Sorry again for the earlier blank post. I usually blog first thing in the morning and I seem to be unable to recall that hitting enter in the title line, sends the post.
Anyway, We started our Sunday split up in two groups. Julie, Chris, and Marg went off to the Tucson Museum of Art while LInda and I went to check out the Museum of Contemporary Art. The group that went to the first museum reported that it had a small, but good permanent collection including some Cassat paintings, a Rodin sculpture and a few other impressionists as well as a collection of indigenous art.
At the MOCA, Linda and I spent most of our time at the Cecilia Vicuña exhibit: Sonoran Quipu. Described as “a map, a diagram, a braid, a knot world - composed of plant and industrial materials that are held together by relationships. The artwork is made from offerings collected by individuals and organizations across Tucson, gathered over six months from kitchens, gutters, artists’ studios, gardens and streets. The invitation was to bring fragments that held beauty or significance, but were not necessarily useful, having been shed by a plant, broken by a child, or left in an alley. These scraps were alchemized by the artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña who transformed the museum into a living studio to realize the installation with help from a small and powerful team of makers.”
A quipu is a is an ancient Andean communications technology that uses knots to record information. It was banned by the Spanish colonizers. Vicuña also refers to “precarios” (installations - but also in Spanish it means precarious) and “basuritas” (little bits of trash) to describe her sculptures hanging from and engaging with quipus.
Linda and I were very moved by it and by her videos which include her singing of songs in an indigenous language - unclear to me whether her own Andean language or one of Sonoran origin. One device in particular struck me - the use of her basuritas on a beach that are then overtaken by the tide, leaving bits of the original sculpture surrounded by a foamy, but gentle wave swirling around them and creating shifting patterns.
It’s a challenging installation to photograph because of the garage-like gallery it’s hung in with a dark grid wall on one side and a very bright wall of windows on the other. But here are a few items to give you an idea:
This one was hard to capture, but I tried with a brief video. The two pink anchors are halves of a child’s pail. The plant laid across them is shedding pieces on the floor - disappearing slowly as we view it.
Next item on our agenda was to meet up at the pottery studio again and glaze our now fired pots:
Hopefully they’ll have their second firing before Marg and Chris leave Tucson. Our creations were clearly those of beginners, but we did learn a lot about the process and have a new insight into how one has to let go of expectation in making pottery because, as several of the potters reminded us, you never know for sure what will happen in the next step.
After glazing, we hopped on the tram and grabbed a quick lunch on 4th Avenue, an area with lots of restaurants (though Tucson is a UNESCO designated “City of Gastronomy” so restaurants are actually everywhere), Then back on the tram to our final destination for the day - the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium for a show about the Planets. It’s a beautiful planetarium with reclining seats so you can see the “sky” projected above you. Obviously pretty dark in there so no photos, but afterwards Chris tried out the “Human Sundial” - it worked!
We also got to witness one of the delivery robots from the Student Union dropping off one of the planetarium staff member’s lunch and heading off on its next mission: