In 1993, Janet Russek began a series of still lifes of ripe squashes, peaches and pears whose rounded forms echoed the plenitude of pregnancy. Using only natural light, she then started to photograph vegetables and roots whose tendrils, reaching for the sun, expressed all of life's striving and aspiration, and finally, the maturing plant, evoking the inevitable downward spiral into decay. In subsequent years, Russek has expanded the project to include pregnant women photographed at close range so that bellies and breasts become almost abstract. Her haunting portraits of dolls explore the darker, more psychologically complex side of childhood and parenting, while the "Memory" series includes photos of significant personal objects that harken to the past, and take this volume full circle. "The Tenuous Stem" also includes an essay, written by art scholar and critic MaLin Wilson-Powell, addressing Russek's creative process.

Mabel Dodge Luhan (18791962) was a political, social, and cultural visionary; salon hostess; and collector of genius in almost every field of modernismpainting, photography, drama, psychology, radical politics, social reform, and Native American rights. Luhan spent her adult life building utopian communities, first, as an expatriate in Florence (190512) working to recreate the Renaissance; next as a New Woman in Greenwich Village (191215), hosting one of the most famous salons in American history; and finally, in Taos, the New World (191847), bringing together a community of artists, writers, and social reformers including writers D. H. Lawrence, Jean Toomer, Mary Austin, and Frank Waters; choreographer Martha Graham; and anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons and John Collier. With Luhan as their hostess, these European and American talents found inspiration in the mesas, mountains, Hispanic villages, and Indian pueblos of northern New Mexico. Modernist works by painters and photographers, including Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia OKeeffe, Ansel Adams, Rebecca Strand, and Paul Strand, are featured alongside indigenous art that inspired their modernist sensibilitiesNative American painters like San Ildefonso Pueblos Awa Tsireh and Taos Pueblos Pop Chalee, whose work Mabel supported, and traditional Hispano devotional art collected by Luhan.