City Views.36
Art & Family in Nature (Storm King 1)
Ok,so since I’m on a roll I’m putting up the first photos from a completely **glorious** day at my own personal very-favorite day-trip location near NYC: Storm King Art Center, which I certainly remember visiting in the early 80’s if not before. As you’ll see here, and in upcoming posts, we had simply the most perfect possible weather, and Mom mustered the energy to hold up more than her half of the sky, even as she juggled a few health challenges of her own. If you’ve not been to Storm King, do go. And support your own local gardens & arts places :-). Peace, out.
Remembering in December
My wandering field life passed the ten-year mark earlier this year. That’s ten years of finding my way into a new work environment and getting to know new colleagues once a year or so. In a more mundane way, it’s ten years worth of photo files to keep up-to-date and to try to remember to share on my blog. A cousin (thanks, Juliette!) noticed that the entries from my earliest days had lost their photos: mine was a rather early blog, and the ways of uploading photos have changed since then. (Many of those earliest posts appear frankly so embarrassingly shallow to me now that I’m tempted to simply wave my editorial wand and have done with them…but thus far my sense for historical accuracy is controlling that temptation…) If my continued research succeeds, many of those photos will be directly restored onto the blog as I find their originals in backup hard drives and other obscure locations: ah, new year’s resolutions before the old year has even wrapped up!
In the meantime, I’m uncovering little treasures that never made it up here, while fondly remembering where I’ve been and what I’ve done. I was recently saddened to learn that Nancy Schrom Dye, former president of Oberlin College, had passed this year. During my years of active alumni-association work I greatly appreciated her contributions to my alma mater – so I was proud to join some other colleagues in taking her for an end-of-year meal which, the digital date stamp tells me, occurred in Beijing on December 31, in 2005. Up above are also a few rediscovered December 2005 Beijing-area shots which somehow didn’t get posted at the time. (Posting photos was more challenging in those early days…)
Just below are some previously-unposted 2015 shots: early-morning moonset at my home here in Haiti; me with my brother and a colleague when I gave a talk at Carnegie Mellon University earlier this year; and some shots from the lovely Frick House & museum in Pittsburgh, from the same visit. And since this put me in the mood, I’ve wandered through the many countries & continents, family meals & trips & assignments on four continents that have filled the years between these two sets of photos so very fully. Assembling them’s been fun for me so I hope viewing them is fun for you too :-).
This time last year? In December 2014, I returned from Sierra Leone & later went with great friends to enjoy the Ai WeiWei exhibit on Alcatraz Island (more photos from that one in the original post….though that particular set of great friends – you know who you are! – are remarkably camera-resistant):
Where’d I spend 2013? Living in PNG, participating in meetings in Amsterdam & dive trips in Australia, then celebrating the holidays with Steve & Mom in New Zealand:
I began 2012 in the US (where I visited Washington, DC in cherry-blossom season), turned 50 in the company of Howard & Gene at Kakadu National Park in Australia, and finished the year in PNG:
2011 was mostly Mweso, a little Lamu, a little London and a year-end back home seeing Frank Lloyd Wright homes of Pennsylvania with family:
2010…wow, what a year. Just seeing all the continents and countries where I spent time (actually meaningful time, with friends and family and work) makes my head spin even now. The photos evoked so much for me that I just couldn’t narrow it down to three or four…so I’m giving you a lot from 2010, a mix of Manipur (start of year) and Mweso (end of year), with a sprinkling of Sweden, Berlin, Paris & California in between:
I entered 2009 in Tahiti, yes it’s true: during the year I took off from work to help Mom with her house, I dedicated two months to exploring Australia (and watching the Australian Open!) and New Zealand, flying in via Tahiti with a few nights in Papeete, just because I could. The year ended, of course, in Manipur and included a great trip to see excellent sites of Rajasthan with Howard & Gene:
2008 started in Nigeria, and ended in Tahiti…with a lot of good work in Nigeria, a short assignment for the earthquake in China, visits in Germany with my exchange family friends there….and a good deal of time in and around NYC (Mom, aunt Judy & I enjoyed a harbor trip past Ellis Island where our own immigrant ancestors entered the country, and also a trip to our favorite sculpture park up th Husdon)…with a side trip for some hiking in Sequoia and other California adventures:
2007…I began the year based in Colombo but spend the new year’s period with Mom & Steve at Angkor Wat, returned to Colombo to finish out an assignment, headed on for training in Paris where I also got celebrate Mom’s 71st birthday…back to the US to reorganize my life after my first two years in the field, and then off for a new assignment in Nigeria. At the time it felt big. Now it’s all fond memories:
…which will bring us back to year two of this current phase of life’s great adventure, the lovely year 2006. From Beijing & Yunnan in China, to Polonnaruwa & Sigiriya in Sri Lanka (where I was based at year’s end), with family time on Cumberland Island (Mom’s 70th birthday dinner!) and in Germany in between. With a special souvenir from Seoul, where I had the opportunity to work a bit with the young ladies pictured with their daffodils. In a small-world twist, I had dinner with one of those two young ladies just a few nights ago in Port au Prince, which she visits sometimes in her current work with the CDC. So much small world, so little time for it all. Happy end of 2015, and many good hopes for a 2016 of more peace and health to everyone, everywhere.
From the River to the Plains
The photographic record of Mom & Paul’s excellent road trip continues with some images from the Minnesota-South Dakota-Nebraska leg of the journey. (And btw, for anyone growing weary of these rambles through the vast heartland of my homeland, fear not, there’s only one more entry due about the road trip, which wrapped up just two states south of where this entry concludes.) In Minnesota, we got to spend a few days being shown various lovely corners of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul) by my oldest friend, someone I’ve known as long as I can remember going back to elementary-school days. So what you’ll see here include shots taken on and around the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi river, in the heart of downtown Minneapolis (including the cool panoramic shot below in which the nature of the camera’s panoramic-image compilation means that the cyclist who was biking past as I took the shot appears in a cool little stop-action sequence…), followed by the only photo I kept from our journey across most of South Dakota, taken at our lunch & rest stop just west of the Missouri River. From there, we kept driving onward toward Nebraska, where Mom had been looking forward to visiting Carhenge, an unusual outdoor sculpture park just north of the town of Alliance, Nebraska. This puts it also close to Chadron, where I’ve learned my grandfather attended college back in the day…hence the photo of Mom on the campus. Enjoy.
Having grown up in the US, I’ve always known a lot of our wheat seems to come from North Dakota. What never occurred to me was that, a hundred and more years ago as our Euro-immigrant ancestors spread across the continent and dispossessed the prior inhabitants, their wheat would need to be milled and their other farm products marketed. The twin cities, it appears, gained much of their early prosperity by dint of turning wheat kernels into flour…witness the many descendants of flour and milling companies still headquartered there.
…look closely above, and any water you see in the distance is the Missouri River which we’ve just crossed in central South Dakota. Below, a fish-eye view of the main Carhenge scultpure, with other items also on display at the Carhenge Sculpture Park. 🙂
High Summer – Storm King
Perhaps my single favorite place to visit in the NY Metropolitan area is Storm King sculpture park, which is something like two hours or so north of the city itself. My mother, who dearly loves grand sculpture of the Calder, Nevelson and Noguchi style, first introduced me to it back in the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier though I believe my first visits would have been early-mid 80s. I have fond memories (and photos) of visits there with a dear friend now long-dead of HIV; such is the nature of places one’s visited again over decades – and I also appreciate the new large works or temporary displays that appear every time I visit, about which there’ll be a caption or two scattered throughout.
In season, no visit to my mother feels complete unless we also head up to Storm King for a day. And you do need to allocate a full day for this trip, especially if you are coming from NYC…and please do try to get here , even if it feels like one thing too much – if you love nature and abstract sculpture, you won’t go wrong. So in early July we headed up with my brother for an afternoon of enjoying the art, the flowers, the nature. They’re not open during winter months, and my recent visits have been in the shoulder seasons, so this was my first chance to appreciate the glory of the wildflower beds at their summer peak. Hope you enjoy these views – and do visit, or support your nearest arts institution instead. 🙂
The mirrored fence was newly refurbished for this season so truly stands out at one edge of the lower lawn area (far center in the panorama above) – they have a more formal name for it, but I think of it as the route I I typically take toward Andy Goldsworthy’s wonderful wonderful two stone walls at Storm King, both additions of relatively recent decades…you can see shots of those in an entry I made in December 2011), and so I had fun with some arty selfies with it, though this is a piece you really do need to experience in person.
And since it was high summer, we saw a good bit of floral and natural beauty. Some time a decade or two back, they started letting large areas of the lawn flourish with higher wildflower patches rather than always mowing it all down, and the results are wonderful. I also did my usual up-close-and-personal study of a few little vegetal items that grabbed my imagination.
The piece above is isn’t my favorite – tends to give me the willies a bit too much – but I do love the wildflowers. The lawn full of Mark di Suvero scultpures, shown below with a foreground of black-eyed Susans, certainly is one of my favorite spots here…though that could be said of nearly all corners at this truly wonderful place…
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
On the Yorkshire dales outside Westfield is an absolutely lovely sculpture park which occupies many acres and includes a number of delightful indoor galleries and – in contrast to Storm King, to my & Mom’s great joy following an afternoon wandering the wet and wooly hills – a cozy cafeteria. Henry Moore, creator of the sculpture above, grew up in this landscape, which over the years has been much shaped by human agricultural interests, most often of the four-footed variety seen here. I’d never before enjoyed sculpture while keeping one eye on my path for sheep pies. 🙂
The Yorkshire dales were, after all, home to the Brontes, so it’s such dramatic, lovely, and often dark and rainy landscapes that shaped the imaginations from which sprang Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights.
(so much world, so little time....) 
