I want to do my part in raising awareness. Texas's Big Bend is set to receive new border security infrastructure, including >100 mi of border wall cutting through Big Bend National Park. Kristi Noem just waived 28 environmental protection laws and regulations to expedite this construction. 🧵 1/4

So this. “The so-called “inefficiencies” of the higher-education sector are…the essence of the experience. It is what faculty, students, parents, and alumni most appreciate about higher education and its transformative potential…” Summary 🧵 1/

And Oklahoma just murdered it’s Regional public university system. The second executive order signed today pushes for 90 credit hour undergraduate degrees and ties faculty employment to student job placement and wages after graduation. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Well, last night was a nice night. Had an opening in Tulsa, 3 person show with work exploring connections to land, space, and time. I showed from my new bodies of work, so considerably less steel and iron than usual. Still present, still work about work, but with natural materials and found media.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

Higher education, if done right, will transform you into a LIFELONG learner. I am curious about so many things because my curiosity was cultivated in college. A BA/BS is only the beginning. You should be reading, visiting museums, going to concerts, debating and discussing things for LIFE.

You can’t handle the truth Charlie Brown.

It's about that time of year again....

The Dept of Education is now accepting comments on a proposed rule that would overhaul Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and make it too expensive for students to go into work that threatens the Trump administration Folks have til *Sept. 17* to oppose the changes ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

Installed number 106 from my Biomechanical Evolution series, an outdoor sculpture, on 3 year loan yesterday- 2 cast iron columns and fabricated steel. She seems happy in her new temporary environment.

Art historian weighing in to say instead of using AI to make sh*t up about Hopper's work, you could instead look at the actual sketches he made for a painting like Nighthawks—freely available online—& use your own brain to get real insight into his artistic process whitney.org/collection/w...

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real. -Baldwin

I wonder how much it would cost to pay teachers and other frontline academics properly, and hire assistants for them as well And would that amount be greater than the total amount being spent to stuff AI down everyone's throat in the hope of "saving money" and "maximizing profit"

I love that @sarahebond.bsky.social points out that the tech and crypto bros can’t read history books without erasing queerness, which is everywhere in the ancient world.

The bulk of tech bros and people with inherited wealth do not fundamentally understand skilled labor at all because they have always been in a position to fail up, and they assume that they are actually the high performers and that everybody else is more incompetent than they are.

put your toluene and dichloromethane-fed corn in your maga-branded instant pot and REJOICE for you are an american goddamn citizen

This is one of the most profound essays I’ve read in years. You don’t need me to tell you that Hanif Abdurraqib is one of the finest writers of our time, but this essay in particular is a hard-won offering. Please read it and share with people you love.

Outdoor sculpture rotation- moved from Sculpture Walk Springfield in Missouri to Bella Vista, Arkansas. All fabricated aluminum. Me for scale. I still like this piece.

It’s turtle-dodging season on the roads around here.

we need to start making some things socially unacceptable again, maybe if we start small we can work our way back up. it is unacceptable to throw litter. absolutely no exceptions whatsoever. unacceptable

The Trumpists were never against "elites." They were only ever against the idea that expertise and authority are built on study, practice and impact, instead of bloodline, divine right, or intrinsic merit. They see themselves as fundamentally better than other people and need others to see it too.

I was notified that I got tenure yesterday, and my students made me this. This is better than the official letter.

New iron casting exhumed from her bonded sand mold this weekend. Cast at the National Conference for Cast Iron Art and Process, poured off my students’ competition furnace. This was made by direct carving into the mold waste from a cast iron skillet mold, and I’m so pleased it.

The kids are alright. (A great defense of #ArtHistory and counterpart to the STEM-heavy defenses of education.)

Columbia Journalism Review tested eight generative AI search tools and found their answers were wrong 60% of the time, and the paid ones actually fared worse than the free ones. Meanwhile, millions of people trust the way they present total bullshit with confident language.

This goes back to the thing of: it's massively helpful to do something you suck at. To experience the experience of not being good at something, starting it from scratch, struggling to improve at it over a long time. People who don't do this, tend to suck shit.

There’s no reason to have a Democratic Party if it won’t go to the mat to save the Department of Education. It’s a fundamental belief that children in America deserve better futures. It’s tremendously simple. You cannot continue funding a government that would close this.

The ACLU is suing the NEA for requiring grant applicants to abstain from using federal funds to “promote gender ideology” in what may be the first major legal challenge to controversial policy changes the agency has enacted since President Donald Trump took office.

Folks, this isn't complicated! Someone who says "of course I support protecting the environment," but then slashes the budget of the *Environmental Protection Agency*, does not actually support protecting the environment! There's no need to pretend there's some secret brilliant principle here!

Maybe we weren’t meant to wake up and read 20 terrible things immediately.

Snow day sculpture time. New additions to my current large work in progress. Cast iron and fabricated steel.

Holy fuck Oklahoma public schools. Holy fucking shit what the fuck.

i will say that we have never experienced anything like an administration trying to essentially freeze the activities of the entire federal government while making a series of illegal power grabs. genuinely unclear to me what kind of response, if any, these guys are generating against them

Some new work in progress. New sculpture with scavenged tire and steel. And some cast wax hedge apples from an Osage orange tree.

Coco Fusco in @hyperallergic.com ❤️🔥💥✨🙏https://hyperallergic.com/984150/the-sanest-response-to-insane-times/

I’m no historian but it seems to me that this kind of thing should be understood as akin to the Nuremberg Laws. Pure fascism.

These fucking losers. Being bad at making music has never stopped people from making amazing music.

On day 5? of tenure dossier writing and organization. What is the motivator that got you through to the end? Is there a reward I can promise myself for getting through this 🤣 #academicsky

Maye Musk stopped by Fox News over the weekend to tell Americans to have kids whether or not they can afford to: "You don't have to go to the movies, you don't have to go out to dinner." www.jezebel.com/the-person-w...

No instructor I know (who isn't a miserable asshole) WANTS an adversarial relationship with their students. We just want you to actually learn the material, & understand why it's important to do so. We want you as robustly capable as we can manage, on the other side of our time with you. That's it.

One of the best things the government could do to actually improve nutrition would be to expand SNAP, but instead we have Republicans talking about restricting it because they don't think poor people should be allowed to eat a damn candy bar.

Ran some iron this weekend. It was a good time. Only burned myself a little bit. A small pour, we ran through around 600 lbs of metal in under an hour and a half.

I once had a professor ask “Why is there a Business section in the newspaper but not a Labor section?” My classmates and I probably rolled our eyes, but damned if I haven’t remembered that question every few days for 30 years now.

"Titus Kaphar makes painstaking copies of historical paintings and then alters them—with a whitewash, tar, by shredding or binding the canvas, by making paintings behind the paintings— to expose hidden truths." The Myth of Benevolence, 2014 Titus Kaphar www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-...

New little sculpture, work in progress from the holiday break. Cast iron, steel, and copper. I love this little casting, pleased with how it’s going. The casting was made by direct carving into bonded sand mold waste.

Rothko Chapel. James Turrell’s Ganzfeld. The entire Glenn Ligon retrospective. Anything by Leonardo Drew. Or James Luna. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. This is an endless list.

a world in which only the elites have the luxury of studying and composing art and philosophy is a dangerous place.

I also think the closure of liberal arts schools and the constant attacks on wide-ranging humanist educations are part of a push against the masses being taught critical thinking. Which sounds conspiratorial, but come on, this is getting real blatant.

'The Mowaa Institute is a first-of-its-kind space dedicated to world-class, cutting-edge science research to develop new narratives and to conserve African art and collections' Prof S. Chirikure says👇 www.theguardian.com/global-devel...