A C. T U. A L. L Y

Louise Bourgeois isn’t just one of my favorite artists.   She is one of my heroes. This is a woman who continued to reinvent her art well into the last two decades of her life, when she was in her 80’s and 90’s.   She never stopped remembering, reworking, rethinking, reimagining, or recreating her life into her body of work.   We saw an exhibition of her last creative efforts—all done with textiles--at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin a few months ago.   It was absolutely astonishing to see the manual dexterity and the acuity of vision she retained in order to sew with invisible stitches fabric landscapes, fabric portraits, and fabric sculptures.   The Museum catalogue contains photos of the entire exhibition, including the wall texts.   Here is an excerpt from the catalogue, giving a brief artist biography and the curators’ insights into the works on display: In the final two decades of her life, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) embarked on a daring new...

Palazzo Costantino (above), once a grand 18 th c. noble residence framing the northeast corner of Quattro Canti , but today an abandoned, broken-down wreck, is for sale---for only nine million Euros!   That might seem like a bargain to some people, but like so many things in Palermo, Palazzo Costantino is trapped in a sclerotic bureaucratic nightmare of cronyism, inefficiency, inertia, and lack of vision. Given its past and its possibilities, the palazzo's story is predictably tragic.   The Journal of Cultural Heritage Crime lays it out succinctly.  A side note:  The article has fabulous photos of the palazzo.  I encourage you to view them if you want to get a better understanding of the palazzo's appearance. My photos were taken at night, in theatrical lighting positioned to illuminate the art works, not the interiors.  The rooms are huge, the ceilings very high, and it was impossible for me to capture the building with an iPhone.  In contrast, th...