Sallie Bingham

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You are here: Home / Art / Hopper Light

Hopper Light

March 4th, 2013 by Sallie Bingham in Art Leave a Comment

Hopper - Early Sunday MorningFLAGSTAFF, FOUR AM, FEBRUARY: The train has stopped, and a dozen or so passengers have gotten off, the coach riders identified by the pillows they carry. Several rush into the station; the warm yellow glow from its door seems to offer comfort or at least heat. Others—four women—take up positions under the lights, downturned beneath tin cups, that line the edge of the old brick station roof. They wait, alert, separate, their luggage at their feet, peering into the darkness for the friend or the taxi that will take them away. None appear. And, as they wait, still under that dim yellow light, I remember the solitary figures in Hopper paintings, sitting on the sides of beds or alone at café tables, also bathed in the light that seems to enforce or at least hint at endless solitude. Women traveling alone, especially in a remote southwestern town at four A.M on a winter morning, used to be emblematic of fear, defenseless, terrified. No longer. In the years since I was a child, due to my efforts and many others, our confidence has slowly grown, in spite of the violence against women that goes on and on, endlessly, in its many forms.

Hopper light doesn’t protect, but neither does it isolate; in his mysterious paintings, it sometimes seems to me that the slightest movement—getting up off a bed, going out a door—would change not only the composition and the meanings we gladly ascribe to it, but the light, itself.

Turning that dim glow into the sharp-edged desert light that brought me, twenty-one years ago, to New Mexico, that land of action and contemplation, as the Roman Catholic priest I shared breakfast with in the diner called Richard Rohr’s center in Albuquerque.

To gather strength in contemplation, under a dim yellow light; to rise up in action as the morning dawns.

Hopper light doesn’t protect, but neither does it isolate; in his mysterious paintings, it sometimes seems to me that the slightest movement—getting up off a bed, going out a door—would change not only the composition and the meanings we gladly ascribe to it, but the light, itself.
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In Art David Hopper Flagstaff New Mexico Albuquerque

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Spring is full of moods here in New Mexico... I keep waiting grumpily for a spell of warm, settled weather. But not my friends the ravens. This is the weather they adore. "My Friends the Ravens": https://buff.ly/a2YelNT #Birds #BirdWatching #Hiking #TheCityDifferent

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At the farmer’s market yesterday, a family band called High Lonesome Highway performed. I don’t know if they write their own music but the wailing heart-broken sounds of old mountain melodies brought #Kentucky here to the high desert https://buff.ly/mhDqow3 #SantaFeNM

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