The Neon Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, features signs from old casinos and other businesses displayed outdoors on 2.62 acres.  The museum features a restored lobby shell from the defunct La Concha Motel as its visitors' center, which officially opened on October 27, 2012.  For many years, the Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) stored many of these old signs in their "boneyard."  The signs were slowly being destroyed by exposure to the elements.  The signs are considered by Las Vegas locals, business owners and government organizations to be not only artistically, but also historically, significant to the culture of the city. Each of the restored signs in the collection holds a story about who created it and why it is important.  The Neon Museum was founded in 1996 as a partnership between the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada and the City of Las Vegas. Today, it is an independent 501(c)3 non-profit.  Located on Las Vegas Boulevard N., the Neon Museum includes the Neon Boneyard and the North Gallery.  The impetus behind the collecting of signs was the loss of the iconic sign from The Sands; after it was replaced with a new sign in the 1980s.  There was no place to store the massive sign, and it was scrapped.  After nearly 10 years of collecting signs, the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada and the city of Las Vegas worked together to create an institution to house and care for the saved signs.  To mark its official opening in November 1996, the Neon Museum restored and installed the Hacienda Horse & Rider sign at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street.   However, access to the collection was provided by appointment only.  For the museum in Los Angeles, see Museum of Neon Art.  For the museum in Warsaw, see Neon Museum, Warsaw.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Museum  

Flash fiction, also called minimalist fiction, is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development.  Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story (also known as "twitterature"); the "dribble" (also known as the "minisaga," 50 words); the "drabble" (also known as "microfiction," 100 words); "sudden fiction" (750 words); "flash fiction" (1,000 words); and "microstory".  Some commentators have suggested that flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality in its ability to hint at or imply a larger story.  Flash fiction has roots going back to prehistory, recorded at origin of writing, including fables and parables, notably Aesop's Fables in the west, and Panchatantra and Jataka tales in India.  Later examples include the tales of Nasreddin, and Zen koans such as The Gateless Gate.  In the United States, early forms of flash fiction can be found in the 19th century, notably in the figures of Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Kate Chopin.  In the 1920s flash fiction was referred to as the "short short story" and was associated with Cosmopolitan magazine; and in the 1930s, collected in anthologies such as The American Short Short Story.  Somerset Maugham was a notable proponent, with his Cosmopolitans:  Very Short Stories (1936) being an early collection.  In Japan, flash fiction was popularized in the post-war period particularly by Michio Tsuzuki (都筑道夫).  It wasn't until 1992, however, that the term "flash fiction" came into use as a category/genre of fiction.  It was coined by James Thomas, who together with Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka edited the 1992 landmark anthology titled Flash Fiction:  72 Very Short Stories,  and was introduced by Thomas in his Introduction to that volume.  In 2020 The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin established the first curated collection of flash fiction artifacts in the United States.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction   

Edward Hopper is widely acknowledged as the most important realist painter of twentieth-century America.  But his vision of reality was a selective one, reflecting his own temperament in the empty cityscapes, landscapes, and isolated figures he chose to paint.  His work demonstrates that realism is not merely a literal or photographic copying of what we see, but an interpretive rendering.  Edward Hopper was born in 1882, in NY, into a middle-class family.  From 1900 to 1906 he studied at the NY School of Art, and while in school, shifted from illustration to works of fine art.  At the age of 37, Edward Hopper received his first open invitation to do a one-person exhibit, featuring some of his finest pieces of art.  16 pieces of his work were shown at the Whitney Club, and although none of the pieces were sold at this exhibit, it did point his career in a new direction, it got his artwork out to the general public, and he became a more notable name in the type of work and the art forms which he most wanted to focus his career on.  In Edward Hopper's most famous piece, Nighthawks, there are four customers and a waiter, who are in a brightly lit diner at night.  It was a piece created during a wartime; and many believe that their disconnect with the waiter, and with the external world, represent the feelings of many Americans during this period, because of the war.  The piece was set up in 1942, in the Art Institute of Chicago, and was seen by many people while it was on exhibit for a show.  https://www.edwardhopper.net/ 

July through October is your chance to see the American artist Edward Hopper’s early works painted on number of visits to Cape Ann in Gloucester, MA at the start of his fame.  Though Hopper (1882-1967) had painted for years in relative obscurity, selling only one painting before the age of 40, it was on Cape Ann, with the encouragement of his eventual wife, Josephine “Jo” Nivison, that he began the watercolor landscapes and houses that launched his success.  The exhibit is open July 22, 2023-Oct. 16, 2023.  Find location and hours at https://home.capeannmuseum.org/edward-hopper/  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2710  August 23, 2023