Canna Lilies Celebrate the Joy of Living

   

          

My sister Andy posted a favorite flower in her garden, her Red-Orange Canna Lily. "Honestly, my greatest pleasure this year!" It looks a lot like an Iris, but it sits atop that tall stalk with those tropical red-veined dark leaves, and it's really stunning. "First thing I see when I open my porch door." 

I've sat on that porch many times, and I know what she means. I love my sister's garden in Tallahassee as much as I love mine in Sylvania, Ohio. Our gardens bring us closer, connect us, keep the love flowing. 

That Canna is a perennial beauty. It has some great symbolism, too, that goes back to Greek, Roman and Egyptian legends.  I love that. The Red Canna especially symbolizes courage and determination, and trust in a higher power. They are good to share with a loved one for inspiration during tough times. We can all use those Red Cannas.  Manna from heaven.  

Red Cannas also attract hummingbirds, those birds of paradise that symbolize enjoyment of life and lightness of being. Even though they are very small, they can travel great distances, so they can follow you across the ocean and stay with you until you land in, say, Greece.  And having to cancel that trip this year due to COVID, I plan to do that next year, a Red Canna and a hummingbird beside me.             

Red Canna, 1919

   My sister's Canna brings to  mind Georgia O'Keeffe's sensuous flowers. Here's one of her Red Cannas, painted in  1919. She was still in New York, finding her way. Art historians think she fell in love with Canna Lilies when she visited  Lake George, New York, with Alfred Stieglitz the photographer in 1918.    

 O'Keeffe loved to garden, lucky for us, because her flower paintings are among her most popular paintings of all. Like my sister, I imagine O'Keeffe looked out at her garden and received the  greatest pleasure. And when she gave them to us in the form of a painting, so did we.

Red Canna, 1924

Sources: 

https://www.culturetype.com/2021/07/28/on-occasion-of-new-exhibition-alma-thomas-everything-is-beautiful-curators-and-scholars-reflect-on-lesser-known-aspects-of-artists-life-and-work/

wikipedia on Georgia O'keeffe

The Incredible Alice Twombly

                                                          

                 

A Teaneck Reunion

Teaneck, 2018

Dear Alice, 

      Can you believe it's been almost 6 decades since our paths crossed in Madison, Wisconsin? We were so young, thirsting for knowledge, eager, idealistic, innocent. The anti-Vietnam War teach-ins and protests, Civil Rights marches, Beatlemania swept the UW campus and touched us all. I was a grad student in the History Department and you were a teacher. I left with a degree and you left a legacy for the students you taught, with many of whom you're still in touch. How fortunate they are! 

Our dreams were still in the bud when we left Madison, but you blossomed ever after through hard times and good times. A master teacher and poet, you've touched so many lives. You have a wonderful family, great sisters, two wonderful sons, beautiful grandkids. 

You make literature and poetry come alive. I think of all the poets you've introduced me to, like the war poet Brian Turner and your sister Veranda, and those poetry readings you have on Thursdays, which I was blessed to have attended on a memorable visit to Englewood a few years ago. I treasure our visits together, here and there. I treasure our intellectual musings and our rants. You are my brilliant, beautiful soulmate, Alice, a treasure of the heart. Love you forever, Fran  

Some Memories:

We re-unioned in Union, NJ after many years on our different paths, when I was visiting Ukrainian friends, 2016 I think. You drove from Teaneck, and got in a traffic jam on the way home. You remembered your dad's business and your family. You knew the streets. We could see the new World Trade Center across the river. We picked up where we had left off, and I felt a sense of peace and joy. I knew we would meet again. 

On a visit to your home in Teaneck, NJ, in 2018, you took me on a tour of the ancient Palisades. We went to a poetry reading by Don Zirilli at the Classic Quiche Cafe, reading from "Heaven's Not for You."  You started this poetry series with your friend Zev many years ago and it's still going strong. We shared dinner together at an Indian restaurant before the readings. We spent an evening at a Shabbat service and dinner at the home of friends. 

We marched in Leonia for women's rights and against the unfit White House occupant, where I met some remarkable resisters, like Anne and Joe Cassidy. Remember? We sang "This Land is Your Land!" 1960s redux. We wove in and around Dutch Colonial brick homes, so full of stories, down Main Streets and side streets. You  reminded me of  NJ American Colonial and Revolutionary War history, with a stop at the Historic New Bridge Landing where George Washington retreated across the Hackensack River with his ragtag Continental army after a great loss at Fort Lee. It moved Patrick Henry to write those famous words, you reminded me: "These are the times that try men's souls."  Applies today, I thought, but kept silent. I was seeing NJ through the eyes of a native daughter. Unforgettable. As was our visit to Brooklyn where I met an old family friend, Jon Kay, and we had dinner with your son Jonathan, his lovely wife Kaori, and their two daughters. 

I hope you remember your visits to Sylvania, touring Main Street America, as fondly as I do. We walked the town, visited the Sylvania Historical Village, went to the Toledo Museum of Art (they had a Greek vases exhibit), shared wine at  Element 112. You were on your way to Madison. A year or so later you visited again. You shared time with my daughters and my friends and we went to the University of Toledo campus to watch the solar eclipse.  That was thrilling. 

Then there was our last visit, which I still feel bad about. November 2019. I had just returned from Morocco about a week before a long planned  to NYC with friends. I got to your house from the Port Authority bus station with the worst cold and cough, a precursor of the coronavirus, I swear. You kindly took me in anyway, and sadly, I left you with the damn cold, which went on for weeks.  Even so we shared some good times, meals at nearby restaurants, long talks. You were waiting for a new sofa. Little did we know then that we would be plagued with the coronavirus and COVID 19 in a few months. It's changed lots of things. Don't know about travel, lots of uncertainties. But your friendship will always remain a constant, Alice, and for that I am grateful. 

At the Toledo Museum of Art for the "Berlin Painter" exhibit

In Brooklyn, a historic tour with old family friend Jon Kay,
and a dinner with Alice's son Jonathan and family.

There's More to Frida than Meets the Eye

 

"Frida in Flames" (Self-portrait inside a Sunflower), 1953-54,  a powerful late painting (Credit: Private Collection, USA. Photo courtesy of Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art New York, printed by Taschen publishing.

                  

                                                                         

There's a new book out about Frida Kahlo's hidden, less well-known works, 152 of them, seldom exhibited, seldom seen. "Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings," by art historian Luis-Harlan Lozano, with Andrea Kettermann and Maria Vazquez Ramos, offers "the first ever survey of her entire oeuvre." 

I was excited to come across an article by art historian Holly Williams, cited below, that reviews the book. I went to order it on Amazon but it costs $200, and I hesitated. Still, how fascinating to catch glimpses of those 152 paintings. They are not the large dazzling self-portraits that we know and love, inspired by the artifacts, landscapes, folklife, clothing, adornments and decorative arts of  Mexico. They are not surrealism or magical realism. 

The cover of the new book on Kahlo, 
published by Taschen. It's surprising that
it's one of the self-portraits that we
 know her by, but then, it will sell books.  

They are portraits of people she knew from here in the US and in Mexico. They are in style, composition, and format different from those we are used to seeing in a Frida Kahlo. They show her range of seeing, her attention to art trends, and some different aspects of her life. They seem to have been  painted early in her life, or toward the end of her life. She died in 1954. She was only 47 years old. These works present interesting facets of her short but often flamboyant and emotionally charged life, her thinking, political passions, range of interests. 

Holly Williams presents an interesting analysis of the painting that begins this blog, "Frida in Flames."

"It's very interesting in terms of aesthetics – when your body is not working anymore, when your brain is not enough to portray what you want to paint, the only source she's left with is to deconstruct the image. This is a very contemporary, conceptual position about art: that the painting exists not only in its craft, but also what I think the painting stands for./  We are left with a painting that is imperfect, certainly a world away from the fine, smooth surfaces and attention to detail of Kahlo's more famous self-portraits – but it nonetheless is an astonishingly powerful work that deserves to be known. There is something tremendously poignant in an artist so well-known for crafting their own image using their final creative act to deliberately destroy that image. Even in obliterating herself, Kahlo made her work speak loudly to us."

Spoken like a true art historian, insightful, penetrating, in cultural and historical context for understanding what this self-portrait might mean. Most of us art appreciators can't claim this kind of expertise, but we are energized just looking at these varied paintings. Some of them are re-printed in Holly Williams' BBC Culture article, and they are fascinating. 

Here's a style, roses in a small blue vase, 1935, that reminds
me, or makes me think of, many other women artists who painted flowers. It's lovely.
It has not been exhibited since 1954 and, according to art historian Holly Williams, 
it shows the influence of the artist's father. I didn't know he was also an artist, a well-known photographer. This painting is not "ethnic," not magic realism, not those large Calla lilies. More traditional it seems, in the western art tradition that her father apparently embraced.    
(Private collection. Courtesy Sotheby's, New York)

Si Adelita (Los Cachuchas), c1927, is another of the lost works.
 "It's sharp Modernist lines are striking."
This one depicts an experience Kahlo no doubt had in NYC,
at a gathering around a game (?) table, artists, poets, surely jazz musicians,
in formal black and white, strong angles and poses.
I think I see Langston Hughes or WEB DuBois or somewhat-familiar jazz musicians.
There's the invitation, a domino, a music score, a woman peering out with a frightened or confused look on her face, maybe Frida feeling like an outsider.  All the subjects look very serious. It's a slice of Frida's life, attentive to detail, emotions, the times.  

Pancho Villa and Adelita (unfinished), warriors for an independent Mexico,
reflecting Frida's strong political interest, painted in 1927.
Holly Williams notes its "avant-garde" style:
 "It indicates Kahlo's interest in Mexican art trends
 before she met Diego Rivera." (Credit: akg-images)

   A still life with white dove, which Holly Williams wrote appeared often
in her late life paintings, this one from 1953/1954, just before Kahlo's death.
I was surprised to learn that she didn't have her first exhibit in Mexico until 1953,
and her art then was hidden in anonymity and neglect until the late 1970s and into the 1990s.    
"Kahlo included the Mexican flag and the dove as motifs in her later work,'
such as this colorful still life, "Long Live Life."
 (Credit: Rafael Doniz/ Banco de Mexico/ VG Bild-Kunst)

Sources:

*https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210719-the-unseen-masterpieces-of-frida-kahlo? review article by Holly Williams. "Lost or little-known works by the Mexican artist provide fresh insights on her life and work. Holly Williams explores the rarely seen art included in a new book of the complete paintings."

* https://news.artnet.com/art-world/frida-kahlo-complete-paintings-taschen-1993532

** https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frida-kahlo-georgia-okeeffes-formative-friendship, interesting article, and great juxtaposition of Frida paintings and O'Keeffe paintings. 

Yarema Kosak, Ukrainian-American Artist Shines Light on his Cultural Heritage

Yarema Kozak, "October," 1980s

There are Cossacks living and working in and around Detroit, those Ukrainian warriors whose history is as complicated as any Eastern European country, as conflicted and torn between East and West for centuries. The Yarema Kosak family descends from a long line of Cossacks, but they are not fighters. They are cultural warriors who have made great art across several generations. The Detroit area has been a recipient of their talent. 

An exhibit of Yarema Kosak's work at the Ukrainian-American Museum in Hapensack, MI, is bringing these Ukrainian-American Cossacks to light. His brother Yurko was also an artist and some of his paintings are included. Yurko was a designer for Buicks at General Motors for many years, thanks to the wisdom of GM managers who recognized the value of his versatile talent. Yarema embraced his life as an artist. 

Yarema's Roses

Yarema was born in 1941 on the border between Ukraine and Poland. That's part of the region of eastern Europe that Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls "the Bloodlands," caught for ages between the vicious rivalries of Western and Eastern Europe and the Russian empire. Snyder writes: "Between 1939 and 1945, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass killings of an estimated 14 million unarmed non-combatants, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust." Snyder's thesis is that the "Bloodlands," a region which comprises what is modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states, is the area where "the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in western history."

After the war, Cossacks were "repatriated" back to the Soviet Union, where they were sent to the Gulags and murdered. The same fate befell millions of Ukrainian children who were kidnapped and sent to concentration camps to build bombs for Hitler.  (https://francurrocaryblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-book-philip-gave-me-making-bombs.html)

Is it any wonder that after the war, Ukrainians sought refuge anywhere in the world that would have them. Many settled in Canada, many in various countries in western Europe. The Kozaks moved to the US and settled in Detroit in 1949.  And so Detroit became "the seat of the entire American Kozak enclave, which embraced various professions and a host of civil and cultural initiatives. Most of all, the Kozaks influenced the artistic and intellectual life of the Ukrainian diasporan community beyond Ukraine." 

(Ukrainian-American Archives and Museum)

Yarema Kozak, Hutsul Woman. 
 The Hutsuls are a Ukrainian ethnic group
spanning western Ukraine and Romania.
The Kozak family is from this region.

While Yuri worked designing Buicks, Yarema devoted himself to his art. Between 1968 and 1975 he headed an art school for youth at the local Cultural Community Club. At the same time he acquired his individual traits as a graphic artist and painter. His first exhibit was held at the public library in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1969.

Yarema was a university-trained artists. He followed the most recent trends in American and world art and showed interest in abstract art, "exploring ways to synthesize modernism with his ethnic Ukrainian background."   I found his paintings, the few I've seen, to show different styles depicting a range of subjects, from beautiful roses to Orthodox icons to abstract landscapes and profiles.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Kozak family was involved in creating the large decorative memorial wall honoring Ukrainian heritage at Wayne State University in 1976.  I first saw it in 2013, after participating in friend Laura Kline's Russian language and culture class in Manoogan Hall, talking about what I learned about Ukrainian history and traditions as a Peace Corps Volunteer. After the class, we had a tour of "The Ukraine Room," where a huge map of Ukraine with motifs from Ukrainian history and national culture filled the walls; it was colorful, upbeat, patriotic. The project was completed by another Ukrainian-American artist, Volodymyr Mayorchak, who added a full-wall mural, hutsul-style wooden benches, and a variety of lovely carvings. The Ukraine Room, which served as a classroom for the study of Ukrainian language and literature, was updated and restored in 2003, reflecting the ongoing devotion of Detroit's large and active Ukrainian community. My Ukrainian friends from Starobilsk visited them when they were in the US for an Open World project. I'll always remember that time.  Я никогда не забуду время, проведенное в Украине.

Sadly, Laura informed me, the language classes, always a struggle to sustain, are now taught only sporadically, victims of the declining support of humanities study on colleges campuses across the country.  America is paying dearly right now for this decline in the study of history, literature, philosophy, and the entire liberal arts curriculum that makes for "informed citizens."   . 

The Yarema Kozak and Kozak family heritage, however, lives on, gaining in public and scholarly recognition. Their artistic efforts to preserve Ukrainian culture, along with organizations like the Ukrainian-American Museum and Archives, represent the extent and depth of America's multi-cultural heritage. In this chaotic time, we really do need reminders that this is what America is all about. 

Parts of the mural in The Ukraine Room at Wayne State University.
 I love the quote from Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, below, who longed for Ukrainian
independence. There are Shevchenko statues all over Ukraine,
including in Lenin Park in Starobilsk, where I served with the Peace Corps.

Sources

http://www.thehamtramckreview.com/ukrainian-museum-features-works-by-local-ukrainian-artists/ by Roman Yatsiv.

https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/close/american-kozaks-mission-and-individuality  Good the Kozaks work was recognized in Ukraine, mainly through various exhibits in various cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks, for a complicated article on a complicated subject, the Cossacks of Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Cossacks_after_World_War_II, "repatriated" to the Soviet Union, which sent them to gulags and murdered them outright. A few managed to escape, among them the Kosak family of  Detroit. Not surprising to learn that this story was hidden from history until 1974, with the publication of "The Last Secret" by Lord Bethell. It was made into a documentary that year.  That same year, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" was published. 

 https://francurrocaryblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/teaching-about-ukraine.html At Wayne State, April 2013.

Talking about my experience in Ukraine for Laura Kline's
Russian Class at WSU, along with a presentation about
Chernobyl.

This artwork is by Yuri Kozak, Yarema's older brother.
St. Trinity Church in Kyiv, 1980s. It takes me back to Ukraine.