A Couple of Thoughts in/on Passing: Rona Pondick and Roy DeCarava

A Sublime Experience in Worcester, MA

I had the opportunity during an unusually busy month to catch the curated exhibition project by sculptor Rona Pondick. The exhibition closed on October 11th, a Sunday, which is precisely the day a friend--Addison Gallery's Julie Bernson--and I made our way to the Worcester Art Museum from Waltham via Boston, MA. Having long admired Pondick's work I had been wanting to see this exhibition since hearing about it when it opened. The closing date had thus remained solidly fixed in my brain during the run of the show. It proved to have been well worth the trip and then some.

I've written previously about how museums and artists can each reinvent their respective roles through placing the artist in more of a directly engaging conversation with institutional space. Traditionally we think of the museum space as a place where selected artists' works are exhibited. We don't often think of placing artists in positions of responsibility to actually determine what is exhibited in that space, particularly if it's not just their own work. Such activity is generally the purview of curators, those persons charged with articulating and visualizing the museum's raison d'étre or conceptual mission through its exhibition program. As in any profession there is a set of knowledge and skills required which generally are gained through both academic training and experience. An advance art history degree usually figures in there somewhere, but certainly not always. Encyclopedic or historical museums tend to have a more fixed professional track than contemporary institutions. I've known and worked with both curators and museum directors who have come to their positions in several different ways and all have attained a measure of success, working successfully in a wide range of museum contexts. Either way, it is the decisions of these curators--in some consultation with the directors--that come to define the institution's public face and identity. It is a position of great institutional and public trust and, one might add, power.

Generally speaking power is too often something that those who have worked to acquire it are loathe to share. The long arc of history generally confirms that those who don't share power, amassing it shamelessly and in a self serving manner, are eventually done in by it in some way. That goes for institutions as well. Institutions--public ones in particular like museums--generally operate within a framework of what we might call socialized power, that is the power to benefit others, in their case by collecting and presenting the best or most interesting visual aspects of culture for public appreciation and study. The question, then, of who is allowed to shape this viewing experience becomes an ever more loaded one, one in which the museum has an opportunity to redefine itself through how it chooses to answers these questions. And I am one who believes that the current climate of economic instability and shifting social change creates a ripe opportunity for museums to take a second look at how they view themselves, the artists they exhibit, the audiences they serve and the configurations these entities might then be placed in.

Rona Pondick's exhibition, "Rona Pondick: The Metamorphosis of an Object," at the Worcester Art Museum is an example of the best that can result from this reconsideration of traditional roles within the museum, i.e artists exhibit and curators curate, and what can happen when an institution shares its curatorial and institutional power with an artist. The result of a conversation began several years ago between Pondick and the Worcester's curator of contemporary art Susan Stoops, the exhibition is one in which Pondick juxtaposes her own sculptures with those from the museum's collection spanning a broad historical range. As Pondick has said, "I want to look at how sculpture is physical and how the physical makes psychological impact. Viewers have conscious and unconscious visceral responses to objects that they feel in their own bodies and that make psychological meaning. I am interested in looking at the way the psychological has been manifested in sculptures from all periods. When these different historic sculptures and mine are installed next to one another, there is a visual communication spoken in "body language" that needs little explanation. The sculptures start losing their historical place and take on more physical, emotional, and visceral relations with the viewer. Gestures and postures don't translate solely into symbolic interpretations particular to a culture or time period. Otherwise, why would people look at historic work?" This statement marks, too, the clarity and acuity with which Pondick has conceptualized and executed the project. 

I'm not one to use the term flawless too freely, but this exhibition came as close to that in its conception and execution as anything I've seen in recent memory. The relational intricacies created through the placement of the sculptures enhanced the viewer's ability to draw connections and allusions between them and made for a joyously provocative installation. The shape and placement of the various pedestals allowed the viewer to move easily and revealingly around each group of sculptures to full effect, permitting one to view the objects as needed to full three dimensional and narrative effect, with all of the subtly revealed allusions clearly explicated throughout the installation. Pondick's spare wall text was almost subliminal in its measured ability to point to her ideas and motivations while leaving ample room for the viewer's own experience and discovery; didactic wall text it was not. I found myself smiling quietly and laughing broadly at the brilliance of it all as I walked repeatedly around the room. The reverberations between her exquisitely realized hybrid like contemporary sculptures and the historical works were wonderfully and variously nuanced, creating--as she intended--a much expanded reading of each. Indeed Pondick's own sculptures contain within them a wealth of references regarding her use of contrasting representational forms and surface finish. The exhibition suggested to me the very best of what one might hope for in handing an artist the curatorial reins.

http://www.worcesterart.org/Exhibitions/rona_pondick.html

The experience of the Pondick project was only further heightened when my friend and I followed it up with a visit to the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College where Kiki Smith was holding forth in a curated exhibition project there entitled "Cut from her Breast" as part of a project entitled "The Permanent Collection: The Artist-as-Curator: Kiki Smith." The museum's pr materials describe the project as such: "Smith's presentation of these works of art is a departure from the typical aesthetics of museum display. By inviting artists to curate selections from the collection, the Davis Museum hopes to expand upon the ways in which works of art are experienced and interpreted. As museums increasingly call attention to how the display of objects encodes and constructs meaning, Smith has joined a growing number of artists sought after as curators." 

This sounds to me a bit more like a "sought after artist sweepstake" than an invitation to any deep and meaningful institutional, curatorial or conceptual engagement. And I would suggest that what the Davis "won" was the use of Kiki Smith's name, certainly not an expanded experience of the objects from their collection for their visitors, since there is virtually no clearly discernible discursive context in which to meaningfully engage with these wide ranging objects. The installation consists of vessels from different cultures and periods placed in display cases that Smith designed (which I believe I recall her saying had some relation to the cases in which her family kept their wine.) In the entrance of the gallery Smith hung a beautiful 18th century Mexican ex-voto of a woman undergoing a mastectomy. First making a reproduction of this painting, Smith then proceeded to cut bits of the painting, reproduced on paper, into irregular rectangular shapes and then place them in various irregular locations within the cases containing each vessel. Several low hanging bare light bulbs complete the vaguely aesthetisized effect.  The relationship between the painting and the vessels? The relationship between the fractured pieces of the ex-voto and their placement in the display cases? The light bulbs?

Unfortunately no interpretive material or even minimal wall text was available to help unravel that particular conceptual riddle, though Smith did look rather thoughtful in the video as she cut out the shapes and placed adhesive on them before affixing them to the insides of the cases and other talking heads held forth in an appropriately academically jargonistic fashion. I even noticed a few rectangular pieces of the reproduced painting affixed to window of the gallery. It all had an oddly rushed and sadly "phoned in" feeling to it that made me want to rush back to Worcester to again immerse myself in what a truly engaged and dialogical project looks like, one in which the artist has her own intense conversation with the objects and the museum and then invites the viewer to participate in the ensuing conversation. 

Like all situations of public presentation, an exhibition is an opportunity for the artist to either fail very publicly or for their ideas and work to take hold in the imagination. It is no different when institutions choose to put artists behind the curatorial steering wheel. In the best cases--my own project at the Walters, Vik Muniz's "Rebus" project at MoMA, Kara Walker's "After the Deluge" at the Met and Pondick's Worcester project would qualify I believe--it becomes an expanded institutional conversation, one that presents a set of provocative choices that emerge out of a serious engagement between all parties. The artist, the institution and certainly the viewers are thus all the better for it, and in some real way are transformed.

Roy DeCarava, R.I.P (1919 - 2009)

To speak of Roy DeCarava takes me back to the very beginning of my interest in photography. Quite simply Roy DeCarava was the first black photographer I ever knew of who was successfully making his way in the world through the making of pictures that were shaped entirely by his own internal need to talk about his experiences and the experiences of the people her knew through photographs. It is hard enough for anyone to make a way in the world in this way and at the time Roy DeCarava made this decision it was certainly almost impossible for a black man to make a way in the world in such a manner. And to do this by visualizing a race of people whose public image was a much maligned one was audacity and faith personified, certainly not the typical subject for the kind of high photographic art of the type that DeCarava was creating. DeCarava turned the African American experience into  photographs that didn't traffic in visual pathology or confirm for a wider audience the dangers lurking in the urban black community that was his home. Rather he created his own idiosyncratic form of visual poetry, one in which content, form and material were seamlessly and evocatively wed. And he saw love, tenderness and humanity where others might have seen something far less. Where he did see pain and social tension in the world he turned them into photographs that crafted a complex visual reading of the situation not merely a didactic and illustrative response.

The publication of his book The Sweet Flypaper of Life with Langston Hughes  and his receiving a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship--the highest honor of its kind--was a watershed moment of validation for all of us who were black and photographers who would come after. Indeed it gave some us the first tangible sense that we could become such a thing, since models have to exist before ideas can take hold in the imagination. Receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship in photography myself a few years ago was, as you can imagine, a profound moment for me in light of these beginnings. Roy was the first black fellow in 1952 and there have still been only a mere handful since. And at a time when photography as a fine art form was still not firmly established DeCarava took the initiative in 1955 to open A Photography Gallery, a space where a number of photographers received substantial exhibitions of their work, including Minor White, Berenice Abbott and Harry Callahan among others. The gallery remained in operation for two years and suggests DeCarava's often overlooked seminal position in securing a place for photography as a fine art in the post war era along with others such as Helen Gee who opened the Limelight Gallery during this same time. As such he was following the example of Alfred Steiglitz, yet another significant photographer whose two galleries, An American Place and 291 also provided an important space for the viewing of significant but then underexposed works by other artists.

DeCarava is too often grouped within a kind of black photographic trinity, which includes James Van DerZee and Gordon Parks. Many years ago I myself made the mistake of naively calling DeCarava to ask if I might interview him for inclusion in an article that I was writing about Black photographers for American Arts magazine. Roy asked me who the other photographers where that I was including in the article and bristled when I mentioned James Van DerZee. I tried to explain that my inclusion of Van DerZee had more to do with the historical reach I wanted the article to have and that I was also including Anthony Barboza, and other younger black photographers. I can still hear Roy's response ringing in my ears. In no uncertain terms he attempted to educate me and set me straight. "Listen, James Van DerZee was a studio photographer, making pictures of people in the neighborhood who paid him. His pictures are interesting for a whole different reason. That's not what I do. If you want to do an article on them, do an article on them. If you want to do an article on me, then do an article on me. But you will not do an article on them and me. I'm not a commercial photographer. What does my work have to do with theirs?" Ouch! I tried lamely to explain, but his answer remained the same. I meekly said, "Thank you Roy," and dejectedly hung up the phone. Of course Roy was right. The difference between working on assignment for Life magazine or working in a neighborhood portrait studio and making one's way in the world independently through pictures that have no obvious commercial or reportorial value or use is considerable, though each may well involve a requisite craftsmanship. And he wanted me to understand that difference and to think about it and his work more critically. There are still more than a few people for whom this distinction is not clear. Roy wanted me to understand the difference between his intentions and theirs and not to carelessly group them together because of race, as often happens with black photographers, who often finding themselves grouped together in conceptually dubious exhibitions in which the rubric of race is often the only unifying factor. It was Roy DeCarava who first gave me a healthy skepticism about these kinds of shows, given their often thin scholarship, thematic diffusion and tendency to further segregate black photographers from a broader historical conversation about the relationship between visual and material culture. If I'm difficult when folks now contact me to participate in these kinds of exhibitions, you can credit it to DeCarava.

He was equally unflinching and direct in his critique of the work that some of us younger photographers brought to him for feedback and criticism. I am still smarting (but oh, so much wiser) from the first critique he gave me some thirty-odd years ago, asking me if that intrusive black border I put on my black and white prints was part of the picture or a overly obvious way of signifying that I didn't crop any of my pictures. He made no comment on the pictures themselves, instead choosing to get me to think about that one heavy handed stylistic gesture. I don't have to tell you that those black lines grudgingly disappeared soon afterwards as they began to look like the material affectation that Roy had clearly seen them for. DeCarava was as generous with his time as he was unstinting in his criticisms. These personal crits began to take on an almost tragicomical dimension as those who had recently brought work to show Roy vied to see who had gotten the worst critical beat down. Running into someone after one of these sessions was like running into someone who had barely survived a too close encounter with their fragile psyche. Jules Allen told me one day after coming from such a session, "Roy had me crying like a baby." Julio Mitchel told me, "I was so upset I threw my cameras in the closet and couldn't photograph for a month." Each such telling had the humorously perverse but earnest quality of trying to outdo each other over who had gotten their ass kicked the hardest by Roy; a kind of pissing contest of sorts. I was loathe to participate in this game of one-upmanship, but appreciated hearing the latest tales of angst emanating from Roy's home and studio on Halsey Street in Brooklyn.

Those of us who knew and respected Roy are a rigorous, hard working and uncompromising lot, as my students will tell you. Roy demanded a lot of himself and in so doing made us all demand even more of ourselves. He didn't want his work, legacy and life taken lightly and insisted that we who knew him approach our work with the same utmost respect for craft, discipline and integrity. He leaves a legacy of sheer brilliance and passion in his picture making and a life lived that calls all of us to steadfastness in the face of challenges and rebukes of every kind and to maintain our integrity no matter what and by any means necessary.  

Photographs (from top): Rona Pondick installation views courtesy of Rona Pondick and the Worcester Art Museum; Kiki Smith installation courtesy of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center; Roy DeCarava portrait © Mitsu Yasukawa courtesy of the L.A. Times; Roy DeCarava at Witkin Gallery courtesy of Coreen Simpson (l. to r. Accra Shepp, Coreen Simpson, Dawoud Bey, Roy DeCarava, Tony Barboza, unidentified)

Diversity and the Blue M & M

When I was a kid the calm evening air would sometimes be dramatically and suddenly broken by my father's excited shout. "There's a blue on!" he would cry out from the living room. Sometimes this simply got shortened to, "A blue!" The tone was such that we all knew to drop whatever we were doing and come running to the TV where on the screen appeared that rarest of things, a black person. We knew we had to come quickly since the presence of African Americans on television at that time wasn't nearly as commonplace as it is now. Blink and you'd miss it. Certainly my father's forceful tone, which shot through the house, signaled that something of high significance was taking place. We had over time come to know what "a blue" was and the presence of one was a historic moment that you had to hustle quickly to catch or things quickly reverted to their normal place in television land; that is "Amos and Andy" (with the connivin' and jivin' Kingfish and company) or "The Beulah Show," with Beulah, the stout maid/mammy character who was touted as "the queen of the kitchen," figuring out a host of minor travails for her white employers, who somehow seemed too flummoxed to think their way out of a paper bag. 

The Beulah role, like the ones of Amos and Andy, was originally played by a white actress in blackface and then was passed from one black actress to another as the perennial and cliched hand me down role, the kind of which were for so long the bane (and sole employment) for black actors and actresses. No matter the program or film, the roles were always the same. But when my dad yelled to alert us to the presence of "a blue" we knew that something different was in the offing. This was not yet another black person caught in the insidious web of media promulgated stereotypes, this was a black person standing on stage practicing their craft--usually comedy or music--in a more dignified manner. As such they heralded a moment in American history that my father didn't want us to miss, a moment when blacks did not have to debase themselves in order to receive their due as they had for so long. There were only a few shows that these black actors, actresses and performers were likely to appear on and there was a hint of something liberally conspiratorial in their mere presence, since whatever shows they were invited to appear on were clearly going against the prevailing racial status quo. Indeed the Southern station affiliates often refused to air those shows that had an integrated lineup, segregation then being the Southern social norm. Advertisers and sponsors were also wary of the the black presence on these programs upsetting their largely white viewers as well. Variety shows such as "The Jackie Gleason Show," "the Ed Sullivan Show" and later "The Dean Martin Show" were the most likely arenas in which a dark presence would suddenly and unexpectedly appear. Likely as not it would the same handful of black performers such as comedians George Kirby and Nipsey Russell, or singers Della Reese and Ella Fitzgerald. Sammy Davis, Jr. was likely to pop up on his "Rat Pack" buddy Dean Martin's show. And if you were allowed to stay up late, you might catch Hines, Hines and Dad (a young Maurice and Gregory Hines with their dad) tap dancing on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson." 

Each of the shows hosts and producers knew that they were breaking the color line and each of the performers knew that they were breaking new ground as well. The comedians in particular made sure to leave their more risque material back in the clubs in Harlem, Philly, and Detriot, where they could let it all hang out for their black audiences. But with a clear intention to let everyone know that "we" too could sing meaningless ditties and novelty songs as well anyone, George Kirby could often be found on the Ed Sullvan Show singing "There's A Hole in the Bucket Dear Liza" of all the corn ball country foolishness. In true assimilationist spirit one could be "a blue" but one couldn't let too much blue show in ones act. This was, after all, being beamed via fuzzy black and white images into living rooms all across America. The presence of "a blue" in the television studio could easily become quite volatile as America found out when Petula Clark innocently touched Harry Belafonte's arm as they were singing a duet on "The Petula Clark Show."  Immediatey the switchboard lit up with outraged white citizen's venting about the blatant violation of the racial codes of conduct created by this benign interracial moment of vaguely insinuated intimacy. And this was in 1968, when both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were violently murdered. So my father's excitement was not without reason or context.

I thought about the presence of blacks in mainstream institutional culture again when I got an invitation recently to attend a program about diversity, or "Diversity." as it was heralded on the invitation. The invitation came from one of my favorite local institutions, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and invites the public to "...join them as they examine the evolving concept of diversity and its impact on museums, artists, and society today." Joining MCA's director Madeleine Grynsztejn in this discussion will be artists Glenn Ligon and Tania Bruguera along with Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor at Princeton University. Given MCA's success in making its programming more inclusive than a lot of other museums, I was surprised to see them still doing what I think is the earnest and presumably well meaning "diversity" song and dance act. I actually think they have--through a lot of hard work--achieved that immediate goal and should now be considering how to achieve something quite different, something I would call inclusiveness or inclusivity. It is this inclusivity that should now be the focus of their enhanced institutional efforts.

"Diversity" to me implies something akin to the blue M & M campaign from a few years ago. You'll recall that M & M (Mars Candy) created a momentary marketing buzz by announcing that they were going to add a new color to the longtime standard selection. They were going to diversify, i.e. add another color to the mix, and invited the public to suggest what the new color should be. Diversity by public consensus! The problem with this kind of diversity strategy is that while one can loudly proclaim that a new and exciting color is being added (to the M & Ms or the institutional mix) the basic taste, structure and packaging remains exactly the same. The only difference being that you can now loudly trumpet your willingness to include heretofore excluded colors. This is, of course, a kind of tokenism by yet another name and trades on the momentary (but ultimately empty and short lived) excitement of seeing a new color in still unexpected places. It would seem to me that by now we should be approaching a point where anyone should be expected to be anywhere. True inclusiveness happens when one allows the flavor and perhaps the packaging and institutional flavor to then take on a different quality in response to the expanding cast of players. MCA is in fact doing this in its exhibition and performance programming, but is laboring--as so many continue to--under the weight of a language and term that is inadequate to articulating the current challenges that lie ahead for public institutions. 

In an age in which it would be superfluous to say that "diversity" has been achieved in the White House, given Barack Obama's position as the titular head of that institution, it's time to turn away from "diversity" as an operative objective and turn instead towards the more meaningful and substantial goal of making institutional spaces ever more inclusive, in the case of museums, to artists and audiences alike. One way to accomplish this is to consider how in fact the institution's identity can be meaningfully transformed and expanded conceptually by this enhanced inclusiveness. Inclusivity implies a desire to actually change through institutional expansion, while diversity implies that those being brought in have to simply fit into the normative and dominant paradigms.

One final note on the upcoming MCA program (which is taking place on September 9th). I always tend to take note of who is not present and accounted for when these kinds of programs take place, since that absence to me speaks louder than any words. Missing from this program are probably some of the only voices who really matter, the ones whose role it is to shape the institutional agenda and experience. In that regard I'd love to see a few of MCA's curators and trustees hold forth on their views about "diversity" or inclusiveness, since they actually have the very real power to enact this programmatically, not two artists and an academic with no substantial affiliation with the institution. I know a number of theses trustees and curators well, and would certainly look forward to hearing their take on this in a public forum, as they are indeed quite an engaged and progressive lot. Now that would be one conversation I really wouldn't want to miss.

Photographs (from top): Comedian George Kirby, "The Beulah Show," Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, M&Ms, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

The Significance of August 28th

[Note: Today I am turning this space over to my good friend the writer and playwright Ifa Bayeza. Ifa's critically acclaimed play "The Ballad of Emmett Till" completed a successful run at the Goodman Theater here in Chicago a year ago, where it premiered. She recently received the prestigious Edgar Award (as in Edgar Allan Poe) for Best Play. Here Bayeza shares her observations about the deep significance of August 28th (today) as it relates to Emmett Till's death and more recent events that we should be cognizant of.]

August 28th: Remembrance and 

Reflection - 2008, 1963, 1955

By Ifa Bayeza

One year ago today, Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States. It was a crystal Denver evening, a twilight sky. He stood before a crowd of nearly 90,000 packed into the Denver Stadium, and in addition, before a record breaking global audience of millions. It was a groundbreaking event, the first African American Presidential nominee, a landmark full of promise. In his eloquent acceptance speech, Mr. Obama spoke often of this notion of “promise,” chronicling our nation’s progress from its revolutionary birth over two hundred thirty years ago. It was fitting that the date marked the anniversary of another pivotal American event, another day of promise.  “Forty-five years ago today,” said Mr. Obama, “[that promise] brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial to hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.” The event, of course, was the 1963 March on Washington, the “young preacher,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another anniversary is marked by this date, another pivotal American event. Fifty-four years ago, while visiting his family in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Louis Till was abducted and killed by a group of white men for the alleged offense of whistling at a white store clerk. In the desolate hours of a moonless Sunday morning, he was subjected to a ruthless torture that brought about his death shortly after dawn, August 28, 1955. Two moments of triumph and one of high tragedy ... Perhaps it is serendipity that these three events share the same date; however, their impact and transformational power are undeniable. 

Among African Americans, the story of Emmett Till has continued to resonate through the decades, rippling through time in wave after wave of influence. His murder and his mother's subsequent decision to have an open-casket funeral are believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement – for just cause. That same year, 1955, on an otherwise ordinary December afternoon, when Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery Alabama bus, she was thinking about Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. It was that reflection that caused Mrs. Parks to refuse to give up her seat, to refuse on that day to acquiesce to Jim Crow segregation. The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott gave Martin Luther King, Jr., his first national platform. 

A few years later, Sunflower County, Mississippi native Fannie Lou Hamer, upon seeing the brother of J.W. Milam, one of Emmett’s confessed murderers, among the sheriff’s deputies confronting her when she attempted to register to vote, decided that day that she would go to jail, rather than submit. She committed her life to activism, no matter the cost. The decision took her all the way to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. This forty-four year old sharecropper’s public plea before the party’s Credential Committee brought the all-white Dixiecrat stranglehold of the Democratic Party to an end, thus paving the way for Mr. Obama’s ascension nearly fifty years later. Muhammad Ali, who is the same age as Emmett would have been, derailed a train in a teenage act of protest upon hearing of Emmett's murder. With the maturing of his consciousness, Ali became a symbol of black excellence and power, worldwide. Like him, current NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, civil rights scholar Cleveland Sellers and many other activists who came of age in that time, credit the Till case with the beginning of their political awakening. Emmett was the first spark of consciousness for black youth across the country and he became a symbol of the youth-centered character of the Movement from thenceforth.

The event bore other emblems of the coming Civil Rights Movement. The spontaneous outpouring of grief of the 50,000 plus mourners who lined the streets of Chicago for the viewing of Emmett’s body foreshadowed the mass, non-violent protest gathering that would be the hallmark of the Movement. As President Obama noted in his speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, when Emmett Till’s uncle Mose Wright summoned “the courage to testify against the men who killed his nephew,” Wright’s dramatic open court challenge to Jim Crow was a harbinger of the scores of civil rights trials to come. The work of journalists across the color line during the court proceedings set the blueprint for how Civil Rights would be covered and for the interracial cooperation that would also be the Movement’s signature. The boycott of the Milam-Bryant family stores, driving the family of Emmett's killers out of business, predated the Montgomery bus boycott by nearly a year.

Then we come to a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, eight years to the day after Emmett’s death. When Dr. King spoke about dreams deferred, he was perhaps referencing the lost promise of Emmett Till, the first child soldier casualty of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The unwitting hero, in his life, in his death, and in his inspiration, propelled us all.

The profound sense of loss and the impassioned commitment that Emmett Till inspired in my generation is matched by the profound sense of hope that President Obama has inspired in this generation. Just as we all became Emmett, a whole generation of youth today can imagine becoming President.

 So when I think of August 28th, that bright white sunlight on the DC Mall and that glorious twilight evening in Denver, I also remember the dark and perilous night when a young boy on the threshold of manhood walked alone, and how his journey changed the course of our nation. From desperation to inspiration, from tragedy and triumph, this date in history will for many reasons be a day to remember and honor -- always. We should celebrate, but let us not forget the great cost and sacrifice of others, delivering such possibility and promise to us. And let us not squander the moment, but as our forty-fourth president has suggested, “seize our future, each and every day.”

Ifa Bayeza is the recipient of a Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Center Fellowship and the 2009 Edgar Award for her play, "The Ballad of Emmett Till," which received its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in May 2008.

Photographs (from top): Barack Obama at Democratic Convention, 2008; Emmett Till, in life and in death; crowds at Emmett Till's funeral; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses crowds at the March on Washington, 1963)

The Invisible East Village

Where the Past Meets the Present

I was in New York recently, the East Village actually, and from my usual perch at BBar on East 4th Street and the Bowery found myself reflecting on the rapid pace of change in that neighborhood. I had worked on St. Marks Place for awhile and spent a lot of free time there as well starting in high school. I discovered Indian food there on East 6th Street and became an eternal convert. I had come to know the neighborhood well and it's still my first--sometimes only--stop when I am back in New York. Whenever I'm there the rapid changes taking place remind me of the place that the East Village used to be, before the luxury hotels, condominiums, expensive boutiques, Whole Foods on Houston Street and homogeneous looking young (white) people everywhere. It was a much more diverse and dynamic neighborhood then.

Every place is simultaneously the memory of the place that was overlaid with the place that currently is. It is this layering of experience and place--so common in a rapidly changing city like New York--that gives the place its frisson and energy as the old is constantly being supplanted by the new. For those who know and appreciate those histories, the ambivalence of the neighborhood's current habitues can be a difficult pill to swallow. I think I first ventured to the East Village from Queens, NY where I grew up when my brother and I went to the Fillmore East, the New York branch of Fillmore West, located in San Francisco. Started by music impressario and promoter Bill Graham the Fillmore was the site of numerous seminal concerts in the late 60s through 1971, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Miles Davis and others too numerous to list. We saw the Allman Brothers band there...when Duane Allman was still very much alive, Blood Sweat and Tears and others I can't even remember. The Fillmore site is now a bank and few of the current East Village residents know that it once housed the concert hall that helped to define American popular music and culture. For my brother and I it was our first serious exposure to live music, though we had also been to the Apollo Theater by that time, having first been taken there by our mother to see a show that included the Cannonball Adderly Quintet, the singer Nancy Wilson and comedian Flip Wilson...all on the same bill! We were of course too young to grasp the audacity of such a star studded lineup performing several nights a week.

Whenever I pass the site of the former Binibon Restaurant on the corner of Second Avenue and East Sixth Street I think about the odd confluence of circumstances and lives that can have permanent and devastating effects and forever alter the shape of ones life. The location will forever be synonymous with good intentions gone horribly wrong. The tragic story of the Binibon features the late writer Norman Mailer. Jack Henry Abbott was a longtime career criminal who in 1978 had ended up in yet another federal penitentiary, this one in Marion, IL. He had entered the penal system at age 12 and continued to be locked up on charges as varied as breaking and entering and fatally stabbing a fellow inmate. Noticing in his readings in prison that the writer Norman Mailer was doing research on the killer Gary Gilmore as part of the background work for his novel Executioner's Song, Abbott began corresponding with Mailer in 1978. Impressed with the literary quality of Abbott's lengthy letters, Mailer alerted friends in the publishing industry and secured a book contract for the convict, complete with a $12,500 advance. Though his murder of the inmate had earned him an even lengthier sentence than he was originally serving, Abbott sought parole, and with the sponsorship of Mailer received it in 1981 just as his book was due to be published. Mailer and the publisher had strategically placed excerpts from the book in various journals, making Abbot something of a rising literary star. Voila...redemption! Not quite. Abbott's book In The Belly of the Beast--complete with an introduction by Mailer--was released one day after his tragic encounter with Richard Adan, a waiter and aspiring actor who was due to be married that week and who worked at the Binibon, a resturant owned by his father-in-law to be. 

The tragic story unfolds as such: Upon securing parole in 1981 Abbott was assigned to a halfway house on E. 3rd Street. He began making the media rounds, appearing on "Good Morning America" and being hailed as a convict literati. On the morning of July 17th, just a few weeks after his parole, he was in the Binibon with two women companions for breakfast. At some point he asked the waiter (Adan) if he could use the restroom, which unfortunately was for employees only as Adan informed him. Abbott didn't take too kindly to this answer and got into a verbal altercation with Adan, who asked him to "take it outside." Both men stepped outside whereupon Abbott, in true prison justice fashion, proceeded to stab Adan to death, leaving him to die on the sidewalk outside. Unaware of his crime, the New York Times published a rave review of his book in the following day's paper. Adan's widow successfully sued Abbott, however, and it was she who received the millions that the book went on to reap. Abbott, returned to prison after briefly being on the lam, eventually hanged himself. The Binibon is now the site of an upscale Thai restaurant called Kurve, but it will forever remain to me the site of an almost Shakespearean drama; a senseless killing and a sadly misplaced desire to redeem and valorize one human being which then resulted in ending one young man's life and future.

For about a year and a half  in the early 1980s I worked on St. Marks place in a photo lab called St. Marks Photo/Graphics. It was actually two separate businesses run by the same guy and his partner, with the graphics and stat shop being the other half of the business. They were located side by side. While I toiled away in the basement black and white lab developing endless rolls of film and cranking out endless prints (I was the one man lab staff), Sur Rodney Sur toiled next door making photo stats and film positives, while also helping to manage the place the rest of the time. As for me, I was hidden from daylight during my hours in the lab other than lunch time, which is when I grabbed a quick bite and then spent the better part of the hour making pictures. My boss, a guy from Thailand with a conspicuously long pinky fingernail was running a cash business and it seems no matter how many hours I toiled and inhaled chemicals the weeks take was always "a little short" and so he couldn't pay me what he had promised. Well, better luck next week I guess (wink wink)! I had taken the job only after having recently gotten married. When my newly minted father-in-law asked me what I did for a living, I told him I freelanced. His response was, "Oh, you mean you work when you want to!" A little bit more of that and I was down in the basement lab doing "real" work, coming home smelly and exhausted like other working stiffs. I had inherited the job from my friend Stephen Critchlow, a former School of Visual Arts classmate who had recently started doing a lot of work for "The Village Voice" and "City Sun" newspapers. He had warned me about the "coming up short" scam, so I wasn't too surprised when it went down. It was a cash business after all and $150 cash per week was a lot better than the peripatetic freelance life at that point, especially considering that I was living in a eight room floor through in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn that only cost $175 per month to rent. I didn't know then that the landlord was going broke at those rates, and that the building would eventually be seized by the city for unpaid back taxes. But we eventually ended up buying the building from the city in one of the low cost housing conversion programs that then existed. It wasn't a bad life at all. Going by to take a look now I see an awning has been added to the site of my former job and it is occupied by a Tibetan shop and a tattoo parlor. 

I run into Sur Rodney Sur every now and then when I am in New York. He and Gracie Mansion opened Gracie Mansion Gallery a couple of doors down from where we worked and the two of them helped usher in the East Village art and gallery scene in the 1980s. He's been with his partner Geoff Hendricks now for a number of years. Geoff, of course, is one of the original Fluxus artists and one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. I taught with him at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts for three years before moving to Chicago. I have a beautiful and haunting picture of Sur made by Gary Schneider that I look at everyday and it too reminds me of that moment in the eighties when we were schlepping stats and prints and planning the future. And I can still hear my boss shouting down to the basement through the trap door, "Dawoud, Ms. Sandrisser is here! Do you have those fifty 5x7s!?"

I used to think that this location on St. Marks Place and Third Avenue across the street from where I worked was the former site of the jazz club Slugs. Now I'm not so sure, it might actually be the location of the former Five Spot. In addition to being the site of some of the most legendary performances in jazz music, Slugs will always be for me the place where trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and killed in February 1972. The night Morgan was shot I happened to be playing in another jazz club--a bar actually--in Hollis, Queens with my friend Phil Clark, a trumpet player and student of Morgan's. I was a student of Lee's drummer Freddie Waits at the time and so we both had a connection to the man. There was a jazz organist in Queens by the name of C.C. Williams who played a mean Hammond B3 organ in a traditional organ trio format. Being a fan of the ultimate B3 player Jimmy Smith I thought it would be cool to play with Williams, which was as close as I was likely to get to playing with Jimmy Smith at any rate. Williams's son Jafa was his usual drummer, but this night the drummer's chair was mine.

So there I was ensconced behind my drum set swinging away with the Hammond B3 organ and its giant Leslie speaker blasting in my ears while Phil did his best imitation of Lee Morgan and early Miles Davis. Halfway through the second set a phone call came in at the bar and everything went quiet. We knew it wasn't good whatever it was. And it wasn't, Lee Morgan had been shot and killed. It seems that Lee, a brilliant but notoriously philandering man, had one of his girlfriends at Slugs with him that night. We found later that Lee's wife Helen had paid him a visit at the club, confronting him about the girlfriend and demanding that he pay some attention to her. Lee uttered some epithet to Helen, who then proceeded to pull out a gun and shoot him where he sat, straight through the heart. Lee died instantly. He was only 33 years old. When we got the call in Queens all of us, especially Phil were totally broken up. After putting his hand through a mirror in the club's bathroom and cutting his hand--effectively ending our performance that night--Phil and I walked home in the snow, telling tales of Lee Morgan and recalling the great man's music. 

Though the East Village is indeed a very different place now, all of this history sits heavily  in the air for me when I'm there, hanging like an ever present spirit over the increasingly antiseptic neighborhood, continually shaping my sense of just where I am. Indeed the past for me continues to shape the deeper meaning of the present.

Photographs (from top): At BBar, 4th Street and Bowery; former site of the Fillmore East; former site of Binibon; former site of St. Marks Photo/Graphics; former site of Slugs (or the Five Spot)

Communal Spaces for A Diverse Populace

Where People Go to Be Themselves in Public

Cities are composed of diverse communities. The makeup of these communities is determined by everything from ethnicity, culture, economics, patterns of migration and more than a little bit of overt and covert social engineering. As much as social engineering (often under the guise of social planning) can create communities it can just as easily destroy them. The creation of Lincoln Center was, of course, the result of the decimation of the community that once stood on its site. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which cut a wide and gaping wound through several Bronx communities created a destabilization of huge swaths of  that borough that persists to this day. Not surprising since the multi-lane highway literally cut through what had once been a physically joined neighborhood. Through the aggressive use of the eminent domain laws (which allows for governmental seizure of privately held property for public use) the late city planner Robert Moses was able to exert his will (and love of the automobile and highways) on the city. This is not news of course, and much has been written about Moses, who in spite of holding no publicly elected office, was allowed to simultaneously build and pillage throughout New York. 

In Chicago the late mayor Richard Daley was an almost single handed purveyor of the city's social engineering cum urban planning during his long reign. Under his watch public housing rose in isolated areas of the city, clustered far from the usual amenities and support services, beginning the process of vertically warehousing (and segregating) large numbers of largely black Chicagoans. Like many cities Chicago has numerous ethnic neighborhoods, including those comprised of largely Mexican, Greek, Italian, Polish, Ukranian, Chinese and numerous other groups. Unlike many major cities where the social dividing lines between these various communities are often fluid and porous,  the instances in which these communities actually intermingle are few and far between here in the Windy City, described by the Chicago Tribune as "the most segregated large city in America." In spite of this social engineering, all cities need spaces where its populace can spontaneously congregate, to join with their neighbors in moments of grief, celebration or relaxation. 

The recent death of pop star Michael Jackson brought spontaneous crowds to Union Square, Times Square and Harlem's 125th Street in New York among other spaces all across the country. And the national grief immediately following the attack on 9/11 also brought an outpouring of spontaneous assembly in parks and public spaces throughout the country as grief stricken citizens sought solace and connection. Clearly these public spaces are an integral aspect of who we are, particularly in those large urban spaces where a sense of isolation (in spite of being physically overcrowded) is more likely than in smaller tight knit communities. When they are seeking various forms of release people need to know almost instinctively, where they can go to not be alone.

This is what makes the Crown Fountain, located downtown in Millennium Park, such a singular kind of communal social space and an absolutely vital piece of public art. When the weather is warm, as it has been lately, the fountain attracts a diverse group of both Chicagoans of every conceivable stripe as well as tourists, all drawn to this location. Completed in 2004, the fountain--conceived by artist Jaume Plensa--consists of two forty foot glass brick towers encasing video LED images of the faces of nearly one thousand Chicagoans. The people populating these almost still video images come from every conceivable racial, ethnic and cultural population in Chicago. As such they directly mirror the diverse population that is drawn to the fountain itself. Surrounded by black granite and containing a shallow wading pool in between each tower the fountain attracts a bathing suit clad array of people from Chicago's various neighborhoods who seldom if ever congregate socially in this segregated city. They are joined by hordes of tourists from around the country and the globe. All fountains must have spouting water of course, and this one does too, with the cooling water periodically spouting from the mouths of the subjects, drawing screaming children to its cascading coolness. 

Crown Fountain raises the bar for public art in an almost singular way. Most public art consists of objects sited within a particular space or environment for public contemplation. The degree to which the public actually interacts with this work is largely cerebral. Jaume Plensa's fountain poses a more visceral approach to public art, blurring the line between the object and the public. That a broad cross section of people rich and poor, resident and visitor can all claim ownership of it suggests what public art can be at its best. Considering those battles in the past in which various publics took offense at some of the public art that suddenly sprouted in their midst, Crown Fountain suggests that forward looking art can indeed be broadly embraced by a diverse and appreciative public of all stripes. As such it becomes a comforting place, a kind of granite beach to which people are attracted and allowed to be themselves freely in the company of others. One can't ask more of public art than that.

(Photographs: Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain; Dearborn Homes public housing; crowd gathered at the Apollo celebrating Michael Jackson; Crown Fountain)

Landscape and Memory

Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago. Gohlke had been one of my professors in grad school as a visiting faculty in Yale's photo program years ago, and I had fond memories of the man as well as a long standing interest in his work, which is considered seminal in the contemporary landscape tradition, having been included in the groundbreaking "New Topographics" exhibition in 1975. So after a bit of back and forth in setting a date, I had finally been able to arrange for him to come and meet with our students and to give a public lecture. Self interest was also involved, as I wanted to revisit his work in his presence and to have the opportunity to ask him some questions that I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him all those years ago. The landscape, quite frankly, was never a favored genre of mine, which may have accounted for my failure to engage him more deeply when I was in his midst as a student. But having continued to follow his work closely since then, I was by now more steeped in his work, though no more steeped in the genre itself than I had ever been. His visit--and events since--have nudged me ever more forcefully into a deeper consideration of the idea and tradition of the landscape.

Gohlke arrived at Columbia lugging a portfolio of large and beautifully printed black and white photographs that he shared with the Thursday class of students. Among the works he had brought along were photographs from a project that he and Joel Sternfeld had been commissioned to do by Queens College in 2003 and 2004 for installation in the college's new Powdermaker Hall. Working in tandem and alone, the two had gone out into the borough to respond photographically to what they saw, seeking to set down their own subjective responses--as outsiders--to the diverse communities that make up this populous area. There are more languages spoken in this borough than in any other American city, and the diversity of its inhabitants has increased tenfold from when I lived there. I was born and raised in Queeens, and spent a good part of my life traversing the borough by school bus, going up and down Hillside Avenue and the steep hill leading away from it, to first elementary then junior high, high school and then Queensborough Community College. I had also drifted far and wide by foot, bike, bus, train, and the back seat of my parent's car in the course of a wide range of activities. My Aunt Louise lived right next door to us in Jamaica, Queens and my Aunt Delcie and Uncle Ted lived in Corona-East Elmhurst, a half hour drive or so on the Van Wyck and Grand Central Expressways. Between visiting them and engaging in a host of everyday activities over many years of growing up, I had come to know Queens in the way that one only comes to know the place that they are truly from. Viewing Gohlke's photographs reminded me of that fact. Speaking recently with the manager of Columbia College's bookstore, who it turned out was also from Jamaica, I mentioned the illuminated brown painted Santa Claus figure that annually appeared above the doorway to the singer James Brown's house every Christmas season. It's a memory that could only elicit deep laughs from someone who knows that neighborhood and Brown's former house on Linden Boulevard intimately. 

As Gohlke showed the students these photographs, my own memories about the place where I grew up were continually jogged. Here a picture of a street with a sign for the Q65 bus visible in the myriad details. There a photograph of a driveway, much like the driveway connecting our house to my aunt's. Looking at the Q65 bus stop picture, I told Gohlke I knew almost the whole route that the bus traversed along Parsons Boulvard from the then almost exclusively white neighborhood of Hillcrest where I seldom ventured to its descent down the hill to Hillside Avenue and on to Jamaica and Shoutheast Queens. The stop on Parsons Boulverad was adjacent to the E and F subway stop where we often waited to pick up my aunt when she came from work. We often met my dad here too, waiting in the car with my mother until he came up from out of the subway. It passes what used to be the Gertz Department store as it continues down New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard, eventually passing the Rochdale Village  apartments where my brother Ken moved when he left home for the first time upon getting married. My friend Gerry--who passed his brother's unused enlarger and darkroom equipment on to me so I could set up my first darkroom--eventually lived there too, with his wife and children. Gohlke's photograph of the driveway also provoked a rush of memories, inviting me into a space so eerily familiar as to recall the feeling of that narrow drive leading to the backyards of our homes which also provided a bridge between our house and my aunt's, where the back door was always left unlocked. My brother and I staged many a cookie raid through that back door.

Seeing Gohlke's photographs also reminded me of an aborted project I had attempted many years ago, the only proposed project that I never completed. In the mid 1980s, as part of a 

fellowship awarded by the New York State Council on the Arts, I had planned to make a group of pictures in the Queens neighborhoods where I had grown up. Starting in South Jamaica at 115th Road and Sutphin Boulevard then moving 

to 119th Avenue and 168th Street and finally to Hollis/Queens Village on 208th Street off of Hollis Avenue, I wanted to photographically revisit the places where I had been shaped. Looking at old family photographs also prompted this desire to return for a "second" look. What I experienced instead, upon visiting the St. Albans neighborhood and my old block there,  was a rush of conflicting emotions and motivations that led me to not make a single photograph. Looking for the past, as it were, and confronted by an entirely unfamiliar present, I couldn't exactly figure out a way to reconcile the two, either emotionally or visually. Of course everything looked smaller than I remembered...it always does. And in spite of the address on the house being the same as the address of the house I had once lived in--168-26 119th Avenue--nothing else about the house looked or felt remotely familiar. How do you photograph a memory I wondered. I was still wondering as I walked to the bus stop to get to the subway and then out to Brooklyn and home. Maybe, as they say, you can't go home again. And yet, through the photographs of an outsider--Frank Gohlke--I had momentarily gone back home.

This encounter with Gohlke's Queens pictures led me that evening to Google Maps, where I typed in my old address and then went to "Street View." Sure enough, there it was: my old home looking even less familiar than when I had ventured out to Queens over twenty years ago hoping to photograph it. With Google's 3D Stret View I then preceded to drift through the neighborhood, looking for my aunt's home next door (still one of the most attractive houses on the block) and then to the homes of various friends and neighbors...all still there, though recognizable only by certain details held in memory. The flagpole is still in front of the Outlaw's house, as it had been since the early 1960s or earlier. My brother and I would wait at their house to be picked up by my mother after school. It was there one afternoon that we learned from a distraught Mrs. Outlaw that President Kennedy had been shot and killed earlier that day. Other places had either disappeared or been transformed into unrecognizable places: the corner candystore was gone, a barbershop now stood where Curt's Bakery--home of the finest sweet potato pies--had once stood. I continued this cyber walk, roaming freely throughout the neighborhood as memory after memory was shaken freee. Here again in this very different but highly mediated arena I was having a visceral experience very unlike what I had experienced in actually being there on the block. 

Oscar Palacio's American History Lesson

With Gohlke and Google Map's Street View providing food for thought about two mediated ways into the experience of landscape and memory, I left Chicago that weekend to meet up with friends in Massachusetts. One, Oscar Palacio, was exhibiting photographs  in an exhibition at Boston's new FP3 Gallery titled Re-represented. The large scale color photographs from his larger project History Re-visited depict places in the American landscape where significant history has occurred or is invoked. This Colombian born photographer is in the midst of a provocative project that casts a questioning and critical eye on American history, and questions how this history is remembered...or not. What is provocative about the project, among other things, is the degree to which memory functions as the critical perceptual device or trigger, since in a number of cases the photographs are rather ambiguous as far as exactly what they describe and in the absence of text or title could easily be anywhere. His photograph "Gettysburg Gate" could well be any weathered wooden fence and posts in the outback, but for the significance of that historical place.

Which is to say that the meaning embedded within the photographs is a received and subjective one, and its appearance is often at odds with the heroic "official" version of history that was enacted or memorialized there. Palacio approaches these sites with an eye that is in equal measure caustic, restrained and unflinching. Much the way that Robert Frank appeared on the American shores from Switzerland turning a jaundiced eye on the American social landscape, so is Palacio making clear the ambivalence and quiet horror at the root of so much of American history. From the locale of the infamous Salem "witch" hunts to the mangy gated Plymouth Rock, he locates the dissonances and unsightly runs in the fabric of American history. In doing so he also questions photography's ability to adequately deconstruct that history or point the way to an affirmative resolution of it. 

Landscapes and the Mediated View

Oscar's photographs were fresh in my mind as we set off  early the next morning with friends to go to North Adams to visit MassMoCA and the exhibitions there, particularly the massive Sol LeWitt wall drawing projects which are installed over three floors in one of MassMoCA's newly refurbished buildings. Driving through the landscape of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts provided wonderful and fresh food for thought regarding the landscape. As we traversed the winding roads leading to North Adams, evidence of the recent harsh ice storms were apparent from the many sharply bent trunks and snapped branches of small trees and growth along the way. Periodically one comes to one of the expansive and majestic vistas of this mountainous region and catches a glimpse of what much of America must have looked like at its dawn. It's hard to miss these locations of course, since they are usually encountered through the clearing of a viewing platform upon which have been mounted at least two large and unsightly mechanical binoculars, which for a quarter allow you to peer through the lens at the then shaped and mediated experience otherwise unfolding directly in front of you. I've never quite understood the need for these devices at these locations, since the drama lies in the vastness of the landscape laid out before you, and it is the physical sensation of standing alone facing this great expansiveness that seems to be central to the very experience. The binocular visually "bites off" only a small piece of this grandeur, putting a device in between you and the experience. It strikes me as somewhat akin to the tourists who in their travels spend more time picturing the experience than actually experiencing it physically and viscerally. You may not touch, feel or remember much, but you'll remember and have the photographs. And so it is as I contemplate this past week in the presence of so many images that seek to help us remember where "we" have been and to provide a sense of connectedness to the world through optical and mechanical--if not physical-- means.

[For an earlier post about Gohlke, my grad school memories of him and his traveling survey exhibition see "A Brief East Coast Sojourn" in Older Posts]

Guggenheim Fellowship Congrats

The recent fellowship announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation brought the good news that fellow Chicagoans Brian Ulrich (left) and Anna Shteynshleyger were awarded Fellowships in Photography. Both are adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago, where Ulrich graduated from the MFA photography program some four years ago. Ulrich has been hard at work on a project examining consumerism in America in all of its varied states, and has been creating a whirlwind of professional activity the past few years, with shows at Rhona Hoffman, Robert  Koch and Julie Saul Galleries among others and attendant interest from a range of museums as well. Shteynshleyger, a graduate of Yale's MFA photography program,  has been flying lower on the radar, but making no less interesting work photographing in Siberia examining the sites of Russian labor camps under the former Communist regime and continuing her more recent project City of Destiny." She's soloed previously at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in a 12X12 exhibition of her work and at New York's Motti Hasson Gallery. A show of her work is slated for the Renaissance Society here in Chicago early next year. Both photographers reaffirm the vibrancy of photographic practice here in the Windy City and make clear the Guggenheim Foundation's alertness to work of significance and depth wherever it may be found.

Dennis Gallagher - In Memoriam

A friend of mine, the sculptor Dennis Gallagher, passed away last Monday after complications from a sudden illness. The husband of Trish Bransten, father of Rena and Sam, and son-in law of Rena Bransten, Dennis was a gregarious and gifted man with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. His large scale abstract ceramic sculptors had garnered recognition for him over the years with many museum and gallery shows. I last sat with him over drinks in O'Reilly's Bar in his Russian Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, one of those notorious watering holes where numerous stories (and more) have surely passed across the bar. A reunion with Dennis and the rest of the Gallagher-Bransten clan was something I always looked forward to. It's been a bit too long since my last stay in San Francisco. The lights of that wonderful city will shine a little less brightly and defiantly in Dennis' absence. He made the corner of the city wherever he stood, lived and worked a much brighter and interesting place.

Photographs (from top): Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Joel Sternfeld, Queens, NY 2003; Oscar Palacio, "Gettysburg Gate," 2008; Photograph by Scott Speck; Brian Ulrich photograph by Dawoud Bey; Dennis Gallagher photograph by Scott Stohler

The Twenty-first Century Museum

When Artists Rock the [Art] House

I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons. I had worked with Jackie Terrassa, MCA's recently appointed Assistant Director of Public Programs, when she was the education head at the Smart Museum of Art a few years back, and had actually known her before that through her work in Columbia College Chicago's Photography Department. So when she invited me to 

give a presentation at MCA I readily accepted, though I wasn't exactly sure what the exact context was. I did know that Jackie was familiar with the project based work I have done at various museums since the early 1990s, and this work was consistent with her own interest in museum education and the museum as an inclusive and dialogical space of participation. I also knew that I have definite ideas about how institutions like MCA can use the current moment of economic and social turmoil as a moment of opportunity, a moment to embrace an expanded paradigm of what and how a museum can exist as a part of the socio-cultural fabric of society. In the past I have only done these kinds of presentations at museums where I am already slated to do a project or, at the least where the institution is consideration extending an invitation to me to do a project and wants to do a presentational "meet and greet" with the staff before committing. I didn't know exactly what MCA or Jackie was thinking, but I was game, having a work in the museum's collection which has been shown there on previous occasions, and being a fairly regular attendee, not to mention perpetual member. Indeed MCA is one of the few museums, through its ongoing 12X12 exhibition program of emerging Chicago artists, to have shown itself to be genuinely responsive to artists in its immediate orbit while also maintaining a meaningful diversity in its other programming as well. It's given the institution an even greater vibrancy while affirming its commitment to talent at its own doorsteps. The question of how to maintain national and global relevance and stature while being responsive to one's local community is one that most museums have simply shied away from entirely, or responded to in a token way when they have responded at all.

My private presentation was preceded by two public events at the museum that took place in the immediately preceding weeks that I thought signaled a significant shift for the museum; both of these were fostered by Theaster Gates, a dynamic young artist from Chicago's South Side, who is himself devising an evolving art practice that directly engages public ritual and social structures, seeking to use his practice to satisfy both his own expansive sensibilities, but also his need to bring together diverse social communities to bridge prevailing social structures. To that end Gates created a series of performances and events in venues across Chicago that included Shine King, a far west side shoeshine stand, the MCA, Little Black Pearl, an arts center in the Kenwood-Hyde Park neighborhood, and Sonotheque,  a club on the north side. At the opening performance in his 12X12 installation Temple Exercises (with his ever evolving cast of cohorts The Black Monks of Mississippi) at MCA Gates--much to the surprise of the museum I'm sure--brought his whole merry overflowing band of enthusiasts to the museum for his performance. Spilling out of the small 12X12 gallery space and out in the MCA lobby, and winding its way up the grand stairway, the capacity audience was a grand celebration of the kind of diverse crowd one would hope to find populating a contemporary institution but all too often don't.

Along with his scatter site performances and events, Gates facilitated a dialogue with Project Row Houses' Rick Lowe and Kyong Park, founder of New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture. Both Lowe and Park have also devised institutions and practices that are broadly and socially engaging, so their presence at MCA during Gates' exhibition project suggested a interesting confluence of sensibilities. This program too was well attended, suggesting a real desire for these kinds of programs, which the museum again must have noted. So I was looking forward to following up on this with my presentation for the education committee, giving my own take on the museum as an active social and aesthetic space. 

I had also been thinking about a few other recent projects that tilted the museum experience in a provocatively engaging way, such as Vik Muniz's recent curatorial project at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "Rebus." The show, which garnered much critical and public praise--friends called it a "must see" show--was the result of handing over the curatorial reins to an artist, who then brought a keen and sometimes humorous sensibility to bear on the selection and arrangement of a wide range of fine and design objects from the museum's collection, mixing mediums along with the high/low function of the objects in a way that created an entirely new and out of the box context for considering the work. This is, in fact, the ninth in MoMA's artists curated projects, "Artists' Choice."  The exhibition was revealing and refreshing for what it said about how a new and meaningful museum experience could be fostered by being willing to reconsider the artist's role, allowing their "work" as such to be the shaping of an exhibition. Muniz's unconventional selection and presentation, with its own quizzically challenging logic, revealed a conceptually refreshing approach to curatorial practice that suggest one way that museums can shake things up by loosening the conventional reins and seeing what results. It was also a way to create a very different kind of conversation around the collection and around the presumed role of an artist. 

As I can hear my more conservative curator friends starting to huff and puff quietly, there is one caveat I'll offer here: not all artists--even interesting ones--make interesting curators. But there have been enough effective ones to give one pause as to what other such opportunities would reveal. (Artist Mickalene Thomas' recent curated exhibition at Collette Blanchard Gallery, "The Brand New Heavies," suggests a similar sense of an astute artist-curator at work, albeit within a commercial gallery context, and provides strong evidence that artists are not only good at presenting their own work. Kara Walker's "After the Deluge" at the Met in 2006 was yet another provocative and successful artist curatorial project.)

For the most part the kinds of conversations that take place within the museum are private ones: the viewer engages with the objects and has a private, often unspoken response to them, and then moves on to other objects, and so on. The transformative experience as such is one which only the individual is privileged to, and there are few (if any) ways for that response to then enter into the actual experiential framework of the museum. If there were such an opportunity for response, the museum space could become a more conversational one. One of the ways I think museums can transforms themselves into more dynamic spaces is to allow for a space where this usually private conversation can somehow become a public one, one which is then embraced and folded into the fabric of the institution. This conversation need not be restricted solely to artists, and can--with a degree of programmatic finesse--be extended to a number of different constituencies. Muniz's engagement with the collection and the resultant exhibition was an example of this kind of conversation, one in which an artists' individual response was shaped into an exhibition. Of course, within the hierarchical environment of most museums, there exists a rather fixed notion of just who is allowed to shape the viewing experience.

The role of curator has long been defined as the kind of position that comes attached to a whole set of assumptions about professional expertise and training, with this training then being subjectively  deployed in the shaping of the experience and perception of the work within the museum going experience. As such, curators have a significant hand in also shaping the larger art historical experience, since museums do make decisions about which works of a given historical moment will be elevated and perhaps canonized by their very display. And while this is certainly one very legitimate way to think about the scholarship and display of art objects within a museum, when assigned instead to an artist or--in the case of my recent project in Baltimore at the Walters Art Museum, assigned to twelve high school age students working with an artist--the results can often bring an even more expansive and certainly unanticipated reading and response to those same objects. Muniz's brilliant and irreverent Rebus at MoMA revealed a selection and arrangements of objects that crossed all boundaries of mediums, notions of high and low, and historical period that is hard to imagine anyone trained in the specificities of any of those single areas doing. My own project at the Walters uncovered works in the collection that were exhibited for the very first time, and in a way that also exploded conservative historical museum notions about how such objects should be displayed and thus experienced. Both projects suggest that artworks need not be solely framed by notions connoisseurship to be with meaningfully engaged with.

One of the things I have noticed about institutions that purport to want to make systemic changes in their programming is that by temperament, training and tradition, a lot of individuals at those institutions are often not  capable of out of the box thinking; they might want to, but they just don't know how, and their academic and institutional on the job training certainly didn't prepare them for this. For an institution to do so requires the kind of power sharing that goes against the grain of the aura of institutional authoritative power. But the results--my collaborative curatorial project in Baltimore received a sustained and positive critical response unlike anything the museum had experienced recently, the Vik Muniz show at MoMA received laudatory press and public response, and Theaster Gates' performance and installation at MCA and Little Black Pearl revealed a largely untapped audience--shows that when museums do open themselves up to new paradigms it's a win-win situation for everyone. What is needed now is for even more institutions to step up to the plate and be part of the inclusive conversation that defines the moment that we are in. The current economic and social crisis that we are experiencing should make it clear that we are indeed interconnected in profound ways, and that we urgently need to be thinking out of the box and having a whole new set of conversations in response to this degree of interdependence. That goes for institutions, and that goes for us as individuals as well. Our collective growth and survival depends on it.

A Museum Quality Cafe - Tweet

I'm probably the last person in Chicago to eat there, so I probably shouldn't even let on, and act like I've been in on the deal all along, but I finally got up to Michelle Fire's restaurant Tweet, located in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood on North Sheridan Road. I'd heard that on Sunday the lines and the wait to get in were completely off the chain, so on Saturday morning with my hungry son and nephew in tow we found our way to what various friends and reviewers  had  described as "the absolute best brunch spot in Chicago." I'd also heard that Fire had an impressive collection of photographs displayed on the restaurant's walls. Having recently met her when she acquired one of my prints of president Barack Obama, I had made it a point to pay her a visit. It turned out to be well worth the trip from Hyde Park and then some. The food was as impressive as I'd heard, with a wonderfully dizzying array of freshly made selections (organic ingredients all), and the photographs on display--salon style--are an absolute treat. It doesn't get much better than having a museum quality viewing experience while downing fabulous food. Among other pictures I recognized on the walls (both in Tweet and the adjacent Fire owned bar Big Chicks) were those by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus and Bob Thall along with works by Tony Fitzpatrick and the late Ed Paschke, along with other luminaries and emerging talent, hanging side by side. My Barack Obama print gazes down from on high at the front entrance. Can't say I've ever seen anything quite like this place in all my years in New York! Michelle Fire is truly a Chicago treasure. I think I may have found a new hangout.

Photographs: (from top) Theaster Gates' "Temple Exercises" (Sarah Pooley photograph); Crowd at Gates' 12X12 "Temple Exercises" performance (courtesy MCA Chicago); Kyong Park and Rick Lowe (courtesy MCA Chicago); Vik Muniz, "Rebus" (Hiroko Masuike/New York Times); "Art Institute of Chicago 2" by Thomas Struth; Installation view, "Portraits Re/Examined: A Dawoud Bey Project"; Interior view of Tweet