Erika Nelson

More stuffed animals and scenics. The older labels mention the artists, which is a nice little posterity nugget.

Love me some good vintage stuffed animal displays with scenics

How do we in the Arts and Culture sector keep up with our massively turbulent landscape? Americans for the Arts Action Fund is holding bi-weekly office hours for updates. Timely, direct, and good resources to take advantage of RIGHT NOW: artsactionfund.org/office-hours-our-arts-advocacy-team

National Council of Nonprofits The National Council of Nonprofits is a trusted resource and proven advocate for America’s charitable nonprofits.

Nonprofits are, by design, non-partisan. The National Council of Nonprofits has been advocating and fighting to keep it that way, and fighting EOs that target our collective work. Check out their recent press releases and advocacy summations to see what's going on: www.councilofnonprofits.org

(2/2) "... Beauty escapes in the pursuit of safety, which promotes a simplistic sameness over a varied vitality."

-Venturi, Brown, Izenour.

(1/2) "Any artist could have told the lawmaker that you cannot legislate beauty and that attempts to do so by the use of experts will result not only in gross injustice but an ugly deafness in the environment..."

"Learning from Las Vegas"

It was a cozy 6 hrs without electricity, in a dramatic blizzard event that sent temps tumbling and snow sideways. Not too many limbs down, but the roof leak patch at the Expo is no longer holding. Spring work list is building itself! On the up-side, there are new shelves full of books at Woodpecker.

This could be why we're all feeling weird today...

Just got an email from Government Bookstore about the new prez and VP portraits available for pre-order, so I clicked through and ordered a big ol' Obama official portrait poster.

How are you, Lucas? A chat with Kansas’ favorite rural art town. — MDW “ I’ve got high speed digital highways, I’ve got affordable spaces, I’ve got good roads. I’m mostly starving for access to other things, like vegetables. Or healthcare. Or meeting spaces that aren’t...

February is Lucas month on MdW Atlas, and our first piece is live: mdw.art/atlas/howare...

S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden | Substack A continuing examination of our historic artist-built environment in Lucas Kansas. Click to read S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden, a Substack publication. Launched 13 days ago.

open.substack.com/pub/gardenof...

World's Largest Things' Substack | Erika Nelson | Substack A Substack celebrating Roadside Vernacular Architecture known as World's Largest Things, and the continuing development of the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World'...

In figuring out new socials, I've started two Substacks - one for Worlds Largest Things, home of the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Version of the World's Largest Things, and one for the Garden of Eden artist-built environment
open.substack.com/pub/worldsla...

(Work, not worth, but the other way is true too)

Faith Ringgold "The Flag is Bleeding"

Last year, my sister and I got to see a giant retrospective of Faith Ringgold's work in Chicago, and a few years earlier, I got to hear her talk about her worth during a textiles symposium in Kansas. Powerful work, that I'm hoping inspires me to keep going.

Happy Kansas Day!

Happy KS Day to you!!!

Me too! For us, it was gaining a bigger voice for artist-built environments - there are a lot in this new pool. We will see how what that means in the coming year...

Ugh. I was hoping there was a shift for that empire away from Trump, but evidently that's only for campaigning.

Thank you Mary! I'm super lucky in that I just transitioned out of a grant-focused org. and can now leverage public/private funds. And the other efforts are more of a cash-in-cash-out for the baselines. It's a shift, but not nearly the horrible shift that it would have been just one iteration ago.

National Trust Announces Major Expansion of Historic Artists' Homes and Studios Program | National Trust for Historic Preservation The National Trust announced today the addition of 19 new affiliate sites to its prestigious Historic Artists' Homes and Studios (HAHS) membership network, representing the largest expansion of the pr...

Exciting news from Lucas' Garden of Eden art site! They've been accepted into the National Trust's Historic Artists Homes and Studios affiliate program: savingplaces.org/press-center...

Hop to it!

It’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than halfway up one you don’t. -Naomi Watts

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time

-The Alchemist

Ugh.

"One day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' ... When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."
-MLK,
speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1967

#MLKDay
#IHaveADream

How Rural Post Offices Sustain Community The rural postal network serves as a living map of relationships and historical narratives, a legacy under threat by new austerity measures.

I know going to the Post Office is a daily ritual for many rural folks (Here in Lucas, if you live within 2 blocks of the building you don't get home delivery and get a free PO Box, which is pretty much everyone...). Here's a nice piece by a good buddy Mary Welcome on rural POs:

Last nugget from "The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing ": A magical combination of flaws and virtues = artist's personality matrix

From Adam Moss' "The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing"

There's a great discussion, too, about when artworks are technically "published"