Stars on Local Time: A Personal Almanac

摘要

First presented at INSAP VIII, the artwork A Personal Almanac is my interpretation of the familiar seasons-of-life allegory. The booklet's eight pairs of seasonal pages--spring equinox through the cross-quarter Groundhog Day--portray a life in the decades from the 1940s to the 2010s under the stars of rural Georgia, France, Miami, West Africa and the other places I have lived. A Personal Almanac is included in the art book A Durable Tale, the illustrated story of my thirty-year search in the Southeast United States and in West Africa for living memories of old star almanacs. In that odyssey I uncovered some very deep roots for an oral literature of the African desert, the nomadic bard's star story that I believe inspired creation of the first nine tablets of the standard version Babylonian Gilgamesh.