Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving, peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other. The primary caregiver is the source of the infants stress regulation and, therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the childs mind and the childs reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as internal working models of attachment.

Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the familys caregiving-attachment system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment. These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation research procedure, which observes the young childs behaviour when separated and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are represented in the childs internal working models of self-other relationships. Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic, transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and resolve their fear of separation and loss.

When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions, particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.

Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns ones worthiness to receive love and care from others.

In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the childs sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment trauma.

Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character traits and personality types and disorders.

Disorganised attachment may occur when the childs parent is both the source of fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is a solution to the activation of the childs attachment and fear behavioural systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases, alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of affective equilibrium.

Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults. This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness, particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an angry and potentially violent reaction.

A thangka, also known as tangka, thanka or tanka (Nepali pronunciation: [ˈt̪ʰaŋka]; Tibetan: ཐང་ཀ་; Nepal Bhasa: पौभा) is a painting on cotton, or silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala of some sort. The thangka is not a flat creation like an oil painting or acrylic painting but consists of a picture panel which is painted or embroidered over which a textile is mounted and then over which is laid a cover, usually silk. Generally, thangkas last a very long time and retain much of their lustre, but because of their delicate nature, they have to be kept in dry places where moisture won't affect the quality of the silk. It is sometimes called a scroll-painting.

These thangka served as important teaching tools depicting the life of the Buddha, various influential lamas and other deities and bodhisattvas. One subject is The Wheel of Life, which is a visual representation of the Abhidharma teachings (Art of Enlightenment).

Thangka, when created properly, perform several different functions. Images of deities can be used as teaching tools when depicting the life (or lives) of the Buddha, describing historical events concerning important Lamas, or retelling myths associated with other deities. Devotional images act as the centerpiece during a ritual or ceremony and are often used as mediums through which one can offer prayers or make requests. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, religious art is used as a meditation tool to help bring one further down the path to enlightenment. The Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner uses a thanga image of their yidam, or meditation deity, as a guide, by visualizing “themselves as being that deity, thereby internalizing the Buddha qualities (Lipton, Ragnubs).”

Historians note that Chinese painting had a profound influence on Tibetan painting in general. Starting from the 14th and 15th century, Tibetan painting had incorporated many elements from the Chinese, and during the 18th century, Chinese painting had a deep and far-stretched impact on Tibetan visual art. According to Giuseppe Tucci, by the time of the Qing Dynasty, "a new Tibetan art was then developed, which in a certain sense was a provincial echo of the Chinese 18th century's smooth ornate preciosity."

HISTORY

Thangka is a Nepalese art form exported to Tibet after Princess Bhrikuti of Nepal, daughter of King Lichchavi, married Songtsän Gampo, the ruler of Tibet imported the images of Aryawalokirteshwar and other Nepalese deities to Tibet. History of thangka Paintings in Nepal began in the 11th century A.D. when Buddhists and Hindus began to make illustration of the deities and natural scenes. Historically, Tibetan and Chinese influence in Nepalese paintings is quite evident in Paubhas (Thangkas). Paubhas are of two types, the Palas which are illustrative paintings of the deities and the Mandala, which are mystic diagrams paintings of complex test prescribed patterns of circles an square each having specific significance. It was through Nepal that Mahayana Buddhism was introduced into Tibet during reign of Angshuvarma in the seventh century A.D. There was therefore a great demand for religious icons and Buddhist manuscripts for newly built monasteries throughout Tibet. A number of Buddhist manuscripts, including Prajnaparamita, were copied in Kathmandu Valley for these monasteries. Astasahas rika Prajnaparamita for example, was copied in Patan in the year 999 A.D., during the reign of Narendra Dev and Udaya Deva, for the Sa-Shakya monastery in Tibet. For the Nor monastery in Tibet, two copies were made in Nepal-one of Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita in 1069 A.D. and the other of Kavyadarsha in 1111 A.D. The influence of Nepalese art extended till Tibet and even beyond in China in regular order during the thirteenth century. Nepalese artisans were dispatched to the courts of Chinese emperors at their request to perform their workmanship and impart expert knowledge. The exemplary contribution made by the artisans of Nepal, specially by the Nepalese innovator and architect Balbahu, known by his popular name Araniko bear testimony to this fact even today. After the introduction of paper, palm leaf became less popular, however, it continued to be used until the eighteenth century. Paper manuscripts imitated the oblong shape but were wider than the palm leaves.

From the fifteenth century onwards, brighter colours gradually began to appear in Nepalese.Thanka / Thangka. Because of the growing importance of the Tantric cult, various aspects of Shiva and Shakti were painted in conventional poses. Mahakala, Manjushri, Lokeshwara and other deities were equally popular and so were also frequently represented in Thanka / Thangka paintings of later dates. As Tantrism embodies the ideas of esoteric power, magic forces, and a great variety of symbols, strong emphasis is laid on the female element and sexuality in the paintings of that period.

Religious paintings worshipped as icons are known as Paubha in Newari and Thanka / Thangka in Tibetan. The origin of Paubha or Thanka / Thangka paintings may be attributed to the Nepalese artists responsible for creating a number of special metal works and wall- paintings as well as illuminated manuscripts in Tibet. Realizing the great demand for religious icons in Tibet, these artists, along with monks and traders, took with them from Nepal not only metal sculptures but also a number of Buddhist manuscripts. To better fulfil the ever - increasing demand Nepalese artists initiated a new type of religious painting on cloth that could be easily rolled up and carried along with them. This type of painting became very popular both in Nepal and Tibet and so a new school of Thanka / Thangka painting evolved as early as the ninth or tenth century and has remained popular to this day. One of the earliest specimens of Nepalese Thanka / Thangka painting dates from the thirteenth /fourteenth century and shows Amitabha surrounded by Bodhisattva. Another Nepalese Thanka / Thangka with three dates in the inscription (the last one corresponding to 1369 A.D.), is one of the earliest known Thanka / Thangka with inscriptions. The "Mandalaof Vishnu " dated 1420 A.D., is another fine example of the painting of this period. Early Nepalese Thangkas are simple in design and composition. The main deity, a large figure, occupies the central position while surrounded by smaller figures of lesser divinities.

Thanka / Thangka painting is one of the major science out the five major and five minor fields of knowledge. Its origin can be traced all the way back to the time of Lord Buddha. The main themes of Thanka / Thangka paintings are religious. During the reign of Tibetan Dharma King Trisong Duetsen the Tibetan masters refined their already well-developed arts through research and studies of different country's tradition. Thanka painting's lining and measurement, costumes, implementations and ornaments are mostly based on Indian styles. The drawing of figures is based on Nepalese style and the background sceneries are based on Chinese style. Thus, the Thanka / Thangka paintings became a unique and distinctive art. Although the practice of thanka painting was originally done as a way of gaining merit it has nowadays only evolved into a money making business and the noble intentions it once carried has been diluted. Tibetans do not sell Thangkas on a large scale as the selling of religious artifacts such as thangkas and idols is frowned upon in the Tibetan community and thus non Tibetan groups have been able to monopolize on its (thangka's) popularity among Buddhist and art enthusiasts from the west.

Thanka / Thangka have developed in the northern Himalayan regions among the Lamas. Besides Lamas, Gurung and Tamang communities are also producing Tankas, which provide substantial employment opportunities for many people in the hills. Newari Thankas (Also known as Paubha) has been the hidden art work in Kathmandu valley from the 13th century. We have preserved this art and are exclusively creating this with some particular painter family who have inherited their art from their forefathers. Some of the artistic religious and historical paintings are also done by the Newars of Kathmandu Valley.

TYPES

Based on technique and material, thangkas can be grouped by types. Generally, they are divided into two broad categories: those that are painted (Tib.) bris-tan—and those made of silk, either by appliqué or embroidery.

Thangkas are further divided into these more specific categories:

- Painted in colors (Tib.) tson-tang - the most common type

- Appliqué (Tib.) go-tang

- Black Background - meaning gold line on a black background (Tib.) nagtang

- Blockprints - paper or cloth outlined renderings, by woodcut/woodblock printing

- Embroidery (Tib.) tsem-thang

- Gold Background - an auspicious treatment, used judiciously for peaceful, long-life deities and fully enlightened buddhas

- Red Background - literally gold line, but referring to gold line on a vermillion (Tib.) mar-tang

Whereas typical thangkas are fairly small, between about 18 and 30 inches tall or wide, there are also giant festival thangkas, usually Appliqué, and designed to be unrolled against a wall in a monastery for particular religious occasions. These are likely to be wider than they are tall, and may be sixty or more feet across and perhaps twenty or more high.

Somewhat related are Tibetan tsakli, which look like miniature thangkas, but are usually used as initiation cards or offerings.

Because Thangkas can be quite expensive, people nowadays use posters of Thangkas as an alternative to the real thangkas for religious purposes.

PROCESS

Thangkas are painted on cotton or silk. The most common is a loosely woven cotton produced in widths from 40 to 58 centimeters. While some variations do exist, thangkas wider than 45 centimeters frequently have seams in the support. The paint consists of pigments in a water soluble medium. Both mineral and organic pigments are used, tempered with a herb and glue solution. In Western terminology, this is a distemper technique.

The composition of a thangka, as with the majority of Buddhist art, is highly geometric. Arms, legs, eyes, nostrils, ears, and various ritual implements are all laid out on a systematic grid of angles and intersecting lines. A skilled thangka artist will generally select from a variety of predesigned items to include in the composition, ranging from alms bowls and animals, to the shape, size, and angle of a figure's eyes, nose, and lips. The process seems very methodical, but often requires deep understanding of the symbolism involved to capture the spirit of it.

Thangka often overflow with symbolism and allusion. Because the art is explicitly religious, all symbols and allusions must be in accordance with strict guidelines laid out in Buddhist scripture. The artist must be properly trained and have sufficient religious understanding, knowledge, and background to create an accurate and appropriate thangka. Lipton and Ragnubs clarify this in Treasures of Tibetan Art:

“Tibetan art exemplifies the nirmanakaya, the physical body of Buddha, and also the qualities of the Buddha, perhaps in the form of a deity. Art objects, therefore, must follow rules specified in the Buddhist scriptures regarding proportions, shape, color, stance, hand positions, and attributes in order to personify correctly the Buddha or Deities.”

WIKIPEDIA

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

A thangka, also known as tangka, thanka or tanka (Nepali pronunciation: [ˈt̪ʰaŋka]; Tibetan: ཐང་ཀ་; Nepal Bhasa: पौभा) is a painting on cotton, or silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala of some sort. The thangka is not a flat creation like an oil painting or acrylic painting but consists of a picture panel which is painted or embroidered over which a textile is mounted and then over which is laid a cover, usually silk. Generally, thangkas last a very long time and retain much of their lustre, but because of their delicate nature, they have to be kept in dry places where moisture won't affect the quality of the silk. It is sometimes called a scroll-painting.

These thangka served as important teaching tools depicting the life of the Buddha, various influential lamas and other deities and bodhisattvas. One subject is The Wheel of Life, which is a visual representation of the Abhidharma teachings (Art of Enlightenment).

Thangka, when created properly, perform several different functions. Images of deities can be used as teaching tools when depicting the life (or lives) of the Buddha, describing historical events concerning important Lamas, or retelling myths associated with other deities. Devotional images act as the centerpiece during a ritual or ceremony and are often used as mediums through which one can offer prayers or make requests. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, religious art is used as a meditation tool to help bring one further down the path to enlightenment. The Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner uses a thanga image of their yidam, or meditation deity, as a guide, by visualizing “themselves as being that deity, thereby internalizing the Buddha qualities (Lipton, Ragnubs).”

Historians note that Chinese painting had a profound influence on Tibetan painting in general. Starting from the 14th and 15th century, Tibetan painting had incorporated many elements from the Chinese, and during the 18th century, Chinese painting had a deep and far-stretched impact on Tibetan visual art. According to Giuseppe Tucci, by the time of the Qing Dynasty, "a new Tibetan art was then developed, which in a certain sense was a provincial echo of the Chinese 18th century's smooth ornate preciosity."

HISTORY

Thangka is a Nepalese art form exported to Tibet after Princess Bhrikuti of Nepal, daughter of King Lichchavi, married Songtsän Gampo, the ruler of Tibet imported the images of Aryawalokirteshwar and other Nepalese deities to Tibet. History of thangka Paintings in Nepal began in the 11th century A.D. when Buddhists and Hindus began to make illustration of the deities and natural scenes. Historically, Tibetan and Chinese influence in Nepalese paintings is quite evident in Paubhas (Thangkas). Paubhas are of two types, the Palas which are illustrative paintings of the deities and the Mandala, which are mystic diagrams paintings of complex test prescribed patterns of circles an square each having specific significance. It was through Nepal that Mahayana Buddhism was introduced into Tibet during reign of Angshuvarma in the seventh century A.D. There was therefore a great demand for religious icons and Buddhist manuscripts for newly built monasteries throughout Tibet. A number of Buddhist manuscripts, including Prajnaparamita, were copied in Kathmandu Valley for these monasteries. Astasahas rika Prajnaparamita for example, was copied in Patan in the year 999 A.D., during the reign of Narendra Dev and Udaya Deva, for the Sa-Shakya monastery in Tibet. For the Nor monastery in Tibet, two copies were made in Nepal-one of Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita in 1069 A.D. and the other of Kavyadarsha in 1111 A.D. The influence of Nepalese art extended till Tibet and even beyond in China in regular order during the thirteenth century. Nepalese artisans were dispatched to the courts of Chinese emperors at their request to perform their workmanship and impart expert knowledge. The exemplary contribution made by the artisans of Nepal, specially by the Nepalese innovator and architect Balbahu, known by his popular name Araniko bear testimony to this fact even today. After the introduction of paper, palm leaf became less popular, however, it continued to be used until the eighteenth century. Paper manuscripts imitated the oblong shape but were wider than the palm leaves.

From the fifteenth century onwards, brighter colours gradually began to appear in Nepalese.Thanka / Thangka. Because of the growing importance of the Tantric cult, various aspects of Shiva and Shakti were painted in conventional poses. Mahakala, Manjushri, Lokeshwara and other deities were equally popular and so were also frequently represented in Thanka / Thangka paintings of later dates. As Tantrism embodies the ideas of esoteric power, magic forces, and a great variety of symbols, strong emphasis is laid on the female element and sexuality in the paintings of that period.

Religious paintings worshipped as icons are known as Paubha in Newari and Thanka / Thangka in Tibetan. The origin of Paubha or Thanka / Thangka paintings may be attributed to the Nepalese artists responsible for creating a number of special metal works and wall- paintings as well as illuminated manuscripts in Tibet. Realizing the great demand for religious icons in Tibet, these artists, along with monks and traders, took with them from Nepal not only metal sculptures but also a number of Buddhist manuscripts. To better fulfil the ever - increasing demand Nepalese artists initiated a new type of religious painting on cloth that could be easily rolled up and carried along with them. This type of painting became very popular both in Nepal and Tibet and so a new school of Thanka / Thangka painting evolved as early as the ninth or tenth century and has remained popular to this day. One of the earliest specimens of Nepalese Thanka / Thangka painting dates from the thirteenth /fourteenth century and shows Amitabha surrounded by Bodhisattva. Another Nepalese Thanka / Thangka with three dates in the inscription (the last one corresponding to 1369 A.D.), is one of the earliest known Thanka / Thangka with inscriptions. The "Mandalaof Vishnu " dated 1420 A.D., is another fine example of the painting of this period. Early Nepalese Thangkas are simple in design and composition. The main deity, a large figure, occupies the central position while surrounded by smaller figures of lesser divinities.

Thanka / Thangka painting is one of the major science out the five major and five minor fields of knowledge. Its origin can be traced all the way back to the time of Lord Buddha. The main themes of Thanka / Thangka paintings are religious. During the reign of Tibetan Dharma King Trisong Duetsen the Tibetan masters refined their already well-developed arts through research and studies of different country's tradition. Thanka painting's lining and measurement, costumes, implementations and ornaments are mostly based on Indian styles. The drawing of figures is based on Nepalese style and the background sceneries are based on Chinese style. Thus, the Thanka / Thangka paintings became a unique and distinctive art. Although the practice of thanka painting was originally done as a way of gaining merit it has nowadays only evolved into a money making business and the noble intentions it once carried has been diluted. Tibetans do not sell Thangkas on a large scale as the selling of religious artifacts such as thangkas and idols is frowned upon in the Tibetan community and thus non Tibetan groups have been able to monopolize on its (thangka's) popularity among Buddhist and art enthusiasts from the west.

Thanka / Thangka have developed in the northern Himalayan regions among the Lamas. Besides Lamas, Gurung and Tamang communities are also producing Tankas, which provide substantial employment opportunities for many people in the hills. Newari Thankas (Also known as Paubha) has been the hidden art work in Kathmandu valley from the 13th century. We have preserved this art and are exclusively creating this with some particular painter family who have inherited their art from their forefathers. Some of the artistic religious and historical paintings are also done by the Newars of Kathmandu Valley.

TYPES

Based on technique and material, thangkas can be grouped by types. Generally, they are divided into two broad categories: those that are painted (Tib.) bris-tan—and those made of silk, either by appliqué or embroidery.

Thangkas are further divided into these more specific categories:

- Painted in colors (Tib.) tson-tang - the most common type

- Appliqué (Tib.) go-tang

- Black Background - meaning gold line on a black background (Tib.) nagtang

- Blockprints - paper or cloth outlined renderings, by woodcut/woodblock printing

- Embroidery (Tib.) tsem-thang

- Gold Background - an auspicious treatment, used judiciously for peaceful, long-life deities and fully enlightened buddhas

- Red Background - literally gold line, but referring to gold line on a vermillion (Tib.) mar-tang

Whereas typical thangkas are fairly small, between about 18 and 30 inches tall or wide, there are also giant festival thangkas, usually Appliqué, and designed to be unrolled against a wall in a monastery for particular religious occasions. These are likely to be wider than they are tall, and may be sixty or more feet across and perhaps twenty or more high.

Somewhat related are Tibetan tsakli, which look like miniature thangkas, but are usually used as initiation cards or offerings.

Because Thangkas can be quite expensive, people nowadays use posters of Thangkas as an alternative to the real thangkas for religious purposes.

PROCESS

Thangkas are painted on cotton or silk. The most common is a loosely woven cotton produced in widths from 40 to 58 centimeters. While some variations do exist, thangkas wider than 45 centimeters frequently have seams in the support. The paint consists of pigments in a water soluble medium. Both mineral and organic pigments are used, tempered with a herb and glue solution. In Western terminology, this is a distemper technique.

The composition of a thangka, as with the majority of Buddhist art, is highly geometric. Arms, legs, eyes, nostrils, ears, and various ritual implements are all laid out on a systematic grid of angles and intersecting lines. A skilled thangka artist will generally select from a variety of predesigned items to include in the composition, ranging from alms bowls and animals, to the shape, size, and angle of a figure's eyes, nose, and lips. The process seems very methodical, but often requires deep understanding of the symbolism involved to capture the spirit of it.

Thangka often overflow with symbolism and allusion. Because the art is explicitly religious, all symbols and allusions must be in accordance with strict guidelines laid out in Buddhist scripture. The artist must be properly trained and have sufficient religious understanding, knowledge, and background to create an accurate and appropriate thangka. Lipton and Ragnubs clarify this in Treasures of Tibetan Art:

“Tibetan art exemplifies the nirmanakaya, the physical body of Buddha, and also the qualities of the Buddha, perhaps in the form of a deity. Art objects, therefore, must follow rules specified in the Buddhist scriptures regarding proportions, shape, color, stance, hand positions, and attributes in order to personify correctly the Buddha or Deities.”

WIKIPEDIA

Box construction

19 x 13 5/8 x 8 1/8 in.

Signed and inscribed on back (fig. 8): Gwendolina Gwendolina (in reverse) / Joseph Cornell (on paper label)

This was one of the first boxes Edwin Bergman acquired directly from Cornell. Following Bergman’s first visit to the artist‘s home in mid-September 1959, Cornell wrote about the travel arrangements for the box in a letter: “I wanted to see the “Night Sky” box under way before I wrote to thank you for your courtesy in bringing me the fairy tokens from the Dorazios. As to the former it got under way on Friday via Railway Express and I believe that it will arrive in the same condition as you saw it. I have kept a tracing of the inner spattered “pane” in case of breakage, and so will you kindly advise if such it might require?” (Joseph Cornell, unpublished letter to Edwin Bergman of September 20, 1959). This letter is revealing of the artist’s attitude to replacement parts for his boxes and to his titles, which he used in a generic, descriptive way, rather than as precise labels.

A large vertical opening is cut into the box’s rear wall to reveal the interior of a smaller box. A pane of clear glass is placed behind the opening, through which a panel covering the rear wall of the smaller box is visible. This panel, which may well be of glass (thus explaining Cornell‘s reference in the above letter to an “inner spattered ‘pane’”), is painted dark blue and spattered with white paint to resemble a constellation. As Cornell’s letter to Bergman indicates, this apparently random splatter was carefully recorded in case the box was broken.

Cornell’s interest in both the scientific and imaginative aspects of the study of the stars is well documented. Here, there is a perfect balance between the three main elements of the image: the title, which introduces the multiple associations with glamour and travel of the word “star”; the “abstract” pattern of a constellation formed by the spattered paint, which resembles scientific photographs of the night sky, taken with the assistance of telescopes; and the figurative representation of the myth of Auriga, after which the constellation is named. The image of Auriga Cornell used in this box derives from Johannes Hevelius’s star atlas, Uranographia totum coelum stellatum, published in 1690 (see Giuseppe Maria Sesti, The Glorious Constellations: History and Mythology, New York, 1991, p. 256, ill.). In a diary entry of July 15, 1941, the artist described his first visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York:

"another moving experience, especially on the second floor with its blue dome, silhouetted city sky-line fringing it, and the gradual appearance of all the stars in the night sky to music. ... The astronomical paraphernalia: charts, transparencies, broken meteors, and especially compass curios (also armillaries, telescopes, etc.) are intriguing. ... On the main floor a particularly fine set of murals of the zodiac, picked out in white on blue. The nicest rendition of the Gemini I’ve seen." (Cornell 1993, p. 96).

Cornell was subsequently a frequent visitor to the Planetarium, subscribing to its periodical, Sky Reporter; and becoming an expert on stars.

At the Stable Gallery, in December of 1955, Cornell exhibited a group of works under the general title of Winter Night Skies, giving them the names of the constellations Auriga, Andromeda, and Camelopardalis. Three versions of Auriga were shown, of which this box was very likely one. A short preface by Garrett P. Serviss in the exhibition announcement merits being quoted in full for its insight into Cornell’s interest in astronomy:

“The mythology of Auriga is not clear, but the ancients seem to have been of one mind in regarding the constellations as representing the figure of a man carrying a goat and her two kids in his arms. Auriga was also looked upon as a beneficent constellation, and the goat kids were believed to be on the watch to rescue shipwrecked sailors. As Capella, which represents the fabled goat, shines nearly overhead in winter; and would ordinarily be the first bright star to beam down through the breaking clouds of a storm at that season, it is not difficult to imagine how it got its reputation as the seaman’s friend. Auriga as a constellation, was in vented long before the time of the Greeks, and was intended prophetically to represent that Good Shepherd who was to come and rescue the sinful world.”

This romantic and Christian interpretation of the myth of Auriga is strikingly different from the one given by Catherine Tennant. She emphasized a different stage of the myth: that Auriga was Erecthonious, future king of Athens, deformed son of Earth and Vulcan, who was placed in a box by Athena and given to the care of two maidens, who opened the box and “when they saw the child inside, entwined by a serpent ... fled in terror and fell to their death from the Acropolis” (Box of Stars, London, 1993, p. 27). Characteristically, Cornell focused on the beneficent rather than the malevolent aspects of the myth.

The words Hotel de l’Etoile, which Cornell incorporated into this box, point directly to stargazing. Moreover, these words are thought to refer to the ballet Le Rendez-vous, whose set design by Brassaï included huge photographic enlargements of hotel logos (see Sandra Leonard Starr, in New York, Castelli, Feigen, Corcoran, Joseph Cornell and the Ballet, 1983, exh. cat., p. 75). Cornell frequently merged notions of theatrical or cinematic and astronomical stargazing.

The trail of spattered paint, intended to evoke a constellation of stars, is also interesting in relation to the new painting practices in New York at the time, which were in turn influenced by Surrealist automatism. Both Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock had experimented with paint-dripping in their work. It is thus possible, given the profusion of both veiled and explicit references to other artists in Cornell‘s work, that the white trail of paint refers to this new development as well, and reflects the artist’s capacity to internalize and play with aspects of abstraction that otherwise seem alien to his art.

— Entry, Dawn Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, p. 74-75.

Closing Plenary Session: Imagine All the People

Imagine that you were born in the midst of a civil war, into bonded labor, or an overcrowded refugee camp. Imagine how the circumstances of your birth—your zip code, gender, or ethnicity—would severely restrict your opportunities. For too many this is not imagined, but a reality. As CGI members, we seek to create unrestricted opportunities for all. To succeed, we must imagine ourselves as others—internalizing the challenges facing people who are born into circumstances different from our own. We must commit our hearts and minds to effective empathy, cooperation, and action to create peace and prosperity for people everywhere. This session will explore the nature and science of empathy and imagine how each of us can apply it to our own work and lives.

REMARKS:

Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair, Clinton Foundation

Donnel Baird, Chief Executive Officer, BlocPower

Bill Clinton, Founding Chairman, Clinton Global Initiative, 42nd President of the United States

MODERATOR:

Uzodinma Iweala, Co-Founder, Editor-In-Chief, and CEO, Ventures Africa Magazine

PARTICIPANTS:

Ben Affleck, Actor, Filmmaker and Founder, Eastern Congo Initiative

Chouchou Namegabe, Founding Member, South Kivu Women's Media Association

Gary Clark Jr.

Magazzini Generali - Milano

23 Maggio 2014

ph © Mairo Cinquetti

o sum up Gary Clark Jr. is more challenging every day. He’s a musical universe unto himself, expanding at a nearly immeasurable rate, ever more hard to define — as a mind-blowing guitarist, a dazzling songwriter and engagingly soulful singer.

With his debut album Blak And Blu he has just become the first artist ever recognized by the Recording Academy with Grammy Award nominations in both the rock and R&B categories for the same album in the same year, winning the latter: Best Traditional R&B Performance” - “Please Come Home” (from the album Blak And Blu). And the day after claiming those honors he provided one of the highlights of the highlights-filled “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles,” with sparks flying as he dueled with Joe Walsh on an incendiary “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Dave Grohl behind them pounding the drums.

But that barely scratches the surface. The album’s a rocket ride from the Mississippi Delta of a century ago to multiple points still out beyond the horizon. Rock and R&B sure, but blues, soul, pop, psychedelia, punk and hip-hop are also in Clark’s expansive musical embrace and insatiable hunger for inspiration, which he’s internalized into music all his own. And his two acoustic blues performances on the soundtrack album for the acclaimed movie 12 Years a Slave show the distinct talent and personality he brings to his music.

That, in turn, has been inspirational to others — including some who inspired him. Just ask Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, Jimmy Page, Alicia Keys, the Roots, Buddy guy, Dave Matthews, Roger Waters, Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Beck, among the many who hailed his arrival as a major talent and cherished chances to perform with him. It’s no accident that he was invited to make more “special guest” appearances on the Stones’ recent 50th anniversary tour than any other artist, including the concluding Hyde Park blowout in which he and band also were the opening act.

Or ask President Barak Obama himself, who seeing Clark command the stage of the PBS White House concert honoring the blues — with Jagger, Beck, B.B. King and Buddy Guy among the veterans performing — declared of the young man, “He’s the future.”

Rolling Stone dubbed Clark “The King of the Summer Festivals” as he captivated audiences from Coachella to Glastonbury, Lollapalooza to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, from Metallica’s Orion Festival to Jay-Z’s Made in America, and of course his hometown Austin City Limits Festival, where he his band set a daytime attendance record. He’s dominated late night and daytime TV with multiple appearances on Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, Conan, Fallon, Arsenio Hall, Queen Latifah, Today, CBS This Morning and so on. Guitar Player magazine made him the first emerging artist to grace its cover in more than 15 years. Rolling Stone proclaimed him no less than “The Chosen One.”

It’s a lot to live up to, but through it all his musical ambition and reach continue to grow. New songs he’s previewed to delighted audiences show him exploring ever further combinations of sounds and styles, all with his distinct stamp.

A man of few words, he’s quietly grateful that the music he makes his way has connected with so many. “To think a weird idea I noodled on at the house has gone to something 40,000 people might hear at a festival is an indescribable feeling,” he told Esquire recently. “As cool as I might try to be, I think, ‘Oh my God, this is real!’”

A thangka, also known as tangka, thanka or tanka (Nepali pronunciation: [ˈt̪ʰaŋka]; Tibetan: ཐང་ཀ་; Nepal Bhasa: पौभा) is a painting on cotton, or silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala of some sort. The thangka is not a flat creation like an oil painting or acrylic painting but consists of a picture panel which is painted or embroidered over which a textile is mounted and then over which is laid a cover, usually silk. Generally, thangkas last a very long time and retain much of their lustre, but because of their delicate nature, they have to be kept in dry places where moisture won't affect the quality of the silk. It is sometimes called a scroll-painting.

These thangka served as important teaching tools depicting the life of the Buddha, various influential lamas and other deities and bodhisattvas. One subject is The Wheel of Life, which is a visual representation of the Abhidharma teachings (Art of Enlightenment).

Thangka, when created properly, perform several different functions. Images of deities can be used as teaching tools when depicting the life (or lives) of the Buddha, describing historical events concerning important Lamas, or retelling myths associated with other deities. Devotional images act as the centerpiece during a ritual or ceremony and are often used as mediums through which one can offer prayers or make requests. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, religious art is used as a meditation tool to help bring one further down the path to enlightenment. The Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner uses a thanga image of their yidam, or meditation deity, as a guide, by visualizing “themselves as being that deity, thereby internalizing the Buddha qualities (Lipton, Ragnubs).”

Historians note that Chinese painting had a profound influence on Tibetan painting in general. Starting from the 14th and 15th century, Tibetan painting had incorporated many elements from the Chinese, and during the 18th century, Chinese painting had a deep and far-stretched impact on Tibetan visual art. According to Giuseppe Tucci, by the time of the Qing Dynasty, "a new Tibetan art was then developed, which in a certain sense was a provincial echo of the Chinese 18th century's smooth ornate preciosity."

HISTORY

Thangka is a Nepalese art form exported to Tibet after Princess Bhrikuti of Nepal, daughter of King Lichchavi, married Songtsän Gampo, the ruler of Tibet imported the images of Aryawalokirteshwar and other Nepalese deities to Tibet.[4] History of thangka Paintings in Nepal began in 11th century A.D. when Buddhists and Hindus began to make illustration of the deities and natural scenes. Historically, Tibetan and Chinese influence in Nepalese paintings is quite evident in Paubhas (Thangkas). Paubhas are of two types, the Palas which are illustrative paintings of the deities and the Mandala, which are mystic diagrams paintings of complex test prescribed patterns of circles an square each having specific significance. It was through Nepal that Mahayana Buddhism was introduced into Tibet during reign of Angshuvarma in the seventh century A.D. There was therefore a great demand for religious icons and Buddhist manuscripts for newly built monasteries throughout Tibet. A number of Buddhist manuscripts, including Prajnaparamita, were copied in Kathmandu Valley for these monasteries. Astasahas rika Prajnaparamita for example, was copied in Patan in the year 999 A.D., during the reign of Narendra Dev and Udaya Deva, for the Sa-Shakya monastery in Tibet. For the Nor monastery in Tibet, two copies were made in Nepal-one of Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita in 1069 A.D. and the other of Kavyadarsha in 1111 A.D. The influence of Nepalese art extended till Tibet and even beyond in China in regular order during the thirteenth century. Nepalese artisans were dispatched to the courts of Chinese emperors at their request to perform their workmanship and impart expert knowledge. The exemplary contribution made by the artisans of Nepal, specially by the Nepalese innovator and architect Balbahu, known by his popular name Araniko bear testimony to this fact even today. After the introduction of paper, palm leaf became less popular, however, it continued to be used until the eighteenth century. Paper manuscripts imitated the oblong shape but were wider than the palm leaves.

From the fifteenth century onwards, brighter colours gradually began to appear in Nepalese.Thanka / Thangka. Because of the growing importance of the Tantric cult, various aspects of Shiva and Shakti were painted in conventional poses. Mahakala, Manjushri, Lokeshwara and other deities were equally popular and so were also frequently represented in Thanka / Thangka paintings of later dates. As Tantrism embodies the ideas of esoteric power, magic forces, and a great variety of symbols, strong emphasis is laid on the female element and sexuality in the paintings of that period.

Religious paintings worshipped as icons are known as Paubha in Newari and Thanka / Thangka in Tibetan. The origin of Paubha or Thanka / Thangka paintings may be attributed to the Nepalese artists responsible for creating a number of special metal works and wall- paintings as well as illuminated manuscripts in Tibet. Realizing the great demand for religious icons in Tibet, these artists, along with monks and traders, took with them from Nepal not only metal sculptures but also a number of Buddhist manuscripts. To better fulfil the ever - increasing demand Nepalese artists initiated a new type of religious painting on cloth that could be easily rolled up and carried along with them. This type of painting became very popular both in Nepal and Tibet and so a new school of Thanka / Thangka painting evolved as early as the ninth or tenth century and has remained popular to this day. One of the earliest specimens of Nepalese Thanka / Thangka painting dates from the thirteenth /fourteenth century and shows Amitabha surrounded by Bodhisattva. Another Nepalese Thanka / Thangka with three dates in the inscription (the last one corresponding to 1369 A.D.), is one of the earliest known Thanka / Thangka with inscriptions. The "Mandalaof Vishnu " dated 1420 A.D., is another fine example of the painting of this period. Early Nepalese Thangkas are simple in design and composition. The main deity, a large figure, occupies the central position while surrounded by smaller figures of lesser divinities.

Thanka / Thangka painting is one of the major science out the five major and five minor fields of knowledge. Its origin can be traced all the way back to the time of Lord Buddha. The main themes of Thanka / Thangka paintings are religious. During the reign of Tibetan Dharma King Trisong Duetsen the Tibetan masters refined their already well-developed arts through research and studies of different country's tradition. Thanka painting's lining and measurement, costumes, implementations and ornaments are mostly based on Indian styles. The drawing of figures is based on Nepalese style and the background sceneries are based on Chinese style. Thus, the Thanka / Thangka paintings became a unique and distinctive art. Although the practice of thanka painting was originally done as a way of gaining merit it has nowadays only evolved into a money making business and the noble intentions it once carried has been diluted. Tibetans do not sell Thangkas on a large scale as the selling of religious artifacts such as thangkas and idols is frowned upon in the Tibetan community and thus non Tibetan groups have been able to monopolize on its (thangka's) popularity among Buddhist and art enthusiasts from the west.

Thanka / Thangka have developed in the northern Himalayan regions among the Lamas. Besides Lamas, Gurung and Tamang communities are also producing Tankas, which provide substantial employment opportunities for many people in the hills. Newari Thankas (Also known as Paubha) has been the hidden art work in Kathmandu valley from 13th century. We have preserved this art and are exclusively creating this with some particular painter family who have inherited their art from their forefathers. Some of the artistic religious and historical paintings are also done by the Newars of Kathmandu Valley.

TYPES

Based on technique and material, thangkas can be grouped by types. Generally, they are divided into two broad categories: those that are painted (Tib.) bris-tan—and those made of silk, either by appliqué or embroidery.

Thangkas are further divided into these more specific categories:

- Painted in colors (Tib.) tson-tang—the most common type

- Appliqué (Tib.) go-tang

- Black Background—meaning gold line on a black background (Tib.) nagtang

- Blockprints—paper or cloth outlined renderings, by woodcut/woodblock printing

- Embroidery (Tib.) tsem-thang

- Gold Background—an auspicious treatment, used judiciously for peaceful, long-life deities and fully enlightened buddhas

- Red Background—literally gold line, but referring to gold line on a vermillion (Tib.) mar-tang

Whereas typical thangkas are fairly small, between about 18 and 30 inches tall or wide, there are also giant festival thangkas, usually Appliqué, and designed to be unrolled against a wall in a monastery for particular religious occasions. These are likely to be wider than they are tall, and may be sixty or more feet across and perhaps twenty or more high.

Somewhat related are Tibetan tsakli, which look like miniature thangkas, but are usually used as initiation cards or offerings.

Because Thangkas can be quite expensive, people nowadays use posters of Thangkas as an alternative to the real thangkas for religious purposes.

PROCESS

Thangkas are painted on cotton or silk. The most common is a loosely woven cotton produced in widths from 40 to 58 centimeters. While some variations do exist, thangkas wider than 45 centimeters frequently have seams in the support. The paint consists of pigments in a water soluble medium. Both mineral and organic pigments are used, tempered with a herb and glue solution. In Western terminology, this is a distemper technique.

The composition of a thangka, as with the majority of Buddhist art, is highly geometric. Arms, legs, eyes, nostrils, ears, and various ritual implements are all laid out on a systematic grid of angles and intersecting lines. A skilled thangka artist will generally select from a variety of predesigned items to include in the composition, ranging from alms bowls and animals, to the shape, size, and angle of a figure's eyes, nose, and lips. The process seems very methodical, but often requires deep understanding of the symbolism involved to capture the spirit of it.

Thangka often overflow with symbolism and allusion. Because the art is explicitly religious, all symbols and allusions must be in accordance with strict guidelines laid out in Buddhist scripture. The artist must be properly trained and have sufficient religious understanding, knowledge, and background to create an accurate and appropriate thangka. Lipton and Ragnubs clarify this in Treasures of Tibetan Art:

“Tibetan art exemplifies the nirmanakaya, the physical body of Buddha, and also the qualities of the Buddha, perhaps in the form of a deity. Art objects, therefore, must follow rules specified in the Buddhist scriptures regarding proportions, shape, color, stance, hand positions, and attributes in order to personify correctly the Buddha or Deities.”

WIKIPEDIA

Gary Clark Jr.

Magazzini Generali - Milano

23 Maggio 2014

ph © Mairo Cinquetti

o sum up Gary Clark Jr. is more challenging every day. He’s a musical universe unto himself, expanding at a nearly immeasurable rate, ever more hard to define — as a mind-blowing guitarist, a dazzling songwriter and engagingly soulful singer.

With his debut album Blak And Blu he has just become the first artist ever recognized by the Recording Academy with Grammy Award nominations in both the rock and R&B categories for the same album in the same year, winning the latter: Best Traditional R&B Performance” - “Please Come Home” (from the album Blak And Blu). And the day after claiming those honors he provided one of the highlights of the highlights-filled “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles,” with sparks flying as he dueled with Joe Walsh on an incendiary “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Dave Grohl behind them pounding the drums.

But that barely scratches the surface. The album’s a rocket ride from the Mississippi Delta of a century ago to multiple points still out beyond the horizon. Rock and R&B sure, but blues, soul, pop, psychedelia, punk and hip-hop are also in Clark’s expansive musical embrace and insatiable hunger for inspiration, which he’s internalized into music all his own. And his two acoustic blues performances on the soundtrack album for the acclaimed movie 12 Years a Slave show the distinct talent and personality he brings to his music.

That, in turn, has been inspirational to others — including some who inspired him. Just ask Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, Jimmy Page, Alicia Keys, the Roots, Buddy guy, Dave Matthews, Roger Waters, Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Beck, among the many who hailed his arrival as a major talent and cherished chances to perform with him. It’s no accident that he was invited to make more “special guest” appearances on the Stones’ recent 50th anniversary tour than any other artist, including the concluding Hyde Park blowout in which he and band also were the opening act.

Or ask President Barak Obama himself, who seeing Clark command the stage of the PBS White House concert honoring the blues — with Jagger, Beck, B.B. King and Buddy Guy among the veterans performing — declared of the young man, “He’s the future.”

Rolling Stone dubbed Clark “The King of the Summer Festivals” as he captivated audiences from Coachella to Glastonbury, Lollapalooza to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, from Metallica’s Orion Festival to Jay-Z’s Made in America, and of course his hometown Austin City Limits Festival, where he his band set a daytime attendance record. He’s dominated late night and daytime TV with multiple appearances on Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, Conan, Fallon, Arsenio Hall, Queen Latifah, Today, CBS This Morning and so on. Guitar Player magazine made him the first emerging artist to grace its cover in more than 15 years. Rolling Stone proclaimed him no less than “The Chosen One.”

It’s a lot to live up to, but through it all his musical ambition and reach continue to grow. New songs he’s previewed to delighted audiences show him exploring ever further combinations of sounds and styles, all with his distinct stamp.

A man of few words, he’s quietly grateful that the music he makes his way has connected with so many. “To think a weird idea I noodled on at the house has gone to something 40,000 people might hear at a festival is an indescribable feeling,” he told Esquire recently. “As cool as I might try to be, I think, ‘Oh my God, this is real!’”

Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving, peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other. The primary caregiver is the source of the infants stress regulation and, therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the childs mind and the childs reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as internal working models of attachment.

Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the familys caregiving-attachment system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment. These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation research procedure, which observes the young childs behaviour when separated and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are represented in the childs internal working models of self-other relationships. Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic, transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and resolve their fear of separation and loss.

When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions, particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.

Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns ones worthiness to receive love and care from others.

In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the childs sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment trauma.

Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character traits and personality types and disorders.

Disorganised attachment may occur when the childs parent is both the source of fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is a solution to the activation of the childs attachment and fear behavioural systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases, alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of affective equilibrium.

Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults. This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness, particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an angry and potentially violent reaction.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Bryan Ilyankoff)

from the "My First Diet" series, posted in observance of International No Diet Day. Read about it at:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-first-diet-one-poun...

TThe Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

Willink’s lean body and the bare landscape give this painting an ominous atmosphere. On the eve of World War II (1939–1945), Willink portrayed himself as John the Baptist, the prophet who preached virtue and justice and saw baptism as the salvation from all sins. With this internalized self-portrait, Willink seems to want to avert the menace and turmoil of the times.

h 90cm × w 68cm

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

Shostakvich School of Music Art & Dance

297 Avenue X

Brooklyn, NY 11223

(718) 376-8056

www.shostakovichschool.com

Kaplun21@aol.com

Since it's inception in 1981, the Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Dance, at 297 Avenue X, Brooklyn, NY 11223, has grown from a dream envisioned by a small group of Russian immigrants, to a vibrant multifaceted music and art institution with three centers in the metropolitan New York area. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School is a non-profit, non-sectarian institution dedicated to high quality instruction in art, music, theater and sport for individuals ages three to adult. The School serves over 500 students in a diversified multi-arts program. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The school does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, national origin, or marital status in its admission, employment, financial aid, placement or recruitment practices and policies. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is an equal opportunity-affirmative action institution.

The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is named after one of the most important Russian composers of our time. The School is both named in tribute to him and in the hope that our students will emulate his artistic talent. Students enrolled at the Shostakovich School are encouraged to achieve their maximum potential and to experience the satisfaction that comes from the study and mastery of the arts. The curriculum has been designed to motivate students to participate fully in the educational process and to relate their studies to life, to society, and their own personal development. This philosophy of education gives inspiration to our students throughout their lives, whether they become professional artists or active amateurs. Course materials and instructional methods have been devised to make the disciplines come alive in the students minds, so they can comprehend and internalize the mode of inquiry characteristic to each of the artistic endeavors. Students are encouraged to undertake independent study or tutorials in accordance with their personal interests. Students from all backgrounds are welcome.

Working Hours: Mon -Fri 7:30am - 8pm, Sat - Sun 10am - 5pm

Payments Accepted: Cash, Check

Opened Since: 1981

Twitter: twitter.com/shostakvich

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Shostakvich-School-of-Music-Art-Da...

Blogger: shostakvichschool.blogspot.com/

Google plus: plus.google.com/u/0/102303762795057560778/about

Warrior Shield Campaign Art by: Pearl Vanessa-Rose Scott, Fort Peck Sioux, age: 20.

NARA, NW Trauma Warrior Art by: Michael, Mechoopta Maidu, age: 12.

-----------------------------------------------------

CONTACT: K. @Alane Golden

Com./S.M. Specialist, NARA, NW: Nak-Nu-Wit

503.224. 1044, extension 264

agolden@naranorthwest.org

The Portland, Oregon Based Native American Rehabilitation Association of the Northwest, Inc., NARA NW, Will Join More than 1,000 National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day Celebrations’ Nationwide.

PORTLAND, OR — On Wednesday, May 9th, 2012, NARA, NW will host a Family Day celebration at Concordia University (2811 NE Holman Portland 97211) from 3 – 7pm, joining more than 1,000 communities and 115 federal programs and national organizations across the country participating in events, youth demonstrations, and social networking campaigns to raise awareness about the importance of children’s mental health. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day seeks to raise awareness about the importance of positive mental health from birth. This year, the Awareness Day national event will focus on young children from birth to 8 years old by emphasizing the need to build resilience in young children dealing with trauma.

For the past forty – two years, NARA, NW has provided culturally appropriate education, physical and mental health services and substance abuse treatment to American Indians, Alaska Natives and other vulnerable people in the greater Portland metro community. NARA’s unique wraparound child and family mental health services program, Nak Nu Wit, serves families, their young children and youth with mental health challenges, offering culturally-based services and supports needed to thrive at home, in school, and in the community. Research has shown when children as young as 18 months are exposed to traumatic life events, they can develop serious psychological problems later in life and have a greater risk for experiencing problems with substance abuse, depression and physical health. Integrating social-emotional and resilience-building skills into every environment can have a positive impact on a child's healthy development.

In conjunction with the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board and Concordia University, NARA, NW will celebrate Awareness Day locally by hosting a Family Day with the culturally-rooted theme: "Warriors Against Trauma", highlighting the strengths & adventure-based youth and family activities, to Elder storytelling, traditional drumming, dancing and singing, the event offers something for everyone - blending rich history and traditions of the past with modern day tribal urban culture. Attendees will enjoy complimentary face-painting, food and drinks, arts, crafts, ceremony, storytelling with Ed Edmo and a special performance by Emcee One and an array of mental health materials and resources aimed at reducing stigma. The event will focus attention on the importance of providing comprehensive, community-based mental health supports and services to enhance resilience and nurture strength-based skills in young children from birth. In the NARA community, Elders, family relations, community members, spiritual helpers and friends are invited to help the family. Nak Nu Wit is a Sahaptin phrase describing the program’s philosophy and mission:

“Everything / All things are being taken care of for the people, the people are the project, our responsibility, our work.” It is in this spirit that NARA welcomes all to attend this free event.

NARA, NW holds sacred the culture and traditions’ passed down from our ancestors and believes that when we recognize our “Warrior Self”, we can exhibit strength, without sacrificing tenderness. It is precisely because our ancestors called upon their inner warriors to be a source of strength to draw upon in times of great need that we exist today. The “Warriors Against Trauma” campaign honors our ancestors and asks today’s youth to thoughtfully deploy their “Warrior Spirits” to manifest as clarity, focus, determination, courage, constancy and an unflappable zest for life.

“Trauma Warriors” understand a true warrior views roadblocks as evolutionary opportunities, and isn't afraid to pursue a purpose to its finish – in the face of hardship, adversity, or strife. There is more than enough room in the existence of the warrior for softness and benevolence, and the warrior’s willingness to stand up for their beliefs can aid greatly in the healing process. As our youth strive to incorporate these ideals with today’s fast-paced world, they broaden their realities to internalize mindfulness while overcoming life’s challenges with an unwavering intensity of spirit. Can we get a W.A.T., W.A.T.?

"’Awareness Day is an opportunity for us to join with communities across the country in celebrating the positive impact we have on the lives of young people when we’re able to integrate culturally relevant positive mental health into every environment,’ says Terry Ellis, Child and Family Services Clinical Manager. ‘When we focus on building resilience and coping skills in young children from birth, especially if they have experienced a traumatic event, we can help young children, youth, and their families thrive.’"

Data released on May 3, 2011, by SAMHSA indicates that an estimated 26% of American children will witness, or experience a traumatic event, before the age of 4 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost 60% of American adults say they endured abuse, or other difficult family circumstances, during childhood. Research has shown exposure to traumatic events early in life can have many negative effects throughout childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study found a strong relationship between traumatic events experienced in childhood as reported in adulthood, and chronic physical illness such as heart disease, and mental health problems which includes depression.

The annual financial burden to society of childhood abuse and trauma is estimated to be $103 billion. NARA, NW is committed not only to treatment aimed at reducing this financial burden, but, strives to address historical trauma through culturally-based mental health services. Through NARA’s child and family mental health programs, our families and youth are treated by nationally recognized trauma experts who aim to decrease the prevalence of exposure to traumatic events among children and youth to eliminate intergenerational trauma, the problems trauma causes, and offer available treatments that can help children and youth recover through resilience. It is a great honor to act as liaisons, standing side-by-side with family and community members helping ensure the complete mental health and well being our youth so they may continue the traditions passed down from elders with strength, honor and dignity.

12 year old Mechoopta Maidu tribal member and Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day contributing artist reflects upon what a Warrior Against Trauma means to him, “I have very bad dreams that wake me up at night. With help from Amber, I learned to call my Warrior to make the bad things that happen to me when I sleep go away. He protects me by throwing a tomahawk at the bad things, making them disappear and helping me sleep better.” Michael, NARA Nak Nu Wit client.

For more information, join the conversation on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/NARANCMHAD/ and Follow us on Twitter @NCMHAD

—

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

Shostakvich School of Music Art & Dance

297 Avenue X

Brooklyn, NY 11223

(718) 376-8056

www.shostakovichschool.com

Kaplun21@aol.com

Since it's inception in 1981, the Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Dance, at 297 Avenue X, Brooklyn, NY 11223, has grown from a dream envisioned by a small group of Russian immigrants, to a vibrant multifaceted music and art institution with three centers in the metropolitan New York area. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School is a non-profit, non-sectarian institution dedicated to high quality instruction in art, music, theater and sport for individuals ages three to adult. The School serves over 500 students in a diversified multi-arts program. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The school does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, national origin, or marital status in its admission, employment, financial aid, placement or recruitment practices and policies. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is an equal opportunity-affirmative action institution.

The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is named after one of the most important Russian composers of our time. The School is both named in tribute to him and in the hope that our students will emulate his artistic talent. Students enrolled at the Shostakovich School are encouraged to achieve their maximum potential and to experience the satisfaction that comes from the study and mastery of the arts. The curriculum has been designed to motivate students to participate fully in the educational process and to relate their studies to life, to society, and their own personal development. This philosophy of education gives inspiration to our students throughout their lives, whether they become professional artists or active amateurs. Course materials and instructional methods have been devised to make the disciplines come alive in the students minds, so they can comprehend and internalize the mode of inquiry characteristic to each of the artistic endeavors. Students are encouraged to undertake independent study or tutorials in accordance with their personal interests. Students from all backgrounds are welcome.

Working Hours: Mon -Fri 7:30am - 8pm, Sat - Sun 10am - 5pm

Payments Accepted: Cash, Check

Opened Since: 1981

Twitter: twitter.com/shostakvich

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Shostakvich-School-of-Music-Art-Da...

Blogger: shostakvichschool.blogspot.com/

Google plus: plus.google.com/u/0/102303762795057560778/about

2015

www.madisonsquarepark.org/things-to-do/calendar/jaume-ple...

Over the past three decades, the celebrated Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa has established an international reputation for creating public sculptures that are both monumental in scale and emotionally engaging in subject. Working in a wide variety of materials, Plensa has invigorated the practice of figurative sculpture with works that examine the intersection of the human form, language and communication, and global citizenship. Echo, a new site-specific sculpture for Madison Square Park, marks Plensa’s long-awaited New York City public space debut, and constitutes the largest monolithic work of art to be presented in Mad. Sq. Art’s seven-year history.

Echo, Plensa’s commission for Madison Square Park, depicts a nine-year old girl from Plensa’s Barcelona neighborhood, lost in a state of thoughts and dreams. Standing forty-four feet tall at the center of the park’s expansive Oval Lawn, Echo’s towering stature and white marble-dusted surface harmoniously reflect the historic limestone buildings that surround the park. Both monumental in size and inviting in subject, the peaceful visage of Echo creates a tranquil and introspective atmosphere amid the cacophony of central Manhattan.

Plensa’s sculpture also refers to an episode in Greek mythology in which the loquacious nymph Echo is forced as punishment to repeat only the thoughts of others. Plensa’s Echo plays on the narrative of this Greek myth by depicting a young girl’s face in a state of reverie, translating this sculptural portrait into a physical monument of the internalized voices of the thousands of daily visitors to Madison Square Park.

ABOUT JAUME PLENSA

Jaume Plensa was born in Barcelona in 1955, and lives and works there today. Over the past 25 years, Plensa has exhibited more than 30 major public art projects in countries throughout several continents. He was awarded a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1993, and received an honorary doctorate in 2005 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other honors. His public art installations are particularly renowned, and include the legendary Crown Fountain (2000-5) in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Nomade (2007) commissioned by the Musée Picasso in Antibes, France. Plensa’s 2011 commission for Madison Square Park constitutes his long-awaited New York City public art debut. Plensa has exhibited to great acclaim at institutions including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Spain; the Musée Picasso, Antibes, France; the Arts Club of Chicago; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid and Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Plensa has been a professor and lecturer at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Plensa is represented in by Galerie Lelong in New York and Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago

This was one of those 60s excursions to Blowing Rock, or some other touristy Smoky Mountain place. Staged gunfights, railroads, horsing around. What was it with mom and dad and tourist traps? I asked Mom once why they moved to Florida in the 1950s. All their family, friends, support network were in Pennsylvania. She thought for a minute and finally said, "We thought it would be fun."

*

When you say “mother” or “father” you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle—to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by—and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity. In saying yes to the river, I had overcome some internalized version of my mother that had become almost a reflex of cautious duty.

~ Rebecca Solnit

*

Relationships are complex because they are part real, part imaginary.

- Martin F. Terman

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

PERIODICO DE AYER www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/0/BNSb013wcfU

LOS ENTIERROS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/1/zu3sPt8zEpw

DE TODAS MANERAS ROSAS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/2/n1xG6hncg4U

LAS CARAS LINDAS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/3/BZ3w684Sfmg

PLANTACION ADENTRO www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/4/b-Ap266F7g8

MAXIMO CHAMORO www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/5/sKCx-DmE7Zk

LAMENTO DE CONCEPCION www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/6/AXOAi4cWNtE

LA CURA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/7/iHnsIDlHECg

EVELIO Y LA RUMBA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/8/NWJCq_S7NQ0

IBABAILA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/9/Bn48g_0mK5Q

GUAKIA INC www.guakia.org/index.html

Based in Hartford, Connecticut, Guakía, Inc. is the premiere Puerto Rican cultural center in southern New England.

Our mission is "to provide a focal point for the promotion of the cultural identity and heritage of Puerto Ricans in the United States through the advancement of the groups' history, language, music, arts, literature, and other cultural characteristics; and to establish a center that will serve as a clearinghouse for the study, celebration, and exposition of the Puerto Rican/Hispanic culture available to all residents of the city of Hartford and the capital region."

This page is just the beginning of our new website, being built with the assitance of Trinity College's "Smart Neighborhood Plan," a project funded in large measure by grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Additional funding for Guakia's website has been received from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

We hope that you will soon be able to learn more about our organizations' history by exploring the pages of this site as they become available. The site will include detailed information on Guakía's educational and arts programs, its community partnerships, and will also feature photos and video clips of participant children and youth. We also welcome inquiries about how to help support Guakía, Inc. as we seek to expand our children and youth programs.

To provide a focal point for the promotion of the cultural identity and heritage of Hispanics in the United States through the advancement of the groups history, language, music, arts, and literature and to establish a center that will serve as a clearinghouse for the study, celebration and exposition of Hispanic cultureavailable to all residents of Connecticut.

Vision and Goals

To be the premier non-profit Hispanic arts, cultural and humanities organization dedicated to enriching the value of the Hispanic community by promoting, preserving and celebrating its cultural heritage and diversity.

To help our youth develop a strong sense of self, maximize their talents, acquire vision, internalize learning and in turn impact others in a positive way, fostering harmonic diversity in our community. Founded in 1983, Guakía is the most prominent arts and cultural organization in Hartfords Hispanic community. The word, guakia, means we in Taino, the language of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean (pre-Columbus). The word guakia signifies the unity of the Hispanic community no matter where individuals may be living. Volunteer parents who felt that their children had lost contact with the traditions of their culture and heritage founded Guakía. They felt their children needed to connect with their heritage in order to develop a sense of pride, community and self-esteem. Originally, Guakía was focused on the culture of Puerto Rico, however in recent years, as the community has become more diverse and the needs have shifted, Guakías mission has been broadened to include all Hispanic cultures. Using a curriculum based on both Puerto Rican and Latin American music, dance, and art forms, Guakía provides a wide array of visual and performing arts initiatives such as folkloric dance, painting, ceramics, traditional Hispanic music, and art classes. The early sacrifices of parents, volunteers, and teachers gave Guakía strong roots in the Puerto Rican culture. These roots have now expanded and sprouted like a beautiful tree with many branches and leaves to include all Hispanic cultures.

Shostakvich School of Music Art & Dance

297 Avenue X

Brooklyn, NY 11223

(718) 376-8056

www.shostakovichschool.com

Kaplun21@aol.com

Since it's inception in 1981, the Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Dance, at 297 Avenue X, Brooklyn, NY 11223, has grown from a dream envisioned by a small group of Russian immigrants, to a vibrant multifaceted music and art institution with three centers in the metropolitan New York area. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School is a non-profit, non-sectarian institution dedicated to high quality instruction in art, music, theater and sport for individuals ages three to adult. The School serves over 500 students in a diversified multi-arts program. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The school does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, national origin, or marital status in its admission, employment, financial aid, placement or recruitment practices and policies. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is an equal opportunity-affirmative action institution.

The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is named after one of the most important Russian composers of our time. The School is both named in tribute to him and in the hope that our students will emulate his artistic talent. Students enrolled at the Shostakovich School are encouraged to achieve their maximum potential and to experience the satisfaction that comes from the study and mastery of the arts. The curriculum has been designed to motivate students to participate fully in the educational process and to relate their studies to life, to society, and their own personal development. This philosophy of education gives inspiration to our students throughout their lives, whether they become professional artists or active amateurs. Course materials and instructional methods have been devised to make the disciplines come alive in the students minds, so they can comprehend and internalize the mode of inquiry characteristic to each of the artistic endeavors. Students are encouraged to undertake independent study or tutorials in accordance with their personal interests. Students from all backgrounds are welcome.

Working Hours: Mon -Fri 7:30am - 8pm, Sat - Sun 10am - 5pm

Payments Accepted: Cash, Check

Opened Since: 1981

Twitter: twitter.com/shostakvich

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Shostakvich-School-of-Music-Art-Da...

Blogger: shostakvichschool.blogspot.com/

Google plus: plus.google.com/u/0/102303762795057560778/about

Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving, peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other. The primary caregiver is the source of the infants stress regulation and, therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the childs mind and the childs reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as internal working models of attachment.

Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the familys caregiving-attachment system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment. These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation research procedure, which observes the young childs behaviour when separated and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are represented in the childs internal working models of self-other relationships. Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic, transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and resolve their fear of separation and loss.

When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions, particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.

Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns ones worthiness to receive love and care from others.

In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the childs sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment trauma.

Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character traits and personality types and disorders.

Disorganised attachment may occur when the childs parent is both the source of fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is a solution to the activation of the childs attachment and fear behavioural systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases, alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of affective equilibrium.

Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults. This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness, particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an angry and potentially violent reaction.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Bryan Ilyankoff)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Bryan Ilyankoff)

from the "My First Diet" series, posted in observance of International No Diet Day. Read about it at:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-first-diet-one-poun...

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving, peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other. The primary caregiver is the source of the infants stress regulation and, therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the childs mind and the childs reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as internal working models of attachment.

Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the familys caregiving-attachment system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment. These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation research procedure, which observes the young childs behaviour when separated and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are represented in the childs internal working models of self-other relationships. Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic, transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and resolve their fear of separation and loss.

When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions, particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.

Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns ones worthiness to receive love and care from others.

In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the childs sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment trauma.

Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character traits and personality types and disorders.

Disorganised attachment may occur when the childs parent is both the source of fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is a solution to the activation of the childs attachment and fear behavioural systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases, alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of affective equilibrium.

Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults. This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness, particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an angry and potentially violent reaction.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Bryan Ilyankoff)

Aghoris are devotees of Shiva manifested

Aghora sādhanā is a process of unlearning deeply internalized cultural models. When this sādhanā takes the form of charnel ground sādhanā, the Aghori faces death as a very young child, simultaneously meditating on the totality of life at its two extremes. This ideal example serves as a prototype for other Aghor practices, both left and right, in ritual and in daily life.

Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving, peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other. The primary caregiver is the source of the infants stress regulation and, therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the childs mind and the childs reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as internal working models of attachment.

Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the familys caregiving-attachment system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment. These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation research procedure, which observes the young childs behaviour when separated and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are represented in the childs internal working models of self-other relationships. Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic, transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and resolve their fear of separation and loss.

When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions, particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.

Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns ones worthiness to receive love and care from others.

In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the childs sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment trauma.

Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character traits and personality types and disorders.

Disorganised attachment may occur when the childs parent is both the source of fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is a solution to the activation of the childs attachment and fear behavioural systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases, alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of affective equilibrium.

Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults. This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness, particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an angry and potentially violent reaction.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

Shostakvich School of Music Art & Dance

297 Avenue X

Brooklyn, NY 11223

(718) 376-8056

www.shostakovichschool.com

Kaplun21@aol.com

Since it's inception in 1981, the Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Dance, at 297 Avenue X, Brooklyn, NY 11223, has grown from a dream envisioned by a small group of Russian immigrants, to a vibrant multifaceted music and art institution with three centers in the metropolitan New York area. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School is a non-profit, non-sectarian institution dedicated to high quality instruction in art, music, theater and sport for individuals ages three to adult. The School serves over 500 students in a diversified multi-arts program. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The school does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, national origin, or marital status in its admission, employment, financial aid, placement or recruitment practices and policies. The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is an equal opportunity-affirmative action institution.

The Shostakovich School of Music, Art and Sport is named after one of the most important Russian composers of our time. The School is both named in tribute to him and in the hope that our students will emulate his artistic talent. Students enrolled at the Shostakovich School are encouraged to achieve their maximum potential and to experience the satisfaction that comes from the study and mastery of the arts. The curriculum has been designed to motivate students to participate fully in the educational process and to relate their studies to life, to society, and their own personal development. This philosophy of education gives inspiration to our students throughout their lives, whether they become professional artists or active amateurs. Course materials and instructional methods have been devised to make the disciplines come alive in the students minds, so they can comprehend and internalize the mode of inquiry characteristic to each of the artistic endeavors. Students are encouraged to undertake independent study or tutorials in accordance with their personal interests. Students from all backgrounds are welcome.

Working Hours: Mon -Fri 7:30am - 8pm, Sat - Sun 10am - 5pm

Payments Accepted: Cash, Check

Opened Since: 1981

Twitter: twitter.com/shostakvich

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Shostakvich-School-of-Music-Art-Da...

Blogger: shostakvichschool.blogspot.com/

Google plus: plus.google.com/u/0/102303762795057560778/about

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

Trying on her mother's clothes, picking up her mother's emotional baggage.

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

Gary Clark Jr.

Magazzini Generali - Milano

23 Maggio 2014

ph © Mairo Cinquetti

o sum up Gary Clark Jr. is more challenging every day. He’s a musical universe unto himself, expanding at a nearly immeasurable rate, ever more hard to define — as a mind-blowing guitarist, a dazzling songwriter and engagingly soulful singer.

With his debut album Blak And Blu he has just become the first artist ever recognized by the Recording Academy with Grammy Award nominations in both the rock and R&B categories for the same album in the same year, winning the latter: Best Traditional R&B Performance” - “Please Come Home” (from the album Blak And Blu). And the day after claiming those honors he provided one of the highlights of the highlights-filled “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles,” with sparks flying as he dueled with Joe Walsh on an incendiary “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Dave Grohl behind them pounding the drums.

But that barely scratches the surface. The album’s a rocket ride from the Mississippi Delta of a century ago to multiple points still out beyond the horizon. Rock and R&B sure, but blues, soul, pop, psychedelia, punk and hip-hop are also in Clark’s expansive musical embrace and insatiable hunger for inspiration, which he’s internalized into music all his own. And his two acoustic blues performances on the soundtrack album for the acclaimed movie 12 Years a Slave show the distinct talent and personality he brings to his music.

That, in turn, has been inspirational to others — including some who inspired him. Just ask Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, Jimmy Page, Alicia Keys, the Roots, Buddy guy, Dave Matthews, Roger Waters, Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Beck, among the many who hailed his arrival as a major talent and cherished chances to perform with him. It’s no accident that he was invited to make more “special guest” appearances on the Stones’ recent 50th anniversary tour than any other artist, including the concluding Hyde Park blowout in which he and band also were the opening act.

Or ask President Barak Obama himself, who seeing Clark command the stage of the PBS White House concert honoring the blues — with Jagger, Beck, B.B. King and Buddy Guy among the veterans performing — declared of the young man, “He’s the future.”

Rolling Stone dubbed Clark “The King of the Summer Festivals” as he captivated audiences from Coachella to Glastonbury, Lollapalooza to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, from Metallica’s Orion Festival to Jay-Z’s Made in America, and of course his hometown Austin City Limits Festival, where he his band set a daytime attendance record. He’s dominated late night and daytime TV with multiple appearances on Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, Conan, Fallon, Arsenio Hall, Queen Latifah, Today, CBS This Morning and so on. Guitar Player magazine made him the first emerging artist to grace its cover in more than 15 years. Rolling Stone proclaimed him no less than “The Chosen One.”

It’s a lot to live up to, but through it all his musical ambition and reach continue to grow. New songs he’s previewed to delighted audiences show him exploring ever further combinations of sounds and styles, all with his distinct stamp.

A man of few words, he’s quietly grateful that the music he makes his way has connected with so many. “To think a weird idea I noodled on at the house has gone to something 40,000 people might hear at a festival is an indescribable feeling,” he told Esquire recently. “As cool as I might try to be, I think, ‘Oh my God, this is real!’”

Closing Plenary Session: Imagine All the People

Imagine that you were born in the midst of a civil war, into bonded labor, or an overcrowded refugee camp. Imagine how the circumstances of your birth—your zip code, gender, or ethnicity—would severely restrict your opportunities. For too many this is not imagined, but a reality. As CGI members, we seek to create unrestricted opportunities for all. To succeed, we must imagine ourselves as others—internalizing the challenges facing people who are born into circumstances different from our own. We must commit our hearts and minds to effective empathy, cooperation, and action to create peace and prosperity for people everywhere. This session will explore the nature and science of empathy and imagine how each of us can apply it to our own work and lives.

REMARKS:

Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair, Clinton Foundation

Donnel Baird, Chief Executive Officer, BlocPower

Bill Clinton, Founding Chairman, Clinton Global Initiative, 42nd President of the United States

MODERATOR:

Uzodinma Iweala, Co-Founder, Editor-In-Chief, and CEO, Ventures Africa Magazine

PARTICIPANTS:

Ben Affleck, Actor, Filmmaker and Founder, Eastern Congo Initiative

Chouchou Namegabe, Founding Member, South Kivu Women's Media Association

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Bryan Ilyankoff)

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.

PERIODICO DE AYER www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/0/BNSb013wcfU

LOS ENTIERROS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/1/zu3sPt8zEpw

DE TODAS MANERAS ROSAS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/2/n1xG6hncg4U

LAS CARAS LINDAS www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/3/BZ3w684Sfmg

PLANTACION ADENTRO www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/4/b-Ap266F7g8

MAXIMO CHAMORO www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/5/sKCx-DmE7Zk

LAMENTO DE CONCEPCION www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/6/AXOAi4cWNtE

LA CURA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/7/iHnsIDlHECg

EVELIO Y LA RUMBA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/8/NWJCq_S7NQ0

IBABAILA www.youtube.com/user/RANiEL1963#p/u/9/Bn48g_0mK5Q

GUAKIA INC www.guakia.org/index.html

Based in Hartford, Connecticut, Guakía, Inc. is the premiere Puerto Rican cultural center in southern New England.

Our mission is "to provide a focal point for the promotion of the cultural identity and heritage of Puerto Ricans in the United States through the advancement of the groups' history, language, music, arts, literature, and other cultural characteristics; and to establish a center that will serve as a clearinghouse for the study, celebration, and exposition of the Puerto Rican/Hispanic culture available to all residents of the city of Hartford and the capital region."

This page is just the beginning of our new website, being built with the assitance of Trinity College's "Smart Neighborhood Plan," a project funded in large measure by grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Additional funding for Guakia's website has been received from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

We hope that you will soon be able to learn more about our organizations' history by exploring the pages of this site as they become available. The site will include detailed information on Guakía's educational and arts programs, its community partnerships, and will also feature photos and video clips of participant children and youth. We also welcome inquiries about how to help support Guakía, Inc. as we seek to expand our children and youth programs.

To provide a focal point for the promotion of the cultural identity and heritage of Hispanics in the United States through the advancement of the groups history, language, music, arts, and literature and to establish a center that will serve as a clearinghouse for the study, celebration and exposition of Hispanic cultureavailable to all residents of Connecticut.

Vision and Goals

To be the premier non-profit Hispanic arts, cultural and humanities organization dedicated to enriching the value of the Hispanic community by promoting, preserving and celebrating its cultural heritage and diversity.

To help our youth develop a strong sense of self, maximize their talents, acquire vision, internalize learning and in turn impact others in a positive way, fostering harmonic diversity in our community. Founded in 1983, Guakía is the most prominent arts and cultural organization in Hartfords Hispanic community. The word, guakia, means we in Taino, the language of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean (pre-Columbus). The word guakia signifies the unity of the Hispanic community no matter where individuals may be living. Volunteer parents who felt that their children had lost contact with the traditions of their culture and heritage founded Guakía. They felt their children needed to connect with their heritage in order to develop a sense of pride, community and self-esteem. Originally, Guakía was focused on the culture of Puerto Rico, however in recent years, as the community has become more diverse and the needs have shifted, Guakías mission has been broadened to include all Hispanic cultures. Using a curriculum based on both Puerto Rican and Latin American music, dance, and art forms, Guakía provides a wide array of visual and performing arts initiatives such as folkloric dance, painting, ceramics, traditional Hispanic music, and art classes. The early sacrifices of parents, volunteers, and teachers gave Guakía strong roots in the Puerto Rican culture. These roots have now expanded and sprouted like a beautiful tree with many branches and leaves to include all Hispanic cultures.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts Projects Day on May 3, 2018. Projects Day highlights academic excellence across USMA showcasing leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity and will employ their education to help build the Army and the Nation’s future. (U.S. Army photo by Michelle Eberhart)

The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.

Read more about the project here:

tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html

Purchase prints here:

society6.com/TiffanyGholar

Buy the book on Amazon and Etsy.