National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community. I was fortunate enough to be present at one of those gatherings, a Saturday morning breakfast conversation called the Director's Vision Think Tank at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was hosted by MCA's Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn, and included various MCA board members, committee members and staff as well as artists and others from Chicago's art community. As artist Kerry James Marshall pointed out, it wasn't nearly as diverse as it might have been, but I don't think it was intended to be, given the number of other site visits Landesman had planned for his week long Chicago tour. Hopefully those were even more diverse than the MCA gathering, which seemed designed to address how that particular institution might begin to wrap a programmatic structure around the idea of creating a more dialogical relationship with the community as it relates to its own future conceptual growth, and to explore that issue with a group of its supporters. Landesman's announcement of the Endowment's new initiative Art Works would seem to provide a possible economic incentive for institutions to begin to more aggressively think through the possible reconfiguration of the various component parts of the art community and create an expanded and mutually beneficial paradigm and relationship. The Endowment admits that it is indeed following the example of the kind of work that has in fact been going on in communities across the country for some time.

The MCA conversation seemed designed to begin to grapple with the question of how a mainstream institutions can become engaged in these inclusive issues that community art centers and institutions have long been engaged in. One has a reputation for being as exclusive and elitist as the other has for being an essential part of their communities. Hyde Park Art Center, for example (where I am both on the board and the chair of the Exhibitions Committee) has a strong and explicit mandate to be both of service and accessible to its immediate community, even as HPAC seeks to bring art to that community in ways that are are unique. While the specific purpose of the gathering at MCA seemed a bit diffused--was it intended to extend beyond the institutional walls of MCA into the larger art institutional community or not?--it provided an opportunity for an urgent and ongoing conversation that quickly moves towards concrete programming. I would suggest follow up conversations take place periodically and soon, the better to keep the irons from cooling around this issue. I would certainly hope that these conversations would include those board and staff members whose deep and enthusiastic ideas and support are essential to the implementation of what could easily become yet another very interesting but rhetorical conversation.

A Neighborhood Spot
Speaking of community, I recently stopped in for lunch at Brett's Kitchen, a none to fancy luncheonette located in Chicago's River North. The place has the feel of a neighborhood spot that has been in its place forever, serving generations of area workers at breakfast and lunchtime (no dinner service). Indeed I have been having lunch at this place long before I ever moved to Chicago some twelve years ago. It's in one of Chicago's original gallery districts, so my son and I would often stop in and get our usual lunch when we were in town visiting my brother and his family. My son loved the place for its grilled cheese sandwich, and invariably ordered it with a side of fries washed down with a bottle of lemonade. I've been getting the exact same thing there for some fifteen years: a tabouli and Pyrenees cheese sandwich on multigrain bread with lettuce, avocado and tomato, washed down with an Arizona Green Tea, with the occasional home style oatmeal raisin cookie on the side. I'm sure they make other things there, but don't ask me; I honestly wouldn't know. I've never felt the need to order anything else. When I stop in now one of the owners, Lourdes, always asks about my son when she sees me, since he hasn't been there in quite awhile. She wants to know how big he is, what he's doing. Inevitably she is amazed when I tell her he's now six feet three and in college, since he couldn't even see over the counter when we first started frequenting the place, and I had to hold him up so he could place his order. I'll have to take him by for lunch soon. He may have outgrown the grilled cheese sandwich, but I don't think you ever outgrow those places where people still maintain a connection to each other. It's a reassuring feeling that gets harder to find each day with the rapid pace of change. The corner store in Hyde Park, where I used to get my daily paper and other occasional sundries is now closed and the windows forlornly papered over, awaiting a higher paying tenant once the building is upgraded, but Brett's Kitchen--thankfully--is still there in River North, tucked underneath the tracks of the Brown line "L," doing what good neighborhood establishments have always done.

Rocco Landesman photograph © Damon Winters/New York Times
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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