Get the Ancient Roman Look: A Hair & Makeup Video Tutorial

in Art, Gender, History, Life | August 7th, 2020

Remem­ber ear­ly April, when we threw our­selves into the Get­ty Chal­lenge, turn­ing our­selves into his­toric art recre­ations in lieu of climb­ing the walls?

Seems like ages ago, doesn’t it, that you wrapped a show­er cur­tain around your head and rifled through the but­ton box, rabid to make your­self into a mas­ter­piece.

While it’s not accu­rate to say we’ve col­lec­tive­ly set­tled into a new nor­mal, many of us have accept­ed that cer­tain alter­ations to our every­day lives will be pro­longed if our every­day lives are to pro­ceed.

First it was depress­ing.

Now it’s just bor­ing (with the occa­sion­al thrum of anx­i­ety).

Per­haps it’s time to shake things up a bit, and Crows Eye Pro­duc­tions’ tuto­r­i­al on achiev­ing an Ancient Roman look using mod­ern hair and beau­ty prod­ucts, above, is an excel­lent place to start.

While Crows Eye spe­cial­izes in build­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate peri­od dress from the unmen­tion­able out, it’s worth not­ing that styl­ist Liv Free takes a few lib­er­ties, adding a bit of mas­cara and lip­stick despite a dearth of evi­dence that Roman women enhanced their lips or lash­es.

She also uses curl­ing irons, pony­tail hold­ers, and a hair donut to cre­ate a crown of ringlets and braids.

If you’re a stick­ler for authen­tic­i­ty who won’t be able to live with your­self if you’re not sewn into your hair style with a bone nee­dle, you may be bet­ter off con­sult­ing the YouTube chan­nel of hair arche­ol­o­gist Janet Stephens.

https://youtu.be/X1ZRgz-Pdh4

But, if your goal is mere­ly to wow your co-work­ers with a full-on Fla­vian Dynasty look dur­ing your next Zoom call, by all means grab some pale lead-free foun­da­tion, some expend­able Hot Buns, and some light blush.

Don’t wor­ry that you’ll appear too done up. Free notes that Roman women of both high and low birth were devot­ed to make­up, but in def­er­ence to their men, lim­it­ed them­selves to the nat­ur­al look.

That’s a tad anachro­nis­tic, huh?

These days, any­one who wants to remake them­selves in the image of Empress Domi­tia Long­i­na should feel free to take a crack at it, irre­spec­tive of gen­der, race, or extra hands to help with the parts of the hair­style you can can’t see in the mir­ror (or a Zoom win­dow).

Once we have mas­tered our new look, we can see about anoth­er muse­um chal­lenge. Here’s some inspi­ra­tion to get us start­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bal­ti­more Hair­dress­er Became a World-Renowned “Hair Archae­ol­o­gist” of Ancient Rome

Roman Stat­ues Weren’t White; They Were Once Paint­ed in Vivid, Bright Col­ors

How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dat­ing Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Iconic Album Covers of Hipgnosis: Meet “The Beatles of Album Cover Art” Who Created Unforgettable Designs for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel & Many More

in Art, Music | August 4th, 2020

Try call­ing to mind Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind with­out its naked, swim­ming baby; or Lon­don Call­ing with­out Paul Simenon smash­ing his bass. Think of Sgt. Pepper’s or Abbey Road with­out think­ing about their sleeves. Clas­sic rock albums and clas­sic, unfor­get­table album cov­ers are insep­a­ra­bly inter­twined.

Imag­ine Dark Side of the Moon with­out its prism….

Hipg­no­sis, the design team behind the near­ly 50-year-old album cover/t‑shirt/poster/bumper sticker/coffee mug/etc. com­plete­ly nailed it, as they say, with this design. They did so after sev­er­al less-than-icon­ic but still mem­o­rable attempts to rep­re­sent the band’s sound with a sin­gle image.

Made up of design­ers Storm Thorg­er­son, Aubrey Pow­ell, and, lat­er, Peter “Sleazy” Christo­pher­son, Hipg­no­sis first got its start when the for­mer art school friends of Pink Floyd asked to design the sleeve for the band’s 1968 A Saucer­ful of Secrets, their sec­ond stu­dio album and first with­out found­ing singer/songwriter Syd Bar­rett. There­after fol­lowed designs for More, Ummagum­ma, Atom Heart Moth­er, Med­dle, and Obscured by Clouds.

In-between Pink Floyd albums, Hipg­no­sis picked up com­mis­sions from dozens of oth­er musi­cians, includ­ing well-known names like T. Rex, Wish­bone Ash, The Hol­lies, The Pret­ty Things, Elec­tric Light Orches­tra, Rory Gal­lagher, and many oth­ers.

Once the Dark Side prism appeared in 1973, “all the top high-pro­file bands who could afford the Lon­don design­ers’ art­work showed up at their door,” as one account puts it.

Led Zep­pelin knocked, as did Peter Framp­ton, Nazareth, Bad Com­pa­ny, Gen­e­sis, Peter Gabriel… Hipg­no­sis’ recog­ni­tion as pre­mier graph­ic inter­preters of rock, most notably of albums that emerged in the post-PF pro­gres­sive boom of the 70s, was ful­ly secured by a string of unfor­get­table cov­ers. Many oth­er album designs from their 190-cov­er career you may have nev­er seen, and may not find near­ly as com­pelling as, say, Wish You Were Here, whose man-on-fire hand­shake burns into the reti­nas.

The team had an unusu­al approach with many of their post-Dark Side cov­ers, recall­ing the 60s with psy­che­del­ic and satir­i­cal imagery, espe­cial­ly on album art for bands who got their start the pre­vi­ous decade. But they updat­ed the aes­thet­ic, invent­ing the “tech­no-psy­che­del­ic visu­al iden­ti­ty” of the 70s, as The Guardian writes, and turn­ing flower pow­er into machine pow­er, post-indus­tri­al land­scapes, apoc­a­lyp­tic fan­tasies, and pop art col­lages. The influ­ence of Christo­pher­son, who became a full part­ner in 1978, helped pull the design­ers into the sleek­er 1980s with cov­ers for Peter Gabriel, The Police, and Scor­pi­ons.

Many clas­sic album artists find a visu­al brand and stick with it. Some, like H.R. Giger, are already extreme­ly niche. Oth­ers, like the leg­endary design team at Blue Note records, have the man­date of defin­ing not only an indi­vid­ual album’s look, but also that of an entire record label. One of the remark­able things about Hipg­no­sis is their range—a char­ac­ter­is­tic that fur­ther fits with their rep­u­ta­tion as “The Bea­t­les of album cov­er art,” writes Why It Mat­ters. “Nobody has ever done it bet­ter than the British design firm.”

As free agents, they could approach each record as a sin­gu­lar work. They were as com­fort­able work­ing with pho­tog­ra­phy as they were cre­at­ing orig­i­nal art­work. They could rep­re­sent brood­ing Eng­lish folk and neon New Wave. Album cov­ers have sold pop­u­lar music for about as long as it has exist­ed as a com­mod­i­ty, but Hipg­no­sis sig­nif­i­cant­ly raised the bar, espe­cial­ly in their con­tin­ued work with Pink Floyd and their Led Zep­pelin cov­ers.

Some Hipg­no­sis cov­ers are time­less, some dat­ed, some baf­fling con­cep­tu­al exper­i­ments that sure­ly made more sense in the plan­ning stages. A NSFW theme of female tor­sos pre­dom­i­nates. It’s hard to say to what degree each band had a hand in choos­ing and direct­ing each image. The design­ers’ last cov­er was for Led Zeppelin’s Coda, released in 1982. “There’s quite a bit of poet­ry in that. In their fif­teen years togeth­er the firm pro­duced many of the most icon­ic cov­ers in music his­to­ry.” As for cor­re­la­tions between the qual­i­ty of the music and the qual­i­ty of the cov­er art—that’s an inves­ti­ga­tion we leave to you. See many more Hipg­no­sis cov­ers at Why It Mat­ters and The Guardian. And if you can swing it, see Thorg­er­son and Pow­ell’s book, For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipg­no­sis. Or Pow­ell’s Vinyl, Album, Cov­er Art: The Com­plete Hipg­no­sis.



Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Art Record Cov­ers: A Book of Over 500 Album Cov­ers Cre­at­ed by Famous Visu­al Artists

7 Rock Album Cov­ers Designed by Icon­ic Artists: Warhol, Rauschen­berg, Dalí, Richter, Map­plethor­pe & More

H.R. Giger’s Dark, Sur­re­al­ist Album Cov­ers: Deb­bie Har­ry, Emer­son, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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H.R. Giger’s Dark, Surrealist Album Covers: Debbie Harry, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

in Art, Music | July 22nd, 2020

The work of H.R. Giger is immense­ly pow­er­ful. Giger’s amaz­ing cov­er for Emer­son, Lake and Palmer’s album Brain Sal­ad Surgery por­trays a Goth­ic touch that could fit any heavy met­al band at any time.

—Jim­my Page

Swiss artist Hans Rue­di Giger is a genre unto his own, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ing the bio­me­chan­i­cal hor­ror of the 1980s with his designs for Rid­ley Scott’s 1979 Alien, the film that launched him into inter­na­tion­al promi­nence and turned Deb­bie Har­ry on to his work. Meet­ing him the fol­low­ing year, the Blondie singer asked Giger to design the cov­er and music videos for her solo album, KooKoo.

The album was panned, but the cov­er end­ed up being as pre­scient as the film that pre­ced­ed it. It would “see its influ­ence in films like Hell­rais­er, the rise of what was called the ‘mod­ern prim­i­tive’ move­ment, and help cul­ti­vate the dark masochis­tic char­ac­ter Har­ry would play in David Cronenberg’s Video­drome,” writes Ted Mills in an ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post. “It was a feel­ing that would flour­ish in the deca­dent ‘80s.”

The record was also, in a way, “a throw­back to Giger’s oth­er famous record cov­er, the one for Emer­son, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Sal­ad Surgery” from 1973 (above). Ten years before Alien, Giger designed his first album cov­er, for a “pro­to-met­al” band called The Shiv­ers.

Their 1969 Walpur­gis, fea­tures what look very much like Alien’s face­hug­gers. Giger had been hav­ing this night­mare for a long time. Years after these begin­nings, due in large part to Alien and its sequels and the Deb­bie Har­ry cov­er, Giger became high­ly sought after by met­al bands, from Celtic Frost to Danzig to Car­cass.

His work appears, how­ev­er, on far more album cov­ers than he would like. There have been “many small bands over the years,” he writes on his site, “pre­sum­ably fans of mine, who had appro­pri­at­ed my art­work for their album and CD cov­ers,” with­out get­ting per­mis­sion. Giger him­self has only cre­at­ed a few pieces specif­i­cal­ly as album cov­er art, the last in 1989 for Steve Stevens’ Atom­ic Play­boys. “Of the approx­i­mate­ly 20 records on which my art­work has been seen over the last 30 years,” he writes, only a small num­ber have been com­mis­sions. These include The Shiv­ers, ELP, Har­ry, and Stevens.

All the oth­er covers—those offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned, in any case—come from work Giger “made for myself, many years before, which the bands, lat­er, licensed for their own use after see­ing them in my books.” Though Giger him­self is more of a jazz fan, his appeal to heavy met­al is obvi­ous. “Giger’s style of adding a sur­re­al­ist twist to mechan­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal scenes,” writes All­mu­sic, “often with twist­ed sex­u­al undertones—was imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able,” and imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fied a band as some­thing seduc­tive­ly taboo and pos­si­bly dead­ly.

At least one use of his work got a band pros­e­cut­ed. “Bay Area punks the Dead Kennedys includ­ed a poster of Giger’s Land­scape #XX, also known as Penis Land­scape (the image depict­ed rows of erect phal­lus­es in coitus), in the pack­ag­ing of their 1985 album Frankenchrist,” writes Rolling Stone, “and were sub­se­quent­ly put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty.”

Those who would mis­use his work and vio­late his copy­right may also find them­selves in court. “It will,” he warns, “cost a lot more than if they had first con­tact­ed me, through my agent, to ask for per­mis­sion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Deb­bie Har­ry Com­bined Artis­tic Forces with H.R. Giger

The Giger Bar: Dis­cov­er the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Cre­at­ed the Night­mar­ish Mon­ster in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Artists Give Advice to the Young: Words of Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Cleese & Many More

in Art, Life | July 22nd, 2020

When Rain­er Maria Rilke began cor­re­spond­ing with a poet­i­cal­ly inclined 19-year-old mil­i­tary-acad­e­my cadet named Franz Xaver Kap­pus, he inad­ver­tent­ly found­ed a genre. After Rilke’s death, Kap­pus pub­lished the mis­sives the two had exchanged in the 1900s as the book Let­ters to a Young Poet, a title to which estab­lished old­er artists giv­ing advice to aspir­ing younger ones have paid homage ever since. Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, their words of advice don’t usu­al­ly come writ­ten in let­ters. They aren’t even lim­it­ed to one-to-one cor­re­spon­dence: now such words of wis­dom can eas­i­ly be broad­cast to every young per­son in the world with rel­a­tive ease. For the young artist, the chal­lenge thus has shift­ed from seek­ing advice to seek­ing out the right advice.

Hence the roundups we’ve post­ed here on Open Cul­ture of offer­ings like “Advice to the Young,” a Youtube series from Den­mark’s Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. In 2016 we high­light­ed its videos of cre­ators who suc­ceed­ed in shap­ing the cul­ture with­out much in the way of com­pro­mise to their idio­syn­crat­ic visions: Lau­rie Ander­son, Daniel Lanois, David, Byrne, Pat­ti Smith, Umber­to Eco, Mari­na Abramović.

In 2018 we fea­tured an update on fur­ther advice to the young offered by writ­ers like Jonathan Franzen and Lydia Davis, film­mak­ers like Wim Wen­ders, and artists like Ed Ruscha. The Louisiana Chan­nel, which has con­tin­ued to add new clips of advice from an ever-widen­ing range of fig­ures, has since uploaded sage coun­sel from the likes of pho­tog­ra­ph­er and film­mak­er Anton Cor­bi­jn, dis­si­dent artist Ai Wei­wei, and Trainspot­ting author Irvine Welsh.

As Welsh puts it, “The most impor­tant thing I would say to any­body who’s doing any­thing” — writ­ing, music, art, what have you — is to “do it with exu­ber­ance, because that will come across.” Long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers may remem­ber Andrei Tarkovsky (an artist who in most respects seems to have occu­pied an entire­ly sep­a­rate world from Welsh’s) hav­ing tak­en that idea fur­ther: young film­mak­ers should­n’t “sep­a­rate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live,” and indeed should accept that their art requires “sac­ri­fic­ing of your­self. You should belong to it, it should­n’t belong to you.” He also advis­es young peo­ple of any incli­na­tion that they “should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as pos­si­ble by them­selves” — per­haps the only mode in which they can stay true to their own per­cep­tions and moti­va­tions.

“I think many writ­ers are led into a com­pro­mise in their basic rela­tion­ship to truth in their mate­r­i­al,” says Rachel Cusk, author of the recent “Out­line Tril­o­gy” of nov­els and much oth­er fic­tion and non-fic­tion besides, in her Louisiana Chan­nel video. “You get a lot fur­ther by stick­ing to your guns.” But where do you find that mate­r­i­al in the first place?

John Cleese answers that straight­for­ward­ly in the Big Think inter­view clip just above: “I sug­gest at the start that you steal, or bor­row — or as the artists would say, ‘are influ­enced by’ — any­thing that you think is real­ly good and real­ly fun­ny, and which appeals to you. If you study that and try to repro­duce it in some way, then it’ll have your own stamp on it.” Only then can you devel­op your own style. Or, to return to the needs of young poets of the world, you could take the advice of no less cel­e­brat­ed a pre­de­ces­sor in the art than Walt Whit­man: “Don’t write poet­ry.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Ven­er­a­ble Female Artists, Musi­cians & Authors Give Advice to the Young: Pat­ti Smith, Lau­rie Ander­son & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Icons of Art Wearing Masks: Frida Kahlo, Mona Lisa, Girl with the Pearl Earring & More

in Art, Current Affairs | July 20th, 2020

We hear the phrase “unprece­dent­ed times” every day now, but the truth is few calami­ties in human his­to­ry are more prece­dent­ed than plagues and pesti­lences. In West­ern his­to­ry, at least, dis­ease epi­demics seem always to have been fol­lowed by Machi­avel­lian oppor­tunism and cultish con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that only made things worse.

Dur­ing the 14th cen­tu­ry, almost six hun­dred years before Nao­mi Klein defined the shock doc­trine, the Black Death “strength­ened the pow­er of the state and accel­er­at­ed the dom­i­na­tion of key mar­kets by a hand­ful of large com­pa­nies,” write Eleanor Rus­sell and Mar­tin Park­er at The Con­ver­sa­tion (hel­lo, Ama­zon). In their argu­ment, dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism may have pre­ced­ed actu­al cap­i­tal­ism, and it start­ed with the plague.

In his his­to­ry of the Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe described how “every­one behaved bad­ly, though the rich behaved the worst,” as Jill Lep­ore writes at The New York­er, forc­ing their ser­vants to put their lives at risk to pro­vi­sion the great hous­es. “This Neces­si­ty…,” writes Defoe, “was in a great Mea­sure the Ruin of the whole City,” though few in Lon­don then under­stood how to slow trans­mis­sion of the dis­ease.

That was not the case when the Influen­za epi­dem­ic took the lives of hun­dreds of mil­lions around the world between 1918 and 1920. Doc­tors under­stood how the flu spread and rec­om­mend­ed that every­one wear a mask in pub­lic. Cities passed ordi­nances and imme­di­ate­ly resis­tance sprang up, lead­ing to orga­ni­za­tions like San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League, whose rhetoric sounds like that of anti-mask pro­tes­tors of today.

The times may be unique—for the speed at which COVID-19 spread around the world, for instance, along with the disinformation—but humans have lived through many ver­sions of pan­dem­ic, and many dis­as­trous­ly self­ish, oppor­tunis­tic, and short-sight­ed respons­es to it. We may con­tem­plate these his­tor­i­cal rep­e­ti­tions as we admire the Insta­gram cre­ations of artist Genevieve Blais, who has been post­ing images of famous paint­ings, stat­ues, and pho­tographs with their sub­jects wear­ing masks.

More than nov­el­ty memes or high­brow pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments, Blais’ cre­ations are part-whim­si­cal/­part-sober­ing reminders of the per­sis­tence of plagues through­out history—their influ­ence on the rise and fall of dynas­ties and pow­er­ful patrons, and the igno­rance and fol­ly that led to so much pre­ventable death. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, humans are bet­ter posi­tioned than ever before to com­bat epi­demics of dis­ease. But it’s worth remem­ber­ing the prece­dents for our cur­rent con­di­tions. Plagues have shaped human his­to­ry. We don’t always have to respond to them the same way. See all of Blais’s masked fine art images at her Plague His­to­ry Insta­gram page. If you DM her, she will make you a print.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Hap­pened When Amer­i­cans Had to Wear Masks Dur­ing the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Down­load Clas­sic Works of Plague Fic­tion: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shel­ley, to Edgar Allan Poe

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Banksy Strikes Again in London & Urges Everyone to Wear Masks

in Art | July 16th, 2020

The per­son who may or may not be Banksy is at it again, this time sten­cil­ing up a Lon­don Under­ground car­riage with his famil­iar rat char­ac­ters. Rats know a thing or two about spread­ing dis­ease but this time they are here to insist that the pub­lic wear a mask. (Ear­li­er in April they appeared in the artist’s own bath­room.)

As post­ed on Banksy’s social media feeds on Tues­day we can see the artist get kit­ted up like one of the Underground’s “deep cleaners”—-a pro­tec­tive face mask, gog­gles, blue gloves, white Tyvek body­suit, and orange safe­ty vest—and enter a car­riage with an exter­mi­na­tor’s spray can­is­ter filled with light blue paint. He also has some of his sten­cils ready to go. “If you don’t mask, you don’t get” reads the video’s cap­tion.

Cur­rent­ly all pas­sen­gers must wear masks on the Lon­don Under­ground, and over the last month Trans­port for Lon­don has report­ed a 90% com­pli­ance rate (take note, Amer­i­ca!). Work­ers have been san­i­tiz­ing sta­tions and trains more, and even installing UV light tech­nol­o­gy to bat­tle the virus.

Banksy’s rats are shown using masks as para­chutes, car­ry­ing bot­tles of hand san­i­tiz­er, and along one wall sneez­ing par­ti­cles across the win­dow, paint­ed using the can­is­ter spray noz­zle. Ban­sky tags the back wall with his name, urges a pas­sen­ger to stay back while he works, and then gets off at a stop. He’s left one final mes­sage: “I get lock­down” (paint­ed on a sta­tion wall) “but I get up again” (on the clos­ing doors). The line is a nod to Chumbawumba’s inescapable 1997 anthem “Tubthump­ing.”

Banksy might be a rebel­lious street artist, but he’s not an idiot: wear­ing masks is imper­a­tive.

The art­work didn’t last long, as Trans­port of Lon­don has strict poli­cies against graf­fi­ti. So few pas­sen­gers even got to expe­ri­ence the art before it was scrubbed by work­ers, long before any­body would have iden­ti­fied it as a Banksy work.

“When we saw the video, we start­ed to look into it and spoke to the clean­ers,” a Lon­don Trans­port source told the New York Post. “It start­ed to emerge that they had noticed some sort of ‘rat thing’ a few days ago and cleaned it off, as they should. It rather changes the aspect for any­one seek­ing to go down the route of accus­ing us of cul­tur­al van­dal­ism.”

The Post even sug­gest­ed that the car­riage could have been removed and then sold as a com­plete art work in itself and raised mon­ey for char­i­ty. (They quote an art bro­ker who val­ues it at $7.5 mil­lion. But where would you hang it? In your pri­vate air­plane hang­er?)

Any­way, like a lot of Banksy work, it appeared, it was doc­u­ment­ed, and it was gone. Trans­port of Lon­don did men­tion that they were open to Banksy cre­at­ing some­thing else at a “suit­able loca­tion,” but then again, that’s not how the artist rolls. Just keep your eyes open, folks, and look out for rats.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Break­down of the Artist’s Self-Shred­ding Paint­ing

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

Banksy Paints a Grim Hol­i­day Mur­al: Season’s Greet­ings to All

The Genius of Har­ry Beck’s 1933 Lon­don Tube Map–and How It Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sub­way Map Design Every­where

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Emma Willard, the First Woman Mapmaker in America, Creates Pioneering Maps of Time to Teach Students about Democracy (Circa 1851)

in Art, Education, History | July 13th, 2020

We all know Mar­shall McLuhan’s pithy, end­less­ly quotable line “the medi­um is the mes­sage,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The devel­op­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies may gen­uine­ly present us with a chick­en or egg sce­nario. After all, only a cul­ture that already prized con­stant visu­al stim­uli but gross­ly under­val­ued phys­i­cal move­ment would have invent­ed and adopt­ed tele­vi­sion.

In Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle, Guy Debord ties the ten­den­cy toward pas­sive visu­al con­sump­tion to “com­mod­i­ty fetishism, the dom­i­na­tion of soci­ety by ‘intan­gi­ble as well as tan­gi­ble things,’ which reach­es its absolute ful­fill­ment in the spec­ta­cle, where the tan­gi­ble world is replaced by a selec­tion of images which exist above it, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly impose them­selves as the tan­gi­ble par excel­lence.” It seems an apt descrip­tion of a screen-addict­ed cul­ture.

What can we say, then, of a cul­ture addict­ed to charts and graphs? Ear­li­est exam­ples of the form were often more elab­o­rate than we’re used to see­ing, hand-drawn with care and atten­tion. They were also not coy about their ambi­tions: to con­dense the vast dimen­sions of space and time into a two-dimen­sion­al, col­or-cod­ed for­mat. To tidi­ly sum up all human and nat­ur­al his­to­ry in easy-to-read visu­al metaphors.

This was as much a reli­gious project as it was a philo­soph­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and ped­a­gog­i­cal one. The domains are hope­less­ly entwined in 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry. We should not be sur­prised to see them freely min­gle  the ear­li­est info­graph­ics. The cre­ators of such images were poly­maths, and deeply devout. Joseph Priest­ly, Eng­lish chemist, philoso­pher, the­olo­gian, polit­i­cal the­o­rist and gram­mar­i­an, made sev­er­al visu­al chronolo­gies rep­re­sent­ing “the lives of two thou­sand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD” (con­vey­ing a clear mes­sage about the sole impor­tance of men).

“After Priest­ly,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “time­lines flour­ished, but they gen­er­al­ly lacked any sense of the dimen­sion­al­i­ty of time, rep­re­sent­ing the past as a uni­form march from left to right.” Emma Willard, “one of the century’s most influ­en­tial edu­ca­tors” set out to update the tech­nol­o­gy, “to invest chronol­o­gy with a sense of per­spec­tive.” In her 1836 Pic­ture of Nations; or Per­spec­tive Sketch of the Course of Empire, above (view and down­load high res­o­lu­tion images here), she presents “the bib­li­cal Cre­ation as the apex of a tri­an­gle that then flowed for­ward in time and space toward the view­er.”

The per­spec­tive is also a forced point of view about ori­gins and his­to­ry. But that was exact­ly the point: these are didac­tic tools meant for text­books and class­rooms. Willard, “America’s first pro­fes­sion­al female map­mak­er,” writes Maria Popo­va, was also a “pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” who found­ed “the first women’s high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion in the Unit­ed States when she was still in her thir­ties…. In her ear­ly for­ties, she set about com­pos­ing and pub­lish­ing a series of his­to­ry text­books that raised the stan­dards and sen­si­bil­i­ties of schol­ar­ship.”

Willard rec­og­nized that lin­ear graphs of time did not accu­rate­ly do jus­tice to a three-dimen­sion­al expe­ri­ence of the world. Humans are “embod­ied crea­tures who yearn to locate them­selves in space and time.” The illu­sion of space and time on the flat page was an essen­tial fea­ture of Willard’s under­ly­ing pur­pose: “lay­ing out the ground-plan of the intel­lect, so far as the whole range of his­to­ry is con­cerned.” A prop­er under­stand­ing of a Great Man (and at least one Great Woman, Hypa­tia) ver­sion of history—easily con­densed, since there were only around 6,000 years from the cre­ation of the universe—would lead to “enlight­ened and judi­cious sup­port­ers” of democ­ra­cy.

His­to­ry is rep­re­sent­ed lit­er­al­ly as a sacred space in Willard’s 1846 Tem­ple of Time, its prov­i­den­tial begin­nings for­mal­ly bal­anced in equal pro­por­tion to its every mon­u­men­tal stage. Willard’s intent was express­ly patri­ot­ic, her trap­pings self-con­scious­ly clas­si­cal. Her maps of time were ways of sit­u­at­ing the nation as a nat­ur­al suc­ces­sor to the empires of old, which flowed from the divine act of cre­ation. They show a pro­gres­sive widen­ing of the world.

“Half a cen­tu­ry before W.E.B. Du Bois… cre­at­ed his mod­ernist data visu­al­iza­tions for the 1900 World’s Fair,” Popo­va writes, The Tem­ple of Time “won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in Lon­don.” Willard accom­pa­nied the info­graph­ic with a state­ment of intent, artic­u­lat­ing a media the­o­ry, over a hun­dred years before McLuhan, that sounds strange­ly antic­i­pa­to­ry of his famous dic­tum.

The poet­ic idea of “the vista of depart­ed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medi­um, the pic­ture will, by fre­quent inspec­tion, be formed with­in, and for­ev­er remain, wrought into the liv­ing tex­ture of the mind.

Learn more about Emma Willard’s info­graph­ic rev­o­lu­tion at the Pub­lic Domain Review and Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bisa Butler’s Beautiful Quilted Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

in Art, Creativity, Fashion, History | July 10th, 2020

Fiber artist Bisa But­ler’s quilt­ed por­traits of Black Amer­i­cans gain extra pow­er from their medi­um.

Each work is com­prised of many scraps, care­ful­ly cut and posi­tioned after hours of research and pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es.

Vel­vet and silk nes­tle against bits of vin­tage flour sacks, West African wax print fab­ric, den­im and, occa­sion­al­ly, hand-me-downs from the sitter’s own col­lec­tion.

In The Warmth of Oth­er Sons, a 12-foot, life-sized por­trait of an African Amer­i­can fam­i­ly who migrat­ed north in search of eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, a wary-look­ing young girl clutch­es a purse to her chest. The purse is con­struct­ed from a com­mer­cial wax cot­ton print titled Michelle Obama’s Bag, which com­mem­o­rates one of the for­mer First Lady’s trips to Africa.

As anthro­pol­o­gist Nina Syl­vanus writes in Pat­terns in Cir­cu­la­tion: Cloth, Gen­der, and Mate­ri­al­i­ty in West Africa:

To wear this pattern…is both to hon­or and aspire to be rav­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful like Michele Oba­ma; It is con­sid­ered a must-have fash­ion piece in the wardrobe of styl­ish women in Abid­jan, Lomé, and Lagos.

The vibrant col­ors of Butler’s mate­ri­als also inform her por­traits, par­tic­u­lar­ly those inspired by his­tor­i­cal fig­ures whose images are most famil­iar in black-and-white.

She is also deeply influ­enced by her under­grad­u­ate years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, where many of her pro­fes­sors were part of the AfriCO­BRA artists’ col­lec­tive. They encour­aged stu­dents to think of blank can­vas­es as black, rather than white, and to throw out the Beaux Arts palette in favor of West African fabric’s Kool-Aid colors—“bright orange, bright yel­low, crim­son red, intense blue.”

As she describes in the above video:

The ini­tial start is who’s it gonna be? Then after you choose that per­son, choose your col­or scheme. The col­or scheme is based on what you feel about that per­son. Peo­ple have col­or around them, in them, that is not evi­dent­ly vis­i­ble to the naked eye.

The Storm, the Whirl­wind, and The Earth­quake, her recent­ly com­plet­ed full-length por­trait of a 30-year old Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, reimag­ines the abolitionist’s 19th-cen­tu­ry garb as some­thing akin to a mod­ern day Harlem dandy’s bold embrace of col­or, pat­tern, and style, delib­er­ate­ly chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. The rich col­or scheme extends to his skin and the homey back­ground fab­ric.

But­ler, who was raised in an art-filled New Jer­sey home by a Black Amer­i­can moth­er and a Ghan­ian father, also cred­its her grand­moth­er, the sub­ject of her first quilt­ed por­trait, with help­ing her find her aes­thet­ic.

An ear­ly attempt to paint a por­trait of her beloved rel­a­tive (and child­hood sewing instruc­tor) result­ed in dis­ap­point­ment on both sides. The crest­fall­en artist’s aunt tipped her off that the old­er lady’s men­tal self-pic­ture was that of some­one 30 years younger.

Inspired by the col­laged work of Romare Bear­den, But­ler gave it anoth­er go, this time in quilt­ed form, tak­ing care to rep­re­sent her grand­moth­er as an attrac­tive woman in the prime of life. This time her efforts were met with enthu­si­asm. “I could feel an ener­gy in the room that some­thing new was hap­pen­ing,” But­ler recalls.

Whether her sub­jects are liv­ing or dead, But­ler strives to bring the same sense of “dig­ni­ty and regal opu­lence” to unsung cit­i­zens that she does when cre­at­ing por­traits of such famous Amer­i­cans as Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack­ie Robin­son, Lau­ren Hill, Josephine Bak­er, and Jean-Michel Basquiat:

African Amer­i­cans have been quilt­ing since we were brought to this coun­try and need­ed to keep warm. Enslaved peo­ple were not giv­en large pieces of fab­ric and had to make do with the scraps of cloth that were left after cloth­ing wore out. From these scraps the African Amer­i­can quilt aes­thet­ic came into being. Some enslaved peo­ples were so tal­ent­ed that they were tasked for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful quilts that adorned their enslavers beds. My own pieces are rem­i­nis­cent of this tra­di­tion, but I use African fab­rics from my father’s home­land of Ghana, batiks from Nige­ria, and prints from South Africa. My sub­jects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ances­tors. If these vis­ages are to be recre­at­ed and seen for the first time in a cen­tu­ry, I want them to have their African Ances­try back, I want them to take their place in Amer­i­can His­to­ry. I want the view­er to see the sub­jects as I see them. 

Explore the work of Bisa But­ler on the artist’s Insta­gram, or MyMod­ern­met and Colos­sal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Free Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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