Catherine Partsch Conlan
@catconlan
Editor of a Labor newspaper. Union card, clinic escort, Nebraska roots, now Minnesota. Hockey, abortion, cake, abolition, liberation. I love it when goalies lose in OT. She/they. Radicalizing over time. Banner photo: IG @havington
Wildfire smoke from further north, wildfire damage from two months ago
thinking about wildfires in "tourist areas" reminds me of the early-00s pushing of tourism and climate refuge/resilience as "alternatives" to mining up here and you know what, the solution isn't going to look like a solution, it's going to look like a revolution
otoh maybe I should just get into Gitchigami, where apparently the water temperature is 45 degrees
I can’t get over the way it gathers its lil paws and then goes ✨ħôp✨
just got a Watch Duty notification for a new fire 80 miles away and -- yeah, okay, a lil trauma jumped out there
I spent a lot of time driving between Omaha and York in 2024 and I stopped to see some old friends (this one is at the westbound York exit).
Looking back, it reminds me (like so many things now) of my time living in Russia in the early 1990s, among the recent but still beautiful wreck of new ideas and deliberate expansion of culture and the sense of Something Bigger that has started to become small and mean.
I’d be interested in an oral history of people who interacted with the artists while they did their work, and how the projects affected them, but…that feels like the kind of money that’s hard to come by these days. Especially, I’m sad to say, in Nebraska.
Like everything in the bicentennial year, it felt big and important (OTOH I was 5). We lived in Lincoln at the time, and visited the sculpture garden at Sheldon often; I believed I lived in a world that was full of huge gorgeous ideas.
My family was doing a LOT of driving along almost all of I-80 in the mid-70s, and brand-new rest areas (Nebraska was the first state to complete its stretch of interstate!) with public sculptures made a huge impression on me.
(Raimondi was in residence in Grand Island, and spoke recently about how he would hold community talks and introduce his then-boyfriend and no one batted an eye. GRAND ISLAND!)
Sculptor John Raimondi’s piece, Erma’s Desire, got a lot of attention for its title and brought him to national attention, largely because people thought it was racy. Instead it represented desire of his mother for her children to go to school past the eight grade.
The project commissioned eight artists from around the nation and paid them to be artists-in-residence in the communities where their art would be installed along I-80. As you can imagine, these were not metropolitan centers.
One of the initiatives that the state’s bicentennial committee put together was a public art installation at rest areas along the newly completed Interstate 80.
we are never again going to have an oversized awkward rawboned D-man who looks like a locomotive engineer from 1890 and that is a LOSS for HOCKEY and SOCIETY AT LARGE