Boston children’s book author Irene Smalls has joined forces with artist/illustrator Cathy Ann Johnson and publicist Ayanna Najuma to establish 2GoGlobal Marketing--an agency to promote independent authors and small publishers at the Frankfurt International Book Fair, in October of 2014.

Frankfurt, the world’s oldest and largest book fair, is attended by some 300,000 publishers, buyers and authors seeking to purchase and sell international rights to books. Approximately 120 countries are represented, at some 1750 booths.

Typically, independent authors and publishers are not represented in Frankfurt.

But 2GoGlobalMarketing will exhibit books in a Frankfurt Book Fair front row booth, “hand sell” and actively search for international sales opportunities for select books, “ according to Smalls.

Smalls, an award-winning author who writes primarily for “diverse” or minority children, was told by her publishers there was “no interest” in her books internationally. But she found that was not true.  “Publishers from Lebanon and China expressed interest in my titles. I would not have known that without pursuing international rights sales on my own.”

According to Johnson: “Authors and illustrators must be entrepreneurs.  Being represented in Frankfurt is the next step in developing our brands and literary businesses.”

Najuma, who will direct 2GoGlobalMarketing’s promotion at the show, said: “Many representatives merely place books on a shelf in a booth. 2GOGlobalMarketing will showcase individual books and seek out buyers at events and venues throughout the show.”

2GoGLOBALMarketing is currently accepting a small number of select titles to showcase, for a $500 fee.  Authors  and small publishers may apply through August 31, 2014 via the 2GoGLOBAL website www.frankfurt2014.com.

Authors represented by 2GoGLOBAL  are also welcome to hold book signings at the 2GoGlobalMarketing booth.

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (2014) and Ithaca Diaries (forthcoming, 2015).

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group--an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Pleased to post this July 30, 2014 release from our Cambridge Innovation Center Colleagues at  EnergySage, Inc., who have launched a partnership with Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy, a national network of local chambers of commerce,   to help local Chambers and their member businesses install solar energy systems.

According to the July 30, 2014 release:

Under the partnership, businesses that are members of a local chamber can use an innovative and user-friendly online solar marketplace at no cost. Users receive quick and easy options for putting solar on their commercial or residential buildings.

The Metro South Chamber of Commerce in Massachusetts is the first local chamber to take advantage of the new partnership. “Lowering costs, saving time, and creating local jobs is a winning combination that strengthens business and increases profits,” said Christopher Cooney, president and CEO of the Metro South Chamber. “The EnergySage process makes it easy for our chamber members to receive multiple quotes, learn about tax credits, and gauge potential long-term gains.”

 “The EnergySage process makes it easy for our chamber members to receive multiple quotes, learn about tax credits, and gauge potential long-term gains.”

Through the partnership, chamber members will have access to robust solar options, an instant estimate of the costs, savings, and financial options and the ability to include local companies in the price comparisons. Chamber businesses that create a free account on the EnergySage Solar Marketplace will receive quotes from multiple pre-screened and high-quality solar installers, easing the process of shopping for the right solar system. EnergySage will make a donation – ranging from $250 for residential systems to up to $5,000 for large commercial systems – to the local chamber of commerce whose members go solar through the EnergySage Marketplace.

“EnergySage is excited about this national partnership with Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy,” said John Gingrich, Head of Corporate Development for EnergySage. “We understand that solar can be complex for business owners and this partnership offers a great opportunity to help these decision-makers choose solar with ease.”

Diane Doucette, Executive Director of Chambers for Innovation & Clean Energy, called the partnership a “win-win” for local chambers and their member companies. “Chambers are always on the lookout for valuable no-cost services for member companies,” Doucette said. “Our EnergySage partnership offers the added benefit of providing chambers with additional revenue for helping their member companies go solar.”

ABOUT CHAMBERS FOR INNOVATION AND CLEAN ENERGY

Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE) is a national network of local chambers of commerce that recognize the economic development opportunity of clean energy. CICE works with local chambers to offer programs that help them and their member companies successfully navigate and prosper in the clean energy space. Through their clean energy information hub, CICE provides easy access to clean energy information, incentives, best practices, and an opportunity for local chambers to connect with clean energy experts throughout the country. www.chambersforinnovation.com

ABOUT ENERGYSAGE, INC.

The EnergySage Solar Marketplace, a comprehensive national consumer destination site for solar photovoltaics (PV) systems. The EnergySage Marketplace transforms the complex Solar PV shopping process into a simple online comparison-shopping experience, by enabling consumers to compare quotes from multiple pre-screened installers in an apples-to-apples format across all financing options. The unique, innovative platform provides unprecedented levels of simplicity, choice and transparency, all at no cost to consumers.

The EnergySage platform helps to reduce prices and make solar PV systems more accessible to a larger portion of the population. Its goal is to drive exponential increases in market adoption of solar. EnergySage’s benefits extend to providers such as manufacturers, installers, financiers and other professionals involved in the solar PV sales process as well, through increased consumer awareness, knowledge and demand for their services. By creating efficiencies in both the buying and selling processes, EnergySage slashes the time and effort required by consumers and installers, significantly reducing customer acquisition costs, boosting consumer confidence, and ultimately accelerating mass-market solar adoption.

EnergySage has received two prestigious SunShot Awards from the Department of Energy to develop and commercialize the Solar Marketplace. www.energysage.com

—Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of  the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem through September 1.

The Peabody Essex Museum’s major summer exhibition, Turner & the Sea is, in the broadest sense, about the maritime painting tradition.  It is also about the evolution of this great artist’s particular vision of earthly elements, and the extent to which that vision influenced – and was influenced by – others.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), a star of the academic system and a rebel against its constraints, was an artist who annoyed contemporary critics even while inspiring champions like John Ruskin.  Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843), which became a classic of Victorian literature in its own right, helped to place Turner in the Pantheon of British painters.

Concentrating on sea paintings, the PEM show includes a number of major canvases, several on loan from UK institutions, a roomful of astonishing watercolors, and a handful of works by such influencers as Claude Lorrain and admirers like Constable, Sargent, and others.   Grand picture postcards like Venice:  The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834) and monumental historical works like The Battle of Trafalgar (1805), paired with De Loutherberg’s Lord Howe’s Action (1793), provide a pleasing degree of “ooh” and “aah.”

Turner, inducted into the Royal Academy at a youthful 26, is associated with the age of Romanticism, with its penchant for “the sublime” and its dual consciousness of the terror and fragility of the natural world.   The Venice and Trafalgar paintings – one all glassy beauty and the other complete turmoil at sea — are appropriate touchstones of the academic as well as the romantic.  Turner, however, is an artist who seems to have mastered convention in order, eventually, to flout and override it.

His early devotion to watercolor, his spectacular abilities in that supposedly lesser medium, are apparent in an array of sketches and studies from the Liber Studiorum (1807-16) that greet us in one of the first galleries.  Looking at his later works in oils, the light and transparent underpainting suggest the remarkable, even triumphant, adaptation of watercolor technique.

We have the chance to see how others – 17th-century Dutch painters like Ruysdale and Willem van de Velde the Elder — approached the seascape and maritime subjects, applying restrained palettes and exquisite control to create moody works of great precision and detail.  In an essay on Turner in Looking at Pictures, Kenneth Clark discusses the difficulty of capturing the constant movement of waves.   Whether in the stylization of Chinese painting or Japanese prints, the almost algorithmic precision of DaVinci, or these Dutch seascapes, one is conscious of an attempt to regulate, to govern the ungovernable.   

Turner was, in his own right, a commander of the seas, to say nothing of notoriously difficult water-based media.  The watercolor and gouache Pembroke Castle (first exhibited in 1806) sets detailed renderings of the daily catch — mussels and fish scattered on the sand – against a majestic expanse of sky.   There is virtuosity here, but also a sense of freedom and a suggestion of the infinite that takes us far beyond the limits of the Dutch horizon.  

Motion defines Turner as light does the Impressionists.  His depiction of moving water, along with the even more evanescent steam and fire, set his work apart.   Flicking paint with the aplomb and seemingly random motions of an abstract expressionist, Turner was an action painter no less than Jackson Pollock.

The principal subject of Clark’s chapter, Snowstorm – Steamboat off a Harbor’s Mouth, is actually on loan for this exhibition.  In this 1842 work, a ship is nearly engulfed by steam, snow, mist, and foam.  Clark hints that Snowstorm may reflect the painter’s mental state.  He says, curiously, that “no one ever saw him at work,” as though there was some chicanery or secret amanuensis that history has kept hidden from us.    But the mystery of Turner’s painting is really the miracle of perception – not how he painted, but how we see.That mere flecks of color can suggest so much to the eye and brain, and that we can translate them so readily, is what astonishes.  

The late paintings have, of course, confounded many viewers.  Here, the PEM show offers a response in the form of Turner’s late watercolors.  Washes of color with a few figurative dashes, their simplicity seems to offer a key to the minimalism and near-abstraction of the late paintings.  They also bring us full circle, back to the medium that so inspired this artist and was the initial proving ground for his technique.   

The exhibition feels substantial yet doesn’t overwhelm, and its efforts to contextualize Turner through the work of others are instructive.   It makes its points deftly and without overstatement – that, and a rare chance to see this range of work, should point the way to Salem before the summer’s end.

–c. Rachel Yurman, 2014

Turner & the Sea was produced by the National Maritime Museum, part of Royal Museums Greenwich, London. Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation, and The Manton Foundation provided generous support.

The East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum also provided support.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

I’m very pleased to report  the launch of Virtual Book Group–which has chosen my book, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity as its featured summer read.

Virtual Book Group is an exciting new venture of digital marketing guru (and chief operating bookworm) Christina Inge.  Readers from all over the world can  to join for free to share their thoughts about selected books and related topics with one another and with authors, over time.

Inge said: “We created Virtual Book Group for people who love books, and love talking about them–whenever and wherever they are. 

“This summer, we’ll be reading Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.  Based on interviews with women who entered male-dominated careers in the 1970s and 1980s, Boston author and reporter Anita M. Harris looks at the intergenerational patterns of women’s lives. She shows how the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence career decisions, and traces the impact of rapid technological and social change on family structures, psyches, and gender roles. 

“As with all summer books, ours is full of great stories, riveting drama, and lessons learned. But it’s not a potboiler. It’s an eye-opening look at generations of women in the workforce that picks up where Lean In leaves off.” 

As the author, I’ll be chiming in for online and video chats through August–and, possibly, beyond.

It’s free to join–but you do need to REGISTER.
If you’d like to buy Broken Patterns,  It’s available at the Harvard Bookstore, on Amazon and Kindle...as well as  Kobo, Apple, Inktera,  Nook, Page Foundry and Scribd.   You can find more information, photos, readers’ comments and tell your own story at Brokenpatternsbook.com.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is an author and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and PR firm located in kendall Square, Cambridge.

On Friday, July 11, my friend Andrew Kreig spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about his new book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which tackles intelligence agency influence on politics and the media.

Presidential Puppetry, is “a non-partisan exposé of the intelligence sector influence in the Obama administration’s second term,” he said.  Drawing from a century of history that includes the Romney and Bush family dynasties, it  argues that failures in news reporting will continue because both traditional and social media are heavily influenced by revenue sources little understood by the public, including most journalists and academics. Link to book preview video

In his talk, Kreig noted  that before the Washington Post was sold to Amazon CEO Jeffery Bezos last summer, the paper had, for many years, received just 4 percent of its revenue from circulation and 14-15 percent from advertising. Approximately 60 percent of Post revenue has come from an education subsidiary, Kaplan, which profits from lucrative but little-reported government relationships.

Similarly, Amazon.com, Bezos’ source of wealth, last fall obtained a $600 million contract to handle advanced computing needs for the CIA, Kreig said. The contract dwarfed the $250 million Bezos purchase price for the Post and further illustrates certain seldom-reported institutional ties between news-making agencies and news organizations.

In another example of close ties between government and the news media, Kreig noted that the president of CBS News is Andrew Rhodes. Rhodes brother, Ben, is Obama’s speechwriter, deputy national intelligence director and, as described by insider columnist David Ignatius in the July 11 Washington’s Post, “the closest thing he [Obama] has to a chief strategist.”

Earlier this month, Kreig pointed out, Ray McGovern, a CIA-analyst-turned peace activist, warned a separate audience at the Press Club that the mainstream media are suppressing vital news stories. According to McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst with responsibility for daily briefings of two presidents, “Never has it been so bad in the 50 years I’ve been in this town” and “there’s one change that dwarfs all the others.”  What is that change? “We no longer have a free media,” McGovern said. “That’s big. It does not get any bigger than that.”

McGovern was first quoted in report published by the Justice Integrity Project, an organization Kreig founded in 2010 to probe courts, politics and media coverage (http://wwwow.ly/yT2Rw)

In Presidential Puppetry  Kreig documents how deep-pocketed corporations and other institutions have, for more than a century, shaped the public agenda with increasingly little scrutiny from watchdogs. The book draws on Kreig’s  two decades as an investigative reporter, lawyer and high-tech advocate based in Washington, DC.

In the book, Kreig alleges that what he calls “puppet masters” wield enormous influence over intelligence agencies, elected officials, and both traditional and social media. For example, he describes a pattern whereby many prominent elected leaders secretly served as CIA or FBI informants before they entered politics, thereby establishing relationships unknown to the public.

Such allegations are endorsed by an array of experts (www.presidentialpuppetry.com), including McGovern and former CIA analyst and retired journalist John Kelly, who is a board member of the Justice Integrity Project (http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=188&Itemid=153. Kelly is the last surviving reporter to have covered the 1960 JFK election victory party in Hyannis Port. He went on to work for CBS and NBC before becoming a CIA officer in Indochina during the Vietnam War era. In organizing and introducing last week’s dinner lecture, Kelly said the news media have become far too timid and institutionally compromised.

The “Puppetry” message is documented with 1,100 endnotes to help other researchers and reformers, Kreig said.  Its conclusion is that any reform must begin with an understanding of our hidden history. That is the theme of a 50-second preview video, entitled “Knowledge Empowers You.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KV8Mt2nV_A)

I knew Kreig when he reported  for the Cornell Daily Sun in the late 1960s.  He’s since worked in journalism, technology, and  law. His Boston background iincludes coverage of the Celtics in the 1980s and a clerkship with Boston-based federal judge Mark Wolf, who is best known for presiding over the Patriarca mob case and exposing the Whitey Bulger scandal(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_L._Wolf). Kreig holds law degrees from both Yale and the University of Chicago. From 2009 to 2011, he researched controversial Bush administration federal prosecutions as a Washington-based senior fellow for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

–Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment.¹ So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new?

In fact, there is much that is new about how these stories have come to light and a very good overview of what we have learned about what Greenwald calls the US Surveillance State. This is a book in two parts. The first 89 pages read like a cross between a detective thriller and a spy story. There are hand offs of thumb drives at airport boarding gates, virgin computers, cell phones sealed off from the reach of the NSA by removing batteries or stuffed in freezers, meetings with a yet to be identified Snowden by an unsolved Rubik’s cube in hand. This part of the book also establishes who Snowden is and how he thinks and views the world and his place in it. This latter introduction of Snowden is completely consistent with the person we have already come to know through his video interviews broadcast a year ago.²

The second half (really it is 170 pages) is a well organized exploration of what has been revealed so far of the NSA’s goals and programs.

THE GIANT SUCKING SOUND – “COLLECT IT ALL”

It is chilling to understand that the internal ethos of the NSA is summed up by the phrase “collect it all” where “it” is all of the information flows in the telephone and internet in the world.  As expressed in the presentation slide “New Collection Posture” from 2010, this is implemented through six strategies: “Sniff It All”, “Know It All”, “Collect It All”, “Process It All, “Exploit It All, and “Partner It All”. Even if you have been following the revelations as published in the various news sources favored with direct access to the Snowden documents, it was hard to envision quite how comprehensive the vision of the NSA is.

BUREAUCRATS DRESSED UP AS JUDGES

Greenwald reiterates the well-known fact that so-called court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, set up by congress to oversee activities of the NSA, FBI and others engaged in intercepting communications is not even an effective administrative element. He notes that in 2012 the “court” did not deny a single on of the 1789 applications. As i have argued earlier³ this so-called court lacks most of the important features that our tradition requires of a court – openness, representation of the plaintiff by a lawyer, and ability to confront accusers. The FISC is just a bunch of bureaucrats dressed up as judges.

BENIGN META DATA

Another issue that Greenwald deals with is the claim by the government and its apologists in the media and academia that the collection of meta data is not really an intrusion on privacy – the NSA is not collecting the content of the communications.(( earlier I have twice commented on this issue: “NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors” and “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata“)) In a very telling note Greenwald repeats other privacy activists challenge to those claiming that meta data is benign that they release the meta data for all of their phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. None have thus far taken up this challenge.

Greenwald touches on many other topics: the role of corporations, surveillance of US allies, many NSA software tools to exploit their data warehouses, privacy in human identity, and more.

In closing, Greenwald’s book is an excellent overview of the issues presented to date by the work done to understand the Snowden documents. And, it is actually a great read with its detective/spy thriller opening that engages the reader so effectively in the drama of the early days of the Snowden whistle blowing.

1. NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014 [↩]
2.  http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-videoand http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/edward-snowden-video-interview both accessed 06012014 [↩]
3. “FISA Court – Not a Court – an Administrative Rubber Stamp – Bureaucrats Dressed Up as Judges” http://currentmatters.markorton.com/2013/07/fisa-court-not-a-court-an-administrative-rubber-stamp-bureaucrats-dressed-up-as-judges/ [↩]

–Mark Orton

This review was originally posted at

Current Matters

thoughts on the passing scene from Mr. Wonderful’s World

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. Mr. Orton is a HarrisCom advisor.

Warren Croce preparing to hide artwork.

Belmont artist  Warren Croce,   , winner of the Cambridge Art Association‘s 2014 National Prize for Best Mixed Media Piece,  is promoting his work by hiding a piece each month in a Boston area business–and  offering residents clues to find the work–which finders may then keep.

Croce’s first “hunt” began in February; the third will start next week. Typical clues, available on Croce’  Facebook page  or via his newsletter ,  include maps of the general vicinity and a photo from inside the business where the art is hidden, according to a recent media release. The only “payment“  is to post on Croce’s Facebook page. 

In February, Croce gave away “Three Wise Monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, “ a series of acrylic monkey faces sprayed on board with newspaper clippings strategically pasted over their eyes, ears, and mouths, found at L‘Aroma Café in West Newton, MA. His second giveaway was a  triptych of face, found at the Bourbon Coffee in Cambridge. 

“I like giving art away,” Croce says. ” I love the joy people get from finding a piece of my artwork. Hey, you only get back from this life what you put into it.”

Trey Klein, who found the  piece at L’Aroma Cafe, said “This was a fun game and these pieces are awesome.”

Llan Levy, who found the piece at Bourbon Coffee in Porter Square,  called the hunt  “Food for the soul.”

Some “hunters”  have posted  photo series or chronological poem-like accounts of their searches on Croce’s Facebook page.

Croce’s winning Cambridge Art Associate piece, called “There is nothin’ like a dame,”  is comprised of twelve 1950‘s album covers glued onto board with a Madmen-esque figure painted over them in acrylic, pastel, and gel.  The exhibition runs until June 26. 

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is an author, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group,  an award-winning PR and marketing firm in Kendall Square.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial was  excoriated as “BS” by the Huffington Post, Even the BBC called the show “confounding and exasperating.”  It points out that the  the 77th edition of the Whitney Biennial begins with a question, asked at the very start of the text that greets visitors: “What is contemporary art in the United States now?” After seeing the work of 103 artists and groups on display here, a BBC critic suggests, “you might not be any closer to answering that enquiry.”

Because I had only a few hours to spare,   friends told me not to bother with anything but the exhibits on the fourth floor. But when I arrived at the museum, a tour of the third floor was about to start so I hopped on board. I’m glad I did.

Docent Janice Lieberman explained that the third floor exhibit, curated by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, was meant to show transitions, the blurring of boundaries, changing concepts of internal and external, of gender and sexuality, of political and geographical economy and environment, and the interplay of images and text embodied in art. “What’s an artist, what is art is up for grabs,” she said. “We’re living in a strange time–the disappearing plane off Maylasia, for example, and the shipwreck off Korea.”  She pointed out that it’s a time of transition for the Whitney itself, because the current Breuer Building, built in 1966, will close this summer, and the museum will move to a new highrise at the tip of Manhattan,”

Lieberman explained all of the above in the hallway off the elevator of the 3rd floor, where work by Ken Okiishi is displayed on screens resembling large ipods–on which the artist superimposed digital images on old video,then smeared the screen with what looked to me like finger paint. As Okiishi explained to Interview Magazine:  “I had already been making straight video works, and then I asked, ‘What if I move even further outside of the screen and work on top of the screen?” According to Lieberman, museum visitors often take photos of this work. thus further blurring boundaries by becoming a part of the work. I dutifully took a photo (top left) but to be honest, was not blown away by these. .   The New England Puritan in me was boggled by photos of Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, a man and a woman who “fell for each other,” as they each switched gender.  Disconcerting and meant to be. I could have lived without the photo of their bare behinds, each with a band aid covering the site of a hormone injection. 

“Meh” to Canopy Canopy Canopy: .com–the work of a collaborative group interested in the history of objects and collections: showing original wooden stand, a reproduction, though others in my tour group were quite impressed by the 3-d printed version o the same.

At one point, when we were standing in front of a workbench amidst sand, tools and other objects, Lieberman said, frankly, “I don’t get this,” I’m not sure if it was she or someone in our group who suggested it was a reference to environmental change. Soon after that, Lieberman warned us that the exhibit gets “stranger and stranger.”

“The American Dream,”  for example, is a collection of paintings by Keith Mayerson, who, Lieberman explained, is a psychoanalyst’s son whose dreams were  to show his work in the Whitney–and  to come out as gay. As described on the Whitney Website, “The salon-style installation includes images of Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Abraham Lincoln, and others, and links these stories to those of the nation and of Mayerson.  Paintings of Superman and popular musicians such as Marvin Gaye and the Beatles are juxtaposed with depictions of the artist as a child with his family…and of Mayerson with his husband, Andrew Madrid.”  The beautifully composed paintings, with striking brush strokes, hang close together on walls from floor to ceiling. More power to Meyerson and his dream, I say. I  also say that it was not MY dream to look up and see a large painting of  actor James  Dean, in the nude, masturbating.

Less vibrant, less provocative, are hats, placed on the floor as islands on a piece of cloth, meant,  to show that New York City is no longer the center of the art world–and that the US is now part of the Pacific Rim. .Another set of three attached hats  is used in performance art to show, when worn by  three people, what it’s like to try to move anything politically, Lieberman explained.

I found the painting, drawing and tapestry of 89-year-old Lebanese poet Etel Adnan quite inspiring. Adnan, who now lives in California,”  makes “accordion-fold books, or leporellos, that meld visual and verbal observation, fusing the artist’s parallel practices in painting and writing as she transcribes poems and records unfolding landscapes and urban spaces,” .according to the Whitney writeup.

Before we entered the last room in the 3rd floor exhibit, Lieberman said that, at first, she’d found its contents shocking. ” I couldn’t believe I’d ever actually show it to people,”  filled as it was, with images conveying violence and sex.  In fact, she added, the museum  considered putting a warning sign in front of the doorway. Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, “goes to the extreme to show the extreme.It’s an example of an artist going to the top to jolt you.” Then, she shrugged. “People love it,” she said. And in we went. The large room  was crowded with museum visitors and mannequins standing or sprawled on couches and chairs, amidst mobiles, hanging art, and stuff strewn all over the place–so chaotically that I couldn’t focus.  When I heard someone exclaim to a friend,  “Look at this,”  I did so. She was holding up a pair of stuffed, beachball sized gonads hanging at either end of a long string.

I decided it was time to leave, thanked Lieberman for her frankness and humor, and asked if I could quote her in this piece. “Yes,” she replied. Then she  suggested mentioning that, in “real life”, she’s a psychoanalyst –clearly the perfect qualification for guiding people through this show.

Incidentally, I did also visit the fourth floor, curated by Michelle Grabner, an artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Grabner’s stated goal was to “develop a curriculum that presents identifiable themes… that are currently established in the textures of contemporary aesthetic, political, and economic realities.” She prioritized “contemporary abstract painting by women; materiality and affect theory; and art as strategy—in other words, conceptual practices oriented toward criticality.”

I found the work she chose more accessible and understandable but far less provocative than the work shown on the third floor. I liked Sheila Hicks “Pillar of Inquiry.” The work of the 80-year-old Nebraska artist melds the weaver’s craft and fine art. (Photo, left,by Bill Orcut)t. Was also struck by Sterling Ruby’s large, colorful ceramic vessels filled with remnants of earlier works that he had deemed failures or which had accidentally blown up during firing” As explained on the Whitney Website, the finished works contain notions of archaeological excavation, reanimating his own objects exhumed from the past into new, living forms.  I did wonder if the docent leading the fourth-floor tour I was kidding when she told us Grabner wanted to award “best-in-how” to a “12×12″or so z-shaped- sculpture coated to look like foam rubber– on a pedastal, with a string pulled through it.

I was sorry to miss Grabner’s selections of women’s abstract expressionists–and also the second exhibit floor, chosen  by Anthony Elms, Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the Whitney, noted: “Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”

While many critics dumped on the show as a whole, I  thought it was fun.

The Biennial runs through May 25, 2014.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm in Kendall Square. Cambridge.