A reminder that if you're a member of the National Women's History Project Network, you're invited to nominate a woman artist as a 2008 Honoree in the organization's celebration of the vision of women artists. The honorees will be selected to represent diverse forms of visual arts including painting, sculpture, weaving, pottery, embroidery, as well as forms from modern media art. To nominate a woman, write an essay describing her life and work and how it expresses her vision. Don't forget to include her birth date (and death date, if she's deceased) and your reasons for nominating her. Send your e-mail nominations to ednasmolly@aol.com by August 15, 2007.

Test your knowledge of women's history on the National Women's History Project (NWHP) website with their quiz. Here are a few sample questions to whet your appetite:

• Who was the first woman to run for President of the United States (1872)?
• Who drove a stagecoach across the roughest part of the West without anyone knowing until she died that she was a woman?
• What woman was invited to teach nuclear physics at Princeton University, even though no female students were allowed to study there?

For the answers, visit the NWHP.

Or, read the very tiny print at the bottom of this post.

Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891), Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997)

While trolling the web, as I am often wont to do, I noticed that some folks are selling back issues of The Pastel Journal on eBay. After the first flush of flattery passed--some of the prices were impressively high!--I thought about readers paying three or four times what they would pay, if they visited our store, and it about broke my heart. We know that many of you covet your back issues of the magazine as though they were printed on gold leaf--we covet our own collections of the magazine too--and we know that sometimes a copy disappears inexplicably or grows legs or is a casualty of beverage misplacement, which is why we're glad we're able to offer back issues at $8 or $9 a copy. It's a pretty good deal. Incidentally, if you're interested in a little stroll through PJ history, the store is your place. It's a little like looking at photos of yourself taken 10 years ago--you see yourself and your own potential simultaneously and very clearly.

The commencement address that Dana Gioia, poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, delivered to Stanford University graduates on June 17 is a lament on the position of the arts in today's culture. Fortunately, it is also a persuasive and passionate argument for why the arts are important and why his audience of new graduates should make a conscious decision to live lives that are arts-engaged.

Gioia's main point is that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists. "There is an experiment I'd love to conduct," he says. "I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name. Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name. I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name."

Gioia asserts that today's culture is all about entertainment, the purpose of which is to market things to buy. "American culture," he says, "has mostly become one vast infomercial." While he admits to enjoying film and his big-screen TV, Gioia cautions that there is a price. "The role of culture must go beyond economics," he says. "It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us."

I felt eager to share his message, because there may be a time when you must make the argument to a friend or to a son or daughter about why art is important, or to a school board about why a curriculum rich in arts is essential, or to your local newspaper about why coverage of the arts is vital, and Gioia's parting words may be of some service (you can see the entire transcript here):

"Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world--equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being--simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

"Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, 'It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.' Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity."

Well put.

French impressionist painter/sculptor Edgar Degas would be 173 years old today—imagine all the other great works he could’ve put out into the world with another 90 years to spare (he died at 83). For a little inspiration today, tour The National Gallery of Art’s online feature on some of his dancer paintings.

For those of you itching to get your hands on our December issue, in which we publish the Greatest Pastels of All Time feature, rest assured that Degas will be in there—how could he not?

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” —Edgar Degas