Last year a group of us heard a presentation by Dario Robleto at the Fogg Museum. (More about that here.) Robleto is a refreshingly unpretentious artist who is doing his work without the sandbaggery of fads, posturing and artifice. His projects have gestated in the liminal space between science and art. Working under the canopy […]
Theater
Do What You Do, and Do it Well
Heather Cox Richardson’s rise to prominence is an “if you build it, they will come” story. The Boston College history professor (with a specialty in 19th century America) started posting informed political coverage on social media five years ago. Carefully written and loaded with relevant historical context, these dispatches were so well received that she […]
Not a Straight Line, More of a Curve
“At moments of historical crisis, when the necessity of choice generates fears and neuroses, men are eager to trade the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions, conservative or radical, which give them “the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one’s proper place in the cosmos.” […]
Stories Within Stories: Romeo and Juliet at the American Repertory Theater
“We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures. They’re assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations. About race, class, gender, sexuality; about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of […]
Slanted Stories
The Winter’s Tale (Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) Tell all the truth but tell it slant —Success in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truth’s superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind — This famous 8 line poem by Emily Dickinson is the […]
Ravenous for Living
We are living at a time when equality is an increasingly sacred value. While my political leanings are deeply aligned with that idea, it doesn’t apply to the world of human passions. I don’t want what I adore to be parceled out into equally sized lots. Because after all, we love what we love. “Even […]
Finding the Signals
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless […]
Stories, Integrity and Horizontalities
Slow Muse has been a personal repository for my thoughts and feelings about art, art making and creativity for almost 20 years. As the landscape of creativity has constantly changed, I have frequently been surprised by what persists and what does not. At this particular moment in time artistic expression has become increasingly politicized, then […]
The History of Our Future
The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was […]
Strangers Meet
At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Every […]