Gardens & Glass — Cowles Conservatory

Sage & John Cowles Convervatory, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 2008, all photos © 2008-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

In keeping with last week’s Writing Topic, hundreds of windows turn Winter inside out at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden adjacent to the Walker Art Center. Established in 1927, the Walker began as the Upper Midwest’s first public art gallery. The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1988, is one of the nation’s largest urban sculpture parks and visitors to the Twin Cities don’t often leave without walking the 11-acre home to more than 40 works of art.

The Sage & John Cowles Conservatory on the western edge of the Sculpture Garden is a community contribution from philanthropists John Cowles, Jr. and his wife Jane Sage Fuller (who also had key roles in bringing the Guthrie Theater and Metrodome to Minneapolis). John Cowles Jr. was named president and CEO of Cowles Media in 1968, after beginning as a police reporter in 1953.

His father, John Cowles Sr., made the cover of TIME in 1935 when he and his brother, Gardner (Mike) Cowles Jr., bought the Minneapolis Star, then the 3rd weakest newspaper in the community. The brothers are descendants of a small-town banker, son of a Methodist elder in Iowa, who started out with little money until turning the Des Moines Register & Tribune and the Minneapolis Star Tribune into well-respected national newspapers.

According to a 1997 article in the Star Tribune:

John Sr. was president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co. from 1935 to 1968, and chairman from 1968 to 1973. Through the influence of his newspaper and his own activities, he is credited with turning Minnesota from an isolationist state to an internationally engaged one, and leading the fight against the anti-Semitism that was openly practiced in the state when he arrived.

         

RainGrate, Standing Pink, Cowles Conservatory, January, 2008, all photos © 2008-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Sage Fuller Cowles is a dancer from Bedford Village, New York, and the stepdaughter of Cass Canfield, Sr., one-time chairman of Harper & Row. In the 1950s, she danced on Broadway and television and served as president of Planned Parenthood of Minneapolis from 1957-59. Her approach to philanthropy leans to the holistic, and our community receives the benefit:

I needed to have a new definition of philanthropy. The Greeks came to my rescue. “Love of mankind” was in the dictionary and that suited me fine. Philanthropy is not just about dollars and cents. It’s about giving time, energy, commitment to some idea or cause that we care about. We can all be philanthropists fueled by our individual passions, and we can do a better job of identifying our passions if our early experiences give us confidence to pursue them.

If we focus on educating the whole being would it make a difference to the quality of our communal life? Would we grow a different kind of citizen?

     -Sage Fuller Cowles from Getting Ahead of the Curve: Engaging Our Youngest Citizens, April 2006

We take a leisurely stroll through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden every time we head to the Walker for a show. The main section of the three-part Cowles Conservatory houses Frank Gehry’s 22-foot Standing Glass Fish that you can just make out in the photograph. It also houses palm trees, pass-throughs covered in creeping fig, and striking seasonal displays in the Regis Gardens designed by landscape architects Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Michael Van Valkenburgh.

When we walk by Deborah Butterfield’s horse, Woodrow, we are walking on the same ground where a 1913 convention of the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulture was held in Minneapolis’ old armory. It was there that Theodore Wirth designed temporary display gardens to show what could be grown in Minnesota’s wintry climate. They were such a success that they were kept in place for decades as demonstration gardens until finally becoming casualties to freeway construction.

    

But the seed had been planted. Architect of the museum, Edward Larrabee Barnes, picked up the torch and designed the original 7.5 acre Sculpture Garden. In winter months (which in Minnesota can run from October to April), the cave-like city dwellers of Minneapolis and Saint Paul bask in places like Cowles Conservatory where walls of glass allow warmth and light to penetrate the Vitamin D deprived, sun-kissed face of a long dark Winter.

Resources:

• Public Gardens of Minnesota
• Walker Art Center — History
• ArtsNet Minnesota — A Glass House: Cowles Conservatory
• TIME Magazine Cover & Story: John Cowles — Iowa Formula, July 1st, 1935
• Star Tribune Cowles Family Tree – November 13th, 1997
• Space, Time, Illusion, May 2005, Walker Art Center — dancer Sage Cowles & filmmaker Molly Davies discuss their 1970’s collaboration, a series of experimental works.
• Getting Ahead of the Curve: Engaging Our Youngest Citizens by Sage Fuller Cowles, a study in art, education, & philanthropy, Louis W. Hill, Jr., Fellow in Philanthropy, University of Minnesota, April 2006.

-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 14th, 2009

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Girl Scout Cookie Season (All Roads Lead To Savannah)

Samoas, Caramel deLites, Samoa Smile, 4 1/3, Hole In One, Girl Scout Cookie Season, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 2009, all photos © 2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

From the moment visionary Juliette Gordon Low exclaimed “I’ve got something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we’re going to start it tonight!,” the fate of the Girl Scout Cookie was sealed. Her providential encounter with Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, led to that historic day on March 12, 1912, when Low gathered 18 girls to register the first troop of American Girl Guides (changed to Girl Scouts in 1913).

Liz and I passed Juliette Gordon Low’s Savannah home on a breezy morning bus tour last summer. Later that day, we would take Mom to see the childhood home of writer Flannery O’Connor, but the tour of Low’s home will have to wait until the next trip South. Juliette Gordon Low was a writer, too. Known as “Daisy” to family and friends, she supported and developed a lifetime interest in the Arts. She wrote poems and plays, sketched, and later became a skilled painter and sculptor.

She was also deaf and spent her life advocating for girls with disabilities at a time when they were excluded from many activities. Juliette suffered chronic ear infections and lost hearing in one ear from improper treatment. At 26, she would lose hearing in her second ear on her wedding day after a grain of good-luck rice lodged in her ear, puncturing the eardrum and resulting in an infection and total loss of hearing.

Long before women had the right to vote, Low was instrumental in encouraging girls to develop self-reliance and resourcefulness, not only in homemaking, but in future roles as professional women in the arts, sciences, business, and marketing so their organization would be self-supporting. Cookie sales began as early as 1917 with the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which (with mothers as technical advisors) baked cookies and sold them in the high school cafeteria as a service project.

After claiming humble beginnings as a simple sugar cookie (click for an original Girl Scout recipe), the Girl Scout Cookie business is thriving. Once packaged in wax paper bags, sealed with a sticker, and sold door to door for 25 to 35 cents per dozen, there are now over a dozen varieties of Girl Scout Cookies sold all over the world. When I was a Girl Scout in the 1960’s, there were about 14 bakers (now there are two or three), Girl Scout Cookies were being wrapped in printed aluminum foil or cellophane, and a number of varieties were available including Chocolate Mint, Shortbread, and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies.

What’s your favorite Girl Scout Cookie? Today there are eleven varieties, including three mandatory ones — Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Sandwich (Do-si-dos), and Shortbread (Trefoils). I’m a Samoa fan (or Caramel deLite, depending on the baker). Liz’s #1 is the Thin Mint. I’m also the resident Cookie Monster. Just last week, I finished up our last box for the year, when Liz and I happened to step into a Walgreens yesterday and guess what? Right smack dab inside the door was a huge table of Girl Scout Cookies, complete with two Troop leaders and three Girl Scouts (sporting Junior Girl Scout Cookie Biz Badges).

What was the first thing we did? Buy two more boxes, one Samoa, one Shortbread. And, sadly, you can never eat just one!

After doing the research for this piece last weekend, I felt qualified to strike up a conversation about “Daisy” Gordon with one of the Girl Scouts in Walgreens. She was excited to tell me that their troop was writing a play for Juliette Gordon Low to be presented at their next meeting. “What’s the bestselling cookie this year?” I asked her mother. “Oh, the Thin Mint, hands down,” she said. “Followed by your friend (tap, tap, tap the box), the Samoa!”

Did you belong to the Girl Scouts? Were your parents involved (my mother was once the Troop Leader of Troop 38)? Or maybe you were a member of another girls service organization. If so, you owe part of what you learned to Juliette Gordon Low. She has had ships, schools, and even a stamp named after her; on July 3, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed a bill authorizing a stamp in her honor, one of the few dedicated to women.

At a time when she was down and drifting through life, Low’s chance meeting with Robert Baden-Powell inspired her to pay it forward. Her legacy lives on in the 3.7 million members, and over 50 million girls, women, and men who have belonged to the Girl Scouts. On January 17, 1927, at age 67, Juliette Gordon Low died from breast cancer at her Savannah, Georgia, home on Lafayette Square.

Low was baptized, confirmed, married, and buried (in her Girl Scout uniform) at Georgia’s first church, and John Wesley’s only American parish, Christ Church Savannah. It was on those same steps in 1912 that she recruited many of the 18 original Girl Scouts. After her death, her friends honored her by establishing the Juliette Low World Friendship Fund, which finances international projects for Girl Scouts and Girl Guides around the world.

Resources:

• Girl Scout Cookie History
• Juliette Gordon Low Biography
• Girl Scout Museum
• Savannah Birthplace of Juliet Gordon Low
• Juliette Gordon Low Biography, Family History, Portrait Gallery
• Test Your Juliette Gordon Low Quotient
• Girl Scout Cookie FAQ’s
• Girl Scout Cookies — Varieties, Photos, Ordering, Nutritional Values

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, March 9th, 2009

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Children Helping Children (And Animals)

Please buy, Madame, child vendor selling clay whistles in Hoi An, Vietnam, December 2008, photo © 2008-2009 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

My oldest daughter, Dee, made 48 brownies this morning for a bake sale today. She and two other seventh-graders are doing a “pay it forward” class assignment, whereby they identify a worthy need and then do good works to support the cause.

Dee and her classmates decided to raise money for a global non-profit called Invisible Children. The group was created in the spring of 2003 when…

…three young filmmakers traveled to Africa in search of a story. What started out as a filmmaking adventure transformed into much more when these boys from Southern California discovered a tragedy that disgusted and inspired them, a tragedy where children are both the weapons and the victims.

After returning to the States, they created the documentary “Invisible Children: Rough Cut,” a film that exposes the tragic realities of northern Uganda’s night commuters and child soldiers. The film was originally shown to friends and family, but has now been seen by millions of people.

The overwhelming response has been, “How can I help?” To answer this question, the non-profit Invisible Children, Inc. was created, giving compassionate individuals an effective way to respond to the situation.

Invisible Children has a singular mission: To use the power of stories to change lives around the world. There are many organizations that help children, some decades old, and I can only imagine it was tough for Dee and her two friends to choose a recipient for their project. Ths group appealed to them because of the medium (film), the young vibe to the organization, and its focus on schools and books for kids (many of whom been forced to grow up and participate in a tragic war) in Uganda.

There is so much poverty in this world. I have seen children in Delhi and Agra, India, little blind beggars and dirty-faced kids performing acrobatics down crowded walkways of trains—scenes and situations brought to light in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Vietnam, South Africa, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and communities in my very own New Mexico—these are some of the places where I’ve seen children living without the most basic of needs met.

It’s easy—perhaps even at times a necessary coping mechanism—to become inured to the realities of the world, especially when we don’t see with our own eyes the suffering and pain. But it’s all around us.

Dee and her classmates also chose as recipient for their works a no-kill animal shelter whose primary focus is to rescue dogs and cats on “death row” (those about to be euthanized by animal control centers in the state). One of the girls working with Dee on this project volunteers at this shelter, which is supported entirely by donations from the community and adoption fees.

These are tough realities for these girls to be aware of, yet they’re learning that through their efforts, no matter how small or big, they can make a difference.

It begins with doing a favor for another person– without any expectation of being paid back.

This is their second bake sale this month. Their goal is to raise $150 per organization. Their first bake sale they earned $80, and within just minutes of setting up for their sale today, they’re earned about $15. They’ll probably have one or two more sales before the project is due. I hope they surpass their goal.

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