Learning about Hoda Shaarawi, the Egyptian feminist and nationalist leader

At the time, women in Egypt were confined to the house or harem. When in public, women were expected to show modesty by wearing the hijab over their hair and faces. Sha`arawi resented such restrictions on women's dress and movements, and started organizing lectures for women on topics of interest to them. This brought many women out of their homes and into public places for the first time. Sha`arawi even convinced them to help her establish a women's welfare society to raise money for the poor women of Egypt. In 1910, Sha`arawi opened a school for girls where she focused on teaching academic subjects rather than practical skills such as midwifery.
After World War I, many women took part in political actions against the British rule. In 1919, Sha`arawi helped organize the largest women's anti-British demonstration. In defiance of British orders to disperse, the women remained still for three hours in the hot sun.
Sha`arawi made a decision to stop wearing her veil in public after her husband's death in 1922. In 1923, Sha`arawi founded and became the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, after returning from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome she removed her face veil in public for the first time, a signal event in the history of Egyptian feminism. Women who came to greet her were shocked at first then broke into applause and some of them removed their veils.
Even as a young woman, she showed her independence by entering a department store in Alexandria to buy her own clothes instead of having them brought to her home. She helped to organize Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women's social service organization, in 1909 and the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914, the year in which she traveled to Europe for the first time. She helped lead the first women's street demonstration during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, and was elected president of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee.
She led Egyptian women pickets at the opening of Parliament in January 1924 and submitted a list of nationalist and feminist demands, which were ignored by the Wafdist government, whereupon she resigned from the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. She continued to lead the Egyptian Feminist Union until her death, publishing the feminist magazine l'Egyptienne (and el-Masreyya), and representing Egypt at women's congresses in Graz, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseilles, Istanbul, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Interlaken, and Geneva. She advocated peace and disarmament. Even if only some of her demands were met during her lifetime, she laid the groundwork for later gains by Egyptian women and remains the symbolic standard-bearer for their liberation movement.
Sha`arawi was involved in philanthropic projects throughout her life. In 1908, she created the first philanthropic society run by Egyptian women, offering social services for poor women and children. She argued that women-run social service projects were important for two reasons. First, by engaging in such projects, women would widen their horizons, acquire practical knowledge and direct their focus outward. Second, such projects would challenge the view that all women are creatures of pleasure and beings in need of protection. To Sha`arawi, problems of the poor were to be resolved through charitable activities of the rich, particularly through donations to education programs. Holding a somewhat romanticized view of poor women's lives, she viewed them as passive recipients of social services, not to be consulted about priorities or goals. The rich, in turn, were the "guardians and protectors of the nation."
Text found on Wikipedia

Photos by William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was a British inventor and photography pioneer who invented the calotype process, a precursor to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

Cécile Tarel sculptures

Née en 1946 dans la Sarthe. Commence à sculpter l'argile dès l'âge de 14 ans. Elève du sculpteur Pikko Nikolitch et élève au Conservatoire d'Art Plastique de Fresnes. Participe depuis 1979 à de nombreuses expositions personnelles et collectives : Salon d'Automne, Artistes Français, Indépendants... Obtient de nombreux prix et récompenses.

"Les femmes de TAREL sont une véritable poésie, un hymne à une féminité intemporelle et généreuse. Hiératiques mais douces, aux formes pleines et apaisantes, ces figures tout à la fois classiques et primitives, sensuelles et réservées font songer aux Korès archaïques, à Picasso (gravures de 1930, l'artiste et son modèle), par le traitement des masses. Bref, une très belle oeuvre, heureuse synthèse d'antiquité et de modernité." Florence Bellet-Ferte

Ursula von Rydingsvard coming to Yorkshire

I read the following article by Caroline Roux in the FT this past weekend and I'm longing to discover both the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Yorkshire and Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculptures.

Ursula von Rydingsvard is almost as little-known in Britain as she is celebrated in the US. There, her enormous art works, created out of hundreds of glued and sculpted cedar planks, are dotted throughout the country - in the collections of the Met and MoMA in New York; in the generous grounds of Microsoft's original HQ in Redmond, Washington; and in such private hands as those of collector Steve Oliver in Sonoma...
Next month, however, a major show of her work comes to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a rolling estate of 500 landscaped acres in northern England that already houses an array of important outdoor works...

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, from April 5
ysp.co.uk

Claudia Leisinger and her beautiful travel photos

Claudia Leisinger takes us to Brazil, Sicily and Bhutan.

Currently based in London, Claudia spent her early childhood in India and Bhutan, before returning to Switzerland in 1980. She finished the MA course in Photojournalism at the London College of Communication in December 2007 with "The Changes Within: Bhutan Between Monarchy and Democracy" a story which documented Bhutan's shift towards its first-ever democratic elections. This was published in the NZZ (Neue Zuercher Zeitung).

At present she works as freelance portrait and documentary photographer. She has had her photos published in the Guardian, the Telegraph Magazine, the Big Issue, the NZZ newspaper and the Foto8 website, amongst others.

She is available for reportage, documentary and portrait work.

You can contact her on +44(0) 7768547700 or photo@claudialeisinger.com

Elisabeth Frink and horses

English sculptor and printmaker. She studied at the Guildford School of Art (1946–9) and with Bernard Meadows at the Chelsea School of Art (1949–53). She was linked with the post-war school of British sculptors, including Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Paolozzi, though her work is distinguished by her commitment to naturalistic forms and themes. Frink's range of subjects included men, birds, dogs, horses and religious motifs. Bird (1952; London, Tate), with its alert, menacing stance, characterizes her early work. She concentrated on bronze outdoor sculpture with a scarred surface created by repeatedly coating an armature with wet plaster; each coating is distressed and broken, eliminating detail and generalising form. In the 1960s Frink's continuing fascination with flight was evident in a series of falling figures and winged men. While living in France from 1967 to 1970, she began a series of threatening, monumental, goggled male heads. On returning to England, she focused on the male nude, barrel-chested, with mask-like features, attenuated limbs and a pitted surface, for example Running Man (1976; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.). Frink's sculpture, and her lithographs and etchings created as book illustrations, drew on archetypes expressing masculine strength, struggle and aggression.

Officium by John Burnside

If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will
come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not
know what hour I will come upon thee - 
Revelation 3:3

It comes to us, after a time,
that there's no forever:

chiffchaff in the hedge, a breath of wind,
that wave of longing in the summer grass

for something other
than the world we've seen;

and how we've waited for years for an event
that couldn't happen:

footprints in the dew
and adsit nobis

sudden in our hearts
like summer rain.

Spititus Sancti: crickets, thistledown,
a wave of longing in the blood-lit dark

for what we are
beyond the things we seem;

and quiet, like the ceasing of a drum,
this penitence by halves is scant relief,

if somewhere in the house, unheard, unseen,
eternity comes creeping, like a thief. 

Isamu Noguchi and his sculptures

Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors.  Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs.  His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for the reintegration of the arts.
Noguchi, an internationalist, traveled extensively throughout his life.  (In his later years he maintained studios both in Japan and New York.)  He discovered the impact of large-scale public works in Mexico, earthy ceramics and tranquil gardens in Japan, subtle ink-brush techniques in China, and the purity of marble in Italy.  He incorporated all of these impressions into his work, which utilized a wide range of materials, including stainless steel, marble, cast iron, balsawood, bronze, sheet aluminum, basalt, granite, and water.
Born in Los Angeles, California, to an American mother and a Japanese father, Noguchi lived in Japan until the age of thirteen, when he moved to Indiana.  While studying pre-medicine at Columbia University, he took evening sculpture classes on New York’s Lower East Side, mentoring with the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo. He soon left the University to become an academic sculptor.
In 1926 Noguchi saw an exhibition in New York of the work of Constantin Brancusi’s that profoundly changed his artistic direction.  With a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Noguchi went to Paris, and from 1927 to 1929 worked in Brancusi’s studio.  Inspired by the older artist’s reductive forms, Noguchi turned to modernism and a kind of abstraction, infusing his highly finished pieces with a lyrical and emotional expressiveness, and with an aura of mystery.

Louise Bourgeois on clothes

"We must talk about the passivity and activity of the coming and going of clothes in one's life. When I come upon a piece of clothing I wonder, who was I trying to seduce by wearing that? Or you open your closet and you are confronted with so many different roles, smells, social situations. For me clothes are always someone else's ... I have never bought or made my own clothes ... Clothes are gifts, a choice, a test of the presence of a man to a woman."

 

Pink Days and Blue Days, 1997

John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter to his son

New York
November 10, 1958
Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.
First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.
But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.
We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Love,
Fa

Found in Brain Pickings in an article written by Maria Popova