After two different people strongly recommended I go see it, I spent an afternoon at the Guggenheim with Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s abstract, spiritual collection, one she began creating in 1906.

I took exactly one photo before my phone died.

Klint is an artist who did not show her work publicly in her lifetime. Her wish was to have it remain out of the public eye until at least twenty years after her death. It didn’t receive real attention until 1986 – over forty years after she passed away in 1944.

“She imagined installing these works in a spiral temple, though this plan never came to fruition”.

It was my aim to view Klint’s work, which I knew would resonate, so I was pleasantly surprised to feel something from R. H. Quaytman’s work (Chapter 34). Since I’m researching examples of imagery in storytelling for my craft paper, I spent time in the reading room jotting down some notes about the way she likes to talk about her entire body of work. From the introduction of the Morning: Chapter 30 exhibition catalogue:

“RHQ has used the word ‘book’ to describe her ongoing production, and the word ‘chapter’ to denote each group of her paintings. She sometimes says that each painting is like a word in a sentence, and that we should replace the word ‘noun’ by the word ‘painting’, and that each painting is like a page. In a battle between words and image, language wins all the time over image”.

Both artists will be shown until 4/23/19. J. really wants to see it too, so I’ll definitely be back at least once more before the exhibitions come to a close.