Harvard Art Museums and Robin Wall Kimmer’s Book
Auspice, Sandra Allen, Graphite on white wove paper https://harvardartmuseums.org/
Many Indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land, they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land. –Robin Wall Kimmerer,Braiding Sweetgrass
Dressed in Holiday Style
Dressed in Holiday Style
Visitors squeezed past a family
gathered around a child who held
a holiday diorama in her hands.
When a string of lemon lights
let go in the jostle, the huddle
of faces turned to watch lemon
drops tick off shoes to vinyl tiles.
A teacher appeared, picked up
a candy and told how her student
skipped recess to glue glitter;
scoured for days to find frosted pines,
colored balls, silver tinsel, foil-
wrapped presents, candy canes,
and fur-trimmed elves in red knit
caps and black boots; skipped lunch
one day to hang Deck the Halls;
came in early another day to place
reindeer hooves securely in cotton
snow, to trim the edges with plastic
holly sprigs, make it all ring.
Babylon, 2023
Winter Solstice
Late Autumn
The white of an apple,
turned out into air,
is the thin-place of fall.
Children can taste it
on wind off the lake.
Lawns iced over lively
with winter, refracted
in splinters of silver,
signal refinement
of fruit flesh and seeds
into fire for the firs
and gold for her hair.
This Will Be a Sign, 2020
Advent Blue
Advent-four Sundays before Christmas-has an ancient and uncertain origin, meaning that it has a natural and spiritual origin. No historical event to pin it onto, no proclamation by a church authority, Advent is month of weeks set apart for hope and preparation. The color of the season is blue, the color of the sky, and Mary’s color.
Advent does not resist commercial Christmas, it just happens to coincide with it
Childhood and Nature, Winslow Homer at the MFA
Of Light and Air is the title of the Winslow Homer (1836-1910) exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1885 the MFA bought a Homer painting. Today the museum holds 50 Homer watercolors and 11 Homer oil paintings. The short film accompanying the current show is a visit to Homer’s studio in Scarborough, Maine for a discussion of the painter’s watercolors and his habit of painting outdoors.
A contemporary poet wrote, “What is childhood but a stranger who won’t go away.”
Homer was a painter of childhood as much as he was a painter of nature. Childhood is the life-season of nature. Water, air, and the environments of earth are all “familiar” to children. When they learn biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy they acquire invented vocabularies to describe what they see, and they lose their friends, out there, outdoors.
Homer’s children are models of mindfulness. They don’t need to be told how to meditate. The earth’s air, water, light and land, in their natural variations, are companions and instructors for them.
November by William Cullen Bryant 1794-1878
November
Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o’er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o’er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.
-William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
California is a Poem
For California is a Poem! …It chants from her snow-crested, cloud-bannered mountain-ranges; it hymns thro’ her forests of sky-reaching pine and sequoia; it ripples in her flowered and fruited valleys; it thunders from her fountains pouring, as it were, from the very waters above the firmament; it anthems from the deeps of the mightiest ocean of the world; and echoes ever in the syllables of her own strangely beautiful name, California. -Ina Coolbrith 1841-1928 (from a label in the Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco)
…the grandeur of its silence, the gravity with which it seems to turn away from the viewer toward some horizon of contemplation… John Updike 1932-2009
Audaciously simple, Rodin injects a single clenched hand with a primordial, other worldy power…[he] was keenly attuned to the expressive potential of hands, and here he reduced that potential to its elements. -Legion of Honor
On What Stays With You Through Life
In her poem “Why I’m Thankful” Nikki Giovanni 1923-2024 wrote I’m thankful/ Grandmother took me/ to Sunday School/ Now when I’m lonely/ I have songs to sing. Near the end of that poem is a recap of good instructions from elders that stayed with her until the end of her life: I go to school/ Clean my room/ Be nice to people.
By going to school, Giovanni means learning, reading. Being nice to people seemed to come easily to Giovanni. She had a fierce spirit and sparkling soul. She wrote about the books that were given to her when she was young, and how much she loved bookstores and libraries: Libraries are the universities of the people. I loved going into the wood-floored green-lighted room where Index cards awaited. There was a world in those cards and I could pick any one of them I chose.
J. M. W. Turner at the Yale Center for British Art
Recently renovated the Yale Center for British Art has the largest collection of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) in North America.
The first truly “modern” artist… J. M. W. Turner was a radical innovator and a stringent upholder of tradition who strove to emulate his greatest predecessors. His visions of nature at its most sublime were filled with everyday human details. He was both an idealist and a shrewd businessman; a progressive and a pessimist; a patriot who extolled Britain’s growing imperial and industrial power while insisting on the futility of worldly hopes. It is this creative tension between romance and reality that this exhibition sets out to reveal. -from the displayed introduction to the exhibition
Turner’s skies approached nearer to the representation of the infinity of Nature than all that have gone before him. -Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886)
Loneliness in American Art at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
Making History: 200 Years of American Art is a compact presentation of paintings on loan in Salem from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Though not a stated or widely noted theme of the exhibit, throughout are images of loneliness, a feature of the American character. America is a nation of immigrants, people from other lands. The American territory is massive, with miles of lonely rural and wild places.
In the July 7 & 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker there is an essay by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, the last line of which reflects the interior landscape of a dedicated artist.
Perhaps this loneliness is the essential fuel for any committed artist. That, and the fear that if we don’t put our suffering to use creatively, it will destroy us. -Ottessa Moshfegh
Artists are at home in environments of loneliness. Perhaps for American artists it’s a special kind of lonely.
Harbors of Heaven 