Art and Museums
Ferida Wolff's Backyard Discovers A Museum Tree
Ferida Wolff Writes: "Sometimes trees reach their life span and start losing their leaves, eventually remaining as just a trunk with bare branches. Most of the time they will be chopped by the township and no one will know that they had once been providing beauty and shade and nesting places for local birds. So it was quite the surprise when I came upon the trunk of a dead tree that was artfully transformed!" more »
Berkeley Talks: Jessica Morse On How We Can Live With Fire
“And so, I dedicated then my time and energy, as well as many of you have, too, trying to solve and answer that question... I joined the Newsom administration. The governor on day one, he declared an emergency on these fires so that we could start investing in the prevention work." Jessica Morse, the deputy secretary for forest and wildland resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency, discusses the current wildfire crisis in California and how we got here, strategies the state is implementing and lessons they’ve learned in order to decrease catastrophic wildfires and create more resilient forests. more »
Sheila Pepe, Textile Artist: My Neighbor’s Garden .... In Madison Square Park, NYC
"The artist’s mother taught her to crochet in the 1960s. Pepe discovered women artists working in America who were a generation or two older and associated with the feminist art movement — Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Nancy Spero — as a crucible to launch her sculptural investigations. Those women responded to the fury of the Vietnam War and became agents of activism for Pepe who overturned hoary assumptions by responding to gender, identity, and civil rights. She also questioned the materiality in sculpture, so closely linked to gender. Pepe radicalized the grandmotherly constitution of crochet into a paradigm of feminist action." more »
Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library
Julia Sneden Wrote: My mind’s eye can still see the face of the Children’s Librarian, although I have long since forgotten her name. We will be wise to continue to back up our knowledge of history and literature and art and science with hard copy. She kept up with my reading level, suggesting writers and books that she thought I might enjoy, feeding my curiosity and interests. I believe that curiosity is genetically programmed into every child. The first way a child explores the world is through direct, sensory experience. Later on, the mastery of spoken language (oh, those questions!) provides information, but ultimately, it is learning how to read that opens a child’s mind to the endless possibilities of a world of literature and science and history and human thought." more »