I recently got a letter from one of our members, asking a series of questions about our magazine, NAWA Now. I think they are good questions, so I’m going to try to answer them in my co-editors’ note for this issue.

What is the purpose of the magazine?
NAWA Now began as a newsletter and over the past six years has grown into a virtual, online magazine. This magazine is for our members, about our members, and by our members, and publishes content that is of interest to our members. We have a letters section for non-members to communicate with us. We are a visual arts magazine, and all of our content is about the visual arts. We are part of NAWA ,which is a non-profit organization run by volunteers. We do not have a corporate business plan. We do not have a political agenda. NAWA is a non-partisan organization.

How does NAWA Now choose content?
We accept submissions from members in the form of essays and articles about art. We do not accept “suggestions.” In other words, if you send us an email and say, this would be a good thing to write about,” we would likely ask you to write it.

We also solicit content regularly from members and from NAWA leadership, especially our NAWA Committee Chairs, NAWA Chapter chairs, and our NAWA Board because we want to inform the membership about what they’re up to. Additionally, we include “Shout Outs,” which are short essays from members about themselves and their art practice, including four or five images. All members are eligible to submit “Shout Outs.”

We have a “Red Carpet” feature article, which is usually an interview, to honor a member’s special accomplishments. We publish a regular feature called, “Tools of the Trade,” to showcase the technical side of our art practice. There is an “Exhibition” section to list member’s one- or two-person shows. We may include a large installation. If you have a piece in a large show and want our members to know about it, please use our NAWA Facebook page.

Sandra Bertrand started the NAWA newsletter and she gave us a very good outline for our features. We continue to follow that outline, but we have added to it to accommodate more content of interest, like the Pathfinders section and the History section.

The editors determine what goes into the magazine. When Sandra was editor, she chose me to co-edit with her. She stepped away to an emeritus position and I chose Patrice Boyes to be my co-editor. Patrice has a masters degree in Journalism, 10 years’ work experience as a reporter and editor, and I feel very lucky to be working with her. She has helped our magazine to be more professional. NAWA’s President and Executive Director attend most of our meetings and participate in our decision-making process.

Because we are all volunteers, we don’t have a regular schedule. When we were a newsletter, we published four times a year. Now that things are more complex, we can manage three times a year, but it’s hard to be driven by specific deadlines when we have so many volunteer writers with so many demands on their time. I’m glad our writer members are enthusiastic enough to put in as much effort as they do. Thank you.

I attend the induction ceremonies to recruit new candidates to contribute to the magazine. The last few years have seen some brilliant writers come on board. People’s schedules change and also their ability to contribute, so we are always looking for new writers.

I am available at [email protected] for questions and suggestions. Thanks to our readers and our contributors for your interest and attention.

Bilbao, Spain (July 2024) -– In the loveliest of non sequiturs, there she was – seemingly the only woman artist represented in an otherwise remarkable collection of Spanish male contemporary painters at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Mary Cassatt’s Seated Woman with a Child in her Arms,” oil on canvas (c. 1890), reflected the prevailing domestic themes in Cassatt’s work. I halted in front of the canvas, wondering how her piece found its way into a museum brimming with the likes of Arteta, Guezala, Picasso, Goya and Guiard.

Unsurprisingly, the museum catalog omitted Cassatt’s painting. Back at the hotel, I found the Cassatt piece in the museum’s online catalog with an underwhelming discussion of its “sketch-like” quality and the conclusion Cassatt must have considered it finished because she signed it. I am hoping the online entry was just a bad translation.

I learned that the Provincial Council of Bizkaia acquired the Cassatt painting at the 1st International Painting and Sculpture Exhibition held in Bilbao in 1919 from her Parisian art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Durand-Ruel is remembered for being the first gallery owner to buy Impressionist works. The Provincial Council donated Cassatt’s painting to the Bilbao museum.

To understand the constraints Cassatt faced more than 100 years ago, please read staff writer Micheline Klagsbrun’s fascinating account in this issue of NAWA NOW of the current “Mary Cassatt at Work” exhibition in San Francisco.

Also in This Issue – We bring you staff writer Susan M. Rostan’s in-depth interview of Judith Brodsky, who inspired us with her keynote address at NAWA’s May 2024 annual luncheon at New York’s National Arts Club. She graciously consented to an in-depth interview with Susan at the Harvard Club in New York in June, and we are so grateful to have a written record of her thoughts in this magazine.

In a first for this magazine, we offer you an opportunity to access two video presentations by an artist for our regular feature, “Tools of the Trade.” The Florida Chapter sponsors an ongoing series of artists’ workshops during which a member discusses her artistic inspirations, techniques and media, and we draw from that bank of presentations for this edition of “Tools of the Trade.” This month, we feature Muffy Clark Gill, an award-winning batik artist, who has been creating batik art since high school. She takes us on a tour of a recently concluded international juried exhibit at the Naples Botanical Gardens, at which international batik artists and Gill exhibited their works. The second video finds Gill discussing how she uses photography and computer techniques to assist in design of her batik pieces.

In this issue, we say hello to the new “Borshch of Art,” a network of Ukranian-American artists, and we bid a fond farewell to the venerable NAWA Honorary VP Audrey Flack, who died on June 28, 2024, to pioneering painter, mixed media artist, activist and innovative quilter Faith Ringgold (d. April 13, 2024) and to Carol A. O’Neill, (d. 2024), a NAWA volunteer.