"Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South" (Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art / City Gallery, Charleston)

Nearly the first thing I saw upon walking into this exhibition was a graphic, with supporting interactive screen, illustrating and explaining how southernness was being understood - a smart move, highlighting the way these designations are always up for grabs, and that this fluidity is itself a theme across the contemporary photographs gathered for the exhibition. Lots of high quality stuff.

Maude Schuyler Clay - 'Anna, Ishy's Haircut' (2000) 

 Lucinda Bunnen - 'Dixie Dogs' (2014)

Sheila Pree Bright - 'Protesting White Nationalists at the "White Power" March in Stone Mountain Park I' (2016) 

Eliot Dudik - 'Alligator Alley, Oregon Road' (2009) 

Shelby Lee Adams - 'Preacher Dillard' (2012)

Stacy Kranitz - 'Island Road' (2010)

Langdon Clay - 'Horse Tomatoes' (2003)

Anderson Scott - 'Clinton, Georgia' (2007)

Greg Miller - '21st Avenue South' (2008)

Jeff Rich - 'Hartsville Nuclear Plant (Abandoned)' (2013)

Once Upon a Time in America

This movie takes its time, and not only in the ways one might expect from a crime epic - the shifting back and forth through time gives it the feel of an elegy, with something of the air of a dream. Great soundtrack too, as you might expect. Leone/Morricone/De Niro.

Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston

Birge Harrison - 'Rosy Moon off Charleston Harbor' (1908-16) 

Thomas Fransioli - 'Rain in Charleston' (1951)

Louise Nevelson - 'The Wedding Present' (1977-79)

Big Mouth seasons 1 & 2

Extreme puberty! Sex positive and empathetic, and as the show itself points out, able to do what it does only because it's animated. Good stuff.

Black Panther

Watched again. I wonder whether the casting of the very English Martin Freeman as an American was a deliberate reversal (ie all white ethnicities/nationalities are interchangeable).

(first time)

Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Cape Cod

Selections from the permanent collection; a retrospective of Mary Sinclair whose work surprised me by pulling me in after a while; some recent award-winners of various kinds, amongst whom Helen Miranda Wilson stood out.

Mary Sinclair - "Yellow Room" (1961)

Varujan Boghosian - "48" (1968) ... I don't know what this is, but I like it

Peter Watts - "Tidal Marsh" (1984)

Helen Miranda Wilson - "The House Dream" (1987)

Specular Maps: Progressive and Avant-Garde Music from Indie Video Games, 2010-2018

A Believer magazine compilation, and given its theme, the preponderance of bleeps and pulses is unsurprising. The ones I especially like are essentially those that could be on a Sofia Coppola soundtrack: "Friendly Diplomacy" by Chipzel, "Epiphany Fields" by Scntfc, "Resurrections" by Lena Raine, "The Ballad of the Space Babies" by Jim Guthrie, "Marketing Director" by fingerspit.

Mitski - Be the Cowboy

This is so many different types of good - the impeccable, sharply-cut opening four tracks, the perfect left turns of "Me and My Husband" and "Nobody", the moody series of songs with which it ends. Arty pop and alt-rock stab. Probably my favourite album of the year so far.

(Puberty 2)

Holly Miranda - Mutual Horse

Two or three brighter moments aside, this one's on the bland side.

(The Magician's Private Library, Holly Miranda)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Everything about the MFA was impressive, including the size of its collection (that part of it on display, that is) and breadth. Given the aforementioned - size and breadth - and that we only had one full day in Boston, a selective approach was called for, which took in:

'Making Modern', spanning essentially the first half of the 20th century of art and design in North America (with an unsurprising tilt towards the USA, and tipping a bit into the 50s and 60s): O'Keeffe, Hopper, Kahlo etc, with some new discoveries too.

Hopper - 'Room in Brooklyn', 1932

Arthur Garfield Dove - 'Motor Boat', 1938

Hughie Lee-Smith, 'The Juggler', about 1964

There was a Winnie the Pooh exhibition, which was charming.

A whole lot of impressionists.

Renoir - 'Landscape on the Coast, near Menton', 1883

Pissarro - 'Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pre)', 1883

A room of Monet (always very impressive, and especially in aggregate).

'Grainstack (Snow Effect)', 1891

'Morning on the Seine, near Giverny', 1896

A room that had basically every other super-famous European post-impressionist painter of the late 19th to mid 20th century (Gauguin, Cezanne, van Gogh, Munch, Degas, etc).

Munch - 'Summer Night's Dream (The Voice)', 1893

Plus: some pretty fun contemporary selections (though this didn't seem to be a focus), including Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin; a selection of French pastels dominated by several Degas pieces; and a fair bit more looked at only quite quickly.

(w/ Penelope)

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was always going to be a highlight of this trip; my going to New Mexico was in large part to make pilgrimage to the sites of O'Keeffe's most iconic landscapes and visit the museum itself. On display was a representative selection of her paintings, with a few sketches, photos and other bits of material, arranged more thematically than chronologically, though in a way that the developments in her focuses over time were clearly apparent. I'd seen some of the pieces on display before, including several quite recently at the Heide exhibition (*) to which they travelled, while others were new to me - in a lot of cases, I hadn't even seen prints of them before, which was a delight. There's not much to say, really - this was blissful.

By theme:

Abstract Nature: 'Bella Donna', 1939; 'Green Lines and Pink', 1919

Becoming Georgia O'Keeffe: 'No. 22 - Special' (1916-17)

The Black Place (150 miles west of Ghost Ranch): 'Black Place III', 1944

At Lake George, New York:  'Autumn Trees - The Maple', 1924

My New Yorks: 'Untitled (City Night)', 1970s

O'Keeffe's Abiquiu garden: Todd Webb - 'Georgia O'Keeffe in Abiquiu Garden in Front of Corn', n.d.

O'Keeffe's New Mexico: 'Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie's II', 1930; 'Horse's Skull with White Rose', 1931'; 'Black Cross with Red Sky', 1929

The Wideness and Wonder of the World: 'Clouds 5 / Yellow Horizon and Clouds', 1963/1964

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe

Enjoyable selection. I liked the short videos I saw, Holly Wilson's sculpture-installations, and the examples of Native artists engaging with 20th century action and abstract art movements, often drawing in elements from their own cultural traditions to good effect.

Patrick Swazo Hinds - "Pueblo Motif"

SITE Santa Fe

Two exhibitions on at this contemporary art space. "Casa tomada" had some interesting pieces but I didn't really glom onto it as a whole; separately, Jacob Hashimoto's pieces were cool, especially the centrepiece installation "The Dark Isn't the Thing to Worry About".

Free State of Jones

Earnest but kind of procedural, and never entirely reckons with the way it's a white man (McConaughey) at the centre of a story about race and the Civil War.

First Man

On the one hand, I thought First Man was good. It made me feel the sheer amount of metal and stress (and engineering) involved with space travel, it dramatised the human element (I especially liked the character of Janet, Neil Armstrong's wife) and it wasn't thoughtlessly jingoistic or triumphalist about the whole endeavour. On the other hand, it felt long at times, maybe because it didn't obviously follow the usual formula for an 'achievement' based film like this (or did so in a less familiar way). Actually, the last film that left me feeling this way was Dunkirk.

Disenchantment season 1

Enjoyable and colourful, if somewhat predictable. Luci is a great character.

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

A fairly cursory look through.

Daniel Peebles - "Carlson Family" (2017)

Alfred Stieglitz - "Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait" (1918)

Ansel Adams - "Moonrise, Hernandez" (1941)

Willard Nash - "Landscape (Santa Fe)" (1930)

Megan Abbott - Give Me Your Hand

As Meg Wolitzer's back cover blurb says, this novel mines themes of ambition, competition, excellence and friendship, and the long, undeterrable reach of memory - Kit and Diane, tied together by what we think is a single dark secret but turns out, by the time the twists of the final pages are done, to be several. Maybe a tiny bit formulaic, but very suitable holiday reading.

Albuquerque Museum

A good one, mixing art with historical and informative exhibits, with a relative focus on Albuquerque while providing an introduction to northern New Mexico as a whole.

Peter Hurd - "A Shower in a Dry Year" (1969)

Felipe Archuleta - "Coyote" (1977)

Fritz Scholder - "Portrait in a White Suit" (1983), Native American iconography; it's figurative but its gestural strokes made me think of abstract expressionism

Bruce Lowney - "Approaching Storm" (1981)

Georgia O'Keeffe - "Gray Cross with Blue" (1929), first O'Keeffe of this New Mexico visit!

Paul Suttman - "Braque Visited by the Conquering Venus Armed with the Apples of Discord" (1991), in foreground