17 March 2020
Often we’re too busy to notice the view right in front of us. One of my students, when I asked about what they missed being away from home, softly described the view of the city at night from his bedroom window in what he called ‘the projects where I live.’
“At night,” he said, “the lights go on forever, and every light, I think, is a soul.”
Make art about seeing the world through your window.
5 April 2019
” I learned my body like a blind child”–Darcy Cummings
Surgery on my eyes when I was a child resulted in my spending significant time without my vision. In the later years of her life, my mother went blind. The experience taught us both surprising things.
Make art about blindness, about being blind, about turning a blind eye, about what can be learned in the dark.
13 April 2017
Make art about vision, about what you see, or are unable to see.
Happy National Poetry Month! My daughter and I agree that her beautiful baby boy has my mother’s eyes. Oh those eyes ❤
Eyes:
by William Matthews
the only parts of the body the same
size at birth as they’ll always be.
“That’s why all babies are beautiful,”
Thurber used to say as he grew
blind—not dark, he’d go on
to explain, but floating in a pale
light always, a kind of candlelit
murk from a sourceless light.
He needed dark to see:
for a while he drew on black
paper with white pastel chalk
but it grew worse. Light bored
into his eyes but where did it go?
Into a sea of phosphenes,
along the wet fuse of some dead
nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t
be found. I’ve used up
three guesses, all of them
right. It’s like scuba diving, going down
into the black cone-tip that dives
farther than I can, though I dive
closer all the time.
Make art about eyes, about what eyes might see, or who we see in a loved one’s eyes.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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