Pomona 1973- Standing: Hap Tivey, James Turrell, Gus Blaisdell, Lewis Baltz
Sitting – Maury Baden, Guy Williams
Gus and Stanley Cavell Gus and Evan ConnellGus and Clark CoolidgeGus and Joe BaconGus and Allan Graham Gus by Joel Peter WitkinGus and Robert Creeley by Bernard PlossuGus and Matisse by Nicole Blaisdell IveyGus Blaisdell and Ira Jaffe 1985Gus Blaisdell and Poet Geoffrey Young Portrait by William Stafford 1971
Gus Blaisdell and Ray Waddington 1976
Gus Blaisdell Portrait by Max KozloffGus Blaisdell and Poet Robert Creeley 2000 Portrait by Nicole Blaisdell IveyGus Blaisdell and writer Evan S. Connell at Trinity Site-Video Still from His Heaviness by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Gus Blaisdell at Living Batch Bookstore 1999 Video Still from His Heaviness by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Gus Blaisdell and Nicholas Brownrigg photos by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Stanford Friends meet again.40 years later
Gus Blaisdell by Matt CohenGus Blaisdell by Douglas Kent Hall ALBUQUERQUE 2000
Gus Blaisdell and painter Guy Williams 1972
Gus Blaisdell visiting Jack Stauffacher’s Greenwood Press San Francisco
Stanley Cavell and Gus Blaisdell Harvard 1970’s
Gus and Cat Aspen Portrait by Arnold Gassan
Gus Blaisdell Polaroid portrait by Johnathan WilliamsGus Blaisdell and Marc Maron Living Batch Bookstore ABQ, NM 1990’s
Gus Blaisdell Portrait by Adrian Salinger
His Heaviness screening at The Outpost 2005 Photo by Gloria Graham Allan Graham, Moon 2, 1986
HE WAS A DEEP CAT September 21, 1935 - September 17th 2003
I’ve loved Blaisdell’s clever, trippy writing for some time now, but this piece, on the work of Lewis Baltz, is spectacular. Two years in the writing, Blaisdell begins by rubbishing the sort of curatorial discourse that attempted to set out Baltz’s work as a sort of sandbox containing all of the concerns of contemporary mainstream art. And he does this in a sentence so long and so elegant that it left me breathless twice over:
‘In Baltz’s case this usually results in his being all things to all camps – simultaneously a minimalist, a conceptualist, and a “definitive formalist,” because a minimalist holds that less is more and a conceptualist holds that it is no longer possible to make signifiant objects in paint, that one must in fact go wholly beyond objecthood (thus photography becomes essential to such enterprises), and a formalist (definitive or otherwise) holds that painting is capable of significance…
A note from Pulitzer prize-winning author, N. Scott Momaday, discussing the GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED book (Gus was UNM Press editor on Momaday’s second book, TheWay to Rainy Mountain, published by UNM press).
Dear Nicole,The book is a clear mirror of the man. It is beautiful and moving. Gus and I made a legendary journey to Rainy Mountain in the hard weather that shapes mind and memory. It was a quest, a journey eminently worth making.With deepest thanks.Scott
In Gus’s “Holygraph” book (a blank dummy book for Ivor Winters’s Forms of Discovery run, filled with friends poems, drawings, autographs and insights) Scott writes,
“Dear Veering, It has been good to be with you on the way to Rainy Mountain. One day you must go to the cemetery there, to see the gravestones of some of these red people you must at times feel that you know. And I hope that the weather is particularly hard on that occasion. N Scott Momaday Christmas Eve 1968"
Gus writes, "On an Inscription in my Holygraph Book for Scott.
We have/ been tog/ether/ now these/ many/ months each on his way to Rainy Mountain, a journey taken in fact, in spirit, and imagination. It is a labor of love without loss, finding my way, finally, to that dark stone that bears your grandmother’s name.
You wish me the hardest weather on my visit Such weather is the weather of my spirit, A semiarid terrain wild with winds, and, At evening, reason’s rage and fury flaming, When the wind blows and wind bells ring Or the snow falls down and no bell rings."
Rainy Mountain from the archive of Gus Blaisdell
N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-Winning Native American Novelist, Dies at 89
blaisdell Ivey collected 