Blog
Exhibiting Patience
Reading Time: 4 minutesTaken in Taliesin’s Garden Court on September 10, 2008 looking toward Taliesin’s east façade. I recall that, around the year 2007, a discussion began: stage an exhibition for the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. 2009 was also the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death; concentrating on […]
“I’m just a tour guide”
Reading Time: 6 minutesA photograph looking (plan) northwest in Taliesin’s Living Room. Wright’s Bechstein piano is in the background. There’s a photo of him at this piano, here, at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website. In 1994, when I was 26, I started giving tours at Taliesin. But, “I’m just a tour guide” is something I usually never […]
Post-It Notes on Taliesin Drawings
Reading Time: 5 minutesThis is a roundabout story that comes to a simple conclusion: I found a Taliesin drawing. Over 12 years ago I worked on a Comprehensive Chronology of the Hillside Structure on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate with Anne Biebel, the principal of Cornerstone Preservation (she was the person who suggested I read the local newspapers, […]
David Wojnarowicz
Reading Time: 7 minutesLooking at Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1987-88. “Hujar” was Wojnarowicz’s mentor & dear friend. The piece has writing silk screened over photographs of Peter Hujar (who had just died from an AIDS-related illness). The writing, in part, says, “I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot […]
In Return for the Use of the Tractor
Reading Time: 4 minutesPhotograph taken in 1943. From Taliesin’s Breezeway looking (plan) south at Wright’s apprentice, Curtis Besinger. He’s in Taliesin’s Garden Court, sorting through flagstones that would later be put on the ground in the courtyard. In my goal of researching Taliesin’s history, I examined Wright’s correspondence looking for anything that might give information about changes Wright […]
“Keiran: don’t try to correct the Internet”
Reading Time: 4 minutesThat’s what a former boyfriend once told me. I believe that came after I’d spent feverish, anxious hours trying to change every incorrect utterance online to Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth date: June 8, 1867. What was wrong? People wrote (and still sometimes write) incorrectly that he was born on June 8, 1869. What can I […]
“This will be a nice addition…”
Reading Time: 5 minutesA drawing of Taliesin, executed in June 1911. This drawing is accessible from https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/28509365;prevRouteTS=1621879846896 110 years ago, on May 25, 1911, the Weekly Home News (the newspaper of Spring Green, Wisconsin), noted on page 4 that: “Mrs. Hannah Wright is building her home in Hillside valley, adjoining the old homestead, a little north and west […]
“Treat him well and love him as I do”—Frank Lloyd Wright on Mies van der Rohe
Reading Time: 4 minutesTwo pictures of the Midwest in Spring: the top shows the Farnsworth House, by Mies van der Rohe, in Plano, IL in early April. The bottom shows Taliesin, and was taken in early June. Taliesin, in Wisconsin, is 3 hours north of the Farnsworth House. I looked into architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) […]
Why Did You Have to do That, Mr. Wright?!1
Reading Time: 4 minutesTwo views of the same space, 89 years apart. Frank Lloyd Wright began his home, Taliesin (south of Spring Green, Wisconsin), in 1911 and worked on it almost continuously until he died in 1959. As researcher and historian I easily documented over 100 changes he made just to his home (that number doesn’t include the […]
The Worst Mistake We’ve Ever Made as a Species
Reading Time: 5 minutesCaption: “Moreuil, France, 30 July 1916. Nurses Coloimbet, Louis, Egot and Flageollet pose with solders at a French military hospital in Moreuil, in the départment of the Somme. This picture was taken a month after the start of the Battle of the Somme…” A7794. Stéphane Passet. That was my assessment about World War I after […]
