large volume businesses and those in physical locations may subscribe at $15 per month.

This notice on thelmasmith.com and on planet.textilethreads is the first public notice. I expect to develop Quilt Voices over the summer. When everyone is settled in by the time school starts in the northern hemisphere I will begin marketing Quilt Voices internationally.

Like Planet.textilethreads, now, with it’s increasing readership and volume, quiltvoices.com will become known as THE place to get your textile fix with one click with your morning coffee.

To get your blog featured on Quilt Voices please
send and email to Spider AT quiltvoices DOT com with the following information:
Name = ……….
Blog Address = http:// …….
Status = Hobbyist or Small Business or Business

Only Paypal is accepted as a method of annual pre-payment.

Valarie James is both an artist and an activist. She takes no verbal stand. She just shows you, with her art, what she sees.

Her work is progressing far beyond this La Madre, which was shown in 2006 in the exhibition Changing the World One Thread at a Time. She speaks of secrets we will never know. She collects precious, heirloom quality, hand work on textiles in the Spanish language.

A documentary, called The Trail of Thread is in process.

Remember, the other week I told you that I had read Art Is a Way of Knowing? It was particularly challenging for me. The minute I was done I took Women Who Run With the Wolves off the shelf.

I have finished reading the book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. The hotlink will take you to one of the 225,000 Google references on Dr. Estés. The book was originally published in 1992. The image and copyright quotes used here are under the fair use for educational purposes clause of the copyright law. I encourage you to find a used copy of the book.

Remember the day I posted about Baba Yaga? She is probably the most pantheistic archetype spoken about in this book. I guess I know her because she is someone I know. It’s not a typo; just a contradiction in terms. Here are some of the quotations that have been important enough for me to note inside the fly cover.

“It is true, I will not lie to you; it is easier to throw away the light and go to sleep. It is true, It is hard to hold the skull-light out before us sometimes. For with it, we see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.”

“. . . . we throw a burst of fire into the darkness of psyche so we can see what we’re doing . . . what we’re truly doing, not what we wish to think we’re doing.”

“Ignorance s not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence if knowing everything, and still being attracted to the good.”