Category Archives: Art

Dollers & Maskers: Part One

I have always had a deep admiration and love for artist, Laurie Simmons and what I am seeing of her show that was on view at Salon 94 only makes me admire and love her more. This exhibit, Kigurumi, Dollers and How We See, documents (beautifully as Simmons always does) the phenomenon of Kigurumi, or, […]

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Unica Zürn: “Here is the doll …”

In a recent dream, a man who looked very, very old … hundreds of years old … said to me: “Hey, dollface.” I love the word, and I knew something was about to be born of this word, from noticing the connotative beauty of it. This is a loaded word. Dollface. The word conjures the […]

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Hans Bellmer’s 110th Birthday Today

I don’t clearly recall the first time I discovered the artist, Hans Bellmer, but I believe, hazily, that it was in a women’s studies class while I worked on my Master of Fine Arts in poetry. I do recall becoming completely taken with him: imagining him alive, imagining him living daily life as a man, […]

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We Lost Many Dolls* This Week

It has been a sad week for art and poetry with the deaths of poet Wislawa Szymborska (88); the last living Surrealist poet and artist, Dorothea Tanning (101); and the pioneering contemporary artist, Mike Kelley (57). Wislawa Szymborska leaves us her poems. She wrote one of my favorite poems of all time, “In Praise of […]

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Little-Known Lester Gaba and His Gal

In 1932, Lester Gaba said he packed “a clean shirt and one of my soap sculptures” and headed from Chicago to New York City. He would become a little-known sculptor, seeming to be known and famous only during his own time after he created mannequins for the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue in 1930s New […]

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It’s Raining Dolls

I went to my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio for the Labor Day weekend. Yesterday I went into one of Ohio’s random gems — Marc’s. This is a store like no other; it is part grocery, part general store. They do not accept credit cards to keep the prices down (and they do just that) and […]

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Warning Us of Our Human Behaviors: Two Wexner Center Exhibitions

The first thing a visitor to the Wexner Center saw up through July 31, 2011, was a sign by the ticket desk warning us of the shock therein, the little trinkets of shock and awe that would overtake us in the galleries below us. The curation of all of the shows I have had the […]

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When Inanimates Become Animate

For the last two days, I have been watching more episodes of A&E’s Hoarders than I should simply because it tears deeply at me. I grew up giving lives to inanimate objects — dolls, Barbies, action figures, teddy bears. Now, as an adult seeing inanimates, knowing of course they are not alive themselves, I still […]

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Red Wine and a Beheading: Oskar Kokoschka and His Life-Sized Doll

Oskar Kokoschka was a Renaissance man with a pulpy, pulsing passion running through his veins. His passion seems to have been both an intense blessing and a curse. One evening, with red wine overpowering him, Kokoschka beheaded the life-sized doll that could never replace his lost love, Alma Mahler. After a fiery relationship with Mahler, […]

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Artist Jessica Harrison and Her Dark Little World

Artist Jessica Harrison works in a place where most of us would be afraid to even look. But the result of her labor forces us to gaze into the darkness as if  into a  frozen-in-time scene of the macabre, a little fantasy place of dark dreams like tiny sparks of stars. My maternal grandmother, Alice […]

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