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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November 21st, 2012

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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.

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The Society of Photographic Education Meets in Philadelphia

The Society for Photographic Education held its national conference this past week in Philadelphia.

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Published here are the remarks I gave during my opening Keynote Address at the College Art Association Conference Convocation here in Chicago on Wednesday evening.

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The 60s and 70s Redux: All Power to the People

I could not have imagined when I was sixteen and seventeen years old selling The Black Panther newspaper on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, NY that forty years later I would finally meet the man who not only visually shaped the paper but also created the ico

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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.

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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.

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[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.

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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.

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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.

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Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago.

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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.

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Art and Youth - A Powerful Combination

One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

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University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum

That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's

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Barack Obama's historic ascendency as the 44th president of the United States certainly signal a huge paradigm shift, one that has numerous national and global implications.

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With Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's forty-fourth president a scant five days away, excitement and anticipation are building as we enter a moment of profound change and potential paradigm shifts.

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I particpated in an Artists at Work panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center three nights ago.

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I was in Nashville, TN for a couple of days last week, where I gave a lecture at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and spent time at Fisk University visiting the storied Carl Van Vechten Gallery, and viewing some of the partially restored Aaron Douglas murals on campus.

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How One Institution Has Made A Huge Difference

I received the recent issue of Contact Sheet, the publication produced by Light Work that documents its programs, resident artists, and exhibitions.

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Barack Obama's Election - The View from Chicago 

My son and I went to Grant Park on Tuesday night for the election night Barack Obama rally and victory celebration, standing for hours amongst a veritable sea of our fellow Chicagoans.

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Believe In Change

Sarah Palin (with the complicity of John McCain) is doing her best to stir the pots of racism and xenophobia in the waning days of their failing campaign.

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Young Artists Take the Lead in Making a Difference

A group of former students from California College of the Arts have gotten together to form Art for Obama, an online auction of photographs to raise campaign funds for the Obama/Biden ticket.

A Beautifully Poetic Show

I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks, but not for want of things to write about. I recently attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition that prompted this entry.

Photographing Barack

I've had the opportunity over the years to do commissioned portraits of a number of people.

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Opening Up The Curatorial Process

I've been in Baltimore, MD for the past three weeks working at the Walters Art Museum on a curatorial project with twelve Baltimore area teenagers that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum in December entitled The Portrait Re/Examined.

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The Difference Between Making It Up and Seeing It

Richard "Chip" Benson (seen above in an earlier Lee Friedlander photograph) once said something when I was a graduate student in the Photography program at Yale that has stayed with me all these years.

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Photographs of Transformation

I've been looking at the Paul Fusco photographs made on June 8, 1968 which were recently published by Aperture, and exhibited at James Danziger Gallery.

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