Watery eyes: a micro climate (Photo: Rose-Lynn Fisher) Maria Popova, curator extraordinaire for Brain Pickings, has identified her all time favorite Moth* story: Life on a Möbius Strip, by Janna Levin. Levin is a brilliant scientist who also happens to be a lyrical writer. Her book, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a […]
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Robinson Redux

In Milan, down a side street I first became acquainted with architect and philosopher Sarah Robinson in 2012 when I came across her book Nesting at one of my favorite bookstores in San Francisco. After falling under the spell of Juhani Pallasmaa‘s extraordinary book, The Eyes of the Skin, I sensed immediately that Robinson was […]
Eye Balling and Free Falling

“Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music,” by Howard Hodgkin (Photo: Miriam Perez) Note: Hodgkin passed away on March 9, 2017. I am just back from a week of art viewing in London—special museum exhibitions including Michelangelo, Robert Rauschenberg, Wolfgang Tillmans, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkins, Eduardo Paolozzi and Elton John‘s estimable collection of photographs, plus […]
The Personal and the Political

From Woman in the Dunes (Photo: Cinescope) We are living through one of those eras when the political spills profusely into the personal. Up to our hips in toxic Trump floodwaters, the landscape of daily life has been transformed. I keep thinking of Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s 1964 iconic film, Woman in the Dunes, and its interminable […]
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Clew Takes on A Life of Its Own

Photo: Stacey Durand Clew opened at the Lamont Gallery on January 20. Since that time the gallery has hosted a variety of events including meditations, dance performances, theatrical readings, beadmaking workshops, and a class of curious kindergarteners. It was our collective intention (Todd Hearon, Jung Mi Lee, Lauren O’Neal, Jon Sakata and me) to bring […]
The We That is Me

Studio window, South Boston When I was growing up, neuroscience believed that the human brain develops during a critical period in early childhood and then remains relatively unchanged. The scientific consensus has now changed. Neuroplasticity is the new norm, the belief that human brains continue to form and change throughout the course of a life. […]
Getting a Clew: Review in Artscope Magazine

Note: The following review, reproduced here by permission, appeared in Artscope Magazine. Thank you to Linda Chestney for connecting with our vision and then bringing it so evocatively into words. The show is at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, 11 Tan Lane, Exeter New Hampshire. It runs through April 15. Deborah Barlow, Vapeerine […]
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The Wheel Inside the Wheel

Adam Gopnik‘s recent piece in the New Yorker codifies the suspicions many of us have been sharing with each other: “We are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers…The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a […]
The Night of the Iguana

Tennessee Williams (photo: Yousuf Karsh) It is an artistic exercise of a particular kind to comb through the books and plays of the past and to find those that achieve resonance—or a fresh reading—for contemporary audiences. American Repertory Theater has taken that tack in past seasons (a production of Paradise Lost, written by Clifford Odets […]
Ways to Picture the World

Angelina Pwerle, Bush Plum, 2005. Pwerle is one of the artists featured in the exhibit, “Marking the Infinite.” (Photo: Bett Gallery) Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, is an exhibit that is making its tour of the U.S. before finishing up at the Phillips Collection in DC in June, 2018. The catalog […]