Hers isn’t the most extravagant, the cleverest or even the most finely-crafted work in the Clay Studio, but it’s the most sensitive.

Anna Noel is a Welsh ceramicist, but her influences are so wide-ranged that her work doesn’t seem confined by geography. Tomb statues, pre-Colombian art and earthenware folk art all can be tasted in her circus-like animals, soft color choices and raku firing. Even the owners of her work are varied; she’s got pieces in the private collections of Prince Ranier of Monoco and museum curator, landscape designer and mustachioed knight Roy Strong.

The use of old limericks does imply a strange, if distant, connection to her heritage, but the cartoonish, figurative proportions of her pieces are all current.

My favorite is her interpretation of the limerick “The Young Lady of Riga.” In her typical softly-grained style, she portrays a simple, almost primitive woman mounted on a white tiger. The base reads:

There was a young lady of Riga

who rode out upon a tiger

the tiger came back with a smile on her face

and the lady of Riga inside her.

She was guest artist in residence in 2010.

Your mother, tumblrbot

I always understood impressionism as art.

When I was a child, “art” was synonymous with New Hope, Pennsylvania, a riverfront community to this day dedicated to curios, antiques and free expression. Recent efforts by Bucks County officials to turn New Hope into a giant Starbucks franchise have hindered the community’s artistic side, but no yuppification can erase New Hope’s importance in Americanizing the impressionist movement during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Daniel Garber’s works embody the New Hope school perfectly. His best-known pieces are of the Delaware River’s serene curves, but his few surviving portraits, etchings and even advertisements are proof that Garber could do much more than survey and replicate light and shadow through pastels. Even some of the great European Impressionists such as Pissarro and Bazille had a tendency to fail at the intricacies and precision required of portraitists. Garber mixes the graceful fluidity of impressionist strokes with precision and attention to anatomy in pieces such as “Tanis” (1915), one of my personal favorites and the one sampled in this blog post.

Garber’s history is similar to artists I explored in Mexico City. Beginning his career in commercial art, he studied in Europe, bringing the most important elements of Europe to the United States and discarding much of the pretension. Garber was somewhat a Romantic, but his work was utterly modern.

As much as I enjoy viewing his works, especially the well-chosen pieces in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, his greatest contribution was as a teacher, where he could impact the new generation. His effect on American painting might not be that direct, but it exists in echoes.

The best collection of Garber’s work is apparently at the James Michener Museum in Doylestown, but I haven’t made it out there yet. We’re planning a trip April 22.

Africa has an image problem. And, that is to say, Africa has an image. Comparing the Zulu nation to Ethiopia’s Coptic Christian empire is like comparing Dublin to Warsaw. But many people who should know better do anyway. To define Africa in a non-superficial way, UPenn’s archaeology and anthropology museum has a new exhibit called ‘Imagine Africa.’ It asks the community for input, a neat and positive concept. But they’ve already failed at proving they can provide a complete narrative of African cultures. The very exhibit doesn’t distinguish regions, presenting Moroccan bracelets aside South African masks.

It’s not as though UPenn has no frame of reference. The next room over has Mesoamerican artifacts. There, Teotihuacano artifacts are displayed separately from Aztec artifacts, and even a casual observer would get a grip on the difference between the Mayas and everyone else featured in the room.

So what’s the problem with Africa? It is not hard to portray cultural history free of excessive stereotyping, but the first step is to portray the differences in cultures of a region, especially a freaking continent. If UPenn wants its museum to portray the actual, not the colonialist, story of Africa, their first step should be to organize the exhibit by specific culture, so we as viewers can learn about how that culture varied from its peers instead of trying to find a definition of Africa.

Here’s some more info about the exhibit: 

http://www.penn.museum/upcoming-exhibits/967-imagine-africa-with-the-penn-museum.html

Here are three bizarre, nonsensical and infrarrealist poems by the late Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, translated into English by yours truly.

I enter/ we say/ filled with the foam of echos

By Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Alone & desperate

dry hair/ stiff cock

silent laughter/ bag empty of troy ounces

yesterday’s faith: burnt water

John Berryman, mute

incomprehensible untranslatable & suicidal

leapt off of 1 bridge

swallowed by fog

the same january that I wailed

the slow centipedes of my first songs

Plop plop/ 1 neurotic drops

gilled cosmo-nahuatl

writing your english but snorting

zero imitations

parodying the fat cows of weight watchers

this is the guy that lives as 1 enchanted bastard

close to the cold that forces your eyes shut

ignoring the dream that forces you awake,

calling to this sandwich-wrapper life,

and spewing as though vomiting.

without the brilliance to calm me,

I will wake to the sad sight of

him pushing 1 canoe, going hunting, perhaps,

for the rotund, paradoxical, deformed birds

introitus(I)

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

The air slips away

the hilts the cunts

the same dust is not life

/The dawns never/

The day slips away

the haggard shadows, the eyelets

the eye of God that He hires out cheap

the sleeping blacks

of Purgatory Road

the Chiclets sellers

& Abyss brand condoms

the semicolon of sweat

that “ayayay” that gets her knocked up and abandoned

The straight man slips away

the stitched hetero

the motherfucking rambler

the shell without sugar

the coffee without cream

Christ slips away

my songs and my virgins

my bag of blames

in a full garbage can

the crater of my Diogenes

my dirty, vulgar liver

my sun is holding a circus

The battle cry slips away

the Teponaxtle drum never

I want to say that the corn mules

are my comal, my caress, my color and my bray but

what I had said slips away

& until today I spoke

in confidence with demons

I am 1 mute life,

he who forms the gestures, then

begets them/ molds them

I slip away

Yeah, I too slip away

Begin to Puke Light

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Love is not a mental equation.

Hatred, yes, scrapes the knees

Silenced lips / gray-haired children;

temporarily

no little phallic cartoon

on a chalkboard is life/

Because death

now walks upon us:

“Tarantula’s Power”,

Life cannot cannot continue being

a mere splotch of food

upon the clean clothes.

Not this,

And not a poster of Raquel Welsh

or Emiliano Zapata reduced to poster,

all at once;

Nor the fables of

Stalin or Samaniego

Seven facts about Mexico City

1. The first house I’ve lived in in a year and a half with a garbage disposal in the sink is in a country that is supposed to be third-world.

2. Condesa has every kind of whiskey and beer that I miss except for Dogfish Head. I won’t lie—it’s more expensive than in the States, but I think that’s just because people get off on spending money there.

3. I went from a city where there was no bookstore to a city where I accidentally went into a bookstore while drunk without even realizing it was one. Maybe that’s unfair since the city I came from was Laredo.

4. Vertigo Gallery. I need to say no more.

5. Pulque. See above commentary.

6. If there’s a place you want to go, you can get there by metro.

7. I can hear Celso Piña and Bob Dylan in the same evening…hell, the same DJ may play them, as tonight, and that may make for an awkward set list, but it makes for a happy Zach.

Tlatlolco, 1968

By Jaime Sabines

(the original poem can be read here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/jaime-sabines/tlatelolco-1968-6/470329068584)

Youth is the theme

inside the Revolution.

The Government is the godfather of heroes.

The Mexican peso is strong,

And the country is rapidly developing.

Following the comedies and banditos on television,

we had demonstrated to the world that we are capable,

respectable, hospitable, sensible,

(What a marvelous Olympics!)

and now we are going to follow with the Metro

because progress cannot be halted.

Women of red,

men of blue heaven,

Mexicans parade in glorious unity

to construct the country of our dreams.

Not all leads reveal clues. Some just reveal alcohol, apparently.

Hija de los Apaches was the pulqueria that Mario Santiago Papasquiaro used to hang out at. He even went as far as writing a poem about it, which, it is claimed, is displayed there to this day. It includes the vaguely horrifying verse “I will die sipping/garlic pulque/pirouetting/like a circus performer/in the Hija de los Apaches/of the good Pifas.” Anyone who has read my blog knows he wasn’t lucky enough to die that way, but garlic pulque is probably an easy way to kill one’s self.

Hija is full of plaques, signs and newspaper clippings, but none of them seem to be related to Papasquiaro, and the good Pifas was nowhere to be found, even though his image was immortalized on a half dozen boxing ads. The kid who was working has no idea who or what Papasquiaro was, but he gave me free reign over the bar to search. The closest thing to a Papasquiaro poem I found was a sticker which declared “¡Cuidado! El machismo mata,” which basically translates into “warning: machismo kills.” A good message for the youth of this city.

I was hoping to find someone old here who knew the late poet, but that doesn’t seem likely. Some of these kids were probably being born when Papasquiaro was dying in the street. At least they card, which is a rarity for bars in Mexico City and pulquerias in particular.

It was the second day in a row that I hit a dead end in my searches. The day before, I went to Toluca to find a mural by Chango Cabral, and came up with nothing. A second day of failure was both annoying and disheartening, so I got myself a beer and sat down with Miguel Angel Fuentes, a cameraman for Milenio. He filled me in on the details. The old bar is gone. The new bar is four times the size, and only a few blocks away, but it’s not where Papasquiaro drank. Dead end indeed.

I recommend going to the pulqueria on Doctor Claudio Bernard 144 even if it’s not the original bar. The pulque isn’t as good as that of Los Duelistas, but the fact that they sell beer is a nice relief, the scenery is great, there is frequently live music and the company is just as friendly as it is in every pulqueria I’ve been in. That, and the look on the taxi driver’s face when you ask to go to Colonia Doctores at night is priceless.