#joe mcshea

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Courtesy of Ivy Haldeman. Photograph by Joe McShea.

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‘Be Patient’: 10 Artists on How They Overcome Creative Blocks in the Studio

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Flags, Paris 2022. Edgar Mosa & Joe McShea for Loewe.

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Teaching About Trees

Joe Stavish doesn’t need any reflection time to summarize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his work. “The new challenge to me as an outdoor educator is working with students who are watching a screen.” The Associate Director for Community Education at Tree Pittsburgh laments months spent planning and presenting programs in which students never have the opportunity to get their hands dirty. “If you’re limited to showing pictures,” he explains, “the wow factor just isn’t there.”

Joe Stavish holding a hickory leaf in pre-pandemic times.

Tree Pittsburgh is a 15-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration and protection of our region’s urban forest through tree planting and care, education, advocacy, and land conservation. Joe’s role, in the eight years he’s worked for Tree Pittsburgh, is to make sure the organization’s contact with communities it serves are as broad as possible. He kids about “cradle-to-the-grave” points of contact before listing near parallel audience segments, K-12 school classes, scout groups, youth groups, university students, neighborhood groups, adult classes, and garden clubs.

Some of the presentations he is involved with are part of formal programs, such as One Tree Per Child, a school-focused tree-planting initiative, or Explorer’s Guide, a collaborative effort with Pittsburgh’s Park Rangers for 4th and 5th grades that is scheduled to soon expand beyond its initial test audience in the City’s Northside neighborhoods. Other programs can currently be described as situational. “Teachers have been eager to have any type of virtual program we want to present.” Joe concedes in recognition of the ongoing and widespread problems with remote learning.

Although Joe is concerned about the limits of screen learning, I found the videos he directed me to on an Explorer’s Guide website to be very well done. Since 2018 Tree Pittsburgh has been headquartered in a riverside campus in Lawrenceville spacious enough to include what is termed a Heritage Tree Nursery. Much of a short video titled, The Life Cycle of a Tree, was shot in the nursery, a facility at the forefront of urban forestry. I never cried “Wow” while I watched the segment, but I learned a lot.

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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The Artists Behind the Ribbon-Filled Set of Loewe’s Men’s Show

The Artists Behind the Ribbon-Filled Set of Loewe’s Men’s Show

In the summer of 2020, when Americans were cautiously emerging from the first Covid-19 lockdown, the multimedia artists Joe McShea and Edgar Mosa quit New York City for Fire Island, a long strip of land just south of Long Island, and began making flags. McShea started out in photography while Mosa trained as a goldsmith, but the two, now partners in work and in life, have long been preoccupied…

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PETER STATHAS DANCE – ‘LEAVING AND COMING BACK’

(l-r): Mary McGrath, Lauren Twomley, Selina Hack, Emilee Pratt in CONUNDRUM by Peter Stathas

Peter Stathas began dancing in Wisconsin, then attended SUNY Purchase, and performed with the Jose Limon Dance Company and Marta Renzi. And then, he pursued a successful physical therapy career for thirty years in the Milwaukee area, and rediscovered his interest in choreographing in 2016. He presented an evening of dances at Danspace, June 20-23. Casting dancers from SUNY Purchase and The Limón Company, Stathas showed four dances, spanning from 1985 to the present. 

His work lies squarely in the Limón esthetic of interpretive modern dance, and as such, it is earnest and carefully constructed but somehow feels very much of an earlier era. The opening dance, for example, “5 Studies for a Waiter and a Businesswoman” (1985), is just what its title describes. Andrew McShea (waiter) presents himself at the start, doing a series of maneuvers, balancing his tray on an outstretched hand. He’s joined by Lauren Twomley (businesswoman) in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. 

They do simultaneous solos on opposite sides of the space in rectangles of Kryssy Wright’s resourceful lighting. Then they interact and arm in arm do a little hop/skip phrase back and forth across the space several times, purposely falling out of unison until finally they jibe, merging their disparate characters into one. When the movement isn’t pantomimic, it involves breathy attitude turns and a lot of forward and backward somersaults. The sections feel unfinished, lacking punchlines to drive home their intention. The score is a collage of interesting musical selections by Penguin Café, Harmonic Necklace, Pythagoras Trousers, and others. 

“Assuage” is a 2018 dramatic duet, danced to an excerpt from Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa,” which at first supports but soon overwhelms the emotions in the movement. Stathas created the dance during a workshop with Doug Varone.  Jesse Obremski and Twomley – both current Limon Dance members – perform it with skill and passion; their tussle for power shifts between them until in the end, Twomley leaves Obremski alone, effectively winning the battle, as the lights fade. 

Barefooted, wearing a suit and tie, and carrying an old-fashioned suitcase, Joe Fransee – a strong, sturdy dancer – virtually pantomimes a recorded text by Stathas, a reminiscence about his grandfather, interspersed with Erik Satie’s delicately sparse “Piéces Froids.” Since the movement illustrates the text without really transcending its literal meaning, the work, “Saturday Mornings,” is a rather sentimental essay.

(l-r): Lauren Twomley and Selina Hack in CONUNDRUM by Peter Stathas

Finally, the New York premiere of “Conundrum” is a four-part piece, set to the  Brahms “String Quartet #1 in C Minor, Opus 5.” In the Friday performance, the solo was danced by Twomley, (who alternated performances with Selina Hack) the duet by her and Selina Hack, the trio adds Mary McGrath, and in the quartet,  Emilee Pratt joins them. 

Selina Hack in CONUNDRUM by Peter Stathas

Costumer Leslie Vaglica dresses the dancers in white, flowing pants and variations of a midriff top. The piece is lyrical in style, driven by the music. The iteration of movement palette we’ve already seen – tumbles, swooping turns, gestural motifs – and a pervasive dynamic evenness, unanchored by character or narrative and unmodulated by stillness or tempo change, make you begin to wish Brahms’s music had either been excerpted or more concise. 

(l-r): Selina Hack, Emilee Pratt, Mary McGrath, Lauren Twomley in CONUNDRUM by Peter Stathas

photos by Josh Pacheco

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