Asher Brown Durand / Kindred Spirits / 1849 / in homage to the artist Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School

Kara Walker / A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 / 2008

Norman Rockwell / Rosie the Riveter / 1943

Grant Wood / The Return from Bohemia / 1935

Charles Stuart / Colonel Crockett / 1839

Andy Warhol / Dolly Parton / 1985

The Corcoran is one of the museums in Washington DC that is private and you must pay for. The original housing for the collection was in today’s Renwick building (seen below, left). If you have a North American reciprocal card with your local membership you should be able to get in for nothing, same as the Women’s Museum or the Phillips. The Phillips may have an “extra” exhibit, many do, that almost negates this by making you pay extra. Luckily, if you do pay, it is only $10. A bargain next to the New York museums.

As history echoes itself last year, the Corcoran’s claim to shame comes in the 80s when it backed down on showing Robert Mapplethorpe’s work in light of a very hostile Right wing in both Congress and the White House. That was at a time when lunatic un-Christians felt that gays “got what they deserved with AIDS.”  So much for that dedication to art.

If you are outside the museum there is poster of the classical painting of a reclining seminude male, which is even more arresting because of the presentation, which is lined up on the floor, its scale and technique. This image was part of the 30 Americans, the show at the Corcoran, of the artworks of many contemporary African American artists, many who have become museum staples (Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas) in most contemporary collections in progressive American museums. As I have written a lot about both of them, including Kara Walker, another one of my favorites, but am not sure which piece she did. It is less about who they are now, but how they will evolve that interests me. There is a Basquiat. I always think of Basquiat, as I think of Janis Joplin, which is where would they have evolved. The trouble with aging, is you find yourself doing that each decade.

The layout of the show is a little confusing, so of course, I would take at least one illegal shot of an intriguing installation. At once, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, as we confront our not to0 recent past, as we are reminded that Hitler patterned his propaganda (Jews as a “race”, public sanctioned murder) upon our dear old post-Reconstruction days. We think we have gone past those days, but when I think of all the hateful things people say and do, who have no business getting involved. But that has nothing to do with the overall show. –Or does it?

Stained Glass from the Cathedral of Soissons

The Corcoran is a good all around museum. While you have a lot of contemporary going on, you also have traditional work and craft, which gives a more pertinent view as to what art could be. The little Remington (below), although more illustration, is a pleasant diversion.

Frederic Remington’s Off the Range  (Coming through the Rye)

I was happy to go through the rooms and see both abstract expressionists and early pop. Hofmann gains more ground as his work ages. I remember when he was strictly NY. Two of my professors were disciples of his. Ironically, not yet 20, I dropped both their classes!

Hans Hofmann‘s Golden Blaze (left) and Helen Frankenthaler’s Hurricane Flag (right).

Mitchell’s reevaluation seems normal in the age of post-feminism. Her color, a little toward tints, does not compromise but enhance, her bold brushwork.

Joan Mitchell’s Salut Tom

Ad Reinhardt’s Red Wall (left) and others

Jane Hammond’s Hand Held

Raymond Saunders’ Red Star and Andy Warhol’s Mao

Chalgrin’s The Salon Doré

Most museums have some recreation of a room or rooms, but nothing is quite like this for the authenticity and the freedom to be inside it. The beauty of this room is that it was imported once from Paris from the hôtel de Clermont to a New York apartment, then again to the Corcoran. Originally built by Count D’Orsay in the 1770s in honor of his fiance, it was moved to New York by Senator Clark in the late 19th century with some modification. It is on the level of Versailles, with beautiful understated decoration and gilt embellishment.

Giuseppe Croff”s The Veiled Nun

Some sculptors invent with a material, let’s face it, stone is not flexible. After working for years in clay, I admire the carvers. Good ones, Michelangelo and some of the Spanish and German woodcarvers, have an interesting ability to truly visualize three dimensionally in that block of material. This wonderful little piece creates the illusion of a veil, while retaining beautifully the features and subtleties of light, especially around the eyes. It reminds me of some of those beautiful Vogue shots in the early fifties which were the last of veiled hats for women.

Rembrandt’s Heinrich Schutz may be questionable for portrait name, and perhaps artist attribution

Within a few rooms sits the likes of several wonderful painters: Delacroix, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz de la Peña, Constable and Gainsborough. These painters would have effect on what would become Impressionism. The paintings, most of them are small and wonderful studies after those overly large historical things one see in the National Gallery and the Met.

x

Who am I to argue a little wall of Corots?

Ooh la lah, a little Corot nude!

Eugène Delacroix’a Tiger and Snake

Diaz de la Peña’s In the Forest

Daubigny’s Sunset on the River

There was an interesting photographic show adjoining “30.” And after seeing the above, I caught sight of the modern American painters of the twentieth century who predated Abstract Expressionism. These few were shot a little better than the others.

Lois Mailou Jones‘ Indian Shops, Gayhead, Massachusetts

Charles Demuth’s Rooftops and Trees

Arthur Garfield Dove’s Space Divided by Line Motive (left) and Marsden Hartley’s Berlin Abstraction(right)

Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell

Wonderful Hopper. A rare use where the figures don’t seem like architectonic ornaments. Check out the use of negative space within the figure grouping. Hopper does Perugino to Cezanne type space in the blink of an eye in this one. Odd color, although I have seen that coloring in New England.

John Singer Sargent’s Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White (above) and Marie Buloz Pailleron (below, left).

I don’t believe there is really any painter like Sargent. I have always admired his brushwork and the detail above (above) is one of the reasons why. He has unfortunately inspired many of those learn how to paint books, because they try to use his technique. He must have been very facile at that, because you have to be a terrific draftsman to lay paint down like that and get that effect. His drawings, robust and broad in a classical tradition, do not really expose what you will see in his painting. This technique to me is more like in some of the looser style of Jacob Jordaens. I also think of what a debt he owes to Delacroix, who really began to structure color against color, for optical effects. Sargents pop up in all museums in the U. S. If I get a chance this summer, I’ll go back and dig up the shots of murals he did for the Boston Public Library, and a few in the MFA.

When I came down the steps I saw this classical statue of a pretty woman with a lovely behind. I humorously smiled, as this was once the tradition for fine art. It came from a day and age, where any “decent” lady was covered from neck to toe. Only sometimes did this lady have a little décolletage showing, or a little adornment, a train or a bustle, attached to her backside. We go forward sometimes, then backwards. Sometimes not.

Sally Mann 

Sally Mann, you make those “mistakes”– we’ll gobble it up.

Richard Serra

Richard Serra seems grumpy but our love for his work will not wane.

Kara Walker

Once I heard Kara Walker speak and it was GREAT.

Cut 1998

Thanks to a lovely conversation with a teacher at The Renaissance Charter School in NYC, I am now growing familiar with the amazing work of Kara Walker. I love shadow and silhouette work, and Walker is quite the master at projecting both. Her work is full of energy, history, and story- I am looking forward to studying it more, and hopefully integrating her work into curriculum designs.

Slavery! Slavery! 1997

Kara Walker amongst some of her silhouettes, by Librado Romero/NY Times

Kara Walker, is a contemporary African American artist best known for her work of iconic silhouette figures made through various media such as installation, drawings, gouaches, projections and puppet-show videos. Born in California in 1969, Ms. Walker knew from an early age that she would become an artist like her father. When she was 13, her father moved their family to the less integrated southern state of Georgia after accepting a teaching job in Atlanta. Her world drastically changed during this time as she was constantly reminded of her gender and skin color and made to feel pain because of it.

Kara Walker first studied art in Georgia and received her BFA from Atlanta College. She later earned her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. It was during her graduate studies where she became interested in the cut-paper medium.

Kara Walker, installing her work.

With inspiration from the artists Andy Warhol and Robert Colescott, and driven by her own experiences as a black female, she developed her own visual language touching on important and challenging issues of race, gender and identity, later earning her a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. 

>Learn More about Kara Walker by watching Art 21: Stories.

Ryan McGinley video at Team Gallery at Art Basel Miami (Still from '60 Minutes')

In all the hubbub over Morley Safer’s segment on 60 Minutes in which he trashes the art world on a visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, a follow-up to his 1993 dig at the industry, one thing we haven’t heard much of, at least not from Mr. Safer, is the names of the artists he shows in his segment—like Ryan McGinley, who made the video of a scantily clad woman holding a make-shift blowtorch, or Mike Kelley, responsible for the installation of sewn stuffed animals and Jennifer Rubell, whose interactive life-size sculpture of Prince William makes an appearance. And while Mr. Safer presents these works as emblems of his confusion and dismay at what has become of the art world, we can’t help think what a thrill it is to see Paul McCarthy’s large pink sculpture of a libidinous dwarf, White Snow Dwarf (Bashful), on national broadcast television. Savoring the moment with a few more artists, here’s a breakdown of some more work we found in the segment, each one paired with one of Mr. Safer’s signature bon mots at the time of their appearance.

2:28 Tony Cragg sculptures including Mixed Feelings (2011) at Thaddeus Ropac (“Upscale flea market”)

2:37 Jennifer Rubell’s interactive sculpture I’m Engaged to Prince William (“there’s very little sense of an aesthetic experience here”)

2:42 Takashi Murakami’s sculpture of a giant panda (“what you hear is the cacophony of cash”)

2:47-2:50 Jaume Plensa, Marianna W followed by an installation view of A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janiero (“this fair seems to be about art as stuff or stuff as art”)

2:51 Mike Kelley installation of stuffed animals sewn together at Tony Shafrazi (“just so much merchandise”)

2:58 Picasso (“There are some timeless gems”)

2:59 Helen Frankenthaler’s Blue Reach (“maintaining a quiet elegance”)

3:00 Sean Landers’s clown painting (“But they’re shouted off the walls”)

3:01 Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Dwarf (Bashful) at Hauser & Wirth (“by the kitsch”)

3:03 Red rose by Will Ryman at Paul Kasmin (with a Kenny Scharf painting in the background) (“the cute”)

3:05 Paulo Nazareth’s sculpture of bananas falling out of a van at Mendes Wood (“and the incomprehensible”)

3:07 Erwin Wurm, Police Cap (2011) at Thaddeus Ropac (“oversized headwear”)

3:25 Video of a nude woman with a make-shift blowtorch, Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery (“And then there’s the question you’ve been dying to ask. How much is this stuff worth?”)

4:37 Installation by Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin (“do baby blue translucent bathroom fixtures prick the imagination? Does that toilet seat raise our spirits?”)

4:44 pink Erwin Wurm sculpture (“or is this the biggest scam”)

5:30 Nobuo Sekine Phase-Drawing2 (Topology16) at Blum and Poe (“renowned for discovering the sharpest of cutting edge art”)

6:53 Kara Walker drawing (“Eli Broad, the one-percenter of one-percenters,” “collectors like Mr. Broad get first dibs on the really good stuff”)

7:12 Cindy Sherman (“[Eli Broad] was one of her first collectors. He first bought her pictures back in 1982 for $250.”)

7:40 Mary Boone booth with Warhol (yellow cow prints against blue in the background) (“For dealers the gold standard is selling to a major museum”)

8:05 Anish Kapoor (“[Jennifer Stockman, Alexandra Monroe] and Barbara Gladstone went ape over this sculpture by Anish Kapoor”)

8:16 Haegue Yang installation (“this tangle of extension cords”)

9:14 Walking with Jeffrey Deitch into Larry Gagosian’s booth, in which there are works by Liechtenstein, Warhol and Jeff Koons (“the famously reticent Larry Gagosian”)

9:35 Jeff Koons painting Ribbon (“[Jeffrey Deitch] could not resist reminding us of our report of 1993″)

11:04 Gerhard Richter painting (“certainly a bargain if your daddy’s a billionaire”)

13:02 Zhang Huan, 49 Days (“Easier to look at than pork bellies”)

13:04 Nick Cave, Soundsuits (“or maybe not”)

Some others we spotted were a Christopher Wool at Luhring Augustine and Thomas Houseago’s Ghost of a flea at Hauser & Wirth. If you spot some more, let us know in the comments below.

I’ve seen Kara Walker’s paper silhouettes around the web. What you encounter in this award winning artist’s work is race and the human form represented as cartoonish racial stereotypes with exaggerated features. The subject matter is heavy, maybe raw, but also amusing… depending on the viewer. Her body of work follows the same vein.

Walker meets history by informing us provocatively and in order to process the fantastical shadow-like images you have to keep looking. Her work, as a whole, is enthralling and unsettling. She doesn’t pander to the traditional and the safe.

Kara Walker speaks with Paulette Beete at Art Works.

Paulette Beete: What’s your version of the artist’s life?

Kara Walker: My life is a life that’s both ordinary and extraordinary. As a single (divorced) mother of one there are innumerable domestic duties and chores and pleasures, which I am always trying to balance with the intensely demanding and often egocentric demands of working on my work. For the most part I have a pretty workable studio and travel schedule and routine, thanks in part to the involvement of my Ex in our daughter’s life. But my life as an artist has never been a bohemian one in the sense that I live completely outside the quotidian. In fact my work has always existed in relation to the ordinary. The themes and methods that I use and reference: silhouettes, cartoons, dime novels all speak directly to the psychology of domestic life. I do go to the studio every day, and I spend time reading or trying to research my interests. Sometimes I bring my projects or sketchbooks home so I can keep the thread alive in between making dinner or in the late night hours. The days that I have to myself I fill with a combination of studio work and spending time with my equally busy friends.

Read more at the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kara Walker and Clifford Owens at MoMA PS1. Courtesy Rozalia Jovanovic.

The artist Kara Walker had a surprise cameo today in Clifford Owens’s last performance in his exhibition “Anthology” at MoMA PS1. It was a resolution, it seemed, of what began unfolding last week when Mr. Owens made known to Gallerist in an interview his intention to force a sex act on an audience member during his last performance in accordance with a set of instructions Ms. Walker had given to him to enact. Yet, while Ms. Walker had supplied the instructions, or a “score” as Mr. Owens calls them (as did 27 other artists) she had no idea, we learned from her in an email, that he planned to take her instructions so literally for this performance, instructions which read, in part, “Force them against a wall and demand Sex.” As a result, she called off her involvement with the performance. Thus, when the door opened today and Ms. Walker appeared and walked slowly toward Mr. Owens, the performance, we knew, had taken a turn no one could have expected.

“Perhaps they are wondering what they will do or how they will react if they are chosen,” Ms. Walker said in her opening remarks, a show of empathy with the audience, many of whom, she added, may have read Gallerist’s article or heard about what Mr. Owens planned to do in this performance. She explained that she first heard of his intentions to force a sex act on an audience member in the article we published on March 8. She then told the audience what they could expect: Mr. Owens would say things like “I’m going to fuck your brains out,” and “You know you want it, baby” and “This is what you think I am, just a nigger toy.”

And while Mr. Owens performed the score similar to the way he had in previous performances, by walking around the room selecting audience members to move in on and kiss or grope, this time he seemed inhibited, somewhat emasculated, as Ms. Walker remained in the center of the room with him, as if on sentry duty, diffusing his machismo, at times kneeling and watching him as if ensuring that Mr. Owens didn’t force someone to engage in a sex act.

At other times, with an angry expression that felt very real, as if she didn’t want to be part of this, she challenged him with questions like “Why did you ask me to do this?” and “Why did you put me in this situation?” He would talk to her—”Kara, I need your help,” or respond, as if to the audience, “Why did you come here? What do you want from me?” or speak in soliloquy as he marched around with a glimmer of his normal cocksure attitude, “This ain’t nothing but a high tech lynching.” Mr. Owens and Ms. Walker would walk in a circle engaged in a kind of war of words.

“Do you want this cock in your mouth?” Mr. Owens said to the crowd at one point.

“Yeah,” a young white woman with blonde hair responded. She was in shorts and red lace-up shoes.

“Do you want it?” he said.

“Certainly,” she responded and smiled. He moved in but did not follow through on her suggestiveness taking her casualness as a rebuff. Later, the blonde woman told Gallerist “I was only responding the way I thought the script called for me to act.” She said she didn’t fear anything would happen to her.

That was the trade-off. While people seemed to feel somewhat entertained and comfortable rather than challenged by Mr. Owens, a comfort and complacency he had aimed to transcend during this final performance, the presence of Ms. Walker forced him to cede some control to her, as a compromise, it seemed, over how the performance would be carried out. And it was clear she was not up for anyone having a sex act performed on them involuntarily on her account, being that she maintains she has responsibility in the creation of “this evil scenario,” as she told us in her email. “The difference is,” she wrote, “my proposal exists as a slip of paper, a planted idea—the performer reserves the right to simply not do it.”

She was stepping in, it seemed, to prevent Mr. Owens from reserving the right to take action.

Yet, while the performance was scaled back, devoid of the kissing and groping that have become standard behavior for Mr. Owens in his performance of this score, Ms. Walker’s appearance made the event unique in a different sense.

“That was Kara Walker’s first live performance,” Mr. Owens said to the crowd. “We’re making all kinds of history, baby.”

Since March 8th is designated International Womens’ Day by the Fawcett Society, it seems kind of appropriate to simply gather here a whole bunch of snapshots – ranging in date from the early twentieth century to the 1970s – united only by being portraits of women, either individually or in groups, in youth or age, and in settings that range from back yards to sports fields, interiors to vast outdoor spaces, and in roles ranging from the traditional ones of motherhood and domestic life to all kinds of less easily categorised and defined moments in their ongoing lives. I don’t know who any of these women are, only that each image somehow catches the glint of light from some single facet of the broader subject of how women were during the period covered by the 21 photographs seen here. From coy bridesmaids to mothers relishing comics, gypsy-costumed tambourine players and tourists to pub denizens, bathers and the kinds of women D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner might have known and written about, this is nothing more or less than a random slice through a lot of personalities and possibilities, none of whom are (to my knowledge, anyway) remotely likely to be celebrated or seen elsewhere. Which seems a perfectly adequate reason to feature them all here, I suppose.

Her haunting yet whimiscal works are known for challenging the images of slaves and women in the Civil War south.

While Kara is a modern artist, she reminds us of where we came from. She grabs history by the  throat and beautifully executes the ugly side of history. I feel like I cannot eloquently put her arts into words. Please check her out!

http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker?n=Main.HomePage

“I walk in the footsteps of giants.”

Writer, David Foster Wallace, once wrote that the lives of others are a writer’s dinner; they are our sustenance. We observe, analog, and interrogate the sequential series of events, happenstances, and eccentricities of strangers and those closest to us, out of necessity — not to meddle. Life’s oddities are our fuel to work, to create; we are able to make connections and deductions that work to bridge varying histories, paths, and people together. But more importantly, we analyze the innards of “human situations” as a way to asses how individuals are perceived.

Without such fodder, we wind up speaking only of ourselves. Wallace absolved a tremendous amount of shame of mine with that principle and it has in turn helped me rectify my fascination with the lives of other women who happen to look just like me. Black women, more broadly — and Black women,artistically inclined and deftly dressed, more specifically.

For a style writer, whose work’s main focal point is the intersection of class, sex, race, and gender amongst the crowds gathered at Les Tuileries, it is uplifting to find tufts of a coiled Afro peeking out above the stylized fashion packs. Although I find that I can enjoy fashion and style on a very neutral level, as an individual who simply appreciates beauty, I preternaturally want to find out who that Afro belongs to. I want to learn how she has found herself amidst the glamour, and how she has navigated it all. This is the sustenance I was speaking of earlier.

In this, I have been taken with the lives and stories of several women, as of late: Solange Knowles, Shala Monroque, Julia Sarr-Jamois, Tracee Ellis Ross, Viola Davis, Kara Walker. All enchanting women who have summoned admirers through their varied talents in art, fashion editorial, music, acting, and entertainment — and yes, their alluring personal style. I’ve eagerly read up on their beginnings, successes, and philosophies in countless interviews, attended their lauded movies or art exhibitions, procured publications which they’ve covered or been featured amongst the pages of, and soaked up their energy and conspicuous intellect overheard in recorded interviews and even, memorable one-on-one conversations.

Though erring on the side of “ogling” (again, Wallace explains, a natural component of my job criteria as a writer), all this helps me piece the woman together, etch out a greater idea of this individual, and create a philosophical and sartorial alignment with one another in my mind. What blooms is not voyeurism, nor fandom, because I think that suggests an unequal balance of interest. But something much more subtle: a simple and honest-to-goodness “girl crush.”

Read the rest of “Sisterly Love…” at Huffington Post here.

Photo courtesy of Vintage Black Glamour

Whenever someone uses the words ‘political correctness’ in a sentence, I’ve found it useful to mentally substitute that formulation with the words ‘good manners’ instead, as the two things are pretty much synonymous and doing this reveals the true nature of most statements in which those much maligned words appear: “it’s good manners gone mad!”; “good manners are an unacceptable imposition on my freedom of speech”; “MP pledges to free employers from their responsibility to show good manners when conducting business”, and so on. It’s surprising how few sentences featuring the phrase ‘political correctness’ this formula doesn’t fit, in fact. The next step for the exposed anti-PC speaker is usually to suggest that the levels of everyday prejudice in existence before ‘political correctness’ came along were grossly exaggerated by that nebulous entity, ‘the Left’, who as we all know, have ‘no sense of humour’ and don’t appreciate that even where there might have been the occasional racist joke, or bit of rough stuff directed at gays, that wasn’t the normal thing, just a few bad apples in an otherwise tolerant and easy-going barrel.

Yet it’s precisely the innocence and lack of malice in the image above that suggests otherwise. James Robertson’s Golly logo was never meant to hurt anyone, so far as I’m aware, nor was the knitting pattern produced by them as a bit of a marketing tie-in sometime during the later 1970s or early 1980s considered likely to offend: the company was (and still is) in the business of selling marmalade, not crusading against integration, after all, though the arguments against the image and its continued use in the British context are aired in detail at the US Slavery website, culminating in Gerry German’s comments in The Voice, saying: “I find it appalling that any organisation in this day and age can produce anything which would commemorate the Golliwog. It is an offensive caricature of Black people.” Although withdrawn in some countries, notably the US, the Golly still adorns Robertson’s produce in the UK.

But the fact that this photograph now looks utterly alien to most viewers in 2012 – like a parody of itself – shows how much attitudes have shifted and manners have improved, and not just when it comes to issues of race, but in terms of levels of acceptance for mere petty difference of all kinds: anyone over 35 will doubtless recall the high chances of being set upon after closing time in many UK towns just for looking a bit odd, or wearing the wrong kind of shirt, never mind anything else. And while it is still possible to draw on these stereotypes and images – as artists like Chris Ofili, Harold Offeh and Kara Walker often have - or acknowledge a history that is sometimes more complex than it superficially seems (as Nick Tosches’ book about the American ‘blackface’ minstrel singer Emmett Miller, Where Dead Voices Gather, certainly did) perhaps we should still be grateful that the Golly is no longer considered a suitable subject for an all-the-family set of matching knitwear, as it clearly was when the pattern seen here was first published.

The silhouette reduces an object to its most basic form. Its historical uses in art can be seen in the paper cuts of Hans Christian Andersen and the artwork of Kara Walker. In photographic terms, the silhouette is created in situations where the subject is backlit. It can be used to hide a person’s identity or play up their distinctive features, and its graphic form is often used artistically to photograph sport and dance. It heightens drama, adds atmosphere and makes a banal scene into a graphic wonder.

More than 200 years ago, the silhouette was the foremost way to document one’s appearance, but it’s still widely used in photographic frames today. From capturing the Costa Concordia to presidential primaries and pilgrims, LightBox looks at the use of silhouettes on the wires this month.

Yep. I live here.

(I just joined Black Girls Run! NYC and I’ve been inspired to do my first race in February!)

At the end of the summer was awarded the Honorable Mention in Poetry by the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund, and got to feature at their 20th anniversary party.

Writers Lenelle Moïse and Kirya Traber share their words at Writeous! Celebrating the Astraea Lesbian Writer's Fund

Though I’m enrolled in the Acting program at my school, I was selected for a special playwriting opportunity for the Spring 12 semester! I’m performing regularly, writing new work, making friends, and staying warm in 18 degree temperatures. For a Cali girl in NYC I think I’m adjusting pretty well. But I can’t say I’ve been without my struggles.

My first semester of graduate school has been challenging.

Shocking, I know.

There’s the work load: sometimes 5 or 6 texts to be memorized at once, papers, performances, presentations, and juries all stacked on top of each other, and there’s ALWAYS another play to read.

There’s the sleep deprivation: 8 hours of class, 4 hours of rehearsal, an hour commute, up at 6am, home by 12am, repeat.

There’s the emotional strain, the physical fatigue, the self doubt, the homesickness, the recurrent waves of “I just need a fucking drink and it’s only Tuesday.”

You know. Grad school.

Though in my case it looks a bit more like this…

Pictographic line memorization technique (patent pending)

Or this…

"Cramming"

But then there’s the other stuff. The equally universal, but not as easy to talk about stuff. The stuff that can’t be fixed by better time management, or just “digging in.” The racism, institutional and inter-personal. The sexism, institutional and inter-personal. The crushing weight of hetero-normative cultural norms that not only isolate and oppress me, but also deprive me of a shared language to communicate my trauma.

You know. Grad school.

I’m not naive. I expected all of this going into the program, and yet somehow you can never really be prepared. By midterm I felt a bit like I was underwater, and I couldn’t even begin to find my way out.

Over Thanksgiving break, I made the “mistake” of reading some Nikki Giovanni:

“The African slave bereft of his gods, his language, his drums searched his heart for a new voice. Under the sun and lash the African sought meaning in life on earth and the possibility of life hereafter. They shuffled their feet, clapped their hands, gathered a collective audible breath to release the rhythms of the heart. We affirmed in those dark days of chattel through the White Knights of Emancipation that all we had was a human voice to guide us and a human voice to answer the call.”

-Nikki Giovanni, Sacred Cows…and Other Edibles

Her words stirred inside me an aching that I had suppressed for the last 3 months. I was famished and this small helping of nourishment only further confused and angered my ravenous hunger. It was not until I watched the footage of the National Book Awards ceremony that the precise nature of this deficit began to untangle itself.

I have been a fan of Cave Canem faculty member, Nikky Finney, since I read The World is Round as an undergrad at San Francisco State University. My moment of revelation occurred just before Finney began to deliver her now renowned acceptance speech. It was the applause that erupted in the ceremony room as she was announced the winner, an unbridled jubilance normally reserved for athletic feats and pop-celebrity idols, that shook me. I cannot watch this video without welling over with tears.

I can only clumsily describe this feeling as a moment of vindication perhaps, or restitution, or eureka, but I don’t know if it can ever be contained by a single word. Like Finney, and so many who dare to call themselves poets, I claim the written word as my salvation.

I discovered verse in the midst of a childhood marked by poverty and prejudice, and bloomed in the small hours of the morning clutching tightly to a pen. These first words eventually found their footing on the stage, through spoken word, and now acting, but I will always be a poet first. My work as a professional artist can be described as matured presentation of these initially private explorations.

photo by Mia Nakano: mianakano.com/ visibilityproject.org

It was not until November 16th 2011, hearing the audience react to Finney’s award, that I realized how integral this is to my identity as an artist. This process of exploration, of discovery, and eventually of radical articulation is precisely what my life’s work must be.

As Giovanni and Finney so eloquently expressed, being a Black woman makes me part of a legacy, by blood and struggle, of a people whose expressions have been deliberately and systematically silenced. In breaking that silence, I have become aware that my every deliberate utterance holds weight. I am interested in the arts as a means of amplifying these utterances. And herein lies the conflict.

My graduate program asks that I sacrifice so much of myself while starving me of the impetus that brought me to the arts in the first place. Nowhere in my curriculum have I found my own history and identities reflected. Instead we are learning from a history text that unselfconsciously asserts performance traditions outside of the “Western” legacy as mere “primitive ritual.” Racist and sexist tropes run rampant through our performance exercises and we dialogue about staging and props. We are given professional development workshops that encourage us to play into our “types” as defined by mainstream media without even a tacit acknowledgement of the oppressive stereotypes they are modeled after. All of this in the name of “succeeding” as a professional artist.

I know now, that I will never be the kind of artist satisfied by mere acclaim. Instead, I seek the roar of a righteous applause for work that has wrestled with its history and found its way into the light.

Kara Walker uses "cartoonish" cut-paper silhouettes to "elaborate on racial stereotypes that are reductions of humans." “The work is two parts research, and one part paranoid hysteria." Contemporary Art and Artists: Arts 1001 Blog http://tinyurl.com/86dacmd

If and when such radical artistry does exist within the institution it will not be quietly assigned between Shakespeare and Baudelaire. I am reminded through my greatest idols, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Giovanni, and Finney (who have each at some point found success within the institution) that the space for this kind of work must be shaped, forged, and forced when necessary, even where it seems most unlikely to be accommodated.

Thankfully, I am not alone. With my folks back in the Bay, here in my new Brooklyn home, and in a few life-saving allies in my program I have begun to create the kind of community that I have always longed for. An extended family of artists and organizers who, like myself, will give all that they have for 40 seconds of raucous cheering in the name of poetry.

well then why are they posting back to back canadian music…cuz this is our blog and we will do what we want, also its great music.

For many, Destroyer is not a new band (depending on your count 9 or so albums since 1996) but Kaputt, the bands 2011 full length was one of my favs for 2011 so why not start 2012 with it.

This nearly 9 minute song off Kaputt highlights the bands musical talent and is hauntingly beautiful. Enjoy!

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And some art from Kara Walker