The vibe is decidedly 1960s-inspired, with orange and red themes and vintage-style mushroom lamps creating a warm, nostalgic glow. The space is intimate. Maybe eight seats at the bar, around forty-five total. We were tucked away in what I called a “make out booth,” a darling little nook with curtains you could draw for total privacy, but we restrained ourselves.

This New York outpost is the work of Mr. Lyan (Ryan Chetiyawardana), one of the most highly-revered mixologists in the world. His bars in London, Amsterdam, and Washington, D.C. have helped redefine modern cocktail culture, with a focus on experimentation, sustainability, and flavor over spectacle.

Mr. Lyan’s philosophy here centers on “planting seeds” by sharing creative ideas and flavor profiles across the globe. The menu itself is a testament to this rigor, even featuring a graph to track the transition of drinks from light to heavy, allowing guests to navigate the menu with academic precision.

Pro-tip for the over 40 crowd: The menu features fascinating, tiny print detailing the bar’s philosophy. Unless you share my specific brand of nearsightedness, you’ll definitely want to bring your readers.

One thing that sets Seed Library apart is how they bridge the gap between spirits and sobriety, replicating many complex flavors in non-alcoholic, mocktail versions. These aren’t juice concoctions, they are truly crafted beverages, treated as a parallel track, not an afterthought.

Dan and I both started with the S&P Spritz, mine with Grey Goose and bubbles and his, a mocktail. The interplay of yellow bell pepper set off the strawberry beautifully to create an herbaceous, dry profile. It reminded us of a dinner at Next, years ago, where Dan’s strawberry-infused white tea emulated the “backbone” of my pinot noir with startling accuracy.

This mirroring of flavor profiles reflects Mr. Lyan’s magic. His work tends to push ingredients in unfamiliar directions, often using techniques like fermentation or enzymatic treatment to change how flavors behave.

Recommended by our server, my next drink was the Shepard’s Delight, a punchy mix of gin, Maker’s Mark, Concord grape, and raspberry. Less boozy than it sounds, I found both of my drinks to be very balanced—not heavy-handed.

For those with dietary restrictions: while the menu labels some drinks “not veg,” anything listed as “cream” is the real deal, so I steered clear of those.

Dan’s second beverage was the Pear + Apple Tonic. It was delicious and beautifully garnished, though the rectangular artisanal ice cube was so massive it might have been better to have a bit less ice and more sips of the actual beverage.

The service is as charming as the decor. I spent half the night accidentally bumping into the framed seeds hanging in our booth every time I turned to speak to our server, Edgar. He took it in stride, eventually handing us a business card at the end of the evening. Of course it was orange and bore a witty, handwritten plea: “Thank you for joining us friends! Don’t knock over the seeds, please.”

It’s a thoughtful spot that proves great drinks, with or without the booze, just might be about the layers you plant in the glass.

But Madison Square Park serves consistent exceptions

The Art Exhibitions by the Madison Square Park Conservancy are the consistent exceptions— a revolving set of innovative installations we love.

Here’s a great NYT primer on the groundbreaking exhibitions of the park created by former curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport.

Since 2013, Rapaport has tapped 22 artists, including Maya Lin, Teresita Fernández, Erwin Redl, Abigail DeVille and Rose B. Simpson, to create ambitious projects in the 6.2-acre oasis rung by skyscrapers and traversed by some 60,000 visitors a day. Martin Puryear’s 40-foot-high sculpture “Big Bling,” presented in 2016, was the springboard to the artist’s solo exhibition in 2019 at the Venice Biennale for the U.S. Pavilion. That Pavilion, organized by Rapaport, brought international prominence to the conservancy as the commissioning institution.

We wrote about My Neighbor’s Garden, Sheila Pepe, Madison Square Park, December 2023 (full photo album) and I’ve documented a number of other exhibits.

Larry Bell: “Improvisations in the Park”

The current show, ending this month, but still there, is Larry Bell: “Improvisations in the Park”. We visited last week— here’s full documentation.

Shahzia Sikander: Havah...to breathe, air, life

Cristina Iglesias: Landscape and Memory

Hugh Hayden: Brier Patch

Brier Patch, Hugh Hayden, Madison Square Park,March 2022

Maya Lin: Ghost Forest

Ghost Forest, Maya Lin, Madison Square Park, 2021

A glorious city park has many spaces

The dog park is sublime

Yet we long for the days of the temporary dog park, which was chaotic and glorious

They also have programs and tours, like this on set for tomorrow at noon: Madison Square Park: The Gilded Age, Before, & Beyond. I assume they’ll cover Two Titans of the Gilded Age, Entwined in Art and Life and their Admiral David Glasgow Farragut statue. Here’s a description:

Join Executive Director Holly Leicht to explore the colorful history of Madison Square Park and its surrounding neighborhood. From pre-colonial times to today, the park has been at the center of social, cultural and political happenings in New York City. Look forward to tidbits about local figures, fun facts and light exercise as we journey to the past throughout the park.

As intended, the setting is theatrical. Upon entering a dimly lit space, a recording from the Met’s new production, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, provides the soundtrack. This opera marks the debut of American composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera (at the Met no less). Conceived as a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the libretto is by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

A maquette of the set is brightly lit in the dim setting, to draw you to it. That lighting theme is carried out throughout the small exhibit, but is reserved for Kahlo’s work, not Rivera’s, which is a not-so-subtle way of calling more attention to her work. In fairness, there are far fewer pieces of Kahlo’s in the exhibit than Rivera’s—which seems to be more a function of the number of pieces of each artist’s work that is held in the MoMA permanent collection.

The artworks themselves are “backstage” in the exhibit, perhaps showing us how the art itself influenced the artists involved in El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego. You pass through curtains to see the innerworkings of the opera, with a wooden structure—like the framing of a set—with art mounted on it.

The installation is an interpretation built around the performance. The opera’s premise centers on Rivera near the end of his life, summoning Kahlo back from the dead on the Day of the Dead.

Backstage, there is a replica of the tree from the maquette, but this time, life-sized with a mirror overhead. The tree of life and we are reflected in it? Music from Frank’s score continues throughout, moving between the worlds of the living, the dead, and art itself.

The lighting is deliberate. Kahlo’s paintings have far more concentrated light. Nearly glowing, like they are lit from within, closer to stage lighting than standard gallery lighting. Kahlo fans will approve of the way her work outshines her husband’s.

There are paintings by Rivera, but also many of his drawings, some studies for his larger works. I find there is something far more direct about the drawings. Finished works carry presence, but drawings show the process.

At times, the small exhibit works well, at others it feels overly controlled. Very unsubtly, it tells you how to look, and how to understand the relationship between the work, the people and the performance.

Then the fire alarm went off. As we all moved out of the space, whatever sense of immersion evaporated.

Less about individual works and more about how those works are framed, Frida and Diego: The Last Dream places painting, set design, and performance into the same system and asks you to experience them together.

A marketer’s dream.

We never met, he never knew I existed, and yet he was critical to my formation as a poet and as a man. The way he wrote, the choices he made, and the way he thought were the ways I wanted to write, wanted to be, wanted to think.

My modified anonymous template

As we say in AA, I wanted what John F, Burns had, and for the last 30+ years, much of who I am was built on the template I deduced from reading him.

I optimized that template starting in 1993 for the life of a minor poet/ playwright who just wanted to build my family tree, tell the truth as I saw it, and try to be one of those who will survive in America.

His obituary, written by longtime colleague Alan Cowell, summarizes:

In his writing, Mr. Burns displayed a deft ability to capture the sweep of history along with the telling detail of the present. A 1992 article, for instance, began with a description of a cellist, Vedran Smailovic, playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor under artillery fire in the ruined streets of Sarajevo, the besieged capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to commemorate the city’s dead.

The article went on to take note of the city’s cosmopolitan history, dating to its founding in the 15th century. By 1992, Mr. Burns wrote, it was “a wasteland of blasted mosques, churches and museums; of fire-gutted office towers, hotels and sports stadiums, and of hospitals, music schools and libraries punctured by rockets, mortars and artillery shells.”

His paragraphs were my stanzas. His hammers were my stage props. His steel eyes propped mine open wide. My poetry books, the Documenters program, my archive practice, our definitions of Arte Agora— all informed by holding the New York Times in my hands over decades.

Injured Child Flow to London

Many of the poems published in my 1995 book, Memo To All Employees, were direct daily responses to John F. Burns news articles. Here’s our discourse on Irma Hadžimuratović.

Read the wikipedia page about the incident and you see that the hammer Burns brought down in his last paragraph— always the hammer— tells you the truth:

United Nations officials here had defended their handling of Irma’s case. They said that careful vetting of each application for medical evacuation was essential in a city where more than 50,000 people had been wounded.

Archive is Life

In the early 2000s I copy/pasted hundreds of articles out of the paid NYT archive into a Blogger blog so as to spread his gospel freely. I spent a lot of time keeping up with search trends and maintained this archive until the NYT changed their hyperlink policy.

John F. Burns: The best writer in American newspapers.

This is an archive of links to John F. Burns articles on the New York Times website. These links (click on the title of any article) do not require registration on the NYT site and are impervious to linkrot. If you are interested in obtaining the complete text of John F. Burns articles going back over the last couple of years, send an email noting the nature of your request (fair use, personal consumption, etc.) and I’ll see if the text is available.

Mooring

So goodbye to the last living person from my formational pantehon of poets, along with Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka. And now I feel unmoored. There’s no reason for this—I know—it’s silly to have traced so much of my life on his. I will re-steady, stay with me, forward.

Addendum / more

Integrity & John F. Burns: post upon his retirement

John F. Burns and Iraqi KPIs: worlds collide.

Deaths from Natural Causes: an op-ed by Zlatko Dizdarevic during the Siege of Sarajevo, the subject of so stories filed by John F. Burns

Bosnia Girl’s Life Hangs on Procedural Tangle: story containing the photo of Irma that kicked off Injured Child Flown to London

British Fly to Bosnian Girl’s Rescue: article on the fateful flight

Bosnian Serbs Overrun Town Protected by U.N.: the initial article, written by Chris Hedges, portending the coming Massacre of Srebrenica,

John F. Burns Reporting on the Imposition of Martial Law in Poland, December 1981 – June 1982: In 2008 got an email from a student at the University of Warsaw looking for his reporting from Poland after the imposition of martial law there in 1981. So I dug up the stories out of TimesSelect and copy/ pasted them to her.

We are art critics and collectors. Today, we are here to talk to you about Arte Agora—that is, art that is made, sold or placed in the public way. And since this art is put in the public way—a term of art I learned while doing a project for the CTA—it is by nature, a discussion about art you will find in any area of density.

Arte Agora is a specific intersection of three separate disciplines: outsider art, street art and commercial art. Many practitioners of Arte Agora are not “trained” artists, so are definitionally, outsider artists. It’s street art, because the art is placed out in the street. This form of art is also often created outside or out in public. And it’s commercial in that many Arte Agora artists sell their art, outside or in public places.

The main point that can trip people up about Arte Agora is that it does not include murals. To qualify as Arte Agora, the piece must be removable intact, which definitionally disqualifies murals.

When artists are making art in the public way, they don’t have infrastructure. The typist desk and typewriters below don’t count as infrastructure because those are tools essential to creating poetry on the street, just as pens and paper are for those who draw.

Selling art in public is a key component of Arte Agora. Below the late Lajuana Lampkins in a booth at Dimo’s on the left with a lot of inventory to sell on a Saturday night. Lajuana creating outside of Dimo’s during the pandemic. Lajuana followed in the footsteps of Lee Godie, who sold her work on the steps of the Art Institute.

We think that Peace Prophet is one of—if not the—best Arte Agora artist working in Chicago today. Below are two pieces of the approximately 250 pieces we have purchased from her. The one on the right, is a collage of Walgreen receipts for her hair, and McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers for her dress. I bought this on our 5th wedding anniversary. And while you may not be able to see it, the collaged woman even has a tiny teardrop blue nose ring.

Below are two pieces we bought from an artist who sells his art near an on-ramp in San Francisco. He uses odd pieces of cardboard and house paint to create his work.

Arte Agora is not all “fine art.” It includes an array of styles, including stickers, or slaps. I snapped these photos last fall during the Midway blitz and they showcase the opinion of many Chicagoans about the activity of ICE.

Below are stickers, some hand drawn and some printed, but all are on 228s—which is the name of the form for Priority Mail stickers from the U.S. Postal Service. The availability of 228s is the greatest government arts program since the WPA. Many artists rely on these because they are free (up to 10,000) and already have built-in adhesive for slapping outside.

But Arte Agora is not all stickers. There are artists who create and wheat paste their work outside. Ojitos is a Chicago-based artist in the Pilsen area who paints a variety of female-oriented characters and wheat pastes them outside.

Arte Agora can take the form of objects too. These constructed objects (below from his Instagram) are all by the artist Rick Farrell. Not trained as an artist, Rick formerly worked in sales. He creates all of his objects from found detritus that he gathers from his travels around the world. Metal items and the color red play an important role in his practice.

Even artists who are represented by and sell their art through galleries, put their work outside. Pizza in the Rain, or PITR is one such artist. While he has not received formal training, you can see that he has tremendous talent (below). Note the gallery tag that he put in the lower right—treating this outdoor installation the same way you would for one that was hung in a gallery or museum.

And then there is the collaboration and communion among artists. The artist Morning Do (center below) takes unofficial collaboration to an extreme and very successful level. She creates art—using photos of herself—that mimic and pick up things from an already existing piece of Arte Agora. The blue face by Tom Billings has been super imposed on her photo and hung just below the original. Morning Do also almost always creates a fairly elaborate frame out of cardboard, to set off her photos. Like PITR, she too deploys gallery tags for her work that she puts outside.

In the image below are the artists Penny Pinch above and T Money lower. They have gone out together “bombing” (wheat pasting) together. For this installation they’ve used existing fashion imagery and made it their own by adding their characters. By putting these pieces up together perhaps they are making a commentary on consumerism.

Below is a sticker smash in Mauer Park in Berlin on a public grill, a piece of public infrastructure. One artist, xz_one, whose work is further above on a 228, collects stickers from sticker artists around the world, and creates these sticker smashes to showcase them. We got to help him put this one up.

In addition to the thousands of artists who place their work outside, some artists have art drops. In these instances, the artists specifically want people to take it. Often they use social media to alert their followers to a drop. Left to right IHeartUSticker, Free Little Art Gallery (similar to a free little library but with art) and TC5 all invite the public to take home their work.

And finally, the city government of Chicago is also free to act in the public way. They act by covering Arte Agora with a brown paint called Wind Tan. In our opinion, it’s clear that the art was far more attractive than this muddy brown, but we are all actors in the public way.

I was hooked and captivated by Butler’s work when I first saw her exhibition “Portraits” at the Art Institute Chicago in 2021. The works were huge. Sometimes ten feet tall. Intricate portraits created from fabric, stitching together history and the present.

Butler works from historical photographs; many pulled from archives like the Library of Congress. Some of the images are well-known, even famous, but many are anonymous.

She described the experience of enlarging these photographs to the size of the finished quilt and living with them for months while she works. “Some of those photos are just sitting there like glass negatives in a stack somewhere with dust on them. They deserve better than that.”

Butler is pulling people out of the archive and putting them back into the world.

One of the interesting things about Butler’s process is that she always begins by sketching on top of a black-and-white photograph. Which means she invents all of the color.

Fabric choices become a kind of interpretive act, something close to emotional speculation. What kind of energy did this person have? What story might they carry?

She described one portrait of a young pregnant woman whose life she didn’t know much about. As she worked on the piece, Butler added sparrows as highlights, to reference the gospel hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

Her explanation was simple: “I wanted to deliberately put a blessing on her.”

Butler and her husband John, who is a DJ, share a studio. While she works on her portraits, he is nearby, working on his music. John tracks down original recordings sampled by hip-hop artists. Butler is interested in that source material, because—while she loves hip hop—she wants to fully appreciate the depth, the rhythm, and the feeling underneath both tracks.

That idea of the original underneath the remix feels like a strangely perfect metaphor for her work. The photograph is the sample. Her quilt is the deeper track. Thousands of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Her artistic process is the kind of slow, repetitive labor historically associated with domestic life, but in Butler’s skilled hands and imagination, the work becomes a monumental “painting.”

Butler is a towering talent. Her huge, radiant fabric portraits are the stuff of art history. They go beyond scale and technical skill.

What Bisa Butler creates is a feeling. The feeling that the people depicted in her quilts are present again, pulled forward from the past and given the grace and dignity that they deserve.

Here’s a look at the art outside:

There’s the basic slap culture

What we did find was a compelling piece that had the kind of deliberate collage-making sensibility that rises above pure tagging.

This ghost bike installation caught our attention — SL and I haven’t typically included ghost bikes in our Arte Agora taxonomy, since they serve that commemorative function.

But it’s included because this one was accompanied by what appeared to be textile art: yarn and fabric work applied directly to the installation. Layered on top of that was graffiti indicating opposition to motor vehicles.

The wooden pole itself also had set of baseball cards stapled on it, and this installation seemed much older than the bike installation itself.

There was a neighborhood well that deserves its own category entirely. It’s not removable intact, so it doesn’t qualify as Arte Agora in the strictest sense — it’s permanent civic infrastructure. But it was decorated with a series of stories told in ceramic tile, each tile depicting notable people from the neighborhood’s history. It’s the kind of thing that suggests a real curatorial effort, a public commitment to memory and place.

The Little Free Library we encountered was decorated with slaps and offered masks — another modest form of public care and decoration.

Every city needs at least one Shepard Fairey slap, and Tempe delivered.

Arte Agora is everywhere.

The exhibition makes clear that beyond his “wild” architecture, Goff was also a painter and composer, deeply interested in modern music. As you move through the galleries, some of his player-piano compositions fill the space. The music is syncopated, slightly jazzy, a little Philip Glass before Philip Glass.

It becomes impossible to separate the buildings from the sound from the drawings. Everything feels like it came from the same internal weather system. And some of the drawings are extraordinary. His rendering for the unbuilt Summer Park Play Tower (below) feels uncannily like Hilma af Klint: mystical, symbolic, almost cosmological.

Wall text notes his influences, including Gustav Klimt, which becomes obvious once you see his ornamental screen (below) layered with patterning.

These aren’t merely architectural documents. They stand on their own as works of art. Even his mimeograph poems feel designed.

Many of the drawings of unrealized projects give a serious Jetsons’ vibe. A 1951 drawing for a journalism building (below) looks like a spaceship. The insistence on roundness intensifies that otherworldly feeling.

The Circle Apartments drawing continues that rocket-like futurist trajectory. A 1961 drawing for the unbuilt Viva Hotel in Las Vegas anticipates a kind of anthropomorphic, almost cartoonish architecture.

And then there are the houses. Some are deeply atmospheric, like the perspective drawing of the Charlotte Gutman house in Gulfport, Mississippi. A pencil rendering (below) that is so evocative it feels cinematic.

Others verge into something else. There’s the turkey farmers’ house, with a roof made of orange outdoor carpeting and plastic turkey inseminators used as decorative elements. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s an object lesson in creative freedom without an internal governor.

Which brings me to the most interesting tension in the show. Part of the issue with some of his later designs is that Goff had so many ideas in his head that he couldn’t edit them into a more distilled form. The buildings get busier. Weirder. Less resolved. Usually far less successful.

He is a case study in imagination versus restraint.

And then there’s the Boston Avenue Church.

Early into the exhibit we had a moment of recognition. Bruce Goff designed the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, OK. When we were in Tulsa in 2018, I remember looking up the architect because the limestone building was such an Art Deco masterpiece, but I did not recall his name, until we saw the drawings.

Goff’s first drawings of the church were made in his early 20s, and he was 25 when the church opened its doors. In my opinion, it is one of the most perfect Art Deco buildings. Monumental and graceful. Fluidly vertical. Perfectly stylized.

Boston Avenue feels like the moment when Goff’s imagination and discipline were perfectly balanced.

Even in later drawings, like his 1957 TeleMovie building (unbuilt) you can still see the Art Deco vernacular peeking through: swooping curves, dramatic open space, a certain sculptural sweep.

Despite being the biggest fan-girl of Boston Avenue Church, not every Goff building “works,” particularly as he got older. Some are goofy. Some feel overthought. Some feel like the product of a brilliant mind unwilling, or unable, to edit itself.

But there is something compelling about an architect who treated every medium — architecture, painting, music, poetry — as part of one continuous artistic practice. Goff reminds us that modernism wasn’t a single clean line. It wasn’t all Mies and restraint. There was also mysticism. Excess. Orbs. Space. Jazz. Turkey farmers with orange carpet roofs.

And occasionally, limestone perfection on a Tulsa street corner.

A Note About the Gallery Itself

It would be disingenuous to not acknowledge something I’ve seen circulating online: claims that the Art Institute of Chicago reconfigured or replaced its African art galleries in order to stage this exhibition. I have not independently verified the specifics of the curatorial decisions or long-term gallery planning, and the museum’s public materials frame Material Worlds as a temporary exhibition within their rotating exhibition spaces. If there is more to understand about the gallery reconfiguration, it deserves transparency and context from the institution.

Despite the dearth of posted Arte Agora in Charlotte, NC, it was amazing to find Tatiana, a practicing Arte Agora artist in that city. If you’re new here, Arte Agora is art made, placed, or sold in the public way and Tatiana makes and sells art in public.

After my initial visual tour of the art in her cart, I was very drawn to this painting (below) and was hoping I could purchase it from her.

I located Tatiana inside a coffee shop adjacent to her cart (with the kind help of another coffee shop denizen), where she sat drawing. I was holding the hand-selected painting when I approached her, and in Russian-inflected English, she asked why I had touched it. I explained that I wanted to buy the painting, but she told me it was priceless, and not for sale.

Two days later, Dan saw her again, and this time, rather than touch any of her work, he simply handed her money and said he would like to buy some of her art. Once again, the art in her cart was off limits, but she gave an address of where to meet her in a couple of hours and said we could pick out something.

Turns out, Tatiana is pretty well known in Charlotte: the young man who pointed her out in the coffee shop; the woman I spoke to after I met Tatiana at her place and selected the two-sided piece above, who said that Tatiana had been living in the neighborhood for nearly 20 years, because she often saw Tatiana when she came to visit her grandmother; and this article Dan found from 2015 in The Charlotte Observer about Tatiana and her art, and how “she gives all of the money from the purchase of her art to the homeless community,” while she herself is unhoused.

On the corner of some public property, she lives in a tent sort of lean-to with an amazing hand-painted tri-fold cardboard “screen” that serves as the door. I did not take photos because that felt far too intrusive on her personal space. But meeting her at her spot, I also then understood why she brings her “priceless” canvases with her as she slowly makes her way through the city of Charlotte.

They go with her, so that she can safeguard them, so that the work she holds most dear is always near.

Let’s start with dining. For the first time this year, the MICHELIN Guide recognized restaurants in the area, and we ate at two: Lang Van and Rada.

Rada also made The New York Times’ list of the best 50 restaurants in America this year. What we ate was sublimely delicious, and SL discovered a wine grape she’d never heard of, Petit Manseng—which was made into a terrific wine from Virginia.

We also hit up La Belle Helene, a sprawling and lovely French bistro, as well as Church and Union, which fascinatingly has a ceiling hand-painted with the full text of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

The city of Charlotte has three art museums, all within view of one another: The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, The Mint Museum (”North Carolina’s First Art Museum”), and The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African- American Arts + Culture. All had some excellent exhibits, and some great pieces in their permanent collections. We’ll do a further deep dive into the art we saw in a later post, but it was great to see such thriving cultural institutions.

It’s worth noting that Dan saw the first “State of the Art” exhibit from the Crystal Bridges Museum at The Mint Museum, which led us to visit Crystal Bridges (and Bentonville, AR) twice, and on that second visit for the second “State of the Art” exhibit, we saw the work of the wildly talented Stacy Lynn Waddell, and added her (Untitled) Two Girls And Love, (see below) to our collection.

Smaller cities, have lots going on, and much to recommend them.

White Eagle in Niles closes after decades as a hub for Polish community and political powerhouses. Snip:

After more than six decades as a cornerstone of local Polish culture and a fixture in national politics, the iconic banquet hall and events center has shut its doors to the public.

The venue hosted a litany of dignitaries and celebrities over the years, from Pope John Paul II to President Jimmy Carter to former Polish President Lech Walesa. Three-time heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was known to have dined there as well.

I thought to myself, “OK those people are cool, but what about Dan Rostenkowski?”

Coming of age in 1980s Chicago, “powerful Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski” was everywhere. He was hauling in federal money for the Chicago Skyway, city bridges, Deep Tunnel, CTA modernization, stabilizing the lakefront— on and on.

Yet he has no public buildings named after him. No parks, no schools, no bridges, no statues, no plaques, no public awards or civic honors visible anywhere in the built environment. Not even a simple brown commemorative street sign near his three-flat compound on Noble and Evergreen streets near St. Stanislaus Kostka.

I saw firsthand the indignities of Rostenkowski in April 2018, when I walked through this home at the estate sale held 8 years after his death. This sad, temporary sign served as a perverse marker:

The sale was surreal. A handmade sign made the kitchen, and its new-fangled 80s stove/ microwave combo, off limits.

I was envious of the groovy dropped ceiling.

I saw personal items like (way too many) golf clubs and a congressional facebook inscribed personally for his wife. It was jarring.

There were the usual things that everyone collected but no descendants want— National Geographic magazines and family china.

I bought a set of artistic depictions of Rostenkowski and headshots no restaurants wanted anymore.

Here he is with his friend Sen. Bob Packwood, who had some issues.

I also picked up this art— what I saw as the key artistic element of apartment— a poster from 1992 marking 30 years of Washington Dulles International Airport, an important place for a commuter Congressperson like him. It was personalized and signed by Joseph Craig English, the artist who made the poster

It reminded me that nothing is permanent, but both infrastructure and ephemera endure.

Born in Jamaica, Pusey immigrated to the U.S. in 1958, initially intent on studying fashion design. But New York had other plans. The churn of construction and the geometry of the city around her attracted her toward abstraction, and she created many profound and intricate architectural compositions.

But over time, Pusey vanished from the art world’s view. Rediscovering her became a kind of curatorial detective story. Hallie Ringle, now chief curator at ICA Philadelphia, began the search years ago when she was an assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Ringle teamed up with Kiki Teshome, a curatorial assistant there, to bring Pusey’s work back into the public spotlight.

While it was known that Pusey left New York for rural Virginia in the late 1980s, other details were scarce. Ringle eventually dug into Virginia court documents and uncovered a 2011 bankruptcy record—an unexpected breadcrumb that helped open the door to rediscovering Pusey’s life and work.

As Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, told The New York Times, exhibiting Pusey now provides a vital encounter with Black abstraction and its many engagements. “She gave herself the opportunity to be incredibly bold in her sensibilities as she sought inspiration in the world around her,” Golden said. “Her work existed in a moment that wasn’t potentially ready for it.”

Well, the world seems more than ready now. Truthfully, photographs don’t do Pusey’s work justice; you need to stand in front of it to appreciate it fully.

The exhibition, Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images closes at ICA Philadelphia today, but you’ll have other chances to see the work of this great abstractionist yourself. The show travels to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2026, and then it will be on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2027.

We went to visit a very dear, longstanding family friend, one of my mom’s sorority sisters—and the bonus was seeing her daughters, whom I haven’t seen since they were tweens who came to help me pack up for college.

We really liked how some of the no-longer-used municipal buildings around City Hall have been turned into luxury hotels. Our visit was before Thanksgiving, so the city was in the process of setting up and opening various holiday markets, which further lent a European flair. There was even a double-decker merry-go-round being assembled.

The dining scene in Philly is great, although we didn’t really take any food photos this time. You’ll just have to take our word for it; you can eat well!

We’ll be doing separate posts about some of the amazing art that we saw, but just know that the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which runs from City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is lined with numerous museums including the Barnes Foundation, the Calder Gardens, and the Rodin Museum. There is also the Institute of Contemporary Art on U Penn’s campus.

One of the biggest draws at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the Rocky statue—or rather, the Rocky statues. When we were there last month, there were actually two. There is one before you ascend the stairs, which is permanent. And at the top of the stairs, where Rocky (in the original 1976 movie) ends a triumphant early morning training run, is another Rocky statue that is apparently owned by Sylvester Stallone himself. Both were very popular for tourists to take photos with, but we demurred.

Don’t you demur, though. Go visit Philadelphia! There is so much to recommend it. You can even do your own early morning training run up the art museum steps—if you want to.

It’s worth mentioning that the exhibit I’m covering today wasn’t even listed on the homepage of PAM website—that’s how chock-a-block full of great things there are to see at this institution.

As part of its Arizona Emerging Artists exhibit, there is an exhibit of the work of Omar Soto (they/them), winner of the 2024 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Award. Soto is also the recipient of the LGBTQIAP+ Photography Grant from the American Photographic Artists (APA).

The photographic tableaux that Soto has created feature saturated color, and our two favorites, appear to be shot in a convenience store. This urban Latinx juxtaposition with religious iconography, including the re-gendering of Jesus in “Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene,” is nothing short of brilliant. In fact, Dan was a gallery ahead of me, and came to get me and said, “This is the best pop art that is currently being made in the U.S.”

For the APA award, Soto was selected from applicants across the country, and the APA news release had this to say:

“Soto is a DACAmented photographer whose surreal imagery explores queer joy and escapism to navigate the marginalization they endure while living at the intersection of race, gender, and social class. Born in Tijuana in 1996, Soto migrated to the United States in 2000 and currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona.”

Soto’s grant submission for the APA award, “Mediums of Hope: Reimagining Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Classical Art,” which covers the exhibit that is featured at the Phoenix Art Museum is—according to the APA news release— “a collaborative photographic project amongst costume designers, makeup and nail artists, hair and clothing stylists, jewelry makers, painters, fabricators, and models to create elaborately staged visual compositions.”

Using iconic works of art history as a jumping off point, Soto’s photographs reimagine these classical works through the lens of QTBIPOC (Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) identities.

“Rooted in the cultural expressions of Mexican and Latinx communities, as well as in music, film, and spiritual symbolism, Mediums of Hope establishes dialogue between classical and contemporary art and challenges the traditional canon in art history by centering queer people, trans people, and people of color.”

What an incredible talent Soto is. Keep your eyes peeled; we can only hope that there is much more to come from this gifted young creator.

We first saw Donahue-Shipp’s work at the McNay Art Museum, in San Antonio, Texas, as part of an exhibit, titled “Sports Gear Becomes Art.” I was very taken by both the concept of “Coach’s Playbook,” as well as the artistic execution. Too often, great conceptual art gets derailed through poor execution, but not here.

Donahue-Shipp’s gallery, Pentimenti had this to say about the series:

“Through the layering of these two simple visuals, Donahue-Shipp reminds us of the complex histories played out in the American legal system. The prints come in various paper colors in reference to the 20th-century American Brown Paper Bag Test.”

Important art; important message.

The same can be said for a one-room exhibit at the Art Institute Chicago (AIC), “Night/Crimes” by Charles Gaines. Gaines originally created this series from 1994 to 1997, where he paired archival photographs of violent crime scenes, victims, and indicted murderers with images of constellations that could have been seen in the night sky when the crimes occurred.

Text printed onto the plexiglass of each artwork lists the location and date of the crime, the constellation’s astronomical position, and a date and time 50 years into the future, a reference to the fact that before computers, star charts were updated every 50 years to account for visible changes in the constellations’ position. Wall text in the exhibit noted that the “50-year span also evokes a human historical awareness: How, and for how long, does violence in the past influence present behavior? As things change, what remains the same?”

For the AIC exhibition, Gaines made two new works for the series which include photographs from the Chicago History Museum’s archives that portray Black men who were wrongfully convicted or acquitted in the city. As with all of the works in the Night/Crimes series, Gaines paired those men’s images with unrelated photographs that depict the aftermath of crimes. “By playing on the viewer’s impulse to assume a connection between the images, Gaines directly addresses how the American criminal justice system perpetuates racial injustice by relying on appearances and cultural biases to construct and confirm guilt.”

These racial biases have undermined justice for far too many people, for far too long.

In his sermon at Washington National Cathedral, just five days before he was murdered, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

We all need to bend much further if real justice is to ever be served.

Aside from the undeniably prolific output of Spanish artist Salvador Dali, who himself joined the Surrealists in 1929, I don’t typically think of artists during the 1960s creating under the Surrealism banner. But, the new “Sixties Surrealism” exhibition at the Whitney argues that “surrealism was in the groundwater of American culture” by the end of the 60s and despite being considered “tasteless or passé, particularly by the New York-centric art world” it “had influenced everything from film and dance to design, fashion, and advertising.”

Turns out, the curators at the Whitney are so right.

Featuring work from more than 100 artists, this brand new exhibit “proposes a radical new view of the decade,” and argues “that surreal tendencies were among the most important forces shaping contemporary art across the United States.” Covering 1958 to 1972, the featured artists “from diverse backgrounds took license from the wildness of the Surrealist imagination to express the psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange, and revolutionary qualities of their time.”

It was nice to see Chicago represented with the inclusion of members of the Hairy Who, an artist collective that mounted unconventional displays of bright, graphic work at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1966-1969. Their work embodied irreverence, spontaneity, and quietly transgressive humor during the distinct rise of counterculture amid a moment of profound national upheaval. We had the good fortune to see five of those six artists at a Chicago Humanities Festival presentation back in 2018.

Aside from shoe-horning a Warhol “Marilyn Monroe” into the show, the rest of the thesis is borne out very successfully throughout the exhibit. Structured around many countercultural themes that challenged the status quo, the exhibit demonstrates that the “cascading social and political changes [happening during that historical time period] affirmed that life, itself, is surreal.”

As art collectors and pet pawrents, we have a number of works that feature Kitteh, our wonderful pup who passed away last week. We had these images made by various artists to celebrate her, and to celebrate our love for her.

We also recently had professional photographs taken of Kitteh and of us with her. The timing could not have been more prescient.

Kitteh O’Neil—aka the Boucher, Kittehcat (July 13, 2011 – September 3, 2025)

Our beautiful, somewhat aloof, fluffernutter Kitteh, crossed the rainbow bridge. She brought immense joy to our home with her big nose, expressive eyes and the softest fur. The Boucher was insistent when she wanted something like her absolute favorite chicken jerky, or to go inside after two minutes on the porch.

She sought out circles of sunlight for napping and loved her family fiercely. We loved her back just as ferociously.

You were our bestest girl, and we will always miss you Kittehcat, but are so grateful for the 14 years we got to have you as part of our family. We hope you are romping and running with many bunny friends in doggie heaven.

I graduated from college smack-dab in the middle of the 1980s, when greed was considered good, big hair reigned, and Art Deco made a huge comeback—both the original stuff from the 1920s (thanks Barbra Streisand) and the reinterpretation of Deco, through the 80s lens.

I worked at the world-class Italian restaurant Spiaggia, which opened in 1984 , and was itself, a paean to Art Deco, filtered through the excess of the 80s—all crushed silk wall panels and mauve velvet banquets. Remember how much mauve we used to see?

Another Italian influence, that could arguably be called a mash-up of Deco and New Wave, was the Memphis movement. It had nothing to do with the city in Tennessee, but was instead a 1980s post-modern Italian design and architecture collective, founded by Ettore Sottsass.

At that time, I was utterly obsessed with Memphis design, and the pages of Metropolitan Home—my design magazine bible of the time—were full of it. That’s why we were so excited to find the poster below, featuring a Memphis collection opening in Chicago in 1984.

At the same shop where we got this Memphis poster, River Otter, we also picked up this fabulous 80s Lucite and lacquer bar cart, that we are using as a table at the top our stairs. And while this piece is from the 1980s, it has the same rounded and simple Deco lines, and on top is an actual Deco black and Lucite letterbox.

“Everything old is new again,” Jonathan Swift wrote. True Mr. Swift; but while I’m enjoying some of this 80s revival, I’m going to skip the big hair this time around.

Around 2022, he began to publicly move away from the medium and explore new forms of art. You can read all about that here in Robert Chiarito’s excellent piece in Chicago Magazine: Steve Walters Has Left His Print.

Recently he reminded me that I took part in a subscription offer that he made around the time that he began making his shift. He typically numbers his work made in editions, and he had set aside #11 for us. So we went to Sunday Art and Rummage to pick them up.

What follows is a quick take on the recent silkscreen art of a legendary silkscreen artist during the time he was moving away from it— documentation of a vibrant artist in flux.

Here’s a precisely-hewn small character suite printed in different colorways. These read like neo-folk, pulp-toy silhouettes filtered through his poster grammar (bold flats, halftone textures).