Judith Scott exhibit at Brooklyn Museum.
Who: Judith Scott
What: I can't take my eyes off the work in Bound and Unbound at The Brooklyn Museum. Scott was born in 1943 with Down syndrome, largely deaf and mute. She started making work in the 1980s as part of a Creative Growth Art Center program, a California-based studio art program for artists with developmental and physical disabilities. But even without any sort of knowledge about her biography, the work she's showing is incredible — mostly fiber-based, these sculptures are tightly bound assemblages of found objects like yarn and vacuum cleaner parts. One work is a shopping cart that's been wrapped and woven into this odd top-heavy contraption.
Where: Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound is on view at The Brooklyn Museum, through March 29. And this website (http://judithandjoycescott.com) has extensive information about her and her twin sister Joyce.
Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton
This is one of the best examples of how books should be put together to compete with e-books, NetFlix, dumb Internet, smart Internet, and all the other reasons it seems like people don't read stories as much as they used to. It's a compendium of memories about the author's history as an Olympic swimmer, watercolor sketches of different pools and black-and-white photos of her bathing suits, but the whole thing comes together like a sweet relic that's so specific it never becomes too precious. It's intensely readable.
One of the strangest works of art in Nashville is the mural Red Grooms painted along the state museum's escalator that leads to the downstairs galleries — it's all naked spacemen holding onto briefcases like some sort of futuristic Dilbert cartoon. That work was painted in 1986 by Grooms, and is based on his 1973 etching “Nashville 2001 A.D.” It's bizarre, especially with the various scuffs and pencil marks that come with the territory of aging alongside an escalator that's frequently filled with kids on field trips, but it functions on a surreal level kind of like that illuminati-laden mural at the Denver Airport, and it's one of my favorite things in Nashville.
WHAT: Lotus Super 7
WHERE: Lane Motor Museum
WHY: I’m not a real gearhead — I can’t even drive a manual transmission — but I’ve always been fascinated by British car maker Lotus in general and this low-slung, go-kart-esque machine in particular. Thanks to a tax loophole, a boatload of Super 7s were sold as kits; when the government closed that loophole in 1973, Lotus founder Colin Chapman sold the rights to Caterham, who still makes Super 7s today. Lane Motor Museum has examples of both Lotus [http://www.lanemotormuseum.org/collection/cars/item/lotus-super-seven-s2-1966] and Caterham [http://www.lanemotormuseum.org/collection/cars/item/caterham-super-seven-1981] versions on display. Even if I get rich overnight (optioning the movie rights to my forthcoming memoir Seventeen With a Beard, perhaps) I doubt I will ever buy a sports car, but I might finagle my way into taking one of these around a track for half an hour. —Stephen Trageser
