Category: Travel

Postcard from London, England: Women-splaining Guerrillas at the Tate

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Above: “How To Enjoy the Battle of the Sexes,” The Guerrilla Girls, London’s Tate Modern

Flash back to 1984 and the International Survey of Recent Paintings and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Women artists did the math: Out of 165 artists, a mere 13 were women. The Guerrilla Girls were born. They picketed MOMA. As “the conscience of the art world,” they’ve been battling gender inequality and racism entrenched in it ever since.

Why masks? The protesters’ anonymity achieved by guerrilla masks puts the spotlight on the issues instead of the individual women artists or their talents.

The Tate Modern currently has a large wall dedicated to Guerrilla Girls’ posters stridently illuminating gender and race gaps throughout the world.

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Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: Putti play while Jesuits pray

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Above: Putti sculpted of marble in Chiesa del Gesu

Known as soldiers of God, Jesuits travel throughout the world to educate and evangelize the masses. They take a vow of poverty when they enter the order, which makes the extravagant beauty found in their churches particularly surprising.

The website of Chiesa del Gesu explains their evangelization efforts through art with words of Saint John of Damascus (676-749):

If a pagan comes and says, “Show me your faith!” take him to church and show him the decoration with which it is adorned and explain to him the series of sacred pictures.

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Postcard from Morelia, Mexico: Crash history course in Michoacan

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Above: Portion of “Defenders of National Integrity, Cuauhtemoc and History,” Alfredo Zalce, 1952, Museo Regional Michoacano Nicolas Leon Calderon

A Spanish Baroque house built in the 1700s is home to the Michoacan Regional Museum Dr. Nicolas Leon Calderon. With the oldest artifacts in the museum dating from more than 1000 years BC, the collection chronicles the history of and life in the state of Michoacan until hundreds of years after the dramatic impact of the Spanish Conquest.

Oh, Emperor Maximilian I (1832-1867) is said to have slept here (I believe this a more reliable claim than that of owners of almost every old house in central Virginia boasting “George Washington slept here.”). The home belonged to Francisca Roman de Malo and her husband when Maximilian stayed there in 1864 at the beginning of his brief reign. Francisca served as lady-in-waiting to Empress Carlota (1840-1927).

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