Required Reading

• Carolina Miranda of the LA Times surveyed a number of Los Angeles art galleries and the results are troubling. It’s a well-researched article:

• Dalton Walker writes about the legacy of Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait, who painted “Mia” for the Land O’Lakes brand. He explains how something that began as a way to more accurately represent Native Americans ended up as a widely disliked stereotype:

DesJarlait’s son, Robert DesJarlait, 73, said he was initially glad that the stereotypical image was finally removed. Then, the power of social media reminded him of another side of the discussion that was overlooked.

On his Facebook page, Robert said many Ojibwe people shared their perspective of Mia while growing up Native. “Basically, it was giving the previous generation a sense of almost empowerment to see a Native woman on a box of butter. It gave them a sense of cultural pride,” he said. “After seeing those posts, I said, ‘that’s right, that’s why my dad created this image to begin with’.”

• The head of the framing department at the National Gallery in London demonstrates how he created six huge matching frames for the Titian: Love Desire Death exhibition:

• George Packer writes about how President Trump is destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will:

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

• I’m an avid listener of the Ottoman History podcast and this episode is very timely because scholar Sylvia Alajaji discusses how in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, music not only gave Armenians a reason to live, but also opened up broader questions about how to define what it meant to be Armenian (yesterday was the 105th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide):

• Michael Harriot writes that ‘Open the Economy’ Is the New ‘White Lives Matter‘:

America is blood.

It was, it is and it always will be.

This recent example isn’t particularly different from All Lives Matter advocates’ refusal to acknowledge the racial data behind police killings or the value of black lives. It’s no different than Alabama’s pro-life Gov. Kay Ivey signing a bill to ban abortions while assassinating Nathan Woods for not killing someone. It’s America’s story of slaughter and slavery and genocide and Jim Crow and Japanese-American internment camps and Charlottesville, Va., and child detention centers and Tuskegee and Tulsa and Bombingham and “Both Sides” and Trayvon and Trump…

• Roofs are amazing:

• Truth:

• The kids of art historians say the darndest things:

• Pure joy:

Required Reading is published every Saturday, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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