Two Houses News: Carter Ratcliff
Substack brings positive affirmations for my mother (and me).
Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
I am thrilled to report a brief exchange with renowned art critic Carter Ratcliff that included a lovely posthumous affirmation for my mother (Mimi Weisbord).
Ratcliff is the author of The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, also Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, numerous monographs (Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, etc.), as well as decades of critical pieces for every major art publication. He is also publishing here on Substack.
In February, Ratcliff posted "Remember Tilted Arc?" about the Richard Serra public sculpture erected in 1981 in Foley Square (Federal Plaza) a little over a half-mile south of my mother’s loft on Lafayette Street. The sculpture was a 12-foot-high steel wall that extended 120 feet and obstructed the path of many federal employees who worked nearby.
Reading that headline, I did remember Tilted Arc. I recalled it was so unpopular it even made the nightly news.
And I remembered that my mother had mocked up a mural proposal to transform Tilted Arc and its public reception. Since then, I’ve been sifting through works on paper that I'd salvaged from her flat files to find it.
But I didn’t save everything.
(I can hear her admonishments in my head.)
Mimi proposed covering Serra’s long obstructive wall with a marching line of sunflowers. There was a bit of Van Gogh in the look, with the dark background of the sculpture and those warm flowers erupting to transform an otherwise industrial minimalist installation.
Her proposal was declined.
Tilted Arc was dismantled in 1989 after petitions, public meetings, and a lawsuit.
In February of 2024, I left a comment for Carter Ratcliff at his substack.
How fun to revisit and confront, once again, Tilted Arc! My mother made a City Walls proposal to transform Tilted Arc with one of her mural concepts in 1980.* I was reminded of these recently while excavating her Soho loft. Tilted Arc was audacious. Now, I see my mother’s proposal to augment the work of another artist as more so. Still, I’d have vastly preferred her version of Soho than the one we’ve ended up with. (I wrote a post about it - https://open.substack.com/pub/twohouses/p/soho-walls-never-funded)
(*It was later because Tilted Arc wasn’t installed until 1981.)
On March 15, I was surprised to receive a reply:
Thank you sending this link. Your mother’s proposals for Soho walls are terrific! I wish she had been able to transform Tilted Arc.
Congratulations, Mimi. You were, as the artist Dotty Attie expressed so well for your obituary, always ahead of your time.
See Mimi’s other City Walls proposals here: Soho Walls Never Funded.
In other news, I received my own “shot in the arm” for this substack recently (an expression often used by my father).
I’m delighted to report that Alison Bechdel, the ground-breaking graphic memoirist, author of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and The History of Superhuman Strength (and a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award), is reading Two Houses.
Over email, I offered her some of my mother’s detritus: an Ad Reinhardt satiric comic publication (the cover is crumbling apart, but it’s hard to throw these things out).
She graciously declined, concluding, "Two Houses is so powerful and wrenching! What a tale you are telling.”
Sheepishly, I asked if I might quote her to “blurb” my substack.
She responded, “Absolutely. Please do.”
Thank you, Alison. I’m so very honored. And my mother loved your work.
The gifts your writing keep giving...as you "give" your mom to the rest of the world!
Lovely! 🤗