The Vibes of March

MARCH IS MY birthday month and I often use my birthday as a time for reflecting on my life. This last year has been a weird one. For one thing, when we moved from Boston I left steady work and professional networks that took years to build. Now, in Chicago, I'm starting from the ground up—and at a relatively advanced age for doing so. I also started this newsletter, which makes me feel all kinds of vulnerable for putting my writing and drawings out there. Although thankfully what other people think of my drawings is one thing I am not concerned about. I enjoy making them too much to care whether or not the final product is actually "good," whatever that even means. Relatedly: I once complimented an extremely famous artist on her drawings of animals, which she had made by dipping a stick into ink and applying it to rice paper, but she just brushed it off. Nah, they're not good, she said neutrally. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, since I had been sincere in complimenting them and wasn't just blowing smoke up her ass, but she truly didn't seem to care either way. Is it relevant that she is in her eighties? Perhaps.

I've been traveling, and also sick, which means I haven't had time to work on anything new, so the comic I'm posting now is one that originally appeared in the January issue of Apollo. My editor there is a saint. She asked me to write about architecture in Chicago on the occasion of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and I suggested I do a comic about it instead. I feel so grateful to her for taking a chance on this. I decided to focus on the Thompson Center, which is soon to undergo a massive renovation as it becomes a Google headquarters. Preservationists fought unsuccessfully to have the building declared a landmark: The Thompson Center is flawed, but it is also remarkable: a short, squat profile in a city that prioritizes height. Also it is extremely colorful.

I participated in a site-specific dance performance there in 1991, so I used that as a departure point. In retrospect, I wish I'd gone into greater detail about the performance. The choreographer was Stephen Koplowitz, and the dance was unbearably earnest, but I felt very professional and important doing it even though I was just one of some fifty people running around on the balconies in white jumpsuits shouting things about government control. The choreographer had a collaborative process with those of us who were the de facto chorus dancers. Even though the final result was, in my memory, kind of a mess, I'm still impressed by its scale.

Forces of Will

I fear that this comic is far too wordy, and tried to cram in too much information, but oh well. I separated the panels to make it easier for scrolling, which is why they are not uniformly sized.

If you're curious, this is a good essay on the fate of the Dubuffet.

Three Things

We are in St. Louis for Michaela's spring break, visiting Chad's mom, and I spent the first three days in a stupor brought on by the flu, so the three things that kept me going this past week are art works we saw yesterday at the Kemper.

1. Chitra's work often strikes me as deliberately, maybe defiantly, untrendy. There's nothing austere or clean about it; it's brazenly figurative and colorfully busy and has a public-mural-under-the-subway-platform vibe. I obviously am going to like what she is doing here, messing around with a style based on popular Indian comics about religious figures.

2. Michaela noticed this painting from across the gallery and dragged me over to look at it. The artist was unfamiliar to me but I was instantly smitten based on the wall text:

". . . in 1923 she remarked, 'Cubism has poisoned three years of my life. As long as I was influenced by the great men surrounding me I could do nothing.' This revelation led her to develop the style that would come to define her late career. . . . During this period Laurencin was unapologetically herself. She had relationships with both men and women, adjusted the price of her works depending on the attractiveness of the buyer, and had a reputation for only painting children whom she liked." (italics mine)

3. We all really enjoyed St. Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving's 2023 installation, Archaeology of the Present. I am a big fan of architectural and urban preservation (see my comic above) and this was an impressive testimonial to the beauty of cities and to the importance of not giving up on them even when they are falling down.

That's all for this week. Have a good weekend! I'm going to go practice being unapologetically myself now.

Hugs,

Claire