16 April 2019
“I have so many words–“chink” words and :gook” words, too–that they do not fit on my skin.” — from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Make art about the words you have, the words imprinted on your skin.
18 February 2019
Geographer Otto Schlüter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an academic term in the early 20th century. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (transl. original landscape) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (transl. ‘cultural landscape’) a landscape created by human culture. The major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.
It was Carl O. Sauer, a human geographer, who was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes. Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. His classic definition of a ‘cultural landscape’ reads as follows:
“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.”
A 2006 academic review of the combined efforts of the World Heritage Committee, multiple specialists around the world, and nations to update and apply the concept of ‘cultural landscapes’, observed and concluded that:
“Although the concept of landscape has been unhooked for some time from its original art associations … there is still a dominant view of landscapes as an inscribed surface, akin to a map or a text, from which cultural meaning and social forms can simply be read.”
Make art about a cultural landscape, on reading cultural meaning in the shaping of land.
13 January 2018
Thinking a lot about the ancestors, about how my DNA report reads like a mini United Nations, about the courage and desperation and desire they must have felt, possessed, to leave their homelands, from eleven different regions of the globe, leaving all they knew, for all kinds of reasons, some forced and others willing, escaping starvation, violence, but all without any idea of what lay before them.
Did they all know they would never go home again? What will it must have taken to survive. Do I carry that same strength of will? Do I honor what it took, what they went through. with my own life? A life I owe them?
Make art about who dances in your blood.
12 January 2018
“Muscle memory has been used synonymously with motor learning, which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems….”-Wikipedia
Make art about what your hands remember.
21 September 2017
Make art about redefining what home means.
22 September 2017
Make art about building or tearing down fences.
23 September 2017
Make art about the power of repetition.
24 September 2017
Make art about genetic memory.
25 September 2017
Make art about your last encounter with an angel.
26 September 2017
Make art about dissent.
27 September 2017
Make art about healing touch.
28 September 2017
Make art about that neighbor.
29 September 2017
Make art about responding to hate with unity and grace.
30 September 2017
Make art about what’s present in the absence.
1 October 2017
Make art about stepping away.
Prompt Love Catch-Up!
6 July 2017
Make art about packing for a trip, what to leave in, what to leave out.
7 July 2017
Make art about arrivals, about arriving.
8 July 2017
Make art about reunion of souls.
9 July 2017
Liminal: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
Make art about liminal space.
10 July 2017
Make art about light and dark, about the juxtaposition of light to dark, about how we need one to know the other. (with love to Mesha Maren ❤ )
11 July 2017
Make art about moving past obstacles (with love to Rahul Mehta ❤ )
12 July 2017
Make art about a whisper, or a howl (with love to Kim Dana Kupperman ❤ )
13 July 2017
Make art about relocating in our own bodies (with love to Jon Corcoran ❤ )
14 July 2017
Make art about the amalgamous nature of memory, of how sometimes the amalgam is more true. (With love to Eric Waggoner ❤ )
15 July 2017
Make art about point of view, about deliberately shifting point of view (with love to Rodney Jones ❤ )
16 July 2017
Make art about departures.
17 July 2017
Make art about driving alone, about that silence in the cocoon of the car.
20 March 2017
A recurring dream plays a significant role in the novel I just started.
Make art about what you dream again and again.
17 December 2016
One of my undergrad degrees is in Anthropology, and the gift of that, the ability to view ‘us’ through the detailed and complex lens I learned from my amazing professors in that field still, every day, shapes the way I move through the world.
I first discovered Anthropology in the library as a child, those trips we made to get books every weekend with my mama, and one of the things I first loved about the anthropology books I found was that, in those books, I found women–not as subjects (although that fascinated me too)–but as the authors, as the experts: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Jane Goodall. They were who I imagined myself to be as I “excavated’ arrrowheads and shark teeth from the plowed up tobacco field beside the trailer park where I lived as a child.
_____________
“It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.”
―Jane Goodall, British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”~Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist and author
“I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself, and one for the world.”~ Ruth Benedict, American anthropologist and folklorist
Make art inspired by anthropology, by an anthropological discovery.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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