Cassilhaus

SABBATICAL WEEK NINETEEN

Fishtail General Store, the community hub of Fishtail, MT, the closest community to Tippet Rise Art Center.

The latest in snowboarding accessories


A vista at Tippet Rise Art Center

You know it's beautiful in Wyoming when you can make this image through the driver's window on an iPhone while driving 80 mph and not looking at what you are photographing.

 

From San Francisco I headed back to LA. I had an unexpected 4 hour visit to the Apple store after both my laptop and iPhone failed on the same day but I emerged (as usual) fully functional and in awe of how great Apple's service is-both were out of warranty and both were fixed anyway.

I had a great visit with Jan Williamson, the ED of the 18th Street Arts Center in LA. With more than 20 years at 18th Street Jan is an industry veteran and has presided over the purchase of their campus and their expansion to the largest residency program in Southern California.

Approaching their 30th year in operation, 18SAC has broad progamming and a full campus of brightly colored buildings for programs, artist studios, residency housing, and exhibition space.  Their 3 pronged residency program was unique among all the programs I'd visited.  They have a long term program for arts ORGANIZATIONS where the full organization is housed on their site indefinitely and works intimately with their other programs, a medium term 3 year residency program for California based artists, and a more conventional short term program of 1-3 month residencies for national and international artists.

Photos courtesy of 18th Street Art Center

Seems like I barely had my feet on the ground and I was back on a plane for Billings MT to see Tippet Rise, one of my most anticipated stops on the trip. I settled in to a very cool and retro airbnb in Red Lodge, MT.

Olive green shag!

Partying Bear Paintings

 

Way back in 2011 I was contacted by Rockefeller Philanthropy Adivsors in NYC about one of the their clients who was developing an art, music, and sculpture center in rural Montana. They were interested in commissioning artist Patrick Dougherty to do a piece on their land. Patrick had recently done a piece at Cassilhaus when he was one of our visiting artists and I was also producing a film about his work called Bending Sticks (website undergoing work) and they wanted me to connect them to Patrick. The client turned out to be Cathy and Peter Halstead, the founders and benefactors for Tippet and I have been following their progress and anticipating the opening for years.

Spectacular is the only way to describe this 11,500 acre dream site and the product of decades of dreaming and planning. Music is the first love of the Halsteads and the indoor and outdoor music venues host world class classical music artists from around the globe for an ambitious summer program which as I write this starts in 3 days.

 

Visiting artists are housed on site in dreamy quarters each with a Steinway grand piano.

 

Sustainability drives everything with conservation easements over 1/3rd of the property, LEED Gold buildings, and a fleet of electric vehicles charged by on-site solar "garages"

The 9 major sculptural pieces have been situated so each can be enjoyed and viewed from near and far without seeing the other works on the property. Lindsey Hinmon, Director of Outreach and Logistics, and Beth Huhtala, their new Educational Program Manager were gracious enough to spend nearly 5 hours with me, including a 3 hour personal tour of all the campus buildings and artworks just days before their season opening for the public. We also had a very lively discussion about the amazing possibilities for a more formalized residency program for musicians, poets (Peter Halstead is a poet), and other artists that they are working on.  THANK YOU Lindsey and Beth!

 

Lindsay and I in front of a painting by artist Mark Di Suvero

Super Guide Beth

Inverted Portal by Ensamble Studios

The legendary Big Sky

Mark di Suvero's Proverb

 

DOMO by Ensamble Studio

Patrick Dougherty's Daydreams

Alexander Calder's Two Discs

Mark di Suvero's Beethoven's Quartet

Frank "playing" Quartet with the artist's blessing. That was way fun.  At it's previous home at Storm King visitors were not allowed to play it.  It seems happier now. Photo by Beth.

After my visit in Montana I was headed for a visit to two programs in Wyoming.  Everyone I spoke to said I HAD TO cross into Wyoming via the Beartooth Highway.  They were right! In the span of just a few hours I went from an altitude of about 4,000 ft to almost 11,000 at the peak and then back down again.  I got a wicked altitude headache but it was worth it. My usual reminder that if you are getting this post via email the videos will not play and you need to go directly to the blog here.

 

 

 

“Sticks are something we all have in common. Everybody knows sticks - the twigs and branches picked up on grandfather's farm; the branches woven in grandmother's basket. Somewhere threaded in all the public mass is a common thread, and that thread is the human spirit.”  --Patrick Dougherty

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK EIGHTEEN

Find a comfy chair and put on your seat belt.  This was a crazy jam packed week. A reminder that you can click any photo to enlarge it.  I'm pretty fired up that I have found more residentially based and/or founder run programs in the West.  I had really hoped to find more programs that had some similarities to Cassilhaus and found exactly one-The Fountainhead Residency which I visited back in Week Thirteen-in the entire eastern half of the US.  Some interesting variants this week.  On my way from Port Townsend to Seattle I stopped on Bainbridge Island to see the program at the Bloedel Reserve. This stunning 150 acre public garden was the private residence and garden of Prentice and Virginia Blodel from 1951-1986.

Photo courtesy of Bloedel Reserve

Paul Hayden Kirk designed Japanese Guest House blends the features of a Japanese tea house and a Northwest Native American longhouse

After Virginia died, Prentice asked well know architect Jim Cuttler to design a small residence/education center on the property to honor his wife and to live out his final days.  It is in this house that Bloedel houses their residency program today.

Photo by Art Grice

Their program has some striking similarities to ours (Well OK so minus the 150 acre pristine garden and the staff of 35 but we have Duke Forest and awesome interns!) and is open to both established and emerging artists, composers, writers, botanists, landscape architects, researchers and others exploring the themes of nature and the human connection with nature.  All projects and work in the residencies must connect in some way to nature. I have to say that my interview with special programs manager Laura Counsel set a new high pleasantness bar with the entire conversation taking place while walking through the gardens including frequent sprinkler dodging (I went on a day when the garden was not open to the public).  Thank you Laura!

I was off to Seattle next for a visit to MadArt which I had learned about only days before from the director of the Seattle Art Museum (see below) which was hosting one of their recent installations. I met with founder Alison Milliman and brand new director Emily Kelly (sorry forgot to make a photo!).  I also met their current artist in residence Jennifer Angus, aka Insect Girl, who was working on this ambitious installation called Super Natural (yes those are real formerly living bugs) in their public storefront studio space on a busy commercial street. (Jennifer's dog Pippy is the one at the top of this post with the wings.)

Learn more about the innovative and audacious ways MadArt is "bringing art into our lives in unexpected ways" on their site.

I had long been wanting to visit my friends Kim Rorschach and John Hart who live in Seattle. We met when Kim was the founding director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, NC where we live. She know directs the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), one of the 20 largest art musuems in the US, including three campuses-the main downtown location, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Olympic Sculpture Park.  John teaches law at UW. We had a delightful dinner and got back up to speed on all things Durham and Seattle.

SAM has a spectacular collection. I only had about 45 minutes before closing so I zeroed in on the contemporary exhibits.

Katharina Fritsch, El Anatsui, Nick Cave top to bottom

 

 

Oh Rockland Residency you had me at these photos.

Based in Seattle and founded in 2015 by the "unmarried husband and wife team" of Jodi Rockwell and Shawn Landis. Imagine an art-loving couple who combine their two last names to form the name of their residency and offer artists free time and space in a residency program based in a contemporary home part of the year and rent the space the rest of the year on airbnb to fund the residency?????  That's getting pretty close to home!

Jodi and Shawn with recent AIR Argentinian Muralist Carla Bertone in front of the mural she created on the garage of the residency house. Photo by Alex Garland.  Jodi is a ceramicist/teacher and Shawn is an artist/contractor and they have big plans to give back even more to the arts community.  They are completely fearless and in the process of fixing up a sort of arts campus of buildings with many live/work possibilities. Stay tuned. I am really grateful to these two for a really fun interview and sharing of ideas.

My next stop was a solid 4 1/2 hours away in Southwestern Washington in the thriving and beautiful metropolis of Oysterville, WA (population 9). I learned about the Willapa Bay Residency from artist Simen Johan who was in residence at Hambidge all the way back in Week 2. He had done quite a few residencies and was very gracious to write me a detailed list of programs that I might want to visit and Willapa Bay was at the top of the list.

 

Founder, "recovering lawyer", and independant bookseller Cyndy Hayward opened her program in 2014 after more than a decade of careful planning. She was very quick to make clear to me that it was not a "residentially based" program even though she lived on site during construction of the residency buildings and that it was not about "engaging the local community" but all about the artists and their experience there. It is a fully subsidized program including meals and each cohort (30 day residencies) of 6 artists includes 2 visual artists, 2 writers, a poet, and a composer.  The only "requirement" of the residency for the artists is that they share the evening meal together. This interaction is very important to Cyndy and the core of her program.  I was fortunate to arrive early in the month as the artists were just getting to know one another and they invited me to share dinner with them and it was wonderful.  Nice having a personal chef................

The program is laid out over 16 stunning acres and includes individual artist cabins, a visual arts studio building, and other specialized studios for the writers, poets, and composers.  There is the common building with the dinning facility and lots of wonderful space.

Here Cyndy shows me around one of the artist cabins.

After dinner I joined a few of the artists for a stroll on the beach.

Willapa is an incredibly well organized program and clearly Cyndy has thought everything through to the nth degree. Artists have clearly taken notice as it has become a very competitive program. I am definitely ready to sign on. I better get working on my portfolio and stop writing these blog posts.

I was sad I had to get on the road.  I spent the night in Astoria, OR and got to cross the amazing Astoria-Megler bridge which is over 4 miles long. If you got this post via email you will not be able to see the videos. You will need to go to the blog here.

image courtesty of zerography.com

 

I headed to Portland, one of my favorite West coast cities, where I managed to actually find a program smaller than Cassilhaus! I was welcomed for dinner at the IN-HOUSE residency program based in the home of Jea Alford and Isaac Weiss, two recent MFA grads who are getting a very early jump on giving back to the arts community. They are the youngest folks I have visited on this trip and it was very inspiring.  Their housemates pitch in to help the program as well. They host a single resident at a time in their spare room and have a shop/studio in the back yard that is for the artist when they are visiting. They make connections for their visitors in the community and arrange for an exhibition of their work in Portland at the end of their stay. The dinner was for their current artist from Austria, Hanna Schwartz, a textile artist from Salzburg. It was a wonderful evening and my hosts were very welcoming.  I took photos but they have vanished for some reason.

The next day I spent some time at the Portland Art Museum and saw some wonderful photography.  I saw a great image by my friend Cheryle St. Onge from her Natural Findings series shot with a large format 8x10 view camera.

and I discovered an artist I was not familiar with named Gloria Baker Feinstein.  Her series of Twins and Quads is wonderful.

 

That night I flew to San Francisco and stayed with my wonderful friends Heather and Oren and their two kids Mari and Zeke.  I had my own apartment on the ground floor of their place in Bernal Heights and it was pretty sweet.  I have known Heather for almost 20 years when I made my first cold call to her at a photography gallery when I just started collecting. She is now the executive director of SF Camerawork, a venerable SF institution. I cannot overemphasize how critically important these longer stays with friends have been to making this sabbatical trip possible, both from a mental health and a budget standpoint. Having a comfortable base in any city just makes everything a whole lot easier. And you can learn a bit about the game of Life.

 

My first morning I headed out to another fun residential program called The Growlery run by a force of nature named Jean Chadbourne. Jean's bio from her site is worth repeating in full:

While studying informational graph theory in Budapest in her early 20s, Jean Chadbourne, future founder of The Growlery, took off for Transylvania with nothing more than a small backpack with a change of clothes and a large knife. One night, while stranded in a small village, an old woman who spoke no English welcomed Jean into her home, insisting on killing a chicken to feed her foreign guest. Jean was so touched by the woman’s hospitality that she decided that very evening to establish a living space for fellow dreamers.

Known to many as “the Beige Ghost”, Jean earned her degree in mathematics from Reed College, where intense academic pursuits are augmented by adventurous self-expression. She’s a video game enthusiast, sci-fi and fantasy fanatic, and retro-futurist; in other words, she puts the tron in patron. Some say she embodies the intellectual rigor of Archimedes with the refined taste of Peggy Guggenheim and the horrific singing voice of Florence Foster Jenkins. A Bay Area native, she never brags about her sharp parallel parking skills. She enjoys candlelight dinners, long walks on the beach, souped-up electric vehicles, and real hip-hop.

Jean has basically taken a 6 bedroom Victorian in Haight-Ashbury and made it available to artists to live and work in at no cost and to transform the space into a malleable canvas for perfomance, installation, and every form of work in between and then inviting the community in to share it. There was an installation going in when I was there and my guess is that it is a pretty dynamic environment all the time.

That afternoon I headed over the Golden Gate (always fun to cross that bridge!) to visit a legend in residency circles, The Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marin Headlands.

 

I can't begin to cover the scope and range of their work in this already jam packed blog post so check out the short video below and spend some time on their site and be amazed. The impact this institution has had on artists in all disciplines from around the world is incalculable.  For over 30 years the Headlands, in its residency program alone, has served more than 1200 artists.  Their home is the historic Fort Barry military base and the very act of commissioning artists to adapt these spaces from military use to fabulous artist spaces is an act of grace in and of itself.

 

 

I met with Holly Blake, their residency manager, who with 22 years on the job gets the experience award of all of the people I have met with and I discovered quickly that there was no experience she had not had with a visiting artist!  She was a wealth of information and we had a very lively discussion. I thought I had a few too many full time jobs but the scope of Holly's job in humbling.

 

While I was north of the city close to Sausalito, I had to visit my friend David Maisel, an artist whose work I have followed and admired for a long time.  This was my first time visiting his studio and seeing his new project called Proving Grounds about the sites where chemical and biological weapons for the military are produced and tested was intense. I have no idea how he gets access to these sites but he was been working on access for a decade and the work is stunning. They will be produced in large scale as prints on aluminum in grids of 9.  He will also produce a series of them as Albumen prints.

 

It was an action packed day but I was on an art high.

While in SF I wanted to get a visit in with former Cassilhaus AIR Chris McCaw and his girlfriend Rachel Phillips and since Heather and Oren know them as well, Heather suggested we get together for lunch on Sunday in the city (Chris and Rachel live south in Pacifica). Heather and I had just put together a new table for their outside area and she was hot to try it out!

And finally somewhere in the blur of my 5 days in the city I managed to squeeze a visit into Pier 24, a showcase for one of the top private photography collections in the country, and it did not disappoint with an exhibition called Grain of the Present.  Many of my favorite artists and a few new discoveries.

Diane Arbus

Alec Soth

Garry Winogrand

Nicholas Nixon     A complete set of all 42 annual photos of the Brown Sisters.

 

OK I'm officially exhausted now. Next week things cool down a bit.

 

 

 Nature can do without man but man cannot do without nature.   --Prentice Bloedel

 

 

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK SEVENTEEN

 

 

I've been buried in trip planning for days. When I embark on a major new leg of the sabbatical I have a list of places I might want to visit and do additional research on. I begin to write letters of introduction in advance without knowing exactly when I will be in their area.  It's a house of cards and at some point you just need to decide where you will be and hope for the best. Once things start to firm up I put on my travel agent hat and make flights, car rentals, airbnb selections etc.  Driving such great distances is getting a little old and so as I was driving to LA from Phoenix I decide to use a sort of hub and spoke strategy for my visits to the West.  My wonderful friends Kevin and Betsy Dill offered me their guest house in West Hollywood for as long as I want so I am making camp there and I am going to be flying to various destinations as needed. First I wanted to spend a few days with their family and check out a few things in LA. I had heard a lot of buzz about the Maholy-Nagy retrospective show at LACMA and I went with Betsy. I knew his photo work but had no idea of the range of other work he did.

 

I think this photograph was my favorite piece in the show.  What an amazing composition. Sorry for the crappy iPhone reproduction. Below Betsy through the exhibition entry door.

I always love to visit my favorite Chris Burdens when I am at LACMA. A reminder that if you are getting this post via email you will likely not be able to view the videos.  Go directly to the blog here. Bellow is a short film about Burden's Metropolis II.

 

I had a little fun with his signature piece Urban Light 2008 at the entrance to the museum.

A new discovery for me this visit was the work of Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem, a self-taught artist who spent 23 years in the Saudi military. This politically charged piece is called Camouflage 2017 and is made of rubber stamps.  The detail below shows the reversed text which appears throughout the work.

 

I couldn't resist the obligatory "levitating" shot of Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (photo by Betsy). If you haven't seen Doug Pray's documentary about the project of getting this 340 ton boulder to LACMA it is worth a view.

Betsy and I also squeezed in a visit to the Getty to see Chris Killip's show.

This was my favorite from the Killip show-Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside 1976

 

I decided that my next segment would be Washington, Oregon, and San Francisco.  I flew to Portland and drove all the way north to Port Townsend, WA.  I was originally supposed to see a residency program there but the appointment fell through and I ended up doing two great studio visits with Seth Rolland and Andrea Love. Seth is an amazing furniture designer and builder that I met when we purchased one of his tables for Cassilhaus.  This is my second studio visit with him and he showed me some of his latest creations.

My friend Andrea is an incredible animator that I met through her parents who are dear friends from Durham.  She does not do computer 2D animation but very labor intensive 3D frame by frame animation from sets and characters that she makes herself.  Here is her demo real to give you a flavor of her work. This old school low tech methodology gives the work an unusually fresh and unique look. She gave me a studio tour to get a glimpse of how the "sausage is made." Click on any image in this post to enlarge.

 

 

Andrea with husband Alex

We all went back to Seth's shop afterwards and then had a nice dinner on the water.  Of course everybody knows everybody already in Port Townsend.

I found a crazy and wonderful airbnb in PT with a spectacular cat.  A hand-built straw bale house that was sort of Middle Earth meets the Moors. The hosts make müsli commercially and sell it at local farmers' markets and online.

I was driving down some random road in PT and out of the corner of my eye I saw this intense splash of color flapping in the wind on a clothesline and I almost drove off the road trying to get my camera out. I was praying the home owner would not come out to find out what the crazy man was doing photographing her sheets.

One of my favorite discoveries in town was Chetzemoka Park. I went back three times in one day.

 

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.

László Moholy-Nagy

 

SABBATICAL WEEK SIXTEEN

 

So what do one of the world's largest radio telescopes and homemade pie have in common??? They were both on Highway 60 in New Mexico on the way to visit my latest bucket list item-Walter de Maria's seminal land art piece The Lightning Field

 

photo courtesy of the Dia Foundation and John Cliett

The Karl Jansky Very Large Array or VLA Radio Telescope is an astonishing instrument.  Click the link if you really want to learn about it (really you do!) but basically a radio telescope, as opposed to a normal optical telescope, receives radio waves rather than visible light and can mathematically combine signals from multiple dishes to get the equivalent resolution and sensitivity of one huge dish that would be miles wide but physically impossible to build. The VLA has twenty seven 82 foot diameter dishes that weigh 230 tons each.  They move on a Y shaped grid of railway tracks and can be deployed in different configurations as wide as 22 miles apart. It was built in the late 70s and the location was chosen because there is zero light and electromagnetic pollution on this vast rural plain.

I photographed the VLA extensively in 2000 (beautiful images if I do say so myself) but unfortunately all of those images are on analog 35mm slide film in my basement and I am not home to scan them!  Ellen was along for the ride this time and I really wanted her to see it.

You can see some of the railroad tracks below.

This is the maintenance hanger where they service the antennae. You can get an idea of scale from the pick-up truck.

This is the beast that moves the telescope around for configuration or service.

The VLA is a fascinating place to visit if you ever get the chance and Pie Town, NM, population 186, down the road a bit further is a great place to eat pie! Folks are trying to bring the town back from extinction and the home made pie competition is fierce.

But back to the main event.  I have wanted to see Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field for a long time.  It is in an undisclosed location in rural NM and the only way to see it is by appointment through the Dia Foundation.  Reservations go on sale on Feb 1st for the year and basically they sell out that day. We secured 5 spots and Ellen and I invited our NC friends and art groupies MJ, BethAnn, and Elizabeth (same crew that invited us for hot air ballooning last week) to join us so we had the place to ourselves. De Maria has strickly proscribed how he wants people to experience the piece: you are driven by van from Quemado NM and you stay on site for 24 hours in the original homestead cabin. They give you no real information about the piece before you arrive so you can form your own impressions during your time there.  Only 6 people max can see it at a time and no photographs are allowed.  This was really hard for me but I honored his wishes and it allowed me to experience the work rather than document it. From Dia:

The Lightning Field (1977), by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles -- two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height -- are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time. A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, Dia offers overnight visits during the months of May through October.

Commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation, The Lightning Field is recognized internationally as one of the late-twentieth century's most significant works of art and exemplifies Dia's commitment to the support of art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery.

When we arrived around 3pm I was a little underwhelmed. At that time of day the sun was such that you can only see a couple of the poles from the porch of the house and you wonder what all of the fuss is about. I read all of De Maria's technical notes about the installation in the cabin and was completely fascinated by the incredible detail and technical accuracy of the installation.  Tolerances were 1/16" between the poles and an elaborate underground grounding network was in place when and if the field attracted lightning.  Then I started walking through and around the field.  I decided to do it solo and my compatriots did the same.  We stopped for dinner (provided by Dia in the frig) and then I started to walk around the field at sunset.  It was magical.  The stainless poles reflected the blue sky and as you looked up one of the poles (about 22' high) the top of the pole completely disappeared and melded with the sky.  I tried walking all kinds of patterns-diagonals, perimeters, etc. If you hold onto the poles there is an amazing vibration from the wind as the poles are anchored many feet below the ground in concrete.  The ground is just scrub vegetation around the poles and there was lots of evidence that animals, including some very large animals, liked the field as well. I couldn't identify the footprints but we thought it might be elk. The next morning early there were similar revelations.  You could see all 400 poles distinctly from the porch in the full 1 mile by 1 km grid. I've never really had this much time to experience a single work of art and it was a transformative experience for me. We didn't experience lightning during our stay (lightning season is more July and August) but it seemed completely unnecessary for our already extraordinary experience. I didn't want the van to come get me the next day. It was a day off the grid and very much in the present. Here is a shot of our crew back in Quemado.

We parted ways with our NC friends and Ellen and I headed off to Phoenix for a fun reunion with three of our former Cassilhaus artists-in residence, Marie Navarre and Mayme Kratz from the Phoenix/Tempe area and Alan Bur Johnson from Jerome. We stayed with our dear friend Lisa Sette and her husband Peter Shikany and they hosted a dinner.

Ellen, me, Marie, Lisa, Mayme, and Alan

 

Lisa owns Lisa Sette Gallery and is the gallerist for all three of these amazing artists. It was the first time we had seen her dazzling new midtown location. We stayed in Lisa and Peter's fabulous guest house which was actually on the cover of the premier issue of Dwell magazine.

I was sad to have to take Ellen to the airport after only a day in Phoenix but somebody has to work! I stayed on for a week to start my planning for the West Coast leg of my trip. Temperatures in Phoenix were brutal so I was forced to use their swimming pool every day to swim laps.

I also managed to get in a wonderful studio visit with Mayme. Her work involves casting natural materials in resin. It is a fascinating process to watch and I was amazed at the range of materials she is using in her work.

It was so great to get to catch up with all of these old friends and Lisa and Peter's place was such a wonderful oasis.  I totally bonded with my dog-sitting charge, Jaxon, too.  Now it is off to LA!  Stay tuned for Week Seventeen.

 

 

 

“Cut my pie into four pieces, I don’t think I could eat eight.”  -Yogi Berra

 

SABBATICAL WEEK FIFTEEN

One of the earliest booked locations I had on this trip was a visit to the Tamarind Institute, a world famous Fine Art press in Albuquerque, NM. My friend Diana Gaston, whom I met when she was the chief curator for the Fidelity Investments Collection and got to know through Curator Camp at Cassilhaus, is now the Executive Director there and she invited Ellen and me out to give a talk about our programs at Cassilhaus. Ellen and I were finishing up our time in Marfa on our #thirteenyearsthirteendays anniversary tour and had three days to make our way to Albuquerque. First stop was Las Cruces, NM and a visit to the amazing White Sands National Monument. It is a photographers' paradise and I had photographed there extensively on my sabbatical in 2000 but Ellen hadn't seen it. We got there at 6:45 am just before they opened to avoid any footprints in the sand and the ranger let us in early. Nothing like a 275 square mile sandbox to bring out your inner child. It did not disappoint. Click any image to enlarge.

Next we headed off to Truth or Consequences, NM to take a soak or two in their famous hot springs.This one at Riverbend Hot Springs is right on the Rio Grande river.  Multiple baths with different temps. Dreamy.

Our airbnb in ToC was an off-the-grid dome house and surprisingly luxurious. If you want to know where all the hippies have moved to......

 

We have an old friend from Durham, Max Rada Dada, in town and it was fun to catch up. Here I am with Ellen and Diana Gaston sporting my latest Rada Dada fashion in front of the latest Tamarind edition by Cassilhaus and Tamarind AIR Rachel Perry.

Tamarind put us up for 4 days in their exquisite artist apartment on the top floor of their headquarters on the UNM campus and we got a fabulous demonstration of their lithography operation and a peak at a selection of their stunning editions produced throughout their history.

Here Ash (left) and their master printer Valpuri Remling work on a 5 color lithograph. It is an incredibly fascinating process.

Prior to giving our talk on Saturday, we decided to sneak away to Sante Fe for the day Friday to take in a couple of studio visits and to find out what all the incredible buzz was about with Meow Wolf. The buzz was warranted. This incredible artist-collective- designed interactive experience/permanent installation is sort of St. Louis City Museum meets acid trip. Incredible and tons of fun.

We fell down this rabbit hole for many hours.  Speaking of rabbit holes.......

 

Our talk at Tamarind on Saturday for a nice sized group of Tamarind supporters went really well. Ellen and I spoke for almost an hour and there were a lot of good questions.  Ellen and I spent much of the morning finalizing and updating our presentation.

 

One of Tamarind's board members held a wonderful reception for us which I stupidly neglected to photograph but it was a delightful evening all around with a tremendous group of people. Thank you Debi and Clint.

 

Sometimes the greatest way to check off an item from your bucket list is to find out about doing it just hours before it happens. We got a call late Saturday from our friends MJ, BethAnn, and Elizabeth who were in town to join us for another bucket list item I will cover in the next post, and they asked us if we would join them for a hot air balloon trip at dawn the next morning.  We impulsively said yes and on a cold Sunday morning we were off to the skies.  Albuquerque has a huge balloon culture and is the site of the world's largest annual balloon festival.

What a spectacular ride and when the burners aren't firing it is incredibly quiet up there.

 

We were done by 9:30am and had time for another trip to Santa Fe to do a little gallery hopping and to visit our photo gallery friends David Scheinbaum, Janet Russek and Andra Russek of Sheinbaum and Russek LTD. They have been photo mentors to me for a long time and one of the first contacts and friends I made in the photo community. They have a stunning home, studio, and home gallery in Santa Fe and it was wonderful to share a meal and an afternoon with them.

 

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

--Barbara Kingsolver