Latest news with #Thinker
UPI
2 days ago
- General
- UPI
U.N. global plastics pollution summit ends without agreement in Geneva
A 20-foot-tall take on Rodin's iconic "Thinker" sculpture pictured Friday outside U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, as an 8-day effort to agree a global plastic pollution treaty wound down. The art installation featuring plastic waste by Canadian artist and activist Benjamin Von Wong was specially commissioned for the meeting. Photo by Martial Trezzini/EPA Aug. 15 (UPI) -- A sixth round of United Nations negotiations on ending plastic pollution broke up in Switzerland early Friday without a deal after disagreements with oil-producing nations pushing for recycling solutions over reducing plastic use. Delegates from 184 countries worked into the early hours in Geneva to bridge division between more than 100 nations pressing for production limits and oil-rich states, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, arguing that plastic was critical to their future economic health. The final text did not place restrictions on plastic production but did address other issues like dangerous plastic chemicals, including forever chemicals, and making plastics easier to recycle -- but left countries to implement changes as they saw best. "We have missed a historic opportunity, but we have to keep going and act urgently. The planet and present and future generations need this treaty," said the Cuban delegation. Colombia blamed the collapse of what was supposed to be the final treaty negotiations, eight months after countries failed to conclude a deal in Busan, South Korea, on a small group of countries, which it said "simply don't want an agreement." That claim was echoed by Greenpeace's delegation, saying in a news release that the call was clear for a strong, legally binding treaty that ended plastic pollution from extraction to disposal, protected human health and provided financial help for the clean up "The plastics crisis is accelerating, and the petrochemical industry is determined to bury us for short-term profits. Now is not the time to blink. Now is the time for courage, resolve and perseverance. And world leaders must listen. The future of our health and planet depends on it," said the group's delegation lead Graham Forbes. The European Union, which along with Britain, had been pushing to cut plastic production and for global plastics standards to boost recycling, was less pessimistic about the outcome, saying it formed a strong basis for further negotiations. "Plastic pollution is one of the defining crises of our age, and our responsibility to act is clear. While the latest text on the table does not yet meet all our ambitions, it is a step forward -- and the perfect must not be the enemy of the good," said EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall. "The European Union will continue to push for a stronger, binding agreement that safeguards public health, protects our environment, and builds a clean, competitive, and circular economy. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the generations yet to come," Roswall said. The effort looked set to drag into a fifth year, long beyond the 2024 deadline for a comprehensive agreement dealing with the "full life cycle of plastic" mandated in a resolution adopted by the U.N. Environment Assembly in March 2022.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Amy Sherald's Blue Sky Vision for America
It has been Amy Sherald's fate to be known for one painting only. Her portrait of Michelle Obama, commissioned in 2018 by the National Portrait Gallery, brought the artist overnight fame. Ignoring the conventions of academic portraiture, a genre associated with pale men standing in front of burgundy drapes, Sherald liberated America's first lady from the fusty, cigar-brown rooms of the past. Obama, dressed in a sleeveless gown, leans forward in her chair, channeling Rodin's 'Thinker.' The background, a featureless expanse of powder blue, suggests fresh air. The painting is an anomaly in Sherald's oeuvre. 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' a compact and rousing retrospective of 42 paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, brings us the work of an artist who is not primarily a recorder of first ladies or famous faces. Rather, Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize. She can be preachy, but her paintings are saved from sentimentality by an unerring sense of geometric design and a taste for spare, simplified, super-flat planes. Stepping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the museum, you find yourself contemplating a curved, rather amazing wall hung with five life-size portraits, each in a different sizzling color. 'The Girl Next Door' (2019), my favorite, shows a young woman in a white polka-dot dress, silhouetted against an emerald green background. Compared with the effortlessly attractive girl-next-door we know from countless films, Sherald has painted a touchingly awkward woman, her red leather belt rising up from her waist to her chest. But you can see that she is trying to look her best. Her immaculate dress, her red lipstick, her fixed-up hair with its attractive side part, are careful efforts at self-presentation that speak volumes about American girlhood. Sherald, who is 51, composes her scenes with extreme deliberation. She picks out models for her paintings and outfits them with costumes and props. She photographs them and works from her reference photographs to situate Black faces and figures into roles and settings complete with suburban lawns, white picket fences and other nostalgic symbols of American plenty. Here is a world in which it is usually summer, and days are squinty bright and shadowless. 'I'm an escapist,' Sherald once said in an interview. 'I love the Teletubbies — the idea of grass with no bugs makes me happy.' Her titles add another layer of fictional intrigue. Sometimes taken from novels or poems, they alternately heroicize her figures or gently poke fun at the human capacity for small, foolish, everyday self-deceptions. For instance, 'It Made Sense … Mostly in her Mind' (2011), shows a 30-ish woman dressed in a timeless navy blazer with gold buttons. She could be a lawyer until you notice she's wearing a lavender plastic helmet and holding an old-fashioned toy, a pink-and-white unicorn stick horse. It doesn't add up, but you can't say Sherald didn't warn us: The outfit did make sense … mostly in the subject's wishful and daydreamy mind. In some ways, Sherald's paintings are re-enactments of the childhood game of dress up. She is drawn to loud, retro-ish fabrics — to wide stripes and dresses imprinted with floral patterns or strewed with rows of strawberries or cherries or lemons. She excels at painting pleated skirts, their folds of fabric as stately and evenly spaced as ancient Greek columns. And note the exaggeratedly clean ambience. White shirts gleam with Tide-strength brightness, and khakis remain unblemished by mystery grease stains. You cannot find fresher clothing in the work of any contemporary painter, with the exception of Alex Katz, the pre-eminent realist, now in his 90s, who similarly garbs his figures in shirts and pants that look as if they were removed five minutes earlier from a J. Crew gift box. In the case of both artists, the squeaky-clean attire echoes in the formal neatness of their respective painting styles. In Sherald's case, at times I found myself searching in vain for any sign of an emphatic brush stroke, a trace of touch. This is especially true in a series of larger-than-life genre scenes that represent her more recent work. 'A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt),' from 2022, a mural-size painting stretching 11 feet wide, shows a man sitting atop a brand-new green tractor. What's problematic is that Sherald's instinct for pristine surfaces — which adds so much allure to her images of clothing — makes the tractor look as blandly commercial as an item in a mail-order catalog. The man could be sitting in a printed ad for a John Deere 820. Sherald's vertical portraits, by contrast, retain their pictorial charisma despite a certain repetitiveness. Nearly all of the portraits in the show, which go back to 2008, are exactly the same size (54 inches by 43 inches). The figures in her paintings, whether men, women or children, tend to have the same unblinking, inscrutable expression. They gaze at you alertly but noncommittedly, as if listening in silent judgment as you tell them a story that doesn't quite make sense. Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1973, Sherald majored in fine art at Clark Atlanta, a historically Black university. She moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, earning her M.F.A. in 2004. She has spoken openly about her health issues. She was just finishing graduate school when she was diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a serious heart condition. One day in 2012 she passed out in a Rite Aid pharmacy and woke up in a pool of blood. She was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she waited two months for a donor's heart and then underwent surgery for a heart transplant. Four years passed. In 2016, she rose to wide attention when she became the first woman and the first Black person to be awarded the grand prize in the National Portrait Gallery's prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which is open to any artist in the United States. Her entry, 'Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)' (2014), is a coolly charming portrait of a Black woman in a bold polka-dot dress. She holds, in her white-gloved hands, an impossibly large teacup and saucer, exemplifying Sherald's tendency to mingle realism and fantasy. 'Kingdom' (2022), for instance — one of the standouts of the show — is a low-angled, 10-foot-tall view of a schoolboy perched on the top rung of a playground slide, his spiky, stand-up hair silhouetted against a blue sky. In a sherpa-lined denim jacket, tan pants and unscuffed white sneakers, he could be any boy of 8 or 9, anyone's brother or son. Except that he occupies the pinnacle of the painting's Renaissance-style triangular composition, looming above us, a momentary king of the universe. Sublime or Not Sublime? So how should we categorize Sherald's style? 'American Sublime,' which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has a baffling title. The word 'sublime,' an art-historical term, refers to art that inspires rapture or terror in a viewer, usually in response to the enormousness and grandeur of nature. When you open the Sherald exhibition catalog to Page 10 and see a full-page reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich's 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' (1817), an icon of German romanticism that appeared in a show that just closed at the Met, you wonder if you picked up the wrong catalog. Sherald's work is not sublime, but in its emphasis on the transforming power of clothing, it can fairly be called 'superfine,' to borrow a word from the title of another Met show.` Sherald, it seems clear, is an American realist, recording ordinary people and pleasures. Her work is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's illustrations for the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. He, too, combined and recombined reference photographs of his models to construct narratives of optimism and uplift about everyday Americans. One of Rockwell's acolytes, the painter Bo Bartlett, is a well-known realist, now 69, also from Columbus, Ga. Once, as a schoolgirl, Sherald saw a large-scale painting at the Columbus Museum that showed a Black man standing proudly outside a small brick house; it was painted by Bartlett, who is white. Sherald, who said she had never seen a painting of a Black person before, has described the moment as life changing, awakening her to how she wanted to spend her future. Even now, her genre scenes, especially 'A Midsummer Afternoon Dream' (2021), nod to Bartlett's luminous, blue-skied landscapes. Sherald also owes something to Horace Pippin, the pioneering, early-20th-century Black artist. In his 'Self-Portrait' (1941) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, he rendered his face as a mask of gray monotone. Sherald similarly depicts the skin tones of her figures in neutral gray rather than in natural browns. She has said that she uses grayscale to sidestep the issue of racial categorization. Yet she does take on politics, especially in her 'Breonna Taylor' (2020), an ethereal turquoise-on-turquoise portrait of the 26-year-old medical worker who was killed in her own apartment in Louisville, Ky., in a botched police raid. 'American Sublime' will no doubt acquire a sharper political edge on Sept. 19, when it opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Portrait Gallery is part of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution and consequently vulnerable to recent orders from the executive branch seeking to dismantle or reshape programs that give off a whiff of diversity, equity or inclusion. The irony is that Sherald's work is not about categorizing one group or class of people. Rather it's about characterizing folks with visibly different lives, ranging from a schoolgirl in pig tails to a legless boxer resting against ropes of red, white and blue, to a tall, transgender woman in a hot-pink wig and high-slit dress posing as the Statue of Liberty. It is cliché these days to say that we want to 'feel seen' or validated, but here's the question: If we are all hoping to feel seen, who will be left to do the looking? Sherald, for one.
