1. Birmingham on My Mind


    September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later
    James Baldwin
     New Orleans, 1963 
    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. As was his wont, my dad didn't talk much about that evening when they came home--I only remember him saying he did not entirely agree with Baldwin, whom he said struck him as being too strident and "arrogant"--but he did make it a point to leave the book sitting out where I could "find" it. Entitled The Movement: Documentary of A Struggle for Equality, it was a collection of photographs depicting the Civil Rights Movement at a moment when the movement was indeed still a vivid and very present reality. Containing photographs by a number of photographers, including Danny Lyons, Charles Moore, and others, its text had been authored by the African American playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry. The book was published by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SNCC), and contained Hansberry's short but evocative texts alongside the photographs. The photographs themselves ranged from scenes of demonstrations, sit-ins, along with photographs of everyday black life in America at that moment..which is to say that some of the pictures were quite gruesome.

    16th Street Baptist Church on the
    morning of the bombing
    Along with photographs of menacing white racists taunting civil rights marchers there were other pictures that more starkly visualized the often  horrific results of  the ongoing attempts of America's black citizens to lift themselves out of a state of enforced apartheid, as well as the violence that befell them and their non-black sympathizers who dared to resist. The pictures came at me in a rush. While I had indeed begun to experience the sting of racism as a black student bussed into previously white schools as part of the first wave of Northern school integration, I had never experienced anything like the raw, naked racist violence that these pictures described. Fire hoses, dog, and tear gas set loose on black citizens, those same citizens publicly stalked and beaten with baseball bats, and set upon by white mobs for daring to sit at a lunch counter or ride a Greyhound bus. Pictures made at lynchings, in which the white participants posed as if at a family picnic while a black body swung from a tree, or smoldered in the embers after being burnt to death.


    Sarah Collins in the hospital
    after the bombing
    Photograph by Frank Dandridge
    By the time The Movement had appeared in print, blacks in the south had been living through an orgy of violence directed against them for two centuries. Blacks in Birmingham, AL had their homes so frequently dynamited by racists who resented their presence and home ownership, that the city had become known as Bombingham. On September 15, 1963 this dynamiting of black lives reached a crescendo with the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The week before, Alabama governor George Wallace had stated that in order to stop integration Alabama needed, "a few first-class funerals." Four young girls were killed that Sunday morning. A bomb having been placed there earlier by  Robert "Bomber Bob" Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas Blanton--Ku Klux Klan members all--exploded at 10:22 AM, taking the lives of Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) who were attending Sunday school and preparing for church service. The bomb exploded with such force that one of the girls was immediately beheaded. Twelve year old Sarah Collins [now Sarah Collins Rudolph], sister of Addie Mae, was blinded when flying glass pierced her eyes. She later lost one eye. It was a picture of a young Sarah Collins, lying in a hospital bed, her eyes covered with huge patches of cotton gauze, that was among the images in The Movement that grabbed my attention and permanently seared itself into my brain.

    Odessa Woolfolk
    Courtesy The Birmingham News
    I was eleven years old when I saw that image of the immobilized little black girl laid out, helplessly scarred and traumatized, and that image has stayed with me all of these years. I realize now that I was at the time the same age as the youngest girl killed in that attack, Denise McNair. Deciding some seven years ago that I wanted to somehow work with this experience, to use it somehow, to confront it by putting myself in Birmingham, I contacted the curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art to see if I might shape a project, working with them on what would become a residency project that would honor the memory of those killed that day while also engaging the contemporary Birmingham community. During that initial visit I was able to attend a service at 16th Street Baptist Church and to have lunch with Odessa Woolfolk, the President and a founding board member of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which had opened in 1992. I had lunch with Ms. Woolfolk, who began to give me a deeper sense of the history as well as the various ways in which that history was still playing out in the Birmingham community. When I told her that I would be visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning, she asked me with a knowing look, "Let me know what happens." I am pretty sure she knew what would happen, but she likely thought it best that I have the experience myself.

    From top left (clockwise)
    Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair,
    and Addie Mae Collins


















    16th Street Baptist Church
    My initial visit to 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning began to give me a sense of the complexity of the situation I was actually entering into. I had approached Birmingham full of the known history. But history as it is lived is usually messier and certainly more nuanced than the mythic history afforded by historical hindsight. Mythos and reality may be, in some ways, related but they are generally never quite the same. This first occurred to me when, entering the church to attend the service, I noticed unsettlingly that they church was filled to only perhaps a quarter of its capacity...at best. I had expected a full and rousing congregation, but was met instead by an almost empty building that was in a sad and obvious state of disrepair. Greeting the minister and several of the deacons after service, I introduced myself and briefly described the work I hoped to do. As soon as I mentioned September 15, 1963 the minister stopped me in mid-sentence. His words echo in memory still. "Stop right there," he admonished me. "Here at 16th Street we're not about all of that business; we're about the business of Jesus Christ. If you're interested in that, we'd love to help you." Stunned though I was, I did my best to keep a straight and polite face. Who was I, after all, to tell them what their "business" should or should not be. Of course "all of that business" was basically all  that I knew of 16th Street. Recalling her knowing look, I realized then that this response would not have surprised Odessa Woolfolk at all. I realized then that I had much to learn indeed about the place where I hoped to make my work. I left Birmingham after that first visit more perplexed than when I came. [Note: 16th Street Baptist Church was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 2006, after my initial visit, and has since undergone a $3 million restoration of the building, reversing years of neglect, including water damage, and damage to the facade masonry.]

    Taylor Branch
    Parting The Waters
    Some time after that initial visit to Birmingham, I began working on a brief residency project in Baltimore with the Walters Museum. An invitation to dinner from one of the senior museum staff took a wonderful and surprising turn one evening when I found out that the friends who would be joining us, Christy and Taylor, were none other than Christina Macy and her husband the renowned writer and chronicler of the civil rights movement Taylor Branch, whose epic chronicle of the civil rights era had garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. Taylor (who was born in Atlanta, GA) and I had much to talk about, as I knew he had spent considerable time in Alabama, and Birmingham in particular over many years, researching what is now a trilogy of important books. When I told him I had ventured to 16th Street Baptist Church one morning, he raised his eyebrows and asked me knowingly just what had happened. He was not at all surprised, and indeed had I given his book another read before venturing to Birmingham, I might have been better prepared, as he writes at length about the complicated relationship of 16th Street to the history of the Movement. Though the church was the site of many of the mass meetings that Dr. King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and other movement leaders called to organize their various marches and actions, the congregation of 16th Street Baptist Church was notably absent from those meetings. Those attending the mass meeting came largely from Bethel Baptist Church, 6th Avenue Baptist Church, and the smaller black churches throughout Birmingham. 

    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
         Birmingham, AL 1963
    When King visited 16th Street Baptist Church on one occasion in 1963 to ask for volunteers to join in a planned demonstration, not a single adult stood to volunteer, much to King's frustration. Instead the young people began to stand. The adults, many of whom worked for whites, simply could not afford the risk of such action. Doing so would likely have resulted in their being fired, their homes foreclosed on or bombed, or worse. Thus many of the black adults took a publicly disengaged and accommodationist stance. So it was the youth of Birmingham who eventually brought the city to its knees. 16th Street Baptist was the staging ground and meeting point for what became known as The Children's March, with even teachers turning their backs as students staged mass class walkouts in order to feign ignorance--and thus avoid complicity--for what was taking place. The bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church took place four months after these successful demonstrations in an attempt to stop the progress that was then being made. Four months after the adults of 16th Street Baptist Church had specifically not participated in public social protest, their church was dynamited and four of their girls were killed.

    Virgil Ware 13 years old
    On subsequent visits to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute I learned that on that same September day two boys, 13 year old Virgil Ware and 16 year old Johnny Robinson has also been killed in acts of racist violence. Virgil Ware was killed while riding on the handlebar of his brother James' bike, shot by two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. The Ware brothers were unaware of the church bombing that had taken place that morning, and crossed paths with two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. Johnny Robinson was shot and killed by a police officer who claimed he had been throwing rocks at passing cars in the disturbances that began to happen in the aftermath of the bombing that day. I decided immediately that these two young African American boys would also be the memorialized focus of my project. I would make portraits of African American girls, ages 11 and 14, and photographs of African American boys ages 13 and 16. Additionally, as a way of suggesting the lives that were cut short and never allowed to unfold, I would make portraits of adult men and women who were the ages that these young people would have been had they been allowed to live out their lives. Thus the portraits would both document black Birmingham's present while memorializing those lost in its past. These photographs would form the centerpiece of my project.

    Filming in Birmingham, AL
    Photograph by Truman Grayson
    I also wanted to continue the work I had begun in video with my earlier Four Stories (2003) that examined the lives of four diverse Detriot teenagers, and decided to create a two channel video piece that would be an evocative meditation on that September morning. I wanted the piece to unfold in extreme slow motion, and invoke the journey that each of the four girls took the church on that "bright blue fall morning" as I seen it described in my readings about that day. Wanting the production values to be as high as I could make them, I began interviewing video and film makers in Birmingham, and decided to work with Six Foot Five, a crew of young filmmakers and editors. After several weeks of pre-production location scouting, most of the principle photography for the video is done, with one more day of filming and audio recording to be scheduled before going to post production editing. The video takes place in four different social spaces, a barbershop, a beauty salon, a classroom, and a lunch counter. Each of these locations have a particular, and in some cases very loaded, place in the social history of the city, with the barber shop and beauty parlor being more intimate and closed social spaces and the classroom and the lunch counter being scenes of highly public social interaction and potential racial conflict and segregation. The other channel of the video describes the languorous and peaceful ride to the church as the car (and the girls) move slowly towards the horrific moment that we know is coming.

    Photographing in the Birmingham Museum of Art
    Photograph by Truman Grayson
    I've also began photographing, making portraits of the first group of subjects, women, girls, and boys of the appropriate ages. I've yet to photograph any men unfortunately, and will need to redouble outreach efforts to locate them and gain their participation. The project has been one of relationship building as much as it has been about making the actual photographs and video work. It's been a process of relationship building for me of course, since while one side of my family is from the south--West Point, Mississippi--I am distinctly an outsider to the Birmingham, AL community. It has provided as well an opportunity for the Birmingham Museum of Art to deepen and extend its relationship with its African American community through a project that is very much about that community and its collective history. As such, the project continues my interest in institutional culture and re-shaping the relationships that museums have and can have with their respective communities.

    Photographing in original Bethel Baptist Church Sanctuary
    Photograph by Truman Grayson
    I have begun the photographic work by turning one of the museum galleries into my temporary studio, using the museum--as I have in the past--as a space for making work as well a space for later exhibiting that work. It also provides yet another way for the people I am photographing to consider just what a museum is and to claim a more active place within that institutional space. It has been heart rending when photographing the people who come to my museum studio to think about them in relationship to the six people whose lives inform this work. To think of someone striking such a young life down with impunity is a renewed horror each time a young person sits in front of my camera. To see the older women, having lived rich full lives, reminds me constantly of the tragically abbreviated lives of those six young people. 

    I'm going back to Birmingham to continue work for another two weeks in December, and to continue working on the video 9.15.63. I'll be photographing in Bethel Baptist Church as well. The exhibition will open September 2013, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. I'll be posting periodically--in this blog and on Facebook--and invite you to come south to Birmingham next year to the completed work. The Birmingham Museum of Art will commence a series of performances and programming as the 50th year begins. Participating artists will include Theaster Gates, Jefferson Pinder, and others. I'm hoping to curate a small selection of related films as well. Watch for it.

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    Labels: 16th Street Baptist Church art and society Birmingham Civil Rights Museums Photography
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  2. 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.


    Both believed that their deep belief in the experience of working people, people of color, and people maligned by the ruthless class, could be elevated, transformed, and made resonant through exquisite articulation, through the marshaling of a considerable history of literary and visual art practice, in order to move that practice forward with integrity through their own work. Their profound humanism and their willingness to use their respective works to speak for those often rendered voiceless, and the ongoing crafting of their own individual creative and expressive voice, marks them as artists and culture workers of the highest order. Catlett practiced professionally for over six decades, Rivera for more than three.

    I met Louis Reyes Rivera sometime in the 1970s when I began spending time with a group of writers in New York, my born and raised home town. Writers, photographers, painters, sculptors, dancers, heretics and the faithful...we were all one community, and could be found at each other's openings, performances, and readings...wherever someone had managed to stake a claim to a space from which to publicly hold forth. Within that circle I both began to find my community and become the artist I eventually became. Attending various readings, it soon became apparent that Rivera was a writer of deep principle and conviction, as well as one marked by a deep and finely tuned love for well crafted language. I came to look forward to not only hearing him read, but in speaking with him, as he loved to turn an idea around and examine it with the full force of his critical imagination, and challenged you to do the same. Over the years he became my "go to" person, the one I could contact when a particular piece of cultural information failed to fall into place in my memory. Places, words, phrases, texts, locations, and who populated those locations when were all firmly stored in his mind, keeping the cultural history intact for yet another generation. His recent loss leaves a profound gap, but his long standing practice as writer and committed citizen provides a valuable model indeed.

    Amiri Baraka delivered the eulogy for Louis at the service held for him in Brooklyn, New York. Amiri was kind enough to send it to me, and I have reprinted here in full for those who could not be there to hear it, and for the reflection of those of you who were. May Catlett and Rivera both rest in peace, knowing that their inspiring works have made a profound difference and shaped history in the best possible way.

    Eulogy for Louis Reyes Rivera - Amiri Baraka
    1
    "People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don't want to cop to God. When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons "Gods" so you can understand the relativity of the term. But for all our talk about the Creator, we rarely use that term for those moving among us whom we could concretely use that word to describe. And whose creations are knowable, tangible, though wonderful even if we could stand in a bar and have a beer with them. It is as if our familiarity with humanity downgrades its profundity. Like the only truly heavy stuff is what we don't understand. Like the economy, what's truly valuable is what we don't have.
    I'm saying this to wake us up to the value of our own earthly lives, and the great creators that have walked, do walk, among us. But also to help us appreciate the grand livingness of what some of us give to each other. Though the contradiction to this is that then we will understand how much we lose when one of those long time creators disappears. Sometimes we don't even know who they are. What a tragedy, like the fog of ignorance which disconnects our heads from our hearts so that we can wander through the world and not even understand what's going on. Though Louis kept telling us, Who Pays the Cost (1978), This One For You (1983), Scattered Scripture (1996) or that great anthology Bum Rush The Page (2001).
    And we are always surrounded by Death. Now Death. Past Death. Death to Come. However we have to face it, it marks us one way or another. It is always much closer than we think and even what we think we see can suddenly disappear. Though there is always light if we know where to look. Our friend, brother, here brought it to us direct and its brightness must help light the rest of our lives. But the news of Louis' passing was freezing and horrible. I read the words and emotionally couldn't understand them. It didn't make sense. It was absurd or confused or a lie or whatever is not true or real. But it was both. But how could it be? Amina and I had just seen Louis and Barbara and hung out all day and ate Cuban food and exchanged observations, experiences, facts, beliefs, maps of consciousness We stood in front of the house and waved, "Take it Easy...See ya later ...Don't Take No Wooden Negroes."
    If you know where the light is and it goes out it frightens and pours ice through you. Like somehow you got put out in the cold and the darkness. There is no one I fear losing like the poets. Not just because we do that, but it means there is one less trusted mind and soul in the world. It is a loneliness that jumps us remembering the someone like Louis Reyes Rivera whom we knew to speak the truth. In a world full of lies and surrounded by death and darkness, someone who would bring that wondrous light and truth to us, that we could count on to do that. That we might hear one sentence that would, say, put the Republican maniacs in check or even give righteous criticism to some leader who still don't know how to act. Or simply remark on a truth we needed but had momentarily forgotten, or simply make us hum that hip tune again like we sposed to.
    He said in his wonderful essay Inside the River of Poetry "Always there is need for song ...and every human has a poem to write ..." This last thing comes to mind because Louis was a live poet. And unlike we old heads Louis had mastered the art of memorization, which the generations after mine, have accomplished. So he was a spoken word speaker in the sense of textless recitation, although occasionally he would read. Louis also dug the enhancement that music gave to the word. Because poetry is the musicked word at base and the skilled recitation accompanied by or integrating the spoken word with music serves to emphasize both. His great poem “The Bullet Cry or A Place I Never Been” creates the living dimension of Malcolm's murder, beginning with the tumultuous and relentless question, Was You There? That work must be dug by any who claim information about real life.
    2
    We have heard Louis read excerpts from his Jazz In Jail, his masterful word music symphony that speaks in multiple layers of metaphor about the music which is our literal as well as our figurative selves, and we must collectively and unceasingly signify and put the whisper to work until that work appears. These grand creators must not be treated like comets to blaze across our consciousness helping us more clearly dig the world, and then disappear. Especially recently we have been losing grand master poets like Louis, Sekou, Pedro, Mikey, Piri, Lorenzo Thomas, Gil Scott.. ..What have we been doing wrong to deserve such spiritual wasting? It's like your head and heart are shrinking.
    Louis' death seemed so unreal to me, because I always thought of him (and he was) younger than me. Even though he had the Imam's long grey beard and the staff to go with it, the peripatetic prophet. We got together in the late 70's around the time of his first book, Who Pays The Cost. With a lot of people who will add a deeper cast to any eulogy or obituary, some long gone like his man Zizwe Ngafua, or the cruelly underknown Safiya Henderson, or the writers like Arthur Flowers and his De Mojo Blues, together with people like my wife, Amina Baraka, poets, Tom Mitchelson, Brenda Connor Bey, Layding Kaliba, Rashidah Ismaili, Gary Johnston and his Blind Beggars Press, Wanjiku Reynolds, Malkia Mbuzi, Mervyn Taylor, Akua Lezli Hope, loud ass Baron Ashanti.
    And in the spirit of John Oliver Killens, Barbara's father, Louis' father in Law, and the Harlem Writer's Guild which reflected his long historied nurturing of Black writers, we together with some others, put together for a brief storied moment a Black Writers' Union that met in Brooklyn and seemed similar, one of these writers commented recently, to the National Writers Union which it preceded. That's the way that do, was my answer. Even so, Louis was chair of the New York chapter of Local 1981 of the National Writers Union since 2004 and active in it from its inception. And he functioned like a real union rep. It was not just a title. If you wanted to know something about the formal attempt to make these Publishing Corpses respect writers' rights, Louis wd publish his work in the union regularly. In this effort were we all, certainly Louis and I and the rest of us brought closer.
    I remember Louis talking about his effort helping John Killens to put together his grand study of Pushkin, Great Black Russian. Lest we forget that until Pushkin made Russian a language that carried literature, the Russians wrote in French. Louis was one of the people most associated with self-publishing. Too many young people loiter unknown in the literary world because they think there is something negative about self-publishing. Thus this attitude keeps us subservient to the corpses. With Shamal press Louis championed the small press and self -publishing efforts that young poets should welcome.
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    Louis was always at heart the activist and this is why I always felt close to him. That the word was to spread the truth and the expression of that word was an act of liberation. It was the spirit of the Black Arts Movement, a more activist oriented reflection of the Harlem Renaissance, which gave us Negritude in Africa and the West Indies, Indigisme in Haiti and Negrissmo in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Spanish speaking territories of the Americas. That we would create an art that was as rooted in our real cultural and historical experience. That we would create an art that would come out of the elitist dens of ambiguity and poet for and with the people. That we would create an art that would help liberate those people! Dig his two anthologies Bum Rush The Page & The Bandana Republic. And you could hear Louis working at it whether in his twice a month workshops, his program on WBAI (until it was cut off by the white knights), his regular gigs and workshops at Sistah's Place or his various academic gigs at Pratt Institute and SUNY Stony Brook. One of the most important of Louis' formal or informal teaching gigs was his insistence on teaching, recognizing and living the Afro- Latin Hinge that characterizes the whole of the Western world. His rocked hat, swinging cane, his various dashikis above which lowered a long constantly stroked beard animated by a determined march to where ever, arriving with "What's Happening" and leaving with "Later," the characteristic Rivera Profile.
    Louis gave us the warmth of his feeling, always. We loved him because we knew that whateverhe looked like to you, he was a soldiers. That's why we miss him so much. And it is the essence of his soldiering that must be passed on. That's what we must urge on artists and scholars, not only cultural workers, but we need our most advanced folks fighting for equal rights and self-determination. To create art, and scholarship that is historically and culturally authentic, that is public and for the people, that is revolutionary. This is the paradigm that Louis Reyes Rivera's life and work presented. Unity with our people and struggle against our enemies. Anyone who really knew Louis would tell you that. They would know that he was a soldier. And we all should know that here, at this precipice looking down into the jaws of corporate dictatorship the new American Fascism.
    That we need all the revolutionary cultural workers, all the soldiers we can enlist and develop. Louis Reyes Rivera was that to the bone, to the head of his swinging stick and screaming dashiki. This One For You he said, he meant us, all of us, all the time. Like Sekou Toure said, "Victory To Those Who Struggle." Louis believed that. He told me so. Unidad & Lucha Companero. Hasta la Vista. Hasta Manana. Venceremos! Later!"
    Amiri Baraka
    March 8, 2012
    Photographs (from top): Elizabeth Catlett, Sharecropper, 1952; Elizabeth Catlett, Photograph © Al Sieb/Los Angeles Times; Louis Reyes Rivera, Photograph © by George Malave; Amiri Baraka's text is Copyrighted © 2012 by the Author
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  4. 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. With falling attendance, the rising costs of museum admissions institutions are realizing that a philosophy of "me-ism" and exclusivity is not only inappropriate, it can be downright fatal. So increasingly institutions are undergoing a reexamination of their missions, their very reasons for being. The smarter ones are coming to realize that their days as thriving public institutions are numbered unless they do more to engage that public than simply unlock the doors in the morning and collect their admission fees. This has led to a number of initiatives to expand the conversation taking place within pubic institutions, making them spaces in which a more dialogical experience can take place. This is not the case, of course, for every museum, but a fundamental shift is taking place, and taking real hold in more than a few places.

    Of course, as one conference participant reminded those gathered at The School in New York awhile back for a conference on publicly engaging art practice, quite a number of community based institutions and organizations have long been engaged in creating just this kind of close relationship with their communities, and not just as a response to dwindling attendance or institutional reinvention. Institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem and el Museo del Barrio in New York, and the DuSable Museum and National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago were created because both artists and audiences of color did not feel welcome in more mainstream places, nor did they see their art and culture adequately reflected there. Some of these institutions, like the Studio Museum have evolved to a point where they are now no longer entirely peripheral to the mainstream, with artists exhibiting in that institution also being exhibited on national and global platforms, even as the institution attracts an ever more diverse audience in addition to its original core constituency.

    But current realities--along with a genuine institutional introspection and a more progressive stance on the part of a younger generation of museum directors and curators--are conspiring to bring forth a more engaging climate for rethinking the ways in which art is experienced. A number of foundations are also stepping up to provide support for just this type of institutional paradigm shift. The federal government--through the National Endowment for the Arts--has also created programs designed to brings citizens into a more dynamic and inclusive relationship with these institutions. Having been a panelist and consultant for two foundations recently as well as a panelist for the NEA, I've seen firsthand how this shift is being tied to funding. Some institutions are being more ambitious in these undertakings than others, and even the more conservative among them are developing programs to go beyond mere "family day" activities and reach for a more radical rethinking of the institutional space and it various prerogatives around how art is experienced and how to make the art viewing experience one conducive to multiple levels and kinds of engagement that do not merely propose to perpetuate a "master narrative" for a passive audience.

    The recently completed Mark Bradford Project at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art was one recent example of a mainstream museum engaging in a radical reexamination of how it was functioning within the equation of art/artist/audience. Taking place over the course of several months, The Mark Bradford Project sought to not only engage 21 young high school artists from Chicago in an ongoing working/mentoring relationship with Bradford, but also sought to introduce Bradford broadly to a number of different communities in Chicago, from the art community to churchgoers, seeking to more deeply engage those communities through Bradford's presence and work during his residency. The project began last September with an ominously sounding program called "The Dialogue," which brought together museum theorist, consultant and educator Elaine Heumann Gurian and Bradford in a discussion moderated by MCA's director Madeleine Grynsztejn. Gurian, who has done museum based work and study for almost four decades (see her book Civilizing the Museum) did a brief but scholarly presentation outlining her ideas on museums, audiences, and inclusion. Bradford did a more conventional artist talk. His somewhat sketchy responses during the Q & A period that followed the presentations left me wondering just how this project would shape up, as he wasn't able to address how this project might shape and perhaps expand his own practice; he saw it more in light of what he could bring to the students.

    That it did very much effect his thinking about his own practice was evident from the public program that took place some eight months after that first one, by which time Bradford had completed his residency. On stage with several of the students who participated in the project he acknowledged how profoundly he had been changed by the experience of working with them. They in turn acknowledged the respect with which he had treated them. This was apparent from the exhibition (Re)Collect that the students mounted of their work in a Pop Up gallery space in Chicago's downtown Loop. The show (on view for only one week!) provided ample evidence of the highly sophisticated formal, material, and conceptual work the students had done under Bradford's guidance. Professionally and smartly installed the work was a far cry from the "after school projects" level that some people still wrongly expect from young artists. The authoritative way in which they held forth in the standing room only program in MCA's auditorium only further reinforced the impact that this experience had on them. Bradford's own survey exhibition remains on view at MCA at this writing. The project is one that could serve as a model to those museums with enough self confidence to not feel that allowing the museum space to be a space of exchange diminishes the serious of the museum enterprise or somehow demeans the art objects themselves. Rather it acknowledges that the viewer has a place in the conversation that is as valuable as what the museum itself has to offer. The challenge is to find a way to enhance that conversation while respecting both the viewers and the objects.

    This project represents another step in the evolution of this museum that began when Madeleine Grynsztejn became director four years ago. The exhibition immediately preceding Bradford's, "Without You I'm Nothing: Art and Its Audience," foregrounded works that required the active participation of the viewer in order to be activated or completed. This emphasizing of the viewer's position and relationship to the object set the stage for Bradford's extended project of community engagement. Significantly in choosing Bradford to undertake this project the museum was not making an obvious choice, choosing someone for whom--like Theaster Gates or Rirkrit Tiravanija--such engagement is endemic to their work and practice. Bradford is first and foremost a painter, a maker of nonrepresentational paintings. In spite of the social content and context underpinning and informing his work (which I feel is sometimes more rhetorical than present in the objects themselves), he is indeed a formalist, a maker of sometimes large scale, often atmospheric material objects. While he may be black, gay, from gritty South Central LA, and a recent MacArthur Fellow, his practice still would not make him an obvious candidate for such an ambitious project. That the project succeeded as well as it did bodes well for MCA, Bradford, the students, and all of those museums who might be looking to this as a successful model of how art and a broader civic engagement can meaningfully coexist. Indeed, MCA is in the midst of even more extensive changes, both physical and philosophical. One writer referred to these changes as, "a philosophical gut rehab." You can read about that here.

    An Eighties Superstar Shapes A Public Project
    Eric Fischl is not necessarily the first name that comes to mind if one is trying to think of an artist who has been engaged in a meaningful social practice. One of the superstars of the overheated art market of the 1980s, Fischl--along with Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel, and others--came to represent the degree to which the economy of the art world was totally out of touch with the economic realities of most people's lives. With paintings selling for far more than the average person's annual salary, Fischl and other came to epitomize the worst excesses of the art world. That was then, this is now. Fischl is now spearheading an ambitious project to bring art to the masses. Dubbed "America: Now and Here," the project is designed to address what Fischl calls, "...an identity crisis in American culture." While I'm not sure that America's varied cultures are in crisis, the projects promises to be an interesting road show indeed. Consisting of up to six truck based roving museums displaying art and also bringing poetry, drama, film to various cities over the next two years, the venture is privately funded.

    Artists include a number of past and present art world stalwarts such as Alex Katz, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Kruger, Ross Bleckner, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, along with Mark Bradford, Lyle Ashton Harris, Fred Wilson, Glenn Ligon, Ellen Gallagher, Kay Walkingstick, and Jeanne Moutousammy-Ashe. Would that others like Moutoussamy-Ashe and Walkingstick, who are under-recognized even as they have been working steadily for decades had been included in this all star cavalcade of culture. Musicians include Lou Reed, Phillip Glass, and Roseanne Cash, and hopefully more diverse talent will leaven this group as well. There is a section of the project called Artist Corp, which will feature the works of young undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate art students. This should go some ways towards making the project a more inclusive one.

    An ambitious undertaking indeed, though the idea of a mobile art experience is hardly new. But if this project can generate half the excitement it is claiming for itself, it should be able to add to the dialogue around art and greater civic engagement with the arts in a meaningful way. You can go to the project website to see when and if they will be coming to your town.

    Photographs (from top): The Mark Bradford Project documentation, MCA Chicago; El Museo del Barrio, NY; MCA Chicago, Mark Bradford exhibition banner, Mia Wicklund photograph © MCA Chicago; Mark Bradford and student lay out work for (Re)Collect exhibition, Nathan Keay photograph © MCA Chicago; Installation view, (Re)Collect; Madeleine Grynsztejn, photograph by Mark Randozzo; Eric Fisch, photograph by Chester Higgins, Jr. courtesy The New York Times


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  5. 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. In all of the obituaries published on the occasion of his passing a little over a week ago, I was surprised to not read more about his role as the founder of the Jazz Mobile Workshop, since that was how I came to know Dr. Taylor.

    Much has justly been written about his founding of the Jazz Mobile touring music program in the early 1960s. He developed this program in order to take jazz music directly into the community by way of a mobile stage which was attached to a truck. In a different context it might have been used as a parade float. Here it was used as a vehicle to bring free music of the highest quality into those communities who might be least exposed to it (given the decline of jazz as a popular music) and least able to afford it (given that the music was now largely played in clubs). During the summer the roving stage is set up in conspicuously public locations such as parks, and name musicians perform. It was a brilliant idea and one that persists to this day. It exists because of Dr. Billy Taylor.

    But oddly, little if anything has been written about the Jazz Mobile Workshop, the free music education program that Taylor founded in 1969 as one of the organization's programs to continue perpetuating jazz music. Located in Harlem in Intermediate School 201 on West 127th Street, just off of Park Avenue, the Workshop provided free instrumental instruction on Saturday afternoon for any and all. Taylor had appointed the bassist Paul West as executive director. I first heard about the Workshop from a trumpet playing friend in my Queens, NY neighborhood, Phil Clark. Queens at that time seemed populated by a wealth of musicians, young and old, the benefit some have said of having basements and backyards to practice in, given that we all lived in houses, not apartments. Phil was, like us, a young musicians and had taken to showing up at the band rehearsals we used to have in first my parents living room then their basement. I'm not sure if one of the other band member knew him or if he heard us playing from out on the sidewalk (the whole neighborhood apparently could hear us), but Phil took to hanging around. I suspect he wanted to be asked to join the band, but bands are formed around compatible personalities as much as shared musical interests and skills, so Phil became a perennial hanger on. Besides, we already had a strong trumpet player in our band. To his credit however Phil mentioned to me one day that he was taking classes with Lee Morgan, the well known trumpeter. He was taking these classes, he said, free of charge on Saturdays at the Jazz Mobile Workshop in Harlem, NY.

    Taking Phil up on an invitation to accompany him to the Jazz Mobile one Saturday afternoon shortly after, I was pleasantly astounded at what I found. Peering into one classroom door in Harlem's I.S. 201 public school building I recognized bassist Richard Davis. In another classroom I spotted saxophonist Jimmy Heath. And in still another I spied guitarist Ted Dunbar. I was a serious enough young scholar of the music by that point that I had seen all of these guys in performance, and heard them on recordings, so I knew they were the masters in the field. Continuing on I located the classroom for drum set instruction and entered the room. The teacher there in the introductory/intermediate drumming class was none other than Albert "Tootie" Heath. After several months in Heath's class I was promoted to Freddie Wait's advanced class after impressing Heath with a particularly fluid interpretation of a passage he had us all perform. Wait's prodigious classroom demonstrations both inspired me while, at the same time, convincing me that I had a very long way to go indeed if I was to make music my life's work...which I ultimately chose not to do, though I continued to play professionally in a number of bands for a few years. Dr. Taylor himself would visit the Workshop periodically. I had my most memorable experience with him one afternoon in the Small Ensemble class. He gathered us drummers together and, with himself on piano and a young Howard "Locksmith" King on bass, told us we were going to practice "trading threes." We each looked at each other quizzically. Most jazz musicians when they solo play four, eight or maybe twelve bars, and often trading "fours," that is soloing for four bars apiece back and forth. As such most musicians develop a repertoire of phrases they often--unwittingly or otherwise--resort to, which playing for an irregular three bars completely disrupts. By having us "trade threes" (soloing for three bars each instead of four) Taylor reminded us that true creativity and improvisation does not rely on habit. It was a lesson I never forgot.

    Other musicians assembled by Dr. Taylor to teach at the Workshop included such luminaries as Curtis Fuller, Sir Roland Hanna, Joe Newman, and Ernie Wilkins. All were following Taylor's lead and making their time and knowledge available to yet another generation. All of this asignificant history, occurring in the pre-internet age, seemed to have escaped the notice of the many writers paying tribute to Dr. Taylor upon his passing. I would have expected former drummer turned cultural critic and gadfly Stanley Crouch to have taken note, but in his obituary in the New York Daily News Crouch spent an inordinate amount of space once again bashing hip hop and "ignorant" baggy pants folks in general, while doing little to pass on this important and seemingly little known aspect of Dr. Taylor's life's work. But Dr. Billy Taylor was that rare individual, a consummate artist who had the vision and the institutional savvy to create something that would outlast him and benefit seceding generations. For that we can all be grateful.

    Passing the Torch Yet Again

    Thinking about Dr. Billy Taylor and Jazz Mobile put me in mind of other artists who have taken on the hard task of institution building. The recently announced impending retirement of Judith Jamison, former principal dancer turned artistic director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, made me recall the formative history of that company and institution. Performing for the first time in 1958 with a company under his own name, Ailey went on to build a company with an almost unparalleled reputation, securing his first permanent home in 1979 after sharing a renovated church with choreographer Pearl Lang beginning in 1971. I was fortunate to see Judith Jamison dance "Cry" shortly after Ailey choreographed the dance--which he created as a birthday gift to his mother--for her in 1971. I saw (and photographed) Jamison dancing this piece and others a number of times, falling in love with her over and over again as she commanded the stage in this amazingly powerful piece de resistance of movement. Not too long afterward I did a portrait of her in the company's studio, and from that moment on swore that I would have followed her anywhere.

    Upon Ailey's untimely death at 58 years of age in 1989, Jamison took over as Artistic Director of the company as Ailey had requested, putting to rest her own newly formed company The Jamison Project. She has grown the institution steadily since then, weathering the economic storms of keeping a both the main and junior companies active, while moving into its second new home, which is no small feat in these times of dwindling support for the arts. At one time in New York there were a wealth of black dance companies: Fred Benjamin Dance Company, Dianne McIntyre's Sounds in Motion, Otis Sallid Dance Company, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theater of Harlem and others could be seen on stage with some regularity. I seldom missed a performance by either of these companies while living in New York. They were an important part of my creative sustenance. But slowly, over the years, they all but disappeared or disbanded, victims of the difficult task of keeping a large or medium sized company together. Some, like Sallid, found early success in the commercial entertainment arena, choreographing for television and motion pictures, and others were fortunate to find work in the academy. That the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater has been able to survive and thrive while hewing to its original artistic vision is a testament to its founder and its soon to be retired Artistic Director, Judith Jamison. Their lives and hard work should be an example to us all.

    (Note: Hopefully in a future post I will write about Wynton Marsalis, who is yet another artist/musician who has done a significant and impressive job as an institution builder in bringing Jazz at Lincoln Center into being. This institution appears to be the first long term major home for the performing and ongoing preservation of one of America's original art forms, with an in-house repertory band and multiple performing venues contained within its home, located at Columbus Circle in New York City.)

    Photographs (from top): Dr. Billy Taylor and youthful admirers; Freddie Waits (photograph © Tom Marcello); Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamison
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  6. 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. The “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) exhibition opened on July 19, 1937 in Munich, organized by Josef Goebbel's Information Ministry, and was thereafter toured to numerous German cities until April 1941 to expose the alleged cultural decline of the Weimar Republic. In the course of this campaign, at least 21,000 art works produced by artists associated with Expressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism and New Objectivity were removed from museums, and sold abroad to earn foreign exchange. Other works were simply destroyed.


    In his speech at the exhibition’s opening in Munich, Hitler declared: “I swore that if Providence made me your leader, I’d make short work of this degeneration. The German people deserve to be protected from these sick minds. These abusers of beauty and art should be confined to secure asylums for the insane until they re-learn how to think as Germans.” Among those artists whose works were classified by the Nazis as “degenerate” were Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz and numerous others. Those who were less famous are now forgotten because their works were either lost or destroyed. Once so labeled, victimized artists were forbidden to make art; many emigrated to save their lives; others died in concentration camps or in gas chambers, or committed suicide.This odious moment in German and world history was brought alive again when eleven banned works of art were surreptitiously uncovered during an archeological excavation in Berlin in preparation for the planned extension of a subway line in that city. All of the recovered sculptures came from museums in Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Berlin, from which the Nazis had confiscated them because the pieces did not correspond to the concept of art propagated by the fascist state. How they came to be at the site is not known, though several theories have emerged about the possible owner of the building hiding them for posterity's sake. Whatever the story, it reminds us that indeed "truth pressed to earth shall [indeed] rise again," and often at fortuitous moments. It is up to us to pay attention and make the connections.

    The rediscovery of the formerly banned "degenerate" art from Germany coincided with the very moment of the recent controversy in Washington, DC concerning the censoring of the David Wojnarowicz video "A Fire in My Belly" at the National Portrait Gallery. There is much to be learned from the former as far as what the American response should be to in response the efforts of politicians and officers of the state to once again attempt to create and impose a national standard insofar as what constitutes acceptable art. The exhibition "The Berlin Sculpture Find" opened at Berlin's New Museum on November 9th. "A Fire in My Belly" was removed from the Smithsonian on November 30th. The timing could not have been more auspicious, though no one seemed to have linked the two events. Lurking there in the news, uncovered from the dirt in Berlin, lying in plain sight, was history's loud rebuke to John Boehner.

    The Art World: In Search of A Script

    One of the reasons (perhaps the most significant reason) that the right is able to be so effective in propagating its message in the public arena has to do with the consistency of the script from which they all perform and hold forth. It is the uniform and persistent tone of their running commentary that adds up to a din that is always heard above the whisper of more reasoned discourse. To wit, neither House Speaker designate John Boehner nor incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor bothered to go and actually see the exhibition in question, "Hide/Seek," before issuing their pronouncements condemning the exhibition. They had received their script from the Christian News Service, a news service that apparently trolls the national social, cultural and political landscape in search of things it deems offensive to its sensibilities. They then alerts their reliable foot soldiers who then go forth to faithfully parrot the CNS script. That they were able to make the Smithsonian shake in its boots and pull the "offending" work should demonstrate the power of a few consistent voices staying on script and creating the perception that they speak for legions of presumed supporters when in fact they never do. The fact that the exhibition had been open for over a month and seen by over 10,000 people who didn't raise any complaints? Doesn't matter apparently, since we still have not heard from those 10,000 unified voices that they don't appreciate politicians who attempt (successfully it would seem) to impose their own parochial opinions on the American people. Thus does the vocal minority hold sway.

    Response from the art community to this recent attack on fundamental American rights has certainly not approached anything resembling a similarly coherent script. Rather the response has been largely to approach this as an attack on gay art and artists, an attack on one artist (David Wojnarowicz), or an attack on one institution (the National Portrait Gallery). All miss the point...perilously. Boehner and Cantor's attack constitutes an attack against the American people and our fundamental rights...not because we are gay, not because some of us make art using religious iconography, and not because of the facts of race, gender, sexuality or any of the other myriad reasons bigots have discriminated against others. What makes such discrimination abhorrent is that it violates basic rights and protections that are presumed to come with citizenship. It is an offense because it violates fundamental rights that make us very different from Nazi Germany in the 1930 and 40s. No, we Americans simply do not roll like that! We have something called the Constitution which guarantees our freedom of expression. And unlike totalitarian societies, we also reserve the right to make up our own minds, not to have these decisions left to agents of the state. And that is something around which we can find common ground with our fellow citizens, including those who may not even care about the Wojnarowicz video, or forward looking art in general. Indeed we are citizens before we are artists. Don't think so? Take a look at your passport and see what it says.

    So while demonstrations which attract a smattering of the already converted are justifiable immediate responses and screening the banned piece in various institutions may be seen as an act of solidarity and defiance, it doesn't constitute a coherent response; it's not a script that can be sent out to all concerned parties. We need to remind everyone that it is not only the arts that are under attack; the arts do indeed represent the culture of the larger society. The writer James Baldwin, in An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis said that, "...if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night." If we in the art community want a script (and we badly need one) I would suggest the following: "An attack on art is an attack on all Americans." John Boehner and his ilk falsely and loudly purport to speak for some presumably outraged citizenry. We need to remind him--and others--that indeed we are those citizens. January--and the ascent of Boehner and Cantor--is just around the corner. They have put us on notice that they will be watching, waiting to make their versions of "degenerate art" disappear. What will our response be this time? Whatever it is it cannot be in the form of a million passionate voices speaking individually (though rightly). We need a coherent voice. We--urgently--need a script.

    An Open Letter from Carrie Mae Weems
    and Others on the Censorship by the Smithosonian

    December 16, 2010

    As artists and citizens, we are outraged by the censorship rearing its head in our nation. In a country founded on freedom of expression – the First Amendment – we find it shocking and senseless that some amongst us would deny the rest of us by silencing any voice they deem “different” or “other.” Dissent is a right that has been bought and paid for by the American people. Disagreement is the cornerstone of democracy. A great nation is represented as much by its art and artists as by its statesmen and women. As artists and citizens, we will not be bullied by blind bigots, silenced by fear, or denied our basic civil rights.

    On December 1, World AIDS day, G. Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian, without consulting curator Jonathan Katz, removed “A Fire In My Belly,” a video piece by artist David Wojnarowicz, from the current exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Catholic League president Bill Donahue, with the support of incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner, exerted pressure on the Smithsonian. Even though this piece had been on view since October 30 without complaint, Donahue and company claimed this four-minute video is “anti-Christian hate speech” and a waste of taxpayer money. In short, the Smithsonian caved.

    Since then public outcry has built across the nation. As citizens, we realize that censoring work in a Washington, D.C. museum violates us all. We understand that this is not an isolated instance. We understand that the real targets go far beyond a four-minute video—to arts funding, to stigmatizing free expression and open dialog, to demonizing gay culture in all its forms. This fear-mongering and distortion is what is truly un-American, and it’s unacceptable.

    On December 14, in the midst of an upstate freezing blizzard, people gathered to attend an emergency screening of “A Fire in My Belly” held by ArtRage Gallery and Light Work in Syracuse. Both Light Work Gallery at Syracuse University and ArtRage Gallery will now continuously screen the work until February 13, the slated closing date of “Hide/Seek.” And we are not the only ones. What you can no longer see in our nation’s capitol you can now see in cities and towns across the land.

    Day by day, and decade by decade, social and cultural liberties have come under attack, disrupting our nation’s progress and the very vitality of our scientists, intellectuals and artists. At every turn we are losing ground with cuts in funding and the dismantling of cultural programs and significant institutions large and small. And this must stop! We are counting on all US representatives who care about fairness and freedom to protect and to defend the First Amendment at all costs. We invite others to join us in this protest. For more information go to Hideseek.org and PPOWgallery.com.

    Carrie Mae Weems and Social Studies 101

    Mary Goodwin, Associate Director, Light Work

    Nancy Keefe Rhodes

    Rose Viviano, Director, ArtRage Gallery


    Photographs (from top): Installation view of "Entartete Kunst", the "Degenerate Art" Exhibition; cover of catalogue from the "Entartete Kunst" exhibition; viewer looks at recovered art at Berlin's New Museum (photograph courtesy of Art Daily newsletter); demonstration in New York, protesting the Smithsonian censorship (photograph © 2010 by Daniella Zalcman); "A Fire in My Belly" being screened at The New Museum, NY (photography courtesy of The New Museum)

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  7. 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. Boehner's ire had been raised when he was contact by Catholic League president William Donohue after Donohue had issued a press release regarding what he called, "the vile video that showed large ants crawling all over Jesus on the Cross." In light of what he considered to be the blaspheming of the Christian religion by a public institution Donohue asked that the House and Senate Appropriations Committees "reconsider future funding" for the National Portrait Gallery, who had included the video in question "A Fire In My Belly" by the late artist David Wojnarowicz in its exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue is, of course, no stranger to uninformed highly inflammatory public remarks. Among other things he has previously blamed the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on homosexuality and claimed that a number of individuals previously and continually abused by priests when they were young were in fact not abused; since they repeatedly allowed the abuse to take place they must have enjoyed it according to Donohue. So we should not be surprised that this self appointed religious watchdog is again rabidly on the attack.


    I was in Washington ironically enough serving as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency who had come under attack two decades earlier from Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative religious groups and politicians for having given funds to an institution that had exhibited Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a large scale color photograph of a crucifix submerged in glowing yellow liquid. From Christ in urine to Christ with ants, the connection was an uncanny one. The National Portrait Gallery furor indeed echoes the controversy surrounding the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's work at the Corcoran Gallery (also in Washington, DC) in 1989, an exhibition which was closed after conservative intimidation and then mounted by the WPA Gallery, also located in DC. The Endowment itself was subsequently eviscerated by increasing funding cuts and its individual artist program--which also came under severe conservative scrutiny--was eliminated entirely. The arts have been vulnerable and drawn apart from the larger society ever since. As an artist who lived through that earlier moment the eerie feeling of déja vu was unmistakable and unnerving.












    On the first day of business during an extended lunch break, on the recommendation of Endowment staff, I decided to visit the National Portrait Gallery to take in the exhibitions, including "Hide Seek." Little did I know that it was the very day in which the Wojnarowicz video work had been removed from the exhibition. I sensed that something was up because the overzealous security guards appeared to be on high alert when I arrived in the exhibition space. Unlike the other exhibitions I had passed through, the gallery containing the show seemed staffed by a few museum guards too many, one of whom seemed to always appear, hovering too nearby as I moved around through the exhibition. My first thought upon taking in the work was that this was decidedly unlike any exhibition I had ever seen at the NPG before. An accompanying exhibition "The Struggle for Justice" (which one passes through on the way to the "Hide/Seek" show) was equally provocative. Indeed it was that show, with its incisive texts panels, that first clued me in to the fact that this was a very different kind of NPG, one with a more revisionist and inclusive reading of the many objects it was showing, particularly those of the modern and contemporary eras.


    Looking at a portrait of the blues singer Bessie Smith (one of a large group of African American portraits made by Carl Van Vechten that I am very familiar with) I proceeded to read the accompanying wall text: "Van Vechten's descriptions of African Americans were of the romantic racist variety, in which they represented elemental and primitive qualities absent in the falsity of modern society. Yet in his photographs he recovered and preserved the dignity and humanity of people such as the great blues singer Bessie Smith..." Well, I'll be! What a straightforward critical dissection of one man's varied intent. Other labels introduced a similar level of criticality into ones encounter with the works. Strategically placed near the small and elegant portrait of Smith is an imposing portrait painting of Van Vechten by Romaine Brooks, here brought down to a more manageable and humanly imperfect size by the aforementioned text which separates Van Vechten from Smith. It appeared to be yet another institutional situation where younger and more critically responsive and ambitious curators were being allowed to step forward and shape the viewing experience and rewrite art and cultural history in less than benign ways. So I was primed by the time I moved on to the next gallery where "Hide/Seek" was installed.


    Entering the gallery I immediately located a number of works by artist friends, including Lyle Ashton Harris, Catherine Opie, and Glenn Ligon along with works by artists ranging from Duane Michals, Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, Beauford Delaney, Paul Cadmus, Agnes Martin, Charles Demuth, Thomas Eakins (whose Salutat graced the exhibition entrance wall), Berenice Abbott, Marsden Hartley and others from both the modern and contemporary eras. Wojnarowicz was represented too, both in his own self portrait photograph (Untitled/face in dirt) and in Peter Hujar's portrait of him. And while much of the work was familiar, it was here contextualized in ways that foregrounded what had long been left out of the discourse surrounding the work: the sexuality identity of either the artist, the subjects or both, and the ways in which the work simultaneously embodied an aesthetic of both the object and the sexualized self; identity here became as much subject as the actual and nominal subject of the work itself creating a much richer and provocative experience of these objects. It was a lively, freewheeling, and thoughtful show, with the theme of difference and desire providing a thematic anchor that allowed it to hang together coherently. Indeed it was the lifting of the veil of sexual identity--particularly with the earlier works that had seldom been thus contextualized--that provided the rationale for the show itself to be brought into existence. As such co-curators Jonathan Katz and David Ward have produced a long overdue breakthrough exhibition.

    And then came William Donohue, roused by a story about the exhibition from CNS (Conservative News Service). After being duly alerted incoming House Speaker Boehner and incoming House Majority leader Eric Cantor proceeded to issue their own separate but consistent hyperbolic and opportunistic statements...without either one having ever having once set foot in the museum or the exhibition, which neither seemed to have thought an odd thing, as if having and airing opinions about things one hasn't actually experienced is the norm. Said Boehner, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy. Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves to end the job-killing spending spree in Washington.” Cantor followed up with, “This is an outrageous use of tax payer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season,” said Cantor. “When a museum receives taxpayer money, the taxpayers have a right to expect that the museum will uphold common standards of decency. The museum should pull the exhibit and be prepared for serious questions come budget time.” The Smithsonian's Secretary G. Wayne Clough then responded to this attack by removing the offending video from the exhibition, with the consent of NPG's director Paul Martin, saying that it was creating an unnecessary distraction that was taking attention away from the rest of the exhibition. Director Martin himself issued a statement attempting to explain the true nature of the exhibition and offering reassurance that nothing more would be removed from the exhibition, which continues through February. So with this attack by the right and the tepid response on the part of the museum the next round of the culture wars--and the unfortunately muted instiutional terms of engagement--were initiated.

    I found all of this out when I opened my hotel room door the morning after my visit to the museum and picked up The Washington Post laying on the floor in the hallway. Reading the front page article by Post art critic Blake Gopnik (who has done a very admirable job in continuing to report this story while bringing a high degree of critical acumen and much needed perspective to the conversation) over breakfast the palpable tension at NPG the previous day now made sense. I wondered too what the art world response would be. Other than Gopnik, who seemed to fully grasp at once the full dimension of this attack, public response was initially oddly muted in relation to the level of the offense. Into this breach stepped Transformer Gallery, a small Washington, DC alternative space headed by Victoria Reis. With perhaps 100 square feet of exhibition space and a window "project" space to their name, Transformer didn't let its small size stop them, becoming "the little gallery that could." While others dithered (cowered?), Transformer immediately sent out a call to action, asking supporters of the arts community to assemble at the gallery on Thursday evening to march in silent protest to the National Portrait Gallery where a vigil would be held. They also started a continuous screening of the banned video in their window, vowing to keep showing it in a continuous loop until the NPG reinstates it in the show. Their call to arms resulted in approximately seventy-five artists and others meeting at the gallery for the evening march to the NPG. I was there at the announced 5:30 assembly time as people slowly arrived. Picking up a few others along the way, the group eventually numbered maybe 100 by the time we had marched from 14th and P Street to 7th and G, the front of the National Portrait Gallery. With news cameras, reporters, and photographers bearing witness the silent vigil was held.

    So what happens next? That is the big and most meaningful question. The Republicans have let it be known that the arts are once again squarely in their sights. They intend to once again isolate the arts community from the rest of the larger social community, making them out to be the odd and perverse miscreants of society, rather than as much a part of the social fabric as everyone else. That is why it is imperative that this assault be framed not as merely an assault on the arts or an attack on a particular institution. It needs to be loudly proclaimed for what it is: an all out assault on the American people. The exhibition had been seen by over 10,000 people without a single complaint before it became the latest political football to be kicked around. Yet Boehner and his ilk do not believe that the American people have the wherewithal to determine for themselves what they do or don't want to see. They would make themselves the self appointed de facto curators of the American creative and intellectual imagination. There can be no "us" and "them" this time. That is what Boehner and the conservative right are attempting to do, to divide the American people along their own self serving fault line. It is no coincidence that this assault is taking place at the very same moment that Washington is wavering on repealing "don't ask don't tell" in the military. As long as any of us can be made to appear to be less than a part of the American family none of us are safe. That is the only story. Let's hope the art community gets it right this time and doesn't participate in its own self isolation. We need to assert our rights as Americans, not merely as artists. In that way we leave no loose threads in the social fabric for Boehner, Cantor, and Donohue to then use to rip us apart from our neighbors, doing the ongoing dirty conservative work of divide and conquer. The right speaks with one voice and from one script; we need to start doing the same.

    Statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors on the NPG Censorship Imbroglio

    The Association of Art Museum Directors, which oversees practices in North American museums and develops guidelines for art museums, issued a response Friday to the controversy at the National Portrait Gallery.

    The Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, removed a video from its current exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" on Tuesday after it received protests about its content from Capitol Hill, Catholic and conservative critics. The video by the late artist David Wojnarowicz contained an 11 minute view of ants crawling on a Christ-like figure. Local artists have marched outside the museum to show their disapproval of the action.

    The AAMD statement said: "It is extremely regrettable that the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, a major American art museum with a long history of public service in the arts, has been pressured into removing a work of art from its exhibition "Hide/Seek."

    "More disturbing than the Smithsonian's decision to remove this work of art is the cause: unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicans and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work.

    "The AAMD believes that freedom of expression is essential to the health and welfare of our communities and our nation. In this case, that takes the form of the rights and opportunities of art museums to present works of art that express different points of view.

    "Discouraging the exchange of ideas undermines the principles of freedom of expression, plurality and tolerance on which our nation was founded. This includes the forcible withdrawal of a work of art from within an exhibition--and the threatening of an institution's funding sources.

    "The Smithsonian Institution is one of the nation's largest organizations dedicated to the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge--an essential element of democracy in America. We urge members of Congress and the public to continue to sustain and support the Smithsonian's activities, without the political pressure that curtails freedom of speech."


    Photographs (from top): Demonstration at National Portrait Gallery, photograph © Jacquelyn Martin/AP; House Majority Leader designate John Boehner; the late Senator Jesse Helms; installation view, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture;" "Bessie Smith" by Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress; Lyle Ashton Harris, "Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera," © Lyle Ashton Harris; Bill Donohue, courtesy CNN; Transformer Gallery, photograph © Jacquelyn Martin/AP


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  8. 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. Certainly it made that work seem much less imperative. During past visits to MoMA recently I had gotten the feeling that something about the Museum of Modern Art had changed. Encountering the small crowd of deeply engaged people reading, writing, and attaching their own wishes to Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree" in MoMA's Sculpture Garden a few months ago was one recent breath of fresh air, one that suggested a very different way in which the museum public might engage with both the space, objects and each other. That piece created a space for both contemplation and participation. And several other shows there lately have seemed more conceptually daring, provocative, and more inclusive, with works not always where you would expect to find them (i.e. photography being shown outside of the Photography galleries and in relation to sculpture, architectural projects not in the design galleries, etc.), and not necessarily by artists you would have always expected to encounter in these quarters. But of course, that is just the point: exactly who and what work one should come to expect to find in the 21st century museum in this age of global culture.

    The younger curators seemed to be finally holding sway (and maybe the influence of newly appointed associate director Kathy Halbreich was being felt) as more and more work outside of the long established "canon" finds its way onto the walls, integrated into the larger conversation in meaningful (and not token) ways. And the very nature of the conversation itself seemed to have expanded. I had a feeling that the museum--in spite of its recent bout of economic exclusivity brought on by the admission price hike (fancy real estate and serious square footage must be paid for somehow I guess)--was trying to reinvent itself, to make itself more relevant to the contemporary moment in a way that didn't necessarily merely re-inscribe the status quo of the larger art world. My most recent visit a couple of weeks ago convinced me that the institution had, in fact, become a very different kind of institution. Of course the irony of the price restructuring coinciding with a more ambitious and inclusive programming is not lost on me, but still it both looks and feels different in significant and intrinsic ways....and I'm not referring to the expanded building itself.

    Walking through the Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition and encountering the work of Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Mel Edwards, Kalup Linzey, Kerry James Marshall, Paul Chan, Huma Bhabha and Kara Walker among others gave an enhanced and far more accurate sense of the state of American art practice in ways that was certainly not characteristic of much of MoMA's history. Din Q. Le's Project 93--which takes a fresh look at what Viet Namese refer to as "The American War"--reinforced this feeling of being in a very different kind of institutional space, one which spoke with a smartly multifarious voice. Some may recall the placement of the important black Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam's painting--exiled to a location by the coat check-- as one among other slights visited upon the works of artists of color in the museum's past...when and if they were displayed at all. That placement of Lam's work had for so long been an apt metaphor for the museum's relationship to its "darker brothers and sisters." That began to change gradually over the past two decades and now a greater and more ambitious inclusivity seems to be an intrinsic part of MoMA's programming. Clearly in addition to making an attempt to respond to its long history of gender inequity (the recent Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography for example was a tour de force), MoMA is facing head on its former perceived racial myopia as well. As such it felt more welcoming than I remember it feeling in a long time, especially since its auspicious reopening in its greatly expanded Yoshio Taniguchi designed quarters in 2004. In 2006 the Cullman Education and Research Center opened, providing the first building for expanded programming and teachers training, further expanding the museum's outreach. The lesson that 2st century institutions cannot expect to grown and thrive in glorious isolation appears to be one that, to some degree, is being taken to heart.

    The real eye opening and deeply moving show for me though--and the one that spoke most forcefully to a paradigm of a broader social engagement--was Small Scale Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement. The exhibition consisted of various projects designed and built by an international array of architects, all producing forward looking design projects in response to needs experienced in various economically disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The notion of architecture in service to an enhanced social order is, of course, not new. It has been central to much of the discourse surrounding twentieth century architectural practice. Much of this discourse centered on architecture's capacity for the creation of a kind of modern utopia, a reordering and transformation of social structures through design. Much of what became the postmodern critique of this utopian idealism pushed aside these aspirations in favor an architectural practice that sought merely to critique itself, yet another form of the postmodern "deconstruction of the text." In spite of this, groups began to emerge in response to this overly aestheticized set of dictates who began to argue anew for a return to architecture's capacity to have real social benefit. New Urbanism was a direct response to wanting to both reframe and recapture modernism's social dimension. The architects in this exhibition extend from that tradition. They believe that architecture can indeed be a powerful instrument for affecting social change and that architects have ethical and social responsibilities.

    I have been aware for some time now of Rural Studio, the design build program for undergraduate architecture students at Alabama's Auburn University. Founded in 1993 by the late Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee in Newbern, an impoverished town of some three people, the program has designed and built some 120 private and public projects, including homes, community centers, chapels, farmer's markets and sports facilities. All are designed and built by the students in consultation with the community. In this exhibition they are showing one of their most recent projects, The $20K House, a project that began in 2005 to address the dearth of affordable housing in Western Alabama. In response they have designed and continually refined the $20K house ($12,000 for materials, $8,00 for labor). Using local materials and local contractors to build them, the houses are affordable to a poor community for whom the monthly $100 mortgage payment (based on median income and the house's value) is as much as they can afford. And yet it allows them to own their own home, avoiding the trailers and other makeshift housing they would more often than not have to use as shelter instead.

    Other projects in the exhibition detail projects situated in Bangladesh (Meti-Handmade School), Burkina Faso (Primary School), Lebanon (Housing for the Fishermen of Tyre), Los Angeles, CA (Inner-City Arts), and Chile (Quinta Monroy Housing) among others. I was particularly moved by Urban Think Tank's Metro Cable project in Caracas, Venezuela. The project ingeniously connects the poor residents of the La Vega and Petare barrios to the rest of the city by means of a cable car system which connects at the end to the public transportation system at the bottom of the steep hill which isolates them from much of the city's social and economic life. Resisting the initial proposal by the city to demolish homes in the barrios to make way for a road project, the architects instead devised an overhead cable system that left the town largely intact. Further, each station along the route has its own social program such as a library, small supermarket, or community center, further enhancing the quality of life of the residents while providing much needed amenities and opportunities for community social engagement as well.

    These projects, both large and small scale, all provide evidence of how a socially engaged practice can exist in ways that advance simultaneously a set of design and social agendas. These principals are adaptable to any scale; it is the intent that sets it in motion. Here in Chicago artist Theaster Gates, for example, is transforming a once abandoned house on the south side of the city into The Dorchester Project, a building which will ultimately act as gathering place, archive, and soul food restaurant for those in the community and anyone else willing to venture south. Gates, like those architects in the MoMA exhibition and other art practitioners working to join their practice to the larger social community are pointing the way to a future in which artists and community come to find that they indeed have more in common than is often thought to be the case. And that can only be a win-win for everyone. Now if only MoMA would do a price rollback on their $20 general admission fee things would begin to feel even better in these times of increasing economic apartheid. That, or giving their free hours greater public promotion so that the less well heeled know the most opportune time to visit, would enhance their newly inclusive stance even further. I am sure that there are those who would suggest that MoMA and other mainstream museums are still the bastions of exclusivity that they always were. Some are, but I would suggest they look a little more closely and consider that the smartest of these institutions realize that they are indeed public institutions and are attempting to come to more meaningful terms with that fact and their various publics, pulling them closer in the institutional conversation. From where I stand at least the house that Abby Rockefeller built seems to comporting itself in ever finer fashion these days.

    Photographs (from top): Installation view, Small Scale Big Change, MoMA; installation view, Contemporary Art from the Collection, MoMA; Viewers read wishes written by other visitors on Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree"; installation view, Contemporary Art from the Collection (Mel Edwards Lynch Fragments in foreground, General Idea AIDS in background); Small Scale Big Change, Primary School project; installation view; Small Scale Big Change, $20K House; installation view, Small Scale Big Change, Metro Cable project; installation view, Theaster Gates, The Dorchester Project.
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  9. 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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  10. 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.

    I was introduced by Robert Storr, artist, curator and Dean of Yale University School of Art. I had met Rob many years ago at a bon voyage party at his home given for a mutual friend. He had just begun his stint as curator at the Museum of Modern Art at that time and we were Brooklyn neighbors. I would leave New York to start grad school at Yale one year later, in 1991. Rob became School of Art dean in 2006. He's a former University of Chicago Lab School kid and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA grad. In his brief remarks to the graduates preceding my remarks Rob reminded the students that there is "a lot of bad energy out there in the art world," and that they would do well to avoid these negative seductions as they began their own careers. Our remarks, taken together, hopefully inspired sober but inspired reflection for the assembled graduating class. My brief remarks follow:

    "Thank you for that kind introduction Rob. A very warm thank you to those of you who invited me here today to address this graduating class. It's a real pleasure to be back. I’d like to congratulate the graduating class and all of the family and friends who are gathered here today to celebrate with you. Before I continue, I’d like to dedicate my remarks this afternoon to Richard Benson, former dean of the School of Art, one of my professors during my time here in the Graduate Photography program and one of the most brilliant and decent human beings I have had the pleasure to know. I want to ask all of you in the graduating class to stand and give a warm shout out to Chip, who couldn’t be here with us today.

    Of course I remember well the feeling that those of you graduating from this institution and the School of Art are feeling today. I was certainly proud of what I had accomplished in moving my work forward, glad to have been surrounded by some of the best minds one could study and work with for two years, pleased to have formed a community of support and, quite frankly, scared half out of my mind! The nervousness mixed with anticipation that you are feeling is understandable, since you are indeed at the end of one journey and at the beginning—or the continuation—of another. What I would like to share with you today is my own sense of how you might go about both alleviating that nervousness and thinking about your place in society as artists at this particular moment in the 21st century.

    Once you leave here you will be faced with a number of decisions and choices that you will have to make. Certainly you will be faced with the need to continue your work, even as you are confronted with the realities of having to somehow sustain that practice at a moment of real economic uncertainty. Making art has never been—as far as I know—the safest or easiest career choice. It’s one thing to do this when you are very young without any real responsibilities to shoulder and another make a serious commitment to this as a vocation rather than an avocation. So it should go without saying that making art is a real act of faith. And your faith is about to be seriously tested once you leave here. Now I have not come here today to make you any more nervous about your possible futures than you might already be. Rather I want to encourage you to believe that your work not only should continue, but that it is imperative and that it needs to exist in the world. You each need to continue to believe that your work matters and that through your work you have the ability to change and reshape the world one person or one viewer at a time and to continue to expand your own sense of who you are in the process.

    Now you might think that this is an overly ambitious agenda I am proposing here, but it is the only agenda to have if you are going to continue along your chosen path. Indeed it is your responsibility to reshape the way the world is experienced through each encounter with your work. The viewer leaving your work has the potential to go back out into the world with new information, new perceptions, new ideas, and by extension a transformed worldview. And hopefully you too will find out something about the world through your own work and feed that back into the world through your own subjectivities. If we are to ensure that our work actually thrives in the world, then we need to be prepared to have a much broader conversation, a conversation that embraces the larger world that we live in, not just the marketplace of the art world.

    In the past we in the art community have sometimes paid a heavy price for ignoring that larger world and living inside of an insulated aesthetic bubble that excluded the larger social community. The so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s was a moment in which the art world and the larger social world found themselves on opposite ends of a great divide, viewing each other with mutual hostility and animosity. Opportunistic politicians exploited these tensions. It didn’t have to be that way, and we can’t afford to let it be that way now. Some of you will be leaving here to return to the communities you left two years ago. Others will be continuing on to become part of new and different communities. Wherever you are going I encourage you to return to those communities not only as artists, but as citizens. I am not asking you to be a social worker, but to consider what it means to be an artist in the fullest sense and how your presence in those communities can be part of a meaningful and necessary dialogue that can both enliven the civic conversation and provide opportunities for your work to embed itself in the social fabric.

    Hopefully while you’ve been here these past two years you have also formed a community of support with each other. Contrary to what some might think, no one gets there—wherever there is--on their own; there is no lone genius who makes a solitary breakthrough without a supportive and sometimes challenging community of peers with whom to engage in an ongoing critical conversation. Each of you have that opportunity to encourage and to sustain each other. Embrace it. There is room for more than one person at a time at the table of opportunity.

    Speaking of opportunities, it is clear that the current economic climate demands that some of the opportunities you are seeking are going to have to be ones that you yourselves create—not only for yourself, but indeed for each other. Recently in Philadelphia I spent some time with Sarah Stolfa, who came out of the graduate photography program here just two years ago. Along with another recent MFA graduate from Syracuse University she started the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, an exhibition space that also provides rental digital facilities for area photographers as well as classes and workshops for others. These two artists have not only created positions for themselves, but have created a much- needed resource for other photo-based artists in that city. I did a benefit book signing for them while I was there and look forward to returning at some point to continue supporting their efforts. Think about what you can do to build and sustain community with each other where you are. It is going to be an increasing necessity, one that you should welcome. So much of my career has been possible only through relationships that span many years, relationships in which I have applauded and sustained the work of others even as they have supported me. And it can be this way for you as well.

    I would encourage you to maintain your relationship with this institution as well and make it a part of your community of support. It may have felt at times like they were giving you a serious beat down up in here, but in reality you have been challenged these past two years as a way of preparing you to continue to challenge yourself over the life of your careers as artists. When people ask me what I most remember about my time here I tell them that this School exemplifies a strong work ethic. I believe that as artists we think by making things. The more things one makes the more you are able to work through the challenges of giving coherent and interesting form to your ideas. That rigor and that work ethic will serve you well as you continue on your path as artists. I know it has served me well. I couldn’t stop making work even if I wanted to. I’m afraid Tod Papageorge would belatedly decide to retroactively kick me out of the program. And so I keep working.

    Yes, you will each have your School of Art war stories to tell; stories about how you were ripped to shreds during a particularly brutal crit. But it will make sense when you hit a rough spot, as we all do, or when you are in your studio thinking of tossing in the towel perhaps, and you hear and feel that nagging internal voice pushing you to keep going and to figure it out one more time. You will hopefully realize then why you were pushed so hard. There is no quick or clever hustle that will sustain you, no one you can meet whose connections will allow you to not have to put in the long hours producing something of substance.

    So, being an artist is a profound act of faith. I hope that each of you will keep that faith as you go forward, finding your own way to reshape the world around you and to continue to affirm that the work we do as artists can and does matter. It’s up to you to make it so, and I know that you will.

    Thank you."

    (Yale School of Art graphic © Paul Rand)

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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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