Required Reading
This week: Calida Rawles paints Blackness and water, the artists who shaped Fire Island, translating literature during the Tehran blackout, why weather apps suck, and more.
Capital B Atlanta's Alyssa Johnson interviews painter Calida Rawles about her show at Spelman College, her alma mater:
The pieces in the exhibit center around water. For the Black diaspora there is a violent history with water, and so how do we hold the restorative nature of it, but also the trauma?
I learned to swim at a later age and it was really important to me to have that skill. I thought I could use my art as a way to show [water] to our community. … A lot of people think of swimming and water and surfing and all of that as somewhat outside of our community, but it’s been ours and I feel like I’m bringing it back to us.
It is both healing and destructive. No matter what I paint, whatever subject, that undercurrent is always there of talking about the balance of things. Some of the hardest times in my life came with a lot of joy at the same time. Water is a great metaphor of how life is. Sometimes big waves come and knock you down, and the only way to float is to breathe.
An artist in Rhode Island has amassed one of the largest collections of die-struck jewelry in the world, Richard Grant writes for Smithsonian Magazine:
Other than Kevin and Danielle, the employees at Potter USA are mostly in their 20s and 30s, and this is a deliberate strategy on Kevin’s part. “The techniques for making die-struck jewelry weren’t written down. You can’t look them up in a book. It was all passed down by word of mouth, by showing the next generation how it was done. That’s what I’m doing here. I don’t want to see the knowledge die out.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, die-striking from hand-engraved hubs was supplanted by CAD (computer-aided design) software and CNC (computer numerical control) machines that engrave, texture and create models for the lost-wax casting process. Now those technologies are threatened by the advent of artificial intelligence 3D model generators. “You don’t even have to draw anything,” says Potter. “Just tell it what you want, and there it is, ready for 3D printing. In the spirit of ‘meet your destroyer,’ we tried it, and it made a perfect die from a photograph of a piece of jewelry.”
For the Guardian, Jesse Dorris reports on a new book about the artists who shaped Fire Island's queer community (though it's worth noting that Leon Black owns Phaidon, whose imprint, Monacelli, published the book):
Fire Island Art sticks the locale’s artist work firmly in the canon. But it goes deeper. “If you don’t know Fire Island, you might think of it as a place where boys in Speedos go and party,” Dempsey says. “And there is some of that. But there’s a counter programming, a scene very in touch with nature and community and friendship. People who care deeply about art and literature are part of that fabric, too. You just have to look a little closer.” David Hockney made extraordinary paintings in and of the scene. “But he was only there for a few weekends,” Dempsey notes. “Mapplethorpe only came from time to time. The fabric of the community is really built on those painters who wake up and paint the beach every day.”
For Public Books, scholar Miaad Bianki writes movingly about the haunting experience of translating a story about death during the Tehran blackout amid US and Israeli bombardment:
Throughout the blackout, I had labored over a story in Trías’s collection about a group of people gathering to keep the memory of their lost loved ones alive through a haunting, strange ritual. It was a desperate, unorthodox effort to tether the departed to the world of the living.
Days later, I saw this very fiction spilling into our cemeteries. I watched videos of women and men who, instead of weeping in traditional mourning, stood over the graves of their fallen siblings and children, and danced. It was a dance of profound, bleeding defiance. When the apparatus dictates how you must live, how you must die, and how you must mourn, dancing over a grave becomes the ultimate refusal of oblivion.
“Care” was the word that illuminated my dark room. In a landscape where the system treats human life as disposable, the act of remembering, naming, and translating becomes our most radical form of care. I was attempting to do with my dictionary what the dancing mourners were doing with their bodies. I was translating one book, but I was living the other.
As Trump takes aim at birthright citizenship, the latest in his crusade to obliterate civil rights, the Nation's Elie Mystal breaks down the Supreme Court oral arguments yesterday:
Alito is gone. There is no hope for him. But there surely is hope for the rest of us. Trump will lose, 5–4 at least, and it’s not beyond reason that he could lose by a stunning 8–1.
Which raises the question: Why is this stupid case even here in the first place? Trump’s arguments bear almost no relation to the law or how the law has been interpreted for over 100 years. Trump repeatedly lost this case in lower courts, meaning the Supreme Court didn’t even have to grant him a hearing. Why are we being dragged through this spectacle to fight the facially unconstitutional proposition that Trump can change the meaning of the Constitution through executive order?
My best guess, after listening to the oral arguments, is that Roberts wanted to make a bit of a show of “standing up to Trump” on a fundamentally easy case. Roberts and his cabal want to say no to this argument, and then bathe in all the “the Supreme Court is an independent institution” stories that will surely follow. Defeating Trump in this case, loudly and thoroughly, gives the Republican justices cover (they think) for all the other times they capitulate to the Trump administration. Trump’s birthright citizenship argument is a straw man, a device designed to be beaten so the court can show how strong it is.
In other fascism news, Trump is gutting the US Forest Service. Jim Pattiz of More Than Just Parks explains why the latest move is a death sentence for the agency:
What this actually is, stripped of the Orwellian window dressing, is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history. It dwarfs anything that’s come before. The [Bureau of Land Management (BLM)] headquarters move in Trump’s first term — widely understood, even then, as a deliberate gutting of the agency — involved a few hundred positions. This involves thousands. That one closed zero regional offices. This one closes all ten. That one touched one agency’s headquarters. This one dismantles the headquarters, collapses the regional structure, and wipes out the scientific backbone of the largest forestry organization on Earth.
The BLM move was a knife in the dark. This is a chainsaw in broad daylight. And just like the BLM move, it will work exactly as designed. Because we know what happens when you tell career public servants to uproot their families and move across the country on six months’ notice. We have the data. We watched it happen in real time.
Weather apps are becoming markedly less reliable, and Kyle Chayka explains why for the New Yorker:
Weather apps have a tendency to alienate their user bases, perhaps because people’s physical experiences—their plans, their dress, their commutes—so directly depend on an accurate report. As Jonas Downey, the co-founder of an app called Hello Weather, told me, “It doesn’t take much for the app to lose trust with someone.” One unforeseen storm might send users looking for an alternative. Ever since Dark Sky shut down, Downey added, “There’s been this absence in the market.” Acme (which has a subscription-based model, at twenty-five dollars a year) is less cluttered than Dark Sky by design. When you open the app, you are presented with the weather “Right Now,” the forecast for the “Next 24 Hours,” and the forecast for the “Next 10 Days”; each is listed under a bold text banner that resembles a print newspaper headline. The twenty-four-hour temperature forecast is shown as a fluctuating black line tagged with icons denoting the weather every three hours. Crucially, though, there are alternate forecasts that appear in the form of paler gray lines; sometimes the gray lines hew closely to the main black one; other times they stray considerably, indicating that the predictions are less reliable during that window. As Grossman put it to me, “Climate change is causing an increase in uncertainty. It sucks that we can’t predict the weather perfectly, but knowing that uncertainty is very useful.”
In case you missed it, the institutional rot at MoMA is still going strong:
Love this for him (happy Trans Day of Visibility!):
My favorite show is back:
@verycoldnoodle new season, same cast, be sure to tune in! #birdbuddy #birdbuddyfeederpro #affiliate @Birdbuddy ♬ [Trailer] Trailer, horror, TV, CM(970524) - NOVA
@hihayderz baby of the family problems 💁🏼♂️
♬ Blue Danube Waltz - The London Symphony Orchestra
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
