#HI I DID IT I DID A CARMEN ART FOR THE ECLIPSE

[gootube]

total eclipse of the sun

[classicschronicles]

Hi lovelies,

‘Carmen et Error’- A Poem and a Mistake (aka my Instagram bio). Anyways this quote just makes me laugh every time I think about it because, of course, it belongs to no other than Ovid. I know he says some questionable things, but he writes it so nicely and I like to think that he was just in a silly goofy mood. Anyways, if you hadn’t guessed yet, todays post is all about the Roman poet Ovid. This post is also for @morallyunethicalintellectualtax because it’s her birthday and she is Ovid’s biggest fan, the ultimate Ovid apologist if you will.

Publius Ovidus Naso (also known as Ovid) was a Roman poet born in 43 BC and is most famously known for his works Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses. He was born to an old and wealthy family in a small town about 90 miles away from Rome. His family must’ve been pretty well to do as his father was able to send both Ovid and his brother to Rome to be educated. Like almost every other poet ever, Ovid had daddy issues, and despite his fathers disapproval, he neglected his studies in favour of writing poetry. Relatable king.

As a member of the Roman gentry (above the plebeians but not quite at the rank of the senate) Ovid was marked out for an official career and even held some minor judicial posts. He soon decided, however, that he was not suited to this position and abandoned his official career to pursue poetry full time. Literally everyone was kind of confused by this decision because he really did have the makings of a great politician. Indeed, when Augustus became the emperor he tried to recruit Ovid as a politician, but Ovid turned the offer down so he could write his poetry instead.

The first work that he published was the Amores (The Loves), which was met with immediate success, and was very shortly followed by the Heriodes (Epistles of the Heroines). Fun fact, it’s because of the Heriodes that a lot of people consider Ovid a proto-feminist and therefore take a feminist reading to works such as Book 3 of the Ars Amatoria, saying that the book is meant to be seen ironically. All of his works seemed to reflect the pleasure seeking company that came with his position as a well established poet. Details of his life can be found in his autobiographical poem Tristia (Sorrows).

With his position amongst the poets secured, Ovid began to move on to more ambitious works like the Metamorphoses and Fasti. The Metamorphoses was almost complete when his life took a complete 180 and he was exiled, by Augustus, to Tomi (near Constanta, Romania). The exact reason for his exile is still unknown, but Ovid states that it was because of a ‘poem and a mistake’. It is widely accepted that the ‘poem’ was the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), which was a controversial set of three didactic poems, instructing on the art of affairs. Given Ovid’s popularity, this was detrimental to Augusts’ programme of moral reform (the Lex Julia) which outlawed infidelity and encouraged childbirth. The ‘mistake’, however, is less agreed upon. Ovid insists that what he did was worse than a crime but that it was a mistake made by an error of his judgment. Some suggest that his exile was due to his affair with the granddaughter of Augustus- Julia (for whom the Lex Julia were named)- as she was also exiled at the same time. I just want to say that if his exile was because he was sleeping with the emperors granddaughter after whom the laws were named, it is the ultimate ultimate slay, and also biggest fuck you. I love it. However, his exile was the milder form (called relegation) and it did not include the confiscation of property or loss of his citizenship. His wife, who was also born to a rich family, remained in Rome to safeguard his interests and to intercede for him.

Despite Augustus banning all of Ovid’s work from public libraries, the immense popularity that Ovid enjoyed during his lifetime continued after his death. From around 1100 onward, Ovid’s fame (which had eclipsed slightly during the Early Middle Ages) began to rival, and on occasion, overtake Virgil. The apparent ‘Age of Ovid’ began in the 12th and 13th centuries, where his work were seen not only as entertaining, but as educating, and his works were taught in schools. His popularity grew during in the Renaissance, particularly amongst humanists who wanted to recreate the classical approached to thought and feeling. The appeal of his writing to the renaissance audience was because it offered an accessible look into Greek mythology and also because of the humanity of his writing. Literally, read the Metamorphoses, it’s sympathetic and heartbreaking and sensual and just amazing.

Anyways. There you have it. A quick fire introduction to Ovid. I think it’s pretty hard to do any justice to his works without just telling you to read it, so yeah everyone go read some Ovid. Happy birthday @morallyunethicalintellectualtax and I hope you all have a lovely rest of your weekend <3

~Z

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

The Mixed Reception of the Hamilton Premiere in Puerto Rico

When Miranda went to the island in 2010 as the star of his Caribbean diaspora hip-hop musical, In the Heights, he received a joyous welcome. One festive number included a Spanish-language call to raise the Puerto Rican flag; the audience members pulled 500 banderas from their pockets, the producer Jeffrey Seller told me over lunch at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, in San Juan. Although Miranda was born in New York, he spent childhood summers in Puerto Rico in his family’s hometown of Vega Alta, where his grandfather ran the local credit union. Lacking fluent Spanish, Miranda passed many days alone making home movies. To be cheered by a Puerto Rican audience, he told Oprah last spring, “closed something in me I didn’t even know was open.”

Hamilton—another hip-hop story of a man born in the Caribbean who comes to New York to reinvent himself and his nation—opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 2015. Miranda then called Seller and said he wanted to take his second show to Puerto Rico. (Broadway tours seldom visit San Juan because of the time and cost of shipping sets from the mainland, the producer explained.) Then, in 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated the island. “The hurricane changed our mission,” Seller recalled. Instead of a simple homecoming, Hamilton in Puerto Rico would become a fundraising venture, a tourism lure, and a declaration of support for the island’s recovery. Miranda had already helped to raise $43 million through his father’s Hispanic Federation for immediate relief. Revenue from Hamilton in Puerto Rico, which runs until January 27, with Miranda returning to the title role, is expected to bring in $15 million to benefit arts organizations on the island.

At the center of the discord over the show was the fact that UPR, like much of the island’s education and economic system, is in crisis. Puerto Rico owes a reported $72 billion in municipal bonds, accumulated over the past two decades to pay for social services as businesses and residents left for the mainland. promesa, a financial oversight board appointed in 2016 by President Barack Obama, had imposed unpopular austerity measures: hundreds of school closures, along with tuition hikes and budget cuts at UPR.

Miranda initially supported promesa, invoking Hamilton’s plea for governmental relief after a hurricane hit the Caribbean in 1772, and implored Congress to pass a debt-restructuring bill. (“I write about Puerto Rico today just as Hamilton wrote about St. Croix in his time,” he said in a New York Times op-ed.) As the star and creator of a musical that champions America’s first Treasury secretary, and that was famously hatched and hallowed in Obama’s White House, Miranda appeared closely linked to the federal authority that had taken away Puerto Rico’s control over its own economy. When Miranda gave a talk at UPR in 2017 to announce a Hamilton production on the island, a group of students marched onstage with a sign that read, in Spanish, “Lin-Manuel, our lives are not your theater.” (According to Carmen Haydée Rivera, a UPR English professor who interviewed Miranda during the talk, he listened thoughtfully to the protest and explained afterward that his views on promesa had changed.)

More obstacles arose as hurricane restoration work continued at the UPR theater and Hamilton began rehearsing there in December 2018. A university-employee association, facing slashed benefits, sent Miranda a letter last November stating that demonstrations might occur if Hamilton were performed on campus. Seller worried about security; police routinely patrolled Hamilton events in New York, but they are restricted on the UPR campus (and recently clashed violently with university protesters). Another option emerged: Ricardo Rosselló, the governor of Puerto Rico, offered Hamilton the Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré, a government theater with more seating and no obstacles to police protection. Only a few weeks before opening night, the producers decided to cancel the UPR engagement and move to Bellas Artes, the same theater where In the Heights had played in 2010.

Instead of quelling controversy, the change of venue fueled it. Now Hamilton was officially associated with a pro-statehood governor whose administration had drawn ire for suppressing Puerto Rican cultural celebrations in the school curriculum. In a post on 80grados, a left-leaning journal, the activist Amárilis Pagán Jiménez asked in Spanish why San Juan should welcome a show that chronicles “the history of the same damn country that has us under an unworthy colonial state and that ended us with PROMESA.” The musical that had been celebrated for the revolutionary diversity of its cast was now being aligned with the American political establishment that Hamilton had tried to reimagine.

These criticisms were compounded by disputes over whether a Nuyorican like Miranda had the authority to speak for Puerto Rico, and whether the arts were a luxury amid crippling austerity. Rivera, the UPR professor, wrote to me that “while many people in Puerto Rico appreciate Lin-Manuel’s efforts and support, these are, at times, eclipsed by the climate of uncertainty brought about by the current fiscal crisis and politically tense relationships between the island and the U.S.,” especially after the hurricane.

...

The performance itself brought three indelible moments. The first came when Miranda entered as Hamilton. There’s often applause for his entrance, but arguably nothing like this time at Bellas Artes, where the entire audience rose, as one, for an ovation that lasted more than a minute and seemed like an epoch. It was as though all the tension of the preceding months was being released in a collective exhalation; the people in the theater, at least, wanted Miranda to know they wanted him there. (“It was the first time I felt a cheer,” Miranda recalled at a press conference after the show. “I felt my hair move.”)

The second moment came when Hamilton, enmeshed in a political scandal, thought back to the hurricane that destroyed his childhood island. “In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet,” Miranda sang, with an emotional depth that belied his customary ebullience. The hall was hushed. (“I feel like I’m going back to Maria when I sing it,” he later explained.) The show had become about the island’s trauma after the disaster. “Hurricane” sounded like an echo of the West Side Story lyric from “Maria” that Miranda had remixed for a benefit single: “Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying.”

The final moment came at the curtain call, after Miranda had thanked his co-creators and invited his father onstage. “Lin-Manuel always said, and I take that to heart, that it was not only to experience Hamilton in its artistic value, but also to leave Puerto Rico a little better than we found it,” Luis said, speaking of their fundraising efforts. Then his son reached into the breast of his Hamilton costume and whipped out a giant Puerto Rican flag. The crowd erupted. Miranda appeared to be in tears. Where 500 flags had greeted In the Heights, what looked like thousands of cellphones came out to capture Miranda waving la bandera puertorriqueña. I showed my cellphone video to my Airbnb host the next day, and she started crying. “We’re a colony,” she said. “We’re treated as American, but we speak Spanish. When Lin-Manuel takes out the flag, it’s like, Yes, we exist.” Did it matter that Hamilton was a show about America’s Founders? “Not at all. It’s a great story!”

This is a great article for providing full context. You can read the rest here.

(Re Lin and the debt restructure, you can read about what he was actually fighting for at the time here.)

[ymd3signs]

Famous Graphic Designers Who Changed Everything

Changing an entire industry is by no means a small feat. The list of designers below still managed to profoundly changed the graphic design landscape as we know it. They helped shape the discourse of branding, the fundamental theories of design and did it all with an acute understanding of the cultural backdrop they tried to represent. Here’s how the greatest famous graphic designers made their mark on the world.

1)  Paul Rand

Paul Rand ought to arguably eclipse all of the beneath neath designers in reputation and legacy. The American Modernist's ground-breaking designs for IBM, ABC and the unique UPS emblems have stood corporation in the century. However, it's miles his theories on layout expressed in his mythical books to stand the check of time.  He flipped American marketing and marketing on its head whilst he becomes named Art Director of marketing and marketing organization William H. Weintraub & Co, a function formerly held through the copywriter. Donald Albrecht, curator of the 2015 exhibition on Rand's paintings Design Is Everything, claimed Rand flipped the method to marketing and marketing on its head. Instead of permitting the reproduction to dictate the layout, Rand u-grew to become an attitude and made photo layout the forefront. "He concept he become bringing artwork to marketing and marketing".

In essence, Rand is answerable for telling the arena that layout is, indeed, everything.

2)  Neville Brody

Neville Brody confronted grievance early in his profession after analyzing at The London College of Printing at some stage in the 1970s. His designs had been untried and strove for a brand new shape of mag artwork which sharply contrasted with the school's conventional printing and layout methods. The fashion dressmaker, emblem strategist, and typographer received his suggestion from the enormous push in his profession, the Punk motion. "London has a specific set of politics and cultural impacts that has been surely instrumental in growing the paintings that I do" he defined in an interview with Dezeen. He desired his paintings to mirror and constitute the converting panorama of London, politics and track; letting all designers understand that taking suggestion from the present-day weather can assist form you as a fashion dressmaker.

3)   Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser is entirely unstoppable in his marketing campaign to be topped the maximum celebrated photo fashion dressmaker of all time. His psychedelic method to the enduring Bob Dylan poster is contemplated in his more fantastic latest method to the Mad Men titles, and his stylistic path leaks into his way to typography. Although Glaser warned in his monograph Milton Glaser Graphic Design that he is "now no longer a kind fashion dressmaker", his Baby Teeth typeface which become designed for the Dylan poster advocated designers international to test with extraordinary forms.

His effect is deeply felt of path withinside the Big Apple, however, stretches past New York. Not handiest does the serviette on which he at the start drafted the I Heart NY brand completely are living withinside the Museum Modern Art, however, in 1976 he additionally designed the whole lot of the eating place which resided withinside the World Trade Centre,  Windows at the World. "I had no concept why it have become an icon now no longer handiest for New Yorkers", stated Glaser, "however for the complete bloody international."

4) David Airey

Now, as famed for his extraordinary running blog capabilities in addition to his outstanding layout portfolio, David Airey has made a call for himself as one of the contemporary-day masters of Graphic Design. His ebook Logo Design Love has emerged as a useful emblem all through itself, with a twitter following achieving 110,000 in its call. His speciality is living in constructing emblem identification via layout with businesses tripping over themselves to get a slice of his expertise. One of the various marks he has left up to now is the fee of self-promoting withinside the virtual age for photo designers, and the sheer energy of the net as a platform to excel your profession. "Without my blog, I doubt you'll understand approximately my paintings" he recently claimed in Design M.ag, "The Internet can open such a lot of doors, and it's as much as every one folks to tread our personal path".

5) David Carson

Texan born David Carson has honestly earnt his proper withinside the Graphic Design Hall of Fame and did it and not using regard for the rules. Experimental and formidable describe his ruthless willpower to interrupt the mould of typography and mag layout and stimulated a technology of younger designers to suppose differently approximately typography theory.

Clean reduce typefaces had been scrapped for distorted lettering that demanding situations the viewer, and his paintings in magazines Ray Gun and Nine Inch Nails are used as works to examine publications around the arena. However, his maximum critical lesson is geared closer to coaching photo designers to accept as true with themselves. "One of the early criticisms of my paintings become that it become 'self-indulgent'" he told Huck Magazine, "and I'd say, 'Hell yeah it's miles, I'm absolutely into it, I'm absolutely absorbed in it, and a part of me hopes it receives regarded and I wouldn't need any person operating for me who wasn't simply as into it."

6)   Stefan Sagmeister

Outspoken and unapologetic, Stefan Sagmeister is an imperative parent in contemporary-day pop & artwork culture. His genuine ardour is expressed via album covers, which he believes is the remaining problem for photo designers. "I do accept as true with that track is in the end the maximum emotional of all of the arts. To be capable of create the visible that comes out of that emotion and fasten it to some thing this is inherently non-visible is an exceptionally thrilling endeavor."

The perfect combo of images and typography form his mind-blowing portfolio and incorporating humans into his layout relentlessly captures emotion. His putting fashion certainly caught the hobby of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and David Byrne, and with a platform of such superstar his paintings, in conjunction with his layout philosophy is deservingly celebrated. "Try to the touch the coronary heart of the viewer".

7)   Aleksandr Rodchenko

Although now no longer a not unusual place family call, Aleksandr Rodchenko helped outline attitudes to fashionable-day layout in significant ways. He becomes a Russian artist and photo fashion dressmaker who become pivotal withinside the Constructivism motion of the Russian Revolution. Born in 1891, Rodchenko demanded that conventional theories of the layout had been altered. The "Constructivists" noticed layout as something to be engineered, no matter gender and classical artwork principals. His designs are nearly scientifically calculated with a restricted colour palette, and it becomes the primary time the arena had visible typography and photographic factors offered in such political paintings.

8)   Saul Bass

Perhaps one of the top family names on our list, Saul Bass' paintings is immortalized inside universally recognizable conventional movie posters. He reimagined how movies had been represented through portraying iconic scenes via a more fantastic summary sample described through symbolism and shapes.  His brand designs on average, have a lifespan of a whopping 34 years earlier than they may be even taken into consideration a redesign, or even then the maximum, minimum versions are applied. His real effect on is living withinside the transformation of establishing sequences in movies. Before Bass got here into the picture, identify movie sequences had been stagnant and dreary. In an interview with Herbert Yager, Bass defined the delivery of film titles as we understand them. As a part of my paintings, I created movie symbols for advert campaigns. I occurred to be operating at the signs for Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones and The Man With The Golden Arm, and at a few point, Otto and I checked out every different and stated, "Why now no longer make it move?"

9)   Adrian Shaughnessy

London-primarily based layout Adrian Shaughnessy spent 15 years as Creative Director of layout studio, Intro earlier than he has become an unbiased fashion dressmaker and writer. His layout instinctively is stimulated through the styles and sorts of the track, and he strategies every layout with bearing in thoughts its ubiquitous presence in a day by day life. His designs stability motive with beauty, experimenting with kind and colour at the same time as making sure practicality stays intact. "Most of what we see is vacuous, or worse, a form of industrial hysteria. But there also are many right and profitable makes use of of photo layout; usages that make our lives better."

10)   Ivan Chermayeff

Ivan Chermayeff's paintings are peppered throughout the US. Pan Am, NBC and Mobil are titans of clients, and who's call will convey Chermayeff into the VIP area of layout forever. Minimal, identifiable and distinguished designs. From company emblems to charity identification, Chermayeff serves as a reminder that every so often in photo layout, heading again to fundamentals with formidable shapes and recognizable colours will create success emblems that last.

11)  Paula Scher

Paula Scher spent nearly two decades in Pentagram as an associate of their New York office. Her passionate technique to intensify the emotion in the back of layout began out to shape after seeing Kathy McCoy speak approximately layout, and claiming the great praise a fashion dressmaker ought to get hold of is that your paintings are 'clean'. "C'mon, there's gotta be greater than that" she stresses "What approximately expression, what approximately emotion, what approximately feeling? ... If you can be neat, it appeared that you can obtain it…If every person can obtain it, why trouble to do it, why don't all of us do it ourselves?"

12)   Annie Atkins

Wes Anderson's movies are famed for his or her exceptional layout and specific, nearly surrealist fashion. Working as a photo fashion dressmaker on Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Annie Atkins carved her take at the director's imaginative and prescient. When operating in movies usually, photo designers take a script and mark whatever which can also additionally fall below their creative freedom. For The Grand Budapest Hotel, Atkins quickly realized the whole movie ought to fall below her inventive responsibility. The film, with its reliance on snapshots and aesthetics, sincerely allowed Atkins to reinvent photo layout for cinema.

13)   Massimo Vignelli

Visionary Italian fashion dressmaker Massimo Vignelli fashioned his profession through making use of European Modernist view to the American layout panorama. A self-branded "facts architect", Vignelli has included his imaginative and prescient so inextricably from ordinary life, from the New York Subway device to American Airlines and Ford. He noticed layout as a technique to explicit facts; this is difficult to comprehend. His legacy is summarised through primary photo fashion dressmaker Tom Geismar; "What usually amazes me approximately Massimo is his cappotential to take plenty of facts and by some means make clear it".

14)   Alvin Lustig

Alvin Lustig is the King of ebook cowl layout. Pastel colours that offset stunning typography thread in the course of his paintings, and he become properly conscious that withinside the first 1/2 of the 20th century – pretty early days for photo Design - he becomes on the sunrise of an enterprise approximately to boom. "The simple distinction among the photo fashion dressmaker and the painter or sculptor," he writes in his essay titled Graphic Design, "is his look for the 'public' as opposed to the 'private' image."

Conveying literature via photo layout become a knack Lustig had right down to a T, and the use of the image in the course of his paintings is a tenancy that designers can be encouraged through for a long time to come.

15)   Max Miedinger

Born in Zurich in 1910, Max Miedinger created one of the maximum broadly used typefaces in photo layout history; Helvetica. The font is so ingrained inside our day by day lives that few even recognize its ubiquity. Miedinger has likely designed the arena's handiest typeface to have a function duration documentary made approximately it. The international first has Eduard Hoffman to thank, who commissioned Miedinger to layout the sans-serif typeface, which becomes named Helvetica now no longer till 1960.

16)   Armin Hoffman

Originally a lithographer, Hoffman quickly has become one of the maximum famed theorists in the back of photo layout that ever lived. A robust present-day of area and shape body cultural and social troubles that helped power the "Swiss Style" motion. Designers Journal claimed that without Hoffman, contemporary-day photo layout could be unrecognizable. "The clarity and cleanliness of the fashion in addition to its uneven layouts, use of a grids and sans-serif typefaces have helped outline how we layout today."

17)   Max Bill

Maybe one of the maximum uncommon designers we've visible, Max Bill added his specific fashion to paintings, architecture, sculpture in addition to photo layout. Colourful geometric styles are utilized in his poster paintings which contributed to the Swiss Style again. Attention to detail, progressive kind and production of format had been the constructing blocks of the 30's Swiss motion and redefined our attitudes to photo layout.

18)   Anton Stankowski

Famous German-born photo fashion dressmaker Anton Stankowski become at the start a church decorator, who later has become one of the first photo artists to create a Theory on Graphic Design. Not handiest did he create emblems for large organizations inclusive of the Deutsche Bank, however his cautiously calculated structural layout stimulated a brand new manner of thinking.

19)   Wally Olins and 20) Micael Wolff

During the 1960s, Wally Olins and Michael Wolff fashioned one of the maximum pioneering layout studios the United Kingdom had ever visible. Wolff Olins become the maximum regarded industrial branding organization in Britain. They used the globalization of businesses as a foundation to shape their branding, and his ardour for cultivating the accept as true with of manufacturers shines via his paintings. "Brands and branding are the maximum great contributions that trade has ever made to famous culture" Olins boasts in his ebook Wally Olins on Brand, and their efforts to craft success manufacturers from BT to London itself, that humans go back to time and time again.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Artists Embrace the Grayscale

Left: Michelle Grabner, “Untitled” (2017); foreground: Mona Hatoum, “Pom Pom City” (2002); right: Mickalene Thomas, “Hair Portrait #20” (2014) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Wexner Center for the Arts is one of those buildings that seems to betray a desire on the part of its creators to force a consideration of the space along with everything on display within it. Largely rejecting the conventional layout of closed-off cubes, the building hosts a string of galleries that feature high-vaulted ceilings, acute angles, and odd segues facilitated by little interior staircases. Running the length of these galleries is a sloping sort of gangway that gradually brings the visitor into the largest exhibition spaces and, combined with glassed-in ceiling and window walls, rather gives one the feeling of being on a cruise ship — especially on an appropriately dark and stormy night like the one that witnessed the opening of Gray Matters, the maiden voyage of newly appointed Senior Curator Michael Goodson.

Goodson chose a simple formal conceit for Gray Matters: It is a group show featuring 37 artists working almost exclusively in shades of gray. Considering that the show was both a rigorous exercise in finding balance among so many monochrome visions, as well as an introduction-by-fire to the unusual gallery spaces newly under his purview, Goodson turned out a dazzling exhibition.

Carmen Winant, “The Answer Is Matriarchy (2016), installation view

The aesthetics of this show are nearly flawless, with works in wildly disparate media and from very different creators creating extremely satisfying conversations. A long table features ceramicist Arlene Shechet’s stunning 2003 work “Building,” a meditation on the events of September 11th that led the artist to cast a series of vessels in an ash-coated mold, with the inevitable variation in their tone creating a grayscale. The eye follows this work to where it dead-ends into a diptych by Suzanne McLelland, “Rank (Billionaires)” (2017), which seems to float in midair on its invisible mounts. So painterly is Shechet’s touch, and so textural McLelland’s painting, that the transition between the two feels utterly seamless.

Foreground: Arlene Shechet, “Building” (2003); background: Suzanne McClelland, “Rank (Billionaires)” (2017)

A trio of artists fill another gallery with indecipherable language. Commissioned specially for this exhibition, Xaviera Simmons’s site-specific “Rupture” (2017) dominates an entire wall with the text of a political treatise attempting to raise the question of reparations due to African Americans, with the word “rupture” inserted into the text. The floor-to-ceiling wall of words is nigh unreadable, as is the content of the adjacent works by Bethany Collins that bookend Simmons’s installation. On one side, “A Pattern or Practice” (2015) invisibly renders the language of the US Department of Justice report on the police shooting of Michael Brown, using a blind embossing technique; on the other, “Southern Review, 1985 (Special Edition)” (2014–15) uses dense fields of black charcoal to redact sections from a special issue of the eponymous literary journal, which consciously featured African American writers. Directly facing Simmons’s piece is Amalia Pica’s “(un)heard” (2016), an entire wall of meticulously mounted “noisemaking objects of protest” that have been literally whitewashed and plastered into silence — thus completing the collection of obstructed and suppressed viewpoints.

Amalia Pica, “(un)heard” (2016), installation view

Left: Xaviera Simmons, “Rupture” (2017); right: Bethany Collins, “Southern Review, 1985 (Special Edition)” (2014–15)

Perhaps by now you’ve noticed an additional element of Gray Matters that I’ve intentionally downplayed: Every one of the 37 participating artists is female. It would be a particularly insidious non-compliment to say that it might never occur to the viewer that they were looking at an all-female show; I will say, instead, that it is refreshing to see an all-female lineup in a context that does not feel the need to dramatically emphasize the gender of its participants. Aside from one video work, Mary Reid Kelley’s “This Is Offal” (2015–16), which is tucked away in its own screening room, there are no bodies on display in Gray Matter. This is a show full of incredibly serious ideas, and as a woman prone to having serious ideas of my own, I was extremely moved to experience a show that connected with my internal reality rather than forcing the focus, as always, to the considerations of my bodily form. As Gray Matters handily demonstrates, the life of women is often lived in the mind.

Mary Reid Kelley, “This Is Offal” (2015–16), still capture from HD video

These are merely a few of many strong moments and powerhouse contributors in this show — others include “Totality” (2016) by Katie Paterson, a vertigo-inducing (but nonetheless irresistible) disco ball constructed from the photo negatives of all known footage of eclipses, thrown, in a whirl of reflected lights, onto the walls of a small gallery; “Hair Portrait #20” (2014), an entire wall of Lauryn Hill rendered in grayscale rhinestones by Mickalene Thomas; and the jaw-dropping “Drawing” (2005) by Nancy Rubins, a wall-mounted paper form layered so densely with pencil graphite as to make it almost indistinguishable from a chaotically crushed sheet of lead. Goodson did not pull any punches with his lineup, and neither did the show’s contributors.

Amy Sillman, “100 from The Bathtub Drawings” (2015)

One senses that the senior curator also has a sly penchant for double entendre, and perhaps the exhibition’s title refers just as much to the mental life of these artists as to their chosen palette. While Goodson may be inclined to blur black and white in his definitions — and even to break a couple of his own rules, allowing the orange-hot filament center of the 1964 Vija Celmins painting “Heater” to glow its own way — he’s drawn an extremely bold line with his debut at the Wexner. Gray Matters is full of formal delights, aesthetic acrobatics, and a well-balanced monochrome bouquet of incredible artists.

Gray Matters continues at the Wexner Center for the Arts (1871 North High Street, Columbus) through July 30.

The post Artists Embrace the Grayscale appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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