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Lulu White worked with Juanita Craft, who we profiled yesterday.

Lulu Belle Madison White was born in 1900 in Elmo, Texas. She graduated from Prairie View College in 1928 and then taught school.

Meyers Metallic Trainer

Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’

Pinterest didn’t create this urge to use visual evocations for little pleasure jolts; in fact, its success lies precisely in being behind the curve. The site’s co-founder, Ben Silbermann, has said that in creating the site, he was just picking up on something people were already doing — i.e., collecting beautiful things and using them as a way to express who they are to the world — and making it easier for them to do it. What the company provides is a clean, well-lighted place to collect found images and share them with others. In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.

Silbermann suggests that collecting online is a form of self-expression for people who don’t create. “If you walk around Brooklyn and ask people how they express themselves,” he said in a speech at New York University, “everyone’s a musician or an artist or a filmmaker. But most of us aren’t that interesting. Most of us are just consumers of that. And when we collect things and when we share those collections with people, that’s how we show who we are in the world.”

Not everyone buys into this, of course. Here’s The Awl’s co-editor, Choire Sicha, for instance, on the subject of rebloggers who fancy themselves curators: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it… .” To which a commenter added: “My Tumblr isn’t so much curated space as it is a symptom of deeper pathologies made manifest.”

‘Curators’ Defend Their Ownership of the Term and Vilify the Plebeians of Tumblr 

Erica Schwiegershausen of The New York Observer got in touch and gave me the heads-up on a panel discussion about the term and profession of the ‘Curator’. It’s an interesting read:

In his introduction to the subject at hand, Mr. Altman noted that the word “curation” has come to be thrown around “more often than a ping pong ball at a fraternity house,” alluding somewhat disdainfully to a dissemination of “curation” to the masses, a phenomenon which he would later attribute to the Internet.  He questioned: “Is the new definition of curation, like, ‘I assemble things on my Tumblr and then I put them up for the world?’ Is that why we don’t want to be called curators?”

Ms. Popova—who, over the course of an hour managed to quote Tchaikovsky, Jack White, Jonah Lehrer and Cicero, among others—proceeded to invoke the latter, citing his belief that if a word didn’t exist it was because “it had permeated society so much and was so ubiquitous that the word was unnecessary.”

“I think that’s what’s beginning to happen with the word ‘curation,’” Ms. Popova continued. “We apply it so much that it’s become vacant of meaning.”

I’ll let you read how the panel collectively vilify Tumblr, but it wasn’t without it’s defender:

Mr. Altman became the only panelist to remove himself from the communal vilifying of Tumblr. “The Internet has obviously democratized the ability to be your own curator,” he acknowledged, conceding that though this comes with “a lot of annoying things,” you don’t need a PhD to be a philosopher. 

You can read the whole piece here

Curator’s Choice Winner: Irina Rozovsky, Untitled (from In Plain Air, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 2011)

The Women’s Committee Of The Philadelphia Museum of Art Announces the Six Winners of the 2012 Photography Portfolio Competition. The winners include:

Noah Addis

George Awde

Hiroyo Kaneko

Isadora Kosofsky

Nadia Sablin

Shen Wei

Curator’s Choice Winner: Irina Rozovsky