The Personal is Political

With a number of other really fine women artists I am exhibiting in The Personal is Political, The Transformative Power of Women's Art
Koehnline Museum of Art
Oakton Community College
1600 East Golf Road
Des Plaines, IL 60016
Opening reception Thursday, October 4 from 5 to 8pm
The exhibit runs from October 4 through 26, 2012
To play a bit of the "Where's Nancy?" game, can you find me in this montage?

Sacred Spaces, ctd.

Why Women Should Yo-Yo; Yo-Yo's in Space

Randi Russo at Uncommon Ground, Chicago, 9/21

 Singer-songwriter, Randi Russo, at Uncommon Ground, at 11:00pm on Friday, September 21, 3800 N. Clark St. Chicago 773-929-3680.

Realization

I realized something today, that I am at the age of 64 doing what I thought I would be doing when I was 18, living the life of a working artist. Of course, there was a lot of "life in general" stuff inbetween.

Nancy Charak, artist, untitled watercolor on Fabriano Uno, 30"x22".

Watercolor on paper, 30"x22", untitled at this point, Nancy Charak, artist.

Sacred Ancestors

Once again with all that ancestral hanky-panky. It was once thought to be a good model, simple, linearly progressive, the "Out of Africa" migration; out of Olduvai, across the Indian subcontinent, eastwards to the islands big and small and upwards through Siberia to Bering to eventually Patagonia. You could draw it with an arrow, practically.  Only one problem, or actually many, the genetics don't support this anymore.

One of only two known remains of the Denisovan girl, this molar and a  phalange (finger bone).

"These days you never know where research related to modern human origins will be reported and published. Here is a presentation from the Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA) conference held in Long Beach, California, on July 13-14, 2012. The team focused on chromosome 1 and used a Korean panel to identify 107,473 haplotypes in Africans, 9,554 in Europeans and 6,933 in Asians. The results are preliminary but nevertheless intriguing. Despite the fact that Africans are by far the most polymorphic, it is Asian rare haplotypes that have better matches with Neandertals and Denisovans. In some cases African haplotypes have their exclusive Neandertal and Denisovan matches, which may indicate a migration from Asia to Africa." h/t Anthropogensis blog.

1040 W. Addison

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Sacred Enterprises

". . .Steve McCurry. . .famous [for his] photograph “Afghan Girl” — as well you [he] should — but he’s no one trick pony. This week, Underground NYPL tipped us [Flavor Wire] off to a gorgeous photo series of people reading around the world that McCurry recently posted on his blog, and we were completely blown away. Spanning the globe from Canada to Kashmir and augmented with choice quotes about the joy of reading from a few famous names, including McCurry himself, the series is a phenomenal ode to the universality and wonder of literature in any language. Click through to see some of our favorite photographs, and then head over to his blog to check out even more shots — they’re all truly fantastic."

h/t Flavor Wire...

We humans, at once so certain and as yet so uncertain, as to what separates us from the animals, surely know that this is what does so. And remember this, integrate it to the very deepest reaches of your soul, nothing but good happens to societies that educate women.

Steve McCurry, photographer, Afghanistan

Sacred Object, Ctd.

Eryphyoid Mite, captured in amber, 230,000,000 years old

An insect trapped in amber, perfectly preserved for millions of years: the image is familiar to fans of Jurassic Park, but in fact, few insects got stuck in sticky tree resin until about 130 million years ago—long after the Jurassic period ended. That’s when trees first began to produce enough of it to ensnare flies and mites.

From:  Caught in Time, the Oldest Bugs Ever Preserved in Amber.

Perspective: 230,000,000 years ago is slightly over half the life of our planet, 450 million.

Look upon it with awe and respect, this little guy is family and this is where he comes from, the Dolomites in Italy.

Sacred Object

Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent's Chair

Sacred Spaces, Ctd.

Out of Africa versus Out of America. That's what's resounding in genetic and linguistic professorial circles. The geneticists have been delving deep into DNA mutations, chromosomes, while the linguists have been parsing data on vowel changes, consonant drift, and overlaying into the timelines of the geneticists.

In addition, there's the Indo-European language family origin professorial squabble that's equally fun to eavesdrop on. The Indo-European language family is the biggest in the world, literally spoken by most of the people on this planet, some 3 billion native speakers. The big question is did the original language, nicely called P.I.E. (proto-Indo-European), originate on the Pontic Steppes or in eastern Anatolia. Important question because there is also genetic tracking of DNA from both farmer groups and from herder groups, that overlays the linguistics. This is deeply fascinating stuff. This is the new frontier of the sciences, data, lots and lots of data, and lots and lots of discussions about why timelines do or do not match.

The Out of America hypothesis is almost scary, with human origins from new world primates.

And then there's the fun with the pre-Clovis origins of the native Americans, or not?

Here's a summary of Out of America, from German Dziebel.

And here's a discussion of the P.I.E. origin question from the same blogger.

Molecular Phylogeny of Living Primates, from http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/out-of-america-family-of-hypotheses/