On the first rainless day in a while, enjoyed exploring the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's "Power of Trees" exhibit with (a few) students from "Religion of Trees." Since I first came to see it three months ago, 
they've dissected a pin oak they had to take down and - unrelated to the trees show - installed several shiny metal "lotuses" designed by Jean-Michel Othoniel. Our jury was out on how the golden ones fit
into the Japanese garden, despite the artist's pablum about the lotus flower "symboliz[ing] spirituality, rebirth, enlightenment, and the sacred." Lotuses rise from murk, not mirrors. But the big chrome ones
in the shallow pools where water lilies are cultivated, managed to achieve a different more mirroring religious point, evoking Indra's Net in their nested reflections of reflections of reflections: cool!
Since I was in the neighborhood I also popped into the Brooklyn Museum and was moved by the new exhibition of work by Santería-inspired María Magdalena Campos-Pons ("Finding Balance," above),
wowed by the spectacular soon-to-close "Africa Fashion," an experience of the effervescent joy of decolonization and embodiment, and wound up in the reopened Asian galleries. Whew!
