June 2019 – Ornamento

Memorial to the Lost

By: ornamento.blog June 27, 2019June 26, 2019

Memorials, Memory, Personal Growth, Philadelphia, street artart studio renovation, Gun Violence, Memorials, PhiladelphiaLeave a Comment

I’ve written about public memorials before on this blog, but I have never seen one quite like the Memorial to the Lost.

Philadelphia lost a lot of people to gun violence last year. Michelle Tamika Washington, Rasul Benson, and Steven Wallace are three names on forty t-shirts hanging outside the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany on South 13th Street in Philadelphia.

Guns murdered 295 Philadelphia residents last year. There were many more shooting victims who did not die.

The organization behind the memorial is Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence, Their literature describes the point of the memorial: “Each shirt has the name, age, and the date of the victim’s death. Each name represents a whole human being, a child of God. Each one deserves to be remembered. Each death deserves to be noted and mourned.”

The Philadelphia Obituary Project has a similar philosophy,

If you are interested in the movement to end gun violence, you can follow Heeding God’s call on their Facebook page which also contains information on volunteering and donating.

Making a Box

By: ornamento.blog June 20, 2019June 20, 2019

Art, art, creativity, crafts, inspiration, creativity, metalsmithing, Personal HistoryArt, hinge making, making metal boxes, metalsmithing2 Comments

Continue reading “Making a Box”

Beyond The Words: Robin Hiteshew’s Portraits of Irish Writers

By: ornamento.blog June 13, 2019June 12, 2019

Ireland, Personal History, Photography, Robin HiteshewArt, Photography, Portraits of Irish Writers, Seamus HeaneyLeave a Comment

It was 1989 and my friend Robin Hiteshew asked if I wanted to attend a poetry reading by Seamus Heaney at Swarthmore College. I was familiar enough Heaney’s work to jump at the chance. Later I got to meet him, but was too shy to do anything but mumble and shake his hand.

Thirty years later, at the opening of his show, “Portraits of Irish Writers” Robin compared a photo portrait of Heaney he took during that visit to Swarthmore with one he took almost a decade later in Cambridge where Heaney was teaching at Harvard. In the first photo, a slightly disheveled Heaney struck a casual pose under a tree on the Swarthmore campus. In the second picture, Heaney was wearing a tailored jacket “Look,” said Robin pointing to the first picture, “his trousers are rolled. That’s before he won the Nobel prize and the game got more serious.”

Robin Hiteshew has been photographing Irish writers (and musicians) for more than forty years and it has been a labor of love. His portraits are personal and revealing in a way that is truly beyond the words. And he has a story to go with each one.

Robin’s new show, “Beyond the Words: Portraits of Irish Writers” will run until June 26 at the McNichol Gallery which is located in the Thomas A. Bruder, Jr. Life Center at Neumann University. Admission is free. For directions, press here.