Findings 43
On essential play, the anticipation of warmth, and poetry in-between
“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.”
This month’s collection: the things we must share, that we insist must exist. That lift us and “[let] the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.”
— from On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry, 1999
I. TO PLAY
A. An exhibition on play as essential mode of inquiry, “that allows joy and artistic rigor to meaningfully coexist.”
— through March 31 at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, NYC
B. “Noguchi tried in every single decade to get a playground built in New York…He thought kids should experience the environment the way man first experienced the earth, as a spectacular and complex place.”
— via Herman Miller, an exploration of Isamu Noguchi’s playground design, ahead of the artist’s upcoming retrospective, opening Sept. 2026 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
C. Compositions that “reference the placement, mass, and scale of floral arrangements that Aline Barnsdall had in the house during the 1920s” combined with the innovative materials of the Sogetsu School, which “challenged traditions of ikebana and celebrated freedom of individual expression.”
— Ravi GuneWardena: Ikebana for Hollyhock House
II. WAITING FOR THE SUN
Two cases for reading by lamplight: Studio Ford’s Pompeii Lamp. “Night Castel” Lamp by Josef Hoffmann, 1920
Sometimes you need a reminder: poppy season will return.
Debussy’s études by French pianist Monique Haas. Cover design by Erik Nitsche. Via @midcenturyclassical.
III. PARTING WORDS
“Between what I see and what I say,
between what I say and what I keep silent,
between what I keep silent and what I dream,
between what I dream and what I forget:
poetry.”
I have always the lilt in your writings. The quote from 'On Beauty and Being Just' is gratifying to savor and read and reread!