#new to public art

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[hinamie]

self-indulgent sukuna sheet

[geometrical-legume]

as a person new to tumblr, and technically new to posting my art PUBLICALLY, its very very exciting to see even the smallest amounts of interaction! I love you all!!!

[bunnieswithknives]

AU based off Nature except I kept thinking about it too hard. Dales not a good dad, but its such an easy problem for him to throw money at, and what do you do when a part is damaged? Well, you replace it.

Basically an AU where Dev gets to experience medical trauma and realizes much sooner how much his dad doesn't love him

[ping-ski]

hihi!! i got the COOLEST opportunity to be a spot artist for @LMKFanzine aka Megapolis Mania! and guess what? LEFTOVER SALES ARE OPEN NOW!

run along now and go check it out! we all worked super hard on it <3 https://lmkfanzine.bigcartel.com

[rocketbirdie]

fateful encounter

[benevolenterrancy]

you can even respect women now! exciting!

[queenoffoliage]

Your honor, he was indeed spinning

[deoidesign]

Doing master studies the only way I know how: Stealing them and making them my guys.

(Barberini Faun)

(The Fallen Angel - Alexandre Cabanel)

(Covent Garden - William Bruce Ellis Rankin)

[garadinervi]

Jacquelyn Strycker, Arrival, (collage of risograph prints on handmade Japanese paper and sewing), 2023 [© Jacquelyn Strycker]

Group Exhibition: Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Present, Curated by Madeleine Viljoen (Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection), The New York Public Library, New York, NY, September 7, 2024 – January 12, 2025

[stardestroyer81]

It finally happened— Pizza Tower is releasing on the Nintendo Switch today!!! I knew I had to whip up a little something to celebrate, so have this drawing of Peppino and The Noise... on the go! 🍕✨

[archiveofaffinities]

Ronald Bladen, "Vroom-Shhh" 60' high steel, 1974, SOM, Marine Midland Center Headquarters for Marine Midland Banks Inc. Plaza, Buffalo, New York, 1974

[shakooo]

YIPEEE HERE IS WHAT IS PROMISED (well, half of what was promised, since on monday i will upload the other 3 remaining pages ;D/ i wanted to upload it ALL at once, but better this way, i hope you like it

ihaven't done a comic with color in a while, and well, making this was an excuse to draw backgrounds and MORE BACKGROUNDS JSKSJS im very new to this but making this mini comic was fun!!!

anyway, this mini comic arose from a drawing i made in my english class, i rrreally liked that i ended up extending it until it ended up being what it is JAKAJAJA

Spanish version!!

[akimbo-akimbo-akimbo]

rode boston metro for the first time in while.

the red line was good, i rode it for 20-30 minutes in and out of boston. we only had to stop for couple minutes to let another train out the station.

the green line was less good. we came to multiple complete multi minute stops during my ride from two almost consecutive stops (there was only one stop in the middle)

although, for all my bitching, the green line wasn't terrible. the wood paneling and the fact that is two feet off the station floor gave it some charm.

in all, you did okay, mbta. would (and probably will) ride again.

[beescake]

Sorry for the spam (^o^;) I just really like your blog

no need to apologize ayy!

in this corner we welcome all forms of enjoyment, regardless of whether you're a

happy to have yall here w me,

headin into homestuck 2024 :^)

[lionofchaeronea]

Illustration by William Heath Robinson of Thumbelina, facing page 64 of Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, London: Constable, 1913. Now in the New York Public Library.