Gridlines: Making History

Gridlines is our recurring feature about the world of visual arts, performing arts, media arts, and beyond. We’re talking about the latest and greatest (and less-than-greatest) happenings—what’s grabbing our attention, bringing us joy, piquing our curiosity, and otherwise making us stop and take note. Today’s Gridlines come from Jennifer Wray, Wex Marketing & Media Assistant.

darling Isabelle / don’t make any sudden moves / but I believe if I lean back a bit I can reach his lute / and club him with it before he reads us another sonnet—Mallory Ortberg channels one of the women in Pompeo Massani’s Ein interressanter Verehrer.

I’m a big fan of The Toast cofounder Mallory Ortberg’s clever and funny Western Art History posts, which imagine what the characters in classical paintings are really thinking, from “Women Having a Terrible Time at Parties in Western Art History” to “Normal Children Who are Very Comfortable and at Ease in Western Art History,” her witty captions encourage a new perspective on art.    

• Business Insider has a roundup of the most famous movie set in every state. Here’s your one-word clue for the Ohio pick: Eskimo.
• Twenty-five years ago, A Tribe Called Quest dropped its first album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Over on NPR, Phife Dawg and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, two of the “four guys from Queens” reflect on their debut and its new deluxe reissue. Be sure to check out their recent Tonight Show appearance to see these masters of hip-hop in action.
• While we’re talking hip-hop greats, let’s take a moment to watch Missy Elliott’s new music video again (and again and again).
• As you may have noticed, we at the Wex are big fans of author, filmmaker, and performer Miranda July, who has worked in our Film/Video Studio Program and with whom we built a New Society last November. So you might (correctly) imagine that her fangirl-style interview in the New York Times Magazine with pop superstar Rihanna made for a particularly fascinating read.
• If you could go back in time and talk to your teenage self, would you? While he doesn’t have a time machine, Peter “Stoney” Emshwiller was able to do the next best thing—in 1977, when he was 18 years old, he filmed himself interviewing his older self. Thirty-eight years later, he completed the interview. See a surprisingly funny and poignant clip on boingboing.
• Although an early childhood reading of Charlotte’s Web has left me with an uneasy affection for spiders, I’m not sure even I could handle Louise Bourgeois’s 30-foot bronze sculpture Maman, located outside the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Says Hyperallergic of the work by the Wexner Prize-winner, “should you be a serious…arachnophobe, look down at your feet and return the way you came. If you’re not, look up at the enormous twisted spider in front of you, a mesh egg sac with 10 marble pills dangling from its cephalothorax.” Read on for more on the new museum and its exhibition of Bourgeois’s work.