Fine Arts News

Timothy Spall finds beauty in the unlikeliest places as painter J.M.W. Turner.

If you picture landscape painting as a delicate, ethereal, pristine process involving an easel on a hillside and a sunset, Mr. Turner will be an eye-opener.

Tim Spall grunts and snorts his way through the film as J.M.W. Turner in ways that will forever link phlegm and art in the minds of viewers. He spits on his canvases, stabs at them with brushes, smears them with rags, blows powdered pigment at them. His method looks less like painting, than like an attack on the canvas — but lordy, the results: Mists and fogs surrounding shipwrecks, steam locomotives belching fire, everything bathed in the most astonishing light.

Spall may make a grotesque of Turner — piggish, rutting, whoring — but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere. In sunsets, of course, but also in a woman's corpse washed up on a riverbank, or in the rashes that bloom on the neck of a gargoyle-like housekeeper. You start to see doors and windows in the film as frames around kinetic images that Leigh's put inside them — ships drifting by, hillsides topped by ochre clouds.

Turner, meanwhile, is distracted by beauty elsewhere — there's a landlady who rents him a room by the sea, and who comes to care for him without knowing he's one of England's most celebrated artists. She is a respite for him. A respite from the fist fights of the exhibition hall, from the preening of critics, from family crises, and from his own excesses. At one point, he nearly dies after lashing himself to a ship's mast during a snowstorm so he can really see the light.

But what he sees, say, on a rowing excursion with fellow artists, as a decommissioned three-mast battleship is tugged into harbor to be turned into tables and chairs? The others see the sunset, the ship's masts and the end of an era. Turner sees the steam-driven tugboat and new beginnings.

Turner's painting of the scene, The Fighting Temeraire will, in fact, become his masterpiece. As Mr. Turner is Mike Leigh's — a growling, snuffling, earthy work of art, every frame worthy of framing.



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Sandro Botticelli's Madonna and Child, painted in 1480, shows a reflective Mary in deep blue.

Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan/National Museum of Women in the Arts

This Christmas, images of the Virgin Mary created over five centuries, glow on the walls of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Mary's role as Woman, Mother and Idea is portrayed by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Rembrandt as well as other major and lesser known artists from the 1400s through 1900s.

"I think of Mary as being brave and strong," says chief curator Kathryn Wat. "I think sometimes people see meekness and humility. I see that, too, but under-girding all of that I see strength."

Monsignor Timothy Verdon, Canon of the Florence Cathedral, is guest curator of the exhibition. "Mary is one of the main themes in Western art for more than 1,000 years," Verdon explains. "Not only are there more images of her than of anyone else – including her son – her son is often part of the image but the interest of the image is normally more focused on Mary, who is the adult, than on the Christ child."



Curator Timothy Verdon says "Mary is unexpectedly fashionable," in Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child, painted in the 1460s. Provincia di Firenze, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence/National Museum of Women in the Arts

In the 1460s, Fra Filippo Lippi of Florence saw the Madonna as regal and queenly — a kind of Byzantine empress. "Mary is unexpectedly fashionable," Verdon describes, "in a splendid crimson underdress and a rich mantel and — my goodness — pearls adorning the hem of her diaphanous veil — a kind of very delicate fabric [that] was immediately recognized at the period as a luxury fabric."

Her filigreed halo is made of gold and her face is serene. But there's a sadness there — a premonition that the big-bellied baby she hugs will meet suffering and death.

"This — and other similar works in which we feel that aura of sadness — were made in an age when one of the most common facts in society was infant mortality," Verdon says. "So for people to see the Madonna and the child veiled with this premonition of suffering really fit into a very important part of their lives."

Sandro Botticelli's Madonna, from 1480, is also reflective — and exquisite, in her deep blue robe and delicate golden halo. A century later, in 1570, Federico Barocci's Mary is very human. She's picnicking on the flight into Egypt. Her head is bare (she's put her straw hat on the ground), she's barefoot, and as her baby reaches happily for some cherries Joseph offers, Mary is catching stream water into a silver bowl.



Federico Barocci's 1570 Rest on the Flight into Egypt shows Mary catching water in a silver bowl as Joseph offers cherries to Jesus.

"This becomes a wonderful symbol of what womanhood, and especially motherhood is — it's a source of life for the families," Verdon says. "It's a wonderfully simple, charming, [but]at the same time, deep picture."

Another bare-headed Mary, chalked in red by Michelangelo around 1525, shows her as powerful. "Not only is her head uncovered, her arms are uncovered and it looks as if she spends all her time at the gym," Verdon says.

She has muscles — which Verdon says symbolized the strength of human desire for God. Each work in this "Picturing Mary" exhibition is layered with meaning. A bowl of fruit symbolizes fecundity. A closed book moves god's word to her womb. A thorn bracelet foreshadows Jesus' agony on the cross.

In the 17th century, Artemisia Gentileschi broke from traditions that kept women painting still lifes and portraits, to show a theological topic in a way no man had done — Mary nursing her child.



Female artists portrayed Mary in a very different light — above, Artemisia Gentileschi's 1609 oil on canvas, Madonna and Child.

"The idea here is that it's quite forthright," says Wat. "She's revealed her breast, the baby's getting ready to nurse. .... It's very frank and this is not the way male artists typically treated the subject. They were a little more roundabout and things were sort of more unnatural-looking or shaded somehow with fabric or the position was a little different. This is just all right there."

Gentileschi's Mary is monumental — she fills the canvas. An earthy, natural woman, she holds her breast to her eager child with no trace of false modesty or shame.

Society — and the church — wanted different Marys as the centuries passed and artists reflected those shifts. By 1884, Nicolò Barabino designs a mural with the basic Marian elements: blue robe, halo, book of god's words. But her face is veiled, and there's no baby. Here she's become an abstract idea, rather than a specific mother or queen or virgin — this is a work about faith.



Nicolò Barabino's 1884 mural Faith with Representations of the Arts shows a more abstract understanding of Mary.

"So faith suddenly is impersonated by Mary," Verdon says. "Mary becomes the most emblematic figure of what it means to be a believer." He believes this shift in emphasis is the 1880s version of keeping up with the times. "The world had already become much less Christian than it had [been] in earlier periods," he explains. "The church, knowing that, looks for a neutral and almost philosophical language in which to re-propose some of the traditional beliefs. Since everyone would agree that faith — which may not be necessarily religious faith, it could be political faith, it could be a faith in ethical principles — that faith was a good thing."

Faith, belief, worship, holiness, Mother of God, the Blessed Mother means many different things to Christians around the globe.

Standing amid the 60 artworks — many of them masterpieces — I ask curator Timothy Verdon who Mary is to him. He answers: "She's my mother."



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In that they may have life (1964), Corita Kent turned images from a Wonder Bread wrapper into a meditation on poverty and hunger that includes quotes from a Hazard, Ky., miner's wife and Mohandas Gandhi.

Corita Kent's silkscreens were once compared to Andy Warhol's; her banners and posters were featured at civil rights and anti-war rallies in the 1960s and '70s; she made the covers of Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post; and she even created a popular postage stamp. Yet today, Kent seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history.



Sister Corita Kent stands in front of her work, including for eleanor, at Immaculate Heart College in 1964. Coutesy the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles

An exhibition that began at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art and opens later this month at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh aims to change that. Ian Berry co-curated "Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent," a retrospective of Kent's 30-year career, and has a good idea of why her artistic reputation has taken a hit. He says, "An 'artist' was from New York. They were a man; they were an epic, abstract painter. And she wore a habit — she just didn't look like what the, sort of, movie version of an artist looked like."

Sister Corita Kent headed the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Graphic designer and art historian Lorraine Wild says Sister Corita, as she was known, had already been experimenting with the silkscreen printing process when she saw a now legendary 1962 exhibition of Warhol's work.


Kent's for eleanor (1964) plays off General Mills' slogan.

"What she got from Warhol, clearly, was that there was this powerful imagery in pop culture that came out of advertising," Wild says. "And that if you just looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could read all these other things into it, and it already had a kind of power because the audience was familiar with it."

One slogan she appropriated was General Mills' "The Big G stands for Goodness," which referred to the capital G the company used for its logo. "And she turns that into 'G,' 'God;' 'goodness,' 'spiritual goodness,'" Wild says.
Kent also freely juxtaposed advertising logos with Bible verses and quotes from Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings. In her hands, images from a Wonder Bread wrapper turned into a meditation on poverty and hunger.

According to Doris Donnelly, who taught in the religious education department at Immaculate Heart College while Kent was there, the artist was also tuned into the Top 40. "This is the early '60s. In general, nuns wouldn't know the Beatles," Donnelly says. "She knew the Beatles. She understood the lyrics of the Beatles." In fact, Kent quoted the Beatles' "Things We Said Today" in a 1965 piece called look, which appropriates the logo from Look magazine followed by the words "Love is here to stay. And that's enough."



Kent not only knew about the Beatles, she also understood their lyrics, which she used in 1965's look.

Her work was also inspired by the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II, as it was popularly known — which led to major reforms in the church ranging from conducting services in English instead of Latin, to allowing nuns to wear secular clothes. The nuns at Immaculate Heart quickly embraced those reforms, to the displeasure of the local archbishop.

"Cardinal McIntyre," Donnelly says. "He thought they were going too far, too fast." According to Donnelly, mounting pressure from the cardinal finally prompted Kent to make a hard choice. "I was in my office and one of my colleagues came in and she sat down and she said, 'Corita's leaving.' It was a total surprise and it was a sad day."

Kent left the college and its convent in 1968, but she never left the church. She moved to Boston to continue her art work. A poster from the following year features news photos from the Vietnam War accompanied by a Walt Whitman poem that includes the line: "Agonies are one of my changes of garments." According to curator Ian Berry, Kent's themes started getting darker for several reasons.



Kent created her "love" stamp for the U.S. Postal Service in 1985.

"She was struggling with disease toward the end of her life," he says. "She fought cancer three times and she was struggling with what that was doing. And she was struggling with what was going on in the world, and that comes out in the artwork, for sure."

Still, in 1985 she created a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service based on one of her favorite themes: love. Over 700 million were sold. She succumbed to cancer the following year.

Alexandra Carrera, director of Los Angeles' Corita Art Center, a repository for Kent's work, argues that Kent had a lasting influence on pop art. She also says Kent's legacy is far different from that of East Coast peers like Andy Warhol.

"She was directing people," Carrera says. "And rather than just standing back and being like, 'This is what's going wrong, and I'm just showing you guys because I'm so cool and I'm not going to be part of it,' she was really asking people to engage. And I think that that is a more popular message today than it was 20 or 30 years ago."




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Afghan war rugs featuring U.S. drones is a recent trend in the market, says collector Kevin Sudeith.


Some rugs feature various weapons of war, including guns and tanks.

This war rug features the infamous AK-47 rifle, a weapon that has become synonymous with many armed conflicts.


Afghanistan has suffered through long decades of war; conflict with the Soviet Union, civil war and 13 years of a U.S.-led NATO combat mission. Among the political, economic and cultural impacts of this violence, there's an artistic transformation: the history of violence is reflected in the country's ancient art of rug making.

Kevin Sudeith, a collector, tells NPR's Arun Rath that he has long been impressed by the craftsmanship of Afghan rugs.
"The thing that awed me about the war rugs ... is the combination of a very ancient tradition and ancient designs and patterns that are tied to specific towns and regions of Afghanistan ... coupled with the most contemporary subject matter," Sudeith says. "And the war rugs document that unselfconsciously, succinctly and beautifully."

During the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Sudeith began to notice images of Soviet weapons mixed in with the geometric patterns on the rugs.

"The first rug that I bought was a red rug that had four Kalashnikovs on it, on the sides, and then a mix of tanks and helicopters in the middle," he says.

Before long, Sudeith wasn't just collecting the rugs; he started selling them to other collectors, who were also fascinated by the living history reflected in them.



Kevin Sudeith, shown at a 2005 exhibit in Davidson, N.C., collects, shows and sells Afghan war rugs.

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Artist Jesse Howard filled his 20-acre property with hand-painted signs.

By all accounts, self-taught artist Jesse Howard was cantankerous. In middle of the last century, it wasn't unusual to see hand-painted signs on country roads advertising a traveling fair or a farm sale. But Howard's signs offered Bible verses. They proclaimed his anger at his neighbors and the government, and his disappointments with the world around him. "Every word I'm saying's the truth," the artist said of his work. "Every word."

Howard's work hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. Now, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has opened the first comprehensive survey of his work.


Jesse Howard, Untitled (If You Want to See a Gang of Hoodlum Police), 1961.


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Diego Rivera recreated his Rockefeller Center mural for Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Man, Controller of the Universe shows a worker at the crossroads of industry, science and the competing political ideologies of the time — capitalism and communism.

It's been called one of the great rivalries of the art world — a clash between egos, riches and ideologies. In the spring of 1932, capitalist (and prolific collector of Mexican art) Nelson Rockefeller hired Mexican painter and staunch socialist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the newly erected Rockefeller Center in New York City. Sketches were drawn and approved, but when reporters leaked that Rivera had added an image of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a battle began.



Diego Rivera, seen here in 1933, works on a panel of his mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center.

In the end, the painting was destroyed, ideological differences hardened and the two families lived with a legacy of animosity. But now the daughters of the two men have teamed up to leave the past behind and preserve not only their fathers' legacies, but the art they both loved. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, 90, and Ann Rockefeller, 80, aim to raise $3 million each to build individual galleries in their fathers' names at the Mexican Museum, set to break ground at a new and bigger site this year in San Francisco.
In the dining room of her Mexico City home, Rivera Marin recounts meeting Ann Rockefeller in the 1980s. She says the two took an immediate liking to each other. They had much in common — after all, they were both daughters of famous fathers. During that meeting, Ann Rockefeller told Rivera Marin that as a young girl she didn't want the family name — she wanted to make it on her own.

"In that sense," Rivera Marin says, "I was exactly, more or less, the same, you know? I never [wanted] to be the daughter of Diego Rivera, and I always [wanted] to be myself and to have my own life."

Rockefeller says she never harbored ill feelings toward Rivera Marin. "Between us there were no wounds."
Andrew Kluger, chairman of the museum's board, calls the collaboration a "peace-making motion." "They just decided, 'Let's put it aside,'" he says. "'That's the old men; this is us.'"



Nelson Rockefeller examines a painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Rockefeller was 23 when he hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural in the newly built Rockefeller Center.

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Frida Kahlo's passion for food was evident in her many still lifes of fruit, like this painting entitled "The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened." She was also known for her raucous dinner parties in Mexico City.

The life of Frida Kahlo seems tailor-made for an opera: pain, love, art, travel and revolution. So the Michigan Opera Theater's decision to mount a production of the opera Frida, opening Mar. 7 in Detroit — where the iconic painter lived with her husband, Diego Rivera, for nearly a year, and where she survived a miscarriage that marked a turning point in her art — isn't so surprising.
But here's something that is: The opera is celebrating not only Kahlo's art and life, but her recipes and cooking, too.



Frida Kahlo's 1940 painting entitled "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird."

Kahlo's passion for food was evident in her many lush, still lifes of fruit. But she was also known for her raucous dinner parties in Mexico City, replete with pulque, mescal, mole and tamales.

Kahlo served dishes she had mostly learned from Rivera's previous (second) wife, Guadalupe Marin. The meals were so central to the household that Kahlo's step-daughter, Guadalupe Rivera, published a book in 1994 with Clarkson Potter of family recipes called Frida's Fiestas. The book uses the meals to frame a memoir of time she spent living with Kahlo and Rivera as a college student.

And that was enough to spark an idea at the opera: Why not celebrate the production — and Kahlo — with Detroit's best Mexican chefs preparing special menus of the artist's most beloved dishes?

"We're really trying to tell the whole story of Frida," said Michael Yashinsky, who directs community engagement for the Michigan Opera Theater. "Part of that is seeing this portrait of her life in this opera, part of it is seeing the art she created at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and part of it is experiencing her through her food."



Detroit's top Mexican chefs are preparing dishes like these stuffed peppers, called chiles en nogadas, on their special menus in honor of Frida Kahlo.

The opera partnered with three leading chefs in the city's Mexican enclave, Mexicantown, where Kahlo is rumored to have done her grocery shopping. The neighborhood first began attracting Mexican migrants working in Michigan agriculture around 1900. By the time Kahlo and Diego were in Detroit in 1932, the neighborhood housed groceries and shops stocked with dried chiles, fresh tortillas and piloncillo sugar. Today, Mexicantown draws artists as well as immigrants, and is home to supermarket taquerias and taco trucks as well as kitchens run by classically trained chefs.

One of those chefs is Israel Rocha of La Terraza, famous for its shellfish dishes. Drawing largely on Marin-Rivera's book, Rocha will focus in his special Frida opera menu on seafood and a rich posole stew with hominy and dried chiles.

Luis Garza of El Asador and Norberto Garita of El Barzón, the other two chefs involved with the Frida opera project, will meanwhile be serving moles: pork in yellow mole; mole negro Oaxaqueño, a chile and chocolate-based sauce traditionally served with turkey; and mole poblano, a reputed favorite of Diego Rivera. Other dishes will include an oyster soup served at Kahlo and Rivera's wedding; red snapper veracruzana with olives and capers; and chiles en nogadas stuffed with cheese or picadillo, a ground meat, nut and fruit filling.

Garza says his hope is that these dishes will help patrons become more familiar with the breadth and sophistication of Mexican cuisine. "Sometimes people come in [to my restaurant] and say, 'Can I have chimichangas?'" he says, pausing. "And I say, 'No.' I want to bring something different, besides rice and beans and tacos."

Garita shares that hope, but also sees a parallel between his work and that of the woman he is celebrating. "Going into the kitchen is something that you have to forget anything else; you just have to focus on your food. You have to love it," he says. "You have to have the passion, because this is an art, too."

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Dave Holmes is the host of Ovation's American Canvas.

When we get to talking about HBO and Sling, about cord-cutting and the future of television, we tend to focus on the advantages of being able to pick out only the core channels you watch most; the ones you know you love. Now and then, though, I'm glad for the vast array of channels that are trying different things with different people, serving audiences smaller than the ones for football and Cutthroat Kitchen.

Ovation, for instance, makes arts programming — actual arts programming, the way Bravo originally did and the way PBS always has. Their latest show, American Canvas, features writer Dave Holmes doing quick hits at a variety of arts and culture locations in a given city. In the premiere, airing Wednesday night at 10:00 PM Eastern, he's in San Francisco for the hour.
What they're trying to do, I think, is take a format that's been used a lot — in food shows especially — and adapt it to arts. And despite the fact that Holmes has a great background in writing about pop culture (his series on hit lists of the past, which once lived at Vulture under the title "Somewhere In Time" and now lives at Esquire is a gem), they're taking a pretty artsy view of what it means to talk about art.



Bandaloop dancers in San Francisco.

The episode opens with a visit to something I freely admit I didn't know existed: the Ai Weiwei exhibition spread across the grounds of Alcatraz. A park ranger shows Holmes around, and then he wanders through the art installations giving some background and also just ... looking at art. He visits a crab business on Fisherman's Wharf, a dance troupe called Bandaloop that performs on the sides of buildings (it's very cool), some food purveyors and a green tea place in Chinatown, several places important to the history of the Beats, the Conservatory of Flowers, the studio of a visual artist, and a sidewalk setup where he chats with a local author about the history of gay culture and the connection it bears to the Beats.

My favorite, though, is the Musee Mechanique, a collection of coin-operated amusements of all kinds (games, but also other weird displays) run by a guy named Dan, who gets around on roller skates.

They're using a broad definition of arts and culture: food, architecture, dance, visual arts, fiction, social movements, botany — and it's built for the rhythms of basic cable shows, in that it doesn't just sit with one thing for 15 minutes, then have a commercial, then sit with another thing for 15 minutes. You don't have a real shot at experiencing these things fully in this format anyway, so it's probably a good call to skip around so that if you're not into flowers (or dance or how they make fortune cookies), something else comes along pretty quickly.

Outside of PBS, which has certainly valiantly continued to do arts programming of many kinds, finding television shows that would open with a guy basically saying, "Let's take a fun trip, and let's start at this politically motivated art installation because it's cool and interesting" is pretty tough. The format feels familiar, but the efforts to connect elements to each other and the frankness with which the sociology is approached (there are conversations both about the racism that affected Chinese residents of San Francisco and about the secrecy that caused the city's gay culture to initially thrive underground) are refreshing.

American Canvas is a three-part series, scheduled to also visit Austin and Miami. It's not world-changing, but it's a solid effort to put a sense of place around a genuinely varied collection of cultural snapshots. There's certainly validity in the complaints that people are paying for a lot more television than they're using, but I do worry that an a la carte model might cost us fun little shows like this that will perhaps never be hits, but will offer a particular audience something it finds hard to get elsewhere.
Also known as "Dave Holmes, No Relation."

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A detail from the north wall of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals shows workers on the automobile assembly line. After Detroit declared bankruptcy, the murals were at risk of being sold.

This weekend, visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts buzzed with excitement over a new exhibit — it was a big moment for the once-troubled museum. The DIA spent much of the last two years under threat as its owner, the city of Detroit, looked for ways to emerge from bankruptcy.



A new exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts displays nearly 70 works by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Finally, in November, a "grand bargain" was struck. Foundations, private donors and the state of Michigan together raised more than $800 million to help rescue public employee pensions. In return, ownership of the DIA was transferred to a trust — thereby securing its future.
The exhibit, "Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit," has special significance to the city — at its heart are Rivera's Detroit Industry murals, painted on the walls of the DIA. Grand in scope and scale, they celebrate Detroit's auto factories, and depict a kind of worker's utopia — men of all races side by side on an assembly line. Commissioned by Henry Ford's son Edsel, the murals offer incredible detail. One engineer at the time said the artist coherently fit 2 miles of assembly line onto two walls.


The Assembly of an Automobile, by Diego Rivera, 1932, charcoal on paper.

But the grand murals stand in stark contrast to Kahlo's paintings, which are small and intensely personal. As the museum says in the exhibit description, Rivera romanticized Detroit; Kahlo rejected it.

Museum director Graham Beal tells NPR's Don Gonyea that the exhibit has taken on a deeper meaning for the museum and for the city as a whole.
"Until recently when you looked at the Rivera murals ... you saw a Detroit of the past," he says. "Sort of somehow that it was elegiac. But things have shifted so much in the past few months ... Now you can see the murals as something that is now looking to the future as well as looking to the past, and that all of the old engineering, all the know-how, all the entrepreneurial spirit is somehow in effect again."

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Interview Highlights

On the time Rivera and Kahlo spent in Detroit

Rivera was invited here as one of the world's most famous artists to paint some murals in the really relatively new cultural palace of the Detroit Institute of Arts. And with him came his new wife. They had been married for two years. She was completely unknown. So you have this artist come here who sees the [Ford River Rouge] plant and the other auto plants, and he just falls in love with them and he loves all of this engineering and all this technology even though he's a Mexican communist who's not supposed to relate to anything so obviously capitalist. ...


Frida Kahlo painted Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States in 1932.

And then you have with him diminutive figure, completely unknown, unformed, in a way, as an artist who loathed the U.S., didn't like Detroit at all, came and went as much as she could, going backwards and forwards to New York, and tragically having to go back to Mexico when her mother died.

So Rivera was here most of the time working on this enormous project, and Frida was here as an unformed artist. She went through the tragic loss of a pregnancy. ... It was through this ghastly experience that you see the emergence of Frida as a signature artist. You see her grasping the fact that she is going to be her own subject matter, something in fact that Rivera urged her to do as well. And so almost like out of a chrysalis, the recognizable Frida Kahlo arrives because of the pain and everything she went through in Detroit.



In Kahlo's painting The Henry Ford Hospital, she depicts her traumatic loss of a pregnancy.

On the Kahlo works on view in the exhibition

Way in the center of the exhibition is the small painting The Henry Ford Hospital where she rather gruesomely shows the fact that she lost a fetus and she shows herself lying in this bed in a very desolate urban landscape with the Henry Ford Company, the Rouge Plant in the background. She basically puts herself in pain in the middle of an unpleasant landscape, and she writes along the bottom of the bed "Henry Ford Hospital," which somehow links her accident with the Ford company.

On how Rivera's murals were a backdrop during the fight to save the museum during the city's bankruptcy — and what it means to hold this exhibition now

It was an accident of timing really. We didn't know about the bankruptcy when we started working on this exhibition in earnest, and we certainly didn't know how long it was going to last. But it really does seem appropriate. It does seem like a very effective exclamation mark. The DIA once again symbolizes the energy and creativity of Detroit. And that can be seen in the murals, which, you know — let's face it — were never going to leave that building whatever happened.



The south wall of Rivera's Detroit Industry mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts.


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Decades ago, the Washington, D.C. artist who goes by Mingering Mike channeled his musical aspirations into a series of meticulously hand-painted LP covers for albums that didn't exist. This piece from 1972 is called Joseph War & Friend, 'As High As The Sky' (mixed media on paperboard).

Smithsonian American Art Museum

"I'm Superman" b/w "Blind in One Eye," 1975 (mixed media on paperboard).

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has just added a handful of soul records to its collection — or at least that's what you might think when you first see the work of Mingering Mike. A self-taught artist, he grew up in a tough part of Washington, D.C., just a few miles from the museum, though his family didn't spend much time there. Now, his work is in the museum permanently.

Mike's work might never have been seen by anyone if it weren't for Dori Hadar, an obsessive record collector. One morning in 2003, Hadar showed up early at a flea market in Washington, DC and started to dig through crates of used LPs.

"I came upon this one crate that contained albums like I had never seen before," Hadar says. "There were approximately 40 LPs that had hand-painted covers and handwritten liner notes and lyrics. And they were all made by someone named Mingering Mike."

At a glance, the albums look like other soul records of the 1960s and '70s — except they're obviously drawn by hand in colored pen and pencil. They feature a young black man with an afro and sideburns, sometimes alone, sometimes with other musicians and dancers. The titles seem to trace the arc of a real career: Grooving with Mike, Boogie Down at the White House, and The Mingering Mike Show: Live from the Howard Theater. Hadar reached into the sleeves to check the condition of the records inside.

"They weren't in very good condition at all, because they were made out of cardboard. And someone had painted them with shiny black paint so that they looked real," Hadar says.

Hadar didn't know why anyone would go to these lengths to create an imaginary music career, but he wanted to find out. It happens that Hadar is a private investigator by trade, and a couple of weeks later, he and a friend were knocking on a door in southeast D.C.

"The door sorta cracked open, and this guy peered out at us. We said, 'Mingering Mike?' And he didn't say anything," Hadar says. "We told him, 'We found some of your things at the flea market.' And he said, 'My babies?'"

Mike was glad to know his albums were safe — but initially, he was not happy to see Hadar at his front door.
"Coming in the ghetto and saying, 'I have your stuff' — what would you think?" Mike says.

Mike still doesn't want to use his real name. At first he didn't want anyone to see the album covers he made either.
"I thought a lot of it, but it was just something private I did," he says. "That's the only way I could say things at the time, 'cause I was an introvert.'"




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