Category: lit stuff

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random art musings #000

AmericangothicAmerican Gothic, ( 1930) painting by Grant Wood Gordon_Parks_-_American_GothicAmerican Gothic, (1942) photograph by Gordon Parks CapricornCapricorn, model 1948, cast 1975 (sculpture) by Max Ernst

So M and I were at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) a few years ago and although I had been to the NGA many times before, we decided to take their “Introduction” tour. While on that tour one of the pieces that they highlighted on the tour and that really caught my attention was Max Ernst’s Capricorn.

It hit me on a few levels, mostly because I am always looking for  the presence of “African design intelligence” or an African aesthetic in art, literature, etc and this piece in particular felt like it had an organic feel to it, in the same way that some many of the African works that I have been exposed to, especially in the sculpture world….I am not sure if it was the fashioning of animals in human “positions” (i.e sitting and standing) or just a kind of symmetry and balance that  I feel in looking at all of these works.

In looking at the Wood and Parks pieces and considering the titles it is clear that the two works are in “conversation” with one another, even if that conversation is oppositional or confrontational, it is there.

The Ernst piece, Capricorn immediately caught my attention because it appeared that it, too, was a part of this visual conversation; its balance the composition, what was depicted all suggest  at the very least a thread of a connection.  The other thing that made me think that they was the timing. Both Parks’ piece and Ernst’s piece were completed very close in time, Parks piece in in 1942 the year of Grant Wood’s death and Ernst a few years after in 1948. I cannot help but think particularly around the time of Wood’s death that engaged artist like Parks and Ernst would not have something say about it in their work.

When I come to a piece of art I am always thinking about its DNA, not just process, materials and aesthetics , but the real lineage of the piece…who, what, where, why or when spawn it…what other ideas or works of art is it connected to, not just movements and manifestos

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Happy Birthday JB, August 2nd

Not this JB…

james-brown

This JB…

 

I don’t remember when I became interested in Baldwin, but I do remember seeing The Amen Corner
as a kid with my parents, and pulling Blues for Mister Charlie and The Fire Next Time
off my parents bookshelf and trying to make sense of the world that Baldwin was talking about. It would not be until I was a teenager that I would start to grasp how deep Baldwin is/was/be.

Much later than that I would come across Baldwin’s essay On Being White and Other Lies. This essay in a lot of ways made me rethink what it means for a group of people to decide and believe  that they are “White” and for that group of people to decide who else was or could become “White” . Conversely, that same group of people convinced of their “Whiteness” (pure, fair, just and deserving of honor) could also determine who would be their binary opposite, the “Blacks”. This essay for me also caused me to question “Blackness” as a function of being this binary opposite and the moral assignments that come along with it.

As student of Mathematics and Information Systems, I also started to think about the inability of a simple binary system in language to capture the complexity of humanity. For me, I find it hard to talk fully about  such complex in such simple terms. In intellectual, creative and progressive circle many of us push the envelope for more inclusive, complexity and nuanced, you see this so much in gender and sexuality discussions, you see it socioeconomic class discussions, yet when it comes to race  and culture we seem to be stuck with the binary.

Both “Whiteness” and “Blackness” are fiction despite the cultural, social, political and economic capital they wield and how real they feel. That is not to say that I am not connected to the substance of the experience in America we call “Blackness”, I am just not convinced that that label effectively or accurately captures that experience. Baldwin help to make that clear for me.

I am going to end with this anecdote, because I think it articulates what Baldwin was saying more clearly than I ever could. A few years ago, I was sitting on one of Dr.Greg Carr‘s lectures at Howard University and he said to a roomful of “Black” people, “In American society someone has to be Black, that don’t mean it has to be you.”  Hearing that made me re-visit Baldwin’s essay and gave me another way to look at the language we use and that is used against us…

 

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Still Blue?

I am almost ashamed to say that I did not remember that Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America was published 50 years ago in 1963.

Here and Here. Baraka lays down the hard fact of the heavy learning mojo that the late Sterling A. Brown put on him (and Toni Morrison, A.B. Spellman, Lucille Clifton, Thomas Sowell and many others).  These are writers and thinkers that inform who I am today so I through them (and his work as well)  I have come to a greater appreciation for Sterling A. Brown.

This appreciation becomes even more significant  as I think about the my recent family reunion down in the heart of  Gullah/Geechee land (Coastal South Carolina), I am remind that I am part of the Blues People Continuum or as Dr. Tony Bolden put it the “blues network.”( his book is called Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture 

bluesnet

I like the fact that Dr. Bolden’s  makes space in the “blues network” for all forms of  “African American vernacular culture” beyond just music, because this is the foundation for some of the new projects that I have coming up. This kind of grounding will be the perfect marriage of my current obsessions.

Thank you Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) for the work…to be continued

 

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African American Art and Culture on Tour (from International Arts & Artists)

header-black.pngdancetheatre.jpg“One of ballet’s most exciting undertakings.”
– The New York Times, 1971 Dance Theatre of Harlem: 40 Years of Firsts

Highlighting Dance Theatre of Harlem’s 40-plus year history, this magnificent exhibition celebrates the history and art of dance with 22 costumes, set pieces, videos, photographs and tour posters from four staged ballets including: A Streetcar Named Desire, Creole Giselle, Dougla and Firebird. Dispelling the belief that ballet could not be performed by those of African decent, Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. This multi-media exhibition captures the majesty of the choreography, the beauty of the costuming, and the dancers who defied gravity and stereotyping. With a modest beginning, holding classes in a warehouse on 152nd Street, the school has greatly expanded and since grown into a multi-cultural dance institution.

The exhibition comes with customized costume forms and backdrops for the four staged ballets. Banners are long and can be mounted to a wall, or will require tall ceilings to hang in open air space.

Available:
May 2013 – December 2015

Contact:
Beth Pacentrilli

Reflections: African American Life from the Myrna Colley-Lee Collection“Reflections presents the lives, traditions, and environments of African Americans from the 20th century to the present…It allows viewers to connect the strong tradition of storytelling by African Americans, with the sense of place that is largely unique to Southerners.”

Reflections: African American Life from the Myrna Colley-Lee Collection

A dialogue between artist and identity is represented through the more than 50 works selected from the collection of costume designer and arts patron, Myrna Colley-Lee. Reflections focuses largely on the figurative and representational, presenting pieces by such noted artists as Romare Bearden, James Van Der Zee, Elizabeth Catlett, Eudora Welty, and Betye Saar. Myrna Colley-Lee is credited as one of the foremost costume designers in the Black Theatre movement. Her collection juxtaposes works by leading artists with that of lesser known, offering a wide view of African American life and culture from the 20th century to the present.

Following its February 2013 debut at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan, Reflections will travel to Alexandria Museum of Art, Louisiana; Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi; and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama.

Available:
June 2013 – November 2013
March 2014 – August 2014
April 2015 – December 2015

Contact:
Beth Pacentrilli

 

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Dance Theatre of Harlem “In capturing the spiritual and emotional essence of this journey that is an essential part of my own history, I felt a strong sense of connection, and a bond with lives just a few generations removed.”
– Joseph Holston

Color in Freedom: Journey along the Underground Railroad

The stories of the Underground Railroad are some of the most powerful in American history. Color in Freedom is an exhibition of 49 paintings, etchings and drawings by Joseph Holston created to capture the essence of the courage and determination required to escape bondage in pursuit of independence; and to enhance understanding of the condition of slavery and the powerful instinct toward freedom.

Color in Freedom consists of four movements that track the flow of events in the lives of those who traveled along the Underground Railroad: The Unknown World, Living in Bondage-Life on the Plantation, The Journey of Escape, and finally, Color in Freedom.

Available:
April 2013 – mid-May 2013
August 2013 – September 2013
January 2014 – December 2014

Contact:
Beth Pacentrilli

 

International Arts & Artists
9 Hillyer Court NW, Washington, DC 20008
202.338.0680 | artsandartists.org

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DC:POETRY: 4/10/12 Angles of Ascent (f/ K. Dargan, G. Pardlo, and A.B. Spellman) @Writers Center, 7pm

The Writer’s Center is pleased to announce a reading by Kyle Dargan, Gregory Pardlo, and A.B. Spellman, poets who will be published in the forthcoming Angles of Ascent: A W.W. Norton Anthology of  Contemporary African American Poetry.  The reading takes place 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 10 at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street Bethesda, Maryland, and will be followed by a reception and book signing.  General admission is $5.00 (free to members and full-time students.)  This is the inaugural reading of the Politics & Prose at The Writer’s Center poetry series. We will announce additional readings as they are scheduled.  For more information call The Writer’s Center at 301-654-8664 or Politics & Prose at 202-364-1919.

Kyle Dargan  is author of two collections of poems, Bouquet of Hungers (University of Georgia Press, 2007) and The Listening (University of Georgia Press, 2004), winner of the Cave Canem Prize.  His poems have also appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and other journals.  He is an assistant professor of literature at American University and editor of Post No Ills Magazine (online), which he founded in 2008.  In 2008, he won the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and he was selected as the 2007 Drew Darrow Memorial Reader at Bucknell University.

Gregory Pardlo is an associate editor of Callaloo, graduated from Rutgers University (1999) and received the MFA in poetry from New York University in 2001.  He is author of Totem (APR, Copper Canyon, 2007), winner of the APR/Honickman Frist Book Prize; and translator of Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace: Selected Poems of Niels Lyngsoe (Toronto: BookThug, 2005).  Pardllo  is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

A. B. Spellman is author of The Beautiful Days (Poets Press, 1965), Things I Must Have Known (Coffee House Press, 2008), Four Lives in the Bee-Bop Business (Pantheon Books, 1966),  other editions under the title of Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan Press) and Art Tatum: A Critical Biography (a chapbook).  He has taught at Rutgers University, Morehouse College, Harvard University, and other institutions.  He also worked for several years for the National Endowment for the Arts, where he served in various positions such as director of the Arts in Education Study Project, director of the Arts Endowment Expansion Program, and deputy chairman for the Office of Guidelines, Panel, and Council Operations.