Century of the Child

Artifacts from PeeWee's Playhouse

Century of the Child
Growing by Design 
1900-2000

This is the title of a new exhibition at MOMA. I read this article in the New York Times about it and was intrigued. I wish I could just hop a plane to check it out! Luckily, MOMA has a fantastic interactive website for this exhibition. It features tons of images and information.

 

 

A toy designed by Vit Grus

The exhibition is organized chronologically in the following categories:

New Century, New Child, New Art 1900s-1910s

Avant-Garde Playtime 1910s-1930s

Light, Air, Health 1920s-1930s

Children and the Body Politic 1920s-1940s

Regeneration 1940s-1960s

Power Play 1960s-1990s

Designing Better Worlds 1960s- 2000s

Marwen Lab

It's hard to believe we finished our 4th year of Marwen Lab in May! I'm so happy I've been involved since the beginning with this program. To see it grow, take shape and become much more effective and refined over the years has been extremely gratifying. We had our first student, Emily,  who had taken 3 straight years of Marwen Lab graduate this year. It's always tough and this year we had 18 seniors out of 28 students! I am so proud of all of them and can't wait to see what they accomplish in the years to come. As I start a family this Fall, I'll be quitting my staff position at Marwen and continuing on as a freelance teaching artist. I am so excited to start this new chapter and am happy I can still continue to teach and be a part of the community.
Here are some photos from the exhibition, the top one is during our last class of students doing a post-it note critique. The next three are details of Emily's art work. I find them so beautiful and thought provoking. This is a small sampling of her project but you get the idea.

Calaveras Big Trees

We didn't do much on our trip to California other than lots of lounging outside, walks, and visiting with family, which was just what we needed. We did take one excursion to the Calaveras Big Trees state park though which was AMAZING. I'm a fan of trees and this park has lots of giant redwoods and sequoias which you just have to see in person. We smelled the park before we saw it, the pine and redwood smell was out of this world. I try to breathe it in as much as possible to counterbalance me walking on stinky Western ave so much:) Anyway, here's some photos I took on my phone, still waiting to process the film I shot.

enormous pinecone!

my p's

The little things

Don't know if it's because of this little person growing inside of me but I've been noticing lots of teeny tiny things lately. Here's a sampling.

adorable colored pencils at Marwen

my first peppers!

book by my former student Samantha Serrano, now studying photo at U of I

Words

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
― Mark Twain

Hayward, WI 2010

 

 

The meal that blew my mind

Since we only had one night in San Francisco I really wanted to have a special meal somewhere. I know there are so many great restaurants in the city, it was really hard to choose. But based on where our hotel was (Union Square), I decided to make us a reservation at Sons & Daughters. I had read about this place before in Food and Wine and read really good reviews. I don't typically go for restaurants that only offer tasting menus- I usually prefer more rustic, simple food and I can be really picky:) But this place offered a vegetarian tasting menu also so just in case I didn't like the regular one, I knew I had another option. Here are both menus.

I ended up choosing the regular menu because with the exception of one course (pork belly), everything else was seafood or poultry, which I eat. I decided to give Matt my pork and try everything else. I'm so glad I did! The whole meal was seriously amazing. Matt did the wine pairings which he said were awesome. As soon as we got back to the hotel, I wrote down a more full description of the menu because the ones above don't do it justice. So here it goes, I didn't take any photos but here's one I found- so pretty!

1. Marin miyagi oyster with lime and thai chili granita and salted watermelon foam, buttermilk chicharon with trout roe and smoked cream

2. Ft. Bragg sea urchin, seaweed, herbs, sea salt, cucumber, dashi vinaigrette

3. Marigold greens gazpacho, herbs and edible flowers, radish, fried Tomales Bay mussel (this was accompanied by a small piece of house made toast that came with butter topped with sea salt and was so insanely awesome, maybe my fave thing all night.)

4. Roasted beets, cucumber, yogurt, pickled mustard seeds, herbs, vadouvan (this came with a little house made sourdough roll)

5. Pork belly, farro, spring peas (whole and pureed), coyote mint, cauliflower, espelette pepper (the pork belly was off to the side so I got to give that to Matt and eat everything else)

6. Squab, pickled fennel, tangerine, marcona almond puree (this came with a house made pretzel roll)

7. Stonefruit semifreddo, pickled blueberries, blueberry meringue

8. Fromage blanc napoleon, wild strawberry, raspberry, lemon, vanilla bean ice cream

*9. Our bonus bite was a chamomile lavender madeleine

SFMOMA

We got back from our trip to California a week ago and I'm finally getting caught up! I have tons of posts coming up but I wanted to start with some photos from our trip to SFMOMA. We saw a huge retrospective of Mexican Photography that was really interesting, I loved some of the more contemporary images. I didn't take any photos in that show so the following are faves that were fun to see in person.

This was a piece in entryway, the view as you were looking up.

This is the same piece but viewed from a mezzanine. There was actually a projection of two boxers on the hanging lights.

Barry McGee

Margaret Kilgallen

Matt enjoying some coffee on the gorgeous rooftop terrace

Rooftop terrace

Anselm Kiefer

This last images reminded me that there was a documentary made about Kiefer called Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. Here is the trailer, I'm hoping it makes it to Netflix soon!