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"Weavers Biography."
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Mabel Mckay
A world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman, Mabel McKay expressed her genius through her celebrated baskets, her Dreams, her cures, and the stories with which she kept her culture alive. She spent her life teaching others how the spirit speaks through the Dream, how the spirit heals, and how the spirit demands to be heard. Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel McKay's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight—the white people's way. Sarris, an Indian of mixed-blood heritage, finds his own story in his search for Mabel McKay's. Beautifully narrated, Weaving the Dream initiates the reader into Pomo culture and demonstrates how a woman who worked most of her life in a cannery could become a great healer and an artist whose baskets were collected by the Smithsonian. Hearing Mabel McKay's life story, we see that distinctions between material and spiritual and between mundane and magical disappear. What remains is a timeless way of healing, of making art, and of being in the world. Sarris's new preface, written expressly for this edition, meditates on Mabel McKay's enduring legacy and the continued importance of her teachings.
eBook
Cloth lullaby : the woven life of Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois (1911 2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, \"Maman,\" stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise's own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois's childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works.
Book
Wasn't that a time : the Weavers, the blacklist, and the battle for the soul of America
\"Following a series of top-ten hits that became instant American standards, the Weavers dissolved at the height of their fame. [This book] details the remarkable rise of Pete Seeger's unlikely band of folk heroes, from basement hootenannies to the top of the charts, and the harassment campaign that brought them down. Exploring how a pop group's harmonies might be heard as a threat worthy of decades of investigation by the FBI, [this book] turns the black-and-white 1950s into vivid color, using the Weavers to illuminate a dark and complex period of American history. With origins in the radical folk collective the Almanac Singers and the ambitious People's Songs, the singing activists in the Weavers set out to change the world with songs as their weapons, pioneering the use of music as a transformative political organizing tool. Using previously unseen journals and letters, unreleased recordings, once-secret government documents, and other archival research, Jesse Jarnow uncovers the immense hopes, incredible pressures, and daily struggles of the four distinct and often unharmonious personalities at the heart of the Weavers.\" -- Amazon.com.
Book
Robert Clifton Weaver and the American city
From his role as FDR’s “negro advisor” to his appointment, under Lyndon Johnson, as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to impact American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out. Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving. A crucial and largely unknown chapter in the history of American liberalism, this long-overdue biography adds a new dimension to our understanding of racial and urban struggles, as well as the complex role of the black elite in modern U.S. history.
eBook
Monumental Dreams
In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors, showing the astonishing paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and other avant garde artists. Young American artists quickly responded by experimenting with impressionism, cubism, and abstraction.
In Monumental Dreams, author Caroline Seebohm tells the riveting story of how Ann Norton (1905-1982)-a child of the South who had eschewed her Alabama roots to become a sculptor in New York City-joined this new guard. She studied with John Hovannes and Jose de Creeft and was studio assistant to Alexander Archipenko. Her work was well received, and by age 35, she had already participated in group shows at MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Despite her burgeoning career, Norton found New York a difficult place to live. In search of paying work, she moved to Florida, where she became a teacher at the Norton Gallery and School of Art, founded by retired Acme Steel president Ralph Hubbard Norton. The two built a relationship based on love as well as common aesthetic values, and after his death, she built her finest and lasting work. Today, her monolithic sculptures-in the spirit of Stonehenge, Henry Moore, and Buddhist temple art-can be admired in the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach, Florida.
eBook
Ronnie Gilbert
Ronnie Gilbert had a long and colorful career as a singer, actor, playwright, therapist, and independent woman. Her lifelong work for political and social change was central to her role as a performer. Raised in Depression-era New York City by leftist, working-class, secular Jewish parents, Gilbert is best known as a member of the Weavers, the quartet of the 1950s and '60s that survived the blacklist and helped popularize folk music in America. Her joyous contralto and vibrant stage presence enriched the celebrated group and propelled Gilbert into a second singing career with Holly Near in the 1980s and '90s. As an actor, Gilbert explored developmental theater with Joseph Chaikin and Peter Brook and wrote and performed in ensemble and solo productions across the United States and Canada.Ronnie Gilbertbrings the political, artistic, and social issues of the era alive through song lyrics and personal stories, traversing sixty years of collaborations in life and art that span the folk revival, the Cold War blacklist, primal therapy, the back-to-the-land movement, and a rich, multigenerational family story. Much more than a memoir,Ronnie Gilbertis a unique and engaging historical document for readers interested in music, theater, American politics, the women's movement, and left-wing activism.
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Doing Things 'Regular': Tom Sawyer's Common Sense Philosophy
Henry B. Wonham draws attention to the way this scene represents exploitative economic systems in America at large when he writes that Tom \"knows perfectly well that those who perform actual work in the novel either receive nothing for their efforts, like the slaves of St. Petersburg, or they receive a meager hourly wage.\" Similarly, Peter Messern argues that Tom holds \"protocapitalist attitudes and practices\" and William C. Spengemann calls him \"unscrupulous entrepreneur.\" Twain's letter to William Dean Howells following the completion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer affirms such readings, given that the author excludes Tom as a candidate when he expresses his desire to write a book that would follow a boy through his adult years. Tom's connection to prominent American political figures who drew upon common sense philosophy to craft persuasive arguments highlights Tom's position as a morally problematic character in Twain's work and foreshadows the author's more pronounced critiques of American politics later in his life, including the United States' annexation of the Philippines. Whereas many critics have pointed to Twain's shortcomings regarding his depiction of economic systems and the material conditions of marginalized people, his trenchant understanding of the role of language in an exploitative agenda participates in denunciations of cultural forms of prejudice, abuse, and coercion. Accordingly, with his multiple representations of Tom Sawyer across different stories, Twain transports the common sense rhetoric of the United States' founding into the mouth of St. Petersburg's bad-boy hero. Tom Sawyer's perspective resonates with documents surrounding the American Revolution, such as the pamphlet Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine and that of his predecessor, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, author of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764).
Journal Article
Acting for America
A captivating cast of 1980s power and talent--John Candy, Tom Cruise, Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, Sally Field, Harrison Ford, Michael J. Fox, Mel Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Jessica Lange, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sissy Spacek, Sylvester Stallone, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Bruce Willis, and the \"Brat Pack\"-stars in the drama of this decade.Acting for Americafocuses on the way these film icons have engaged in and defined some major issues of cultural and social concern to America during the 1980s.Scholars employing a variety of useful approaches explore how these movie stars' films speak to an increased audience awareness of advances in feminism, new ideas about masculinity, and the complex political atmosphere in the Age of Reagan. The essays demonstrate the range of these stars' contributions to such conversations in a variety of films, including blockbusters and major genres.
eBook