Tag 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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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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The Bachelor Who Made His Family

Not many people have heard of Morton Bartlett, a quiet Bostonian bachelor who had been an orphan till adulthood. Upon becoming an adult, Bartlett began to long for a family of his own. His solution to this desire: he would create them himself from plaster and paint. The only book that I know of about […]

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