weekend links: Miriam Schapiro, Whiting Awards, Poetry Rx
A piece from Surface/Depth: The Decorative after Miriam Schapiro. Photo by Jenna Bascom. Image courtesy The Museum of Arts and Design.
In many galleries, you may come across pieces that bend the line between craft and art, specifically pieces that include fabric and decoration. For that, we can thank artists like the late Miriam Schapiro. Contrary to the more masculine Minimalist movement, Schapiro created art with rhinestones, flowers, and fabrics that you would see on quilts and carpets. Her impact continues to resonate in the proliferation of such work today. [Artsy]
There’s a new wave of photography sweeping the Houston art world. FLATS, a pop-up photography exhibition series, introduces a new way to look at photography—one that takes place in homes. The unconventional style of gallery is in place to promote the idea of living and creating in Houston. Here, we learn how the organization’s creators and their unorthodox background led to an idea that is breathing new life into Houston’s photography scene. [Arts and Culture TX]
At the George Washington Carver Museum, an exhibit will be showcasing the many protests spearheaded by minority communities in Austin in the past two decades. While primarily focused on the ’70s and ’80s, the exhibit provides a reminder of how police brutality, civil rights, and gentrification are issues we still struggle with today. [Austin Chronicle]
Widely celebrated author Anita Shreve, who often wrote about Maine and its coast, died Thursday at her home in New Hampshire at 71. Here, we learn more about her remarkable life and how her summers in Maine inspired “The Stars are Fire,” a novel that centers on wildfires in the region in 1947. [Press Herald]
Roxane Gay provides an opinion piece about the widely talked about reboot of Roseanne that aired this week. Gay discusses the show’s groundbreaking original run, while comparing it to its reincarnation, pointing out the importance of the issues the show tackles while also criticizing the incessant romanticization of the white working class. [The New York Times]
There’s an interesting fascination occurring lately with rappers that have controversial backgrounds. Both 6ix9ine and XXXTentacion have been accused of domestic abuse (the former with a child), yet they still have flourishing careers. Here, rap’s fixation on problematic figures is explored more, discussing how manipulation, through lyrics and otherwise, can lead to star power. [DJ Booth]
The future of Chicago’s poetry scene is black women, and the Breakbeat Poets is their scripture. Just three years ago, Haymarket Books took a chance on a new school poetry book that highlights poetry in the age of hip hop, and now poets like Jamila Woods, Eve Ewing, and Fatimah Asghar are telling the story of thousands of women that are underrepresented in mainstream culture. Here, we learn about five Chicago poets and how they’re changing the literary landscape while also repping their beloved city. [Chicago Magazine]
The Whiting Award winners are officially out, and in an interesting turn of events, seven out of 10 of them are queer! Here, each of the queer writers detail what they were doing when they learned that they were winners, and what winning this highly selective prize means to them. [Them]
As part of the Paris Review’s new Poetry Rx column, poets Claire Schwartz, Kaveh Akbar, and Sarah Kay offer poetry that will help remedy the woes of everyday life for people who write—a prescription, if you will. A favorite from this week is when Claire Schwartz was asked “Is there a poem that will teach me how to accept that [my lover] had a previous love and life before we shared ours?” She recommends Angel Nafis’s “When I Realize I’m Wearing My Girlfriend’s ExGirlfriend’s Panties.” [Paris Review]
Widely celebrated poet and art critic Frank O’Hara’s birthday passed this Tuesday, and to commemorate, there have been poems and think pieces that have been particularly fixated on O’Hara’s eccentric style and image, one that was infectious while he was alive. Here, O’Hara’s bigger-than-life image is compare to that of Christopher Wallace, the rapper widely known as Notorious B.I.G. [Full Stop]
Have you ever been writing and felt upset or even ashamed that you were borrowing too much from another writer? Fear not, we are all in debt to other writers, and because there has been so much written, it’s almost impossible to not borrow from something. Here, poet Hayan Charara discusses how frustrating it is to not be able to read anything ever written, and the art of influence, borrowing and stealing. [Poetry Foundation]
—Nia KB