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Sleeping Lion by Colleen Plumb

Greetings on this fine, spring NYC Wednesday, collector friends. Colleen Plumb's stunning exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery is well underway, and we're all looking forward to her return to 6 Spring Street later this month. She'll be back on the evening of April 21st to chat with Associate Director Jeffrey Teuton about the exhibition, and to sign advance copies of her gorgeous debut monograph Animals Are Outside Today, published by our friends at Radius Books. So let today's announcement serve as a save-the-date for another festive event with this talented, articulate artist. It's also an opportunity to become a patron by acquiring our newest edition from Colleen, Sleeping Lion.

I spent the early part of this morning contemplating leonine inspirations—cinematic (the Cowardly Lion) and nostalgic (Leo, the Steiff hand puppet that my mom got me as a get well gift when I was a wee lass)—and also indulged in a little anthropomorphic speculation (is Sleeping Lion sad? bored? above it all?) This was followed by a quick revisiting of Why Look at Animals?, an essay in which John Berger firmly debunks such folly, which made me feel awfully silly about all the emotional baggage I was burdening this regal beast with.

Sent back to the drawing board in search of something more pragmatic, I rediscovered a long-ago post to my (now-neglected) blog Personism. In 2009, I paired Sleeping Lion with a passage from Leaves of Grass, wherein Whitman considers going to live among animals, imagining an existence uncluttered by existential angst:

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I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.