Research Notes

the first line of some essays in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020) by Olivia Laing (because my own writing isn’t going well): In the spring of 1982, a rumour started swilling around New York. (about Jean-Michel Basquiat) Art must derive from inspiration, Agnes Martin said, and yet for…

Charlotte Posenenske, German, 1930-1985. Charlotte Posenenske, German, 1930-1985. Charlotte Posenenske, German, 1930-1985. Posenenske concluded that art was inadequate as a tool to effect social change. Her choice of materials, form, and presentation was directly related to her interest in the rights of factory workers and their autonomy. Once she decided…

agnes martin (1912-2004), a STRONG and DETERMINED woman*… abstract, minimalist painter, contemporary of Jackson Pollock opposed the cult of personality but at the same time facilitated the same nearly became an Olympic swimmer training to be a teacher up until her 40s encountered art through the teacher training programs starts…

Linger outside Renzullo’s long enough and you’ll hear people chirping…“Hi Franco!”, “Bye Franco!” multiple times. There’s something different going on here and it rubs off on people…in a good way, a really good way. Having a place you can hang out, where you can go just about anytime, leave anytime,…

Danish researcher Meik Wiking, and founder of the world’s first Happiness Research Institute in Denmark, states in The Art of Making Memories (Penguin, 2019) that “If we have encoded and stored information or [sic] an event, we have the opportunity to recall or retrieve it. A memory is only a…

that’s Laurie Parsons. Reflection and associations through a bulleted list. emerged in the 80s doesn’t make anything walks in natural and urban areas where she collects found objects lives with the objects in her studio exhibits those objects do objects have a presence? Field of Rubble, 1988: covers the floor…

hedonic = (adj.) relating to or considered in terms of pleasant (or unpleasant) sensations.–Oxford dictionary online. InThe How of Happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want (2007), Sonja Lyubomirsky relays strategies for improving happiness backed by scientific research, some of which is her own. Lyubomirsky’s area of…

Habits and routines can bring comfort and a sense of ease to being because we don’t have to think about doing something, we just do that something without expanding brain energy. No questioning, only action. So it was that when I was in Oaxaca in 2017 I decided I would…

There is a term that sociologists use to describe the unspoken social contract that occurs in many different cultures: civil inattention.* It describes how we behave as pedestrians and in public spaces to maintain personal distance, physical or emotional, at any given moment; depending on one’s mood, one might switch…

I read somewhere that the comedian Jerry Seinfeld kept a year wall calendar where he would cross out each day when he wrote a joke. The idea was to have a visual reminder that became a motivator to not break the chain of crosses. I found myself doing the same…

1 2 3