Listen up, suburbanites and city dwellers. You are not the only game in town. There’s a vast tract of land you never think about, that just might hold the key to the next stage of human evolution. While we tend to look to New York, Silicon Valley, or Washington, DC, rural areas also give rise to experimentation and innovation.
In the early years of the Iraq War, female veterans slowly trickled in. They, too, were thrust into the general patient pool. Sometimes we had fifty-seven male residents and three females on the same floor. Of course, the women complained that they were “hit on.” And they were scared—because their doors had no locks. The open-door policy had been in place for decades, to ensure staff access to all rooms in case of emergency.
Lindsey Cook was twenty-four when she went to Ramallah, six miles north of Jerusalem, to teach fifth through nine grade at a Quaker girls’ school in 1987. Her students would soon be caught up in the Intifada or Palestinian uprising. Her classroom became a second home for young girls searching for both a personal and a national identity.
As the nation absorbs gripping accounts from lawmakers who sheltered within the U.S. Capitol during the riot, and from the Capitol Police—a lingering trauma remains. If there is a redemptive dimension to this tragedy, it may be that it has brought home the city’s significance in our collective American story.
Maria Sibylla Merian could not resist the lure of Suriname. In 1699, together with her daughter, Dorothea, she began a great adventure—at the age of 52. It was, by all accounts, a perilous voyage. After staying in the burgeoning capital of Paramaribo, along with two Black slaves and two indigenous guides, they ventured into the rainforest and were dazzled by the incredible richness and intense colors of the flora and fauna.
You know, your great grandmother was a slave.” A week ago my mother shared this piece of our family history. Old Yaya, was one of the millions of Armenians who were either sold into slavery, beaten or starved to death during the ethnic cleansing program of the Ottoman Empire.
There’s a jarring sense that we are living in apocalyptic times, and we hope and pray that all the turmoil—social, political, economic, and ecological—will somehow lead to a last minute save or revelation.
When Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Daniel Chester French, and their fellow commissioners chose Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design for the Lincoln Memorial in 1913, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, led by an associate a Frank Lloyd Wright, threw a fit.
Who gets to say what parts of the American narrative are acceptable and what parts are to be excised or erased? This is the heart of a heated conversation about the role of public art today.
The spotlight has been on New Deal muralists known for their radical views of history.