Mister David

When I lived in Anchorage, there was a checker at grocery store near my house who was trying to do the Mandated Thank The Customer By Name by reading my name from the receipt. Probably not having run into a lot of Scottish surnames in the country of her birth, she looked briefly consternated then quickly smiled at me and said “Thank you, Mister David!” She called me that until I moved away in 2009. It’s become more common, and I’m fine with it. It’s a weird looking name. Easy enough to figure out if you have time, but a weird sequence of letters, especially if English isn’t your first language.

Today I learned that there is a paint color called “Mister David” and I quite like it.

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities

Activist art in the United States has historically arrived in bumps and waves. Sometimes it makes a significant and lasting impact beyond the art world (think the AIDS Quilt) and sometimes it makes a splash then just as quickly fades away. When Erina Duggane stumbled on twelve boxes of archival material relating to the 1980s movement Artists Call in the vaults of Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, she discovered a body of work that involved hundreds of artists working across the US and in several countries in Central and South America.

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