Vietnamese businesswomen

Several months ago, Montreal artist Anne Ramsden requested permission to reproduce one of my photographs taken in 2004 in Vietnam. She’s an accomplished artist and professor of visual arts at the University of Quebec. Her work has been exhibited across the globe, from Japan to the United States.

Ramsden is putting together a new exhibit of posters called, “The Museum of the Everyday,” including one of the above photo. She has begun to post the exhibit online at Flickr. So far, however, the images are just available to her list of contacts. It looks like she is putting together an amazing collection of images. Additional information on the exhibit is forthcoming.

The women shown in this photo pedal their way to the villages, trading new kitchenware for old, for a small fee. They call themselves businesswomen. I happened to snap the shot from inside a moving van while in Vietnam as a 2004 World Affairs Journalism Fellow.

My assignment then was to tell the story of the Friends of Danang of McMurray, Washington County, Pa., a group of Vietnam Veterans whose members have been doing amazing humanitarian work on their former battlefields. Follow this link to a story about what would become some of my most fond memories of the country.

Warhol at home

Friday, February 23, 2007

Warhol is always famous here

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH – Whether they like his art or not, it’s no wonder people in Pittsburgh still talk about their most-famous homegrown artist, who died 20 years ago Thursday.

If nothing else, Andy Warhol left them an outstanding museum on the city’s North Side, which always attracts crowds of people, many of whom could or did qualify as his chums. They range from blue-haired American Carpatho-Rusyn women who come to celebrate their heritage to the likes of avant-garde filmmaker John Waters, who put out an exhibit of Andy’s porn.

Both of those events took place at the same time 2006. Some visitors sneaked behind black curtains to watch graphic sex scenes while others dined in the basement on ethnic foods Warhol surely would have eaten when he was a boy. Traditional Carpatho-Rusyn versions of Donny and Marie Osmond performed lovely music on one stage while Ska musicians wearing animal masks clanged out much different sounds in a gallery. Both worlds collided to create something remarkably Warhol.

Mick Jagger was given a private tour of the place a couple years back while he was in town for a Rolling Stones concert. This year, while in an elevator to the top floor, I bumped into what appeared to be a man in drag, dolled up like the cool, sexy 1980s rocker Debbie Harry. Last week, I couldn’t help but smile while standing over a display of one of Warhol’s wardrobes, noticing that the pencil-thin celebrity wore a pale, yellow girdle and pink body suit under his black jeans.

The traveling exhibits always bring me back to this museum to fascinate over how well its curators juxtapose other people’s things beside those belonging to the artist to offer a glimpse into what made Warhol Warhol. On one occasion, the museum displayed expensive floral pattern china with bright blue, pink and orange flowers, embellishments that looked strikingly similar to the posies in Warhol’s well-known silkscreens.

Through March 18, 2007, the seven-story museum houses a creepy but captivating exhibit: “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.” It chronicles Darwinism and its focus on natural selection, the Nazi persecution of Jews and other attempts through science and medicine to justify eugenics as a means to select who lives and dies.

The museum also is showing the contents of Warhol’s medicine chest, the size of which could stock a shelf or two at Wal-Mart. It should be no surprise that he had boxes of blonde women's hair coloring, an assortment of unidentified pills and an array of creams, lotions and solutions.