Just when icy weather in the garden this week made it more pleasant to investigate warmer and more welcoming indoor realms, images from two ends of a spectrum ended up lying juxtaposed on my desk. After the recent Presidental election and with excitement mounting about the impending Inauguration in January, I was mulling over the world of possibilities for investigating ideas about decorating with antiques and collectibles, with a twist of American history.  And there, side by side on the desk, were Lil’ Kim and George Washington, staring at me from two different worlds yet oddly similar, and begging for comparison and contrast.  Â
Washington’s portrait, General George Washington at Trenton, painted in 1792 by American artist John Trumbull, is part of an exhibit currently at Louisville’s Speed Museum (www.speedmuseum.org) entitled “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery”, which will be on display until January 4th, 2009. I’d been looking at the brocure given to me by a friend who recommended going.  The exhibit contains a wealth of not only paintings but pottery, furniture and metalwork items from Yale’s collection of art and artifacts spanning the American experience through the late 1800s.  Â
The cover art on the new book DEFinition: the Art and Design of Hip-Hop by Cey Adams with Bill Adler (HarperCollins Publishers; Collins|Design, 188 pages, $29.95) is left unmarred by the addition of a removable title strip wrapping the rapper; entitled Lust, it’s the 2005 creation of artist Mike Thompson, noted for his ad-work for Infiniti and Coca-Cola, and who has been called a modern-day Norman Rockwell; to see what I mean, check out his portrait of President-elect Barack Obama and others at http://www.miketartworks.com/BetaSite/MikeTArtworks.html. Whether you’re a fan of Rap and Hip-Hop, or completely befuddled by this currently evolving culture, DEFinition will put together a review of about the last 30 years of its music, personalities, advertising, tags, clothing and art so that your perspective is enriched. Oddly enough, titles like “Class, Race and Conflict” and “Ambition and Display” from the Yale exhibit brochure apply here as well; platinum records and rides display riches, and allusions to race are self-evident. It’s difficult to see just which artifacts from this contemporary collection will survive to be displayed in museums 200 years from now, but one thing is certain: “The Making of a Nation” is still a work in progress.
