The Eye Museum Flip Book

[Josephina]

Mygrandmother is from Japan so I am a quarter Japanese, and have a huge appreciation for Japanese culture. So when I found out that Morikami Museum & Gardens is three hours away from Orlando I was pretty excited to visit and add it to my travel journal. I use a quick and easy method of journaling detailed in a previous post. Here is a peek at my travel journal from Morikami.

The veggie bento box from the Cornell Cafe was delicious! It included veggie dumplings, Asian eggplant, fried tofu, cellophane noodles, rice, veggies, egg rolls and sushi all in a beautiful lacquer box! The Asian eggplant was surprisingly my favorite, the sauce on it was really good. They have a classic bento for the meat eaters reading this and a sushi bento as well. There are lots of fun flavored sake, and some novelty ice creams I wanted to try but I was too full. Alas, next time.

Make sure you take off your shoes before you step on the tatami mats and take a seat in the sitting area. The museum has a fun and interactive example of a Japanese house with a kitchen where you could open up the refrigerator and oven, try out some chopsticks and even see what a bathroom would look like. Time to figure out what all those buttons do for our future trip to Japan! There is also an interesting section on the history of the community of Japanese farmers that settled in Florida. These are two permanent exhibits to the museum but there are also some rotating exhibits, workshops, and festivals that take place, so make sure you check their website.

If you've had it up to here with spring cleaning, don't flip out! Instead, come to Thomas J. Watson Library and thumb through some of our flip books. Most of us had flip books as kids: books entirely composed of images that seem to move as if in a slow-motion film as you page through the book.

A quick search on WATSONLINE for material/document type "flip books" will bring up quirky visual treasures by artists like Janet Zweig, Amanda Friedman, and Sturtevant. See videos of some of these books in action below, and enjoy!

The 32 artists whose drawings are on display range from Renaissance masters like Michelangelo, to modernists such as Picasso, to the contemporary artist Fred Sandback. In all cases, both the front and the back of the sheet have been used, sometimes as documents. This is the first exhibition devoted entirely to the display of drawings as three-dimensional objects with both a front and a back. Many of the flip sides, called versos, are revealed to the public for the first time.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Michelangelo, Paolo Veronese, Agostino Carracci, Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jacques-Louis David, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Lger, Henry Moore, David Smith, and Claes Oldenburg.

When you visit the Reading Public Museum and wander through the second floor galleries, you spend most of your time moving from work to work along the walls, making observations about the subject matter, application of paint, and style or technique of paintings and other works of art, but did you know that the reverse sides of paintings can tell us lots of information too? Collectors, curators and museum staff spend a lot of time researching and documenting works of art in their collections to establish its history, also known as provenance, and clues that help tell its story, which can sometimes be revealed by simply turning a painting over.

One remarkable case-in-point is a painting by William Baziotes, the renowned Abstract Expressionist, who was part of the movement also known as the New York School of painters. His colleagues and fellow painters included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko among others, who helped make New York City the new hub of the international art world in the 1940s and 50s.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1912, William Baziotes moved with his family to Reading in 1913 when he was a year old. His parents were Greek immigrants who came to Berks County for business opportunities. The family ran a successful restaurant and bakery in the city. For a time, his father was a partner in the Crystal Restaurant on the 500 block of Penn Street in Reading. Baziotes also worked at J. M. Kase & Company, a stained glass manufacturer in the city from 1931 to 1933.

The artist moved to New York in 1933 on the recommendation of friend and Reading poet Byron Vazakas. He enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design and absorbed influences of European modernism including Surrealism before adopting his mature abstract style.

The reverse of the painting indicates that the painting was lent by Mr. Samuel Kootz of Kootz Gallery to an exhibition, The New Decade: Thirty-Five American Painters and Sculptors (1955-1956) held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which also traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Art Galleries of the University of California Los Angeles, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, and the City Art Museum of Saint Louis.

Importantly, Moon Forms was included in the 1959 international exhibition, which traveled to the Museum Fridericianum and Orangerie (Kassel, Germany), and Schloss Bellevue (Berlin). The show was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City titled documenta II, which included works by 339 artists including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Adolf Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, among others. The loan/accession number from that 1959 exhibition appears several times on the back of the canvas.

In 2012, BREAKFAST began experimenting with Flip-Discs, a mechanical display technology that was originally developed in the 1960s for airport signage. BREAKFAST developed a way to increase the speed the discs could flip and began creating large-scale installations using this modified technology. In 2017, BREAKFAST completely redeveloped and modernized the technology from the ground up, turning it into an unparalleled technological medium.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY owns a very special pair of red, white, and blue flip-flops. Republicans sold them at their 2004 convention to fuel their flip-flop attacks on then-Sen. John Kerry, the Democrat running against President George W. Bush.

IF HALEY IS THE CLEAR REPUBLICAN ALTERNATIVE to Trump, what would be her platform? If she somehow captures the nomination, what would she promise? If she ended up in the Oval Office, how would she govern?

It is probably safe to say Haley would not try to seize power or hold on to it if she lost a presidential election. But would she compromise U.S. democracy in other ways? For instance, how would she handle Trump and his MAGA movement? Her history tells us nothing.

I nominate Nikki Haley for her own Smithsonian exhibit. She may or may not be on track to wrest the 2024 Republican nomination from Donald Trump, but this much is clear: She\u2019s already a museum-level flip-flopper. Flip-flops with five-inch heels, anyone?

Haley\u2019s prospects of emerging as Trump\u2019s chief primary rival grew much stronger Tuesday with twin endorsements from the powerful, well-resourced Koch network and Judd Gregg, the former governor, House member, and senator from influential New Hampshire, which holds the FITN primary\u2014first in the nation. So far, she has avoided much scrutiny of her flips and her flops. Expect that to change.

This is not the \u201Cengaging ambiguity\u201D of a Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose vague nods and \u201Cyes, yes, yes\u201D responses left people with the misimpression that he not only heard them, he agreed with them, as Warren Moscow told the New York Times in 1982. Haley is a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who has made it almost impossible to discern where she stands on the two fundamental issues driving Democratic electoral success in the last three years: abortion and the Trump threat to democracy.

Back in 2016, Haley called Trump \u201Ceverything a governor doesn\u2019t want in a president,\u201D but she then joined his administration as U.N. ambassador and endorsed him for a second term. He was \u201Cincredibly reckless with our national security\u201D in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, she has said, but she also attacked the criminal justice system and said that if he\u2019s convicted, she\u2019d be inclined to pardon him.

She said after January 6th that history would judge Trump harshly and the GOP should move on from him. But she also said \u201Cgive the man a break,\u201D opposed impeachment, and campaigned for 2020 election deniers last year. Though some news organizations did not note the passive voice, her recent campaign-trail language carefully avoids direct cause, effect, and blame. \u201CChaos follows him,\u201D she said of Trump in South Carolina this week. I wonder why that is. \u201CWe have too much division in this country,\u201D she said. Again, I wonder why that is.

Haley has forged a similarly confusing path on abortion access. She argued at both the first and third GOP debates that a federal ban is impossible because it would not pass the Senate. She also suggested that there\u2019s a national consensus to ban late-term abortions (incorrect and problematic\u2014has she never considered medical crises or major fetal abnormalities?).

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