Fire Escape

Ber Anena

At the gym today, Spotify suggested a song you made me fall in love with. Divenire. To become.

I should’ve pressed next but the treadmill was going too fast, or perhaps, I wanted to re-live the moments that have become accompaniments to that tune:

The occasional rides from Manhattan to Jersey, your car filled with nothing but Ludovico’s piano. Slow then fast. Intense then gentle. Gripping all through.

How you drummed the steering wheel to each note when the traffic slowed down. How I ran my fingers through your afro when the lights turned red. Why did you let me?

How you smiled when I reached for the dashboard to press replay? Why didn’t you stop me?

The occasional photoshoot on your fire escape. How you cleaned the camera lens like you didn’t want to miss a strand of my hair. How you turned up Divenire as I gazed at the leafy horizon. How you lay on the living room floor, pointing camera at me through the open window. How I posed for your perfect shots until my feet ached. Smile, you said. Okay, I said. Beautiful, you said. Stop it, I said.

You knew we were not becoming anything, didn’t you? You knew the next morning you’d wait for me to leave & send that text saying you couldn’t do it, didn’t you?

I was at the gym, running like a lunatic to forget but an app squeezed you in with a song you called ours. What do you think that made me become?

I still love windows, except now I want to walk down the steps without posing on your fire escape.

Dan Rico

Rochester, NY 1912–Los Angeles, CA 1985

Subway Drillers

Wood engraving, 1937

Sheldon Museum of Art

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Allocation of the U.S. Government, Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration

WPA-318.1943

JOSEPH LeBOIT

New York, NY 1907–Walnut Creek, CA 2002

Paving

Lithograph, 1937

Sheldon Museum of Art

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Allocation of the U.S. Government, Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration

WPA-308.1943

Louis Lozowick

Ludvinovka, Ukraine 1892–South Orange, NJ 1973

Night Repairs

Color lithograph, 1939

Sheldon Museum of Art

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Allocation of the U.S. Government, Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration

WPA-306.1943

Hard at Work

Shannon Valkr

Labor is always bent over their work, consumed by the task at hand, those Big. Strong. Hands. Face down, ass up, they don’t even notice us gawking.

Or maybe they do?

Workers hardly need to remind us that they’re always pounding, drilling deep, just wrecking everything they touch.

Where there’s work there’s smoke, and where there’s smoke there’s heat. Fire.

Dare I say it, Sparks.

Can you blame me for seeing this as pornographic? Marx says when you have to sell everything, eventually you sell yourself.

So workers of the world, unite on the dance floor and sell what your mamma gave you.

Because honey,

We are buying.

IAN DAVIS born Indianapolis, IN 1972

Files

Acrylic on paper, 2007

Sheldon Museum of Art Sheldon Art Association

Gift of Robert and Victoria Northrup

S-879.2012

As for this work, by a painter born in Indianapolis, painted in the year 2007, at around the time I left Indiana for good—I don’t like it much. At least, I don’t like it more than I liked Indiana.

Like that place, it seems to lend itself a bit too easily to that most brutally obvious way of seeing: allegory. Here, we have men in business attire, gathered in deferent postures around a line of six industrial machines, and taking notes— capitalism’s fetishistic excess, et cetera.

And yet, like the miles of corn that threatened to swallow the dying steel town I grew up in, framing it in bounty so absolute it became poverty, it is not completely without its small charms. Notice, for example, the scattershot ribbons of pink lacing and unlacing the walls, the floor, the men themselves, as if to say not even allegory, nor the sober silence of that most sober of states can be so serious as to preempt light’s play.

But then, there is also the sadness of the machines, which almost seem to sag, elephantine, under the weight of their silence.

I worked once with machines not unlike these, which had waited long decades in the quiet half-dark of a warehouse floor—for years, I lifted them gently by crane, or scooped them up in the tines of a forklift, and carried them, carefully, down the machine shop floor to the scrap metal bins, and to my station where, with just as much care, I’d open them up and take them apart.

Switched on, these machines would hush together twinned electrodes with such gentleness it resembled a kiss, and sparks would fall to dance on the oil-stained floor. Left dormant, as these had been for years, they reminded me of nothing so much as giant, unbeating hearts, whose chambers were rooms for cobwebs, grease, and stale air, and maybe the air’s slightest breath, which lifted a cobweb, then released it, every ten minutes or so, for years upon years.

It is perhaps then no small thing that Ian Davis, child of Indianapolis, would paint these six achingly quiet machines in postures of holiness. Almost to a one, the men of midwestern steel towns know that these machines— turbines and furnaces, slide gates, ladle cars—even now falling silent, are their culture’s holiest relics, and the last escapes they’ve kept shored up between themselves and endless corn, and the whispered dialogue between them, asking always “ what now? ” and “ why here? ”

Towering above themselves, they built a heart, made perfect in that when the day’s work was done, it could be switched off.

Hank Willis Thomas

born Plainfield, NJ 1976

Cotton Bowl

Digital chromogenic print, 2011

Sheldon Museum of Art

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust

U-6506.2015

Watching

Caleb Petersen

I touch the turf for the first time. Dad kneels down to show me. Digs his fingers into the torn up rubber. Says, look, lets the pieces roll around in my hand. He throws me a touchdown. Carries me on his back. Singing fight songs as I bounce in his arms. I can feel the drums of his hands as they thud in my feet, Go. Big. Red. Da-da-da-da. Go. Big. Red. da-da-da-da. Go. Big. Red. da-da-da-da-dum. I feel the thrum of my history. A repetitive beat. I feel it weaving, planting itself, in my identity.

College football is my identity is spectacle is prayers for the boys to bring home a win is a line of scrimmage is a group of bodies that I watch is standing in the stadium where I yell break his legs! as an adult as a joke but actually mean hit him really hard not so hard but maybe let him see the stars for a second make his ears ring and hear the song of our victory of our strength in the crowd.

The crowd is a violence is my friends is crying out to God is punching the sky is beating their wives is shaping their lives is worshipping the image. The image is a body bent to the ground. The ground is accumulating like the hits to the head on the O-line slamming helmet into helmet for the days and the years and the life. This is a land of memory loss. CTE. A movie with Will Smith that I watch to feel good feel sorry. Sorry’s in the mouths of the coaches, statements for ESPN.

My favorite sport is a harvest is unpaid labor is Nebraskan is the local economy is my consumption my catharsis my communion is what brings me together with my family on Saturdays with chips and salsa around the TV is contact with the dirt is in touch with my roots is history is present is how I avoid my own pain. I just keep watching. It goes on. Another season.

My Dad takes me to the Cotton Bowl. I dye my hair red. I don’t have to pay a dime. We drive down to Texas. Hike up the stands. Cheer and laugh and eat nachos and I love this memory. The feeling of being special, like inside my chest is one of those balloons that gets released by the fans after the first Husker touchdown. I keep wanting to feel it. Stuff of history.

I am formed by what I want to watch and what I want to avoid. A thing of the past is not a thing of the past if I can’t stop watching it.

No more apologies. To watch is to play the game.

I want to plant sunflowers in my memories. I want to talk to my dad more. Form traditions that don’t take pleasure in watching over Black bodies.

I could tell him my love for him is scared is fraught is digging into a field and watching the dirt fall through my hands. I could tell him

I don’t know what to look at. That I want to learn to love what I look at. That I don’t know how to look him in the eye. That I’m done releasing my pain into other people’s bodies. Screaming it into a screen. Done talking around our lives by rehashing the game. No more side-stepping. This place has shaped me. I’ve been shaping it. Now, I have to live and work in it.

LISA SANDITZ born St. Louis, MO 1973

Pearl Farm II

Acrylic on canvas, 2007

Sheldon Museum of Art

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust

U-5493.2007 every goddamn thing is a glimmering mirror of divinity

Penny Molesso

heaven is a city, glossy pink like inside cheek flesh. we’ll shuck the gates. out gushes everything clean, pearly iridescent pus pooling like motor oil in our dirty little sanctuary.

everything swallowed the crystalline city’s bleeding nucleus and spit up utopia in chunks. plastic skin, bubble wrap frisson, piss sluice streaming service in DIY eden.

the angels fell to earth. ancient oysters cradled their sweat. microscopic tektites, little scrying orbs. precious as candy. precious as cell phones.

once the irritant has been implanted it can take years to shape into a crucifix, a star, an antler, a pair of wings. i too formed a glistening shell around the biotoxic boy inside me, miserable and thriving.

the promise of eternity gutted this place, so we saw the glitter smog sunsets and named them gorgeous, borderless. we sink into an artificial lake, sweet endocrine water brimming with futures, contagious shell-cracking salvation.

ROCKWELL KENT

Tarrytown Heights, NY 1882–Plattsburgh, NY 1971

Headlands, Monhegan

Oil on canvas, 1909

Sheldon Museum of Art

Nebraska Art Association

Nelle Cochrane Woods Memorial N-244.1971

Bodysurfing

Syble Heffernan

The day opens like a rose on fire; waves crashing over jagged rocks. I taste salt on the wind, draw the moment in like a kiss, from lips to lungs. My blood- stream rushes bright red and vital, and it is as if I were seventeen again. At seventeen

I did not know the sea is slowly filling with poison from leaking nuclear bombs.

I had not yet seen the amber glow of streetlights on wet railroad tracks after trying to drive fast enough to leave this world behind.

I had not yet heard the call of death, crashing like waves against my skull, or felt the gray plastic chair at my back in the psych ward, tea going cold in my hands as I begged to go home.

At seventeen I did not know that one day the sea might take us back, waves crashing over our cities and our bodies until we are nothing but rubble and bone at the bottom of the earth.

It is as if I am seventeen again and my bones still belong to me, and they don’t ache or crack as I start running, running, toward the call of life. I kick up the pale sand of everything that has gone before me. I run until the sea engulfs me like a warm, new womb, glittering like a future worth staying for.

CHRISTINA FERNANDEZ born Los Angeles, CA 1965

Lavanderia #5 [ Laundromat #5 ]

Archival pigment print, 2002-2003, printed 2022

Sheldon Museum of Art University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust

H-3128.2022