Art to Keep You Warm

Circling Homework #18

I had been planning, since my latest visit to my favorite crappy museum, to write a more longform exploration of the tradition of folk art and what it means to place myself within it. This week as I write this, my brain does not feel quite equipped for, shall we say, RIGOROUS ANALYSIS, dazed I am with sadness, with worry for my loved ones whom our nation does not value.

But still I am thinking, as always, about making art in the world. 

By chance last weekend, I was reading Olivia Laing’s essay collection called Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, which compiles reflections on mostly queer, marginalized, or ill artists and the place of their work in recent decades. In retrospect, I’m glad to have entered this week grounded in awareness of my elders who have continued to make their art through grief, through illness, through oppression and disenfranchisement and loss. Making things not because it is easy or profitable, but because it is part of being human. Because we would be lost without it. Because it is the only way we know how to live.

I am attracted, perpetually, more to the daily-ness of artmaking than to the fulcrums of success. I think often of an exhibit of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe that Lynnette and I saw years ago, which incorporated not only the artist’s visual work but also personal effects and clothes, some of which she made herself (❤️).