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The Army Corps of Engineers completed Phase 2 of fire debris removal for Altadena resident Margot Stueber and is the first person to receive building permits to rebuild her home on March 7, 2025. (Mayra Beltran / Los Angeles County)
Announcement video on YouTube
Since 2022, I have been slowly working toward realizing an epic historical diorama depicting all of Ancient Rome, circa mid-4th century CE. The project came in with the historical center at the Palatine and Capitoline Hills. The second phase saw a northward expansion which introduced new typologies upon the much broader Quirinal and Esquiline Hills. Today, I am announcing SPQR – Phase III which, with your support, will leave the monumental floodplains of the Campus Martius conquered!
Phase III will expand the historical diorama of the 4th century city west, adding at least another 90,000 bricks to the contiguous landscape. Added to Phases I+II, this will bring the total number of bricks well past a quarter million, likely approaching 300,000. Remember, the full diorama should easily eclipse a million bricks, though none of this continued progress will be possible without new & long-standing project supporters over on Patreon.
CAMPVS MARTIVS
Known to the Romans as the “Field of Mars,” the Campus Martius represents the epic rise of the Roman Empire. These relatively low-lying fields quickly ascended from largely underutilized training and festival grounds to a comparable level of development as the urban core during the first century BCE. This crucial period of city expansion also manifested in the political transition between the fading Roman Republic and its eventual consolidation toward imperium.
The Campus Martius during the Imperial era was nothing if not monumental! Many ruined structures in the area have provided the foundations for buildings raised in the centuries since. The Theatre of Pompey was the city’s first permanent theatrical venue, and its semicircular footprint is evident in the city layout near the Campo de’ Fiori to this day. Likewise, today’s Piazza Navona stands atop the groundworks of the ancient Stadium of Domitian.
But the most breathtaking of the Eternal City’s handful of well-preserved ancient structures is the Pantheon. Initially built under Augustus’s righthand man, Marcus Agrippa, and definitively restored under Hadrian in the second century CE, the Pantheon once served as the preeminent temple of worship dedicated to all the Roman deities. The inclusion of this temple has been one of the most widely anticipated additions to my SPQR diorama from the start!
Festina Lente
Now, I must stress that none of this progress is a foregone conclusion. Victory loves hard work, but I continue to rely on your support to ensure my self-reliance as a one-man small business owner. Therefore, I humbly ask that you please consider supporting this unprecedented project by becoming a member over on my Patreon page. No amount of support is too small and it’s no exaggeration to say that subscriber-based platforms are virtually the only way to fund such long-term visions.
Your support ensures the continued growth of my oeuvre as I work toward the goal of exhibiting in museums and galleries around the world and for many years to come. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but with your help, the Eternal City can serve as the necessary gallery centerpiece and vital educational diorama I first envisioned prior to the outset of Phase I back in 2021.
For more information on the benefits of supporting this endeavor and to follow along with all the upcoming insights into the months-long design + build process of Phase III, check out my Patreon page in the link below.
Experiments to make an image or image sequence that fits the music piece "Violin Phase" by Steve Reich.
Amtrak Heritage Phase IV P42DC is lead power for the Autumn Colors Express Excursion Train.
Hinton, WV.
This black phase Timber Wolf female pauses with her head in the warmth of morning light on a bitterly cold morning at the Colorado Wolf and Wildfire Center - Divide, CO
August 20/22
22-630327
Toronto
Toronto Waterfront
Toronto Skyline
Residential/Retail Development
Sugar Wharf
Sugar Wharf: Sugar Wharf Condominiums Phase 1
(LBCO Lands)
95 Lake Shore Boulevard East
Menkes Developments
64s + 70s
architects-Alliance
Mixed-use Development
Sugar Wharf
Sugar Wharf: 100 Queens Quay at Sugar Wharf
LBCO Lands),
100 Queens Quay E,
Menkes Developments,
25s,
B+H Architects,
Yesterday, when I put up the photo of the Red Squirrel, I mentioned that we'd, recently, been visited by a black-phase Gray Squirrel as well. Here she is! Seen on June 26, 2012 in Columbia County, New York, USA. Neither red nor black-phase squirrels are common in my area, but we are pleased to see them every now & then & try to make them feel welcome! I, first, saw them when I worked in lower Westchester County, New York & was pleased when I saw them farther north! Read below for more information:
www.woodlandhabitat.com/articles/black-squirrels.htm
www.massaudubon.org/Nature_Connection/wildlife/index.php?...
Secretary-General Kofi Annan (right) and Nane Annan (Second right) observing a hearing of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Melesio Casas, Born El Paso, TX 1929
-died San Antonio, TX 2014
Humanscape 62, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 73 x 97 in.
Humanscape 62 satirizes the trivialization of brown cultures--both Mexican and Indigenous--in American advertising. Melesio Casas depicts the Frito Bandito (a racist cartoon mascot of the Frito-Lay Company) as part of a Mesoamerican jade pendant. He juxtaposes this with images of American Indian and Mexican American people, a Brownie Girl Scout, and a tray of brownies, labeling them all "Brownies of the Southwest."
A central figure of the Chicano arts movement, Casas created Humanscape 62 the year Frito-Lay began to phase out its use of the character in response to lobbying by Chicano activists. The painting both documents the character's existence and confronts the power of mass media to shape and perpetuate cultural stereotypes.
americanart.si.edu/education/learning/our-america-latino-...
In the early 1970s, Chicano activists successfully lobbied the Frito-Lay Company to remove the Frito Bandito from public circulation. This figure, which was the advertising mascot for Frito-Lay corn chips, became the centerpiece of Casas’s pop-styled painting Humanscape 62. Here he surrounds the Frito Bandito with a series of “brown” references drawn from American and indigenous cultures. Such incongruent juxtapositions–which include a tempting plate of brownies, a junior Girl Scout, a Native American in profile, and quotes of masterworks such as a turquoise Aztec mosaic—critique the trivialization of Chicano culture and allude to the rich cultures stereotypes obscure.
americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/our-america/online/humanscape
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Manuel Alvarado and Emma Alvarado are closer to rebuilding now that the Army Corps of Engineers have completed Phase 2 of fire debris removal on March 7, 2025. The Alvarado’s navigated the rebuilding process with help from grandson Antonio Cosby who has helped every step of the way.
(Mayra Beltran / Los Angeles County)
Xmas Holidays!
Alors la, j'ai pas voulu en faire trop...
On recoupe un carré plongeant, on effile.
Teinture noire presque partout, et une meche jaune jonquille pour tout faire flash!
Granada Village Shopping Center Redevelopment (Phase 1 Construction - 2011-04-18) - Granada Hills, CA. Urban One www.urbanone.com.
Phase II build-out at the South Germantown Bike Park. 118 volunteer hours in 3 days to get the beginner and intermediate lines open and running before the 2014 MoCo Epic.