A guest post by Brent Bond. All links added by editor.

A strong voice and a long life, both were well served by Elizabeth Catlett who at the age of 96 recently passed away in her sleep at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Though primarily known as a sculpture, her output of graphic works would make any printmaker proud. She utilized the medium as yet another vehicle for her powerful visual messages of racial, gender, and social equality. While awarded a scholarship to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, the university disallowed her attendance upon discovering she was black. She went on to graduate cum laude from Howard in 1936. Coincidentally she was the first person to receive an MFA in sculpture from the University of Iowa in 1940. Helping to solidify her reputation in our world of printmaking, in 1946 she accepted a fellowship to Mexico City’s famed Taller de Gráfica Popular, where she worked hand in hand with so many art world heavy hitters with the same passion and conviction. She said, “I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful.” FULL ARTICLE

Rosenquist began the painting F-111 in 1964, in the middle of the Vietnam War. He positioned his main subject, the F-111 military plane, which was in development at the time, flying through fragmented images of consumer products and references to war. Through its expansive network of colliding visual motifs, F-111 addresses the connections between the Vietnam War, income taxes, consumerism, and advertising.

The Chicago Snowman

In addition to mimes, insurance guys, clowns, Jehovah’s Witnesses and nuns, snowmen are among the creepiest of entities, especially in Chicago.  By the time the sun  starts them on  their slow, shape-shifting erosion, they’ve been pissed on copiously by dogs, drunks and homeless dudes.  Invariably someone tries to piss their name into Frosty while circling, and falls on his ass because, there it is: three and-a-half feet away. . .the ass-print.  FULL STORY

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The Ghosts of Earth, a Haiku

We all die someday.
But our ghosts search for new worlds,
To haunt once again.