Neglected Orchid - Thomas Jefferson

The Neglected Orchid (Dactylorhiza praetermissa) is a species of flowering plant in the Orchidaceae family. It is also called "Neglected Dactylorhiza", "Forgotten Dactylorhiza" or "Forgotten Orchis". This species can be found in wet meadows and dune slacks in northern Europe, from Sweden to Italy. In France, it is found in the North of the country, from Brittany to Alsace.

It is a robust perennial herbaceous plant that can reach 40 cm in height. Its flowers, ranging from pale pink to purplish-red, are arranged in a fairly dense spike. It blooms from June to July. It is recognizable by its spreading lip, which is only slightly lobed with lateral edges that curve slightly forward. Small colony of neglected orchids. The species is declining as a result of the decrease in the number and size of wetlands and unimproved grasslands. It is classified as NT: Near Threatened Species.

This collage is to introduce to the color, textures, and concept.

                                        

It is included on the lists of protected plants in the European Union, notably in the Netherlands, Belgium and the French regions of Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine.

This is a collage of beautiful Robert Mapplethorpe of orchids.  I am looking at it for inspiration for shapes and postures for orchids that I will later draw and block print.

These are some drawings and block prints of orchids for inspiration.

This is an exploration of the color purple in the food,

This is fauna with purples in it - insects, birds, and fish.

This is a collage with images of neglected orchids and neglected women. 

Neglected (adjective)

Synonyms of neglected

: not given proper or necessary care or attention

neglected children

a neglected subject

a sadly neglected garden

• Women often express feeling neglected indirectly, through questions rather than statements.
• These questions are signals of unmet emotional needs, not accusations.
• Common themes include a need for reassurance, attention, and emotional presence.
• Questions often reflect fears of losing love, priority, or significance in the relationship.
• They point to a desire to feel seen, valued, and chosen.
• The underlying issue is usually emotional disconnection, not conflict itself.
• Responding with empathy and consistency can help repair closeness and trust.

 

Collages - Studio 1A - Thomas Jefferson

 

Making so many Concept Collages for Studio 1A at Jefferson.  I left UC Davis and I'm in school at Thomas Jefferson.

Looking at How the Professionals Do It - View Magazine

Looking at How the Professionals Do It - Selvedge Magazine

My Takeaways

Looking at the Book - Design by Nature

My Response

The Dangerous Old Woman Archetype - Photography Assignment

The Neglected Orchid - Preliminary Work for Artist Residency in  France

Tulpehocken Street — Land on the Turtle’s Back

The Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion stands at 200 West Tulpehocken Street, at its intersection with Greene. Tulpehocken itself is a Lenape name, most literally meaning “place of the turtles,” but when I grew up, I learned its meaning in a more cosmological sense: “land on the turtle’s back.” The ground beneath the Maxwell Mansion, and beneath the street itself, is far older than any house, far older than the grid of Germantown streets. The mansion, built by a wealthy textile merchant who only lived there for just three years, is a false permanence—a teaching object. It asks: What do we build for? What actually holds us? For me, the answer seems increasingly not walls, but attention. And now, studying textiles, I know I will likely never build a mansion, but I can create works that hold attention, meaning, and memory.

There is a  Tulpehocken Station Historic District in Germantown.  It's defined by large suburban houses were built in the area from about 1850 to 1900 in a variety of styles including Carpenter Gothic, Italianate, and Bracketed as part of the Picturesque Movement of architecture. In the 1870s styles moved toward High Victorian and Second Empire. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, and it covers about six square blocks, bounded by McCallum Street on the north, the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks on the south, Tulpehocken Street on the west, and Walnut Lane on the east.  The Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion is part of this district.

Tulpehocken Street carries layers of meaning. On one level, it is linguistic and literal: from Lenape roots, tulpe / tolpe means turtle, and -hocking / -hocken indicates land, place, or stream. On another, it is cosmological and symbolic. In many Eastern Woodlands traditions, including those of the Lenape, the world itself is formed on the back of a great turtle. North America is often called Turtle Island by indigenous people. To walk on Tulpehocken is to walk on land held, carried, and supported, not inert; it is to inhabit a place layered with ecological, spiritual, and relational meaning.

As a child, I passed Tulpehocken without fully understanding its depth, yet its presence was grounding. Many friends lived on and around Tulpehocken, in beautiful Germantown houses off the small streets that branched from it. I remember Nikki Anderson, a pretty, petite girl I think I knew from Germantown Friends. I don't remember exactly anymore. She lived in an apartment overlooking the train tracks by Tulpehocken station. I was tall and gawky beside her, while she moved with small, smooth gestures, stud earrings glinting. Tulpehocken held the rhythms of friendship, observation, and everyday life.

Tulpehocken was more than a street — it was a signal and a guide. The Tulpehocken station on the Chestnut Hill West line, the stop before Upsal, marked my preparation to get off for home from Masterman. When the conductor announced Tulpehocken, it was a warning, a marker of transition, a reminder to pay attention to movement and timing.

And then there is the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion.  That place that I dreamed about in December. Waking up with the words, "Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion on my lips." It sits on a street with an Indigenous name (someone must of thought let's name these trips for the Indians - wouldn't that be fun), a large stone house asks to be noticed. Its presence teaches permanence is an illusion. Walking past it, standing in it, observing it, it asks what truly endures. Tulpehocken Street, in all its linguistic, cosmological, personal, and historical layers, reminds me that the land I inhabit, and the art I create, rests on layers of living memory and attention. Every pattern, surface, or textile I design is built on the layered foundations of both place and experience and Tulpehocken is part of who I am.  It's in my blood and bones.

Tulpehocken reminds me that the land is on the turtle’s back, fusing microcosm and macrocosm. I once found an eastern box turtle in the Wissahickon and brought him home, naming him Tippy. Yet I had to release him because he would not eat; he didn’t want to be confined, and I had to honor that. I understood that if I kept him in a terrarium, he would die. He needed to wander and explore. I am like that turtle—I, too, carry the land on my back and walk on land beneath my feet.  I too need to wander and explore. 

I think now as I am writing to have a Tulpehocken mentality is to know that carrying the land on your back is a responsibility. It is a reminder to tread gently, to be present, to be joyful, and yet to honor the world I inhabit. I say I live on Turtle Island, not North America, because I want to honor the Indigenous people who were already here. To be Tulpehocken, in mind and in heart, is to walk with care, awareness, and the knowledge that attention and responsibility are the foundation of both life and art.

Greene Street — The Thread of Memory, Spine of Becoming, and Path of Learning

Greene Street is like a longitudinal thread running through my life, carrying layers of meaning. From walking it to Germantown Friends Kindergarten through fourth grade, to catching the train at Greene and Upsal for Masterman, to waiting for the H bus at Johnson and Greene to Central High School, Greene Street has carried me both physically and emotionally. Its corners, houses, and trees are vessels of memory, reminders of a youth long gone. I am 55 now, and though I haven’t lived in Philadelphia for decades, Greene Street remains alive in me.

Most poignantly, Greene Street holds the memory of a spring walk in third grade with Aran Pelicia, a boy I had a huge crush on. It’s hard to believe I could have felt such intense emotion at eight years old, yet I did. Before he moved to Arizona, we began walking together along Greene Street. He told me stories of his father running marathons, of his family camping in Baja California, eating lobster burritos by the sea. One day, he walked with me past his turn on Tulpehocken, staying all the way to Johnson, telling me that he used to think I was weird—but now he realized I was actually very cool. I hung on every word. Did he like me? Would he become my boyfriend? Even today, I feel the elation and specialness of that walk: him staying with me, going out of his way, crossing a threshold into shared attention.

Greene Street was never just a route. Unlike Germantown Avenue—“The Great Road,” as Indigenous people call it, darker, denser, and confining—Greene Street felt rolling, open, and spacious. For me, it became a street of movement, transition, and aspiration, a place where I learned how to go from somewhere toward something. And somehow, Greene Street was always about education: the small lessons at Germantown Friends, the expanded horizons at Masterman, the deeper challenges at Central. Each step along the street carried me closer to knowledge, self-discovery, and the realization that learning happens in motion, in observation, and in walking alongside others.

On Greene Street, I was observed, re-seen, recognized. Aran’s words articulated a truth I already felt but had never been reflected back to me. And it happened walking, side by side, in spring, past Tulpehocken and the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion, past where he should have turned. In that brief overlap of our paths, I felt truly seen—and, for the first time, in love, with the thrilling sense that it might be reciprocated. Greene Street, in all its familiar bends and intersections, is a street of formation—a place where my early self, my curiosity, my capacity for emotion, and my journey of learning first walked in alignment. 

Chariots of Fire, The Hill House and Me

I believe God made me for a purpose.

But He also made me fast.

And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

— Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire 

Chariots of Fire  (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson, tells the story of two British runners competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics: Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish missionary, and Harold Abrahams, a Jewish Cambridge student determined to overcome class and religious prejudice. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. I was eleven when I first saw it, and forty-four years later, I can still hear Liddell’s voice in my ear, the Scottish brogue lingering on the word pleasure. 

Only now do I understand, through Albena Yaneva’s writings on architecture and actor-network theory developped by Bruno Latour, that what Liddell embodied could be described as a kind of pragmatism in motion. For Liddell, running is relational and communicative, a way of being in dialogue with the divine. He participates in a dynamic network where meaning arises through interaction among human and nonhuman actors: body, beach, wind, and God. His pleasure is the feeling of connection within that network.

Harold Abrahams, in contrast, perhaps embodies a structuralist mode of thought and communication. He runs within and against the social architecture of Britain, its class hierarchies, anti-Semitism, and academic elitism. His approach is analytical and disciplined; his running is a tool in pursuit of other interests. Unfortunately, in his opposition, he remains bound by the very structures he seeks to transcend. The film presents two philosophical ways of being: Abrahams’ structural design of self and Liddell’s relational communication of spirit.

In 1992, after working as wardrobe supervisor for the National Theater of the Deaf’s Northern Ireland tour, I was suddenly laid off. At twenty-two, I took a hydrofoil from Belfast to Scotland to see the houses and furniture of starchitect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There was no internet, no Uber, no GPS, just paper maps, bus timetables, and strangers’ directions. I had to figure it out. But that was fun.

When I first studied Mackintosh at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, his work existed as images on slides, flattened light projected on a lecture-hall wall, filtered through Dr. David Brownlee’s very certain affected Harvard accent. His voice made architecture sound grand but somehow distant, polished, elite, not meant for everyone. I learned how Mackintosh fit into the architectural canon: his position within a linear, evolutionary story of architecture. That framework was important to Brownlee; it gave architecture coherence and lineage, placing each building within a rational progression of styles and ideas. But it also reflected a structuralist way of seeing, a system built on sequence, influence, and hierarchy, where meaning is derived from position within the whole. And you can talk about it endlessly without ever physically being there. 

When I finally arrived in Scotland, I stepped outside that structure and into a network. When I entered The Hill House, after a long bus ride and a walk on a wet and chilly November day, something in me shifted. The light, the landscape, the wallpaper, the elongated proportions of the furniture. In that moment, like Liddell, I felt God’s (Goddess’s) pleasure. Standing in Mackintosh and Macdonald’s space, I was in awe. I was so excited to be alive.

The building, too, was alive. We were in conversation, me, a Black Jewish girl from Philadelphia, and this famous Scottish house were communicating. I was no longer looking at a work of art on a slide. I wasn’t even thinking about Mackintosh; I was participating in its unfolding. The lines and proportions I had memorized for Brownlee’s exam now faded: I was now more interested in the way a window framed a cloud, the height of a chair back, the mud on my feet, the silence of being one of only a few people there. I became part of the system. I wondered what processes were involved in making this structure - clearing the site, bringing in the materials, who built the house and tended the land? Did they like each other? Who actually lived in the house - what were their stories? And now who now was taking care of it?  How did the get here? Did they ride the same bus I just rode? What were their lives like? How did they feel about their jobs? 

It was the difference between the canon’s structural order and Yaneva’s Latourian network, between knowing about something and being in relation to the processing of making and sustaining it. What filled my heart was not the authority of understanding but the humility of connection. Maybe tomorrow  the next architecture student would be here processing the experience in their own unique way. 

 

Staying With The Trouble

Staying with the Trouble

“We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes joyful histories too…”

— Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

When I was a resident assistant set designer at the Old Globe Theatre, I remember a staff meeting where the eloquent showman Jack O’Brien spoke about the importance of theater. We tell the stories of people’s dreams, hopes, and desires, he said. We offer escape, poetry, miracles, and feasts for the imagination.

I was spellbound. Captivated. The way he spoke about our work made it feel sacred, almost mythic. He was talking about sets, costumes, lights, acting, the scripts, the directing—the collective act of bringing a story to life. Theater, he said, was describing a communion of imagination. Ralph Funicello to an external site. nodded enthusiastically. Sheldon Epps to an external site. smiled as if he had written the speech himself. And I believed it. I was part of giving the imaginal space in which to dream, to question, to feel. That belief became a kind of moral pass: I was participating in something transcendent. Yet beneath that dream was another story—one of consumption, waste, and harm. I helped purchase and discard millions of dollars’ worth of materials used for a single episode of a television show. The culpability is too large to hold in my mind.

Still, I hear the famous Jack O’Brien’s voice: what we did mattered so much. And maybe both stories are true. Film, TV, and theater are powerful cultural mechanisms, but they are also engines of waste. To stay with this contradiction, to resist disowning either story, is what Haraway calls staying with the trouble. It is a way of remaining accountable without collapsing into guilt, a way of composting contradiction into understanding.

In 7th-grade English class, I can still see in my mind’s eye my South Philadelphian Italian American junior high teacher, Mrs. Tedesco. She was teaching us urban smart kids about literary conflict. She believed in us so much—the kids who traveled from all over Philadelphia to 17th and Spring Garden Streets to go to the most prestigious magnet school in the city, Masterman. She wanted to give us every tool she had to open up the possibility of brilliant futures. She wrote with determination on the board "Man vs. Nature" and "Man vs. Himself." Even then, I sensed the two were one and the same. Man against nature is man against himself, because we are  nature. Every act against nature is an act of self-harm, a kind of planetary self-mutilation. And I also forgave her the “man” part; I was a feminist even then.

Masterman - Named by US News and World Report as one of top ten high schools in the nation

Haraway writes about city kids learning to see themselves in pigeons—those despised birds—as “valuable and interesting city residents.” It feels a bit like poverty porn when you are one of those city kids being described as learning to see by a white woman in academia. But I’ll stay with the trouble. I also remember in seventh grade, where we took the long bus rides, played endless games of cat’s cradle and Jacob’s ladder with string—cheap, collaborative, complicated. We didn’t have money, but we had that web between our fingers, weaving and unweaving the world together. I don’t know if I believe that Haraway has really played cat’s cradle, but I’ll stay with the trouble.

The eyes were on the blackboard. Alex Kudera watched (my boyfriend) who became an award-winning novelist and professor. Nikki Harmon (my best friend)  watched. She became an award-winning filmmaker, professor and writer. We learned about literary structure from the all giving and earnest Mrs. Tedesco. And I watched too, wondering who I might become. And I’m still wondering. We weren’t specimens in someone else’s theory; we were flesh-and-blood twelve years olds. Maybe that’s why when I read Staying with the Trouble, something in me resists. Haraway uses the language of collaboration to describe multi-species entanglements, pigeons carrying research devices, but I can’t call that collaboration. The pigeons didn’t choose to participate; they couldn’t give or withhold consent. She's weaving a Jack O'Brien type tale when she claims to ask for their confidence. To call it collaboration feels too easy, too romantic, too Doctor Dolittle. True collaboration requires reciprocity and the possibility of refusal. Until the nonhuman can say no, stewardship will always carry the trace of dominion.

I didn’t want to go to the fancy public school. I liked playing with Leonora and Judy on Cliveden Street, where we lived. But once I was accepted to Masterman, it was like I had been selected for a different kind of flight. My days became long commutes: three hours of buses and trains, swim practice, mountains of homework. I couldn’t play anymore, even though Leonora and Judy lived just down the street. Somewhere in there, my childhood ended. I had become the Haraway's prized carrier pigeon—carrying the weight of expectation and the message of upward mobility for my family, my school, my city. I had given the system my "confidence and skill" without fully understanding how it was changing my life. And I absolutely I did not give my consent.

And I’ll stay with the trouble. Because I can’t let go of what a great education, theater, film, and TV gave me—the reverence, the imagination, the problem-solving. Even the ability to write this way-too-long discussion post. And I can’t unsee the personal loss, the waste, the harm, the staggering material footprint of what we call entertainment.

Now, as an artist and designer, I try to live in that tension. To stay with the tangle, to keep weaving and unweaving, growing and regrowing, as the world does. From the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7) comes the Mahāvākya “Tat Tvam Asi”—Thou art that—one of the great declarations of the Indian wisdom traditions, teaching that the self (Ātman) and the world (Brahman) are one. The Isha Upanishad and later yogic teachings echo this truth through the mantra “So Hum”—The universe outside of me is the same as the universe inside of me. For me, it is not Human vs. Nature; it is Human As a Part of Nature. The Deep Ecology of Tim Ingold, “the difference between making and growing is by no means as obvious as we might have thought.” I want to make as though I am growing, to create responsibly with materials knowing they  are alive. To participate in the world’s ongoing weaving rather than simply extracting from it. To begin to do a really dive deep into William McDonough's idea of waste as 1) consumables 2) durables and 3) unmarketables.  That Centennial Sermon was one of the most beautiful essays I've read.

It's a Black Thing

 This is in response to a foreign student's response to the article

"COSMOGRAMIC DESIGN: A CULTURAL MODEL OF THE AESTHETIC RESPONSE"

Nettrice R. Gaskins

Downloaded from https://direct.mit.edu/books/chapter-pdf/260518/9780262351454_cbq.pdf

Reply from Nya Patrinos:

There’s a saying: “It’s a Black thing (thang).”  We often use it when we can't explain ourselves to non whites because there's too much insider knowledge needed to continue the conservation. I think some of the ideas in the article that you may not relate to aren’t necessarily Western, they come from the lived experience of the African Diaspora. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American woman writing about things that are very African American. She explains, “Afrofuturism… according to scholar Alondra Nelson, offers ways of looking at the subject position of Black people that cover themes of alienation and aspirations for a better future.”

So the “subject position of Black people” might lead to a sense of unfamiliarity if you aren’t Black. And since you didn’t grow up in America, you don’t have the experience, however distorted, that white faked experience of being a Black person because one has consumed media depicting black characters/caricatures. Maybe you never saw In Living Color, watched (now abhored) The Cosby Show or A Different World, suffered through a billion Tyler Perry movies, or followed the Black comedians of the year on Saturday Night Live. If you never went to a Black church (or saw it depicted in almost every other movie), perhaps Call and Response feels confusing.

And if you don’t have enslaved ancestors, this passage might not strike you as deeply as it struck me:

“In a basement floor at the First African Baptist Church, which is well into its third century and one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, there is space that is four feet tall and held hundreds of enslaved Africans following the Savannah River to freedom. Builders punctured holes in the floor in the cross-and-diamond shape of an African prayer symbol, the Kongo cosmogram, and publicly worshipped its ancient meaning.”

Because you wouldn’t relate to what it means to have ancestors who were captured in Africa enslaved in the Americas. You can’t see your granny there. You can't see yourself there.  And if your whole culture hadn’t been erased, if 20 million African ancestors hadn't died in middle passage,  it would be hard to understand the urgency of reconnecting to Africa and to the Kongo cosmograms.  

So I absolutely understand why it doesn't fit your breath.  But I don't think it is unfamiliar because of Western Aesthetics. In my opinion, this article is  just a black thing (thang).