I’m pleased to inform you George Bush has entered his cold wax phase
Plus: NASA can't stop you from buying this moon dust
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Hello, in this week’s issue we’ll look at…
I’m pleased to inform you George Bush has entered his cold wax phase
Did Trump totally derail his White House photographer’s book plans?
NASA can't stop you from buying this moon dust
The Smithsonian just got all your favorite RBG collars
I’m pleased to inform you George Bush has entered his cold wax phase
Artist and former President George W. Bush has picked up a new medium.
Bush announced a new exhibition Monday that includes work made from cold wax. Waxing Poetic: Expressions with Cold Wax runs through Sept. 25 at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Made from beeswax, resin, and solvent, cold wax is mixed with oil paints to create work that looks textured and layered and doesn’t require heat. According to the Bush Center, the former president often creates copies of his work by laying a sheet of paper over it and using a roller to make a mirror image that he sometimes further embellishes.
The show will be the center’s fourth exhibition of Bush’s work, and the first to show artwork that’s not oil paintings or portraits.
Bush’s first show, The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy (2014), was portraits of world leaders, Portraits of Courage (2017) was portraits of U.S. military veterans who served since 9/11, and the most recent exhibition, Out of Many, One (2022), which closed just two weeks ago, was portraits of immigrants.
The last two exhibitions also both came with an accompanying book and policy agenda. Portraits of Courage raised money to help veterans, and for Out of Many, One, Bush called for increasing legal immigration and pathways to citizenship for “Dreamers.”
For Waxing Poetic, though, Bush created work showing landscapes, floral arrangements, and birds. No politics, just paint and wax.
Did Trump totally derail his White House photographer’s book plans?
Former President Donald Trump’s White House photographer was preparing to publish a book of her photos from Trump’s time in office until Trump decided to publish his own book first.
That’s according to reporting from the New York Times that found Trump’s Our Journey Together only came together after Trump agreed to write a foreword for a book by former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
Craighead had decided on a book agent and negotiated a publishing contract when she heard from a representative for Trump who said he wanted a portion of her book advance in exchange for the foreword. Later, Craighead was asked to put her book on hold and that Trump could no longer write the foreword as planned, according to the Times.
Our Journey Together was announced in Nov. 2021 and published by a publishing company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. in Oct. 2021.
Craighead, who’s photographed other Republicans including Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, is being publicly diplomatic about the book.
“I stay apolitical as possible, as I am a neutral historical documentarian,” she told the Times. “By staying neutral I am able to remain a keen observer.”
NASA can't stop you from buying this moon dust
If you want actual moon dust, you’re either going to have to go up there and get some yourself, or you can buy the only Apollo samples that can legally be sold.
Five aluminum sample stubs topped with carbon tape with moon dust are going up for auction at Bonhams next Wednesday as part of the auction house’s space history sale. Expected to fetch between $800,000 to $1.2 million, they’re only available because the government mistakenly sold them.
The samples — four of which were collected by Neil Armstrong — were stored in a NASA decontamination bag that ended up in the hands of a Kansas museum director who was later imprisoned for stealing and selling artifacts. The bag was then sold in a U.S. Marshals sale in 2015 for $995.
Though NASA tried to take the dust back after discovering the sale, the buyer sued for wrongful seizure of property and won, giving the dust the court-ordered distinction of being the only Apollo sample able to be auctioned off like this.
“It’s an incredible piece of history, and losing it was a colossal mistake for NASA,” former NASA Office of the Inspector General special agent Joseph Gutheinz told the Wall Street Journal at the time.
The dust first sold at auction for $1.8 million in 2017.
The Smithsonian just got all your favorite RBG collars
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is getting robes, collars, and other artifacts from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thanks to a donation from her children.
The Smithsonian announced last week that it would acquire items including…
Ginsburg’s gold “Majority” collar from Anthropologie, often worn to deliver majority opinions
Her “Dissent” collar made from a Banana Republic necklace repurposed as a collar
A decorative polychrome tiled collar given as a gift from the New Mexico Chapter of the International Women's Forum and worn in the official 2017 Supreme Court photo
Her judicial robe from French legal and academic dress outfitter Maison Bosc
Her library cart name plate
A leather briefcase with RGB in gold
A framed copy of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
Her 2019 MTV Movie Award for Best Real-Life Hero for “RBG”
I’m most impressed that Ginsburg mixed high-end French robes with collars made from items available at your local mall.
In other RBG news, the U.S. Navy said Friday it will name a ship after Ginsburg.
There’s a U.S.-U.K. space race to get art to the moon thanks to a NASA initiative. Read more in last week’s newsletter. — Hunter