Art
Five Essential Books to Enliven Your Art Library – Cultured Magazine
Faith Ringgold: American People
They’ve made the Faith Ringgold book we’ve all been waiting for: the one with the artist’s paintings and quilts rendered at a generous scale for your viewing pleasure. It also includes a new essay by Lucy Lippard; a guide to Ringgold’s “French Collection” series by the artist’s daughter, Michele Wallace; hot takes by young artists and a 1985 Black American Literature Forum excerpt from Amiri Baraka. Baraka’s words from 1985 still ring true through Ringgold’s decades of work to be shown in the upcoming New Museum retrospective: “This is why figurative, realistic, expressionistic work, such as Faith’s, whose approach and theme is critical realist (the real and its willed change), is opposed by the rulers of the society (the shapers of the “aesthetic”) because it reveals too much of the actuality of this pace, the terror of its relationships.”
What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle
MoMA PS1’s recent retrospective was just an appetizer for Niki de Saint Phalle fans. 2021 saw one other major exhibition and the publication of two new books including “What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined,” a biography put together by Nicole Rudick from the late artist’s textual works, letters and drawings. There are clues here that function as first-person testimonial only can like this tidbit on Saint Phalle’s “Shooting Painting” series: “We took turns shooting. It was an amazing feeling shooting at painting and watching it transform itself into a new beginning. It was not only EXCITING and SEXY, but TRAGIC—as though one were witnessing birth and a death at the same moment.”
Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001
Howie Chen did more with the pandemic than most. He used it as an excuse to charter a self-directed residency dedicated to anthologizing, through first-person interviews and pavement-pounding research, the history of Godzilla, the first Pan-Asian political and arts organization on the East Coast and a seminal collective within New York’s 1990s arts scene and beyond. Chen’s findings are not exhausted in Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001 but adumbrated into a digestible timeline of activities and achievements that scratches the surface of what we have not yet learned to appreciate about the revolutionary collective. To this end, in the preface, Chen already promises a part two about the members but for now asks you to enjoy all the goodies included within, from to-do lists and flyers to articles and actions.
The Clearing by JJJJJerome Ellis
Very few poetry books can hold their own as a visual specimen but The Clearing by JJJJJerome Ellis makes the leap with ease. Wrapped in an unplaceable blue paper cover, this lyrical paperback submerges its reader in an infinity of music and stutters where the letter J is no longer just a sound, but a bird on the page or a floret of a dandelion. Accompanied by an LP, The Clearing reveals how a pause can be as significant and expansive as our words. Or as Claudia Rankine blurts on the back: “Ellis’s metaphor of the clearing becomes a place of possibility and momentary transitory, glimpsed liberation. He invited us to meet him there.”
Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015
You may not be familiar with the work of Judith Joy Ross but the photographer’s eponymous coffee table survey with Aperture opens the floodgates into a lifetime of portraiture and truth seeking. Ross once said of her work that it was trying to “know something about somebody.” Moving from the congressmen and women who set Vietnam to action to Cleveland public school children, the photographer has not only traversed the country but the opacity of power structures and their bureaucracies. The book, which is organized by series, showcases the expansiveness of Ross’s effortless lens while the essays give context to how these images came to be and the work it took to make them real.
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A trio plays a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy as a dozen people settle in for an intimate open mic night inside Derrick McCandless and Dawn Mills’s cozy spot off highways 6 and 68 in Manitoba’s Interlake.
Strings of antique-style light bulbs cast a soft glow over the mandolin, banjo and dobro guitar that hang on a wall behind the band. An array of pottery shaped in-house by Mills dots the shelves behind the audience.
The Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop is full of tchotchkes — like an Elvis Presley Boulevard street sign and vintage Orange Crush ad — that create the rustic country-living vibe the couple dreamt up before buying and transforming the vacant space over the past three years.
“I have met so many people in this community through them that I probably wouldn’t have … because of this hub,” says Mills’s cousin Dana-Jo Burdett.
Mills and McCandless are bringing people together in their rural community in more ways than one — though a return to Mills’s hometown wasn’t always in the cards.
The couple met in Winnipeg in 2011 while McCandless was playing a party at Mills’s cousin’s place. They had plans to settle in the Okanagan in McCandless’s home province of B.C. until he suffered a health scare. After that, they decided to head back to the Prairies.
WATCH | McCandless and Mills channel creative spirit into Eriksdale community:
Dawn Mills and Derrick McCandless host the RogerKimLee Music Festival in the Manitoba Interlake community of Eriksdale. They also turned a long-vacant space in town into a live music venue, instrument repair and sales store, and pottery and framing services shop.
It was the height of the pandemic in fall 2020 when the pair relocated to Eriksdale, about 130 km northwest of Winnipeg. They bought the old Big Al’s shop, once a local sharpening business that was sitting vacant.
“He was an icon in the community. He was a school teacher. He did a drama program here,” said Mills. “He brought a lot to the town.”
The building has become their own personal playground and live-in studio.
“It keeps evolving and we keep changing it and every room has to serve multi-function,” says Mills. “It’s a meeting place.”
While they love the quiet life of their community, they’re also a busy couple.
McCandless is a multi-instrumentalist with a former career in the Armed Forces that took him all over. Now, he’s a shop teacher in Ashern who sells and fixes instruments out of the music shop.
WATCH | McCandless plays an original song:
Derrick McCandless plays one of his original songs on acoustic guitar at the Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop in March 2024.
Mills helped found Stoneware Gallery in 1978 — the longest running pottery collective in Canada. She offers professional framing services and sells pottery creations that she throws in-studio.
They put on open mic nights and host a summer concert series on a stage next door they built together themselves. They’re trying to start up a musicians memorial park in Eriksdale too.
One of their bigger labours of love is in honour of McCandless’s good friends Roger Leonard Young, David Kim Russell and Tony “Leon” — or Lee — Oreniuk. All died within months of each other in 2020-2021.
“That was a heart-wrenching year,” McCandless says.
They channeled their grief into something good for the community and started the RogerKimLee Music Festival.
Friends from Winnipeg and the Interlake helped them put on a weekend of “lovely music, lovely food, lovely companionship” as a sort of heart-felt send off, said Mills.
That weekend it poured rain. Festival-goers ended up in soggy dog piles on the floor of the music shop to dry out while Mills and McCandless cooked them sausages and eggs to warm up.
“It was just a great weekend,” says McCandless. “At the end of that, that Sunday, we just said that’s it, we got to do this.”
Mills says the homey community spirit on display during that inaugural year is what the couple has been trying to “encourage in people getting together” ever since.
The festival has grown to include a makers’ market, car show, kids activities, workshops, camping, beer gardens, good food and live music.
This summer, Manitoba acts The Solutions, Sweet Alibi and The JD Edwards Band are on the lineup Aug. 16-18.
Burdett has been a part of the growth, helping with branding, social media and marketing. McCandless and Mills’s habit of bringing people together has also rubbed off on Burdett.
“There’s more of my people out here than I thought, and I am very grateful for that,” says Burdett.
Their efforts to breathe new artistic life into Eriksdale caught the attention of their local MLA.
“The response from family and friend and community has been outstanding,” Derek Johnston (Interlake-Gimli) said during question period at the Manitoba Legislature in March.
“The RogerKimLee Music Festival believes music to be a powerful force for positive social change.”
Dolly Lindell, who has lived in Eriksdale for about three decades, said the couple is adding something valuable that wasn’t quite there before.
“There’s a lot of people that we didn’t even know had musical talent and aspirations and this has definitely helped bring it out,” Lindell says from the audience as McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie wrap their rendition of Take it Easy.
McCandless, 61, said there was a time in his youth where he dreamed of a becoming a folk music star. Now his musical ambitions have changed. He’s focused on using that part of himself to bring people together.
“I think it’s that gift that I was given that that needs to be shared,” he says. “I don’t think I could live without sharing it.”
WATCH | Trio plays song at Eriksdale music shop:
Derrick McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie play a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy at McCandless and Dawn Mills’s music shop in Eriksdale in March 2024.
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- Duration 4:42
Joel Jamensky’s sunny disposition explains why the artist with Down syndrome uses the name ‘J-positive’ for his online art business, started with the help of his parents two years ago. “There’s a lot more going on in [Joel’s] art than may be at first glance – just like him,” said his dad, Mark.
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Made Right Here: Woodworking art CTV News Kitchener
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