"I miss Odysseus; my heart is melting. / The suitors want to push me into marriage, but I spin schemes... By day I wove the web, / and in the night by torchlight, I unwove it."

I made this feverish, unwinding loom for @youremysunshine8 's bday, since she is reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey.

It's made from an old painting frame with the canvas removed. I painted the wood a darker color and hammered in a couple hundred tacks, which I strung with white yarn.

The weaving itself took a long time, since I've never done that before and wasn't using a real loom, though I did make a make-shift heddle from a ruler. The meander is woven in soumak, which means you wrap the weft around each warp instead of just going over-under; this takes a long time but gives it a really cool dimension.

I carved Penelope's hands from chipboard, and painted them the same color as the loom. I wanted to convey the "muscular, firm hand" from Wilson's translation.

[ID: a sculpture of Penelope from Homer's The Odyssey, unraveling her weaving. It features an incomplete black and white patterned weave, warped around a large wooden picture frame. Wooden detailed cut outs of hands unravel the thread. The top is mostly intact, with the weaving becoming more unraveled towards the bottom. It is being unwoven in disorganised pieces, with patches of both weft (horizontal) and warp (vertical) threads missing. /end ID]

marisol payero, a trans college student at kennesaw state university in georgia, passed away on monday night and her family is almost at their fundraising goal for her funeral. marisol was almost done with her degree in history education and was a scholar of classics, latin american studies, and dying languages. please help out if you can.

Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum) 2022 Pigment and acrylic on deer hide, 36 x 55 in. (91.4 x 139.7 cm) Nicholas Galanin Born 1979, Tlingit/Unangax̂

"Galanin’s work engages themes of persistence, power, and survival in the face of settler colonialism and its legacies of institutional racism and collective amnesia. Here, the floor plan of the British Museum is painted over a blue field. Pictograms of baskets, masks, woven hats, weapons, tools, and textiles reference the contested objects held in the museum’s collection, while a red line maps an escape route for these examples of Indigenous cultural production. In many Native cultures, hide paintings relay histories across generations and objects embody lineages; in referencing both, Galanin is proposing a getaway plan for his ancestors."

Sculpture of a seated man with two dogs.

Veracruz, Mexico, 400-800 A.D

Jewish prayer book from Kurdistan, 1869

Fabergé jeweled gold and silver-mounted charka (vodka measure)

St. Petersburg, Russia c1896

textile sample books, french, c. 1840s-60s.

Fifteenth century tarot cards, possibly the oldest known deck. Look how beautiful they are! These are from way back before they were used for cartomancy.

Bottle. first half 18th century. Credit line: Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448432

The Margravial Opera House is the best-preserved example of a freestanding Baroque court theatre. Built between 1744 and 1748, Germany

Carved and Painted Head of a Bearded Man

North America, c. 1900

Carved from solid block of wood, probably pine, old paint decoration, mounted on a later square plinth

Bonhams