curators

"I do think of my work, certainly in Refashioning Futures and Conscripts of Modernity, as work that has grown out of the larger conceptual vision that for me inspired the initiation of the Small Axe project — that is, a sense that the dream of anti-colonialism through which my generation came of age in the Caribbean, and through which the Caribbean was imagined as a space of social transformation and revolutionary change, has now been exhausted. And the end of that dream (and the practices of criticism that accompanied it) has created a demand for us to rethink the project of criticism and social change. This sense of the present infuses both my stewardship of Small Axe and the directions of my own research and writing."

"One of the things that Small Axe has been trying to do over the years is to be self-conscious about criticism as a question."

"...To bring us back to Small Axe, one of the things that we have had to worry about over the course of our existence is the extent to which or the senses in which we are a Caribbean journal with a sense of concern for the regional Caribbean, and not a diaspora journal, as we might have imagined ourselves to be."

"In 1918 he retired as an officer of the , and in the following year was elected of the . Here he officiated for the remainder of his life, serving as curator, director of its museum, and editor of its nationally known magazine, "Old-Time New England." In 1894 he founded the Topsfield Historical Society, serving as secretary and treasurer of the Society, and editor of its publications. When the came into the posssssion of the Society, he was in charge of the restoration. Because of his knowledge of early New England architecture he was often consulted, and had charge of the restoration of a number of eighteenth century houses for individuals and historical societies throughout New England. He also designed the . In 1922 he organized the Marine Research Society at Salem and edited its long and valuable series of publications."

"Of course it goes without saying that when a whale was sighted, the whalemen were in for a hard job, a harder job than the uninitiated could ever appreciate. The chase, the capture, the , the were dangerous and inordinately wearisome. But the chase and the capture, too, had their better sides. The love of a princely sport thrilled the whalemen when the cry of "blows" came from aloft."

"The ' shipped 15,000 brown biscuit and 5,000 white, that is, , i.e. crackers; also or half-cooked bacon, as it came from the , which was much liked with the biscuit and when fried was considered a delicacy. Haberdyne () was also a staple article of diet; also . Potatoes were practically unknown at that time and the store of cabbages, turnips, onions, parsnips, etc., soon ran short and gave way to boiled mush, , s, etc. Their beer was carried in iron-bound casks."

"I have had several opportunities to mentor people at Vispero, including interns and new team members. Mentoring is a humbling experience—it is usually less about teaching and more about learning together, and I truly value those connections. I tend to gain fresh perspectives and insights from the folks’ I mentor."

"Do not hesitate to reach out. We function like a well-oiled machine, which can feel intimidating at first, but everyone here is incredibly kind. The team is fueled by passion—we are all here because we want to be, which creates an amazing environment for growth and learning. Even though we mostly work remotely, we are always available to help, so don’t be afraid to connect and ask questions."

"I wanted to do something with animals when I was a kid, which does not really compare to what I do now. Still, animals remain a big part of my life, and I adore them. When I was younger, I pictured animals as my career and technology as my hobby. Now, it is the opposite: assistive technology is my job, and caring for my animals is a hobby."

"It reminds me that showing up and trying is what really matters, mistakes will always be a part of life."

"I am not very interested in seeing the future, but I love diving into history, especially when it’s told from lesser-known perspectives. You can learn so much from the little details that mainstream stories often miss. I would travel back in time just to be a fly on the wall, not to change anything, but to understand the nuances that shaped our world. Also, let us be honest, to see some of the more dramatic moments that are not fully known, the part of history that happened behind closed doors."

"I have worked at Vispero since June of 2018."

"“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”"

"I take a lot of joy in seeing people learn skills they can apply in their lives, and I am fortunate to experience that regularly in my current role. When I look back on my time at Vispero, and even in my previous roles, what really stands out is the ability to empower others through learning. Helping people gain skills that make their lives easier or more independent is incredibly rewarding."

"Recently, I felt particularly energized by the recent conclusion of our second annual Next Big Thing contest and Sharkvember celebrations, a project I am actively involved in and really enjoy. Also, the release of FS Companion has been incredibly exciting. The team all worked hard on development, spreading the word, and ensuring our users know about it. Seeing that effort begin to pay off has been thrilling for everyone."

"I do not always remember every single word, but the energy and essence of Theodore Roosevelt’s quote has stayed with me since my teens:"

"Professionally, I am exploring how AI and data can help us make better decisions. It is amazing how quickly this technology evolves and how it can empower us all. On the personal side, I am always reading something new, and I am excited to try my hand at using a pellet smoker. I am looking forward to experimenting with different flavors—maybe even smoked cheese, as my smoker has a cold smoker box."

"I have always been excited about new technology, and it naturally led me to explore assistive technology I could use as a blind individual. Over time, I discovered that I also love teaching. I discovered this through teaching braille, which was my second job. Those combined passions brought me to where I am now. I also love working with people and thrive as a part of a team."

"My very first job was teaching the JAWS screen reader when I was in college to another college student at the University of Central Oklahoma. That was all the way back in 2004!"

"“People only care how much you know when they know how much you care.” A mentor teacher shared this with me, and it turned out to be both wise and true."

"I am not sure if it’s a hidden talent, but I play a mean game of Pinochle, and my family is fiercely competitive about it. I am a high energy person, so I keep busy. I also have two dogs, two cats and, of course, a flock of eleven chickens that I enjoy caring for."

"I love reading and cooking, especially experimenting with different recipes and methods. My high school-aged kids keep me busy as they prepare for the next stage in life, but I also enjoy taking care of my pets and my backyard chicken flock. Even though I do not get to water ski or hike as often as I’d like, both are favorite ways to enjoy the outdoors when the weather cooperates. I feel blessed to have a job I love, and when I want to relax, I often unwind with a good Netflix series or documentary."

"For over 600 years, artists have been drawing Venice. It is the most-drawn and painted city in the world. How can anyone find something new and fresh to say? All I could do was to draw the reality of my own existence there. I drew what I wanted to understand, or where I wanted to explore or spend time. By just remaining in a place and drawing, you see so much more. You experience the life of the place, you become part of it. Because of my constantly drawing in Venice and keeping notebooks, I feel that I understand what Canaletto was doing and experiencing with his drawings."

"The Afro-Cuban group from the Santa Marta neighborhood (at the far, far end of Dorsoduro) is great fun. The idea of this nutty group of Rasta-haired Venetian guys singing topical songs in Venetian really appeals to me. I understand Venetian dialect and I follow the local issues that Venetians are concerned about. Santa Marta is probably the Bronx of Venice. Not the most elegant part of Venice but a great place to grow up."

"Last March, I stood on the loggia of San Marco, by the reproduction horses, and made a drawing I'd been thinking about doing for a while--the entire sweep of Piazza San Marco from above. It was cold, but I stood still for two hours and became completely immersed in the making of the drawing. It is a wonderful thing to experience ... a total absorption ... and a strange sense of power that I can do this."

"I began coming to Venice regularly in 1989, when Matilde Dolcetti, director of the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia (SIGV), a school of printmaking and graphic design, invited me to come to the school as a visiting artist. In subsequent years, I taught classes in burin engraving, drawing, and the history of prints there. My involvement with the SIGV connected me with the printmakers, book printers and bookbinders of Venice. Those artists became my core group of friends in Venice, and the SIGV has long been my base and point of reference."

"In Venice, I work on my engravings on a big old oak kitchen table I bought for this purpose. The table has a very large drawer, a pullout board for rolling out pasta, and still has its pull out, meter-long rolling pin. For plate prep and proofing, I use the facilities at the Scuola di Grafica."

"My laptop computer is on a desk between my engraving table and the terrace door. There is a seven-hour time difference between Venice and Des Moines. Around 4 PM, as my colleagues are arriving at the Des Moines Art Center where it is 9 AM, I log in remotely to the museum's server. From Venice, I can literally work on the computer and printer on my desk in my office in Des Moines. Email is the same whether sent from the office next door or 6000 miles away. Work keeps going in Des Moines until around 5 PM, or midnight in Venice."

"In Des Moines, we live on a quiet street in a beautiful old wooded neighborhood. Our house is surrounded by a large yard with three century-old oak trees, bushes, and perennials. I have my own study with all my print history books. My printmaking studio is in the basement of our house. I have a 36 x 60" American French Tool etching press. From 1970, when we moved to Des Moines after graduate school, until 1997 I worked primarily as an artist and a teacher of printmaking, design, and art history. In 1974, I began to curate exhibitions on the history of prints for the DMAC, then was invited to do projects for other museums. In 1997, after I had been doing guest curatorial projects for 20 years, the DMAC finally created my part-time position as curator of prints (now prints and drawings). My responsibilities at the museum include organizing three or four exhibitions a year on prints and drawings, writing gallery guides and labels, gallery talks, doing research on works in the permanent collection, recommending acquisitions, advising on conservation, working as part of the curatorial team, cultivating collectors and donors, etc. We don't have a public print room, so there is no public access to the collection. I am staff liaison for the Des Moines Art Center Print Club, a very active group of print collectors, artists, and people interested in prints. They organize monthly programs, commission prints, and purchase works for the collection."

"The Oxford Project was a great thing to become involved in. It was created by two University of Iowa professors, Peter Feldstein and Steven G. Bloom. Peter started photographing everyone in Oxford, Iowa in 1984 in part as Conceptual Art and for sociological reasons, but also it was Peter's attempt to be accepted by the residents of this tiny Iowa town that he had moved to. He started rephotographing the same people 21 years later, in 2005, and Steve Bloom interviewed the portrait subjects. Feldstein and Bloom proposed The Oxford Project as an exhibition to the Des Moines Art Center. I was basically assigned the job of evaluating whether it was worth doing at our museum. I was intrigued and organized a selection of the works for an exhibition in 2007. The public response was incredible. The exhibition was also shown in Padova, Italy, where it was very well received. Italian viewers understood that these amazing stories were not just American, they were universal."

"Sometimes, someone in Venice will ask me, "What is it like in Des Moines?", and sometimes, someone in Des Moines asks, "What is it like to live in Venice?" I respond with the same answer - You can't imagine. It is another world."

"On the other hand, being a print curator gives me amazing access to museum collections and original art objects. I learn so much. I do not feel unconnected from history, but rather part of a continuum. I don't try to emulate artists who have gone before or who are working now, but I certainly do measure myself against them."

"I have been a resident of Venice since 2004. For the past five years I have arranged my schedule so that I spend a full six months a year in Venice and a bit under six months in Des Moines. Approximately every two months, I go from one home and existence to the other. Sometimes I feel that I am living two completely different lives, but they are connected, and I love both of them."

"Very much so. Being a curator and an artist is bad in one way. In deciding to work as a curator, I sacrificed my public persona as an artist. There are many conflict of interest issues that can arise. Although my museum has many of my prints in its permanent collection (these were acquired before I became a curatorial staff member), I certainly can't ever include my own work in an exhibition. Also, I feel extremely reluctant to try to promote my work to curatorial colleagues in other museums. That is really up to the gallery that represents my work. (I do have prints in numerous museum collections, but probably could have had a lot more). A museum would like to organize a retrospective of my work, but here again, I barely have time to prepare for it. Being a curator means no longer having all day to work in the studio. Sometimes, I come home and work from after dinner until midnight in the studio."

"Sometimes work I have done as an artist gives me an idea for an exhibition, even though I can't incorporate that fact into what I write about it. For example, right now I am preparing the exhibition, Art in Ruins, for the Des Moines Art Center. But it is really my own experience of drawing in the wreckage of a relative's house destroyed by fire and making engravings of this, and witnessing a small plane crash and later engraving it, that made me interested in this subject."

"The Des Moines Art Center is an extraordinary institution with a terrific collection, a great work environment, and wonderful colleagues. I have an enviable work arrangement. I feel I still have something to contribute in the way of teaching about prints. So I will undoubtedly continue to commute from Venice to Des Moines for the foreseeable future"

"We live near Campo San Giacomo de l'Orio, in the sestiere of Santa Croce. Our palazzo is visible in Jacopo de' Barbari's 1500 bird's eye view of Venice. In the Campo, during the day the elderly sit on the benches under the trees, the retired men stand and chat, and friends meet to drink coffee, wine, and spritz at the cafés. In the afternoon, babies toddle, kids rollerblade and kick soccer balls, and parents chat. On Wednesday evenings, I often attend Incontri, a weekly gathering for artists only, organized by the painter Maria Morganti. We meet at the Fondazione Bevilacqua LaMasa on Rio San Barnaba. Artists present talks on their work to other artists."

"We have a boat, and my husband has become really good at rowing, Venetian-style. He goes out rowing almost every evening through the year, even around midnight. He rows through the canals late at night because there is almost no one else out at that hour. It is very dark on the inner canals, but it is an amazing thing to see Venice this way. Sometimes I go along as a passenger. I often take a notebook and draw while we go through the canals. The drawings have to be really fast since we are constantly moving. He is willing to stop and tie up every once in a while so I can make a drawing from a fixed spot."

"My arrangement with the museum is that my schedule is mine to figure out. There are times when I have to be present in Des Moines, such as a month or so before the installation of a new exhibition. When I am in Des Moines I work very intensely, plan, and do much in advance to enable myself to be away for my regular two-month absences."

"Here is a recent example of how curatorial travel influences my work as an artist: On January 21, the day after Barack Obama's inauguration, I flew to Washington DC on a courier trip. Walking up the hill past the US Capitol, I saw that it was still completely set up for the inauguration, but the two million people had all gone home. It was amazing to stand in that place on the day after the inauguration. After I did my research at the Library of Congress, I walked back down the hill, stood in front of the Capitol, and drew the scene. (To see the drawing, please click here.) The next day at 7 AM, I boarded an art shipper's truck at the National Gallery of Art and accompanied several paintings on a 19-hour ride back across the US to Des Moines."

"Since I am usually doing research on some aspect of the history of prints, I try to make appointments to visit the print rooms of museums in cities that I happen to visit. When we lived in London on a sabbatical in 1986-87, I enrolled in a year-long class to study lettering engraving at Sir John Cass College, City of London Polytechnic, a college that trained young engravers to pass the Guild exams and become certified engravers. I did this because I knew how to engrave pictorially, but had no sense of how to engrave words or inscriptions so I could print them. As an art historian, I had become curious about the extraordinary calligraphic inscription on an engraving of a Vanitas personification by the Dutch Mannerist engraver, Jan Saenredam. A curator friend at the British Museum suggested that I look at the British Library's collection of engraved calligraphy writing manuals from the 16th and 17th century. After years of research on what became an utterly absorbing topic for me, I ended up writing a long article about this subject (“Calligraphic Inscriptions in Dutch Mannerist Prints,” in Goltzius Studies: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1993). In addition to my art historical discoveries on this topic, I was able to incorporate the technical experience I had gained by studying lettering engraving."

"The delight I take in crossing barriers and mixing things up may date from my experiences as a child. I grew up in The Bronx where I attended elementary and junior high school with many kids whose parents were WWII refugees. Many of my friends did not speak English at home. During the summers of 1959 and 1960, when I was 12 and 13, my father, a NYC school principal and science educator, taught National Science Foundation summer institutes for black science teachers at Virginia State College in Petersburg, VA. This was still the era of segregation, and we spent those two summers as the only white family living on the black college campus. As a teenager attending the High School of Music and Art, I absorbed the cultural richness, variety, and excitement of the city."

"I draw more frequently when I travel (and especially, when I am in Venice), than when I am in Des Moines. Besides an infinite number of drawings made in Italy, I have major bodies of work from time I have spent in Japan, France, Russia, Turkey (Istanbul), India and England. I have some drawings from my travels around the US too. I also make drawings while killing time in trains, planes, and airports."

"I draw almost every day in drawing books made by a Venetian bookbinder, Renato Polliero, using an old pump fountain pen that I can fill with my own waterproof India ink. I love the flexibility of the point of a good old writing pen. For most of my life, I made drawings for completely private purposes and rarely showed or published them. They served only to generate ideas for my engravings. Since I started my drawing blog in 2006, I now draw also in order to share my images anonymously with the world on the Internet."

"are secreted by the of all ns and only cnidarians. Of the three categories of cnidae (also called cnidocysts), s occur in all cnidarians, and are the means by which cnidarians defend themselves and obtain prey; s and s are restricted to a minority of major . A cnida discharges by eversion of its tubule; venom may be associated with the tubule of a nematocyst. About 30 major morphological types of nematocysts are recognized, but no single nomenclature for them is accepted."

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"... we have to remember that the description given us by Herodotus represents the entry of the into . It is the starting-point of the phoenix myth as we know it today, the foundation of the story told by Métral, and the only solid evidence we have concerning the phoenix itself."

"Some territories are used for feeding alone and these are defended outside the breeding season. The is a well-known example. . In winter male and female occupy separate territories for feeding only."

"There are certain very small flies, known as . The females of this species carry a dagger at the end of the abdomen, a dual-purpose tubular dagger. This dagger is known as the , or in more common terms, the organ for laying eggs. The female ichneumon stabs a in the back and lays an egg in its body. The egg hatches, the grub emerges and feeds on the green fly."

"... every shark is a survivor of an extremely archaic race, older even than the , and there is no need to describe what everyone, and especially the ocean-going seamen, think of sharks."