i've never done this before with the newsletter- right before i send this to you i am writing my intro. usually the introduction gets crafted over a week as i think about what's been swimming through my mind but this week strange things are doing laps in there. i don't know if strange is the right word: more anxious, overwhelmed and curious ruminations. gaza footage keeps me up at night thinking about how powerless i feel. i'm becoming obsessed with blue zones and weirdly how religious community is a factor...i've been reading Sally and Sarah Clarkson's Life Giving Home, which is filled with Jesus talk but also so much around ritual and belonging that happens within your own walls. as you've heard me ramble on- i'm still digesting the pandemic and what it means to live publicly after hiding in the resourcefulness of our little private worlds.
another major thing that i wasn't sure if i should write about: on my way to Miami for the first time (i don't have great recommendations as we mainly sat on the beach, swam and ate at our hotel), our plane had an emergency landing. why you ask? because there was a literal ELECTRICAL FIRE on our row. it was so traumatic, everyone crying and praying thinking these were our last moments. even the flight staff cried when we hit the ground. the result was a lot of weepy moments in miami contemplating shells, waves, my children's beautiful smiles thinking how precious it all is.
lately i'm trying to fight against my impulse of keeping my world super small. with my existential concerns i've been wondering what it would feel like to have a hidden life. everything around me has taught me to present myself to the world in bold and magnificent ways, making waves with whatever i choose to do. more eyes more ideas more relationships...but what if dinner parties without documentation, or quiet trips to the museum or baking to brian eno is enough? as i contemplate my next moves in my work life these are the kind of preoccupations that run through my mind. how do you reconcile this? do you feel hidden or very seen?
then this thing happens: i meet an artist like this week's guest, Shirin, through my work teaching strategic planning and i'm blown away but their thoughts, ideas, projects and choices. Shirin was one of my students last year and I asked her to be a feature. enjoy her life like i do and make her celery stew with me. i'm making it tonight.
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Pictured in front of my piece Revolution at Four Freedoms Park across from the United Nations in New York for an exhibition supporting the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
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Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. Towfiq focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and her artwork reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.
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what kind of life do you want to live?
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This is a photo of a collaborative sculpture between me and my husband called Cup for Two. Yes, our tea is connected!
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A life that makes time for sharing, connection, vulnerability, and warmth!
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A current project of mine is called Thinking About Migration, which is made of prints of Persian rugs on gauze fabric. They blow and turn gently like ethereal spirits from a fan placed in the corner of the room that personifies the imagination of magic carpets. In old Persian stories magic carpets are woven with magic threads that are able to transport anyone to anywhere in the world instantly. The rugs, and their delicate gauzy materiality suggest bodies of Iranian migrants and the precarity of migration. Their delicate motion and scale creates an ambivalent sensation—simultaneously of overwhelming vulnerability and loss while suggesting a calm freedom swaying easily in the wind.
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This is a little assignment I keep in my back pocket if I feel stuck in the studio.
1+1 = 25 sculptures
- Start by writing a list of 50 materials in your sketchbook(preferably materials that you can find a lot of) i.e. Dryer lint, toothpicks, coffee grounds, etc..
- Choose one material from your list and pick one material as a joinery i.e. toothpicks, gum, super glue, etc.
- Create a sculpture a day using only one material and one joiner.
You only have one day to make each sculpture and can not work on it the next day.
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shirin's film of the week
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A show I’ve been binging right now is called How To with John Wilson on HBO.
I highly recommend! It’s hilarious.
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shirin's song of the week
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shirin's article of the week
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I’ve loved this short piece of writing, Learning The Grammar of Animacy by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She speaks about how language shapes our worldview, what ideologies form out of language, and what can not be translated while she learns her ancestral language.
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shirin's food of the week
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We have been eating Khoreshteh Karafs (celery stew) all week in our house. I’ve just been craving it! It’s tart, lemony, herby, sooo good!
This is my basic recipe (sorry, I never write down measurements)
Khoreshteh Karafs
- Sauté onion until translucent and slightly golden
- Add turmeric, black pepper, garlic powder, and salt
- Add cubed chicken thighs and lightly cook exterior
- Remove chicken to prevent overcooking
- Add minced parsley and sauté until bright green
- Add celery, 1/2 cup of water, cut dried mint leaves, and a pinch of dried fenugreek leaves. Cover and cook until celery is softened.
- Add lemon juice when celery is desired texture
- Add chicken back in
- Optional: Add jarred marinated cooked artichokes (strain the jar liquid)
Enjoy with Persian rice and yogurt!
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The funny thing is, that I met my husband because of bread. He was a baker when we met, and I needed his help with dough consistencies for a video performance project I was doing all about a bread society and access to basic needs, called Soft & Sensitive.
My husband mills his own grain and bakes us a weekly whole wheat sourdough bread, which we devour with lots of Kerrygold butter.
Lately we’ve been covering our loaves with sesame seeds before baking, which we have been loving!
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In 1979 my mother and her family were forced to leave Iran for their Baha’i Faith never to return again. Many of our family members had been put in prison, tortured, and killed. My family who could escape persecution left all of their physical possessions behind to start a new life as refugees in America. As a child, I had always wondered what my family's life was like in Iran, and what they looked like. I would ask for photographs from their time before I was alive, but there weren’t any. About twenty years after my family left Iran a young man was walking down a street an hour away from his home when he found a photo album in the trash that was being cleared out from a deceased man’s home. He intuited that the photo album did not belong to the person who had lived there and thought he might reunite the photos with their original owner one day. Twenty years later the man met my great uncle at a conference in London to find out that all this time he had been living between Iran and twenty minutes away from my grandfather and mother in California. In 2021 my family’s lost photo album was delivered to us which included my mother's childhood pictures, old library cards, my grandparent’s wedding and engagement pictures, their original invitation, and even some film negatives. That these photographs came into our lives through improbable circumstances fourty years later, something that my family would have never thought possible, made it feel as though these images had a life and journey of their own to come back to us.
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and a few picks from push...
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obsessed with this old sesame street animation by tee collins a pioneer in TV animation
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former push picks karen azoulay has a new substack about flowers and their meanings. clearly i went nuts for the one on roses!
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we hope you are staying warm and that you enjoyed another installment of push picks. as always, if you like what you read, forward it to someone or encourage them to sign up. it would mean the world to us 🌎
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