Gregory Meander

I turned the corner in the gallery and a burst of color met my eyes, my breathe stolen for a moment. The artist had already taken me on an operatic journey in my visit to SFMOMA’s Joan Mitchell by the time I had arrived at the back gallery towards the end of the sweeping survey of the artist. I had flown back to San Francisco to see these paintings together, which is most likely the only time in m...

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? ( Mother Abbess, The Sound of Music ) There was one reason I had planned in mind for my October 2020 trip to Paris and it was the planned installation of Christo and Jean-Claude’s L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped . I wanted to see a cloud pinned down in the middle of Paris. Though nearly forty years in planning, it was once again delayed to 2021 because of the g...

How might a picture of apple pickers be a symbol of environmental and food justice and pay equity? Camille Pissarro’s Apple Harvest at the Dallas Art Museum is one of my favorite pictures of all-time. Actually, in a lot of ways this painting was radical and was seen pushing the idea of what was art because it highlighted women working, not nude reclining on a piece of furniture. I love it mostly b...

I recently was back in San Francisco. I had booked a trip back in March when the dates for the Joan Mitchell exhibition had been re-scheduled. I often struggle selecting one piece to focus on each week, especially after viewing so much great art between SFMOMA (Joan Mitchell), Legion of Honor (Wangechi Mutu), and the de Young Museum (Judy Chicago). I was able to visit each exhibit with great frien...

Who is invited to your Dinner Party? The guests have changed for me throughout the years. Right now, I think I might invite the fictional character Brian from Company , or the mystical Teresa of Avila, definitely Sacagawea of the Corps of Discovery, and Queen’s frontman, Freddie Mercury. And the one and only, Judy Garland (maybe Liza, too). Georgia O’Keefe and her many lovers (her flowers from Lak...

In my recent drives of the Midwest through Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, I have been inspired by the landscape. These drives Americans will most likely never do because it is not Interstate driving from Point A to Point B. These roads are not the typical “road trip” roads. The roads are tighter, two-lane, curvy, and a bit rough. The roads carve their way through the rolling farmland of...

Over this past weekend, I finally made the sojourn to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The Ozarks are full of river bluffs, rolling hills, and sprawling forests of green. It is a beautiful landscape that I have grown up with in Central and southern Missouri. As you go further south, the hills get steeper the bluffs wider. Set among a beautiful forest, Crystal Br...

What does a discovery in art history mean in your every day life? Not much. I am unsure of the real impact. Most likely it is an unmeasurable and unquantifiable paradigm shift in your brain. I am not here to convince you that art history matters or maybe I am? I am still unsure why I keep writing these reflections and sharing them publicly. But, I know something about pausing and focusing on one p...

Hands down, my favorite book is Peter Benchley’s Jaws . I read it before I saw Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 film. The book is fast-paced, mysterious, and complex. Loving the ocean growing up, it was the first story that immersed me in an ocean world through storytelling (other than Jonah and the whale). I have yet to tackle Herman Melville’s Moby Dick . I love Jaws because it introduced me to science...

On August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock died in a car accident. Lee Krasner (his wife and lesser known artist) moved into his barn. Still to this day, she has not been correctly placed in the art history canon as a great painter of abstraction. Krasner used this period of pain and grief to produce her Umber series. Umber, making reference to a color, being a natural pigment resembling but darker than...

I was recently introduced to the work of Go Mishima. He focused on idealized versions of Japanese men in contemporary time. How do we represent ourselves? I gravitate towards male bodies. I am queer and am attracted to the male body, though representations of the nude male body are seen as taboo. I am attracted to this image for a lot of reasons but chose it mainly because I think Asian men genera...

I had an Olympic dream. I started swimming when I was four years old, but didn’t start taking it seriously until I was twelve years old (which is quite late in swimming years), though my career stretched onto a Division 1 collegiate team an achievement in itself, my career ending in injury. To dream to be an Olympian is something you hold inside yourself day in and day out. And this is not somethi...

Why do I fall in love with queer artists of the past? I mean, I fall hard. I read obsessively on their lives. I find out when they woke up or how late they stayed up. Were they insomniacs? I wonder if they liked coffee or tea or water with a sprig of mint? When did they make art? What was their process like? Who did they love or who did they sleep with? Who were their friends and did they hang out...

It is Bastille Day - it is the day when they turn on the fountains at Versaille. Ironically, the day celebrates the storming of a state prison and is federal holiday in France. (It is also my mother’s 71st birthday - Happy Birthday Mom!) It makes me wander towards another painting that I have had the privileged of viewing in-person - Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 Liberty Leading the People . I might men...

I did a “touristy thing” this past week in New York City. I had pre-purchased ferry tickets, it was a timed entry, and took my friend to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe's Island, now known as Liberty Island. I went for book research. To be honest, I wanted to go. Who doesn’t want to brush shoulders with an icon? Once on the ferry dragging my carry-on luggage, I noticed my friend a...

In describing Walter De Maria’s work, I often get the response: Why? Why did he do that? Why stainless steel? Why is this art?  Contemporary art causes a specific kind of visceral response for some people. I welcome these questions because it helps me clarify my thinking and my own experience of the artists and artworks. Most people have not heard of Walter De Maria, let alone knowingly seen any o...

You are too much. Too much. You are too loud. Stop talking. Oh, you are too much. Too much. During my childhood, well into present day, I’ve been told by mainly straight-identifying white people that “I am too much.” I was even reminded this past week through a radio interview with Broadway star Andrew Rannells where he spoke of his memoir titled Too Much is Not Enough. I tend to agree with Andrew...

One of the aspects of land art is that it takes a great journey to experience them. There is planning required with your time, clothing, food, and transportation. The effort to see is very much a part of the art. Four wheel drive is required. A mental fortitude and determination, and toleration of heat are helpful. There is an inherent tension that lives with the mere idea of an artist trying to m...

“To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.”  ― Susan Sontag,  On Photography Throughout my study of art history, I...

Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence.—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land A solstice is always coming.  Numerous landspeed records have been set on the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, UT since 1911.  My first visit to the Sun Tunnels was a morning in early June. There was one man from Bainbridge Island, Washington. He and his wife had been coming to the area annually for a gather...

It is hard to write about people you think you know. I have yet to attempt to write about strangers. The artists and art I write about are friends. We expect the art to say something to us, to hold some sort of meaning for us, so why can’t there be a dialogue? I think there can be a conversation with the artist, no matter if they are living or not. People at an art museum always want the one right...

I have to be honest I am not the biggest fan of sunflowers. I know, they are the quintessential American flower. The bloom and stalk are larger than life and takes up much of the sun like Americans often do. I think there might be a few reasons I don’t like sunflowers. For one thing, they were the heaviest of the flowers we sold at the Ferry Building farmer’s market located at the now defunct Port...

Paris and I met in March on the eclipse of my thirty-second year after a torrid long-distance affair since I was a ten-years old. I got off the metro train at the Notre Dame stop and I was not sure what to expect at the top of the staircase. You know that feeling when you trust yourself to get off at the right subway stop, but you aren’t sure which staircase will take you to the proper street corn...