Meredith Schroeder of Paducah, Kentucky is
the 2013 inductee to the Quilters Hall of Fame.
She founded the American Quilters Society in 1984, and co-founded the
National Quilt Museum in 1991. The
Paducah-based museum is now the world's largest quilt museum. Schroeder also helped develop the first
standardized guidelines for appraising quilts.
Karla Bowsher
Chronicle-Tribune July 14, 2013
August 7, 2013 Orson Welles made his feature film debut as a director with Citizen Kane and before that he directed the
eight-minute short film Hearts of Age. However, Welles worked on another film
between those two efforts, which was believed lost forever... until now. Dave Kehr at
the New York Times has
posted a feature article on Welles' Too
Much Johnson, a 1938 film he wrote, directed and never finished
based on the play by William Gillette, which has recently resurfaced
"in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city
of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the
1970s." Classic film organization
Cinemazero is working with George Eastman House and the National Film
Preservation Foundation to preserve and transfer the nitrate film to safety
stock, after which the 40 minutes of surviving footage will be screened at this
year's Pordenone film festival on October 16 with a hope for financing to offer
the film on the Internet later this year.
Brad Brevet http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/lost-orson-welles-film-too-much-johnson-has-been-found/
August 7, 2013 In late July, Gibraltar,
a British territory that Spain wants for its own, began dumping concrete blocks
studded with iron spikes into waters off its coast. The Gibraltar government said the blocks were
intended to create an artificial reef that would foster fish stocks; Spanish fishermen
saw them as a devious attempt to tear their nets and keep them from their
habitual fishing grounds. But torn nets
were only the beginning. Decrying
Gibraltar’s unilateral decision to sink the blocks, Spain made one of its own:
a day after the blocks were sunk, Spanish Civil Guards began subjecting the
steady tide of cars that daily cross what Spain calls the “fence” (it refuses
to acknowledge the line as a “border”) into Gibraltar to heightened, even
meticulous, inspections. Suddenly the
crossing of a few meters was taking as long as seven hours. By Aug. 3, Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister
José Manuel García-Margallo was threatening worse: to look into a tax that would exact a €50
($67) levy from every car entering Spain from Gibraltar as well as measures to
prevent any plane arriving at or departing from Gibraltar’s tiny airport from
entering Spanish airspace. Explaining
his position to newspaper ABC,
García-Margallo sounded not unlike the hero of a summer blockbuster. “The party’s over,” he said. Why so much bluster about what is essentially
a hunk of rock? Only 30,000 people live
within Gibraltar’s 6.7 sq km, and although most are British nationals, they
rely on Spain for things like telephone service and reasonably priced
groceries. It would seem a perfect place
for a little cross-cultural cooperation, if it weren’t for lingering disputes
surrounding the 300-year-old Treaty of Utrecht, which in the course of ending
the 18th century War of Spanish Succession ceded Gibraltar to Britain. The treaty failed to mention whether that
concession included the isthmus attaching Spain to the Rock and, even more
pertinently, whether the deal came with any water included. And therein lies the root of today’s
conflicts. “Spain maintains that the
original deal included no territorial waters,” says Martín Ortega Carcelén, a
professor of international law at Madrid’s Complutense University. “But Great Britain says that it’s only
logical, that any territory in the world includes an extension of water. How many miles of water? No one knows. They could negotiate that, but there is no
negotiation.” There was an attempt at
negotiation a few years ago, when Spain’s then Socialist government proposed a
“tripartite forum” that would bring Britain, Spain and Gibraltar to the table
to negotiate as equal partners. But one
of the first things that the current government, in the hands of the
conservative Popular Party, did upon being elected in 2011 was to reject
three-way negotiations and to insist that what it perceives as a colonial relic
be returned to its purportedly rightful owners. “Margallo started out by saying the Gibraltar
was Spanish,” says Alejandro del Valle, an international-law professor at the
University of Cádiz. “And everything got
blocked from there. There are no
channels of dialogue anymore, so everything that happens becomes a problem.” Adding to the complication is the fact that
the current Spanish government has made it clear that it will only negotiate
with Britain, not with Gibraltar itself.
Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa died August 6, 2013 in San Francisco. She was interned during World War II, first at the Santa Anita racetrack in
Arcadia, where she lived in a horse stall that reeked of manure, and then at a
relocation center in Arkansas, where 8,000 detainees were surrounded by barbed
wire fences and watch towers. It was a
defining experience, but not a devastating one.
Decades later, when Asawa had achieved fame in the art world and
admiration in San Francisco as an educator and arts advocate, she told an
interviewer that she felt no hostility about the painful period in her youth
and blamed no one for her hardship.
"I would not be who I am today had it not been for the
internment," she said, "and I like who I am." "An artist is not special," Asawa
told an interviewer in 2006. "An
artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them
special. An artist looks at a juice
bottle, an egg carton or a newspaper and sees something valuable in them." Asawa had a large presence
in the Bay Area as a longtime member of the San Francisco Arts Commission and
founder of the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, launched in 1968, and the Ruth
Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school open since 1982. She was also known as San Francisco's
"fountain lady," who designed "Andrea," a mermaid fountain,
for Ghirardelli Square and "Aurora," an origami-inspired abstract
work, for the San Francisco waterfront. But
her most prominently located — and fiercely guarded — work is "Hyatt on
Union Square Fountain," a huge cylindrical bronze depiction of San
Francisco and its people. Produced in
1973 with the help of 250 friends and schoolchildren, the landmark was at the
center of a storm last year when plans for a new Apple store threatened to
demolish it. A public protest sent
architects back to the drawing board. Born Jan. 24, 1926, to Japanese immigrants in Norwalk,
Asawa was the fourth of seven children. Her
parents, Umakichi and Haru Asawa, scratched out a living as truck farmers. It was a hard life, but Ruth said the farm was
her earliest inspiration to be an artist.
"I can see glimpses of my childhood in my work," she said in
later years. "We used to make
patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now
see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures." Asawa was 16 when she and her family were
incarcerated. But she considered herself
lucky because she completed high school at the camp in Arkansas and enrolled at
Milwaukee State Teachers College, thanks to a Quaker organization. She planned to teach art, but her Japanese
ancestry prevented her from completing her credential. Undaunted, in 1946 Asawa headed off to Black
Mountain College, a North Carolina school with visionary teachers. It was a turning point that shaped the rest of
her life. She flourished within the
school's experimental educational program and met her future husband, architect
and designer Albert Lanier. They settled
in San Francisco in 1949. Asawa's focus
on arts advocacy put her own work in the shadows, but it returned to the
limelight this spring when Christie's auction house in New York presented an
exhibition of her work and sold a group of hanging sculptures for more than
$1.4 million. Suzanne Muchnic http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ruth-asawa-20130808,0,3036563.story
August 8, 2013
Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist
at Tulane and Boston universities,
stumbled upon wall art while exploring the
innards of a pyramid that was encased within another pyramid. The carving dates to the the 590s, and is
located in the town of Holmul in the Peten region of Guatemala, part of the
ancient Maya lowlands. Maya civilization
thrived from around 800 BC to 850 AD in Holmul, which was the site of ongoing
strife between warring groups, such as the Kanul and the people of Tikal. Last year, Estrada-Belli and his team
excavated one of the site’s pyramids and found a tomb with the bones of a
single adult male whose teeth had jade fillings. The tomb was also filled with 28 ceramic
vessels, which perhaps signified that the corpse had once been a local ruler. Walking up a staircase from the tomb, the
team stumbled on the carving, which stretched more than 26 feet across the wall
and was well over 6 feet tall. It was made of a limestone-and-water stucco and
was painted in red (a pigment that came from local iron ore) with flourishes of
blue, green and yellow. It depicted
three humans, all wearing bird headdresses and sitting cross-legged on top of
the head of a mountain spirit called witz. Estrada-Belli thinks the three figures are all
former rulers. The inscription on the
carving refers to the actions of a king name d Ajwosaj, who was part of the nearby
Naranjo kingdom believed to rule over Holmul at the time. The inscription also
indicated that the Naranjo had restored order, implying that Holmul had been in
the hands of invaders, Estrada-Belli said.
The artwork provides key clues for the effort to reconstruct the dynamic
power grabs that took place throughout this era, he added. Brad Balukjian http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-maya-stucco-carving-20130808,0,2984742.story
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