Life and Death at the Field Museum

This past weekend, I had an opportunity to visit the Field Museum. My first stop was Death: Life's Greatest Mystery, which I heard about and felt compelled to see. 

 

Photography is forbidden in the exhibit, but I couldn't resist taking a picture of the quote above. It was one of many in this very thought-provoking collection. I found it very contemplative and respectful. It covers many aspects of death, from spiritual beliefs that surround it to cultural traditions from around the world. I noticed several children there with their parents. I think it would be a good way to introduce kids to the concept of mortality. Depending on the child's level of maturity, I could see it as appropriate for ages 8 and up. The exhibit closes August 27th.

Afterwards, I decided to take a look at an exhibit I'd been meaning to check out, Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. 

The exhibit is an important reminder that Native American culture exists in the present, since it is so often depicted as existing only in the past. It features a wide range of stories from Indigenous people from all over the United States, with a special emphasis on the community here in Chicago. It also includes people of mixed Black and Native heritage. It breathes new life into the museum's ancient artifacts and supplements them with new contributions, including a humorous video clip from the popular TV show Reservation Dogs. 

I was surprised to see the museum acknowledge its role in the theft of priceless objects from Native people in writing, as in this plaque that I took a picture of:

What the curators chose to show was just as important as what they decided not to display.

Before I left, I felt like my visit would be incomplete without visiting the Africa exhibit. Built in 1993, the exhibit left a memorable impression on me when I went to see it for the first time as a teenager.

It's full of informative graphics that put a lot of things into perspective.

I don't argue with people on the Internet, but if you need something to shut the trolls up, here you go. Take that, Ron DeSantis!

I was glad to see that this is still here. This scroll is another artifact that I'll always remember from my first time seeing this exhibit. What an interesting cultural exchange between China and the African city-state of Malindi.

Also, as a designer, I had to stop and appreciate the beautiful ornamentation that surrounds these windows. 

Now let me tell you what I saw on the other side of the room when I turned around: The Middle Passage. I forgot that it just kind of sneaks up on you. While there are ample content warnings in the Death exhibit, the Africa exhibit doesn't have any such signage. I suppose someone could argue it was a deliberate curatorial experience, art imitating life, they might say. A swift, sudden, horrifying abduction from a familiar way of life to be mercilessly thrown into what poet Robert Hayden called "a voyage through death." But having begun my museum excursion contemplating death, I didn't feel like seeing more of it. The fittingly grim and haunting replica of a slave ship wrenched my heart and reduced me to tears the first time I ventured through it as a high school freshman and I wasn't in the mood to see it again on Saturday. One minute I'm admiring my ancestors' handiwork and the next I'm faced with a replica of the Door of No Return. Some jaded people about my age and older accuse younger generations of being coddled by trigger warnings, but I honestly see the benefit of including them for something like this. I've never been one to avoid slave narratives, but I have to be in the right mood and mindset to engage with them because my reaction is so visceral. I appreciate the museum showing me in its other exhibits how this one can be improved nearly 30 years later.

Time to raise my rates

graphics from Essence Magazine

Today is Black Women's Equal Pay Day. If you've followed my blog for a while, you may be aware that I've often taken the opportunity to increase my prices this time of year. This year, the prices of my artwork are staying the same, but I am raising my rates for my interior design services. 

The new rates are as follows:

Full Service Interior Design

$15 per square foot

Premium Design Consulting

$10 per square foot (ideal for renters)

Basic Design Consulting

$5 per square foot (ideal for clients on a budget)

Art and Accessory Selection

$2.50 per square foot

One-time Design Consultation

$300, up to 4 hours

Please visit my website for detailed information on the services I provide, and thanks for your support. 

My thoughts on Barbie The Movie

[SPOILER ALERT: this post contains spoilers for the 2023 Barbie movie.]

I never wanted to watch movies about Barbies as a kid because I felt no need to see them. As I wrote about in detail in The Doll Project, the official character traits and storylines Mattel had assigned to Barbie, her sisters, and her friends were wholly irrelevant to the roles and relationships I had imagined the dolls in my collection to have. Some were heroines and some were villains. Some were single career women and some were married. Some had biological children and some adopted. And sometimes I changed my mind about who my Barbie characters were or improvised when playing with my cousins and friends.

It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I began watching Barbie media, adding it to the mix of silly kids shows that I watch to relax. Some people unwind with reality TV; I've always preferred cartoons. So when the news about Barbie: The Movie came out, I was actually looking forward to seeing it. I had enjoyed Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse and Barbie: It Takes Two. My skepticism about The Lego Movie and Trolls had been unwarranted, as it turned out, and I found both toy-based movies to actually be insightful, heartwarming, and rewatchable entertainment for my inner child.

As a doll collector, I was thrilled to see all the new movie tie-ins. These are two of my favorites:

I was excited to dress up and go to the movies since I haven't been to a theater since 2020.

 

I went with 2 of my cousins and 1 of my friends. Aside from the excitement of seeing a film in person again, the spectacle of a Barbie world on a big screen was captivating. The costume and production design were impeccable. The soundtrack was great. However...

Something didn't curl all the way over for me...

I couldn't quite put my finger on it...

But something was missing.

It lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

I appreciated the feminist theme throughout the film. If horrible men like Ben Shapiro hate it, I thought, it must be good. But as a Barbie collector who also studied many forms of storytelling—from fiction writing to playwriting to screenwriting—I was very disappointed with they the way the movie's elements came together.

There have been too many good movies about toys for this one to be so muddled. The Toy Story, Lego Movie, and Wreck-It Ralph series have all cleverly played with the idea of toys and video game characters having minds of their own that the humans playing with them cannot perceive. There have been too many good models of a fish-out-of-water character from a more innocent world coming face-to-face with our sometimes ugly reality—like my beloved Elf where Buddy the Elf leaves the tidy little community that Santa and his elves have built for themselves in the North Pole to live in gritty early 2000s New York City—for this one to execute the trope so poorly. I also think there was a missed opportunity for Ken to be a lovable hapless himbo who stumbles into success somehow, like a cross between Zoolander and Forrest Gump.

Instead, Mattel has given us a motley assortment of plot elements that kind of remind me of the loose parts you might find at the bottom of a toy box. It just occurred to me that the examples I gave in the previous paragraph are from films with male main characters. Maybe the Barbie writers were so focused on making points about the main character's gender that they lost the plot. Yes, the film is feminist, but what wave of feminism are they referencing, anyway? Nowadays, as more expansive notions of gender come into play, what is the point of fixating on a Barbie/Ken binary? Furthermore, why does Barbie's world have a gendered hierarchy? Why are the Kens and Barbies playing a zero-sum game? Why can't they share power? Why is Mattel ignoring their own products and acting like Ken dolls haven't had their own careers since the '60s?

It's also unclear who Barbie the movie is ultimately for. Its gender politics are a bit outdated for modern audiences, despite America Ferrera's outstanding monologue about the difficulty of being a woman in the world. The Kens drink copious beers after they take over, but the Mattel executives are very cartoonish in their chase scenes. President Barbie hilariously drops an f-bomb that is bleeped and censored by a Mattel logo and the Ruth Handler character speaks openly about her arrest for tax evasion, but the grown-up humor stands out because the story feels so immature. And all of this culminates in an ending that I found unsatisfying, despite its refutation of what I wrote in The Doll Project about Barbie looking so happy because she doesn't have to worry about things like breast cancer, PMS, and menstrual cramps. She has chosen to be human, but why? She has chosen to live in the real world, but why? Because the writers are obviously human and live in the real world? What's her motivation?

It seems as though Mattel is seeking to humorously deconstruct one of its most popular intellectual properties while still trying to sell us as much stuff as possible through a seemingly endless assortment of brand partnerships. But post-deconstruction, it doesn't reconstruct anything interesting, and it never considers that toys are what kids make of them. Children breathe life into them and it is their wild imaginations and not the text on the back of a bright pink plastic package that determine how things work in the multiverse of imagined Barbie worlds. Barbie and Ken can be anything, and the possibilities for storytelling with these miniature mannequins are endless, but you would never know that from this movie. If only they put as much effort into writing this film as they did into marketing it.

 

 

 

 

A little something I made recently

Here are a couple little things I made recently while waiting for several coats of Mod Podge to dry on another painting:

I've found that making these collages is like putting a puzzle together, and the missing pieces could be anywhere. I often find the elements I need to finish them in unexpected places.

I had fun making new Zazzle products that feature these designs. The one with the swatches worked really well with Zazzle's new tiling capabilities. 

Right now, the originals are not available to purchase online, but I do have a nice assortment for sale on Tiny Frock Shop.