Crow 31 Days: The Chopstick Table

I saw it before I knew what it was made of: when I looked at the on-line estate sale I stopped to study a round table with brightly colored lines radiating out from the center. Hours later when I walked into the studio of a good friend and renowned artist Pamela Nelson: I saw it again. 

Chopsticks. This table was made as an assemblage of brightly colored chopsticks. I walked over, breathless. It was everything: beautifully crafted: colors and lines cleverly placed just as Pam does best. She even painted the legs with a leopard print. It's such a special thing: bright and whimsical. 

I thought about Pam: collecting all those chopsticks over the years and bringing them to her whimsical studio in Downtown Dallas. I imagined her placing each one in layers of lacquer and brightly colored paint. 

Pam is practicing the art of minimizing as she begins a new chapter in a nature-lined area of Dallas: Turtle Creek. She is shedding years of furniture, sculptures, prints and paintings. It was easy to be overwhelmed. This was no ordinary estate sale. I am also dipping my toe into minimalist thinking, so I resisted the ease of bringing so many wonderments home: even the Chopstick Table, which by way of this essay, I am clearly still thinking about. 

I saw other moments of appreciation of Asian art and culture as I walked through the swell of Pam's life as a collector. A Chinese Dancer framed in the garage, two paintings in the hallway, lamp bases and prints. Asia was part of Pam's journey, but a journey that moves into a future as she continues to traverse the globe. This artist of the world brought home textiles from Honduras and inspired new ones via Honduras Threads . She commissioned couches for her living room in the Ming furniture style.  I noticed a textile from Egypt and glass hand blown in Mexico. She is a collector of culture. Asia is just part of her story. 

All of these experiences land in paintings and collage in future work. Pam's life is part of every assemblage. I saw it in large canvas murals in the halls of her home and studio, and in little framed works of art on the window sill. I saw it in the collaged tops of side tables and the button lamp I also can't stop thinking about. 

Piece by piece, work by work, Pam created a living space with her dear late husband that was, as it was assembled here in her home, composed. And through this weekend, friends, fellow artists are taking little bits of Pam's moments with them: like a big beautiful sand mandala, it comes apart, and all of the energy moves into a new existence: piece by piece. 

I studied this. Most people wait until after they are gone to have the big estate sale. Pam did it now--she packed up the items she loves most for her new apartment in the sky, and left. Left this life for a new one: I know no one braver. How brave and how light she must feel. I am so inspired by this minimalist mindset: what matters most is how we learn that which is most precious. 

I have a feeling Asia went with her, too. However, I love that she left the Chopstick Table for someone to discover and love. The new owner won't know all of her stories: chopsticks from this take -out place and that, but they'll make new stories (while Pam is making new works of art) around the centrifuge of color and chopsticks. And the beautiful energy of her creation is carried out into the world: back to the place it all came from. 

Crow 31 Days: Summer Day

With Summer just hours away, I share this poem by Mary Oliver as a celebration of slowing down: A consciousnessI believe we learn in Asian art and philosophy: 

Summer Day 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean-the one who has flung herself out of the grass,the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

Crow 31 Days: I Have a Few Rubies in My Closet

Her name is Ruby Bhandari. She is part lightning bug, part butterfly, part unicorn: you've never met anyone like her. Mysteriously she never sleeps, and miraculously she can draw something in Dallas, Texas and within hours, a sewing machine in New Delhi, India is bring it to form. Ruby is magic.

I met Ruby and her amazing husband Raj for the second time though their magnanimous offer to create a fashion show for our members at the museum over 15 years ago. We are convinced we met years earlier on the campus of the University of Texas as we both served on the Cabinet of College Councils. It is the kind of friendship where--when we met "officially" we all felt like we'd known each other forever.

Ruby is a dear friend, but Ruby is also an accomplished fashion designer and entrepreneur. She started her company Silk Threads while still as student at UT. She is the epitome of tenacity.

Ruby works two shifts for two time zones: telecommuting with India has it's challenges. She fills her day meeting with clients in Dallas, working on her many distribution projects, designing the next season and building the business.

Walking into the showroom is better than Alice in Wonderland. Ruby has a team of devoted employees--and she pops in and out between calls and clients to offer a style or a color: she knows how to create something ravishing.

Her confidence is magnetic: I've walked in planning just to stop by and say hello. I've walked out with mid-riff bearing sarees, jewelry, salwar kameez, gowns fit for royalty and two tunics commissioned for the opening of our sculpture garden.

She is a marketing genius, a talented businesswoman and simply impossible to say "no" to. Once you see the Ruby, you are part of a marvelous elixir: an intoxicating concoction of joy, glamour and fun. Ruby dressed me for an engagement party, several local galas, a fashion show and several evenings with the Asia Society at the Tiger Ball in Houston. She even dressed me for the opening of an exhibition we supported in New Delhi-sending her cousin to our hotel for a last-minute fitting. Ruby was thousands of miles away on the phone: designing by satellite.

Ruby's success has been earned: over 25 years of grit and courage. She is recognized as one of the first designers to bring Indian fashion to the region. Raj has been a guiding light in their partnership and in their business. This is one of my favorite Power Couples in Dallas.

A visit to the Silk Threads showroom will not disappoint. Plan to spend a few hours sifting through the gowns, and do not be afraid to try something bold. Be like Alice in this wonderland and drink it all up. I promise you'll walk out smiling. And you just might find a few Rubies in your closet, too.

Crow 31 Days: 98 Years Ago

Ninety-eight years ago today Margaret Doggett was born at her home in Dallas, Texas to Lillian and Edwin B. Doggett. She must have been a most anticipated, cherished gift--they'd tried unsuccessfully for years to have children. She would be their only child. She was precious.

No one knew quite how precious until we all did. She would forge a partnership with young, enterprising and debonair Trammell Crow. She would raise six children--all the while entertaining ambassadors and business delegations. She supported Trammell's enchantment with Asia: at his side for every adventure. She amplified his taste with an exquisite eye for the decorative arts of China. She asked a question in a family board meeting soon after his diagnosis of Alzheimer's: is there enough museum-quality art in our collection to create an art museum for our city in Trammell's honor? 

Bold questions in the Crow Family usually turn quickly into big visions. A curator was swiftly engaged from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to select the objects that would be removed from homes and offices and donated to the non-profit Crow Family Foundation soon to be doing business as the Crow Collection of Asian Art. She designated funding toward an endowment that today supports 1/6 of our operating expense. Her question at a board meeting created so much possibility: last year our art museum produced over 600 events and provided cultural access to over 108,000 people.

That's what one idea can do. That's what one person can do. Ninety-eight years ago, a soul came into the world and made a difference through her acts of compassion and her willful wisdom. She left us there years ago, just shy of 95, but one idea inspires a value of being visionary and seeing the possibility beyond any obstacle and barrier. She didn't want to create a museum for the sake of displaying objects in perpetuity: she wanted young people to know the joy of exploring the world's art, religion and culture: a world Trammell opened up for her through his voracious curiosity and inquiry.

31 Days of Asia celebrates this remarkable offering we can all experience thanks to the life of Margaret and Trammell Crow. Their vision for Dallas as an international city created more access to compassion and to each other than we could have ever imagined. And in some ways, we're only just beginning.

What is your question?

What is your idea? 

Crow 31 Days: We Know You've Got Soul

I heard it before I understood it: a pulsing. It was familiar. Blood rushing. A heartbeat. A womb.  Something begins, but it is distant--and sounds fade like fog on a warm lake.

I am standing in the Samurai Gallery of the Crow Collection of Asian Art. I am part of a sound installation: We Know You've Got Soul by Grammy Award-winning composer Henri Scars Struck: a brilliant world premier commissioned by Soluna and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

We 

Know 

You've 

Got 

Soul. 

The gallery I am in is the first stop on a journey. Henri calls it Before. I stand quietly, re-contextualizing the sounds I hear based on the images in the Japanese Screen, the Samurai suit, the beginnings are everywhere.

I move to the second gallery This Life: a pairing to the exhibition: Landscape Relativities: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney. I am in an assimilation of sounds, landscapes and intrigue. Parts of this composition are light, joyous, others slow and melodious. A piano takes me into This Life: slowly.

In the stairwell, one of my favorite places in the museum, I walk through The Passing. It was actually the stairwell: an illuminated, enlightening stair designed by Graham Greene and Ruben Garza, that beckoned Henri to create a commission of sound for the full museum: in this stairwell he transformed an idea for one sound installation into a symphony of 8 spaces: it is no accident he chose an auspicious 8. In this stairwell, as part of the passing, I hear the pull of a baby crying, children, air. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

The lure of the next gallery pulls me up: what is just around the corner -what I can't yet hear takes me there. The Jade Room offers the fourth stop on this journey of sound: Judgement. I sit on the grey couch and take it all in. The composition swells around me: beautiful yet distorted: not quite right. In some ways, uncertain. I stay with it though, looking for meaning in me and around me.

The Arbor Walk and the Mezzanine offer Merciful Judgement. I try to distinguish the differences in these two experiences: I listen for less uncertainty. I listen for answers. I hear more beauty and less distortion. I am guided by the words: the signposts for this journey, but I need them and want them. The context of these titles frame my interpretation. I am grateful.

On the Skybridge I hear the space of silence. I stand in one of my favorite spaces in the museum: a bridge between two galleries: a Tree House looking over Flora and the marvel that is the Nasher Sculpture Center. I am still but I am moving. The word Transition is just right.

Gallery III: the Indian Gallery offers the final two chapters in this practice of cycle: Eternal Rest and Gratitude. I realize I need more time, perhaps hours, to really feel these moments Henri intended for us to hear and see. 64 voices collaborated for this final composition: 64 languages. It is, just as it was in the beginning: everything. I wanted to lie down--the way you feel in a grassy field. I wanted to roll down the hill of this sound and land at the bottom. I wanted to be still and move at the same time. I want to talk to a friend about it and I wanted to be quiet. This installation is brimming with impermanence.

I promised myself I will come back and sit with the composition several more days. It is, after all, a journey. I love Henri's choice to place meditation mats in the Gallery for Eternal Rest. Eternal Rest. I've associated those words with a cemetery. This experience, however, is the opposite: I was "with" the energy in this work: part of system of risk, failure, forgiveness and love. More human than religious, this is a work of spirit: a complement to the boundless realm of art and nature in the study of Asia. Henri Scars Struck teaches us that this system is-as is life-and as is our museum: one big circle holding all of us in the human experience.

Come walk this journey on your own and be with us. We Know You've Got Soul. The installation is open through June 4. Immense gratitude goes to Henri, Grace, Luminous curator Muriel Quancard and our friends at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Soluna Festival.

Crow 31 Days: A Gift from a Shop Keeper at the Rambagh Palace

Her name is Siddhakshi. Her name was sent to me over Facebook Messenger from a friend I met in the beautiful little jewelry shop inside the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, India. The owner of the jewelry store knows Siddhakshi's family.

She was heading to America, enrolled as a Freshman as an international student at Southern Methodist University. Her parents were hopeful to find someone in Dallas for Siddhakshi to have as an anchor here. I was honored to be her anchor, to ease--even just a little bit-- the unimaginable worry of sending a daughter overseas for nine months.

Baker, my ten year-old and I ventured out to the International Arrivals at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in August of last year. I regretted not making a clever sign for Siddhakshi, but we were there, with flowers in hand, ready to receive this adventurous and curious young lady. After too many hours of travel (alone), she walked through the doors just outside of customs and into our arms: relieved and exhausted. We quickly texted her parents--who were up in the middle of the night waiting for word of her safe arrival.

Siddhakshi was quiet and reserved: I tried to give her an orientation to the city without overwhelming her. It was Sunday afternoon and due to flight schedules she was arriving two days after the international students at SMU, so we enjoyed the unexpected adventure of finding the off-hours welcome desk. As it does, it all worked out, and a couple of hours later, the luggage, which eclipsed her tiny frame, was all moved into her new home.

Today, nine months later, I helped Siddhakshi move some items to our house for storage over the summer while she goes back to India. I marveled at the blossoming in her over the academic year. She was completely at ease as we stood in the place we unloaded her luggage in August. This young lady is nine months and some years older, wiser, even more amazing than the day I met her.

She excelled in her course work--taking 18 hours in the fall. She joined clubs and organizations, offered to stay with our boys, helped me at the museum and attended some of our Compassion Dinners last fall.

She is everything: smart, curious about the world, enterprising and fiercely determined to get the most out of her opportunity to be in college in Dallas, Texas. I wish I could say she needed me this year, but she really didn't. She coped with homesickness, culture shock, rigorous course work and the complications of being an international student in 2017 with grace and ease: Siddhakshi never asked me for anything.

So the irony in all this is that, while I didn't get to see her as much as I hoped to, she became my anchor. She taught me what real courage looks like. She shared her fearless heart with all of us. My dear husband will take her back to Terminal D (the International Terminal) in a couple of days and she will fly home to a family waiting for her most anticipated arrival.

How grateful I am to have walked into that jewelry shop before boarding our bus back to New Delhi in January of 2015. The real jewel I got that day is Siddhakshi, a young lady we plan to treasure as part of our family for a very long time. 

Crow 31 Days: In Praise of Shadows at White Rock Lake

As I began to look for them, the bountiful lessons of Asia are everywhere. I moved with my family to a little bungalow just west of White Rock Lake twelve years ago. Our house is tucked away on a cul-de-sac between three parks. I can walk to the shore in about 5 minutes. 

I started a serious walking practice six years ago, in the summer of 2011 when I was facing a health crisis. My brilliant integrative medicine doctor encouraged me to pair exercise with something I love. I've loved the lake since the moment we moved here. It still astonishes me that a place so placid and beautiful can exist in Dallas. I started walking each morning at the lake, and each day I document the sunrise for a project called "Pocket Sunrise" at some point in The Magic Hour. Those that study the sunrise know about The Magic Hour: it's that luminous time when the light lifts us out of the darkness and dances over the horizon. It's the slowest hour you can know: brimming with the potential of a new day. 

Since 1998 I've studied the practices of Asian art and philosophy: art and nature cannot be separated, in Asian art, nature is the center of the universe, the power of nature over human and the ever-present collaboration in art such as jade and rock crystal of nature as the artist and human as the co-artist. It wasn't until I spent slow time looking as the nature in my own "backyard" that I began to understand the gift of a life in nature. 

In 1933 Japanese writer Jun'ichirō Tanizaki penned a In Praise of Shadows illustrating the important elements of Japanese aesthetics: 

“We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.” 
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

His use of the term "Orientals" is a now-anachronistic reference, but what he writes about in this gem of a book is still true today: whether we use the brighter lamp, Amazon or Facebook to distract us from exploring the things we cannot see: the things to really be conscious of are in the shadows. 

Since 2011 I've been looking in the shadows: in the blackest black of the night, in cold, wet wind and in the hot, heavy air of late July. I've watched the sun move from the northern edge of east to the southern hemisphere in winter. I've stood at the water's edge and listened to the sound the fog makes when it shape-shifts across the surface of the lake. I've seen coyote, snake, duck, mouse, nutria, tortoise, fish, heron, crane and pelican: all of these creatures in this system, yet dwarfed by the landscape of reed and water. At 6 in the morning, just before the first light of a new dawn, the Lake is Queen. Nature is everywhere. And I know this from looking in the shadows and being still and quiet. 

Tanizaki goes on to write: 

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.” 

I've seen this tranquility hold sway but slowly: over years of study. I've learned that the clouds in August are different than the clouds in October. I've studied the water in all ranges of wind and learned how the seasons alter what an how we see. And in this time before dawn, in late spring, the maturing egret follows me along the water's edge. He does not know I see. These moments, that may seem less significant are the most important: if I choose to pay attention the world offers one miracle after another. 

This experience of being in nature is so similar to how I believe one can experience art: we have permission to wonder. We have permission to take our time. We have permission to be in awe and in love. Contemplative practice finds its genesis in many of the works in our museum. 

How to look is up to us. 

How to be in that looking (curious, still, quiet) happens when you spend enough time praising the shadows. I found the real meaning of the sunrise by looking in the shadows. Enjoy the journey.