Nancy Chen

"The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country. I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas-from a huge tree to a tiny snail."

Lovely plein air painting session and catch-up with Leslie yesterday 🤗 (at Humboldt Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQGbVD5D5ep/?utm_medium=tumblr

Via Stuart Davis: a catalog raisonné

Via MoMA: Schwitters pasted and hammered objects onto what appears to be an earlier oil painting, its moody greens and blues still partly visible. The reworking testifies to a conceptual shift: from the work of art as picture to the work of art as surface for the accumulation of matter.

“I set up my easel in front of this piece of water which adorns my garden with its coolness; it is only 200 meters around and its image aroused in you the idea of the infinite...as in microcosm, the existence of the elements and the instability of the university which transforms itself, every moment, before our eyes.” –Claude Monet, who spent the last three decades of his career painting his garden at Giverny

“I wanted to make music that wouldn't be for the ears. Music isn't just what you hear or what you listen to, but everything that happens.” –George Brecht

A postcard showing Lorado Taft’s Fountain of the Great Lakes, 1907-13, originally installed along the Art Institute of Chicago’s South Terrace. The sculpture was commissioned by the B.F. Ferguson Fund, established to beautify the parks and boulevards of Chicago.

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

His style developed between two continents and two wars, is as insistently remote from the Synthetic Cubism that was his starting point as it is from the American Action-Painting that surrounds him today.

From William Hazlitt, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England, London, Taylor & Hessey, 1824, pp. 2–6. -- as cited in Carol Duncan’s Civilizing Rituals, p.15

Eva Hesse - Sketches of sculptures in Richard Serra’s Guggenheim exhibition, 1969

Art Institute of Chicago - Clarence Buckingham Collection 1928.925

Capital with hell-beasts. Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne (photo by James Austin, via “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art” by Michael Camille)

Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make