Fine Arts News

A robot, controlled from afar, moves in for a closer look.
Alexey Moskvin/Tate Britain

There are four robots roaming around the Tate Britain museum in London. Since Wednesday night, they've been roving the halls after hours, streaming video to the world as part of the After Dark project.

As the robots move through the museum, their little lights illuminate hundreds of statues and paintings — works of historic and contemporary British art — spread over roughly 20 rooms.

If it's not cool enough to have robots making their way around a museum in the dark, there's another cool factor: Regular people all around the world are controlling their movements from their computers.

"[The robots] have controls navigating around the gallery. They can go forward, left, right, tilt the head up and down, look around," says David Di Duca, one of the project designers. He's with a digital design studio called The Workers. They received the Tate Britain's IK Prize, which awards a group that uses digital technology to bring the museum's collections to a wider audience.

"When someone's controlling the robot, they're effectively curating the feed or the experience for a much wider audience."

That means anyone, anywhere, with access to the Internet can be a curator. Every night since Wednesday, people have been able to visit the site and fill out a simple form for a chance to take the robots for a spin. What's more, the event also offers a chance to reach people who may never visit the museum. People from all over the world can log on for the robots and stay to explore 500 years of British art.
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Art experts and gallery guides are working in shifts to provide commentary throughout the night.
One potential challenge, though: When you are sending robots into galleries at night and letting people remotely take the reigns, how do you make sure the precious artworks don't get ruined? Di Duca says there are a lot of precautions in place.

"The robots are designed with a wide lower base, and the outside edge of that is a kill switch, which takes out the power to the robots. Some artworks are directly on the floor, [so there's something for the robots to hit] in that worst-case scenario."



There are also humans behind the scenes if something goes wrong. Ross Cairns, one of the founders of The Workers, is also working on the project.

"We have a sort of HQ in the dungeons of the Tate where we're just making sure everything's running well, while upstairs in the gallery the robots are roaming free."

Di Duca says that generally things have been running smoothly. Some of the best moments are when two of the robots actually meet each other in the gallery.

"They sort of look at each other," he says. "And you have no idea who the two people controlling them are, and they're never gonna meet each other, but they're, for some split moment, staring at each other with these funny robot faces in a gallery in London."

If you want to see artwork, Di Duca still thinks the best way is to actually go to a museum. They're not trying to replace that experience.

"It's meant to be something else — some experience on its own right which allows you to see things in a way which hasn't been seen before."

There's still time. You can watch the live feed and maybe even get lucky enough to take control. You can still get involved here. The last tour will go until 3 a.m. GMT Monday.



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Researchers asked 4-year-olds to draw a child. Here's a sample of their artwork. Twins Early Development Study/King's College in London hide caption

At age 4, many young children are just beginning to explore their artistic style.

The kid I used to babysit in high school preferred self-portraits, undoubtedly inspired by the later works of Joan Miro. My cousin, a prolific young artist, worked almost exclusively on still lifes of 18-wheelers.

These early works may be good for more than decorating your refrigerator and cubicle, researchers say. There appears to be an association, though a modest one, between how a child draws at 4 and her thinking skills at 14, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science.

The findings don't mean parents should worry if their little ones aren't producing masterpieces early on. But the study suggests intellectual and artistic skills may be related to each other in a way that reveals something about the influence of our genes.

Researchers from King's College London enlisted 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins in England to draw pictures of a child. The researchers scored each drawing on a scale of 0 to 12, based on how many body parts were included. All the kids also took verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests at 4 and 14.

Kids with higher drawing scores tended to do better on the intelligence tests, though the two were only moderately linked. And that was expected, says Rosalind Arden a cognitive geneticist who led the study while at the King's College Institute of Psychiatry. The drawing test researchers used was first developed in the 1920s to measure children's cognition. And studies have shown the test to be useful, but not always accurate.

In a surprise to the researchers, the drawings and the test results from identical twins (who share all their genes) were more similar to one another than those from fraternal twins (who share only half their genes). "We had thought any siblings who were raised in the same home would be quite similar," Arden tells Shots. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that suggests genes can play a role in both artistic and cognitive ability, she says.

This doesn't mean that a child's genetic predisposition necessarily hurts his or her chances of succeeding in artistic and intellectual endeavors, Arden says. As previous studies have shown, countless factors affect a person's abilities — and genes are only one of them.

How would Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have done on the drawing test when they were kids? Arden says she and her colleagues are trying to figure out whether judging the children's art in some other way (maybe based on creativity instead of accuracy) would reveal something different about their intelligence.

But we shouldn't assume that these abstract masters couldn't draw realistically, Arden says. Picasso was a prodigy, who could draw everything from birds to busts with amazing accuracy at a young age. In fact, the artist famously said he easily learned to draw like Raphael when he was young, but it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.

The most amazing thing about the drawings collected for this study is that they represent such a range of both ability and style, Arden says. "I had a fantastic time looking through them."

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This installation at the Tower of London will ultimately feature 888,246 ceramic poppies, honoring the soldiers from Britain and the British colonies who died in World War I.

How do you memorialize an event that happened 100 years ago? Almost nobody is alive who witnessed the start of World War I. In England, at the Tower of London, an unusual artistic commemoration is blooming. Its name comes from a poem, written by an anonymous soldier in World War I: "The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red."

The Tower of London was built in the 11th century, and for most of the years since then its moat was full of water. But today, operations manager John Brown looks out and describes the sight: "In effect, a green field surrounding the castle, and within that, we have started to build this huge artistic installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies."



The ceramic poppies at the Tower of London are handmade; each one is unique.

That's one flower for each soldier from Britain or the British colonies who died in WWI. Each is handmade, and volunteers plant each poppy in the soil by hand.

The red poppy is a symbol of remembrance for a reason: In Western Europe, it is the first wildflower to appear when soil is churned up. So after a war, fields where soldiers fell become vast expanses of crimson blooms.
The ceramic poppies at the Tower of London are not planted in orderly rows. They look like an undulating sea from afar. Up close, each bloom is unique. Droplets cling to them from a recent shower. Against the walls of the tower, they crest like a wave of water — or, given the color, like a wave of blood. They cascade from one of the tower windows to the ground like a waterfall, and a 30-foot curl of red poppies crests over the tower's main entrance.

The concept came from a ceramic artist named Paul Cummings. He decided to make the flowers, but he had no place to put them. "So we said, we have the real estate," explains Brown. A British theatrical designer, Tom Piper, provided the design and interpretation of the idea.

"Every morning when I walk through the site just to make sure everything's ready, you get your own moment of inner peace for yourself," says Jim Duncan. He's one of the Yeoman Warders, the iconic beefeaters who live and work at the tower. For the next three months, he will be overseeing the planting project.

"You get the goose pimples. You get the lump in the throat," he says. "And then you get a great bunch of people that come in, work hard, work together as a team. It was raining this afternoon — nobody left."

The sound of hammering comes from the corner of the moat where rain-soaked volunteers are working in matching red shirts. They pound metal stakes into the ground, then place a red ceramic blossom on top, supporting each one with small rubber plugs.

Lynne England came from the New Forest on England's southern coast to plant poppies with her husband, Arthur, in honor of her great-uncle. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for holding his position while under fire during WWI. "He was shot three times, but he held position. And because of that, he saved a lot of British lives. So we felt we had to come and plant a poppy for him today," she says.

"I'm almost in tears just talking to you now," she says. "Just look at it — every single poppy, every poppy you hold, is somebody's life."

"And the fact that they're all handmade and they're all individual," says her husband, "it's not like you're doing some process and repeating something. Each time feels very, very special."

The first of these flowers was planted Aug. 5, the first full day of fighting in the war. The last one will be planted on Nov. 11, Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent. They'll come down after that. People can buy them online — thousands have already been sold — and the money will go to veterans' charities.

Even though each blossom represents a British or colonial life lost in the war, a staffer pointed out that more than 100,000 Americans died, too. So as we concluded our interviews, she handed me a red poppy, and I planted it in the soil at the Tower of London.

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The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

By Anonymous (Unknown Soldier)
The blood swept lands and seas of red,
Where angels dare to tread.
As I put my hand to reach,
As God cried a tear of pain as the angels fell,
Again and again.
As the tears of mine fell to the ground
To sleep with the flowers of red
As any be dead
My children see and work through fields of my
Own with corn and wheat,
Blessed by love so far from pain of my resting
Fields so far from my love.
It be time to put my hand up and end this pain
Of living hell, to see the people around me
Fall someone angel as the mist falls around
And the rain so thick with black thunder I hear
Over the clouds, to sleep forever and kiss
The flower of my people gone before time
To sleep and cry no more
I put my hand up and see the land of red,
This is my time to go over,
I may not come back
So sleep, kiss the boys for me



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Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya is one of the women featured on Jason Porath's blog Rejected Princesses. Oktyabrskaya was the first female tanker to ever win the Hero of the Soviet Union award.

Many of us have come to know the tales of Disney's princesses by heart. But put Snow White, Cinderella, Belle and Ariel aside for a moment and consider these characters: A transgender Native American, a tank commander and a Mexican revolutionary.

Theirs are not the kind of stories you find in a Disney princess flick, but they're in the spotlight on the blog Rejected Princesses. Each week, former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath adds a new illustration and write-up about a woman who is, as the blog says, "too awesome, awful or offbeat for kids' movies."

"I take women, sort of unsung heroines — usually from history, but a lot from mythology and some from literature — who wouldn't necessarily make the cut for mainstream animated princess movies, and give them that style," Porath tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It's sort of an alternate-reality glimpse into, 'What if they got their moment in the sun?' "

One of his favorite examples is the aforementioned Soviet tank commander, Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya. Porath says Oktyabrskaya's husband was killed by the Nazis, so she sold all of her belongings in order to buy a tank and fight. She named the tank "Fighting Girlfriend." The illustration shows her sitting atop her tank, anthropomorphized in Cars-like fashion, amid a battle.

"It's this weird, incongruous mash-up of history as well as these mainstream animated movies," he says.



Porath drew Elisabeth Bathory washing her hair before a dresser strewn with references to her reputation as a torturer. He also wrote a spirited defense of Bathory's innocence.

But Porath's also includes some non-heroic Rejected Princesses, like Elisabeth Bathory, who he says is possibly the most prolific female serial killer in history. He says he didn't want to only include one type of female character.

"I didn't want it to just be everybody is shiny, happy, kick-butt heroines," he says. "There are people who are heroes, there are people who are villains and there are people who are just weird."

The project started as a bit of a lark, Porath says, and was born out of a lunch conversation he had while working at DreamWorks about unlikely stories to be given the animated princess treatment. The blog and the premise quickly took off, he says.

But Porath says Rejected Princesses isn't meant to bash Disney and the work they do on their mainstream animated princess stories.

"That said, I feel like there is room for people that don't get the spotlight put on them," Porath says. "Maybe they won't make $100 million ... but there should be a place for that."

Porath says there is no shortage of women to feature on the blog, and he still has a list of about 600 ready to go.


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  Zhang Kechun; Under the Abandoned Pier, 2013-2014. Zhang, 34, spent years shooting photos along the Yellow River. The figures are tea sellers.
  
  Zhang Kechun/Courtesy of Three Shadows +3 Gallery
  
  Liu Di/Courtesy of Pekin Fine Arts
  
  

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These supporters of Scottish independence are saying yes, and separatist groups in other parts of the world hope it will give them a boost as they seek to break away. David Cheskin/AP hide caption

Scotland's referendum on independence Thursday could resonate far beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. There are many places with separatist movements, like the militias in eastern Ukraine who have been battling the Ukrainian government this year.

Here's a look at some of the other places with separatists who want to break away from their current rulers, from Canada to Spain to Belgium to India.

Quebec

Quebec's separatists have had long and close links to the Scottish National Party, which is spearheading the "yes" campaign. The Parti Quebecois is hoping that a "yes" vote or even a narrow defeat in Scotland could rejuvenate its own attempts to break away from Canada.

The French-speaking province has held two referendums on independence, one in 1980 and the other in 1995. In the more recent vote, the side that supported staying with Canada barely held on. Since then, support for independence has fallen dramatically, according to polls.

Still, Daniel Turp, a Quebec nationalist politician, is in Edinburgh this week to witness Thursday's vote, and he says the events in Scotland are reminiscent of how the 1995 vote in Quebec played out.
"The end of the Scottish campaign is absolutely déjà vu," he told The Telegraph.

He says he has advised Scottish pro-independence leaders to beware of last-minute promises from the pro-union side.
"I said that if they did well, there would be all sorts of late promises of more autonomy and more devolution," he said. "And look what's happening now. Ottawa did the same with us. But these promises are hollow. If Scotland votes no, they will be quickly forgotten."

Andre Lecours, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa, tells The Associated Press that the "yes" campaigns in Scotland and Quebec have similarities as well as major differences.
"There are lots of similarities, first in that the Yes campaign has been positive, with the same message, that 'we're good enough and big enough, and we can do it,' " he told the AP. "And a bit like the PQ, the Yes Scotland campaign has energized Scottish society and reached people that typically aren't involved in the political process."

The AP adds: "On the other hand, he said the Scots have avoided an often-cited pitfall of the Quebec separatist movement — a lack of clarity about what exactly would happen in the event of a referendum victory."

Flanders

The Flemish-speaking region of Belgium has in recent years uneasily coexisted with the French-speaking south of the country.

The New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA, emerged as the single-biggest party in elections in May, and is likely to be at the head of any national government. Flemish nationalist sentiments are strong, and political scientist Dave Sinardet tells Agence France-Presse that a good performance by the "yes" vote in Scotland "could inspire the base of the N-VA."
Still, as De Morgen, a Flemish daily, notes, "There is little appetite for the economic uncertainties of a separatist adventure" in Flanders.

Here's more from AFP on what's a more likely future for the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium:

"For Flemish nationalists, a more realistic perspective that Belgium becomes a confederation where Flanders would enjoy almost complete autonomy without breaking up the country.
"If they prove that once in government they are efficient managers, N-VA strategists believe they could emerge strengthened from elections in 2019 and make a big push then for a confederation."

Catalonia

Polls show more than half the people in Catalonia support independence from Spain, and the region's lawmakers are hoping to put that backing to a referendum on Nov. 9.

The Washington Post reports:

"Catalonia has long been one of Spain's main industrial engines, representing one-fifth of the whole country's economy, and its politicians believe its future would be rosier if it was free of the wider dysfunctions of the Spanish economy. Madrid, though, has been far less accommodating of Catalan aspirations than the British government under Prime Minister David Cameron has been of Scotland's move toward independence."

The government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has said he will block a vote, and indeed the country's constitutional court is likely to stop any referendum, which needs government approval. Rajoy has also said an independent Scotland will have to negotiate entry into the EU and NATO, an apparent signal that independent-minded regions should not expect an easy path to international organizations.

Albert Royo-Mariné, secretary general of the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia, tells USA Today that Spain should learn from "the way Britain managed to find a way to give the people of Scotland a vote that mirrors their political will."
"Scotland has been given the opportunity to choose what they want to be, and Spain needs to be inspired by this precedent. This is the way to solve political conflicts," Royo-Mariné said. "Spain is a young democracy, and it cannot afford to block a peaceful movement such as this. That would be dangerous for Spain."

Kashmir

Kashmir, the region claimed by both India and Pakistan, has been the scene of a pro-independence movement for decades. As NPR's Julie McCarthy recently noted, a heavy Indian army presence has kept a lid on rebellion.
As the BBC notes, several thousand Kashmiris who live in Scotland will vote in Thursday's referendum.
"That vote will determine whether a region with a distinct identity can successfully secede from a much larger nation," the BBC says — a sentence that can have a parallel in Kashmir as well as Scotland.

Kashmiris were promised a referendum — but only a choice between India and Pakistan and not independence — soon after the king in Muslim-majority Kashmir joined India in 1947. But that vote never took place. India maintains that conditions aren't right for one, and so chances of a vote are slim to none. The BBC adds:

"If there was a referendum in Kashmir, what would the outcome be?
"Nobody knows.
"Twenty-five years of separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir, and the Indian response to it, have claimed tens of thousands of lives. They have also created a climate where people are often reluctant to say what they really feel."

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These pastel boxes originally owned by Mary Cassatt were acquired recently by the National Gallery of Art.

Imagine if you could see the pen Beethoven used to write his Symphony No. 5. Or the chisel Michelangelo used to sculpt his David. Art lovers find endless fascination in the materials of artists — a pen, a brush, even a rag can become sacred objects, humanizing a work of art.

And now, at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, visitors can see some of the materials that impressionist Mary Cassatt once used — three well-loved, large wooden boxes of pastels from distinguished Paris art supply stores. Each box is filled with stubby pieces of pastels, some worn down to half an inch, others almost untouched.



Six years before Cassatt died she gave these boxes of chalk pastels to Electra Webb Bostwick, the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer.

"I'm delighted," says curator Kim Jones. "It's the kind of thing that really entrances people."

One gallery visitor bends over to inspect the chalks — and gasps when she realizes what she's looking at: "It's just fascinating. It's a piece of history," she says.



In her 1878-1879 work, At the Theater, Cassatt incorporates metallic paint with gouache and pastel.

To think that Cassatt held them, and used them — it offers a rare glimpse into the process behind the masterpieces.
Jones says the National Gallery will be doing examinations of the pastels in the near future — testing to see what they're made of, which pigments were used, how the soft pigment powder was stabilized, how the pastels were fixed to drawing paper so they wouldn't smudge (these days, some artists use hair spray as a fixative).

In her last decades, Cassatt was using pastels more than oil paints. Her luminous colors were vibrant — beautiful fuchsias and teals. In 1920 — six years before she died — Cassatt gave these boxes of chalk pastels to the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer. Years later, that granddaughter, Electra Webb Bostwick , admitted she didn't know just how special the gift was.

"Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends," she recalled.
Now they belong to the National Gallery's collection of artists' materials — paints, brushes and other artifacts, useful to scholars and other artists who study them for inspiration and edification. They'll be on view until Oct. 5.




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Plaster casts taken from soldiers' mutilated faces (top row), new sculpted faces (bottom row), and final masks (on the table) sit in the studio of Anna Coleman Ladd in 1918.

Sometimes art can change how people see the world. But Anna Coleman Ladd made art that changed how the world saw people.

It was World War I, and soldiers were coming home from the battlefield with devastating injuries. Those who survived were often left with disfigured faces.

"The part of the soldier's body that was most vulnerable was his face, because if he looked up over a trench, that was the part that was going to be hit," says David Lubin, a professor of art at Wake Forest University.



Ladd's papers include these photos of a World War I veteran with and without his mask, circa 1920.

As director of the Red Cross mask-making studio in Paris, Ladd worked with mutilés de la face, men who had taken shrapnel, bullets and flamethrowers to the face. Ladd studied dozens of those disfigured faces, then sculpted masks made to resemble the soldiers' former selves.

The Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art has just posted a collection of Ladd's papers online — photos, letters, diaries and other texts documenting her work. Lubin, who researched the sculptor for an upcoming book, tells NPR's Rachel Martin that part of the artist's process was to discover the man behind the injury.

"She wanted to make the Studio for Portrait Masks, as it was called, a really warm and inviting place, where men could come in and feel happy and relaxed," Lubin explains.

It started in 1917, when Ladd, who was then a sculptor and socialite living in Boston, read about the work of a sculptor who ran what was called the "Tin Noses Shop," a mask-making studio for disfigured British soldiers. Inspired, Ladd set up her own studio in Paris and set to work sculpting new faces for those who had lost a piece of theirs in trench warfare. For many, the studio was a safe haven.

"These men couldn't be seen on the street," says Lubin. "They'd gone through multiple operations, and they were seen as so hideous people would sometimes pass out from seeing them."

Ladd started by getting to know the men: their quirks, daily habits, what their siblings looked like, the limited facial expressions they were still capable of. Then, she would choose an expression. For some, that expression would be the only one they could wear.

She'd make a plaster mold of her subject's face, fill in the missing parts, and then galvanize the result in copper. After repeated fittings and adjustments, which might take several weeks, Ladd would position the mask on his face and a paintbrush.

"She would try to paint a pigment that would be like the color of that man's skin," says Lubin. "She would always take a tone that was halfway between what it would appear to be on a cloudy day and what it would appear to be on a sunny day."

In about a year and a half, Ladd and her colleagues sculpted almost 100 masks, each one a labor-intensive feat.
"She was very proud of the fact that men who had thought they were going to have to live lives as recluses were able to go back into society," says Lubin. "I have my doubts. I really don't think it was as easy [for the men] as she portrays."

Lubin says when the war ended, the Red Cross couldn't fund the studio anymore, so the studios closed. Ladd returned to Boston, where she resumed sculpting portrait busts and art for fountains.

"I would have to say," says Lubin, "that the art that she made before and after the war nowhere comes near the sort of importance and gravity of what she did during the war."



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Geoffrey Holder and his son, Leo.

Shortly after the death of dancer, choreographer, actor, painter and director Geoffrey Holder, his son, Leo, composed and shared this letter about the end of his father's life.

This Is A True Story
Geoffrey Holder 1930-2014
October 5th
A little more than a week after developing pneumonia, Geoffrey Holder made a decision. He was calling the shots as always. He was done. Two attempts at removing the breathing tube didn't show promising results. In his truest moment of clarity since being rolled into ICU, he said he was good. Mouthing the words "No, I am not afraid" without a trace of negativity, sadness or bitterness, he sincerely was good with it. He had lived the fullest life he could possibly live, a 70+ year career in multiple art forms, and was still creating. Still painting, a bag of gold (of course) fabric and embellishments in his room for a new dress for my mother, sculptures made out of rope, baseball caps and wire hangers. New ideas every second, always restlessly chasing his too-fertile mind.

A week of breathing tubes and restrained hands had forced him to communicate with only cryptic clues which I was fortunate enough to be able to decipher at best 40 percent of the time. The fact that we all struggled to understand him enraged him to the point that he could sometimes pull tantrums taking up to four people to restrain him from pulling out the wires. He was headstrong (understatement), but he was also physically strong. Iron hand grip that no illness could weaken. Nine days of mouthing words that, because of the tubes, produced no sound, forcing him to use his eyes to try to accentuate the point he was trying to make.

But this didn't mean he wasn't still Geoffrey Holder. This didn't mean an end to taking over. Holding court as he always did. Directing and ordering people around. Choreographing. Getting his way. We still understood that part, and the sight of his closest friends and extended family brought out the best in him. Broad smiles in spite of the tubes, nodding approval of anything that met his standard (which was very high), and exuding pride and joy in all those in whom he saw a spark of magic and encouraged to blossom. The week saw a parade of friends from all over the world checking in to see him, hold his hand, rub his head, and give him the latest gossip. But he was still trying to tell me something, and although I was still the best at deciphering what he was saying, I still wasn't getting it.

Saturday night I had a breakthrough. After a good day for him, including a visit by the Rev. Dr. Forbes, Senior Minister Emeritus of Riverside Church, who offered prayer and described Geoffrey's choreography as prayer itself, which made him beam, I brought in some music. Bill Evans with Symphony Orchestra, one of his all-time favorites. He had once choreographed a piece to one of the cuts on the album ... a throwaway ballet to fill out the program, but the music inspired him. From his bed, he started to at first sway with the music, then the arms went up, and Geoffrey started to dance again. In his bed. Purest of spirits. Still Geoffrey Holder. Then he summoned me to take his hands, and this most unique dancer/choreographer pulled himself up from his bed as if to reach the sky. It was then I broke the code: He was telling me he was going to dance his way out. Still a Geoffrey Holder production.

If it had been up to him, this evening's solo would have been it. The higher he pulled himself up, the higher he wanted to fly. I had to let him down. Not yet. There are friends and family coming in from out of town. He resignedly shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes and went to sleep. I got it. Really. I got it. I walked out of the hospital elated. Ate a full meal for the first time in days, slept like a baby after. The next day would be his last. I was not sad. It wasn't stressful for me to deal with him in this state. It was an honor and a privilege to tend to anything he needed. This impromptu dance was his dress rehearsal.

Next morning, I show up early. Possible second thoughts? Should we wait? What if he changes his mind? Did he understand what we were talking about here? Thoroughly. Mind as clear as crystal. "You still game for our dance tonight?" A nod, a smile, and a wink, with tubes still down his throat. We're still on. But he still wants to do it NOW. NOT later. He's cranky. Sulks a while. Sleeps a while. Eventually snaps out of it.

From noon on, a caravan of friends and family from all over the globe comes through the ICU wing. Ages 1 to 80. Young designers and artists he nurtured and who inspired him. Younger dancers he encouraged to always play to the rear balcony with majesty. The now "elder statesmen" dancers on whom he built some of his signature ballets. His rat pack of buddies. Wayward saints he would offer food, drink, a shoulder to cry on, a couch to sleep it off, and lifetime's worth of deep conversation and thought. Closest and oldest friends. Family.

They know they are here to say goodbye. He knows they are here to say goodbye. He greets them beaming with joy to see them. By this time I'm reading his lips better and am able to translate for him as much as I can. The last of them leave. It's time for his one true love to have her time with him. His muse. Her champion. This is their time. 59 years distilled into 5 minutes of the gentlest looks and words as she caresses his noble brow one last time. She puts a note she wrote to him in is hand. She leaves.

Everyone is gone except me. My moment. I will be with him as he goes.
One more time: "You good?" Nod & faint smile. "You ready?" He is. I have asked the doctors to not start the morphine drip right away, because I want him to have his solo on his own time. Knowing him, he might stop breathing right after his finale. For dramatic effect. He's still Geoffrey Holder.

They remove the tube that has imprisoned him for the past nine days and robbed this great communicator of the ability to speak. I remove the mittens that prevent his hands from moving freely.

I start the music, take his hands and start leading him, swaying them back and forth. And he lets go of me. He's gonna wing it as he was prone to do when he was younger. Breathing on his own for the last time, Geoffrey Holder, eyes closed, performs his last solo to Bill Evans playing Fauré's Pavane. From his deathbed. The arms take flight, his beautiful hands articulate through the air, with grace. I whisper "shoulders" and they go into an undulating shimmy, rolling like waves. His Geoffrey Holder head gently rocks back and forth as he stretches out his right arm to deliver his trademark finger gesture, which once meant "you can't afford this" and now is a subtle manifestation of pure human spirit and infinite wisdom. His musical timing still impeccable, bouncing off the notes, as if playing his own duet with Evan's piano. Come the finale, he doesn't lift himself off the bed as he planned; instead, one last gentle rock of the torso, crosses his arms and turns his head to the side in a pose worthy of Pavlova. All with a faint, gentile smile.

The orchestra finishes when he does. I lose it.

They administer the morphine drip and put an oxygen mask over his face. And I watch him begin taking his last breaths.
I put on some different music. I sit and watch him sleep, and breathe ... 20 minutes later, he's still breathing, albeit with this gurgling sound you can hear through the mask. Another several minutes go by, he's still breathing. Weakly, but still breathing ... then his right hand starts to move. It looks like he's using my mother's note like a pencil, scratching the surface of the bed as if he's drawing. This stops a few minutes later, then the left hand begins tapping. Through the oxygen mask, the gurgling starts creating its own rhythm. Not sure of what I'm hearing, I look up to see his mouth moving. I get closer to listen: " ... two, three ... two, three ... " He's counting! It gets stronger, and at its loudest sounds like the deep purr of a lion, then he says, "Arms, two, three ... Turn, two, three ... Swing, two, three ... Down two, three ... "
I call my mother at home, where she was having a reception in his honor. She picks up. There are friends and family telling Geoffrey stories simultaneously laughing and crying in the background. "Hi, Honey, are you all right?"

"Yes, actually ... he hasn't stopped breathing yet." I tell her about his solo, which brings her to a smile and a lightening of mood. I continue:
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure, Honey. What?"
"Who the hell did you marry?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're not gonna believe this. He's got a morphine drip, going on over half an hour, an oxygen mask on, his eyes closed, AND HE'S CHOREOGRAPHING!"
This brings her to her first laugh of the day. She now knows we will be all right.

He continues on like this for quite a while, and a doctor comes in to take some meter readings of the machines. I ask the doctor if this is normal. As she begins to explain to me about the process, his closed eyes burst open, focused straight on us like lasers, and he roars with all his might: "SHUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!! YOU'RE BREAKING MY CONCENTRATION!!!!!!!"
We freeze with our mouths open. He stares us down. Long and hard.

Then he closes his eyes again, "Arms, two, three ... Turn, two, three ... Swing, two, three ... Down, two, three ... "
He continued counting 'til it faded out, leaving only the sound of faint breathing, slowing down to his very last breath at 9:25 p.m.
Still Geoffrey Holder.
The most incredible night of my life.
Thank you for indulging me.
Love & best,
L


More...

To see the National Portrait Gallery's Out of Many, One in its entirety, visitors must take to the air above the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tami Heilemann/Department of the Interior

Last month on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., trucks pulled up bearing thousands of tons of dark topsoil and sand. Volunteers arrived with shovels and rakes. Following an artist's instructions and guided by satellite coordinates, they laid out a design across 6 acres to create a work commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.

Now, standing at the perimeter of the portrait, it looks like a field under construction. The only clue that something more complex is going on is that the soil is laid out in carefully contoured lines — so when it's viewed from way up on high, you see the image of a face.

A tourist visiting from Ohio walks by. Jim Mahoney hasn't heard about the piece, and would never have guessed it was a face by looking at it from ground level.



At the ground level, it's hard to tell this field of dirt, sand and gravel has been carefully arranged to form a giant face. Oliver Dearden/NPR

"The easy answer would be, 'Well, that doesn't make sense,'" he says, but "I guess I'm a little more open minded to think symbolism really matters. It's not what it is, it's what it means."

Eva Folkert of Michigan was excited to actually walk on the sand after seeing large-scale images of the piece. "You create art yourself in your mind as you try to put these singular pieces together to make one whole thing," she says. "And maybe that's part of the concept too, right?"

Out Of Many, One is the name of the piece. Although the artist behind the work, Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada, has done similar projects in Europe, this is his first in the United States.

Rodríguez-Gerada moved to the U.S. from Cuba at the age of 4, and was raised in New Jersey. He grew up in with an ethnically diverse group of friends, which he says has had a lasting impact on him. He wanted the portrait to represent America, so the face on the Mall blends photos he took of young men from many racial backgrounds.
After a few early trips to the site, Rodríguez-Gerada realized the National Mall is on a flight path. A happy coincidence, that's part of what makes the piece so unique — it can be appreciated from so many vantage points.

"It's designed to be viewed here, now, walking through it, from the Monument, from the planes flying out of National," Rodríguez-Gerada says.

If you're not in a plane, the one reliable way to see this portrait in its entirety is from the top of the Washington Monument.

Up on the observation deck, people look out over the city in all four directions.

Many are surprised to find an enormous face peering back at them, where normally there is only grass.



Guided by artist instructions and satellite coordinates, workers mapped out patterns in the soil not far from the Washington Monument.

It's now been a little more than a week since the the portrait made its debut. Despite several good rains, the edges of the face have stood up to the elements — with a little help from volunteers who come by to rake the sand back into place.

But the work, by design, will disappear. At the end of this month, it will be plowed under and reseeded with grass, preserved only in photographs and memories.