Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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More than 160 Vietnamese refugees are doing well working in a local meat packing plant (where employment has doubled in the past four years), and some of them are beginning to start their own small enterprises on the side. Wichita's unemployment rate for blacks, 7.7%, is much lower than the nation's average. Women are also getting ahead. Olive Beech, who with her late husband founded Beech Aircraft, is now its chairman (not chairperson), and thus ranks as one of the nation's highest female executives. Wichita's Nancy Kassebaum is the U.S. Senate...
Sure there are shortcomings. Housing is scarce. Even the most vocal Wichita cheerleaders admit to a certain provincialism. Bible Belt conservatives have barred the public sale of liquor by the drink. But the city is on a culture kick. In the past decade, Wichita has opened a flying saucer-shaped civic center that dominates downtown, a 12,200-seat coliseum for conventions and cattle shows, one of the nation's better Indian museums, two art museums, a planetarium, a zoo and three new libraries. That hardly makes the community a rival to, say, Chicago. Yet almost everything...
...likely to be known to most museum visitors. What the five curators who chose the show have given us is a pan around a diverse, though often bland horizon, rather than a squared-up essay in the dominance of some historical direction. And rightly so: one lesson of the past ten years in American art has been that movements have vanished with the death of the avantgarde. The very idea of collaborative groupings, once an essential part of modernist practice, seems to have lost its strength−at least for the moment. In fact, it takes some effort to remember...
...oversubtilized criticism. Less, these days, does not seem to be more, especially when the work in question is yet another empty grid by Sol LeWitt, or something like Richard Serra's Toll, 1978-79−three walls of a gallery enclosure painted dead, oily black. In the past, some of Serra's sculptures have been memorable, their slabs and rolls of lead or iron imbued with a harshly macho directness. Compared with them, Toll is merely a shrug of indifference. What is such work about? Nothing, except the conventional performance of an artist basking in the routine approval...
Limericks: Too Gross (Norton, $7.95 hardcover). Asimov the poetaster and John Ciardi the poet might seem like an odd couple. But the two, who first met at a writers' conference, are close friends. They are also competitors and over the past several years have tried, with limited success, to top each other at composing limericks. The result of their 1978 Shootout is a book in which each offers 144 of the five-liners. One of Ciardi's milder offerings reads: "Said a voice from the back of the car,/ 'Young man, I don't know...