Familiar Words and Phrases

Ruth Asawa, Artist

Ruth Asawa, 1926 - 2013, was an American artist known particularly for her intricate wire sculptures.

This piece was constructed from brass wire, copper wire and resin. 

Asawa's Japanese American family was interned during WWII. Afterwards, she travelled to Milwaukee to pursue a teaching degree but after encountering discrimination, she moved to Asheville, NC to study art at Black Mountain College. It probably won't surprise you that one of her teachers was Buckminster Fuller, of geodesic dome fame.

Ruth Asawa's sculptures can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA and the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.

The following video about the artist and some of her work includes information about Black Mountain College in the post-war period.

Staying Cool

😄

Nursing in the Olden Days

Endo

I wonder if you've heard of Endo? A gelding, he has been blind since experiencing eye disease when he was 8. His owner/rider, Morgan Wagner, chose Endo out of her grandmother's herd when he was only a few months old and she was 13. They've been together through thick and thin ever since and have a very strong and unusual bond. 

After Morgan and her vet's desperate attempts to save both of Endo's eyes and after they were removed, 6 months apart, Morgan taught Endo to walk with confidence and to trust her. They have both made incredible leaps of faith. 

Now they travel across the US and Canada, putting on performances that include liberty work and even jumping. Endo can do everything a sighted horse can do and even more. His story is here and you can follow him and Morgan on Instagram which is where I ran across them. 

I understand that if you make it to one of their performances, there's an opportunity to meet Endo and Morgan and congratulate them on achieving the seemingly impossible.

Happy Canada Day!

Split Tooth, Tanya Tagaq

If you want to celebrate Canada Day this year by supporting our indigenous people, I challenge you to read, or better still, to listen to Tanya Tagaq's first novel, Split Tooth.

I say 'challenge' because you will not find this a comfortable book to read or to listen to since it contains material that is uncompromising and hard to hear.

Here's the GoodReads blurb: 

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. she knows jo, and friendship and parents' love. She knows boredom and listlessness and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol and violence at the hand of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

Veering back and forth between the grittiest of features of a small Arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine reader will never forget.

Tagaq is an Inuit artist, writer and throat singer. Split Tooth, a memoir combined with fiction and poetry is sweeping, gritty and astonishing. Each chapter of the audio version is bookended with a musical interlude, usually throat singing. You will not want to miss this experience!

Tanya Tagaq's website can be found at TanyaTagaq.com.