Tiny House

Window shopping gets into the issue of consumerism.  I've been following some of the minimalists, which led me to the tiny house movement, which goes further yet.

Courtesy of Construire Sa Maison En Afrique

I don't think I could.

Early Abstract Art

Roberta Smith implores people to save The American Folk Art Museum's 10 year old building on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.  The Museum houses an impressive historical collection of quilts, along with four to five thousand works by 20th century outsider artist Henry Darger. 

On the quilt exhibition, Ms. Smith observes,

They effortlessly combine personal and national histories with an exceptional kind of down-home formalism, all the while using available, often humble, fabrics. Like painted furniture and ceramics — only more so — they encourage a free-range pictorial expression outside of painting’s traditional boundaries. Like Navajo blankets, many can be counted among the earliest abstract art in post-conquest North America.

Courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum

Artist, Rebecca Fisher Stolzfus, 1903

Wool with rayon binding (added later)

We don't often think about a bunch of 19th century housewives, or Native Americans, American slaves or unassuming Amish as predominant 19th century abstractionists, or, as the New York Times writer notes, regarding Rebecca Fisher Stoltzfus' 1903 Diamond in the Square, "precursors of Minimalism's rigor and scale ... worthy in its boldness of the young Frank Stella .. a marvel to dissect and reassemble with the eye."

 

Could this, too, be part of the reason the museum is scheduled for closure?