Ridley Howard

Not from the vault- but under appreciated: SAUL FLETCHER

Sebastiaan Bremer

Link to interview with Fred Tomaselli
(Check it out, Joseph- he's your kin)

http://flavorwire.com/42644/beyond-the-drugs-exploring-the-work-of-artist-fred-tomaselli

from the the painting vault: Alma Thomas-1891-1978

Watusi

cherry blossom
skylight
From New Georgia Encyclopedia

"Alma Thomas (1891-1978)

A prominent abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s, Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solo art exhibition

Alma Thomas

at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in 1971.

Born in Columbus on September 22, 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was the eldest daughter of John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a dress designer. Alma Thomas showed artistic tendencies as a child when she used local clays to make homemade puppets and sculptures. Her home life was a constant changing environment of cultural activities, as her parents arranged for various lecturers and speakers to make presentations there.

Despite this rich atmosphere of culture, the prevalent social ills of racism and a poor education system for African Americans caused the Thomas family to worry about the future of their family in Georgia. In 1907 the Thomas family moved to Washington, D.C., where they settled in a house that Alma would occupy for the next seventy-one years and that remains in the Thomas family to this day.

In high school Thomas excelled at math and architectural drawing. After graduation she enrolled

Air View of a Spring Nursery, 1966

at Miner Normal School, where she studied kindergarten education and received a teaching certificate. After teaching art for several years, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., to study costume design. She graduated in 1924 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts, becoming the first Howard University student and perhaps the first African American woman anywhere to hold that degree.

After a long and distinguished career as a teacher, Thomas retired in 1960 to focus her energies entirely on her own art. During her professional career she had remained active and visible in Washington's growing art community, and in the late 1950s she developed the confidence and knowledge to pursue the highly colored abstract style for which she is known. Her close relationships with fellow artists Gene Davis, Jacob Kainen, and Morris Louis of the

Untitled (Music Series), 1978

Washington Color Painters, whose works emphasized abstract color shapes, assured her acceptance in this circle. Thomas's work was included in the important show Contemporary Black Artists in America, held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Thomas died in Washington, D.C., in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Three years later a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. In 1998 the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana organized a retrospective exhibition of her paintings that traveled to Columbus. Today her work can be found in many major museums.

The Columbus Museum holds an important collection of Thomas's paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and marionettes, as well as a significant archive of her papers. The Smithsonian American Art Museum also has an archive of her paintings and family papers. "

Suggested Reading

Merry A. Foresta, A Life in Art: Alma Thomas, 1891-1978 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).

Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998).

Info on 4th annual David Lynch Weekend in Fairfield, IA Nov 13-16

http://dlf.tv/2009/4th-annual-david-lynch-weekend/

The Fixers Collective

Re: Artists Groups:

Check this out--very cool.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/garden/08seen.html?ref=garden

From the Painting Vault- Nick Krushenick

	Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was one of the forerunners of the pop art movement. Krushenick began showing his work publicly in New York in 1957, at the age of 28. By 1962, his work was shown at upscale galleries and, by the year 2000, was part of major permanent collections throughout New York and the United States Born in New York City in 1929, Krushenick served in World War II, then studied art upon his return to home life. He attended the Art Students League of New York (1948–1950) and the Hans Hofmann School Of Art (1950-1951). He and brother John Krushenick opened an artists' cooperative called the Brata Gallery in the late fifties. In 1969, Krushenick gave up his soft brush abstract expressionist technique for bolder colours and lines similar to illustration, yet maintaining use of abstract figurative forms. This style marked him as one of the original practitioners of pop art. In his later years, Krushenick taught at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1977 to 1991. He died in New York on February 5, 1999, at age 69.

Up and Running

After Wedding Fun, here is a review of Eagleton's new book.

After Theory
by Terry Eagleton
225pp, Allen Lane, £18.99

Being at once a leader and a rebel is a good trick. Mrs Thatcher managed it brilliantly, speaking as if she were a dissident in the government of which she was in fact head. The ordinary fudges of political life took place despite her. Terry Eagleton has always done something similar, a soi-disant intellectual outsider who was once the country's "top" literary professor. When he was Warton professor of English at Oxford he styled himself "a barbarian inside the citadel". (Now he is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, the self-image is a little less defensive.) Travel the campuses of Britain, however, and you will find that for many he is the orthodoxy. His Literary Theory: An Introduction , a punchy synopsis of other writers' ideas first published 20 years ago, must be the best-selling work of lit crit ever.

Characteristically, this book for students of literature argued that there was no such thing as literature and that literary criticism was but a conservative political ideology: "Departments of literature in higher education are part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state." The arrival of literary theory from France was broadly welcome, for it crushed with its rigour the effete mutterings of bourgeois humanism. Yet while he was theory's ambassador, he always managed to signal his own distance from it. Literary Theory ended with what became his signature declaration of the hidden significance of politics in intellectual life (hidden from most theory buffs, too).

Now here he is again, calling us away from the herd. In a prefatory note he declares that his new book "argues against what I take to be a current orthdoxy". Other early theory enthusiasts have, in effect, recanted. Eagleton leaves no room for the admission of his own involvement in error or folly. Theory has gone astray, but not because it has encouraged academic obscurantism and grim reductiveness. It is because it has not been political enough. So, as a "radical", Eagleton is necessarily out of step with even the intellectual fashions for which he once seemed cheerleader. "It is not pleasant to be out of line," he says, contentedly.

He senses that the campus campaign against traditional lit crit has been won. Nowadays "quietly-spoken, middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies". Hooray! But no, the postmodernism that has made deviancy the norm has disengaged us from political conflicts. There is no hypocritical respectability to rail or rebel against. He rather misses the "old-fashioned bourgeois values" that underpinned "liberal humanist" approaches to reading and teaching. At least the battle lines were clear.

He is caught between two attitudes to the academic business. On the one hand, he rather wants to laugh at all those earnest undergraduates (and lecturers) attaching the same arguments about sexual transgression to whatever they are studying. Here he speaks in a voice familiar from his literary journalism, a wry commentator on academic habits. "Students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert, but all that has been transformed. Nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on Friends." He is jokey, roguish, strictly jaundiced. He is still in love with the supposedly comic similes and illustrations that were such an odd part of his style in his memoir The Gatekeeper.

He is always good for a laugh at the habits of academics, and there are plenty of side-swipes here at crusty dons. Indeed, he still depends a good deal on his convenient fiction of what "traditional" critics are like. They study flower-imagery in Tennyson or emote about Keats. "The belle-lettristic gentlemen who ran the critical show some decades ago" are his adored opponents. "Conservative critics" turn up frequently as a type, always spouting simple-minded pieties. You wonder if he has ever met an intelligent antagonist.

At an imagined distance from the currents of intellectual fashion, he effortlessly encapsulates decades and sums up intellectual movements with the droll wisdom of hindsight. Yet, for all his reflections on academic self-delusion, never has there been a critic so rooted in academic habits. He credits academia as the source of intellectual progress and preserver of values. He flatters his students with being subversive idealists, who study arts subjects because they are "morally conscientious". He believes that "the grey-bearded guardians of the state" have always been "rattled" by those who study only for the delight of it.

For there is also Marxist Terry, who sees the duty of intellectuals to be revealing the depredations of capitalism. In this voice he speaks solemnly of the shortcomings of "cultural theory". We inhabit "a social order which urgently needs repair" and we are told that "theory must be harnessed to practical political ends". Yet it is not quite clear what he thinks is to be done. How is the study of culture to effect the revolutionary changes he dimly sketches? He talks about "fashioning a world in which the hungry could be fed", but takes it for granted that this is not something that would ever concern those professionally involved in politics or commerce. He is superciliously dismissive of all politicians. He likes to use the word "democratic" about what he likes, "the whole idea of cultural theory is a democratic one", and so on. Yet his only word for the state in which we live is "capitalist".

This will sound like the Terry of old, yet the truth is that he is tiring of the revolutionary rhetoric. In the latter part of this book, he starts deviating from stern Marxism. He has been reading Aristotle, bits of the Bible and the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre. He wrangles with those who deny that there is any such thing as human nature. He begins audaciously to bruit the notions that there is an objective reality and that morality is not just ideology. You can imagine the news spreading through the seminar rooms. He ends up musing amiably about what is wrong with fundamentalism and why thinking about our mortality is salutary. The old rogue begins to sound quite human.

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London.