Remembering

 Two days ago, M and I went to the Tredegar Iron Works site, which is now a museum of the Civil war.  It's very interesting, lots of photos, lots of text, all in the huge old iron works building. The text tells the history from three viewpoints, the North, the South and the Slave. These old walls have so much to tell us. There are several of the original buildings on the site and some of the old machinery, but some things have been recreated. This site, by the way, is only a mile and a half from my house.

 M gave me a book she just finished called MARCH by Geraldine Brooks. It's the story of the father in the book Little Women. I just started reading it and it's very interesting. It takes place during the American Civil War.

 Yesterday, and today, M and I attended a symposium at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on the work of Xu Bing. I was familiar with his Book from the Sky, which we saw installed at the Sackler in Washington DC. Now, he's done a project at the museum using tobacco.  The exhibit is amazing and hearing the panels of scholars yesterday, and Xu Bing today, was very informative.  I'm glad we decided to attend this.

 This is the studio school of the VMFA. I'll be teaching my 2-d Design classes here for the next six weeks starting this Tuesday evening. I'm very happy to be doing this again.  I'll be in that 2nd floor studio, in the further building.

 This is what's left of the HUGE 100 year old tree that fell over in the storm and knocked out the power to the studio school. That's the back of the building. The tree, fortunately to state the obvious, didn't fall on the school building, just fell across power lines.

 I snapped this behind the museum during the lunch break yesterday. It was so sunny and the grounds are now complete including sculpture.

This is my 9/11 commemoration Mail Art. I was thinking a lot about what I might do and, while walking home from the symposium, it came to me that I had to do a quote about fear. My rubber stamp technique left something to be desired, but still, it worked out okay.