Not only is the history of Harlem incredibly inspiring, its influence was felt around the world. In 2024 the Met Museum had an exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance and its impact on famous artists around the world. In conjunction with the exhibit, they had a podcast called “Harlem is Everywhere” - and it is!

Living in Harlem is especially potent as an artist - and this short video I filmed last week shows a little bit of my life here and the inspirations it offers. I forgot to add my trip to see Othello in Marcus Garvey Park with a stunning production by the Classical Theatre of Harlem

The Harlem renaissance may have started 100 or so years ago, but it’s still happening in daily life here in 2026.

______________________________

Harlem’s Summer Stage

https://ogs.ny.gov/event/summer-stage-harlem-arts-roots-rhythm

Mother AME Zion Church

https://www.motheramezionchurch.org/

Classical Theatre of Harlem

https://www.cthnyc.org/othello/

This weekend i listened to music, played music, vocalized and painted. I got ready to start doing some recording and i got new eyelashes- haha!

I’ve been BUSY

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A concept that Cameron uses is that of an artist date where you take yourself (your inner artist/child) somewhere inspiring and fun. I had the opportunity to go to the Art Institute of Chicago this week and it gave me a lot excitement to do art.

Most every time I go to a museum - any museum- I take pictures of different paintings… not the famous ones necessarily, but the ones that catch my eye for some reason or another.

I used to feel like there was a right /wrong way to enjoy a museum, that i wasn’t doing it “right” and that i had to absorb every single piece. Instead, I now follow my instincts and my eye and pay attention to the things that stick out to me as something I’d like to incorporate in my work, or that I admire.

Here are a few examples:

1. This piece by Ker-Xavier Roussel, (ca. 1893-94) stood out to me for a few reasons - the red under painting that shows at the edges gives the work depth without over-working. I also liked the textures of the dresses and the folds and the red of the little girls dress. I liked how the figures were flattened and the brush strokes were seemingly simple. I also like the vibe of the women hanging around together - women of many ages just being together doing their different activities.

   
   The two dimensional feeling of the ladies reminded me of that famous painting by James McNeill Whistler (ca. 1871) which has a very different feel to it in other ways.

2. Another piece that stuck out to me was this beautiful life-size portrait of Erik Satie by Ramon Casas. The dismal weather in Paris’s Monmartre district is palpable, and Satie, with his monacle, looks slightly unsteady on his feet, and you can see tiny loose threads on the back hem of his coat. I couldn’t help but hear some of Satie’s famous piano music in my head while viewing it.

3. I also loved this piece of a woman and a vase… how cool that her dress is the majority of the composition.

It seems i was quite inspired by figures in black this trip ( I only noticed afterwards looking at the photos i took)….

4. I love Elephants, and I have been drawn to Ganesha as a result. Ganesha, the remover of obstacles was one of my last photos taken at the Art Institute.

What a great date and I’m looking forward to enjoying all the inspiration I took from my day in Chicago. Please take yourself on an artist date.

Let us know in the comments what kind of artist dates that you go on!

My collection is up at the 40th Avenue sidewalk museum in San Francisco - my first museum show. Curator is Cappy Larson- thanks Mom!

Read more about this in my post last month:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” - George Santayana, from The Life of Reason

When I left my hometown of San Francisco, I saw the city with new eyes. Somehow distance gave me a new curiosity and clarity. It was with this keener interest that I took a book out of the library called “Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld.” It was written by Herbert Asbury in 1933.

Through Mr. Asbury’s colorful and antique prose (which is often not politically correct), I learned about the variety of gangs, murders, kidnapping and theft that were common during the time of the gold rush. One thing I had never heard of, and was stunned to read was chapter 8 - “The Slaves of Chinatown.”

Girls were shipped from China to San Francisco starting around 1850. The girls were primarily provided for white male customers. By 1869 it was a large business with a conservative estimate of 1500-2000 prostitutes in the 1870s.

At one point there were four gangsters who owned between them 800 girls (girls ranging from 2-16 years). A couple of dealers kept 100 girls in pens and were rented out to a variety of bagnios/cribs (aka brothels).

The girls were kidnapped, or sold by their families in China, and shipped as freight in shipping crates. Once the girls arrived they were sold in open market. Ages ranged from age 2 - 16.

The contracts each girl had to sign …. note that missing days of work compounded the time they were enslaved.

The Asbury book also revealed how when the women became “unsellable” they were encouraged to go into a dark room with a bowl of rice and a little water - they were locked in for two weeks, until someone came around to check if they were dead or not. If they weren’t dead, sometimes it was hurried along by less “natural” methods.

This weekend I did a bit of journaling and sketching related to this sad chapter, and I also did some research and found some amazing photos of women at that time. The photo of the woman staring outside the caged windows is so heartbreaking. I imagine the paper she is holding is the contract signing away her life.

This kind of trafficking is still going on - and I hope by recognizing this history, we can aim end it in the near future by acknowledging the harm and choosing a different path.

• California State Library Photos https://delivery.library.ca.gov:8443/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE8330

• CHINA’S LOST WOMEN IN THE FAR WEST by Lynne Yuan, 2019 https://historynet.com/chinas-lost-women-in-the-far-west/

• Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by Herbert Asbury, 1933

Sometimes the pressure of making art can feel heavy - that’s when you need to give yourself small steps.

I really enjoyed the books by Austin Kleon which break down the mystique of creativity and gives us everyday tips to just do the work. You can follow him on Substack:

Austin Kleon

Weekly art, writing, and creative inspiration from the author of Steal Like an Artist and other bestsellers.

My mom and dad built a mini museum on their block in San Francisco. I have been working on a few little pieces to share - hoping to be exhibiting sometime in the coming months. I will be sending to San Francisco this week.

During the pandemic, there was a flurry of mini-museums popping up around the USA. Smithsonian Magazine did a feature of their rise, and attributed the growth to COVID/pandemic closures and also the outgrowth of free mini-libraries over the last decade or so.

I hope this post inspires us all to find small ways to share our creativity throughout our lives, and to keep art an important part of the public discourse.

“When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.” - John Trudell

In a world where we have the best of the best posted on our feeds, and where extraordinary skill and talent is held up as the standard, we can start to feel our art is not good enough, or worth being done.

One of the biggest and hardest lessons I learned about being an artist was that sometimes your art is not great and that greatness in and of itself can be empty.

Making bad art is a little more pallatable when you realize that the act, or practice, of making art, is more important than the result. Doing art is a fundamentally human endeavour, and even if we don’t live up to our own expectations, does that mean we shouldn’t try or study? Of course not! Art makes us more human.

I spent years as a frustrated artist - looking back I was just practicing in the judgement and stress into the work I was doing. No wonder I never wanted to practice! I focused completely on the end result and how I never lived up to my own high standards. I ended up having to change art forms for a while in order to change my habits.

Here are a few best practices I’ve learned that i hope others learn earlier than I did:

1. It is important to encourage artists of all stages and ages. Who cares if it’s cringe? Let people explore their bliss! Florence Foster Jenkins comes to mind - no one could keep her from enjoying her singing. The fact that her singing was ridiculed is quite sad, and I actually find her devotion to music and the arts and her own yearnings in her heart inspiring.

2. Your life is your art, or rather, your life is your song/ canvas/ sculpture, etc; every kind word, every time you choose truth and justice, every time you simply be your full and authentic self, all of that is art. Studying art and music helps us become more human. It connects us to ourselves and the world around us. That is why I believe the arts training in schools and art in public spaces is so important.

3. That the process of making art is a devotional practice. It works best if you can let go of ego and expectations and allow flow. This is not to say it should be overly reverent, since that can also keep us from doing it. The most important thing is to show up for your art.

Finally, I’ve been thinking a lot about how having high level of technical skill being the definition of a great artist, can lead to us ignoring problematic aspects of a person who we look up to. This outlook also, by nature, excludes a lot of great people from being considered artists who aren’t as technically proficient, and create idols out of people we should not emulate.

In the age of Epstein files, it seems a lot of people are not who we thought they were. The last few months has really made me question artists I look up to and why. It’s devastating when one of your heroes lets you down. I personally feel like the art is inextricably linked to the person and how they live their life.

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

John Trudell

The payphone used to be a life line…. and you always needed an emergency supply of coins in order to use it.

These were such an important and iconic part of our lives and now they are pretty much obsolete.

Honestly I miss them. We were all a bit more engaged and present in our lives without the 24/7 personal computers we call phones now.

Oh, and PS - If she’s still around, this is your reminder to CALL your MOM (Happy birthday to mine - love you mama!)

One of the last times I saw Dave, he gifted me his hand-soldered brass peace sign before I moved to the East Coast. He used to wear through the sixties. I remember him running out of his bedroom with a smile on his face and holding it out for me and saying “Greta, I want you to have this!” I felt the energy in the piece, and it is a treasured item of mine to this day. I wear it on special occasions.

Dave was a Catholic, and gay, and this was an eternal conflict in his life. We would walk the sands of Ocean Beach in San Francisco together, go back to his apartment out in the far reaches of the Sunset and talk about God and the universe, morality and spirituality. He loved new age authors like Neale Donald Walsch and Deepak Chopra, and introduced me to their work. We’d go back to his little house in the Sunset district and he’d play the piano, or we’d listen to recordings and watch some of his favorite videos.

He told me about the sixties, volunteering at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, and smoking a lot of pot. He told me he had sex with a priest one time - which he found a healing experience given his experience as a Catholic who struggled with his sexuality, though in hind sight that priest was one of San Francisco’s potentially abusive cult leaders.2 Luckily Dave only had that passing and positive interaction.

According to Dave he saw native dancing ghosts in Yosemite one night while stoned and camping with a friend. Yosemite is a notoriously haunted place, but Dave was the first person I knew who had experienced the indigenous ghosts of California’s history personally.

Dave didn’t smoke pot or do any drugs in the nineties, but he would entertain us with his stories of his hippie days. One of our favorites was about the time he helped hide a neighbor….. I asked our mutual friend Dennis to recall the story for me:

I think [Dave] was pretty much living on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. In some apartment … Not sure where he was working, but it was the late 60s or early 70s. He heard that there’s this there’s this person [hanging] around the Haight-Ashbury who was couch surfing and was ..on the lam from “the man.”

Her name was Tanya. And it some [neighbor/]friends had … hinted that she was looking for another place [to stay] ]because the heat was getting on, and they needed to move her somewhere else….

“You saw Tanya. She’s cool, right?”

The neighbors asked if she could stay at Dave’s place. Of course he didn’t want to say no.

He didn’t want to say no, but … also, I don’t know at what point he knew who she really was, [but it was an open secret that Tanya was] Patty Hearst.

And then, [Dave] said, “yeah, well, okay.” And then once she was there, Dave couldn’t bring himself to [go back] to hi8s place … because he was scared or didn’t want to be around or didn’t want to be get caught up in anything.

So he ended up … staying with someone else the whole time that she was there and I don’t know if it was a week that she was staying at his apartment. Or longer.

She did stay there and then she moved on, I want to say… no more than a couple weeks.

And Dave was relieved because he felt like he could finally go back home.

In the early eighties my mom and my sisters and I drove south of San Francisco down the El Camino Real to Redwood City (check out my first post about the El Camino). We took this trip once or twice a week so I could learn to swim. I needed the extra help since I was not physically well coordinated. There would be several teachers in the pool doing one-on-one or small group classes with us kids while parents sat around the pool and watched, or chatted with one another.

After lessons my mom would go home and whisper with my dad about one of the other moms. I would see my mom and the woman talk occasionally at the side of the pool; the woman was pretty, with long straight blond hair and brought her young child to learn to swim. I begged to know the secret, but mom wouldn’t tell me.

Swimming lessons were almost done for the season, so mom finally shared with me that the woman was named Patty Hearst and that Patty Hearst had been kidnapped in the sixties by a cult named the SLA because she had a very wealthy family.

Mom said she didn’t want us to act weird around her, so that’s why she didn’t tell us right away. Mom and dad didn’t say too much more, except that she spent time in jail and married her jailer.

Mom pointed out the fact that Patty Hearst would wear a touristy beaded belt saying “Hearst Castle” on it. Mom and dad felt she must be a cool lady with a good sense of humor after all she had been through and knowing most people would recognize her.

The Dreams of San Francisco piece below - I will post more stories in the future that are alluded to in the detail.

For subscribers - here is the video where i went through detail of the El Camino piece

One consistent item in my sketch books are drawings of sleeping cats.

You see, when a cat is sleeping near you, and you do not want to disturb them, and you want to practice your life drawing skills, this is the perfect set of circumstances to create many sketches and studies of sleeping cats.

Below you will find many of the cats in my life are represented, including my childhood cat, Nicholas, in a drawing from 1991. The most recent piece represented is Velvet in 2025. I embellished her nap with some shapes and colors.

May you remember to nap, to rest and enjoy a sunbath this week.