Woman Around Town’s Editor Charlene Giannetti and writers for the website talk with the women and men making news in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities around the world. Thanks to Ian Herman for his wonderful piano introduction.
Which one, you might ask? There are so many of them rattling around in our memories. London, where the soap box orators vent? Upstate New York where memories of FDR are enshrined? The South Side of Chicago where a great university shares a neighborhood with a President’s pre-White House home; gracious 19th Century houses and churches speak of times when space was spent lavishly to accommodate families and worshippers?
I spent the past week in the last of those three Hyde Parks watching my sister benefit from the genius of great doctors at The University of Chicago Medical Center and discovering a hotel with a big brand name and a massively creative take on that name, which manages to achieve both predictable quality and absolutely unpredictable personal touches. For a few days, I had the feeling I had visited Downton Abbey or the Bellamy residence and that the staff had been directed to foresee and respond to everything needed to make a challenging time into a touchingly positive one. The Hyatt Place Chicago-South/University Medical Center Team are to hoteliers what Merlin was to magicians. Or perhaps I should compare them to Mary Poppins’ Uncle Albert who was said to be able to “fix everything but broken hearts.”
Need to get from the hotel to the hospital or vice-versa? From 7AM to 7 PM just ask and in 10 minutes Larry or Dwight will whisk you there in a Mercedes bus they operate as if it were a streamlined sedan. Unfortunately, nothing is needed to shuttle you to the iconic ice cream parlor where tastes are offered any of the scores of original flavors. Local eateries include the cash only cafeteria President Obama is said to visit whenever in his hometown. A cornucopia of options surrounds the hotel and they make it easy to allow guests to order in to their in-house central delivery facility. A lavish breakfast is served daily.
Outside the doors is a world of options for all the necessities and niceties to establish a home away from home, from first run cinema to homewares and shopping options.
The “urban village” of Hyde Park is much like that of my Manhattan 10065. A quick review of the December issue of It’s Happening in Hyde Park showed me a stunning catalogue of cultural and historic icons that dot this Southside neighborhood (above). They range from the singular Museum of Science and Industry to the Du Sable Museum of African American History; the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House and magnificent Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and U of C’s Court Theater. A full page shows parks to be visited and others amaze with lists of houses of worship, restaurants and ongoing events. Everywhere there is the mosaic of people that power the strength and diversity of this enclave.
“Town and Gown” is a phrase that has its own varied meanings wherever institutions of learning live and further inspire their surrounding neighborhoods. Having seen the Hyde Park neighborhood from a home away from home in its center, I leave with a treasure of hope for what our great nation of villages can achieve.
There is a moment in the flight between JFK and Cuba when the passenger looks out and sees the Island country and the State of Florida simultaneously. When that happened to me early in the first year of the new Millennium, I thought of the advice the boy Arthur was given by Merlin in Camelot. “If you soar high enough, borders disappear.” A little more than a week later, I had seen the truth of that advice from on board the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital, which took off from New York looking mostly like an iconic DC-10, but was soon transformed into a world class teaching hospital of ophthalmology.
Along with the writer Eamon Lynch, on assignment from The New York Daily News, and photographer Lyn Hughes, who after decades of shooting what she describes as everyone and everything “from Top Chefs to Top Dogs,” we set off on a glorious adventure she called “transformative.” I was reminded of it last week by the news of Fidel Castro’s death. But the memories, like the experience have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with healing. That is the universal currency of ORBIS the humanitarian champion in the fight against preventable blindness.
Having recruited many journalists to travel with Orbis, to observe its unique missions to countries where preventable blindness is endemic, I had never personally observed one. And so, in the era of the Elian Gonzalez drama and when only a humanitarian objective would allow our government to grant visas in cooperation with a mutually respected neutral consulate, I knew when presented the opportunity that my initial reaction of “I can’t go the very week we are moving to a new asc international office,” was overruled by the profound conviction “I can’t NOT go.”
And so, Eamon, Lyn and I joined the Orbis staff and volunteer doctors and nurses in Cuba’s Matanzas Province for a glorious and appropriately high-soaring adventure.
The many journalists the asc team had encouraged to travel with Orbis to observe its unique missions to countries where preventable blindness is endemic, were unanimous in the sense of wonder at what they saw and filmed and photographed in those missions. But I, personally, had never seen how eminent ophthalmologists volunteer their time and skill to partner with the Orbis staff and local medical communities to create a unique learning and healing experience. I had never seen how a DC-10 touches down and is seamlessly turned into a world class teaching hospital; how from hundreds of candidates for treatment, a number are chosen on the basis of the ability to provide healing to the patient and invaluable learning for their new colleagues.
The challenge to the journalist is to discern the subjects who will emerge as the story: six-year old, whose alternating esotropia would have to be addressed and reversed before the window of opportunity closes. So it was with the feisty Katherine/Katerina that Eamon’s story followed (photo above). She was chosen because her condition was generally not treated in Cuba at that time, and so it presented the ideal teaching opportunity in which the Orbis volunteer physicians could share insight with their Cuban counterparts.
As the ORBIS nurse assured her that the pre-op IV was simply a way of feeding her, Katerina responded by directing the translator to report that she was not hungry. Puzzled by Eamon’s Irish name, she brightened when told that it was the Irish equivalent of Eduardo. When the two met again at the end of her successful procedure, they met eyes and she said through the translator, “I will call you Eduardo.” To which he spoke from deep joy, “And I will call you Kate.” You see, when you soar high enough borders do disappear.
Surrounded by miracles, Lyn was observing and chronicling how the first-class section of the reconfigured DC-10 became the operating theater. There, each procedure from laser to full scale retinal surgery, was observed by members of the Cuban medical community gathered there and also transmitted to an adjunct hanger space to accommodate the large numbers of medical personnel eager to grow, to dialogue, and to learn.
What we saw along the way has burned itself into the newly awakened eyes of my heart and mind. There was the arrival night reception when our Cuban hosts offered performances of dancers mirroring the amazing variety of latter day Cubans. In a judgment colored by something akin to fatigue from jet lag, travel, arrival, change from traveling clothes to jeans, and reconfiguring the plane to hospital, I concluded that, in Matanzas, the length of a set of dancing is measured as the span of “a life well lived.” Among protests of “but please, we have more Rum to offer you,” the well-traveled worker bees crept off to their beds to prepare for the healing heart of the visit.
When a “free Sunday” arrived, it brought a Jeep-borne one day field trip to Havana. A roadside stretch of beach illustrated the astounding gifts of automobile preservation and restoration that seem to reveal that the Leonardos of those arts live in Cuba. We crowded in quick visits to some of Hemingway’s favorite haunts, a bookstore to search for a biography of Jose Marti and finally a too-late return trip on a road that boasted no road lights but scores of families on bicycles bearing platforms that seemed to support all their earthly possessions.
Home restaurants, marking the early entry into individual enterprise, offered a way to learn the many definitions of Cuban tastes. The hotel where we were assigned, was host to many Canadian and Italian tourists who followed the paths to what Cubans of the past likely considered a sort of Hamptons get-away.
Walking further and further out into the sea that lay beyond the white sand beaches made it somewhat easier to believe that a young mother might have believed she could simply continue walking and so take her son to the other beach that lay to the west. At the start, she too might have had the look of intense maternal joy Lyn remembers seeing as another mother walked from a miraculous airplane, holding a child in her arms whose sight had just been restored.
For both of their sakes we can hope that Merlin was right and we can continue searching, each in his or her own way for new ways to “soar high enough.”
Opening photos and map from Bigstock by Shutterstock. Newspaper images from The New York Daily News. Article by Eamon Lynch, photos within article by Lyn Hughes.
Author’s note:
Eamon Lynch is a contributing writer for Newsweek and previously editor of Golf Magazine.
Lyn Hughes, photographer to Top Chefs and Top Dogs (Animal Medical Center), is a NYC photographer for over 25 years. Lyn captures the essence of the moment from Ethiopia’s Awash River Valley to Red Carpet Night at the Tony’s. You can view her work at www.lynhughesphotography.com
Mary Poppins and Bert used magic to create sidewalk art that opened a whole new world to the children and them. Courtesy of the artist they discovered wondrous new places and people that charmed, amazed and inspired.
Church of St. Vincent Ferrer toward Great East Window
At absolutely no risk of overstatement I can say to all of us dwellers in our urban village who stroll the enclave of the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer (SVF), from 66th to Lexington and then east on 65th can enter a magical world of museum-quality sidewalk art every day of the week.
In the simple act of looking up at this National Historic Landmark Church, they will see a lavish gallery of Charles Jay Connick stained glass art created over more than three decades, beginning from around 1916 when the cornerstone of the Bertram Goodhue structure was laid. The architect imagined fine stained glass windows of the delicacy and refinement of those gracing classic Gothic churches like the iconic Cathedral at Chartres, as the perfect complement to his work in our urban village.
The Organ Loft and Great West Window
When Connick was given the commission by the Dominican Prior he was, relatively speaking a “beginner: as his Boston studio was founded in 1913. But his style was no doubt most attractive to both the Dominican Friars and their architect who would have found the delicacy of his work the perfect counterpoint to the massive Gothic Revival stone walls and tracery. That delicacy was one of Connick’s artistic signatures as was his use of blues that define so many of the windows of SVF. The lofty clerestory windows were placed to create what Connick calls “rivers of light and of color” that illuminate the interior from above. He revisits that theme in his notes and journals as well as his 1937 book Adventures in Light and Color.
The center of the top of the Reredos
By juxtaposing blue-dominant and red/gold-dominant windows he hoped to balance the effects of direct and indirect sunlight that occurred at different times of the day. What he learned at Chartres and elsewhere was the technique of painting on clear glass to achieve the subtle effects often lost in windows that are more opaque.
The decades-long collaboration of the Priors of SVF, the architect, and Connick is a story of respectful cooperation. Some of the correspondence found in the Charles J. Connick Stained Glass Foundation Collection at MIT Libraries preserve exchanges like the one in which Connick comments on books about the Dominican Saint Albert the Great that the Prior had sent him and which fueled the creative vision embodied in the window that portrays that saint.
St. Albert the Great Window
A majority of the Clerestory windows feature saints set in the context of their contemporaries, their mentors and historic figures that influenced their lives and ministries. They summarize the Order’s 800-year history and its relationship with New York. One of the surprises from history is a portrayal of Napoleon Bonaparte linked to the negative impact of the Napoleonic Wars that blocked the access of Bishop Luke Concannon who had been consecrated Bishop of New York, but who died before he could reach his see due to the blockade of the Port of Naples dictated by Napoleon. There is also the presence of the philosopher Aristotle (he’s the one with a green halo, versus the gold adorning angels and saints) as a figure in a window honoring the St. Albert the Great, teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy and theology were strongly influenced by Aristotelian thought.
Aristotle from St. Albert the Great Window (detail)
The Catherine of Siena window honors the 14th Century Saint, who was a lay member of the Third Order of the Dominicans. She was philosopher, theologian, mystic, Saint, minister to the sick and skilled diplomat who succeeded in healing the breach in the Papacy that ended when she persuaded Gregory XI to return from Avignon to Rome. She did not hesitate to serve plague victims which made her a saintly icon of healers. Long after her death at age 33, the strong, compassionate woman was declared a Doctor of the Church, Patroness of Italy and Europe. She is surrounded in the Connick window at CSVF with Saints like Agnes of Montepulciano, Catherine of Siena’s early 14th Century inspiration, and to her right, the 16th Century Catherine de Ricci, showing three centuries of visionary women, from mystical to diplomatic.
St. Catherine of Siena Window
St. Agnes of Montepulciano from St. Catherine of Siena Window (detail)
Subjects of other of the major stained glass Clerestory windows range from patron of lawyers, St. Raymond of Pennafort; missionary to South America, St. Louis Bertrand; Saint Antoninus, symbolizing the Order’s relationship to art and architecture and champion of social justice issues such as the need for a living wage.
Two of the masterpieces of SVF’s world of stained glass art create the east and west boundaries of the nave’s pantheon of Dominican Saints. The Great West Window facing Lexington Avenue is a classic Rose Window whose theme is “the whole company of Heaven and all the powers therein.” It depicts the nine choirs of angels and illustrates the relationship of great Dominican saints to the distinctive spiritual powers symbolized by each of the Angelic choirs.
Center Aisle toward Great West Window
The recently restored Great East Window is centered on the Return of Christ to Earth as a symbol of birth into new life. The major window of Saint Dominic stands at the head of the Friar’s Chapel, a replica of the Medieval choir, and setting for the daily communal prayer of the resident Friars. It is one of the most recently completed portions of the Church. Each smaller lancet, each smaller window punctuating the walls in a series of side chapels honoring patrons including St. Patrick, and others and portraying such Scriptural events as the Visitation of her older cousin Elizabeth by her young relative, the Virgin Mary. Each one of every size honors a Mystery of faith or saintly inspiration.
Great West Window detail
Medieval Cathedral exteriors, and especially their stained glass windows, functioned as “sermons in stone and glass,” especially for the many faithful who were illiterate. The striking number of Connick windows in St. Vincent Ferrer’s French Gothic Revival structure make it a preeminent example Connick’s creativity, and one the three principal examples of his artistry in New York City. It is unusual to have such an abundance of the work of the master and his studio in a single location.
The large East Rose Window of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is one of the 14 of that Cathedral’s 94 windows designed and executed by Connick and his studio. Arthur Femenella, Sr. notes that that work was completed by Connick’s studio after his death in 1945. The third of New York City’s major examples of Connick’s artistry are to be seen at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Both its Greater and Lesser Rose Windows, Clerestory Level Windows, windows in the Arts Bay, and the Saint Martin Chapel are of Connick Design. SVF and Saint Catherine of Siena Music Director James Wetzel reports that the Connick stained glass dates from around the first half of the 20th Century.
Five Lancets from the Great West Window
The glory of Connick’s artistry is unquestionable. It is easy to understand why Connick ranks in a trio of masters along with Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge. His human and humane qualities are equally noteworthy. These include the fact that upon his death in 1945 he directed that his studios pass to the craftsmen who worked there with him in what he described as “only incidentally a business.” They continued creating in his style and spirit as Charles J. Connick Associates, until 1986. A charming video documentary chronicling the Last Window shows an elderly craftsman narrating to a young woman, the steps involved in the restoration of a Connick window. The nearly two-year work of restoration of SVF’s Great East window with its central figure of Christ’s return in glory, demonstrated that the same painstaking skills of the 13th and 14th Centuries are being kept alive today.
Great East Window, the “Window of the Last Judgement”
Before the closing of the Connick Studio in Boston, the craftsmen agreed to donate most of the studio records, working drawings and related materials to the Fine Arts Department of the Boston Public Library. The Connick Foundation works with Boston Public Library and Rotch Library at MIT to “conserve, maintain and enhance” the art form Connick and his colleagues developed.
For residents and visitors to the extensive Connick creations in our urban village surrounding SVF the voyage of discovery begins simply by looking up.
We would like to offer special thanks to the generous spirits who lent glorious images and insight into Connick’s masterpieces. Photographer Brian M. Kuttner is a retired general dentist from Millville, NJ, whose hobby is shooting famous architectural and historic sites, on the National Register of Historic Places. He has created a portfolio of images documenting Connick’s works at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer used in this story. On Facebook, readers can find his chronicles of its exterior, its side and auxiliary chapels, facades, and many other works of sacred and decorative art. The pastor of Saint Vincent Ferrer, Very Rev. Walter Wagner, OP was most generous with his kind assistance and unparalleled knowledge, interpreting the scores of Connick’s works at CSVF; thank you to Arthur Femenella, Sr. President of Femenella Associates for his insight into Connick’s works at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and to James Wetzel for similar insight into the Connick works at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
I read one morning that learning one new word in a foreign language each day fosters brain health. How could anybody resist such an optimistic opportunity and challenge?
So, as you have read in the headline of this column, the first learning experience I was able to log in on in my trajectory to improved brain health was an expression of gratitude. For the two or three of you who share my woeful lack of proficiency with America’s second language, that phrase means “I am so grateful.”
Let me tell you about some of the other things I learned and which richly deserve to generate gratitude.
I learned that test trains are running up and down the tracks in the Second Avenue Subway. And so besides being grateful, I also apologize for my comment in the inaugural Street Seens column that the subway line apparently had eternity as its due date. Workers on the Second Avenue Subway fortunately either never knew or had forgotten that I “dissed” it and by association, them, in that first column and were all smiles as they assured me that test trains on the line have had successful round trips as they check for proper functioning and put up signs to mark the many stops between here and Coney Island.
I learned that our national anguish of an endless electoral campaign will presumably end in less than two weeks. And I am grateful to be able to call up and invoke once again Abraham Lincoln’s invitation to summon up “our better angels” as we face the task of making peace in a respectful atmosphere where there are inevitable winners and losers. I am truly grateful that his words stand as a beacon as we work as hard as it will take to feel compassion for one another and turn aftermath into prelude to better things via better angels.
I learned that when I walk the block between Second and Third Avenues (the uphill path) that I am not just imagining that it seems longer than that. It is presumably because this was the location of horse barns housing the actual horsepower that fueled the earlier NYC public transport that preceded the now defunct Third Avenue “El” required that amount of square footage. Homes for these equine powerhouses set the perimeters that now define Manhattan House. In one stroke, history has decreed that both are provided the luxury of ample space.
“Sister Peggy” Dr. Margaret Ann Landry, RSHM
Finally, and most marvelously, I learned that there is such a heroine as “The Purple Nun,” and that she is not the central character in a graphic novel. She was a Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary for more than five decades. In a community that takes as its mantra the scriptural promise to work to bring life and bring it more abundantly, it probably shouldn’t be surprising to review a chronology that includes service as a teacher, a college administrator, a faculty member of Marymount International School in what was then Umtali, Southern Rhodesia, and one who helped create there the mission school of St. Killian.
On return to the US she once more set out on an unexpected path for more than two decades as counselor and campus minister at Long Island’s Stony Brook University, where she could have been remembered as Dr. Margaret Ann Landry, RSHM; DHL upon receiving the University’s accolade of Doctor of Humane Letters. Instead though, to most of the scores of students, alumni, and colleagues who traveled to Tarrytown to honor her in a rainy night’s Vigil and the next Day’s jubilant Mass of Resurrection she was “Sister Peggy or The Purple Nun,” so called for her penchant for unifying her wardrobe around that single color.
Tens of thousands of shares on the linked social media pages of Stony Brook and the RSHM global network celebrated memories of the wise, practical and remarkably generous woman who always made time for the human concerns and aspirations that she respected as of first importance.
In a final commendation at her Funeral Mass at Marymount Convent in Tarrytown, the celebrant suggested that in this painfully fractured political season we might do well to consider that in her light we will come to see how red and blue reach new glory as purple. None better than she to discourage anyone who might consider that miracle impossible. French was the language she taught to students at Marymount School in Arlington, Virginia, but I think she will not object to being the heartfelt Amen! Alleluia! of a story about gratitude headlined “Soy tan Agradecida.”
No, I don’t mean for drop dead luxury. We do, after all live in an urban village where many consider space the ultimate luxury. By extension, that could mean that if your kitchen has a window, it’s luxurious, and Oscar-worthy.
Whatever the size or amazing appliances, the real secret to a successful kitchen is that, like a good movie script, it has a strong and successful through-line. That’s the magnetic effect that accounts for you being drawn through the story so that you recognize and follow the “and then” factor that holds the story together and keeps you interested and involved. In the case of your kitchen, it is the something unseen but compelling that enables you to move through the steps from prep to clean up in a way that has a smooth flow like a well told story. It is the x-factor of interesting moments that carries you forward, leads up to a great conclusion, and cuts out the unproductive backing-and-forthing that replaces stress and fatigue with look what I just did and the ease with which I did it satisfaction.
Here are some of the practical tips to create a through-line that helps make meal preparation and clean up more nourishing than nightmare. And most of them can be achieved in relatively bare bones settings.
Set up the kitchen so that it would appear on a chart as one fluid movement through the spaces and functions that that go from raw materials, to cooking, followed by serving and clean up. Many successful kitchens are designed so that the chopping, peeling, rinsing of greens, etc. are achieved next to the sink. If you can find a sink that includes a bin for depositing the peelings into a container you can fill, then lift out and dispose of in one step, take it. It will save steps and make the floor around the sink safer. And if you are a composter, it will help that as well. Place the stove as near as you can to the prep area, so that you can keep the flow of your “story line” unbroken.
In selecting a refrigerator, make sure that you take note of its “handedness.” I once discovered to my great disappointment that it’s a really bad idea to have the refrigerator door open so that it succeeds in blocking your access to the rest of the kitchen, the meal ingredients and means of preparing them. If by opening to the left you and your well chilled ingredients are stranded in the dining area and blocked from the tools to turn them into dinner, count it as a loss to the through-line and your Oscar. Remember, the point to your script is to establish the simplest and most productive connection between the ingredients and the appliances where you turn them into a meal.
Can-Am cabinetry
If the currently popular “prep island” does not come with the design of your rental property, there are ways you can make up for that lack without breaking the terms of your lease. In a single aisle kitchen typical of many apartments dating from the immediate postwar period (for that read all the whitish brick buildings that sprang up from around 1947), think about using some freestanding and therefore removable amenities. For example: a free standing butcher block on legs placed next to the fridge and opposite the stove. In the “empty space” under the butcher block you can use sets of portable drawers or cabinets (I’m impressed with ones from Can-Am recommended by a genius kitchen stylist I know). There are several online sites where you can plan your portable island, including Can-Am. When planning your design, just be sure to measure the available space exactly so that you can slide whatever configuration you select to turn your available areas into new found storage solutions. If all else fails, you can find plenty of less ambitious alternatives in shops like The Container Store, Home Depot or even the highly versatile TJMaxx.
For summers like the one we just endured, consider a window air conditioner that will ensure that your oven is not the consistent loser to the microwave throughout the lengthening term of the city summer.
If you have a taste for colorful and interesting stoneware, you may want to consider wall mounted shelves with see-though sliding doors. They can preserve a slightly greater sense of spaciousness while doing the storage job and combining it with “wall art.” The see-through doors are also a way to discourage any tendency you may have to hoard more serving plates, cups and bowls than you really need.
Julia Childs will get a credit as set designer/psychological counsellor in your Oscar-worthy kitchen if you use her advice as to how you store a daunting number of herbs and spices you may acquire. Think, for example of the turmeric you purchased to use in a recipe you rarely revisit. Where in the world do you look for it when you pull out that little-consulted recipe? If you take the great Julia’s advice it will be easy. She recommended that you alphabetize your seasonings. So just look in the “T” section where it lives with the more often-used Thyme and Tarragon. To maximize the benefit, wall-mounted acrylic shelves can be used to position All-Spice to Vanilla Pods at easily reachable eye level. I can’t promise that some of your visitors might not wonder if you’re just a bit compulsive.
But there are certain allowances made for Oscar winners. So count on those as you celebrate the “through-line” your kitchen illustrates. And start looking for the perfect place to display that bald-headed golden statue.
All photos: Bigstock by Shutterstock, except photo of Can-Am cabinetry courtesy of Can-Am.
On Monday I learned of a cause taken up by the remarkable New York City Girl Scouts. They described it quite eloquently on Channel 7 Eyewitness News. Happily, I also know that they have a formidable champion for their cause that they may not be aware of. But the fact is that she is an heroic figure mounted on a horse of equally formidable proportions and can be found only a short bus ride away from Central Park, which the Girls Scouts have identified as the battleground of their campaign.
The Scouts want a female statue to be added to the crown jewel of New York’s parks system whom they will be able to see as a more realistic role model than the fictional women/girls Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose and Juliet Capulet (embraced by the young Romeo Montague.)
Several years ago I was introduced to the monumental figure of Joan of Arc who rides into battle from Riverside Drive at 93rd Street. It took author/film maker Mary Pat Kelly to open my eyes to the woman who reigned there for more than a century, since her 1915 dedication, as the first and at first the only non-fictional female memorialized on a Manhattan public space. With her keen sense of the convergence of real individuals in the popular culture of other times and places, Mary Pat has encouraged her friends to explore the rich connections they can find in the urban villages that make up our city.
That instinct led to her pointing out that May is a rather perfect time to celebrate the mighty Joan, who was burned at the stake in May of 1430 and went on to become the patroness of France credited with leading the nation’s troops to victory in the siege of Orleans. My most recent visit to the Equestrian Saint happened last May 30 just a century and one year after she came to Riverside Drive on the day of her dedication. I was charmed to see that several bouquets of flowers had been left at her feet by earlier visitors.
I could not help but hope that they also honored the eminent artist and art patron Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973) who sculpted the statue and thereby crushed the stereotypic view that such a monumental work could never be achieved by a woman.
The crowd that gathered to celebrate the unveiling of her statue in the throes of a World War included political dignitaries from at least two continents and even Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison as one of those who pulled the cord to unveil that stunning 20-foot sculpture. The informative account of the Joan of Arc Memorial on the NYC Parks website includes the detail that portions of stones from the Tower of Rouen where Joan was imprisoned are embedded in the base created for the statue by John Van Pelt.
It is rich in details of how Hyatt Huntington tapped into conventional and unconventional sources to achieve the awesome work: a horse at work for her local Massachusetts fire department, armors from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections and her own young female relative to serve as a model of the equally young soldier-saint.
After turning back the siege of Orleans the young Joan was ultimately captured and sold to the enemies of the King whose restoration she was inspired to seek; tried and condemned to be burned at the stake just a few months after her 20th birthday. Her story has been a favorite of playwrights, artists and authors.
But back to our Girl Scouts and their campaign to see a non-fictional female become the subject for an important statue in Central Park. Who better to adopt as their patroness in this enterprise than a young girl who lived on this earth for less than two decades and in that time dared to become a heroine, depicted in a work of art so rightly described as “larger than life size.” Or for that matter, who better as a joint inspiration than a sculptor who overcame skepticism that she was up to the task and was subsequently commissioned to fashion the statue of Cuban patriot Jose Marti, the whose statue stands near the southwestern entrance to Central Park.
And so, advice to all the dreamers: To Horse!
Opening photo: Bigstock by Shutterstock
All other photos courtesy of NYC Parks/Art & Antiquities; last photo by: Dorothy Cheng, NYC Parks
Brooklyn-based artist Stephanie Costello’s most recent drawing literally sprinted on to the page in a single week, insisting on appearing in brilliant color on her return from this summer’s Rio Olympics where she got to see Usain Bolt run. That might have sparked the exhilaration that brought her Track and Field to life on paper in a way that broke the established “rules” of her painstaking style of pen and ink drawings in black and white. Both would likely have come as a surprise to her and her followers who can see and purchase her work through the Flat-file program at Pierogi Gallery.
She describes her art as inspired by the places she has lived and traveled, citing Italo Calvino as “a special ally.” His book, Invisible Cities, sets a theme she follows, namely, walking the line between real and imagined worlds, between abstraction and representation.
“Rio2016,” pen and acrylic on paper, 16″ x 13,” 2016
A comment on her recent voyage of discovery to Rio described how she fell in love with the visual culture of Rio, and how her time there moved her to try to capture the emotion of triumph and the delicacy of loss in her two most recent works. The friend she accompanied to the city lost his chance to compete in the 100-meter sprint due to a hamstring injury. She captures the complex experience in these words, “I think all cities are visual representations of that dichotomy (between opportunity and deterioration) in the urban environment. The Olympics in Rio were somehow the epitome of everything I’ve been trying to choreograph in my work.”
By contrast to Track and Field, her City Palace, evolved over a period of two months, as she spent 30 hours per week for a total of 200 hours. That work began its life in the Indian town of Udaipur in the Rajasthan region some ten hours from Mumbai. Like much of her work it began with walking the streets sketching and photographing impressions of what she saw as a tiered “Wedding Cake City” with its lake creating the after image of a floating city. But then “Steph” is nothing if not surprising. The story of why that is so is one I learned in a conversation last week that took me to a nearby “urban village” accessed by telephone and the internet and an artist as open to discovery as she is structured in her drawings.
What our conversations suggested is that Stephanie’s artwork cannot, in fact, should not, be seen as separate from the rich tapestry of her whole life adventure.
Drawing in Istanbul, Turkey, 2013
Sensing a fascination with urban subjects, I asked Steph if she considered herself an urban artist. Her answer was as textured and intriguing as her drawings. “I’m not sure if I would describe myself as an ‘urban artist’ I certainly draw much inspiration from the urban environment, but the ‘urban’ label can be tricky. I do not make street art, but I am inspired by the streets, if that makes sense.”
She went on to describe how her love affair with her adopted neighborhood continues to evolve. It moves from an apparent passion to enter into the place where she lives on levels as varied as the places and the people she invites into her life as they invite her into theirs. No artist as island for Stephanie!
“The fact that I am a part-time bartender at a neighborhood spot in Brooklyn, and have managed to create a network of friends and neighbors, has given me opportunities to teach, to create murals, and to commission works of art.” She has done murals for a few Brooklyn restaurants and bars, and last summer, a large project in Las Vegas for a friend (the NBA player and former Brooklyn Net, Alan Anderson).
“If its Magic,” 2015, pen on paper 22″ x 30″
Inspired by the people of her neighborhood of friends, she has created album cover art, custom t-shirts, and painted storefront signage as parts of her portfolio. Her website of side projects includes an intricately crafted drawing of a rhinoceros. Her “well of course” description of the image she created to capture the symbol a Haitian-born doctor chose for his practice includes his hope that the iconic drawing would speak of strength and vitality and incorporate Caribbean and South American favelas. The central symbol of a ring is at the heart of the work she created to celebrate the wedding of two friends in Chicago. A work that I saw as symbolic of her crossing from Manhattan’s lower east side to her current urban village, features a stylized Manhattan Bridge. Its name, If it’s Magic, is from a track in the Stevie Wonder album Songs in the Key of Life.
It is evident that gift and giver are fully interwoven in her work with Bed-Stuy middle school students in an after-school art program. She learned of it from Bed Stuy friends she met as bartender in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy “urban village” in which she has put down the roots from which her creativity grows. One of the students Steph came most to admire is the one who showed her the other side of her own highly disciplined and structured approach to doing art. What her student taught her was the lyrical approach that gets to a creative breakthrough by seeming always to question whether G to A to D might be even more interesting than a standard A to B to C approach. She might borrow the lyrics from Anna in The King and I and say, “As a teacher I’ve been learning….”
And what of the role her other avocation, bartending in one of her neighborhood’s magnet locations? I asked if her art is enriched by what some see as the bartender’s access to the revelations associated with psychotherapy? She mulled that over and concurred that her patrons reward her with unexpected insights. She illustrated with a story about how John Ruskin learned of the beauty of the green grass of the English countryside simply by savoring/letting it into his senses of sight and touch. That might match with the bartender’s non-judgmental listening that tends to turn up fresh and honest insights.
And so, every day, the choreography continues!
Opening photo: “Track and Field,” pen, acrylic, and cut paper on paper. 22″ x 16,” 2016
For starters, remember that Manhattan is my urban village and the reason a friend who lives in South Carolina recently said to me when I told her this story, ”It wouldn’t surprise me if you said you had run into Queen Elizabeth II in Bloomingdales on Thursday.” But seriously, a few weeks ago I encountered a remarkable gentleman (and I use that noun as an accurate observation, not simply a conversational platitude.) The encounter taught me two things well worth remembering.
The first one. On the day of the anonymous encounter, I did not recognize the gentleman although he is a person with a considerable public profile. But that was all to the good. It reminded me in a forceful way that impressive people’s power to impress you is at its best when it comes from the simple experience of their presence, or their aura. and not from their resume. (That in turn echoes the brilliant writer David Brooks’ distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues described in his book The Road to Character.) But back to the encounter. The gentleman and I had a lighthearted exchange and went our separate ways, chuckling. When the lightbulb went off hours later, I thought to Google the name that had dawned on me might identify the “gentleman.’ It did.
As I read the Google results, I learned that the until-then-unnamed “gentleman” was, among a long list of accomplishments and achievements, a “Polyglot.”
That led to the second thing I learned that day, as I thought, “He’s a what?” There are a number of little used or seldom encountered words that sound vaguely uncomplimentary. Polyglot is definitely one of them. It’s the kind of word that when used in relation to someone you are inclined to admire, you want to say, “He’s a what?” At that point you may (or may not) be rescued by a couple of commas or parentheses. In this case, the designation “polyglot” was followed by the explanation that the “gentleman” has mastered a remarkable number of foreign languages. A polyglot’s “parenthetical” reads like this: XXXX is a polyglot (who speaks 7 foreign languages). So I moved the word from the possibly minus column to the unquestionably plus one. And I smiled as I remembered how many times I had reminded clients of my marketing strategies practice that forming, establishing and repeating their “parenthetical” is at the very heart of their success in branding themselves, their products or their company.
It’s very helpful to make sure you take possession of a designation. For example, “Hymini, the world’s first handheld wind and sun powered generator, can power all your five volt devices.” Or: “Your Finland visit is likely to include Rovanemi, the town designed by Alvar Aalto and postal address for Santa Claus, in the Arctic Circle.”
But, back to the encounter with a thoroughly memorable polyglot. The second thing I learned the day I encountered him is that little used and rarely recognized words depend on their accompanying parenthetical every bit as much as a respected brand of floor coverings or decorative hardware or fine crystal collectibles.
So, if in the future you hear that Tom, Dick or Harry runs an eponymous retail operation don’t fear that the trio are running a family enterprise into the ground. With their parenthetical the trio come out as “Tom, Dick and Harry, (sons of the legendary retailer Selfridge, for example) are reinventing the eponymous London store into a 21st Century success story.
To save you puzzlement and time, here are a few “red flag” words you can know from the start are good news, not bad, when applied to a person you meet or read about. If moved to think he’s/she’s a what?, it could very easily have a happy ending and not a disenchantment. Pigney is a term of endearment for a girl that evolved from the Saxon word for girl. Pernoctation in ecclesiastical usage is a night vigil of prayer and meditation. (But just in case, watch out for an adoption of the term to suggest spending the night together, often not specifically for joint prayer). Ustulate or scorched, used as a $20 replacement for sunburned. An atoraxic, you can be happy to know does not (presumably) suffer from an eating disorder but is that happy human who is unalterably calm and without stress. Plenipotentiary got to be that upon appointment to a position from ambassador to a delegate so you don’t have to wonder if he does magic tricks like a prestidigitator might be likely to perform.
You scrabble players will have many more examples of recently discovered and/or little known words. And I hope you marketers will continue to gain an increasing understanding of the power of the parenthetical. But I doubt that any of you will have the very great pleasure I had this summer in encountering a polyglot whom I know also to be a champion of compassion.
Set up the kitchen so that it would appear on a chart as one fluid movement through the spaces and functions that that go from raw materials, to cooking, followed by serving and clean up. Many successful kitchens are designed so that the chopping, peeling, rinsing of greens, etc. are achieved next to the sink. If you can find a sink that includes a bin for depositing the peelings into a container you can fill, then lift out and dispose of in one step, take it. It will save steps and make the floor around the sink safer. And if you are a composter, it will help that as well. Place the stove as near as you can to the prep area, so that you can keep the flow of your “story line” unbroken.
The Scouts want a female statue to be added to the crown jewel of New York’s parks system whom they will be able to see as a more realistic role model than the fictional women/girls Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose and Juliet Capulet (embraced by the young Romeo Montague.)
That instinct led to her pointing out that May is a rather perfect time to celebrate the mighty Joan, who was burned at the stake in May of 1430 and went on to become the patroness of France credited with leading the nation’s troops to victory in the siege of Orleans. My most recent visit to the Equestrian Saint happened last May 30 just a century and one year after she came to Riverside Drive on the day of her dedication. I was charmed to see that several bouquets of flowers had been left at her feet by earlier visitors.
After turning back the siege of Orleans the young Joan was ultimately captured and sold to the enemies of the King whose restoration she was inspired to seek; tried and condemned to be burned at the stake just a few months after her 20th birthday. Her story has been a favorite of playwrights, artists and authors.
