In this week’s post, I continue my discussion of Margaret Renkl’s article “Waking Up to History” in the New York Times. To see where this began, read last Monday’s post. Are Fiber Arts a Way to Subjugate Women? Along with being a public historian, I am a fiber artist and have been since I was a child. I learned some from my mom, who crochets extraordinary afghans, but I was also encouraged in my self-taught…
Waking Up to History An opinion piece by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times caught my attention recently. Called “Waking Up to History,” the piece explores Renkl’s experiences with learning fiber arts from her grandmothers and how she cast those experiences aside by the time she was in college because she “had internalized the message that work traditionally done by men is inherently more valuable than work traditionally done by women.” As a feminist,…
Fergus Falls and Der Spiegel The town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, recently had to publicly correct the historic record. A reporter from Der Spiegel spent several weeks in the town in order to write a story focusing on the politics of rural America. Turns out he made up a lot of the story, giving a skewed view of the city and its residents. Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn provided a correction via their article on…
Olio: a miscellaneous collection of things Happy Groundhog Day! The fat, disinterested rodent didn’t see his shadow, so spring is supposedly coming early. Although with the warm temps this past weekend, we don’t need a rodent to forecast this for us. While we wait for spring, here are items of interest from my online browsing. From The Coffeelicious on Medium – “The Discontent Optimist” – In my middle age I have become wary of too…
Anita Mills, one of my college professors, posted this marvelous New York Times article about blind contour drawing on Facebook. I remember blind contour drawing well. The exercise has students, using charcoal and large pieces of newsprint paper, draw a subject without looking at the paper. The results are always laughable, but the exercise makes students see their subjects differently and frees them from trying to draw the “perfect” picture. This is what Sam Anderson,…