One of the things that is so fascinating about the Govan crèche collection is how many different materials artists have used to create the nativity story. I neglected to note anything about this rolled paper one but I think it is from somewhere in Africa.
This completely different paper one is by Lila K. Ridley of South Carolina.
M. Eugenia Weinmann of Chile crafted this crèche from seashells.
This glass one is from India.
The sign on this ceramic one with mirrors and beads was a bit confusing as it says it’s from India but then lists the artist as Barbara Ryan, USA.
Another one from India, this metal one was made by an unknown artist.
This painted clay one from Portugal was one of my favorites and is interesting as two artists are listed one, Quinara, made the figures and another, Robert Davis, the altar. This crèche is one of the ones featured in the book I have about the collection. Presenting the figures on an altar like base like this originated in the late 1920’s in Estremoz a small town east of Lisbon. The inspiration came from the presentation of popular saints at festivals on large staircase thrones. The “altar nativity” became a miniature version of the festival shrines.
This wood, fabric, paper, and metal one from Thailand is by Khunjing Tongkorn Chandavime.
I love the three kings in this painted clay one from an unknown artist in Egypt.
I think this one is painted wood and is from Nicaragua.
I guess the curator or installer thought this painted wood one from Kgrgysten looked particularly inviting as it was one of the few with a Do Not Touch sign.
This one from Nepal was crafted with Karma wood by Narayan Shilpakor.
I’ll end with this one I neglected to get any information about. I particularly like the angel on the top!
Some of the creches in the exhibit at LUMA were commissioned by James Govan and the artists often execute the nativity in a way that reflects their culture as in this Alaska Crèche by Linda and Bruce Berget. As Govan points out in a video showing as part of the exhibit, the celebration of birth is a universal experience.
The above nativity scene includes animal skins and feathers. It’s fascinating to see all the different media that have been used by artists throughout the world. More on that and more favorites in the next post!
The annual Art of the Crèche exhibit of nativities from the Govan collection at the Loyola Museum of Art was back in full force this year. There were so many wonderful ones that I hadn’t seen before that I couldn’t stop taking pictures of them. So I’m going to write more than one post about them.
This one from Mexico was the first one to catch my eye. Check out that skull at the bottom. There were two more folk art ones from Mexico I loved as well.
I was especially excited to see the Santos or little saints from the French region of Provence because I recently read a book called “The Art of Living in Season: A Year of Reflections for Everyday Saints” by Sylvie Vanhoozer who grew up in Provence. Each of the chapters of the book focuses on one of the santons from a typical Provence crèche.
The book includes illustrations of each of the little saints by the author and it was wonderful to get to see them in person. The santons in the exhibit were created by the Workshop “Santons Marcel Carbonel”. The late artist Marcel Carbonel was the first “santonnier” to fire the clay figures that artists had been making since the late 1700’s. The figures include typical rural people from Provence each carrying a gift for the baby Jesus including L’agriculture (the farmer), La femme au fagot (the woman with kindling), and La poissonniere (the fishmonger).
I am mostly drawn to the folk art nativities by an “unknown artist” as the exhibit labels say or by artists working in traditional styles but I also appreciate some of the more modern interpretations. I don’t think I’ve posted a picture of this one constructed of found wood by Jean Morman Unsworth in 2011.
Stay tuned for more crèche posts!
Ella Jenkins “the first lady of children’s music” collected spinning tops during her travels around the world and she willed them to the Chicago Children’s Museum. They are currently being displayed along with information about Ella and other artifacts in the Eleanor C. Beidler Changing Exhibit Display on the second floor of the museum.
The exhibit explains that she liked tops because playing with them helped her to think.
There is an old flier in the display case from a time when Ella brought some tops to the museum: “Come sing along and spin tops and dreidels with Ella Jenkins and Louis Berman” it invites.
I was all ready to try the tops outside the display case but it turned out that they were permanently affixed, of course!
There actually wasn’t a Stitchtober list this year. For a short while it seemed as if there would be. In fact, Adam who had hosted the previous years Stitchtobers confirmed on Instagram that he was thinking he might do it again this year. But in the end he didn’t and since I had had the idea that I’d like to do it again using constellations, I went back to one of his previous lists from before I started participating.
In 2020 Adam’s list included all 31 days of October but I only wanted to do Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays like the list was in 2021 when I did it for the first time. So after taking out a few of the words that I knew wouldn’t work with constellations I wrote the others on pieces of paper and had my husband pick 14 of them out of a basket.
I was going to post my list on Instagram so I made a slide but I realized that, due to my design idea, I really wasn’t going to be able to stitch the constellations in the order I chose the prompts. This mobile, stitched by someone I follow on Instagram, was my inspiration for how to represent the constellations.
I knew I wanted to stitch them in a circle and through googling I found this cross stitch pattern.
After googling each of the prompts and deciding on which constellations to stitch, I began googling drawings of the actual constellations and drawings of the representations of them. I quickly found out that neither the actual constellations or the representations (or the stories that go along with them, for that matter) are consistent. So I picked the images I wanted to use and began arranging them in the large circle I had drawn on my pieces of taped together graph paper. As I began converting to x’s, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stitch lines connecting the stars and that I was going to need to start stitching in the middle of the piece with Aquarius who was a response to the prompt “talon” which was number nine on my list. So I ended up posting the constellations on Instagram as I stitched them. Here are the first nine (from the bottom up) on my Instagram grid.
And here is the post of the piece with all 15 constellations. 15 because for the prompt “season” I stitched Orion and Scorpio who appear on opposite sides of the sky According to the myth, Orion hunts in the winter and flees in the summer when the scorpion appears.
After I had stitched all the constellations I added stitches to fill in the spaces a la the Kitties in the Round pattern and then I turned it into a pillow for our work/guest room futon.
It may look like Christmas at other people’s houses already but over here it is still Fall. I already wrote about some of our Fall decor – the sunflower picture I needlefelted and the Day of the Dead offrenda ornaments and the new quilt my Brooklyn niece gave me for Christmas last year – so here’s the rest of it.
I was inspired to make these little mushroom houses by @studio_rosie on Instagram. I made the little tiny pumpkin in front of the second one (from the left) after taking an online workshop with Mirjam Gielen. It was wet felted in a tea strainer and embellished with embroidery thread.
I went to Marshall’s the same day I watched the tutorial and couldn’t believe that they actually had a round tea strainer! I made an apple too and I intended to make an Evil Queen (from Snow White) pegdoll to hold it but had trouble drawing the face – maybe next year.
We put the Halloween trees in the living room again this year.
I didn’t feature the heirloom ornament I made for it last year because I was making other ones as a Christmas surprise.
I made some ghosts out of an egg carton after they flashed by quickly in an Instagram story. I intend to hang one or two on the trees next year but this year I made a garland of them and hung them in the dining room under the Fall branches.
I took them down today because when it actually snowed this morning I thought “Well I guess I should take down the Halloween decorations” but it is obviously still Fall out there!
The only thing we bought this year was this little grey fuzzy pumpkin. When we saw it during the Andersonville Sidewalk Sales we knew it had to join the other grey pumpkin we bought at the Found Cottage a few years ago.
Last year Four Sided featured old scary movie posters in their Halloween windows and I knew that was what I wanted to use for my treats this year. I found one that was perfect – several people commented on the fact that Vincent Price was in it. I paired it with Kit Kat Ghost Toasts (apparently they tasted like Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal) and simply wrote “Boo!” on the back in orange.
The treats are all gone now and the Halloween decorations are back in the storage box but happily the Fall decorations will stick around until the end of November!
One of my favorite Christmas gifts last year had to wait until now to be displayed and featured here because it was meant to go with my Day of the Dead offrenda wreath. My Brooklyn niece made me this beautiful cempasúchil flower mini quilt using new fabric as well as fabric from her mother’s (my sister’s) stash. She based it on a pattern from the book “Flossie Teacake’s Guide to English Paper Piercing”.
Hanging under my sister’s offrenda ornament this year is the new one I made for my husband’s brother, who died in June.
He was an animal veterinarian who specialized in transplanting cow embryos, and at various times in his life, he either embraced or hated getting cow gifts. So I thought his offrenda definitely needed a cow. Being a Christian was an important part of his life for many years, so I added a cross. But before he embraced Christianity, he was a serious Deadhead, so instead of cempasúchils I added the Grateful Dead bears all around the sides of his offrenda ornament.
We miss you, Allen.
I thought I knew all the ways to work with felt, but then Jennifer from the children’s museum shared this on her Instagram stories:
Felting in an embroidery hoop? I did some googling and found out you don’t actually do the felting in the hoop – you needle felt into a piece of fabric on a felting pad or foam piece and then frame it in the hoop. When I thought about what I might want to felt, a field of sunflowers came to mind maybe because my sister had just sent me a picture of herself in a field of sunflowers. After I googled a bunch of pictures of fields, I realized I actually wanted to felt a picture of my sister in the field, not just a random field of sunflowers.
I didn’t want to attempt her face, and that thing thing that people do where they leave the faces blank really creeps me out, so I decided the picture should be of her looking at the sunflowers.
I used both kinds of fiber since that’s what I had, and I found that batts seemed to work a bit better than roving – in fact, for the sunflowers, I started with batting and topped it with roving since the roving was the right color.
When I sent my sister a picture of it, she exclaimed, “Is that me?” and wondered if it was her birthday present. No, but maybe Christmas… For now, it’s part of my Fall decorating.
When the butterflies left (flew away from?) Michigan Avenue, I wondered what would be next. At first, I thought it was going to be flowers since I saw a couple of different ones.
But then I realized that those were just part of the spring landscaping. After a while, a few art pieces appeared. Spying them from the bus windows, I thought they were meant to be buildings, but when I looked at them from different angles, I realized they were Chicago stars. They didn’t have any placards with information, but by using the Google search feature on my phone, I found out that the “Rising Star” or “Everybody is a Star” sculptures were commissioned by the Magnificent Mile Association and painted by artists from the Englewood Arts Collective.
There is one more inside Water Tower Place but I haven’t stopped in there yet. So that makes 6 not nearly as many as the lions a British family I follow on Instagram are finding in Cheltenham and Gloucester.
They posted the above tally a few days ago and today (yesterday?) they set off to find some more.
When people ask me if I like living in Chicago and if I miss living in Western Massachusetts, I have to say yes and yes. I miss many things about Western Massachusetts, including the landscape and the music scene, but I also love things about Chicago, particularly all the art. I mean, there is even art on the bus shelters sometimes!
It is kind of hard to take good pictures of it, and I often only see the shelters through the bus windows but here are two from a series called She Who Sits by Adrienne Elise Tarver that appeared on bus shelters from last August to November.
Now, there is a new series by Paul Anthony and I noticed it was installed by the Public Art Fund. Googling led to their website and this description of the series that currently appears on Chicago, New York, and Boston bus shelters:
“The exhibition title, Melodies from a running spring, suggests the artist’s dreams or visions from Jamaica. Each piece features a photographic portrait—sometimes of a single figure, other times two—set in a natural landscape. Smith’s picotage disrupts these photographs in various ways: their backgrounds are sliced by geometric grids, the landscape is obscured by fields of perforation, and in some cases, the figures dissolve almost entirely into texture.”
And of course, another thing I love about Chicago are the buses themselves. People here complain about them a lot, but coming from a place with virtually no public transportation, I find them amazing!
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 