Louise Bourgeois: Walking Through the Spider Woman’s Web

When French-American artist Louise Bourgeois passed away in May 2010, most remembered her as the “Spider Woman” thanks to her Maman series—giant metal spiders scattered all over the world in a macabre modern art gesture of maternity. Literally trapped in the shadow cast by those mammoth mothers of her own invention, Bourgeois’ other work done over her nearly century-long life has been sadly neglected. Germano Celant’s Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works brings together for the first time Bourgeois’ mostly non-arachnid art. Taken as a whole, Bourgeois’ oeuvre seems a complex web of personal and philosophical associations, but Celant acts as the perfect guide to lead you not necessarily to safety—for Bourgeois is never safe—but to a greater understanding of this complex and important artist. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Louise Bourgeois: Walking Through the Spider Woman’s Web."

[Image: Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, 2005. Fabric, 16 x 21 inches (40.6 x 53.3 cm). Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland.]

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of Germano Celant’s Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works.]

Members Only: Relics of the Age of Relics and Reliquaries

Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you can’t help but look back and wonder what we “members” were thinking. A similar phenomenon surrounds the modern perception of the medieval cult of relics and the precious reliquaries that once housed them. In the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, currently at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011, modern pilgrims can see that the cult venerated not just members (such as the arm bones once inside the arm-shaped reliquary shown), but any souvenir of the sacred from items related to the life of Christ to even stones or water taken from the Holy Land. Gaining an appreciation of the allure of such objects opens a window onto a medieval world at once very different than our own and yet somehow a precursor of our own cults and memberships. Please come over to at Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Members Only."

[Image: Arm Reliquary of the Apostles. German (Lower Saxony), ca. 1190. Silver gilt over wood (oak), enamel (champlevé). 51 x 14 x 9.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, 1930.739.]

[Many thanks to the Walters Art Museum for the image above and to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, which runs at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011.]