The Solace Project

7:57

The Solace Project

The Solace Project ·

2026/09/13

This past week at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, I delivered a lecture on the topic of Art, Nature, and Well-being in Museums, pure joy to see a packed audience, so much interest in this topic. A museum colleague said that she came because I was speaking her love language.I started by posing the question: What if museums were places where we learn about art and also places that help us feel better and live better?What if, as the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said just last week, “museums

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8:01

The Solace Project

The Solace Project ·

2026/08/23

As a child, I learned history by arranging and rearranging little figures. As a curator, I learned history by arranging and rearranging works of art in galleries.This week, I am packing my studio in Putnam Valley, New York, the last part of the move to Chicago. I have been looking again at my collection of tiny US presidents.LookAs a little girl, I loved this set of US president figurines, Washington through Johnson. My Uncle John collected them in the 1960s, one tiny dude with each full tank of

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7:09

The Solace Project

The Solace Project ·

2026/08/03

The Solace ProjectLooking CloselyA practice of attention and graceToday my practice of looking and paying attention takes me from deer to squirrel, allowing me to think again about a particular painting of a boy by the American painter John Singleton Copley, one that I spent a tons of time on long ago and haven’t thought about for just as long.LookLet’s start with the deer. In a “who gets to do this?” moment, I recently went on a retreat to to Nara, Japan. I watched deer in the park, in the streets

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The Solace Project #35

The Solace Project ·

2022/02/07

Dear Friends,Oh yes, while the pandemic gave me and so many others hours at home to research and write, doesn’t it feel that getting out into the world makes time evaporate? I’m not complaining, not my style—just yesterday I was talking to a neighbor here in New York about the exquisite beauty of the ice coated trees and shrubs glistening under blue skies and he said, why so optimistic all of the time, all I see is the likelihood that I will slip and fall and that will be that. I’m glass half full

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8:22

The Solace Project #34

The Solace Project ·

2021/11/23

Dear Friends,I went to the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Jasper Johns’ work a few weeks ago and haven’t stopped thinking about the flag paintings. Maybe it’s because my friend Stefanie--who goes to exhibitions like it’s her job, seeking out the popular and the complex, the mainstream and the counterculture, and then texts me to recommend or ask what I think--told me that she just doesn’t get the flag paintings. How could she not get the flag paintings? In my mind, I immediately flashed to Map, the

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8:22

The Solace Project #34

The Solace Project ·

2021/11/22

Dear Friends,I went to the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Jasper Johns’ work a few weeks ago and haven’t stopped thinking about the flag paintings. Maybe it’s because my friend Stefanie--who goes to exhibitions like it’s her job, seeking out the popular and the complex, the mainstream and the counterculture, and then texts me to recommend or ask what I think--told me that she just doesn’t get the flag paintings. How could she not get the flag paintings? In my mind, I immediately flashed to Map, the

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6:10

The Solace Project #32

The Solace Project ·

2021/10/19

Hi friends,It's been awhile since I've posted, at least a few weeks. One thing I’ve learned from Substack the platform on which I write and record this blog is to be consistent with my posts so that you open the emails and come back week after week. Apologies that I've been inconsistent of late and I have an excuse. A lame excuse, no pun intended: I broke my right arm and it's taken me a couple of weeks to work through the pain, to figure out how to type with my voice because yes of course it's my

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The Solace Project #31

The Solace Project ·

2021/09/13

Hello Friends,I have been thinking alot about close looking that I’ve been writing about for weeks and realize that my close looking, even as it connects to solace, is largely grounded in my training as an art historian. I’m looking, but as a step to research and investigation of the work of art. I think, more and more, that we are looking too closely at the work of art and not at ourselves. The transformative learning moment for me, long ago, came when I found Marcia Pointon’s circle of questions,

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The Solace Project #30

The Solace Project ·

2021/09/05

Dear Friends,And now, about that squirrel…. Over the course of the past three weeks in residence in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where I held the space for scholars in the Tyson Think Tank, my focus on the squirrel in Copley’s portrait of Frances Deering Atkinson of 1765 (you can catch up on the back story for this adventure) became a little obsessive. In my own defense, I would say that that little rodent on the chain attracted more interest than any other part

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