Leann Davis Alspaugh

Tuesday

Leann Davis Alspaugh

The contingent talent of Emily Sargent

When your brother is one of the most successful artists of his time, you might feel reluctant to pick up a paintbrush. Yet, the works of Emily Sargent, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Portrait of a Family, prove that she was an artist in her own right. Sargent (1857-1936) was not in her brother’s shadow, although she was undoubtedly in his debt. John, Emily and their sister Violet were the children of FitzWilliam Sargent, a successful Philadelphia physician, and the artist Mary Newbold Sargent. By the 1850s, the Sargent family were living a nomadic existence in Europe – John and Emily were both born in Florence. Encouraged by their spirited mother, the Sargent children were instructed that no matter how many sketches were begun in a day, at least one must be finished.

Tuesday

Leann Davis Alspaugh

My secret love of Electronic Dance Music

When I heard the breaking news that one of Electronic Dance Music’s most popular DJs has resolved to make dance music ‘more fun and more inclusive’, I groaned. Must politics invade dance music as well as every other aspect of modern life? I’ve been listening to EDM almost daily for years. The genre is maligned for its repetitive, mechanized sound, and its reliance on Auto-Tune, but it’s also surprisingly complex and various — diverse, one might even say. It’s true that EDM is often the soundtrack of drug-fueled club raves, but do charges of elitism and homogeneity really hold up in the sober light of dawn? EDM emerged in the 1980s.

steve aoki edm

Wednesday

Leann Davis Alspaugh

A changing climate on the Texas Gulf Coast

It’s 9 a.m. on Sunday morning and my mother and I arrive at her church for Mass. Inside, I greet the mother of one of my oldest friends, ‘Buenos días, Señora, cómo está?’ ‘M’hija!’ she exclaims, and we embrace. My Spanish is serviceable, but it gets a real workout when I attend my mother’s church. At the Catholic church in my Texas Gulf Coast hometown, the Spanish Mass has the largest attendance. Everyone there, except my mother and me, is Hispanic. The altar servers are Hispanic. The middle-aged deacon is Hispanic. The only other exception is the parish priest, Father C., who is from India.

beto o'rourke texas gulf coast church

Monday

Leann Davis Alspaugh

The Precisionist Impulse: in search of the first American art movement

‘The chief business of the American people,’ said Calvin Coolidge, ‘is business.’ Commerce to Coolidge was a kind of religion: ‘the man who builds a factory, builds a temple.… The man who works there worships there.’ In the forward momentum of American industrialisation from the turn of the 19th century through the Great Depression, skyscrapers, factories, docks and railroads, all became urban temples. If you had looked closely at one such building, a 20-story structure going up at 100 Church Street in Lower Manhattan in 1958, you would have seen two figures clambering up scaffolding trying to reach the highest point, pulling out first a camera, then a sketchpad.

precisionist impulse precisionism