You can’t beat a region that boasts a House of Stuff!
Continue readingThought for the day
If racism has become a non-issue for minorities, as some believe, how odd that it remains a widespread and life-destroying influence on white males, which seems the basic premise of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor.
Continue readingDowntown Deco
Lower Manhattan is a carnival of art deco details.
Continue readingBook Review: Martin Ramirez: The Last Works
Martin Ramirez: The Last Works, by Brooke Davis Anderson, Richard Rodriguez and Wayne Thiebaud. Pomegranate, 160 pages, 136 illustrations, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7649-4695-0 The ratio of text to photos in this second major volume dedicated to Martin Ramirez is low, and that comes as a relief to someone who feels compelled to read books front to back, even when not reviewing them. The catalog published last year in conjunction with Ramirez’s epochal one-man at the American Folk Art Museum had many virtues. Contributions by Anderson and by Victor and Kristin Espinosa supplied essential (and in the Espinosas’ case ground-breaking) background and
Continue readingBook Review: Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor
Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor, by Mechal Sobel. LSU Press, 256 pages, 46 illustrations, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8071-3401-6 Pity the poor dead outsider artist. Odds are good you’ve been reduced to a collection of anecdotes gathered by an early collector or dealer then recycled, with declining fidelity, through biographical capsules, reviews and newspaper articles. Your life is a series of clichés attached to a stunning body of work. If you’re exceptionally lucky, like Martin Ramirez, you may eventually pique the interest of serious scholars and become the subject of actual biography. But when your life story is
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo
If you’re cutting the cake, your main responsibility is to not lick your fingers between pieces.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo
All slopes are slippery.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo
Not every offer to help is a passive-aggressive effort to assert control.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo: Managing Up
It’s unfair that the burden is on employees to make ignorant bosses understand. But that burden is far greater if they don’t.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo: Effectiveness
For best results, attack the person and the problem.
Continue reading