Take That Step #11

1) Amy Sherald became known after painting the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Her paintings of African-American figures posing against solid, colorful backgrounds—and wearing even more colorful clothing—have become her trademarks.

American Sublime, Sherald’s first solo show in a New York museum, opens at the Whitney in less than a month, on April 9. The artist will present 50 paintings from the last two decades. She stated: “images can change the world.”

2) And, I apologize!, I'm going to talk once again about my favorite exhibition of the moment: Caspar David Friederich at the Met. The NYTimes article about German Romanticism has passages that are too good to be ignored:

But that’s the whole point here; you don’t need to go all the way to the Matterhorn or the Grand Canyon to discover the infinite, because the infinite is inside you. As observed by the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner, what’s sublime in Friedrich are not the mountains or trees (…).

What’s sublime in Friedrich are the subjective effects of these natural things on painter and viewer, or what a landscape does to an observer in history and time. The Romantics had a word for this: Erlebniskunst, an “art of experience,” in which what you feel has primacy over what you see.

Shrouded in fog or illuminated by sunbeams, landscape for Friedrich was always finally a journey into the unknown, the geographic unknown but also the unknown of the heart.

Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, circa 1818, Caspar David Friedrich

3) I write what I see and paint what I am — Etel Adnan, poet and artist

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5) I'm obsessed with Joni Mitchell (California is one of my favorite songs by her). And watched on repeat the video that went viral of Amanda Seyfried playing this track on the dulcimer:

6) Everything that impresses us is medicine. I think of healing through wonder, through amazement. Through the numinous. — Carl Jung

PS: I had to Google the word numinous — “suggesting the presence of a divinity.”

Lyne Lapointe

7) Liu Jiakun has won the 2025 Pritzker Prize, the top prize in architecture:

8) From the book Clay, de Jennifer Lucy Alan, that opens with this quote: What else can tell you about human life more than a pot does? — Magdalene Odundo

Clay is earth locked in a cycle with water and air that is only broken when we surrender it to fire. Lots of water makes clay liquid. Less means it is mouldable and can manifest our visions in the material world. Subject it to enough heat and it becomes a ceramic form that may survive 20,000 years or more into the future. Because of this, to mould a fistful of clay is to encounter a fission and a fusion of deep time and the human present. This way of making began in our most distant prehistory, and persists into the present.

The Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi described his working with ceramic as a close embrace of the earth, as a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions. It is this - an encounter with humbling geological timescales (…).

Every time we make something with clay, we engage with the timelines that are in the material itself, whether it was dug from a clifftop, riverbed or pit. In firing what we make, we bestow the material with function, meaning, or feeling, and anchor its form in a human present.

Objects made from clay contain marks of our existence that collectively tell the story of human history more completely than any other material.

PS: I’m enjoying Running Point, the new Netflix show produced (and sometimes written by) Mindy Kaling, that feels like a feminine version of Ted Lasso with basketball instead of soccer.

10) I feel Spring in the air…