Accelerate: Access & Inclusion at The Tang Teaching Museum No.1

Jamal Cyrus (born 1973), Untitled (Threads), 2016 Wax, ink on canvas, 31 ¹⁄₄ � 24 ¹⁄₄ in.

Purchased with funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.4.2

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Accelerate # 1 2017

Published in 2017 by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at The Tang Teaching Museum is a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Skidmore College 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 518 580 8080 www.skidmore.edu/tang © 2017 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College All artwork is copyright the artists.

All interviews and recorded conversations have been condensed and edited. Original transcripts are available to researchers at The Tang Museum.

Editors Ian Berry, Dayton Director Rebecca McNamara, Mellon Collections Curator Design Linked by Air Photographers Arthur Evans Shawn LaChapelle Jeremy Lawson Raymond Stockwell Printer Shapco Cover image Kamau Amu Patton performing at the two-day Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow performance festival organized in collaboration with Adam Tinkle, Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Documentary Studies at Skidmore College.

Inside cover images Details from Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (established 1981), I See the Promised Land (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), 1998, matte acrylic, pencil, and book pages on canvas, 62 ¹⁄₄ x 46 ¹⁄₈ in., Gift of the artists, 2011.7

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Move Up

Move In

Move Out

Ian Berry Dayton Director We are living in turbulent times. Increasing destabilization, violence, and fear amid a simmering unease around issues of mistranslation and distrust is pervasive in many forms. Our task is to ignite a collective sense of intellectual curiosity and thoughtful engagement through deeper understandings of compelling issues. Creative propositions have the potential to spark radical transformations. How can the activities of the museum and use of its collection in particular help aid in this charge? How can we move up to realize new ways to provoke change through education and dialogue?

Catalyzed by a partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at The Tang Teaching Museum is an ambitious three-year project at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College to engage these questions in unique forms throughout the museum’s program. This publication serves as a document of our first year and a point of dissemination—a hopeful catalyst for others to join us as we utilize the museum as a laboratory for exchange and experimentation.

This year we inaugurated the Accelerator conversation series, addressing issues such as whiteness and migration, diving deep into action plans.

Organized by the Tang’s Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier, the series continues as an open and inclusive public forum featuring key cultural influencers from arts and culture as well as academia, entertainment, government, journalism, and beyond who present new perspectives and disrupt the status quo by encouraging a “getting comfortable with discomfort” attitude in order to think and work through big ideas to drive change.

Our growing collection is the spark for many of the Accelerate program’s activities, and new acquisitions were key to our first year. You will read about how a gift of Sun Ra archives formed part of the syllabus of a new course and prompted new writing by students and faculty and a two-day performance festival that brought uncommon artists together to perform and respond to this avant-garde free-jazz innovator. Artworks by Willie Cole, Yinka Shonibare, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Hassan Hajjaj, Mickalene Thomas, and Zanele Muholi, to name just a few, inspired conservation research, oral history recordings, experimental class responses, and

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innovative exhibitions. Extensive collections of work by Joachim Schmid and Corita Kent fueled collaborative research projects from faculty and students, which are included here, along with entries from a wide range of writers on collection highlights. As a whole, this publication offers just a taste of the museum’s diverse programming and collections, but reflects our dedication to critical thought and inquiry around urgent conversations on our campus.

Thanks to Michele Dunkerley ’80 for her sustaining support of our dialogue series and to Peter Norton, Jack Shear, Eileen Harris Norton, Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, Ruth and William S. Ehrlich, Joel and Zoe Dictrow, Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, Terri Kapsalis and John Corbett, Harry Hambly, and the Estate of Terry Adkins for their important gifts of art. Special thanks to Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara. She arrived at the Tang less than a year ago to help direct the activities of this ambitious new program. Rebecca immediately jumped in and helped form the program’s activities in important ways and has edited this volume with great savvy and skill.

Discovery and change happens in community with others as knowledge and experience spreads.

We are grateful to the artists, faculty, students, supporters, Tang staff, and local community that participated in this first year of action and exploration that has propelled us to move up in our goals, to set the bar of access and inclusion higher, and to support innovation and individual growth with gusto.

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Zanele Muholi HeVi, Oslo, 2016

I solde Brielmaier Curator-at-Large Portraiture, at its very core, is about capturing the likeness of an individual. For photographer Zanele Muholi, the genre has provided a tool with which to create lasting imagery of the black queer community in South Africa, to firmly establish her subjects’ visibility and presence among us. And what enables Muholi to extend her portrait photography into a realm that boldly posits the contention between strategy and spectacle is the artist’s ability to underscore in both overt and subtle ways the range of feminine and masculine qualities and physical attributes that are played out within a single image—and by extension within us as viewers.

How do we recognize who is before us? What of our own ideas, experiences, and misconceptions do we map onto an image? And in what ways, time and again, do the people pictured resist our seemingly innate desire to name them?

Scholar bell hooks has noted that the “oppositional gaze” can be seen as a site of resistance for colonized black people globally.1 Muholi’s sitters—and sometimes the artist in her own self-portraits—look directly at us, unflinching and grounded in who they are. Accordingly, hooks’s assertion that there are layers of power relations embedded within the act of looking highlights the ways in which this act is reflexive: it works both for the looker and those who are looked upon. It is in this context that Muholi’s work HeVi, Oslo must be read. In this black-and-white image, the artist presents herself in a full-frontal, partially revealed nude pose, her eyes directly engaging the viewer.

Muholi is situated in an outdoor setting, her curly Afro blending in with both the color of the foliage and the bending curves of the leaves behind her.

Similar to the ways in which Muholi’s photographs

of others work to acknowledge and subvert the traditional gaze of portraiture by using the genre to disrupt and complicate the visual identity of black South Africans, the artist’s self-portraiture is equally considered, composed, and psychologically probing. Muholi is both present and absent; she is visible and yet blends or fades into the background of the image. She invites us to pause and take in the entire scene from foreground to background, from left to right, while the artist keeps a watchful eye.

Perhaps this is a metaphor for Muholi and her South African black queer community’s very existence— one that is both seen and unseen—and for the ways in which she draws from her practice in an effort to solidify its existence and generate meaningful and undeniable acts of insertion into the world.

1 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: Sound End Press, 1992), 116.

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Zanele Muholi (born 1972), HeVi, Oslo, 2016 Gelatin silver print, 39 ¹⁄₂ � 29 ³/₄ in.

Purchased with funding from Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, 2016.30.2

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Paula Wilson Data Unloaded 2008

Ian Berry Dayton Director Paula Wilson lives and works in Carrizozo, New Mexico. Working in a desert town with a population of 900 outside of urban art centers has allowed her space and time to explore deeply interconnected synergies between art and life. Her artwork is a hybrid, pattern-filled mosaic of materials and imagery that mixes biography and body with fashion and technology—equal parts grounded craft and visionary thinking. She is a feminist multicultural maker experimenting with new ways to realize her artwork from how it is developed in collaboration with others to how it is physically deployed in spaces.

In 2008, Wilson and her partner, Mike Lagg, started MoMA ZOZO, a unique artist-in-residence series/ gallery/studio/community gathering space that is fast becoming a hub of creativity in their small town.

I asked Paula if she could recall making Data Unloaded in that same year, and she offered this memory of the time and its sources:

Data Unloaded is a stand-alone piece. I made it on the kitchen table of David Humphrey & Jennifer Coates’s apartment where I was staying while I worked for Kara Walker one summer. I had begun my move to New Mexico but returned for the opportunity to assist Ms. Walker on her second puppet video. Without a studio, the space of this paper became my minute visual playground.

I’d recently bought this used book, Embroidered Gardens by Thomasina Beck (1979), which relates the history of gardens to the needlework that existed simultaneously. I was fascinated by how distant our modern concept of a garden is from its medieval and Elizabethan origins—thinking about containment, patterns, symbolism, and planning . . . relating woven stitches to pixels . . . women’s work, wanting to exult and bust out!

Looking at Data Unloaded I think of Wilson’s life now in New Mexico and how this collage/painting looks and feels like a diagram of that life she was about to embark on. I asked Paula how this work, almost ten years later, looks to her now. How does it fit within her evolving whole-life practice—does it feel like she somehow manifest MoMA ZOZO with a work like this? Is it a dream, or a road map of sorts?

She replied:

When I look at Data Unloaded today, I’m struck by the visualization of technological machinery—unfurling pixels that unleash a pattern deviating from order.

I like the idea of a road map, as you put it. Depicting a freedom of expression with ones and zeros that don’t often get to be something fun and unexpected. My current life in Carrizozo feels possible because of the connective threads of the Internet. It feels like I live in a you-create-your-own-reality zone. A Minecrafted space, if you will. It hadn’t occurred to me until you asked, but I find that Data Unloaded reflects the ethos that surrounds my life in New Mexico quite aptly.

When I woodblock printed the compact discs in Data Unloaded, MP3 players were becoming ubiquitous and the CD was destined to become obsolete.

In New Mexico one farmer hung CDs from fruit trees to deter the birds. The light bounced off the discs, spinning. CDs had transformed from cutting-edge technology to decorations or light reflectors to detract birds.

Art is the vehicle to show how speed, loss, and our senses get altered over time.

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Paula Wilson (born 1975), Data Unloaded, 2008 Collage, watercolor, colored pencil on paper, 39 ³⁄₈ � 26 in.

Gift of Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer

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Amber N. Wiley

Wiley’s students were assigned to study and write about one of nine artworks she chose from the Tang collection. Her students’ writing on Carrie Mae Weems’s Run Nigger Run (from Sea Islands Series) is on pages 76–77.

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In spring 2017, I taught a longstanding Skidmore course—“African American Experience”—and, for the first time, created an assignment that centralized art as a cultural product that can help us better understand that elusive topic. The African American experience is neither univocal nor monolithic, but the purpose of the course is to provide an understanding of the role African Americans have played in the history of the nation from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Obama’s “post-racial” America. This includes African American contributions to, and exclusions from, various aspects of democratic American society. We engage in pluralistic discourse throughout the semester, learning from many sources and analyzing individual voices. The course, not meant to be a comprehensive history of African Americans, pays particular attention to migrations of African Americans within and outside of the United States. This consideration illustrates how industry, war, social segregation, international diplomacy, and family ties helped shape the relationship between rural and urban African American experiences. As part of the American studies department, the course is innately interdisciplinary and open to new methodologies. I incorporate texts and theories from art history, English, ethnomusicology, geography, critical race theory, and urban planning. Readings are coupled with film, music, poetry, personal narratives, and, of course, art.

One of my goals in engaging the Tang with my course has been to guide my students to gain some ability to speak about art in ways that maybe they weren’t comfortable with before. I chose nine pieces from the Tang collection that offer an array of artistic styles, content, messages, and time periods. Even though we are incorporating artwork into the curriculum, we’re not acting as knowledgeable critics talking about the evolution of a style or formal qualities.

Art has the power to create a dialogue with personal experiences on a day-to-day basis. I looked at the Tang collection and asked, What will speak to my students?

What will create a dialogue between them? This course is about the African American experience, but I can use art as a means of expressing what it means to be African American in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all the while staying within the critical lenses of postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and other topics we discuss in class. The Tang collection serves as a gateway to create coursework that not only helps develop students’ visual literacy and ability to talk about art as a cultural product, but also teaches them to own the experience of seeing, reading, reacting to, and researching art as an expression of a specific topic.

The students’ final project was to analyze an artwork from the Tang collection after they had the opportunity to see all nine works in person at the museum as well as discuss their reactions and share thoughts and ideas in the classroom. At first I was a bit apprehensive about the assignment and how well my students—none of whom were art history majors—would be able to complete it. But with significant time to access, reflect on, discuss, and, importantly, research the work, my students produced final papers that were at once personal, academically rigorous, nuanced, and honest. There was no pretense as to what the art means or how it should be approached. They simply understood it on its, and their, own terms, with the information they learned in class as well as the information they gleaned from popular and scholarly sources. Their dedication to this research and the conclusions that they drew from the process of analyzing the artworks is a reflection of the richness of their own academic interests and the way that students from outside the traditional art historical paradigm can come to understand the storytelling power of artistic expression.

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Amber N. Wiley, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Skidmore College, received her PhD in American studies from George Washington University.

She specializes in architectural history, urban history, and African American cultural studies. Her research interests are centered on the social aspects of design and how it affects urban communities—architecture as a literal and figural structure of power.

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Carrie Mae Weems When and Where I Enter the British Museum, 2006

Amber N. Wiley Assistant Professor of American Studies As an academic, as a woman who studies art history and architectural history, as a scholar, as a black woman: those worlds collided when I saw Carrie Mae Weems’s When and Where I Enter the British Museum. It derailed me, and I had to take a moment to reflect on why this image spoke to me so strongly.

I visited the British Museum four years ago.

It’s a treasure trove of history. I saw Assyrian lions that guarded the gates of ancient cities that no longer exist. I saw busts of pharaohs, Roman replicas of Greek originals. I saw the Elgin Marbles. I sat in front of the Rosetta Stone for a very long time thinking about how we decoded hieroglyphics. And while I was looking at this history of the world and feeling so blessed and happy that I had the opportunity to do so, I started to feel this slight contradiction. Why were the Elgin Marbles in London?

It started to feel like the British Museum was more of a monument to British imperialism.

I was feeling this weight on me like I should not be enjoying all of these things. All of these things should not be here. Why are they here? Why aren’t they in their home countries? What was the situation when the British Museum acquired these pieces? Were they “stolen”? Were they acquired during a time when the British were ruling over a particular territory? If we’re thinking about

ourselves living in a postcolonial moment, I’m wondering, what does that mean? Should we be doing repatriation of these works back to the places where they came from? Should the Rosetta Stone be here? Should it be repatriated back to where it was found? Or does the Egyptian government not have the resources? And does the British Crown owe anything to these countries?

When I saw When and Where I Enter the British Museum and then I thought about the title, it brought so many of those memories back, and it made me question what my position was within this institution, and what that meant as a woman, as a black woman, as an American. Because the title is saying, “When and Where I,” not “When and Where You,” or not “When and Where We Enter the British Museum,” it is instantly personal. Yet still it’s accessible for someone like me. I can connect to that.

I felt like she hit the nail on the head when thinking about your own position, or my own position, within this larger institution.

The poetics of the image in a formal way are really important—how she situates herself in the frame, how she directs our eyes. We see Carrie Mae Weems as the silhouette against all the other action in the image. We have this deep portion of the pavement that leads us, that gives us this sense of

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Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953), When and Where I Enter the British Museum, 2006 Digital print, 29 ¹⁄₂ � 19 ⁵⁄₈ in.

Gift of Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer

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In March 2017, Amber N. Wiley, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Skidmore College, recorded a personal reflection of her experience first seeing Carrie Mae Weems’s When and Where I Enter the British Museum.

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directionality into the entrance. But she is isolated.

Does she want to enter? Does she not want to enter?

Why does it feel like she’s questioning that decision?

There is ease with which everyone else around her is moving. I can feel a flow of movement there, but then a stillness within her. The frame propels us to want to move forward. But there’s something within her that is giving us pause. She’s giving us pause.

She’s contemplative of this relationship to this institution. She’s able to capture this nonchalance of everybody else in the piece, while she is having a serious study of this thing that she’s about to do.

There’s a momentum, a weight, an energy, to what’s about to happen, if she does decide to enter.

I appreciate Weems for giving us that space, for being okay to show that distance with the institution. It lets me know that I’m not alone in this kind of struggle with owning the institution, or owning the canon, or owning this art or design history as my own, as something that I can possess.

It’s relieving. It’s reassuring. It’s okay to not necessarily feel like this full history is for you or speaking to you in a direct way, and it’s okay to question the canon.

That is the kind of pause that I can take only with a greater understanding of the global history of architecture or the global history of art, a greater understanding of how colonialism and imperialism shaped our collections, our knowledge base, what we consider to be the best-of-the-best high art.

We have to be knowledgeable of that narrative. And the British Museum is definitely a purveyor of the Western canon. It perpetuates the notion of a dominant story just by its existence. Everything within it leads to this idea of an ancient civilization and a progression of history. It’s such a rich collection. You cannot deny it. To deny this collection would be to deny yourself the history that’s held in this building.

This image encapsulates part of the African American experience, trying to understand your place within these larger themes. This is an example of experiencing issues with institutions and power, this negotiating your identity with the established canon, with the things that you’re supposed to love and appreciate, but sometimes you have to do so at a distance.

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Silvia ForniAsafo Flags On March 29, 2017, Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum Curator of Anthropology in the Department of World Cultures, spoke to the Tang about a collection of Asafo flags that would be displayed in the exhibition If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day: Collections of Claude Simard.

On the History of Asafo Companies and Asafo Flags Asafo companies are the militias of the Fante states of Southern Ghana, and they are, and were in the past, the military arm of the state. In each state, which in many cases corresponds to a town or a village, there are between two and fourteen Asafo companies, territorial associations in charge of protecting a specific side and part of the state. In precolonial times, Asafo companies were protecting the state, going to warfare with enemies from other

states, and then during colonial and postcolonial times, they morphed into a protective association of a different type. They maintain a ritual function that is meant to keep the community safe from a spiritual point of view. They perform rituals to the city gods, participate in annual cleaning and cleansing ceremonies, take care of the cleanliness of the community, make sure that people don’t walk around the streets of the quarter drunk and that teens stay safe, and they stay involved in the community. They are old formations born of a specific military function that were able to transform with the changing of society and maintain their relevance.

The flags are their insignia. Asafo companies have a number of art forms that they produce and a number of ways in which they state their presence in the territory. There’s a visual language that is broader than Asafo flags and that is understandable across mediums. One can find concepts, aesthetic, symbols,

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ideas, iconography that are also found in gold weights, on drums, in the shrines, and in a number of other three-dimensional or two-dimensional art forms. The biggest and most stable forms of visibility for the Asafo companies are their shrines, called Posuban, which protect the gods of the company.

On ceremonial ritual occasions and festivals, the companies come out with their uniforms and flags, the most shifting and creative performative embodiment of Asafo power. The most important appearance of the flag is when it comes out with the Frankaatunyi, the flag dancer, and it’s performed during rituals. That whole part is really about dance, it’s about choreography, it’s about performance, and it’s about the connection of the flag with the body of the dancer—which is completely lost in the museum environment. Flags are sometimes hung or strung in towns, especially if a company has many flags, then they could decide to string lines across town and usually connect it to their shrine, and hang a number of flags there during the ritual days. That is a way to make a strong claim of importance and wealth and relevance in the urban environment.

Every company has a range of flags, and they choose what to display depending on the occasion and the message that they want to convey. Flags are usually messages of pride and boastfulness, whereby one company is communicating to the public, to other companies, to their enemies, to bystanders ways in which they consider themselves to be superior or to be important. Asafo companies can have between eight to sixty flags, depending on how many new flags have been introduced, how good they’ve been in continuing to maintain and reproduce older types of flags, and overall the wealth and size of the company. Every time a new captain is installed, they have to produce a flag, and they can choose whether or not they’re reproducing an old symbol and an old motif or creating a new motif. There are different types of flags that companies use. Some reference proverbs or sayings or symbols that have been historically associated with the companies. In other cases, there can be new ideas and new iconography that is introduced based on recent events or interests that the company has developed or specific roles that the company has assumed.

There are specificities of the format used by Asafo companies. There are some figures and ideas that are quite specific. There is usually a pointing figure that indicates what people should be paying attention to. Sometimes the pointing figure is a captain or is a leader, and one can recognize the leader of the Asafo company because usually he or she is wearing a whip at his or her wrist, and so that is a clear sign of leadership. The leader or another Asafo member is somehow indicating what the main

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Silvia Forni, PhD, is Curator of Anthropology in the Department of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is responsible for the permanent and rotating display of African artworks in the Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific. Among other projects, she curated Art, Honour, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana at ROM and is coauthoring a book on the same topic with Doran H. Ross. topic, what the main message, is on the Asafo flags.

And that’s not necessarily something that is found in other forms.

Flags convey a specific sense of identity, even though they’re much less formalized than the kind of flags we may be accustomed to in the West, whereby there’s no possibility of shifting interpretations. In Asafo flags, there is a greater level of variability, but there are certain things that are strictly codified, and if people use or misuse colors and symbols, it can be a source of great tension and sometimes conflict.

Asafo companies would challenge one another or find ways to upset other companies by intentionally manipulating the use of symbols and colors to create fights or to send very defiant messages to other companies.

There’s no Asafo flag that is created by chance.

The colors are always regulated and the symbols are always mandated by the company. The artist who produces the flag can shape the composition, but they would not be able to decide the color of the background, for example, or the iconography.

Each one of these examples at the Tang connects with a specific company history and a specific company

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iconography. However, the colors and the symbols change from town to town, from village to village. So what is tricky with Asafo flags is that unless you know where it has been collected, it’s very, very difficult to trace back a flag to a place. The red background in Cape Coast would clearly identify No. 1 company, Bentsir, but in Gomoa Dago, it would be No. 2 company, Tuafo, and in another town, it could be any other number of companies. The connection between colors and symbols is always site specific.

The earliest accounts that talk about flags and companies are from the late 1600s, early 1700s.

However, we really don’t know the way the flags looked then. These types of flags were probably in this format that developed increasingly under British colonial rule, probably in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. There are many similarities between this format and British colonial flags, in the sense that they had the British flag in canton, and then a narrative space in the mainframe of the flag.

Whether the British colonial flags were inspired by local flags or the other way around, I don’t think there is anybody that has assessed that for sure. There is definitely an intersection.

On Asafo Flags in the Market and in the Museum The meaning and the significance of the flag are in the context of use. When displayed in museums, one loses the embodied movement and performative aspect of the flag. The disconnect and loss of meaning happens before the museum, in the moment in which the flag enters the market, and it happens quite immediately because it’s very rare that dealers would collect specific field information about the flag, whether intentionally or not. Buying a flag can be a complicated deal. There are flags that are stolen, but there are many, many flags that are sold. How many people are involved in the sale of the flag and who reaps the benefit from the sale of the flag can be contentious issues. The same workshops are oftentimes producing for both markets, so it’s not easy to distinguish a flag that belonged to a company from a flag that was made for the market just by looking at the way the flag was made.

When it comes to African art there is a tendency to deny the market or to see the market as evil intervention that undermines the authenticity of the objects themselves. In this case, the market is what has sustained the savoir faire of the flag making.

It is what has made it possible for workshops to continue to specialize in flag making, and in certain cases to actually produce quite sophisticated and well-made objects because it becomes a sustainable activity. There are flag makers that make three flags a week, and so they become specialists.

I’ve heard and I’ve witnessed, specifically in Ghana, some people get quite upset by the thought that these flags are in Western museums. There is definitely, in certain cases, a claim of ownership and inappropriate positioning of these flags, and a strong reaction to the thought that these would be objects circulating in the market. I have heard people saying these objects should be repatriated. However, the counter to this is that when I was going around with my binders full of images of Asafo flags that had been taken out of Ghana, almost never was I able to identify specific sites of origin or find people that would say, “This is our flag,” or that would be able to reconnect and re-identify specific objects with specific locations.

In certain cases, there is a strong sentiment against the circulation of these objects that really connects to a deeper political sense of continuous expropriation and one-way direction of who gets to collect, who gets to buy the sources, who gets to take the people away. It’s a long history of expropriation that continues also through the art market.

There are very strong feelings against that, and some people would be quite opposed to this idea that flags would be exhibited in Western museums.

On the other hand, these objects are not necessarily protected by the law and it’s quite easy for people interested in acquiring these objects to export. It’s actually sometimes quite instrumental for the companies themselves to choose to sell the flag for specific company purposes. It’s a fraught and complicated scenario in which there have been thefts and expropriations of flags in ways that were unethical, but it’s not always that story. There are also stories that are legitimate transactions in which legitimate owners decide to sell their property because they need to re-roof the shrine, for example, or because they have other strategic things that they wish to accomplish, and they need cash, and they know that they can get cash for an old flag. To say that that is not a legitimate way of using one’s own property is complicated as well. There are much broader issues that are not so specific that anger people and create a lot of resentment for the fact that we can have these collections in the West.

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Whiteness & “Default Culture�

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The first of the Accelerator Series, a new series of conversations organized and moderated

by Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier, was held on March 23, 2017. The discussion questioned the concept of a “default culture” in a multicultural society, exploring issues of race in the United States.

Isolde Brielmaier Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, in a 2015 interview said, “We live in a society where default whiteness goes unremarked. No one ever asks for its passport.” What exactly is this whiteness that Diaz is speaking of? How might that relate to default culture or not?

Dara Silverman As a white person, I’m never asked to contextualize myself. Everyone’s expected to understand where I come from. The expectation is that I’m going to be treated with respect, that police officers and other officials will see me and will try to be helpful. A young

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what do we not get as a result of not embracing that culture? We don’t get all that wisdom, and all that understanding, and all that depth of how it is to live in harmony with the world, and with the earth, and with the gods as they represented them. What about all those other elements that we just miss out on because of an ancestry that many of us today feel very, very challenged in facing?

black man was arrested in front of my office in Beacon, New York, because he was trying to protect a younger black man who was being harassed by the cops. I was right there, too. I was saying everything that he was saying, but I was white, and nothing happened to me.

I didn’t get arrested.

As the Movement for Black Lives has grown, as the Immigrant Rights Movement has grown, what we’ve seen are more and more communities of color fighting more publicly and saying, “White isn’t the norm in our lives and in our experience.” For those of us who are white, it’s a question of how we start to see that the world that we see isn’t what everyone else is experiencing. It isn’t in fact what the majority of people in the United States are experiencing. What does that then mean every day when we’re walking around with this privileged lens of all the things that we can’t see?

Treva Lindsey What is most noticeable to me becomes power when I hear “whiteness”—the invisible and yet hyper-felt and hyper-visible ways in which that’s able to function.

Hearing things like, “She talks like a white girl; that means she’s educated”—being educated was read as “white.” It at once normalizes and valorizes whiteness or some kind of vernacular speech, but also demonizes African American vernacular speech, saying it is less valuable. In one fell swoop, you’re demonizing the spaces of blackness, valorizing whiteness, and reinstating power.

TL In the Movement for Black Lives I often hear about claiming black humanity. This, for me, is a failure of recognizing the inhumanity that Matthew’s talking about. We have to look at the dehumanization of whiteness and white people to think, What allows you to do such harm to a community? What allows you to participate in the genocide of indigenous people? What makes it possible for you to participate in the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, to establish Jim Crow, to not afford women’s rights, to not guarantee food security for people, to have all of these systems of marginalization that stem from notions of anti-blackness, anti-feminist, anti-queerness, anti-poorness. And that’s actually about the dehumanization of whiteness.

There is a cultural dominance that comes with this kind of weirdness of whiteness. And that is about dehumanization but not of people of color. I refuse to see that territory of being dehumanized or reclaiming my humanity as a project that’s for people of color and the oppressed. I don’t have to prove I’m a human being to you. And that’s nothing I think anyone should have to do. But as we examine and be self-reflective in these conversations around whiteness, we may have to look at the history of dehumanity and inhumanity that is very much part of the history of whiteness.

DS What does it mean to say, I’m going value my whiteness above the lives of people who will be killed by the policies that this government is going to be putting into place? And what do we benefit from when that happens?

There’s a disconnection between knowing people will die when they lose their health care and believing

IB When you talk about race, it usually, in most people’s minds, connotes black and brown people, African American, Latino, Asian, Chicano. How do we make that shift to put more of the spotlight on the idea of whiteness as a race?

Matthew Cooke When we talk about whiteness and think about default culture, I think about a dominant culture. And a culture that I’ve come to learn and understand committed a genocide against Native peoples here, which is not only a travesty obviously for them but for all of us because

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Matthew Cooke is a filmmaker, actor, director, producer, and editor of the Oscar-nominated documentary Deliver Us from Evil (2006).

Cooke is a recognized advocate for social justice and prison reform.

Treva Lindsey, PhD, is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Lindsey’s research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip-hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics.

She is a guest contributor to online forums such as Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, and HuffPost Live.

Dara Silverman is founding director of Showing Up for Racial Justice. Silverman is an organizer and trainer who has been building movements for economic, racial, gender, and social justice for over twenty years.

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people don’t deserve handouts. Where do we get that sense that government isn’t actually about supporting all of us to survive, particularly people who are struggling?

IB I hear a lot of people now saying, “Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe how divided things are.” Things have always been very divided from my perspective. And we have these really intense, heavy conversations; I’ve been having them all my life. But what are the takeaways?

What can you do?

MC We have to be inventive in each one of our talents, whatever that unique thing is that we’re bringing into the world. For myself as a filmmaker I can learn about the history of things outside of my tiny upbringing and have heroes that are outside what I call the “dominant culture.” And for me what that phrase does, it just makes me want to fight against it.

There’s lots that that can be drawn and grabbed and picked from to make people who would otherwise feel very fragile suddenly feel like a part of something, a part of a movement toward human rights. I want to learn, I want to listen, I want to incorporate that into my stories, into my filmmaking. If we don’t do anything, if we just sit around and shake our heads, we’re never going to make the progress that we need to—which must be radical.

DS I think there are two parts. One is interpersonal. And part of that is turning to the people around you and being in conversation with them. There can be a real desire to only be with people who agree with you, and I would encourage all of us to be in conversation and engage those who are near us. Even if they mess up and don’t have the right language, not to focus on the words but to ask, What is it that they’re trying to get across? And how can I be in this with these white people who are around me?

The other piece is really structural. We’re in what can we call “the moment of the whirlwind” where

hundreds of thousands of people are emerging and wanting to take action. We need to do really boring things like go to the democratic town meeting. We need to do both at once and to do that all of us need to be organizers.

TL Everybody has things that they are uniquely gifted at.

One of the first times I went to Ferguson after the Ferguson uprising and the killing of Michael Brown, one of the people I remember most was this woman in the community who cooked us food. Everybody knew who this woman was because she could just cook. That was her moment in the movement. She could sustain us. Not all of us are going to be out in the street, and not all of us are going to be crowding jails; not all of us are going to be writing books or making films, but there are so many ways for us to be impassioned about something and to act.

Listen to marginalized folks. Really listen, don’t just hear; listen to marginalized folks. So many other things that we’re talking about institutionally that we need to build are what marginalized folks have had to build when things have fallen. People on the margins have always created things to sustain ourselves when we knew dominant powers, default culture, would not provide those things. Look at models that already exist from people who’ve always had to create freedom dreams when the nightmare is right at their door. Too many of us waited until the nightmare was at our door before we got concerned and motivated. As much as I’m inspired by the hundreds of people at town halls, I’m wondering, when I was in Ferguson, at every Black Lives Matter march I went to, at rallies I’ve gone to for transwomen being murdered, where is everybody?

Where have we been? Did it need to be you for you to have to feel the thing? I know for a lot of people that’s just the reality, that it has to affect you.

DS I think part of the work for white people is how we take action and take accountability through taking action and keep showing up and doing the work. We’re going to make mistakes because we can’t see all the things

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that are there. That consistency and continuing to show up is a part of the work.

MC Context is everything and if we don’t have history, we have nothing. History—especially the truth and one that challenges the mainstream or the corporate culture that has an agenda, which is to continue things the way they are—is vital.

Audience When we talk about white people showing up, how do we challenge white supremacy without centering whiteness or recentering whiteness?

DS By naming race, we’re not centering whiteness; white supremacy has already done that. For us to be talking about race and deconstructing it but also naming our own complicity in it, both the benefits that we get individually and the system that’s set up, we’re actually pulling some of the veils back to make it more apparent.

Be in accountable relationships with people of color and ask, “Hey, what could be most helpful in this situation?” People will tell you if you ask them.

front of your face. And maybe at first, it’s with shaking hands and it’s not with the right words. So what? What a beautiful human moment. And then you try it again, and the next time, you’re more comfortable with it. You might get checked here and there but it’s so worth it.

TL Use the privilege of being able to take up space. The privilege ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. What can you do to use that to be an interrupter of the kinds of violence that are impacting marginalized communities?

Because even if it doesn’t work in that exact moment, that person needs to know that somebody cares, and that they weren’t rendered not only violated but invisible in that moment.

Imagine that every day, marginalized people wake up marginalized people. So every day when you wake up with whiteness and the privilege of class, or heterosexuality, or whatever normativity, use that to challenge, so that we get closer to a world in which that privilege doesn’t have that kind of power and no longer is a privilege but it’s just who we are.

IB It’s challenging, this idea of intervening within a space without taking it over.

DS I think there’s importance in taking risks. Sometimes we can get so caught up in, “Is it the right thing to say?

Am I going to be taking up too much space?” There are calls for men to do anti-sexist work. Generally when men start doing that they’re going to take up space. But it’s also so rare to have a man who will talk about sexism that sometimes we’ll think, “Oh, thank God. Some guy said that, and I didn’t have to say it.”

TL Let’s start from the place of agreeing white supremacy exists, so what are we going to do? And how uncomfortable are we willing to be and how are we willing to diminish our own proximity to power? You have to put this in a position of saying, “I see your humanity and you need to see your inhumanity,” and you need to stand in for that undocumented person who can’t be there.

MC Right now you might be in a space where, if you started talking about a certain issue, there might be a couple other people here who you seem to be taking up space for, but there are so many other situations in which you will be alone out there and you will find yourself not amid the people who can speak up for themselves at all.

You’ll be at an immigration checkpoint or you’ll be somewhere where someone’s getting arrested right in

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Caridad Svich

On October 6, 2016, playwright Caridad Svich presented an essay about Johannes VanDerBeek’s Ruins from the Tang collection.

Following her talk, Skidmore students performed in front of the artwork excerpts of her play The Orphan Sea (which was having its multilingual premier at Skidmore’s Black Box Theater, directed by Skidmore professor Eunice S. Ferreira).

I’d like to begin with a story, maybe even a parable of sorts. I have started to think about love and politics, and how at a time where militant sectarian violence appears to have overturned world order alongside the simultaneous rise of neoliberal economics as a new kind of “faith,” finding love among the ruins of civilization may be the only chance we have to progress as societies.

Now, to wit: I am not talking about a free and easy love, but one that asks all of us to bear witness to suffering, and to then move through it toward acts of communion, transcendence, and a direct appeal to selves that we do not recognize—namely, the self in love, the self that is ecstatically outside itself, the self that becomes selfless and at the same time a greater self (because of it)—one capable of seeing beyond the self and able to take in, or try to take in, the whole of humanity.

But I get ahead of myself here, because of course in neoliberal market-driven value systems, it is very hard to transcend the self; it is hard indeed to even see the rest of humanity.

These thoughts arise out of that which Ruins evokes through its materiality of impermanence. Here, Johannes VanDerBeek posits, are the scraps of rubbed-out, frayed, buried, photographed images from Life, Time, National Geographic, and other magazines, embedded in the ruins of a past held together, cobbled together, with wood and glue. Here are the lives of humans and nature, and humans in nature that remain after years—slivers of images arrested by time, pulling at memory’s tide. Crude and ephemeral, our lives and the record of our lives will be seen one day as merely this: ruins.

Look here. This was once Western democracy.

Perhaps someone will say.

Look how life was lived then. What can you imagine from this assemblage?

What images remain on the retina after the specter of Ruins falls away, and in turn, also becomes ruin, a hollow shape made of ephemera from the past?

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In weakness, there is strength. In fragility, there is hope.

From the small scraps of these memory pieces, one might begin to apprehend not only a sense of one’s own fragility and mortality, but also the necessity to register and take stock of the small things before they, too, approach the vanishing point.

Pages 25, 26: Details from Johannes VanDerBeek (born 1982), Ruins, 2007 Life, Time, and National Geographic magazines, wood, glue 113 � 200 in.

Gift of Stefan Simchowitz, 2012.16.11

And this gets me to thinking about politics and words like “hope,” which are bandied about in callow and ideologically persuasive ways.

Hope is a difficult word. Its weight is immense. And yet it is only one syllable.

Hope. We hold it on our tongues for a moment and it is gone. We hold it in our bodies for a moment and trust our bodies will remember to carry on.

But hope is hard-won. Even among the ruins. Because it asks us to put some faith in and register the small things.

Now, what do I mean by this?

Shall we make a list?

Sometimes lists help. They can be another assemblage of life.

1 How do I regard someone else? Is there love? Is there generosity?

Is there contempt?

2 Who do I see when I walk down the street? With whom do I think I have an affinity or possible affinity and why? Who gets excluded in this act of seeing and why?

3 There’s a gentleman who cleans the sidewalk every day. Every morning.

At precisely the same hour. In all weather. How long has he had this job?

Does he have a family? Is he alone? How does he get by? And what happens if one day this job, which may be his only job, ends?

4 At the far end of the street there is a garden. It is a purposefully unruly garden. But there is art there. In nature. And the humans, too, that tend to this garden.

5 History is often told about the big things. Books are filled with epic stories. But history is, too, about the person that lived on that street once and how they conducted their life, irrespective of who had power.

6 Power is not out there, but within us. We often choose to forget this.

7 A dog remembers smells. A dog will return to the smell of someone that cared for it.

8 I lie awake at night and think about—not the weather, as some song goes—but about how the world often feels in a mad rush to nowhere, because there is so much forgetting or because the demands of the marketplace exhaust our capacity for tolerance and forgiveness.

9 There are random acts of kindness everywhere, but it seems perhaps more so in cities, where the brunt of incivility is more profound.

10 Even on wretched days, there is light or its possibility, unless the grand human conspiracy to savage the ecosystem outruns us all.

What would a politics of hope look like if this, by no means exhaustive, list of small things was taken into account?

What ruins would be left us then?

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Caridad Svich is a playwright whose English and Spanish works have been performed at venues across the United States, as well as in Chile, Germany, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.

She has edited several books on theater and sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico García Lorca as well as other writers.

She received a 2012 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement in theater, among other notable awards.

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Sun Ra Archive 1960s–1970s

John Corbett Writer, Curator, and Collector Alton Abraham (1927–1999) was Sun Ra’s manager and main supporter in the 1950s and well into the 1960s. He helped build the Arkestra, arranged rehearsals and concerts in Chicago, publicized the band, produced their earliest recordings, cofounded Saturn Records, and, by 1952, had encouraged Ra to legally change his name from Herman Poole Blount to Le Sony’r Ra. One of the first black X-ray technicians in Illinois, Abraham was both a scientist and a mystic—he and his associate James Bryant were avidly interested in alien abduction and other UFO studies. (Bryant, like Ra, identified as having been visited by extraterrestrials.) Theirs was a small, ripe group of occult specialists, with Ra at the helm.

When Sun Ra passed away—an event in 1993 that his enthusiasts often refer to as “departure day,” bookending his “earth arrival day” 79 years earlier—I wrote a piece commemorating him in DownBeat. Abraham saw it and called me, which was a delightful surprise, and over the course of the next six years we met a few times and spoke frequently on the phone. When I heard Abraham died in 1999, I considered the material he had shown me, which constituted some essential documents and a few extra-special items of Saturn Records ephemera, as well as the huge cache that he’d mentioned having. Figuring that the stuff would be safeguarded by someone in his family or by Bryant, I did not pursue it—until a year later, when by coincidence I heard that the contents of Abraham’s house were being thrown away.

At that point, through a wild and circuitous series of events, my wife, Terri Kapsalis, and I bought the contents of the house, managing to save this important material just as it was being walked in bags to the front curb. We filled a twelve-foot cubic space of Sun Ra–related material at a storage facility, where we worked diligently for several

years, sorting, arranging, archiving, discarding, and assessing all manner of Saturnalia and Ra-o-philia.

There were incredibly important finds, like the previously unknown early writings from which Ra gave street-corner sermons in the mid-1950s and the original artwork for many of the early Saturn releases, as well as gas bills, candy wrappers, and all the other kinds of things that one would expect to find in a home salvage operation. When all was said and done, there were more than 400 audio tapes as well as nearly 100 boxes worth of papers, photographs, books, artworks, instruments, and other items deemed worthy of keeping.

In 2007, wanting to keep these materials close to their point-of-origin in Chicago, we donated the bulk of them to the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago and donated the audiotapes to the Chicago-based Experimental Sound Studio Creative Audio Archive. The idea in both cases was to make them accessible to scholars, artists, and other interested parties. Thus far, multiple artistic projects and at least one major scholarly study, Paul Youngquist’s A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, have come from the Alton Abraham archives. They were also the source of an exhibition that Terri and I curated together with Anthony Elms, which took place at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2006 and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Durham Art Guild, North Carolina, in 2010.

Along with these materials were additional ones that we had in multiple, many of them exceedingly precious uncut copies of printed sheets used to make record covers, often referred to as “tip on” sheets. In 2016, Terri and I gifted a complete set of them to the Tang Teaching Museum, where we hope they will continue to spread inspiration and fascination with all things Ra, leading viewers to what he called “art forms of dimensions tomorrow.”

Background to foreground: Artist Unknown, Sound Sun Pleasure!!, c. 1970 Offset print mounted on cardboard, 12 ¹⁄₂ � 12 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of John Corbett & Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.43 Artist Unknown, The Soul Vibrations of Man, c. 1976 Offset print, 13 ¹⁄₂ � 13 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of John Corbett & Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.8 Artist Unknown, Discipline 27-II, 1972 Offset print, 17 ¹⁄₈ � 22 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of John Corbett & Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.4 Artist Unknown, Super-Sonic Jazz, c. 1962 Offset print, 14 � 14 in.

Gift of John Corbett & Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.2

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Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow 30

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Adam Tinkle on Working with the Sun Ra Archive

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Late in 2016, in an informal chat with Dayton Director Ian Berry, I described a new course I was designing for the following semester, “Black Studies, Sound, and Technology.” Noting the centrality, in my conception of these three intersecting topics, of Sun Ra (1914–1993), the legendary composer, bandleader, keyboardist, poet, and philosopher widely credited for inaugurating Afrofuturism, I expressed an interest in connecting the course to the museum, as I have done, in smaller or larger ways, with most of my courses at Skidmore. Little could I imagine that, in scarcely a month, I would be in Chicago with Ian and his longtime art-world friend John Corbett, a central figure in writing about and preserving Ra’s legacy and archive, sitting at a table piled with material from that archive, which Corbett and his wife, Terri Kapsalis, ultimately gifted to the museum.

In the week before the spring 2017 semester started, when it became clear that my students would be able to work with this stunning trove of Sun Ra material, I overhauled my syllabus to place it at the heart of the course. As the semester progressed, the project grew in scope into a three-part curatorial endeavor. First, working with my students, we collaboratively selected material from the Sun Ra archive for an exhibition, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow: Sound, Black Study, and the Multidisciplinary Artist. Students individually wrote short catalog essays about many of the pieces, drawing on theoretical, historical, and analytical perspectives from the course. Most centrally and most satisfyingly, the exhibition became the occasion for placing contemporary artists in conversation with Ra’s legacy—with the Tang, I organized a two-day music festival featuring five multidisciplinary artists. And, as an additional entrée for the public to experience Ra’s music and the museum’s recent acquisitions of his ephemera, I was soon also curating a Sun Ra “mixtape” for the museum’s Elevator Music series, which bridged his better-known Arkestra work with some lesser-known contributions as poet, teacher, and sonic experimentalist. Working into the summer to dub student-created radio broadcasts onto cassette tapes for a second phase of this elevator exhibition, I found that the project’s resonance and interest for me far exceeded even the ambitious classroom experience it began as: it offered me an opportunity to connect my interests as a scholar to the broad public audience provided through the museum.

Though Ra’s influence on a now-ubiquitous Afrofuturist aesthetic and on the musical underground are well understood, I chose to focus my curatorial choices on two underappreciated facets of Ra’s work: its multidisciplinary blending of varied media and its articulation of the study of black life in a newly imaginative, critical, and personal mode.

This meant placing the Ra archives in dialogue with contemporary works from the museum’s collection by Terry Adkins, Outtara Watts, and Tim Rollins & K.O.S. in Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. These works interlinked with one another and with the Sun Ra archive because they all pay tribute to icons of sonic blackness associated with the same era in which Ra came to fame: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (in Rollins/ K.O.S. and Adkins) and Jimi Hendrix (in Watts and Adkins). Hendrix brought to mainstream popular culture the electricity, noise, and dissonance that Ra had practiced underground; the revered civil rights work of Dr. King also comes to us first and foremost as sound. King’s words are archived as oratory, his martyred memory bound up not only with a dream, but with a speech act that conjures and projects that dream. If Hendrix bent the musical legacy of the blues guitar to new modes of subjectivity and liberation, King brought the oratorical

Artist Unknown Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, c. 1970 Offset print, 14 � 14 in.

Gift of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.12 Detail, Artist Unknown Universe in Blue, 1972 Offset print, 14 ¹⁄₈ � 26 in.

Gift of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, 2017.6.38

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a two-night festival of contemporary performance . . . honored Ra’s boundless intermedia practice and emphasized multidisciplinarity while centering sound and music

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tradition of the black church into a new form of politics. Like Sun Ra’s album covers, these contemporary artworks all place visual abstraction in the service of an urgent injunction: to listen to the black past and hear it anew.

In the spirit of these artworks, and of Ra’s constant focus on the future, the project could not be just an exercise in celebrating the past.

Thus, a two-night festival of contemporary performance—by Kamau Amu Patton, Ephraim Asili, Chris Corsano, Joe McPhee, and Matana Roberts—honored Ra’s boundless intermedia practice and emphasized multidisciplinarity while centering sound and music: we heard filmmaker Asili spin records and musician McPhee recite his poems; we saw saxophones scream (McPhee and Roberts) and witnessed the raising of the archival voices of the dead from tabletops strewn with electronics (Roberts and Patton). Documentary video (Roberts and Asili) conjured the erasures and breakages of Afro-diasporic memory, while live soundtracks to those images sought to bring to our hearing those histories of a new, bold experimentalism. Deft musical dialogues between McPhee and Corsano suggested the ongoing relevance of the telepathic, energetic approach to acoustic improvisation that was central to Ra’s music, while the transportive waves of Patton’s homebuilt synthesizers suggested Ra’s promise of “space music” as a more widely accessible form of space travel.

In a fresh programming innovation, all five artists came together for an audio-recorded wide-ranging dialogue, a “hang” that ought to be a part of every festival. Each artist brought a vast well of knowledge and first-person experience of Sun Ra’s work (Asili even brought a few ultra-rare LPs), and their collective opinion and expertise on the subject took the conversation to places covered in none of the scholarly literature. Guest artists also engaged with classes, conversing about their work and ideas in settings enhanced by the museum’s concurrent installations. In one dialogue, my “Community and Radio” class and Berry’s “Inside the Museum” class—presumably strange bedfellows— met together with Asili and Patton. These two artists, active across these very different contexts for the display of their work, brilliantly connected these topics. One key insight from Patton: “Every museum should have a radio station.”

A key takeaway from the projects revealed itself when I spoke with Patton about his performance’s incorporation of archival audio of a Malcolm X speech (just as Terry Adkins’s Flumen Orationis uses audio of Dr. King): with the 1960s in the commemorative rearview, contemporary artists now find themselves increasingly in a position to use the 1960s’ black radical tradition—including Sun Ra’s work—the same way that Ra used ancient Egypt: as an unjustly underappreciated past that implies an alternate future.

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Adam Tinkle received his PhD from the University of California San Diego and is now Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Documentary Studies at Skidmore College. A multidisciplinary artist and scholar committed to the cross-pollination of these domains, he focuses on auditory culture and sonic art, with particular interests in sensory immersion, inclusive participation, and paths to transformation.

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ON RA

ADAM TINKLE EPHRAIM ASILI, CHRIS CORSANO, JOE MCPHEE, KAMAU AMU PATTON, MATANA ROBERTS 36

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In spring 2017, John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis gifted to the Tang a selection of album covers, off-prints, advertisements, invitations, tickets, and ephemera from his personal archive of the Sun Ra Arkestra. To celebrate this important acquisition, Adam Tinkle, Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Documentary Studies, organized an exhibition and two-night performance festival in April. On April 14, 2017, as part of this festival, a private roundtable conversation was held between Tinkle and multidisciplinary artists Ephraim Asili, Chris Corsano, Joe McPhee, Kamau Amu Patton, and Matana Roberts.

Adam Tinkle Sun Ra is in the history books as a musician, but he also made important contributions as a philosopher, as a poet, and as a visual artist. One of the goals of the Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow festival is to talk about the ways that you are practicing multidisciplinarily and the way that sound functions within your multidisciplinary practices.

Kamau Amu Patton I’ll start with talking about getting free from music. I grew up in Brooklyn, born in ’72, pretty deep hip-hop kind of environment, sample-based music. I grew up with my father’s record collection, my friend’s record collection, records everywhere. There’s a particular sound that at the time was being mined. You got a funk sound, you got a James Brown zone. And then you got people getting a little bit deeper into exploring jazz records and grabbing it from there. So, being a kid, growing up in that environment, I was doing things that were a little bit kind of not “it,” skateboarding, beat boarding, break dancing, getting into some other weird stuff. I was always trying to explore, What’s the weirder thing? What’s the more out-there thing? What’s the more obscure thing? And for me, getting into the Sun Ra sounds were outside of the outside. These are the edges. And that just opened a lot of doors for me. Every

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sound is cool, and it’s all connected to sounds that I was familiar with. And then from that, getting free from particular sounds. You can just do whatever. Everything’s cool. Every way of expressing is cool. There is no sound. There’s no you.

Joe McPhee I was a big Miles Davis fan. Wasn’t playing at that time but listening to a lot of music. And I heard Charles Mingus’s “Pithecanthropus Erectus” that threw me off the planet. And about that time, I also heard Ornette Coleman, and DownBeat was writing about how it was not jazz and how it was going to destroy the world, and John Coltrane’s music was anti-jazz and was going destroy the world. And I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I mean, Ornette’s music was out of the blues for me, Coltrane’s music was so accessible, and Eric Dolphy, took me a little longer, but I got there, I think, eventually. Later when I started to play, those were my guide posts. That’s where I wanted to be. And then I met Pauline Oliveros, which took me to another area, Sun Ra with the synthesizer and so forth. I started working with a friend, John Snyder, who bought an ARP 2600 and he lived with it for a while. And I said, “Wow. That’s it.” And that changed a lot for me. And that’s how all of that kind of started. So it came out of Sun Ra, really, a lot of the later stuff that I was doing.

Ephraim Asili Philadelphia would pay for the Arkestra to give a free concert every summer. And I remember this one time

they played right outside of their house on Morton Street in Germantown, a black neighborhood on the fringes of Philly. Sun Ra had already passed. It was one of those moments where thunder started rumbling, and the band started playing. They were doing their spacecore thing and it was really going crazy, like haywire. It was really something. And then it just started raining, really intense rain, pouring, and everyone left. But the whole band stayed on stage. It was a trip. And then they started going into their procession in the rain. They played all the way out of the park in the rain. My life was changed for sure.

Part of Ra’s practice that is sort of underrepresented is his capacity as an organizer in terms of maintaining a big band for about fifty years. It’s kind of unprecedented, and talking to some of the older jazz musicians that I’ve interviewed, people like Mickey Roker who talk about back in the day when the only time they would see groups of black men that were well organized that weren’t, say, in the NAACP or a church, were big bands. And how he felt like Sun Ra kept this idea going where a group of guys would come to town, dress the same, and bring positive energy, and they would travel around—that was this really, in and of itself, magical thing.

AT Joe made a comment yesterday with my class: in addition to being well organized, the Arkestra was almost like a social service organization for some of its members.

JM This was 1967, when they had the place on Third Street.

And Lex Humphries was having some kind of problem, and the Arkestra, they just took him in and took care of him. It was part of their mission. That’s what they were doing.

Matana Roberts My understanding of Sun Ra’s music was purely by osmosis. My father was a political scientist who studied space and war because of the music of Sun Ra. My father took his senior prom date to the Jazz Showcase to see Sun Ra, who happened to be playing that same

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night. And he would talk about how they played two sets and they were supposed to stop. They would not stop playing. The owner came, they unplugged everything. They turned off all the lights and the Arkestra just kept playing. They had their own sense of unification. I’ve been hearing about Ra, Ra, Ra all my life. I’ve been hearing that music all my life. I’ve been mostly inspired by the legend and also the powerful statement of taking care of the people that you care about—a band that’s a band. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder to do for a lot of people these days, economically speaking. Not only were they a band, they lived together. I’ve heard the stories about the 24-hour rehearsals, 12-hour rehearsals. You hear all these crazy stories.

I will never be able to hear a Sun Ra cut and not think of my father. I will never be able to talk about Sun Ra and not think of my father. The music for him supported the politics at the time. It was so political for him. It had such a political base even though it wasn’t specifically talking about any particular politics. It was so uplifting and so nutritious in that way. Sun Ra, when I get an image of him in my head, he made people believe. They still make people believe even though he’s not here. He really made people believe in this whole other universe and ways of seeing.

KAP It’s freedom. It’s a freedom music. The work that I’ve had over my lifetime of intersecting and interacting with Sun Ra recordings, it’s like they’re a cross-genre and then they become their own genre. They’re their own thing. That’s amazing to me. I used to go to the Prospect Park drum circles with my dad. There’s no recorded music. There’s nowhere where this exists in recording. Sun Ra has that essence of making a music that’s bigger than the space that contains it, bigger than the record.

Chris Corsano I was checking out Dick Griffin, this trombone player who played in the Arkestra and was checking out an interview with him talking about Sun Ra. And when he joined the Arkestra, Sun Ra told him, “All right, you’re gonna open up and you’re gonna go out into the

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audience and you’re gonna play until you get a standing ovation.” And he did. He’s a great player. And so he got the standing ovation. And he said that the band came on after fifteen minutes of him just going for it or whatever. Sun Ra was never super demonstrative but he just gave a smile and a nod. It wasn’t something that he thought you could just do, but because Sun Ra asked it of him, he said, “This is what’s going to happen.”

“Visionary” is a really good word for Sun Ra in a whole bunch of ways because he would see stuff and he’d be able to materialize that stuff one way or another.

Thinking about the collection here at the Tang, he would say, “We’re a band. We’re going to a concert.

What do you need to do a concert besides the band?

You need posters, you need tickets.” So he taught himself, figured out how to do all these things around making more than just music happen. You can look at how the dominant culture does their version and then say, “Well, I’m going to do my version, Sun Ra’s version.” Seeing it here was a good reminder that he figured so much stuff out.

Sun Ra seemed to be drawing from so much different stuff. He’s pulling from numerology, Egyptology, from ancient to the future. His scope was wider than anybody I’ve ever read about. Me doing my thing is a real tunnel-vision version of trying to take some inspiration.

EA This idea of Ra being on the other side of time, it often gets represented as him always looking into the distant future. But it’s actually not about that in my opinion.

It’s the idea that there is no time. You can go in any which direction. It’s not linear.

MR I think he was really trying to explore his life and the privilege of being able to have access to things and ideas that perhaps he would not have had in other places. I look at that as a bit of inspiration. Because for me, in my work, history gets me out of bed every day.

For me, knowing that some 200-plus years ago, I’d have gotten up to go to the cotton field, gets me out of bed every day. I get up and I get to deal with the

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saxophone. And the saxophone takes me all over the place and I don’t have to deal with particular levels of disrespect. I don’t have to deal with particular levels of being subservient to an Other. I see that as a pushy momentum. It doesn’t have to do with race or difference, but for me, that history is what makes me move.

I sometimes wonder if for him and for many of those musicians, if that’s also what gave them move and inspiration.

KAP Some of the stuff we’ve been talking about in terms of time has brought me to these thoughts about him as a musician, thinker, being ahead of the technology that he has access to. At this point, if you want to deal with time, you can in a computational media; you can do all kinds of things with the image of time with your laptop right now. Here’s this individual who’s pushing and accessing synthesized sounds to do things that are really cutting edge. What would that be like to drop that mind into now and to access what’s possible in terms of spatializing sounds, synthesizing sounds, the speed of thought. Would this all be robot music? Would they just be algorithms? That’s what people are doing now. There’s a lot of algorithmic music happening that sounds like Sun Ra’s Solo Piano to me.

AT I wonder if in those early ’60s records is the one where one of the band members figured out that if you plug the output of the tape recorder back into the input, you get a reverb or slap-back delay. That’s a time computation that they discovered organically and realized that sound had a kind of meaning in terms of time and all the things that you guys are talking about—consciousness of history, historical consciousness, the relationship of the history of guys showing up to play their big band gig, then to do it in robes. They were totally using sound as I hear it to change people’s historical consciousness and their consciousness of time as a phenomenon.

MR And maybe to just remind people that it’s really up to you. You do not have to synthesize history in the way that other people synthesize it if you don’t want to. You don’t have to make very particular guilt connections to why you should remember something or why it should be this way. It really is up to you how you want to remember things, memorialize things, or forget them.

KAP This music is a liberation.

positioning Egypt at the beginning of the search for truth and knowledge as an initial move to get out of the trap of only having access to forms of knowledge that have already been legitimated by the culture that we live in. That’s the first move that then allows him to look at all these other things as almost intentionally hidden by this long history that has deprived us of all of the richness and diversity of the sources of information.

Every class has to start with Plato. Every government building is neoclassic.

KAP You can go to the museum and see African masks.

Who’s to say that you can’t, as an empowerment move, just take that same material and take another look at it, particularly if you’re in a state of mind where you’re saying, “I don’t necessarily know if I can trust what you’re saying about this thing. Let me take a look at that directly.” That’s a move that resonates with me. Why not do your own acts of Jesus?

AT Absolutely. I think that’s exactly right.

MR It’s the importance of understanding parallel histories.

That’s something that none of us get enough of in school in terms of understanding, okay, this was happening, but this was also happening. Or this was happening this way, but it could have been happening in this way as well. You don’t ever get those types of comparisons. But Sun Ra had a lot of examples.

EA I’ve been reviewing a lot of art from the Black Arts Movement era lately. And there’s a lot of unhealthy stuff being communicated, misogyny, homophobia, etcetera.

You’re hard-pressed to find any of that in Sun Ra’s work at that time. It’s very wholesome. There’s just really no space for anything negative. There’s darkness and there’s dark energy, but not negative, hurtful vibes.

KAP That’s It’s After the End of the World where you heard that apocalyptic sound. We’ve heard it and we’re getting close to it.

MR He’s after exploration for the sake of exploration or, something I often say within some of my own multidisciplinary work, is experimentation for the sake of experimentation; everything else is secondary.

AT Ra’s early understanding of the need to investigate other sources of knowledge, or be your own authentic gatherer of knowledge, is because of the influence that this long trajectory of Eurocentric thinking and

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Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker and professor.

His films include documentaries about the Sun Ra Arkestra and about his own travels throughout the African diaspora. He DJs on WGCX FM and at the semi-regular dance party Botanica.

Chris Corsano has worked at the intersection of free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990s. Corsano’s solo music is an always spontaneously composed amalgam of extended techniques for drum set and non-percussion instruments of his own making that are incorporated into his kit.

Kamau Amu Patton is an artist and educator.

His recent work has embraced the transformation of speech, radio transmission, video feedback, and painting.

Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner working in improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater.

Joe McPhee is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist, and theoretician active since the height of the Black Arts Movement.

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KAMAU AMU PATTON EPHRAIM ASILI

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As part of Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, visiting artists participated in Skidmore classes.

On April 14, 2017, two courses were uniquely combined for a conversation with Kamau Amu Patton and Ephraim Asili: Adam Tinkle’s “Community and Radio” class and Ian Berry’s “Inside the Museum” class.

Ian Berry Tell us about yourselves.

Kamau Amu Patton I make sound works. I make sculpture. I do textiles. I’m a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ephraim Asili I’m an artist. People say filmmaker. I identify as an artist. I deal with records as well; sometimes that’s called DJing. And whatever else moves me, when it moves me, I’ll try that, too. I teach film production at Bard College. I host a radio show. I just kind of do my thing and call it what you want.

IB My class is spending the semester thinking about the relationship between artists and museums, and how avant-garde artists have made things that didn’t quite fit in traditional museums and how they had to find alternate spaces, and then potentially those spaces turned museums into different things. Talk about how you have worked inside and outside museums. Have museums been good sites for you? What kinds of constraints are in museums that don’t always fit what you want to do?

EA First and foremost, museums are places where you put stuff in buildings. I’ve always specialized in the ephemeral. I don’t think of my films as being permanent things. I don’t think of my video work as existing on a hard drive, but I think of my videos as existing in the moment that they’re projected. I’ve always had a situation where I don’t know how exactly I interact with the museum world in that way. And as a DJ, generally museums aren’t interested in DJs. Even the idea of DJing as art would be questionable in a lot of spaces.

Generally, I find that museums don’t have a high priority for moving image work. To treat film properly, you can’t have it on display. You need to have it in a dark room and you have to go into the room and be quiet with it, and that’s contradictory to the idea of a museum in a lot of ways. On the one hand, you want your work in a museum. On the other hand, there are always these tensions around how the work lives in the museum. For me, it’s been a complicated relationship.

I think of the museum as a very specific place, not here is my practice, and if it’s good enough, some

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museum will collect it. I think of it as an engagement where if I’m going to be in the space then I should be interacting with it for what it is. There’s this great film, Statues Also Die, which was about how art from Africa ends up in a Paris museum, totally out of the cultural context. What can that art do for itself to stay alive in the museum? It’s really no different for us. You’re not with your art and you can’t represent yourself; that has a way of flattening everything more times than not.

When I have the opportunity to do something at a museum, it’s important for me to do something where I feel like I’m having a dialogue with the museum itself.

KAP I’ve had fantastic experiences at museums and I’ve had terrible experiences at museums. The museum is as good as the people that work there. As an artist, I can think about those conventions of white walls, lighting, rectangles and respond to them, play into them, do whatever, and present a work that fulfills expectations or not. The other side of that is a museum professional who can know those conventions and deviate from them or uphold them more in dialogue with the artist or the art object. These experiences point to the willingness of everyone involved to take chances or push back or deal with their own limitations about what’s possible. I think that anything is possible; you can really do whatever you want to do if you create a space for that.

IB If you could imagine your perfect museum, what are some things it would have? What would it look like?

KAP It would have time—time to do things. Every museum has a different kind of schedule, but ideally there’s some time to have a conversation and figure out, What does this project really want to be? Permeability, that it doesn’t feel isolated or insulated, that it’s networked, and that could be networked to where it’s actually situated in the world and beyond. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts invited my band to be in a show. We decided that we were going to do this live-on-TV band thing where we would set up a studio and perform.

This would somehow be on TV sets throughout the museum. That’s a lot of cables to run through this whole museum. But this museum’s wired so you can just plug into any wall and send audio and video signal to anywhere in the museum. The museum is totally networked to be able to handle media in that way. That met my desire before I even walked in. That is an ideal in terms of the museum anticipating new media and facilitating their deployment.

A strong education department is major. There should be teaching and learning going on. Not just put art up and let it be, but there should be engagement, which potentially includes the people that authored the

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…it’s important for me to do something where I feel like I’m having a dialogue with the museum itself. work in deep investigation regarding the context of where the work sits.

EA First and foremost, all museums, regardless of where they are, should be free for low-income people, just flat out. Even the idea that that’s an offer can make people feel like this is somewhere that I am welcome.

I don’t think I grew up feeling welcome in a museum.

It was something that felt sacred. Related to that, most museums don’t have consistent evening hours and most people work for a living, and so not everyone can go look at art on a Wednesday from 2:00 to 7:00.

Making it as accessible to as many people as possible.

Regardless of what happens inside, you’ve got to start right there.

Inside, a museum should have stuff that people can touch, handle, look at. You should be able to touch a Sun Ra record. You can get a $10 record and a $50 turntable, boom—removing the mystification of things you can’t touch. Obviously, some things people shouldn’t be handling, but there are a lot of things that people can handle. I had a really transformative experience recently. I just finished a film commissioned by the Calder Foundation on Alexander Calder’s sculpture. A lot of Calder’s work is meant to move; it’s kinetic.

However, you don’t see the work move because no one is authorized to touch it. So, it’s not really looking at his work. To see the work articulated and to see a human being just lightly touch it and make it move, it was like lovemaking or something. You go away and an hour later it’s still moving. Seeing that was a powerful experience.

Second to that, a darkened room without windows where films can play. I have that in my apartment; every museum should have that. Museums should have a place where the work is accessible and every type of work should have the proper space.

One other thing I would add—and this music festival is a great example—is consistent and regular public performance of music. In the city, it tends to happen as an after party, or, “look at us, we’re doing

something zany—we have a band playing on Sunday.”

Why is that any different than any other type of art? I have zero understanding of why it’s eccentric to do that in the museum context.

They’re simple things. I’m not saying anything radical, but it’s surprising how much we don’t get these things in a lot of museums.

Adam Tinkle You mentioned Statues Also Die and the idea of museums as places of decontextualization, but also recontextualization. Could you address that in terms of your practice on radio or as somebody who plays records live? That’s also a practice of decontextualization and recontextualization. How do you think about those two things as related or different?

EA All very related. I’m very much a record collector. A lot of what I do as a DJ or as a radio host personality, programmer, comes out of a practice of just being really interested in the music itself. I’m a huge fan of music, of jazz music especially, in history and culture. I can pick up a beautiful record and take it somewhere and play it. And then, it’s out on the airwaves and someone who happens to tune in can listen to it—that to me is just fascinating. For me, the radio practice is the inverse of the museum practice because to put the thing in the museum means you have to go there and be with it, but when you put something on the radio, it’s going out, it’s pushing the opposite direction.

KAP Every museum should have a radio station.

EA I agree.

KAP My first museum broadcast was at a show I did called Icons of Attention. My work at the time was sound sculpture, dance. I’d been, at the time, toying with ideas around radio and broadcasting. I thought, let’s just do a pirate radio thing. I built instruments, sculptural things to create the sounds that we would use to transmit. All the sculptures were networked into a subfloor that we built. There were contacts on the floor itself, so just walking around the room would create sound. It was just this big instrument. It was usually five, ten people jamming together at any one time and then visitors could come in and touch, beat on the sculptures, bow the sculptures, tap on the sculptures.

And all this was sent to the transmitter, which was on twenty-four hours and broadcast into downtown San Francisco. So, for me, the sculpture itself was social and I could invite all my friends to come and hang out and play and also pay them a stipend, so that was cool as a community thing. And the museum had a staff of

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…bandwidth is not equal across all peoples. The faster you get your information, the faster your trades can go.

feedback and noise and stuff that happens. The people who run Bambuser are in Sweden. It was echoing, right, the reverberation? I imagine that globally, that’s happening over and over and over and over and over and over; there’s this global echo for every transmission that’s happened.

EA Like science fiction film in the ’90s, like the planet can hear that sound, like a fax machine.

KAP It’s just like doot-doot-doot . . . It’s just going and going and going and going and going like everything ever said. That’s the hum that we’re living in right now.

folks that could say, “Oh, you want to build a subfloor?

Okay, we’ve got people that’ll do that.”

The broadcast, for me, was a way to deal with some of these issues around access and inclusion and community. The radius of the transmission was larger than the actual museum—it expanded the walls of the museum. So, you could tune in at any point in time, whether you liked it or not, maybe we were jamming some frequencies, and be a part of what was going on.

Also, it was a way for me to rethink sculpture for myself.

IB It gets to your definition of flexible and open borders.

It’s a perfect example of what most museums would not let you do.

Student At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, have you ever done anything related to radio broadcasting and activism and artwork through sound production or music improvisation?

KAP Yes, all the time. We can do something here right now if you want. In class, we try to experience media as directly as possible and try to be critical of the speed of media. We all know that bandwidth is not equal across all peoples. The faster you get your information, the faster your trades can go. Or the slower your Internet connection, the weirder you are on Skype, so the harder it is for you to get a gig, maybe.

EA I just thought of eBay auctions.

KAP EBay. You’ve got to snipe it. I’m broadcasting now. If you are on a phone that can receive it, you can go to http://bambuser.com/v/6699766 to receive this broadcast right now and we can see what that’s like.

Turn the sound up. I think you can get the sense of it, in terms of the delay between reality and the image of reality or the transmission. And all the

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Kamau Amu Patton is an artist and educator. He received an MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and has had solo exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Queen’s Nails Annex in San Francisco. He has worked collaboratively on artists’ projects at MoMA and at LACMA, has shown work at SFMoMA, and was a 2010–2011 artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2012 he participated in Pacific Standard Time: Modern Architecture in L.A. and in 2013 in The Machine Project Field Guide to L.A. Architecture. His recent work has embraced the transformation of speech, radio transmission, video feedback, and painting.

Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker living in Hudson, New York, working and teaching at Bard College.

His films include documentaries about the Sun Ra Arkestra and about his own travels throughout the African Diaspora. He DJs on WGCX FM and at the semi-regular dance party Botanica.

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Terry Adkins Flumen Orationis 2012

Adam Tinkle Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Documentary Studies Terry Adkins created the forty-two-minute audiovisual work Flumen Orationis as one component of The Principalities, one of the “recitals” for which he was known. Central to Adkins’s oeuvre, the recital is a form that combines installation and live performance in the service of an abstracted memorialization and tribute to important individuals from American history. Adkins dedicated The Principalities to Jimi Hendrix, an artist whom he frequently named as an influence alongside other electrified sonic experimentalists such as Miles Davis. The video’s soundtrack consists of the audio from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Why I Am Opposed to the Vietnam War” overlaid with performances of Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”—a work Adkins called, in one of his few published writings, the “coming of age rallying call” of his generation of black artists, those “precious few” spared the “genocide” of conscription to Vietnam. (Thus, Adkins suggests, this war was a matter of life and death not only for drafted Americans and the Vietnamese, but, in some sense, for a threatened and precarious trajectory of black experimental artmaking.) The combination of Hendrix’s guitar and King’s voice surprises not with a sense of contrast or mashup juxtaposition, but rather with how naturally the two fit together. Adkins creates, via a kind of radiophonic illusion, a “theater of the imagination” in which the two men seem to perform together on a stage, collaboratively synchronizing their impassioned intensities in rhetorically impeccable rhythm.

It is perhaps a cliché of cultural criticism to refer to the orality of African American music (for example, Hendrix’s popularization of the wah pedal,

which allowed his guitar to literally form vowel sounds) or to the black preacher’s musicality. Yet Adkins’s alignment of these two forms of sonic virtuosity makes the underlying connection both immediate and profound. The video’s title, Latin for “flow of speech” or “river of oratory,” suggests the joint effect: a pummeling torrent of human communicative discourse. But this is also electronically amplified, mediated, acousmatic sound, flowing from no visible origin, which is to say, flowing from beyond and outside the hypervisibility of blackness.

Adkins was committed to abstraction and felt that many younger black artists, caught up in identity politics, were insufficiently so. Consistent with the ways his recitals often abstracted their subjects and themes, this video’s image track—found stereographic images of early twentieth-century military aircraft, balloons, blimps, and parachutes—complicates the soundtrack’s obvious anti-war content.

These grandly pictorial images of war and flight refuse any standardized visual language associated with Hendrix—aside from the biographical reference to his 1961–62 paratrooper training—with King, or with any of the 1960s’ overused memorial tropes: peace signs, peace marches, protests, etc.

Adkins revivifies these unfamiliar still images.

Originally produced to be viewed through a stereoscope to create an illusion of three-dimensionality, here the images flutter between two frames that were intended to be viewed by the right and left eyes. The artist thus refashions frozen historical imagery into visual music, creating a kind of mechanical rhythm that phases in polyrhythm with the more organic discursive flow of the soundtrack.

Though its sources are archival, Flumen Orationis bends our newsreel stereotypes of the 1960s and creates new ways of hearing King and Hendrix that evade their obvious iconicity. Adkins takes them at their most radical (King came out against the war well before most other mainstream leaders and was widely condemned in the press for doing so), and, restoring to them the shock and the dissonance they once conjured and represented, he radicalizes our hearing of the history itself.

Stills from Terry Adkins (1953–2014), Flumen Orationis (from The Principalities), 2012 Single-channel video with sound, 00:41:35 Gift of the Estate of Terry Adkins, 2017.10

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00:30–00:40

Hendrix: [Unaccompanied guitar chords, audience cheers] King: I’m using as a subject from which to preach, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”

09:19–09:59

Hendrix: [Percussive, unpitched 16th notes in guitar, answered by signature riff in drums and bass; guitar shifts to high, siren-like bends] King: There is an obvious and almost facile connection between the War in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam.

39:17–39:26

Hendrix: [Steady drumbeat emphasizing high-hat on each beat; minor chord vamp in low register of guitar with swirling modulation effect] The way you, the way you shoot me down . . . you'll be going just the same [answered by falsetto male backup vocal] Three times the pain King: I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards us.

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Ana-Joel Falcón-W on Curating

As part of a semester-long research project, Ana-Joel Falcón-Wiebe examined a set of twenty-nine recently acquired late nineteenthand early twentieth-century panoramic photographs by French photographer Alexandre Bougault. The project culminated in a spring exhibition, Inhabited Landscapes: Bougault’s Algeria, which brought together photography, poetry, and music for an immersive museum experience. In March 2017, Falcón-Wiebe was interviewed about her research and curatorial perspective.

Alexandre Bougault was born in 1851 in Paris. His parents died when he was fourteen years old, and four years later he enrolled in the French military. He served in the Franco-Prussian War, and soon after he was deployed to Algeria. To our knowledge, this is the first time that he encountered the Algerian terrain—through a context of military conquest. In 1893, Bougault moved to Toulon, one of the major port cities in southern France, with his wife and children, and from this city he was conveniently located to make frequent trips to Algeria.

What attracted me to the photographs was that they diverged from the model of Orientalist photography that exploits the human body by focusing on the female body and over-sensualizing it or making it erotic in cultures where standards of decency and clothing are wildly divergent from Western conceptions. Bougault doesn’t do that. The images of women that he includes are few but also they seem more integrated within the activities that would be considered routine, even though they are to some extent still staged. One of the elements that makes Bougault’s work stand out from the many photographers that dedicated the bulk of their artistic careers to Algeria is this format of the panoramic photograph that was designed to attract tourists to give them a different view into the Algerian terrain.

Bougault, as a French military officer, is seeing through his own lens the terrains in a very organized

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way, a way that vanishes French presence overtly from the scenes. This idea goes back to the title of the exhibition, Inhabited Landscapes. One of the objectives of giving such a title to the exhibition was to draw attention to what it is that is inhabiting these landscapes. I wanted to bring to this exhibition poetry, song, and music as voices that also inhabit this exhibition. For this, I sought a collaboration with professors at Skidmore College within the world languages and literatures and music departments. There is such richness in dialogue and discourse drawing from their strengths in talking about folk songs, Berber songs, the songs of lore. And what it means that the spirit of the poet within Algerian society is one who not only calls people to remember their heritage, but one who gives comfort and solace to the people.

These Berber poems for the first time were transcribed from Berber as spoken language around 1936 by Jean Déjeaux and then for the exhibition, we translated that into French, which had more currency at this time period. From that, we translated the poems into English, which has more currency in our context. So now we have this panoply of meaning and layered presence and a range of voices to enrich this dialogue between a beautiful lyrical scene and yet a voice of resistance that calls for a return to the old ways or that cries out to God for strength in resisting change.

The three lenses that guide the viewer’s experience, perception, and interpretation of these photographs are rooted in the layered composition of the photographs themselves, but no photographs neatly adhere to any one category.

In the idea of Resonance we have a strong allusion to sound and the way sound reverberates, or an idea reverberates. We have scenes of the Algerian ports and from these ports, we have complex relationships where ideas and people traveled, where the views of Algeria as an exotic, alluring terrain were fabricated and reverberated. They resonated to the extent that inhabitants, visitors, tourists, travelers,

and officers were beginning to come and inhabit the Algerian terrain.

Another aspect of the lens Resonance is the traditions themselves of these nomadic people in the ways that their lifestyles drew so much attention, and reached the ears of a European mass audience without being fully understood and seen through a very Western paradigm of the exotic, of the other, in a way that projects itself onto this unknown entity.

Redefinition is a category that draws attention to change and transformation and the very visible, tangible ways that French presence, French military colonizing presence, transformed Algerian terrain by renaming cities like Algiers from Mozghranna. That change impacts notions of identity for people who now live in a city that has lost something. It has lost its essence by a change of name, a change of identity.

The poem that accompanies these images within the category of Redefinition was written by Abd-ElKader, who was the leader of the Resistance of Algeria at the time when Algiers had fallen to the French. So, in this poem we have moments of mourning and deep emotion and despair, wondering about the future of Algiers.

It’s a wonderful juxtaposition between an Algerian voice that articulates all the emotion conjured by this change power, and then the complete restructuring of the face of the city of Algiers through architecture. When the French colonized Algiers, many vernacular buildings, architectural structures, were destroyed to make room for a more Western facade, a more Western-looking city.

Resilience speaks to the traditions, the rituals, the lifestyles that in a way defied change through perseverance, through consistency, through cyclical repetition of traditions of old. We have secular rituals like a marriage processional in the desert or simply nomads inhabiting the desert dunes. We have religious rituals like a call to prayer or the individual lifestyle of a Muslim who stops in the middle of the desert with his camel to pray to God. By seeking solace in tradition, by seeking solace in religion, these are instances of resistance.

Ana-Joel Falcón-Wiebe was Visiting Lecturer of Art History in the spring 2017 semester at Skidmore College. Her work focuses on seventeenth- through nineteenth-century European art. She received her PhD from Queen’s University and has taught at colleges and universities in Canada, France, and the United States.

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Alexandre Bougault (1851–1911), Étang de Tataouine, c. 1890–1910 Gelatin silver print with tinted baryta, 23 ³⁄₈ � 9 ⁷⁄₈ in.

Promised gift of Jack Shear, EL2016.1.291

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Alexandre Bougault (1851–1911), Grand prière, c. 1890–1910 Albumen print, 9 ⁵⁄₈ � 23 ¹⁄₈ in.

Promised gift of Jack Shear, EL2016.1.301

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Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Reimagining of Dorian Gray

Yinka Shonibare MBE (born 1962), Dorian Gray (Scenes 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 shown), 2001 11 black-and-white resin prints, 1 digital lambda print, 30 ďż˝ 37 in. (each) Tang purchase with funding from Jack Shear, 2017.25a-l

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Barbara Black, PhD, is Professor of English at Skidmore College where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture. She is currently finishing a book titled Hotel London, which she sees as the final installment in a trilogy—a work in conversation with her earlier books, On Exhibit (2000) and A Room of His Own (2012; paperback 2013). Black is the reviews editor for the international journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts and is on the graduate faculty of the Sewanee School of Letters.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my favorite books to teach, and Oscar Wilde enjoys a prominent place in my pantheon of literary greats, so I was thrilled to learn that the Tang had acquired Yinka Shonibare’s Dorian Gray. Wilde’s 1890 Gothic masterpiece is a wily book that challenges all who read it; it was certainly a dangerous book for him to write. Such risk is evident in the preface that Wilde added to the 1891 version of his notorious novel, a key component in his strategy to defend The Picture of Dorian Gray against the harsh reviews it had already received.

Here he admonishes readers who look for one simple meaning to the novel, and he also confronts directly the controversy over art and morality that his novel—condemned as “unmanly” and “indecent” by its earliest reviewers—raised. In 1895, Dorian Gray would factor in Wilde’s trials; being deemed a “sodomitical book,” it was used as evidence to prove that Wilde was (to use the parlance of the day) a practicing homosexual. As a consequence of its public condemnation, the novel was removed from the shelves of W. H. Smith, the nation’s largest bookseller. Dorian Gray would be Wilde’s only novel; however, his single attempt at a long work of fiction produced a legendary Gothic tale that has terrified and mystified generations of readers.

We are likely to know the basic plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray even if we haven’t read the novel. Two longtime school friends, the painter Basil Hallward and the dandy and wit Lord Henry Wotton, are society men drawn to the ephebe—beautiful young boy—Dorian. An innocent, Dorian becomes the “creation” of these two older men: first, as the model for Basil’s portrait; then, as a hedonist-intraining under the tutelage of Henry. A triangle of desire, if not of love, emerges; and a tale of influence unfolds. Dorian Gray is Wilde’s rewriting of the German Faust legend, with Lord Henry playing the role of Mephistopheles, a tempter whose sly words and exquisite promises seduce the Faust figure, Dorian. The exact terms of Dorian’s pact with the devil can be variously construed: Dorian requests never to age, to pursue pleasures without consequence, to seek sensation for sensation’s sake, to live a life beyond good and evil. Imbedded in his wishes

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are certain cultural and aesthetic debates about art for art’s sake and decadence that roiled Wilde’s own era. Readers might hear in Dorian’s desires echoes of English art writer Walter Pater’s suppressed conclusion to The Renaissance, a book that Wilde deeply admired: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.” 1 Dorian spends much of the novel cruising London’s nighttime streets, committing, we are invited to assume, a multitude of crimes. As the novel progresses and as Dorian remains immune to conscience, the casualties of his desires mount: his spurned lover, the actress Sibyl Vane, commits suicide; Dorian’s friends Alan Campbell and Adrian Singleton either die or vanish; Sibyl’s brother, James Vane, is vanquished attempting to avenge his sister’s death; Dorian murders Basil and later stabs himself— or his portrait—to death with the same knife.

A simple way to understand the novel is that Dorian switches identities with his portrait: he remains young while the painting registers his vices and ages in his stead, a kind of proxy for the self.

In effect, Dorian is a man who looks perfect on the outside but is evil within. It is likely that Wilde was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a sensation since its 1886 publication. Like Jekyll, Dorian lives a double life. Dorian Gray may also owe a debt to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), with an evil portrait substituting for a mad wife locked away in a house’s top floor. In all three texts, readers enter the territory of the Gothic novel and its signature preoccupations: a house with a secret, a crime that must be punished, misleading appearances, a suspicion about what lies beneath. Yet here a reader’s certainty ends; Wilde knew that Dorian Gray was a text of indeterminacy, and his provocation to his readers is tantalizing: “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.” 2 It is almost as if Wilde anticipated, and even invited, the many interpretations and adaptations that would build the rich afterlife of his novel. Nigerian-English artist Yinka Shonibare is one of those artists to revisit this magnificent but cagey novel.

Shonibare’s 2001 series of twelve photographic prints presents a narrative sequence that formally replicates both the novel and the 1945 Albert Lewin–directed film of the same title. Though sequential, these moments are nevertheless fragments, in line with Wilde’s own departure from conventional nineteenth-century realism in this “novel without a plot.” Shonibare’s choice of form aligns with the mandate of decadence, drawn as it was to the intensity of the fragment, both in art as well as in life—by way of moments for those moments’ sake. Shonibare’s Dorian Gray is a series

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of tableaux vivant, a popular Victorian art form that further establishes an affinity between the twenty-first-century Shonibare and the Victorian Wilde. Shonibare’s decision not to glaze his Dorian Gray prints achieves a Paterian gem-like intensity— a striking immediacy that draws the viewer in. In the sequence, Shonibare plays the role of Dorian, the dandy; and it is the dandy who forms the centerpiece of another Shonibare series, Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998). For both Shonibare and Wilde, the dandy is a charged figure. A man of leisure whose sole focus is his stylish clothing and appearance, the dandy is a subversive re-inventor who radicalizes conceptions of masculine identity. Non-normative, non-bourgeois, the dandy can alter his appearance at will; he is a figure of mobility whose very identity is performative, whose focus on appearance is both self-protection as well as self-advertisement. In his magnificence as well as his difference, the dandy raises questions about bodies, culture, and history—central questions for both Shonibare and Wilde. While it is Shonibare’s blackness that underscores the exceptionality of his Dorian, it was both Wilde’s Irishness and his sexuality that drew him to the dandy. Indeed, he became Victorian England’s most celebrated dandy; in this way, Dorian is very much Wilde’s “son,” a gorgeous progeny that society can see only as deviant. As Wilde himself explained, Dorian’s story concerns a “desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.” 3 Basil explains the tragic truth of the novel: “It is better not to be different from one’s fellows.” 4 In fall 2017, I am teaching Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in the class “Secrets, Shame, and Privacy in the Nineteenth Century,” and my students will work with Shonibare’s Dorian Gray, which is on view in the exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self. Certain elements of the work particularly interest me. First, I am struck by the sequencing effect of Shonibare’s move from two tableaux featuring Sibyl Vane to the crowded scene of Dorian in society, which is followed by two images blanketed with fog. Here a viewer senses the growing isolation of Dorian as a result of his illicit desires, a narrowing of the perspective that leaves just two men standing: creator and creation, and—possibly—two same-sex lovers wrapped in the obscurity of a metropolitan haze. Shonibare appears to understand that Wilde’s novel at its heart is concerned with artistic as well as sexual freedoms; it is a novel that had no other choice than to be a novel written in code, where a high-stakes pact is made by Dorian, a man who loves other men in the age of the Labouchere Amendment, the British law that criminalized homosexuality. Perhaps the secret truth of this Gothic novel is that it cannot sustain the world of artistic freedom and sexual expression that it first summons—that there is no other way to imagine Dorian but as “a beast without a heart,” 5 the criminal that must be punished at the end. Wilde himself admitted that the “terrible moral” at the end of his novel was the only artistic “error” in the book.6 For Wilde deeply loved, I believe, the three protagonists who formed for him a single entity: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” 7 That phrase, in other ages, is heart-achingly expressive of Wilde’s own utopian impulse that cannot be satisfied in the current social context. Wilde can only hope for an imagined future when a man may express openly to desire, to be, Dorian.

Given these ambiguities that swirl about Dorian (and more broadly, the dandy), Shonibare’s single most inspired decision is the use of a mirror rather than a portrait in the second print. Here he depicts the novel’s inciting scene: when Dorian first sees his portrait and experiences a kind of erotic and artistic awakening. It is only by means of Basil’s art, and the artist’s love for his muse and subject, that Dorian comes to know himself; he is Basil’s most magnificent creation, and the portrait and self are one. In another brilliant move (and a nod to the film adaptation), Shonibare’s tenth print features the mirror again, and is the only color print in the series. This anomaly draws the viewer’s eye to the climax of the novel when Dorian kills the portrait, and thus himself, his monstrousness

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made visible in the novel for the first and only time on his face. In this emotionally intense scene, Dorian’s body is “framed” in more ways than one, revealing what is Shonibare’s and Wilde’s most powerful shared theme: the politics of representation.

One of Wilde’s harshest reviewers condemned The Picture of Dorian Gray as a “medico-legal” fiction: this libelous charge accuses the novel of taking up the matter of homosexuality, a topic, it was said, only lawyers and doctors should discuss (for it was believed to be a crime and/or a disease). A reader attuned to the opacities of Dorian Gray comes to appreciate how dangerous and subversive a work it is, particularly in light of its debut only a year after the Cleveland Street Scandal in which numerous men of “respectable” society were caught patronizing a gay brothel, exposing London’s active gay subculture. I relish the opportunity to teach The Picture of Dorian Gray because it is a beautiful and brave book for Wilde to have written, and I find the work of Shonibare equally courageous. The third

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epigram of the novel’s preface perfectly expresses my admiration for both artists: “The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.” 8

1 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, quoted in Walter Pater: The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 188.

2 Joseph Bristow, introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: O xford World’s Classics, 2008), xxiv.

3 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 19.

4 Ibid., 7.

5 Ibid., 67.

6 S t James’s Gazette (London), June 27, 1890, http://www.readbookonline. net/readOnLine/9894.

7 Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 352.

8 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 3.

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Hannah Traore ’17 on Curating

Africa Pop S

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p Studio Hannah Traore ’17 graduated with honors from Skidmore College with a major in art history and minor in visual art. She was a member of the Honors Forum and received the Periclean Scholar Award for Outstanding Senior Projects. She grew up in Toronto and resides there now.

As I hung up my cap and gown and drove away from the home I built over the past four years, I reflected on the aspects of my Skidmore College experience that most impacted my education. The first thing that came to mind was the Tang Teaching Museum.

I benefitted from its art and captivating lectures and events, and in the past year, had the opportunity to develop a more personal relationship with the museum. During the fall of my senior year, I walked into the museum with an idea, and walked out with the support to realize my vision—suddenly the museum that I so loved turned into my most important classroom.

I was raised in Toronto by a Canadian mother and Malian father, which greatly influenced my upbringing. When it came time to decide on a senior project, my father’s culture was an obvious source of inspiration. My desire to honor him and my interest in practical learning led me to approach museum director Ian Berry and curator Rachel Seligman with an exhibition idea that compounded these interests.

They said yes. My exhibition, Africa Pop Studio, highlighted artists from Africa and the diaspora who look back, whether directly or indirectly, to the portraiture of Malian photographer Malick Sidibé.

Sidibé was a street and studio photographer working in Bamako, Mali’s capital, after its independence from France in the 1960s. This was an exciting and unique time for the newly independent country, and Sidibé delightfully captured such sentiments in his work. Before artists like Sidibé, most camera

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owners were colonizers; therefore, most images of Malians were on posters or postcards and the sitters had little to no say in how they were represented. But in this new, independent era, the artist and his sitters could together determine how they wished to be portrayed. The power dynamic changed as these new photographs lacked the exoticising and exploitative nature of previous images. This in itself was enthralling to me, but what really caught my eye was Sidibé’s vibrant aesthetic. He often used patterned backdrops that intentionally clashed with the patterns of the sitters’ clothing. Africa Pop Studio positioned Sidibé as an ideological source and visual touchstone for a new generation of artists who have adapted his aesthetics and spirit to establish their own artistic individuality. As a whole, the exhibition was a celebration of blackness and of black creativity.

Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj was invited to the Tang to create an installation of furniture and wall paint for the show. The bright red and yellow paint he chose was inspired by the garages in Marrakesh where he slept as a child, and the furniture, which visitors were encouraged to use, was made from recycled materials from Morocco—ways in which, in his typical fashion, the artist incorporated himself into his work. Africa Pop Studio evoked the mood of an African photography studio—a space of vibrant pattern and posed bodies, alive with music, fashion, and design while being interactive and comfortable.

Each artwork added its voice to create a broader conversation in the “studio” and to highlight and celebrate the diversity of the African continent and diaspora.

To enrich the exhibition’s lively, interactive mood and to further celebrate the creativity of Africa and its diaspora, I organized performances for the Tang’s Spring Celebration. Rashawnda Williams recited original spoken word poetry, Royal Court African Dance Group performed, the Ujima Step Team performed, and DJ Tesfa perfected the mood with music from the continent. I wanted visitors to see the brilliant talent of individuals both from Africa and its diaspora in Skidmore’s own backyard.

I now plan to pursue a career in curating and have the Tang to thank for that realization. Ian Berry and Rachel Seligman believed, trusted, and supported me through the entire journey of conceptualizing, planning, and realizing Africa Pop Studio.

My life is forever changed, and I am forever grateful.

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Atong Atem Fruit of the Earth 2016

Rachel Seligman Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Atong Atem, a visual artist and writer, is South Sudanese but was born in Ethiopia and spent her early years in a refugee camp in Kenya before emigrating to Australia at age six. Atem is a self-described “third culture kid,” a term used to describe someone who spends their formative childhood years in a culture or cultures other than that of their parents. For Atem, it means an identity that is both and neither: both South Sudanese and Australian, but feeling neither South Sudanese enough, nor Australian enough. Much of her work investigates her relationship to this history and the cultural confusion and uncertainty it engenders.

Atem currently lives and works in Melbourne— which she calls Narrm Melbourne, using the Woiwurrung word of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the indigenous people who lived there before European settlement. Atem is deeply concerned with the history of colonization and its current repercussions, the ways in which African culture is seen through a colonial lens, and the effects of that Eurocentric narrative on black bodies both within Africa and across the diaspora—concerns that she explores in her art and her writing.

In Fruit of the Earth, a self-portrait, Atem poses adorned with flowers and fruit, her body filling the shallow space of the photograph, her eyes closed.

She applies color digitally to the black-and-white image, as if hand-coloring a vintage photograph.

Atem sees self-representation—her photographs are mainly of herself and her friends—as a form of empowerment and is interested in critiquing imposed narratives and in decolonizing the black body. She has studied vintage African studio photography and the work of Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and Philip Kwame Apagya and says, “What draws me to the studio photographers of Africa is the power in the simple gesture of turning the lens onto ourselves and changing the European narrative of photography from one of ethnography and consumption, to one of ownership on our part. Studio photography became something entirely different when we, as Africans, embraced the medium, and that’s what my works are paying homage to—the radical gaze of black studio photography.” 1

1 Atong Atem, quoted in “Gallery Talks: Red Hook Labs,” Nataal, 2016, http://nataal.com/atong-atem-at-red-hook-labs/.

Atong Atem (born 1991), Fruit of the Earth, 2016 Digital C-print on Dibond, 30 � 45 in.

Tang purchase, 2017.12

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Omar Victor Diop Ken, 2011

Joseph Underwood Visiting Lecturer of Art History

Omar Victor Diop (born 1980), Ken, 2011 Pigment inkjet print on Harman by Hahnemüle, 23 ⁵⁄₈ � 15 ³/₄ in.

Purchased with funds from the Carter-Rodriguez Fund for Student-Curated Art, 2017.2

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Omar Victor Diop is a Dakar-based photographer who unites dynamic backdrops, crisp clothing, and youthful faces across his different series. Ken belongs to Diop’s The Studio of Vanities project, a suite of forty studio portraits that capture the vibrant personalities currently shaping what he calls the “African urban universe.” The series’ subjects include curators, models, DJs, makeup artists, bloggers, and chefs, demonstrating the far-reaching influence of these individuals in cultural spheres—both online and across the African continent.

One such innovator, Ken (Akya) Aïcha Sy (Senegalese, born 1989), founded the online platform Wakh’Art (Wolof for “Talking Art”) in 2011, a site that includes music production, exhibition reviews, and a rigorous calendar of events. Already a touchstone for the urban youth of Dakar, her website provides both a space for collaboration and an archive of accomplishments for slammers (poets), columnists, and music groups. Ken Aïcha is an ambassador for a generation rooted in the rich legacies of modern Africa and in contemporary globalization. With mixed cultural heritage (her mother is French Martiniquais; her father is celebrated Senegalese painter and performance artist El Hadji Sy) and dispersed geographic experiences (studying in Paris, building a business in Dakar), she represents increasingly complex identities that defy simple, traditional categorization.

Would she be categorized as “African” or a member of “the diaspora”? In 2017, do such labels even matter?

Diop’s lens offers a glimpse of one individual who plays a part in a larger network of exchange.

In this portrait, he does not position Ken Aïcha as belonging to one racial type or national identity.

Instead, she stands for herself and her mission to promote cultural heritage and engagement in her hometown of Dakar. In many ways, The Studio of Vanities series resonates with the conventions of earlier West African photographers, like Seydou Keïta, Mama Casset, or Malick Sidibé, whereby individual subjects choose garments and props that fashion and project conceptions of their cosmopolitan selves in an increasingly global age.

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Hassan Hajjaj (born 1961), Mr. J.C.-Hayford (from My Rock Stars), 2012 Metallic lambda print on Dibond, Papillon matchboxes in white frame, 35 � 24 ³⁄₈ in.

Purchased with funding from Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, 2017.9

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HASSAN HAJJAJ

on Art, Fashion, and Morrocco

On April 21, 2017, Hannah Traore ’17, curator of Africa Pop Studio, with Dayton Director Ian Berry interviewed artist Hassan Hajjaj, whose artwork Mr. J.C.-Hayford and furniture installation and paint scheme was featured in the exhibition.

Hannah Traore Can you talk about your background in the arts and how you got into the art world?

Hassan Hajjaj I came from Morocco at the age of thirteen to London.

I didn’t speak English; I had to learn English halfway through school. I left school with zero qualifications.

I was unemployed for about six years. And within this time, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, London was going through this cosmopolitan change where there were many people similar to my background from the Caribbean or China. We had different cultures but we found something between ourselves.

During this time, there was nothing for us.

We got together and we started to find spaces. One would have DJ equipment and would be a DJ. One would be designing clothing. We found our own

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village within the city. I was doing lots of underground parties. I would create the space, promote, and put on DJs and bands. I was learning about promoting, about working in a team, about making something out of nothing because we didn’t have money. We were creating this new scene in London. I had lots of friends who were photographers, artists, filmmakers that were just starting their careers. I suppose this was my learning stage of being an artist.

I took an interest in photography around the late ’80s. I bought a camera and a friend who studied photography showed me how to use it. It was just a hobby. I was in Morocco in the mid-’90s, a friend of mine had an old riad—a place with a courtyard—and he had an Elle magazine shoot in his space. He asked me to be there because I spoke English. I sat there and realized all these people are from Europe—stylists, photographer, fashion designers, makeup artists. And I thought, they’re just using Morocco as a background, and then I thought, why not shoot work with my people with our own traditions, with a twist. And that gave me the first thought to present people around me and to understand what I wanted to do in the world of art.

All my photography is always on the street.

I’m not confident to use lights in the studio. When you’re shooting in the street, there’s a whole ambiance

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for the setup. And you have people passing by in mud and rain. It’s a moment of luck, what’s going to happen every day, but it’s exciting.

HT We’re sitting in your installation and the yellow and red paint on the walls reference garages in Marrakesh. How else has your environment influenced your work?

HH It’s lots of graphics. Photography is one thing but then I wanted to go beyond, so when people come they will

experience something beyond just the images. This was the idea and I think it comes from when I was doing the parties because I was creating space for people to use.

And also in Moroccan culture, we normally welcome people to the house with food; things like this happen naturally. Because I grew up with lots of recycling in my life in Morocco I wanted people to actually use, touch the work, and be immersed in this world.

HT We’re sitting in front of one of your works, Mr. J.C.Hayford, which is part of the My Rock Stars series.

What inspired that series and this particular image?

HH When you say, “rock star,” in my eyes and my friends’ it’s normally a leather jacket, long hair, a guitar, and dark glasses. That’s kind of a brand. I wanted to take this brand and turn it into my brand, my rock stars: it’s my friends, it’s people who have a similar journey from different parts. Joe Casely-Hayford struggled throughout his life trying to beat the fashion world. He’s still working, he’s an incredible designer. He’s influenced me in many ways.

I’ve chosen these friends, which I call the underdogs, in that they’re not mainstream. But they have this passion and they’re born with something and they follow it. Even when they fall they get up and keep fighting. When I started this project I was very lucky because of my background. Because of doing these parties I’ve been very lucky to have these kinds of people around me.

When you hear the title My Rock Stars you expect musicians. And so I try to have the Henna girl, male belly dancer, the snake charmer, the bad boy done well. The underdogs are more attractive to me personally.

Hassan Hajjaj is a self-taught artist whose work includes portraiture, installation, performance, fashion, and interior design, including furniture design. Heavily influenced by his North African heritage and by the hip-hop, reggae, and club scenes of London, Hajjaj’s work combines the personal with the political. His colorful and glossy portraits also combine the visual vocabulary of contemporary fashion photography and pop art with the tradition of African studio photography in a thoughtful commentary on the influences of cultural trappings, the interpretations of high and low branding, and the effects of global capitalism. His work plays with and upends stereotypes, the power of brands, and the familiarity of everyday objects, applying a “street-wise” approach to his layering of influences, items, and cultural signifiers to imbue the work with an electrifying tension. He was the winner of the 2011 Sovereign Middle East and Africa Prize, and was shortlisted for Victoria & Albert Museum’s Jameel Prize for Islamic Art in 2009.

Ian Berry Could you talk about some of the specifics about the photograph? Where does that suit pattern come from, and the background?

HH Normally when I’m between shooting, if I see a textile I like I’ll buy it and take it back to Morocco. I have a few people I work with in Medina, artisans that make suits.

And then I would make something out of it and it could be hanging in my wardrobe for six months or a year, but it’s ready for the right person. This fabric, it’s from parasols and it’s a fabric that I remember from when I was a kid in the ’60s. Normally, you’re not supposed to make a suit out of this because it’s very stiff. It’s like a canvas.

The plastic mats, my uncle used to make them in the village and they’re everywhere in the continent of Africa. That one’s from Senegal, the backdrop.

The socks I think are very cheap soccer socks probably

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made out of nylon. And the sunglasses are sold in Kanda Market, which is a tourist market, for something like 2 pounds. The hat is about 50 cents. This idea was trying to buy the cheapest stuff and create something grand. If you come to my place in Morocco you’re going to see bags of hats, bags of sunglasses, bags of socks, loads of suits, loads of dresses. These are always ready, and then I’ll go with the flow. If the person likes the suit, I’d like to give it to them because then it means it’s gone.

HT You make the clothes in the images, which is really unique.

HH Ninety percent would be my designs. Some of the artists have a specific style and so I don’t want to touch them. I might add socks or sunglasses or a hat. For example, in Mr. J.C.-Hayford, all the stuff is my design except the shoes. The shoes are his. I had these pink sunglasses ready for him and he turned up with the shoes. I thought, this was meant to be.

IB Do you know what street you were on?

HH This is outside my store on Calvert Avenue in London and it was a great day with a bit of rain here and there, so every now and then we’d go back inside and come out and shoot.

IB And did you say how to pose?

HH In the street when you hang these bright color mats, everybody walking by is going to look. And most of the people I’m shooting are performers. I say, “When you’re inside this frame, this is a stage, you can do with it what you want. You can be yourself or you can be theatrical.” I have a plan when we sketch the composition I want but then I let things go, and sometimes a person gives you something unexpected.

IB So he’s showing off like a butterfly?

HH Yeah, he’s somebody who has this kind of a colorful character.

HT Your frames are a huge part of your work. They’re three-dimensional in a lot of cases. Can you talk about that a little bit? Do you make the actual frames?

HH I have a carpenter. The products I choose determine the measurements of the frame. The frame gets made and then it goes to the sprayer and then it comes back and the product and the print would be stuck on. So it could be twelve weeks’ production from beginning to end.

My early work was totally about products.

I used mainly Arabic products in my photography.

It was more about graphics and the strength of the brand. If you see this crate [part of the furniture installation on which Hannah and Hassan sit], even if it’s in Arabic you know it’s a Coca-Cola brand. I wanted to bridge my old work into the new work. Using the frames, I was using the brands and also I was using these repeated patterns that we have in Morocco, the mosaics. At that point I was thinking to myself, Well who is Hassan Hajjaj? If I’m going to become an artist I’m probably going to be a product.

If you come to my studio you’re going to think it’s a store. An image could take forty to sixty products.

So it means I have to have those things ready to be able to finish the frame. And the last thing I want is to start something and that product is not there anymore.

When I see something unusual I have to buy a minimum of sixty to a hundred. These are my paints.

IB About the presentation—it looks like a metallic print.

What is it and how did you do it?

HH It’s a metallic lambda print. It reminds me of cans of Coca-Cola, it has this shine. When you put the right lights on it, when you walk past it, you can see the color changing. So it was about this eye-catching immediacy.

It’s the pretty picture first and then hopefully there’s a deeper story to it. On the frame are butterfly matches from Morocco. Sometimes I play with the products within the images. So playing on sexist words as well but they’re just for me trying to play around with the subject.

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Create Artwork Inspired by the Tang Collection Ginger Ertz Museum Educator for K-12 and Community Programs

This project supports the Common Core Learning Standards, particularly the Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy as they relate to social studies, and the National Core Arts Standards for Creating, Presenting, Responding, and Connecting.

Supplies  Ink pads in a variety of colors (or acrylic paint, but this can get messier and be more difficult to keep colors separated)  Water  Assorted fruits and vegetables (apples, potatoes, brussels sprouts, celery, cabbage leaves, corn on the cob, and kiwi are good options)  Paper or fabric to print on  Newspaper or plastic tablecloth  Lots of paper towels and/or wet wipes Step 1 Cover the work area with newspaper and/or a plastic tablecloth.

This could get messy!

Step 2 Cut fruits and veggies into halves or slices to bring out the best shapes in each. You can even carve into a potato half to create fun shapes.

Adult supervision recommended for young children.

Step 3 Use ink pads or pour paint into small, shallow bowls, one color per dish. Dip the “stamp” into a pad or bowl, then stamp onto the paper, printing in repeated patterns and looking at the original artwork for inspiration.

Step 4 Before dipping the stamp into another color of ink or paint, use paper towels/wipes to completely clean the first color off of the stamp’s surface. Try dipping different stamps into different colors, then make a picture using them in creative ways, including by overlapping the shapes.

Use as many colors and shapes as you like!

Step 5 Let dry, then display the prints on the wall, in windows, on the refrigerator door, or anywhere you’d like to see something bright, cheerful, and loaded with culture and history. And, remember, you can even cut them up and collage them into clothing or other creative designs!

It’s always fun to leave time at the end to make an “exhibition” out of the work, allowing participants to say what they enjoy about somebody else’s artwork.

For a Family Saturday project, we looked at images from the exhibition Africa Pop Studio (see pages 58–61), including Namsa Leuba’s Damien on the opposite page. We took a close look at how bright colors and active patterns are used in the clothing and backgrounds of artwork by Omar Victor Diop, Hassan Hajjaj, and Leuba, and discussed how they might have printed those patterns on the fabrics. Inspired by these African prints, we created potential fabric patterns using stamps that we made ourselves out of vegetables and fruit. Some of our little artists cut up their completed papers and collaged them into clothing designs.

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Namsa Leuba (born 1982), Damien (from NGL), 2015 Fiber pigment print on Dibond Purchased with funding from Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, 2017.7

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FATOU KANDÉ SENGHOR on Filmmaking in Senegal

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On October 13, 2016, the Tang screened two films by Senegalese artist and filmmaker Fatou Kandé Senghor, Giving Birth (2015) and The Other in Me (2012). The event was followed by an interview with the artist.

I’m a traveler. I’m the daughter of great travelers, and I’ve been traveling for forty-five years. I’ve been soul searching for twenty years. And I’m an artist. I didn’t really choose to be. I think art chose me. And, where we come from, art is not a career, it’s not a path of 71

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Stills from Fatou Kandé Senghor (born 1971) Giving Birth, 2015 Video with color, sound, 30 minutes Gift of the artist, 2016.3.1

life, it’s not a practiced discipline. It’s more of a mission. It’s the kind of mission that really you bear with a lot of attention, because the community you are a part of identifies you as a person that is about them, with them, but on the margins at the same time. You point your finger at what’s not working in the community. It’s a very serious mission to me. I’m becoming a fabulous artist because I love it, because I am knowing more and more about humankind. I know we have more in common than differences.

I practice video and photography, probably because they are the mediums of my time. The digital tool has provided me with a voice, and it has allowed people to come into my life and give me their stories. And it has allowed me to have the decency of sharing their stories, and sharing them with the angle of listening and not judging, and not pointing, just to stir the inner conversation with the viewers. I need to be that person that can humbly take in important moments of people’s lives, because they are related to themes that run the world: identity, fertility, masculinity, environment.

The mission of artists is only to talk about history. That’s their main preoccupation. They’re part of a chain, but in this chain they have to deal with the past, with the present, and make projections for the future.

On Giving Birth Giving Birth is the story of ceramist Seni Awa Camara, who’s in her late seventies. She grew up in a ceramist home, where people make pots and usual things to eat and drink from. And she tells the story about getting lost in the forest, when she was around seven, for a week, and coming back with clay and little figurines. She says something taught her. And then here she is, in her village, producing very odd figurines that nobody knows in that culture.

The reputation of being really something, a mystical creature, enhances, and her life becomes quite tough. She’s married when she’s fourteen, and as she describes, “I was married. I didn’t even have breasts.” And that body is forced to have children. Four times in a row she’s pregnant, and it breaks her body. She never has a child. In that culture it’s important to have children, to

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I followed her rhythm.

I wanted to listen to understand.

I wanted to listen to feel and to see what had happened to her.

have male babies in particular. She becomes what is called a tree that cannot bear any fruit. You become part of a caste that cannot participate in most activities in the community.

It’s a story about hope. It’s a story about strength. And it’s a story about communication. These figurines, when I met her fifteen years ago, were pregnant. And then fifteen years down the line, the family is here. Things are crawling up these figurines. And they are half human, half animals, half what-nots, and it’s very impressive. It’s about her, but it’s also about another reality that is not of these times. The mix between mystic and personal despair, it’s all there.

I followed her rhythm. I wanted to listen to understand. I wanted to listen to feel and to see what had happened to her. I have three daughters that have gotten out of my own body, loved and raised, seen at all stages of their bodies.

If she tells me at fourteen her body was already in womanhood, I can feel that.

Every time I look at her, I can see that. I can see why her body said no, why her body never gave birth, and why somebody or something just shut down her life at an early stage. And I could be a window to talk about the subject. When I come back to my comprehension of what art or an artist is, it’s that position.

It’s just shutting your mouth and listening and watching.

Giving Birth (2015) follows the creative process of Senegalese sculptor and ceramist Seni Awa Camara.

Camara’s lively work was included in the landmark French exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989) as an example of contemporary art from the non-West.

Senghor’s film presents Camara in her own words as an act of taking art history back from the “center” of the art world. Repositioning the oeuvre of Camara, Senghor reasserts the work’s legacy within the history of not only the Global South, but also women’s art-making in Senegal.

On The Other in Me When I did The Other in Me, I really had to shut up because I’m married to one of the protagonists. It’s a film about family, about his, about mine. Etienne and Leopold [twin grandsons of Senegal’s first president, poet and philosopher Leopold Senghor] came to the States, they were seven years old, with diplomatic parents who were working for the embassy in Washington, DC. They were growing up as American boys in American schools.

Etienne comes back to Africa, he’s twenty-seven, and Leopold comes back to Africa, he’s forty. Etienne, when he comes back, he felt a calling. He came back home, struggled to capture language, culture. But I was there to help, so that went well for him, I think, in terms of getting back in balance. And because he saw his twin change, Leo figured, “Me, too. There’s something wrong with my

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Stills from Fatou KandĂŠ Senghor (born 1971), The Other in Me, 2012 Video with color, sound, 65 minutes Gift of the artist, 2016.3.2

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life in the States.” Everybody’s back home but him in his family of six boys.

So, here he is, coming back, struggling. He really struggles, and I can see that, I can feel that. We decided to do this film to exorcise this.

This film was very hard to edit, very hard to film, very hard to organize.

It took some time, but in the end, we managed to make a classy film. I think a very powerful one. And it connected with very different people, people that were not necessarily from Africa. And I think it got the job done. It got the job done for Leo, for his twin, Etienne, and in particular for Leo’s children, who developed a better interest for their father and for the motherland, too.

The Other in Me (2012) charts the journey of twin brothers Etienne and Leopold as they live between Senegal and the US. Engaging themes of diaspora and belonging, this film uses the lens of Negritude to examine how two individuals—the grandsons of Senegal’s first president, the poet and philosopher Leopold Senghor—find their roots.

The works I produce are honest, and they’re finding their niches a bit everywhere.

I want them to survive time; I want them to be meaningful. And I suspect, in the future we’ll still be dealing with identity issues, and people are still going to be lost, because everybody’s going from one point to the other, and losing a lot in translation and in geography.

There’s a bird in Akan mythology from Ghana. It’s called the sankofa.

It flies toward the future, but with its head turned to the past. And it does that so it can measure where it should land in the future. It’s a particular position, but I can understand it. You cannot do without that past. You have to process it in the present, because that’s when you have the energy, and that’s what your mission is, at that time. But you’re also trying to place it in a time, in the future, so nobody forgets the research you have done, the efforts you have put in. That’s why you need to treat it right, make it right, and contribute with generosity, and not just make it about you, about a career. I’m more like a warrior, a highlander. The work will survive me, will definitely resist. I can’t control what is said and done before me, but I know that I come at a good moment, my moment.

A graduate in film studies from the Université Charles de Gaulle Lille III in France, Fatou Kandé Senghor is the founder of the Waru Studio in Dakar: a platform for artistic research through the use of new technologies. The studio serves as a laboratory for experimentation in art, science and technology, ecology, and the politics of change. Senghor has directed and produced several films, and her work has been shown at festivals including FESPACO (Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), the Goethe-Institut (Dakar), and the Venice Biennale.

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Carrie Mae Weems Run Nigger Run (from Sea Islands Series) 1992

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953), Run Nigger Run (from Sea Islands Series), 1992 Gelatin silver print with text panel, 20 ¹⁄₄ � 40 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.28a-b

Taina Cotto ’20 Art can evoke emotion and tell stories in ways more powerful than words. Viewing Run Nigger Run, I was initially drawn to the nature photograph.

The scenery is beautiful, and I could see a younger me running around in the wooded area, but when I read the lyrics of “Run Nigger Run,” that vision suddenly became a demented one. The song and image together bring back thoughts of enslaved people desperately attempting to escape the South, a place with beautiful land but the horror of slavery.

The lyrics—running from the “patty-roller” who would catch enslaved people in their escape—take the scene from being a natural, serene woods to an eerie place where human beings ran for their lives.

At the center of the photograph is a slight clearing in the trees—seemingly the perfect escape. But when

merged with the lyrics, the clear path becomes a space to be easily found by a slave hunter. The clearing had potential to be a symbol for hope, but instead it became a symbol of despair. The idea of running from the “patty-rollers” and from the racism and oppression of the South on an island becomes symbolic of how black people in the South were trapped in their experiences, told to run but with nowhere to go.

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Katie Coggins ’20 Using the combined power of music and lyrics with the graphic depiction of the landscape, Carrie Mae Weems invokes a history deeply imbedded within the place and culture of the American South to create a dialogue with the present. The juxtaposition of the delicacy of the trees and the upsetting lyrics of the music taint the image with an unsettling sensation, poisoning it with violence. Alongside the sing-song lyrics of the song, the moss-draped cypress trees attain an eerie sensation and conjure the memory of lynching photography, their hanging moss taking the place of bodies.

The theme of running, as presented in the song, implies seeking safety or better conditions.

In this way, the song acts not only as a representation of the past but as a symbol of modern African

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Americans trying to escape harsh conditions.1 Escape seems to be an enduring dream. Problems of the past are the forbearers to the problems of the present and are not distinct and dead. The running may have started here, but it is far from over.

The disadvantages African Americans face today go beyond outright violence: they include education, employment, living standards, health care, and security. Run Nigger Run seems to call into question the advancements that have been made since the time the folk song was written.

1  Newman White, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 78.

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Tim Rollins and K.O.S. I See the Promised Land (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), 1998 In June 2017, Tim Rollins with Angel Abreu and Rick Savinon, two senior members of K.O.S., sat with the Tang to discuss their 1998 artwork I See the Promised Land (after Martin Luther King, Jr.).

Tim Rollins I grew up in rural Maine in the woods, and as a kid my colossal hero was Martin Luther King Jr., and I watched him on TV religiously. I had pictures of him in my room. And I remember vividly April 4, 1968, I was in bed and trying to go to sleep, but I had one of those minds that was just whirling. I could hear downstairs on TV, they announced the assassination of Dr. King. I was thirteen, and it was the first time in my life that I felt grief over death, the first time that death really approached my heart, and I cried myself to sleep.

His last sermon was “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” or “I’ve Seen the Promised Land,” in downtown Memphis. There was a huge thunderstorm that night. The skies were screaming. He didn’t have notes with him and he just came on in and he tore the place up. He was prophesizing his own demise on that night. When he finishes, you see in his face the fear, the trepidation, the trembling.

It reversed me to one of his best sermons, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” He says that life at its best is a triangle with heights and depth and breadth. He says on the lower angle is me– meaning you have to invest in yourself before you’re going to help anyone else. And that’s one of the basic tenets of K.O.S. We’re into developing people, personalities, intelligence, and knowledge. In order to help who? We is the other lower angle. King says the apex of the triangle is the diety, God, spirit, hope, vindication, determination. In the painting the apex goes off. There is no point; it’s endless. It’s a highway to heaven. It’s Jacob’s ladder, and it’s inexhaustible as a force. So that’s where the notion of the triangle comes from.

What I had everyone do is come up with their own color. So it’s a self-portrait in the form of a unique color. One little rule, don’t use it straight from the bottle. You got to make it yourself. This is about how the aura and the spirit that you have inside yourself can manifest itself in a form and in a hue.

Angel Abreu Because every work is made as a self-portrait, when you put them together, it creates this kind of cacophonous spirit. And there is joy, there is anger. But there is also hope. That represents basically what we do.

As we grew together as a group, creatively and artistically, the work all started looking like one person did it. As we matured, we all started coming together as one. And I feel like this particular work is when that really started.

Rick Savinon I had left the group for about a year. During that time K.O.S. developed this work. And I remember looking at it, it gave me a sense of peacefulness, a sense of hope, a sense of relief. Martin Luther King Jr. knew what he wanted, but it was a passive practice that he had. When we make these works, it’s almost like it’s a practice of service as well.

TR Ralph Waldo Emerson said that books are not to be read; they’re to be used. And that’s exactly what we do. We use them from the perspective of what we live through in our own personal lives, as individuals and as communities. It’s a way to have a conversation with history where sometimes we feel like we’ve been cut out of history.

RS We’ve had folks come to us and say, “I completely forgot about this book. I’m going to re-read it.” And then they thank us because when they first read it, they were going through different experiences.

They’ve evolved. They’ve seen it in a different light, a different perspective. That’s what we want people to come out with when they see the paintings.

TR They’re teaching machines. So they keep on keeping on.

AA I’ll go further. The work allows us to collaborate with whatever author or composer we’re working on. And they give their input as well; we feel that.

We really do. We feel, this is the lightning bolt.

Whenever it hits, it’s coming from that collaboration.

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Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (established 1981), I See the Promised Land (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), 1998 Matte acrylic, pencil, and book pages on canvas, 62 ¹⁄₄ � 46 ¹⁄₈ in.

Gift of the artists, 2011.7

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Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler Constitution on Tour, 1991

Beau Breslin Dean of the Faculty, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Professor of Political Science To ratify. To consent. To lend agreement to a contract, constitution, or arrangement that will, from that moment forward, profoundly impact both the ratifier and the community.

We most commonly think of ratification as a relic of the United States’ constitutional past.

Ratifying conventions were formed in the late eighteenth century to decide on the merits of the newly drafted US Constitution. The debates that ensued were some of the most spirited, and important, in the country’s history. That period of constitutional ratification can and should be seen as an epic drama, one that in many ways changed the nature of popular government forever.

And yet the statesmen who framed and eventually endorsed the US Constitution understood that the principle of ratification was to be an ongoing enterprise—an enduring project that was not fixed at a particular moment in time. Every generation has a responsibility to interrogate its relationship with the Constitution; every generation can and should ratify the text. Indeed, to ratify, they said, is to take personal responsibility regardless of whether one is participating in a formal convention or not. To own. To engage individually with the meaning and purpose of the collective constitutional agreement. The moment of ratification is an intimate, defining moment.

Contemporary Americans have largely forgotten, or perhaps foolishly ignored, the intimacy of ratification. We rarely contemplate our private bonds with the Constitution. We don’t regularly ask ourselves why (and if) we endorse the spirit and meaning of the United States’ fundamental law.

We have relegated the power of ratification to our dead ancestors.

Recently, though, art has tried to carry the torch of constitutional ratification. Museums and

objects have become the best lens through which we contemplate our personal association with the constitutional document. At the National Archives in Washington the original Constitution and Bill of Rights are on permanent display. The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia—a museum dedicated entirely to the Constitution and its amendments—cleverly invites visitors to engage in the tangible process of ratification. In Signers’ Hall, visitors are asked to reflect on the Constitution and to “sign” it—to ratify it—based on private reflection.

Some sign the book signifying their support for the Constitution; others sign a different book that signifies a rejection of the text. For many patrons of the museum it can be an emotionally powerful moment.

Contemplating Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler’s Constitution on Tour can be equally powerful. And equally emotional. To celebrate the bicentennial of the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1991, and in response to a nationwide tour of the document, the artists designed a provocation. They sandblasted and painted the entire Constitution and its emendations onto a thin slab of marble and then proceeded to destroy the pristine text—the sacred text—into small shards. Offensive? Perhaps. Thought provoking? Definitely. The image of a destroyed constitutional document, much like that of a burned flag, asks the viewer to contemplate her relationship with the American body politic. It probes the very essence of constitutional meaning. It makes us think about whether we want to take the small shards and piece them together—to reconstitute the Constitution; whether, in this period of staggering political discord and strife, we want to return to the country’s guiding principles—liberty, equality, and democracy; and, ultimately, whether we have the courage to recommit to America’s blessed constitutional values. To ratify.

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Kate Ericson (1955–1995) and Mel Ziegler (born 1956), Constitution on Tour, 1991 Model train cars and tracks, sandblasted and painted marble, metal brackets, 26 ³⁄₄ � 94 ⁵⁄₈ � 4 ³⁄₄ in. (installed) Tang purchase, 2005.3

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Other Side: Art, Object, Self

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What is the “other side”? Is it the same for everyone?

This exhibition, featuring contemporary artworks from the Tang collection, offers many “other sides.”

Although the term suggests duality—I’m here, you’re there; this is right, that is wrong—sides are never as clear-cut as we might imagine or wish them to be.

The artists in Other Side: Art, Object, Self explore the interconnections and the elusive boundaries between concepts like life and death, seen and unseen, loss and hope, artifice and truth. They use objects, materials, and bodies in provocative ways to encourage viewers to assess preconceived notions and to prompt critical examinations of the self—of national, cultural, and personal identities.

Humans, by nature, are faced with questions of self, and many of us spend our lives constructing our identities, changing them as we grow, as we experience life. Other Side offers space for contemplation as well as conversation—space to engage in dialogue with artworks and with other visitors— regarding what we see, feel, or think when looking at art. Importantly, this exhibition aims to stimulate thoughtful consideration of ideas and beliefs, seeking vital exchanges and mutual understandings.

Other Side: Art, Object, Self is curated by Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara

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Fred Wilson Pharaoh Fetish 1993

Sophie Heath ’18 Fred Wilson often uses hidden or overlooked objects in his artwork to comment on dominant understandings of history and culture. His installations and sculpture address issues that can arise by placing cultural objects on display. By combining the known and neglected histories of these objects, Wilson illuminates the limited lens through which Western museums often view history and art.

In Pharaoh Fetish, a black plaster pharaoh stands tall on a deep yellow base that adjusts the statue to be eye-level with the viewer. The yellow base is akin to a pedestal found in an ethnographic museum. There is a subtle subordination present.

Perhaps the name itself implies this, a “fetish” being a passive noun, something to be desired or worshipped. The passive nature of the title alludes to the West’s continuing fetishization of Egypt.

A typical tourist souvenir, the truncated pharaoh is emblematic of Egypt’s growing popularity since the late eighteenth century. After Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, Egyptian goods became “fetishes” for European and American collectors.

However, broader understandings of Egyptian culture were largely ignored as these ancient goods began to represent Western exploration and discovery. Several leather necklaces hanging on the pharaoh depict a profile of the queen Nefertiti against a silhouette of Africa. Nefertiti, whose body remains lost, is seen as a symbol of the West’s prowess with discovery after Westerners tasked themselves with “rescuing” her remains.

The “Western hero” narrative overshadows Nefertiti’s significance as a powerful Egyptian queen and the mother of one of the most famous pharaohs in history—Tutankhamen.

Other symbols adorning the pharaoh’s body include the ankh, a symbol of life and power in Egypt, and beads in Pan-African colors strung onto leather cords. While the ankh represents Egyptian

power, the beads allude to the necklaces worn by Black Power activists in the United States in the 1970s. By combining the ankh with the beaded necklaces, Wilson reminds viewers of synergistic moments in African and diasporic history: the precolonial African continent and the civil rights era when, after centuries of slavery and hardship, black and brown peoples in late twentieth-century United States fought for equality.

Prompted by Wilson’s work, we are reminded of these histories and encouraged to ask further questions. For many years, the ankh and pharaoh have represented Western wealth and exploration.

Is historical Egyptian symbolism now lost from these objects? Are the ankh, Nefertiti, and pharaoh “Egyptian” symbols to Egyptians? Wilson does not present decisive answers but asks us to consider the varied meanings of objects and their display, as well as our possible desensitization to their original cultural meanings. Pharaoh Fetish asks us to reevaluate our existing knowledge of history and museums and critique the hidden lenses that refract our view of the world around us.

Installation view, Fred Wilson (born 1954), Pharaoh Fetish, 1993 Plaster, paint, leather, cotton, wood, glass, amethyst, copper alloy 68 ¹⁄₂ � 15 � 18 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2014.7.15a-b

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Willie Cole To get to the other side, 2001

Rebecca McNamara Mellon Collections Curator What does it mean to get to the other side? Most simply, it is the answer to the question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” A result of the artist’s fascination with double entendres, this characterization holds symbolic undertones.1 The fowl, a commonly sacrificed animal in African religions, reflects an ability to traverse between different realms—land, water, sky (earth, spirit, space, time)—and in Yoruba practice specifically, “the fare fowl” is sacrificed to ease the deceased’s transition to afterlife. 2 In To get to the other side, an oversize chessboard contains not fowl, but instead, thirty-two black-faced lawn jockey statues. Their faces are caricatured; their posture, hunched over and servile.

The statues are part of a history of so-called black memorabilia in the United States: Mammy ashtrays, Aunt Jemima salt shakers, Uncle Tom cookie jars.

The Jim Crow–era racism embedded within these figures cannot be erased, but Willie Cole’s lawn jockeys aren’t negative symbols: they’re about spirit, and about reclaiming power over an image.

Cole has reimagined the statues as stand-ins for the Yoruba gatekeeper god Elegba, imbuing each with the power of a deity who allows people—or not—to reach higher orishas, to get to the other side.

Standing together en masse, the lawn jockeys transform into postures of strength, combat, and forward momentum. Named pieces hold knives in place of ring-in-hand hitching posts and are adorned with symbols and metaphors reflecting their roles on the gameboard. The rook, impoverished, carries his “castle”—his belongings held in bundles—on his back. His white-painted eyes suggest a spirit that

lies within; physically made of cast concrete, each statue is figuratively a vessel. The knight’s concreteand nail-ridden body is reminiscent of Congolese Nkisi statues. The bishop holds liquor bottles, containers, and pots—a literal positioning of his role as the carrier of spirits. The king and queen wear neckties, contemporary American “power cloths,” while strings of beads from Brazil reference deities in the diasporic Yoruba religion Candomblé. These are just a few of the seemingly endless meanings of individual adornment.

As a whole, the work expresses a singular goal—to get to the other side—but where that is and how one gets there are uncertain. The Tang’s configuration shows a rook about to be captured by a pawn.

It is an anxious moment. Elegba is a gatekeeper but also a trickster; perhaps this is the moment when the god flips the switch, tricks a believer, tricks itself.

There are two teams on the chessboard: will only one reach the other side? Cole has said of the work, “Chess is a game of war” and, “To get to the other side is a battlefield.” To reach a higher spiritual realm, to get to the other—an other, any other—side, must we shed blood in sacrifice? Does the chicken ever make it across the road?

1 Quotes and references to Cole’s own interpretations of the work are from an interview with the author, June 13, 2017. For a condensed, edited version of this interview, see pages 90–94.

2 Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, eds., Encyclopedia of African Religion, volume 1 (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 123–24, 277.

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Installation views Willie Cole (born 1955), To get to the other side, 2001 32 cast-concrete lawn jockeys and mixed media, galvanized steel, wood, 32 ¹⁄₂ � 198 � 198 in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.35

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WILLIE

COLE

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on To get to the other side, Lawn Jockeys, Art, and Music

On June 13, 2017, Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara and Dayton Director Ian Berry interviewed Willie Cole about his sculpture To get to the other side, which is displayed at the Tang for the first time in the exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self.

Rebecca McNamara You first created To get to the other side in 2001 in response to a commission from the Bronx Museum. Can you talk about when and why you initially made this piece?

Willie Cole I went to Brazil, I think in 2000, and in Brazil, I got a big dose of Candomblé, which is kind of the Brazilian version of Ifá, from the Yoruba traditions. I was very moved by that. I had been reading about the Yoruba traditions for many years. My daughter’s mother was Yoruba. We had many conversations, and I’m experiencing it as an outsider, like an investigator, and then I went to Brazil and saw that it was part of their daily life.

Those kinds of symbols and meanings were really present with me.

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A few years before, I read a book called Black Gods: Orisa Studies in the New World, and it lists the attributes of every orisha. Elegba was the one that I felt I had the greatest connection to, the presenter of choices.

RM Why lawn jockeys? What does the lawn jockey mean to you?

WC The symbol of the lawn jockey is perceived as negative.

But in this piece, I’ve turned it into a symbol of power by placing it in the position of power, as a member of a chess team, but also giving it the embellishments of spiritual icons from African traditions. What it means to me, personally, before it’s embellished, is just a symbol of the difficulties that this country’s had with race. It’s not a personal symbol of present racism. It’s a redefining of a negative symbol, giving new meaning to something old.

In Brazil and in Cuba, all the so-called orishas or black gods have European or Western counterparts.

The Virgin Mary might be Yemanjá in Brazil. Every god has a counterpart. The lawn jockey is a stand-in for Elegba, the god at the crossroads, the presenter of choices. His symbolism might be the doorway, the cross, the colors red and black; the so-called traditionally painted lawn jockey has those same symbols. You see a lawn jockey standing at the top of the driveway, where the road goes across, or by the front door. It just goes on and on and on.

In the book The Divine Horseman, the author uses the words of the Haitians who are involved in voodoo ceremonies. In the ceremony, if a person becomes possessed by a god, they say the person’s being ridden by the gods, that the gods are the divine horsemen, and the people who are worshipping, who may become possessed, are the horses. So that was the real kickoff for me with the lawn jockey, because in the ceremonies, you have to present your first offering to Elegba. If that offering’s accepted, then Elegba opens the door for you to get to the next level. The jockey wants to ride the horse, but the jockey boy [who is represented in the lawn statues] has to bring it to him.

So it became almost the same thing.

RM You mentioned how the black lawn jockey, just in itself, has these racial and racist undercurrents. For the lawn jockey that’s standing in for a Yoruba god, what sort of message or energy do you see that as transferring?

WC With a lot of African art, you don’t get it, but you feel it.

You can go into a gallery of African art and stand between two Nkisi and get nervous because you can feel the power. You don’t know what it means, but you can feel it. I would be very pleased if people don’t

understand what my piece means, but they feel something, because it’s all about feeling and spirit.

RM The sculpture is called To get to the other side. What side are the figures on? What side are they trying to reach?

WC I am a big fan of double entendre and double meaning.

I love that stuff. Why’d the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. What is the most sacrificed animal in certain rituals? The chicken. I thought that was amazing. So I put those two together. The first offering will go to Elegba. That pawn could be carrying a chicken to the other side. Getting to the other side means crossing the plane from our everyday life to a more spiritual plane. In these traditions, sometimes that’s done through sacrifice. In Christian tradition, it’s done through warfare. They both shed blood. To get to the other side is a battlefield.

Ian Berry When you come to a town like Saratoga, and you take the drive from downtown to the college, and you pass by dozens of lawn jockeys, do you imagine who’s living in those houses? What do you think about what that might mean? Does that have meaning?

WC It means big fans of horse racing, because I know that’s where I am. I don’t think that there are racial indications in it at all, but I wonder if the people who own the jockeys know the history of the jockey in that way, because I haven’t seen a black-faced jockey here yet. So I think it’s horse racing. But to me, it’s also the persistence of particular kinds of symbols or belief systems, how things can be hidden in other things.

Sometimes I find that there are things that people do and say that they don’t really know the deeper history or meaning of. In those situations, the meaning is winning the war, if that makes sense. The color black might be associated with death, and suddenly we’re all wearing black, but we’re not thinking about death. Symbolically we’re still advertising those old meanings. As in my piece, we’re recontextualizing it to fit in a more contemporary environment, but those old meanings still have relevance. It’s only through time that they appear to be different. But at some level, there’s only now, and everything is compressed. The past, present, and future is all happening at the same time. So even though we think that we’re advertising “cool,” we’re still advertising “death.”

IB So if you paint a black lawn jockey’s face lighter, isn’t there still black skin under that?

WC No, they’re just solid cement until the maker decides on

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Willie Cole prefers the term “perceptual engineer” to “artist.” His work, inspired by African art and culture, often reconfigures found or ordinary objects—steam irons, hairdryers, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys—into powerful sculptures and prints. His work has been shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Miami Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, and elsewhere.

The artist lives and works in his home state of New Jersey.

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being, just drawing, making sculpture for you, the viewer, to see, to interpret, to experience, and hopefully to grow from.

IB What’s the difference between art and music?

WC Just the medium is different. The real gift, so-called gift, is creativity, and you can apply it to anything you want.

IB What is creativity?

In preparation for installing To get to the other side in Other Side: Art, Object, Self, Monica Berry, conservator of objects and sculpture, worked with the artist to identify conservation needs and stabilized and treated the lawn jockeys during summer 2017.

a color. The idea of black skin exists because of the history of the jockey statue in this country. To me, on a spiritual plane, everything happens at once. So even though you don’t know that your jockey is linked to a history of the past, that moment in time, it’s all piled up together. To me, everything is stacked up, the past, the present, and the future. You see a lawn jockey. In this moment, he has a white face. Yes, he’s still a lawn jockey, and his negative energy still exists. It’s just that you don’t have the awareness, so you don’t experience it directly on your plane of existence, but it’s still there.

Me, knowing where I am and knowing who I am, I see the lawn jockey, and, yes, I know the negative symbol, but I know where I am. I know I’m in this moment, in a town where people are into horse races. So that meaning rises to the top.

WC What would Sun Ra say? I think creativity is more like a direct connection to the source of all things, and everybody has it. You think of the faculties of the mind.

If you mix perception, reasoning, imagination, memory, and will, when all those are added together, it’s creativity. Being open to allow something to enter and grow.

But creativity, art, and music, it’s the same thing. A lot of musicians are artists. Sylvester Stallone is a painter.

Bob Dylan is a painter. Miles Davis is a painter. Terry Adkins is a jazz musician. It’s the same energy, just applied through different medium. You can get a direct hit, like a main line, or you can take a pill. What I like about music is that I think music is more main line.

I think jazz is the highest calling in all the creative acts because it is so immediate. That’s why my art is play, because I want to be more like John Coltrane. When I was an illustrator, it was not like jazz.

It required somebody giving me a concept. It required research. It required sketches and all that stuff. But with my sculpture, it’s just play. It’s like, now is the time. I had a friend who was a jazz musician. He told me that improvisation was the reordering of learned information. That’s what I’m doing here. I’ve learned about the lawn jockey already. I’ve learned about African religion already. So now let’s play with all these things and see what happens. Don’t sit down and contemplate it and make it heavy. Just jump into the “do” stage of it all, and see what song comes out.

IB Your work is often cited in conversations about race and to reflect or agitate about experiences that other people, besides you, are having now. How do you feel about your work in that catalytic place?

WC I’m glad just to be working and to be seen and to be talked about. So I don’t mind that, negative or positive. My work is only about race because you choose to see it that way. I draw a picture. I draw a black person. I’m not talking about race. I’m just drawing a person. I’m just doing my humanness, being a human

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Hamilton Elementary School Students Visit the Tang, Meet Artist Willie Cole Ginger Ertz Museum Education for K-12 and Community Programs

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In June 2017, third- to fifth-grade students from Hamilton Elementary School in Schenectady, New York, were guests of the Tang Teaching Museum, where they met artist Willie Cole, talked about contemporary art, and made their own works of art. Because Hamilton has little or no funding for field trips, I have been visiting the students at their school two or three times per year for the past several years, and was thrilled that we could support a field trip that brought them to the Tang. They are a diverse, curious, creative, and intelligent group of children.

Willie Cole was visiting the Tang to review his 2001 sculpture To get to the other side before it would be conserved and displayed. This was the perfect confluence of events to provide the Hamilton students with an experience that would make a difference to them. By giving these students the opportunity to travel to a museum and have direct and personal access to a contemporary artist, and by honoring their ideas and their creative talents, we were able to offer a formative experience that may influence some students to strive for success in an area that they may not have realized was open to them.

Cole talked to the visiting students about how he came to be an artist at age three and about To get to the other side, an approximately sixteen-foot-square chessboard and thirty-two chess pieces made from lawn jockeys. Having ascertained that virtually all of the thirtyfour youngsters considered themselves to be artists, he told them that he loves speaking with fellow artists.

Throughout the conversation, Cole listened and shared, responding to their ideas as openly and thoughtfully as he would with any adult audience. Surrounded by the jockeys, the students’ hands shot up with questions, and their comments proved that they knew quite a lot about chess pieces. They asked Cole why his castles/rooks were covered with little bundles. Cole explained that castles are homes, and he thought of the homeless people he had seen where he lives in New Jersey and how they have to carry everything they own with them. This idea made perfect sense to his young audience.

The conversation between Willie Cole and the students was inspiring to all of us: students and their teacher and parent chaperones as well as Tang staff.

We were thrilled to bring the students here, offer a memorable experience with a “real” artist, help students create their own artworks, and have a group lunch where they talked about how they were inspired by the visit— dubbed by several students as “the best field trip ever.”

This experience was a perfect example of what makes the Tang a teaching museum and what we mean by “access and inclusion,” both for the artists and for our current and potential audiences.

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George Osodi Blackened Explosion, 2004

S ami Israel ’19 and Teague Costello ’19 Nigerian photographer George Osodi is a strong believer in the camera’s ability to incite change. This belief led to his career as a photojournalist, which greatly influenced his work as an artist. His Oil Rich Niger Delta (2003–2007) series is one of his most well-known projects and put him on the map of the contemporary African art world. The series, comprising two hundred images, is an artistic photographic reportage of the environmental, economic, and social impacts of oil in the Niger Delta region. It provides a complex portrayal of the Niger Delta, exposing the atrocities of Western oil companies, the neglect of the Nigerian government, and the plight of local people caught in the middle.

Osodi emphasized that he wanted the focus of the series to be on the “real people” of the Delta: they are the ones who suffer from this environmental degradation; they are the forgotten victims of the world’s insatiable appetite for oil.

The artist captures the ways in which oil has not only shaped the people of the Delta’s physical environment but also the structure of their communities. For instance, traditional means of governance has given way to rebel militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). MEND and other groups are thirsty for a portion of the oil revenues; as is, virtually none

of the money made from the oil trade goes back to the Delta. One tactic the militants use to pressure the government is “oil bunkering,” in which they purposefully rupture the pipes of major oil companies, thereby causing massive explosions. An example of this can be seen in the image Blackened Explosion, which portrays smoke and flames billowing from a pipeline ruptured by militants. It has been suggested that the explosion is representative of the explosive neocolonial relationship between the Niger Delta and Western oil companies. While the oil industry causes mass pollution and health problems for the people of the Delta, it also stimulates the Nigerian economy.

As other writers have noted, this complexity and tension can be seen in the depth and variety of blackness present in the explosion. The intense contrast between the black clouds of smoke and flames against the landscape embodies Osodi’s desire to portray the “beauty of ugliness.” The explosion overwhelms the composition of the photograph, suggesting the ways in which the oil industry suffocates the region. Despite the violence of this image and many others in the series, Osodi states, “The Niger Delta was and is a beautiful place.” 1 1 George Osodi, Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise (London: Trolley Books, 2011), 29.

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George Osodi (born 1974), Blackened Explosion, 2004 Digital inkjet print, 46 ³/₄ � 31 in.

Gift of George Osodi and Z Photographic, Ltd., 2012.9

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The second panel discussion in the Accelerator Series, organized and moderated by Curator-atLarge Isolde Brielmaier, was held on April 20, 2017. The conversation about international movements of people went beyond political boundaries to explore issues of identity, citizenship, and what it means to be human.

Migration Borders: Visible Invisible Walls

Isolde Brielmaier Our conversation revolves around an urgent global discussion around the international movements of people, both voluntary and forced. This movement of people goes beyond political boundaries; it calls into question issues of identity; human, legal, and political rights; displacement; the definition of home and what home means to a broad range of people. I’m interested in how we can go about challenging surface notions, particularly those conveyed in the media around this idea of mobility, migration, immigration, and refugeeism from both a local and global perspective. Individuals, communities, masses of people have been put into motion and exile. They have been moved into spaces of uncertainty, into the so-called shadows, into what essentially has become states of suspended life or existence, where you’re living in the in-between. Hassan, as an individual, as an artist, and specifically as somebody who’s traversed multiple spaces, how do individuals today find themselves at home in multiple places?

Hassan Hajjaj I’ve had a journey of a kind of self-choice to be moved from my native Morocco to England via my mum and my dad. Along the way, I found myself a misfit from both countries. Growing up in London I became a Londoner but I don’t see myself as British. And going back to Morocco you realize that you’re the person that lives abroad. I use this for my work to try and express my experiences, my journeys. For example, the series My Rock Stars was an idea of people that I met along the way in London, in Paris, people that had been moved. I have friends who’ve come from Brazil, got married in London, have documents in London, next minute they’re living in Paris. There’s a whole new world in front of us with many different problems using this kind of movement. It’s a worrying time. I’m trying to look into this and trying to use this with my work beyond pretty pictures.

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IB Tanya, you’ve worked in the creative realm for several decades in addition to being active with social justice and human rights issues, and you’re particularly interested in the role that culture plays. Recently you touched on the idea that borders have many layers to them. You posed an interesting question: how do we keep our cultural borders open?

Tanya Selvaratnam When I was thinking about the theme of visible and invisible walls I thought about how sometimes the walls we have are between us and the people who are right in front of us. We’ve seen in our country over the last few months how this lack of understanding and this lack of empathy has led to horrible decisions being made, and how important it is to be able to pierce walls that those in positions of power would seek to erect between us. I’m so proud to be sitting in front of this particular portrait

by Mickalene Thomas of her mother [Madame Mama Bush, 2012]. I produced Mickalene’s film about her mother, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman. Making that film was part of her process of getting to know her mother from whom she had been estranged for so long and who had sacrificed so much to give Mickalene the ability to express herself as an artist. This is a way that art has been used to bridge that wall between a mother and a daughter.

I think about how grateful I am to be existing in this country today because of the sacrifices of people like my father, who came as an immigrant from Sri Lanka where he was a minority discriminated against. He came here to seek better opportunities only to find that once he got to this country many white people saw him as black and some black people saw him as white. And how hard he had to fight to exist in this country.

Like the great Toni Morrison quote, “Now is the time when artists get to work.” All artists have to get to work and contribute to building empathy and understanding.

IB Many artists feel a strong sense of responsibility not only to their craft but also to building a groundswell in terms of movements.

Richard Mosse I spent the last three years making artwork about the refugee crisis that’s been unfolding in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I made this work along various points on two of the busiest and most perilous routes into the EU. That’s taken me from the Persian Gulf to the border of Syria and Turkey, across the Aegean Islands, up the Balkan Corridor to Germany. And the second route that I’ve intercepted at various points is from SubSaharan Africa such as Mali and Niger through the Sahara Desert toward Libya on the route north to Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. I couldn’t go to Libya because I’m working with a camera that’s classed as weapons grade, so it’s sanctioned. So I intercepted this route again off the coast of Libya on Italian rescue boats.

IB You’re following multiple migrations here?

RM Yes. Those are the routes but there are whole different types of people on the routes from so many different countries, fleeing so many different harsh realities. Along the southern route, people are coming from the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea and Somalia, all the way across to West Africa, countries such as Senegal and Mali, or fleeing Boko Haram and other Islamist groups in places like Nigeria. There’s a lot of climate change in the Sahel that’s forcing people off their lands. There are also people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa fleeing persecution and conflict, which often has a correlation with climate change. And the route from the east, these people are fleeing war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. But I’ve also met people from Iran, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, fleeing persecution and economic hardship.

The whole project—film and photographs—was produced and made with an extreme long-range border-enforcement and military targeting camera. It’s thermographic so it can see day or night, and it can image the human body from about eighteen miles. That doesn’t mean we always used it from such a distance, but it has that feature. It’s a very powerful technology, and it’s very much a military tool, not available for consumer use.

IB And why that specific camera?

RM To investigate the medium. It’s very much about a European subjectivity—to remind but also to confront the viewer, particularly a European or American audience, that these are the technologies that our governments— surveillance states—are paying vast sums of money to control our borders against what they describe as “insurgents” but who are usually stateless, dispossessed, and very vulnerable people.

So my project attempts to confront the viewer with that reality, to reveal this, as well as to work against it, to

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allow the viewer to think through this form of representation, and hopefully allow the viewer to see the refugee’s struggle anew, to refresh the subject and provoke the viewer to see in a way that hopefully holds a mirror up to them.

The project is very much about perception. It is also about privacy—the camera depersonalizes and anonymizes the individual—which is both an appropriate yet symptomatic approach to figuring these individuals, due to, for example, the Dublin Convention (refugees often wish to conceal their identity from the camera’s gaze). So there are tensions within the work that we are deliberately bringing into collision in order to make the viewer feel these problems, and their own complicity.

There are also ways to interpret the work more simply in terms of body heat. If you’re a refugee, on a daily basis, you’re facing the risk of hypothermia, mortality from the elements, because you are living in tents and risking your life on the cold sea waves. Boats frequently sink and refugees die of hypothermia, something we witnessed many times and which we show in the film itself. To image the refugee’s body as heat is a way to allude to that bodily risk, and particularly hypothermia.

IB One of the things that you’re talking about is an alternate mode of creating visibility. Not only for the subjects, the people who make up the contents of the images, but also a heightened visibility or awareness on the part of the viewer. To talk about what’s going on in Europe now and not be fully aware and engaged with the history of colonialism on the part of the French, on the part of the British, on the part of the Dutch, the Germans, it goes on and on and on . . . There’s a big disconnect there.

TS There’s also this false construct of what it means to be an original person. There’s a delusion that people give themselves about who is an original citizen or inhabitant of a particular place. And this perplexing need that those in power have to dehumanize someone—they just change who that someone is at certain points in time. Right now it’s the Mexican and the Muslim—they’re the most visible enemies in the United States that have been constructed by those in power. If we go back to earlier in the century it was the Japanese, if we go back to the nineteenth century it was the Irish, who came to this country in waves during the famine. I’m always aware of how much there is this need to dehumanize somebody so that somebody else can consolidate their power and control people.

TS Power and money are these systems we’ve set up to enslave ourselves, and those who’ve mastered the tools of these systems can only maintain their power by creating people who are separate and selfish and scared, which is why it’s so important to have artists doing the work to force people not to be separate and selfish and scared, to realize that actually there are a lot of commonalities between us. We know for a fact that most Americans actually feel very similarly about a majority of issues whether it be climate change or immigration or criminal justice reform. Yet we’ve been manipulated to think that we are separate.

IB And that’s a wonderful opportunity for artists to step in and change that image. This idea of humanizing, of making more visible individuals or communities that are disenfranchised or pushed to the margins.

TS But it’s also important to recognize the limitations of art and technology. I was at a talk where a Google executive was saying that technology was going to save the world, that because there were more people with iPhones and cameras taking images and witnessing things that it was going to make the world a better place. Because you see the Syrian refugees, because you see the warfare. But we’re creating disaster porn. Are we changing policy?

While we’re using art and technology we must also understand that it’s important to take political control because until we take political control, the issues we care about won’t be actionable.

IB How do we do that? Where is that bridge between art, technology, the visual realm, culture, and actually impacting policy?

RM One criticism of the contemporary art world is that it’s constantly preaching to the choir. I think art does have this power to move people, including the laymen who don’t necessarily read Artforum. We communicate, that’s what we do and I think our role now is to move people.

IB And define themselves in a way—the way in which we define Americanness, the way in which we define citizenship. Who has access, who is able to rightly claim is often done along those in opposition to something, along those false binaries.

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Richard Mosse, born in Ireland, is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose recent project Incoming (2014–2017) is concerned with the refugee crisis unfolding across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and prior to that he worked extensively in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to create The Enclave (2010–2015). Mosse received the Prix Pictet, the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.

Tanya Selvaratnam is an Emmy-nominated and Webby-winning producer, writer, actor, and activist. She has produced the films Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman by artist Mickalene Thomas and the short film series Beginnings by Chiara Clemente. She has produced work by Liz Garbus, Catherine Gund, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others. She is the author of The Big Lie, and her writing has been featured in Vogue, Bust, Paper, the Huffington Post, Journal of Law and Politics, and elsewhere. She has been a featured guest on CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, NPR, Sirius XM, and CBS Radio News.

Hassan Hajjaj, Moroccan-born and based in Marrakech and London, is a self-taught artist whose work includes photography, installation, fashion, and interior design. His portraits combine the visual vocabulary of contemporary fashion photography, pop art, and traditional African studio photography. His work upends stereotypes, the power of brands, and the familiarity of everyday objects, applying a “street-wise” approach to his layering of influences and cultural signifiers.

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I have problems when people want art to be didactic or become propaganda. I think art needs to stay in a rather neutral and ambivalent space to be effective, to make people feel, because I feel that human experience and social responsibility is not about likes and followers and angry comments on Facebook—it’s far more complex, and the viewer is very often complicit in certain ways.

I guess we should ask ourselves what art’s task is. Is it to hold a mirror up to society, to confront us with an image of ourselves that is not necessarily comfortable? Or is it to affirm the beliefs and positions to which we already subscribe? Or is it to prescribe, to tell people what to think and how to respond?

HH It’s true. Artists can say something and can change something but at the end of the day it has to come from the person. We can only do so much. It’s nice when you can communicate with people who don’t look at art. I’m doing my best and trying to see if I can touch one person, which is better than none.

IB That’s creating a sense of responsibility in your viewer in terms of thinking about reception.

Audience As a storyteller, as an artist, how do you tell the story of people who are extremely vulnerable without objectifying them? There’s a fine line between telling the story of the subject and telling the story instead of the subject.

IB When we talk about individuals, communities who were historically and are currently vulnerable, oftentimes they have been defined by someone else, and they have not had a voice, and not been visible. In my curatorial practice and teaching it’s about providing a platform to allow people to have a voice, to speak for themselves.

HH For me I’m working from the experiences I’ve had on my journey and what’s around me, so I try to stick to this and try to express from my point of view.

RM A lot of my work is about visibility. So many people in eastern Congo are dispossessed; it is a place that I would argue is in a state of near anarchy. Of course those people have their own voice; I’m not trying to put a voice in their mouths, but the work is trying to challenge some of the conventions of photojournalism, reportage photography, and to try to find an alternate way of communicating that particular story, hopefully one that’s more effective. In the newer projects—Incoming and Heat Maps—that objectification is embedded in the work on some level as is the problem that the work is trying to deal with and trying to reveal. The camera becomes the author, and a camera like that portrays people in a way as a heat trace.

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The way the camera strips the individual of identity, anonymizing the individual, portrays people as a biological trace rather than as a person with colorful clothes and identity even though of course they are. It felt like an appropriate way to portray the refugee, which is this stateless person. And also the people around him, the volunteers, emergency workers, Frontex officers, search and rescue people, and other aspects of the military humanitarian complex that has formed around this crisis.

All of these people—whether citizen or stateless—are living, breathing human organisms, we share the biological fact that we are pools of heat created by cellular combustion. So I hope this work will evoke this sense of shared humanity, which seems to be a very difficult idea in these febrile times.

TS It’s often up to debate whether a work of art is exploitative or whether it is giving voice. It is the utmost responsibility of the artist to fuel that responsibility to their subject. In my own work when I am showing difficult situations, to have it connected to some type of action that might lead to the eradication of that problem and solving of that problem, greater awareness of that problem—that’s something that always has to be in mind.

There are organizations that have been beating the drum of the need to witness for decades because when you have situations without witness, the atrocities are exponentially higher.

You can’t really say that only those who are the identity of the people they’re filming are allowed to film.

That means that I, as a Sri Lankan woman can only film Sri Lankan women? For me the ultimate goal has to be highlighting the efforts of others, giving a voice to others, and focusing on positivity and inclusion and uplifting people as much as possible. That’s where documentarians can get to work in filling that role so that there is witness.

And when they tie it to action it’s even more powerful and potent.

A real task for artists moving forward is how to inform people about the commonalities between us. That we are truly human first.

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A rt in C onversation

SARAH SWEENEY’S REIMAGING ERICA & JOACHIM SCHMID’S ARCHIV 104

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Sarah Sweeney, Associate Professor of Art at Skidmore College, is a nationally and internationally exhibited artist. Her digital and interactive work interrogates the relationship between photographic memory objects and physical memories and is informed by both the study of memory science and the history of documentary technologies. Paris Baillie ’17 graduated with a major in studio art with a concentration in digital media from Skidmore College.

An experimental stop-motion animator, she assisted Sweeney with Reimaging Erica. For this dialogue, they selected panels from Joachim Schmid’s Archiv (1986–1999), a work consisting of 726 panels of found photographs, and responded to them by creating panels using photographs from Reimaging Erica (2017– 2018), a digital archive constructed from images of a woman found in the Creative Commons of Flickr, manipulated in Photoshop, and reposted to Instagram.

Below, they discuss what they found in these two archives, and how these images speak to one another.

Paris Baillie What is photography for?

Sarah Sweeney In both Reimaging Erica and Joachim Schmid’s Archiv, that’s the complicated part. Photography is supposed to capture and preserve, right? That’s what Kodak says, and that’s what other advertisements say, but at the same time, Schmid’s work comes from images that have been thrown away, and so those images have been divorced from their original function of preserving someone’s memories, and they’re now something else.

PB Originally, photographs were for memory, but now they’re not important in that same way.

SS They’ve been detached from memory, and that’s true of the Erica project as well. In Erica, we don’t have her memories. The images become a way to preserve a cultural memory rather than a specific person’s memory.

PB I immediately think of social media when I look at Joachim Schmid’s work. When I see images organized on pages in Schmid’s Archiv, it makes me think of people on Instagram posting photos of their food all the time or people posting the same vacation photos.

SS It underscores the idea that patterns exist everywhere.

The way we’ve organized Erica allows us to see patterns in really stark ways. In June, she’s always going to a specific place. Why do we have so many images in front of the Christmas tree? Why is that a staple backdrop?

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Or, as you said, the new staple of taking photographs of what you eat.

PB And then sharing them online. In the end there are thousands of the same images being taken. It’s interesting to see someone decide on certain categories when faced with an endless amount. When we looked through Archiv, I started to wonder what subjects were missing.

Does the person organizing the images matter?

SS I think it does. There’s a perception that the authors are the people who took the photographs, but the choices made by Schmid are just as interesting as those made by the people who shot the originals. There are definitely things that are missing. Did you find things that you thought weren’t represented or were strange choices?

PB As women, we noticed that there were a lot more images of nude women than of nude men in the collection. We spent a lot of time thinking about why that was. I think because we are two women working on the Erica project, we are telling Erica’s story from a female perspective, and we are also arranging grids based on patterns we are interested in. I’d be curious to see how Schmid would arrange Erica’s images, what he would notice.

SS Your point about gender is interesting because it shows that we have subjective perspectives. In its comprehensiveness, Archiv suggests that these are all of the categories of photography. But there was an author who made the grids and made choices; the collection has changed because of the authorship in the same way that our collection has radically changed because you and I are approaching Erica in a specific way. We chose a mom. She’s a mother and she’s a wife. We could have chosen somebody completely different.

PB What do you think of the grid format?

SS Grids suggest a scientific quality. There’s a suggestion of juxtaposition and comparison.

PB On social media, everything is put in a grid for you.

With the Erica project, we were arranging it in a grid because that’s how it’s translated on Instagram.

SS It’s interesting that both digital technology and Joachim Schmid are using the grid for similar reasons. The grid organizes images . . .

PB So that we can study them.

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Joachim Schmid (born 1955), Archiv # 031, 1988 Collage on paper, 15 ³⁄₄ � 19 ³⁄₄ in.

Gift of the artist, 2016.22.1.546

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Sarah Sweeney assisted by Paris Baillie, photographs by Michael Bentley, Across the Water, 2017 Digital photographs, dimensions variable, Courtesy Sarah Sweeney, CC BY 2.0

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Joachim Schmid (born 1955), Archiv # 642, 1995 Collage on paper, 15 ³⁄₄ � 19 ³⁄₄ in.

Gift of the artist, 2016.22.1.439

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Sarah Sweeney assisted by Paris Baillie, photographs by Michael Bentley, After the Wedding, 2017 Digital photographs, dimensions variable, Courtesy Sarah Sweeney, CC BY 2.0

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Joachim Schmid (born 1955), Archiv # 125, 1991 Collage on paper, 15 ³⁄₄ � 19 ³⁄₄ in.

Gift of the artist, 2016.22.1.38

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Sarah Sweeney assisted by Paris Baillie, photographs by Michael Bentley, Waiting for, 2017 Digital photographs, dimensions variable, Courtesy Sarah Sweeney, CC BY 2.0

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Corita Kent (1918–1986) for emergency use soft shoulder, 1966 Serigraph, 29 ³⁄₄ � 36 in.

Tang purchase, 2013.17.1

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Bernardo Ramirez Rios

For the last ten years, I have worked with immigrant populations from Oaxaca, Mexico, to understand better the migrant experience to the United States and how immigrants’ children associate with Oaxacan culture. This work has led me to research sports, migration, and identity—topics that are naturally politically charged. I have also worked closely with themes of social justice, particularly with regard to immigration, and at an institutional level with the promotion of diversity and inclusion in higher education. It was along these realms that I met with Dayton Director Ian Berry and Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara to discuss possible research collaborations. Upon exiting the meeting, I saw several Corita Kent serigraph prints on the Print Room table, and with interest and intrigue I asked, “What are those?” I had never heard of Sister Corita Kent before that moment, but I felt like I knew her work. The prints felt familiar, particularly their vibrant colors. The saturated blues, yellows, and reds

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lured my attention. Then, the words provoked emotion, feelings related to issues of equality and social justice.

I am a second/third generation Chicano from Northern California.1 My parents and family were advocates in the social justice movements in and around Sacramento, California, during the 1960s and 1970s. My parents worked with local artists and community organizers to advocate for the Chicano/a community in the area. In the 1970s my father joined a Sacramento-based artist collective called the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), a group influential in creating serigraph posters, murals, performance art, and exhibitions that focused on the promotion of the Chicano/a community. 2 I grew up in a household full of artwork from family friends, and I visited many exhibitions that promoted Chicano/a art at regional galleries like La Raza Galeria Posada or at California State University, Sacramento, where my father worked as the director of Chicano/a studies from

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Ricardo Favela (1944–2007), El centro de artistas chicanos, 1975 Screenprint on paper, 25 � 19 in.

Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, 1995.50.40

1972 to 2002. In particular, posters that advocated for issues of social justice and equality pervaded the region’s Chicano/a community. As art historian Shifra Goldman points out, “the Bay area and Sacramento led in poster making . . . Almost invariably, in the 1968 to 1975 period, Chicano posters were communicative and educational. Poster making was taught to the public, especially young people, at Chicano and Raza centers and galleries and in the schools where Chicano artists taught.” 3 Feeling a strange connection to Corita Kent’s work, I spent part of my summer studying the Tang collection of Kent prints, exploring the link between Kent and the political poster initiatives that are so prominent in the Northern California Chicano/a community. I was assisted by student researcher Lisa Moran ’17, a double-major in anthropology and Spanish and double-minor in Latin American studies and studio art with a printmaking concentration.

Within these studies, her work has been closely aligned with themes of social justice and public art projects. In a semester abroad in Bolivia and a second trip there during her senior year, she made an ethnographic documentary film about street art

and murals as tools for social change in Bolivia’s major cities. For each of us, researching Kent expanded our knowledge on social justice and art communities in the United States, informing our other work.

In 1947, Kent joined the art department at Immaculate Heart College, and in 1951, she began to produce art with a screenprinting process. In the years that followed, her reputation as an artist and teacher grew. In the 1960s, a student named Karen Boccalero worked under her guidance before attending Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where she graduated with an MFA in printmaking in 1971.

That year, Boccalero returned to Los Angeles and worked with local Chicano/a artists to form the community arts center known as Self Help Graphics & Art—an epicenter for artists to create, produce, and promote their artwork. During the 1970s, Chicano artists Malaquías Montoya, Gronk, Frank Romero, Patssi Valdez, and many others produced work and shared their knowledge of art production with others.4 The community center is still in operation today and its celebration of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is arguably one of Boyle Heights’s longest-running traditions.

Corita Kent undoubtedly influenced and encouraged the artistic-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but she also influenced many different ethnic and cultural communities and the branches of art and activism that arose from those groups independently. She is at the beginning of a long thread of social justice themes in art, and more specifically the Chicano/a community in Los Angeles, and her work led to the serigraph artistic movements that still resonate with artists and activists in the United States today. Further, her work contains many layers of significance, allowing for her to have relationships with communities to which she may not have belonged. As historian Kristen Guzmán has stated, “Sister Corita had a lasting influence on Karen [Boccalero]’s artistic and community work and, indirectly, on the future artistic development of Self Help Graphics.” 5 The connection between Corita Kent, Karen Boccalero, and other artists in California and elsewhere is intriguing, but the impact of Kent’s inspiration and artistic production as a process of socially conscious expression needs further study, especially within the canon of art history. In our ongoing research, we are interested in how a dialogue moves in two (or more) directions. During the 1960s and 1970s, was any of Kent’s work politically motivated or culturally influenced by the Chicano/a community of artists and organizers and their silkscreen art?

This unique perspective on her life as an artist, activist, and teacher allows us to create a foundation for

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research that contributes to the disciplines of both art history and Chicano/a studies. We are interested in how some agents of change—particularly Mexican Americans in Los Angeles—have been overlooked in existing literature. How did the Chicano/a community’s silkscreen posters and socially conscious artwork impact and coexist with Kent, Boccalero, and other artists both within and beyond their communities? The question of how we enact social change through visual media, and what communities have done successfully throughout history, is at the epicenter of the project. Research on Corita Kent’s artwork and background with Chicano/a communities in the United States is rarely explored and examining the layers of influence and inspiration in multiple directions adds new perspectives to art history and opens pathways to new readings of Kent’s life and work.

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Bernardo Ramirez Rios, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore College. His research emerges through the humanistic principles of equality and social justice. Rios specializes in the anthropology of sports, transnational migration, and identity studies.

He actively works with marginalized groups including indigenous populations in the United States and Mexico.

Lisa Moran ’17, research assistant to Bernardo Ramirez Rios, graduated as a double-major in anthropology and Spanish and double-minor in Latin American studies and studio art with a concentration in printmaking from Skidmore College. She is now a teacher at a charter school in the Bronx, New York.

hicano/a is the chosen ethnic identity of some Mexican Americans in C the US. The term refers to the 1960s–1970s multiregional sociopolitical movement that promoted the reclaiming of cultural and ethnic identity for Mexican Americans.

2 Ella Maria Diaz, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

3 Shifra M. Goldman, “A Public Voice: Fifteen Years of Chicano Posters,” Art Journal 44, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 50–57.

4 Colin Gunckel, ed., and Kristen Guzmán, Self Help Graphics & Art: Art in the Heart of East Los Angeles (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2014).

5 Ibid., 7.

Corita Kent (1918–1986), chavez, 1969 Serigraph, 11 ⁷⁄₈ � 23 in.

Gift of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios 2016.14.205

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Corita Kent (1918–1986) Four prints: damn, everything, but the, circus, 1968 Serigraphs, 23 � 23 in. (each) Gifts of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios 2016.14.30, .29, .27, .28

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JEFFREY GIBSON CORITA KENT In June 2017, Bernardo Ramirez Rios, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and his student Lisa Moran ’17 interviewed artist Jeffrey Gibson about Corita Kent and the influence she has had on his artwork.

Bernardo Ramirez Rios What draws you to Corita Kent?

Jeffrey Gibson Corita Kent combined everything from spirituality and religion, conviction, belief, politics, pop, aesthetics, and color. Those are all things I had been criticized for in my work as a young artist. How do these bigger ideas intersect with aesthetics and beauty? In the ’90s when I was an undergraduate at the Art Institute of Chicago, anything with political intention was meant to look very serious and intentionally political. It certainly didn’t involve color. It certainly didn’t involve beauty. Those things were taught as reasons to look critically at the work and maybe not trust it.

I bought my first Corita print in probably 2008.

It says, “people like us,” and sits in our dining room, so I see it every morning. I began to relate to the words “people like us” in terms of thinking about the communities that I’m affiliated with: LGBTQ, Choctaw, Cherokee, and an artistic community in upstate New York.

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Those became the “us” and the “people,” and then I started looking deeper into her work and trying to find other political tensions. If you look at her larger body of work, it ebbs and flows between being more direct to more playful.

BRR I first saw Corita’s prints by chance. I’d never heard of Corita Kent and didn’t know what the prints were about, but I stopped because for some reason, they felt familiar. I was drawn to the aesthetics and the use of color. From the Chicano 1960s and 1970s art that I grew up with, bright colors that are spiritual in nature are very familiar to me. Could you speak about that aesthetic and color, and how those go hand in hand in terms of expression?

JG Color with Corita is the first attraction that I have—and in particular, fluorescent and neon color. From the time she was working, those colors were somewhat new and had this eye-catching immediacy. When I was making totally abstract paintings, I would use fluorescent color to reference fancy dancers and fancy shawl dancers in the powwow community, and people would say, “I don’t know how neon represents a Native aesthetic.” But I’ve seen dancers do everything. It was this idea of being able to draw attention to yourself because the powwow

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arena is competitive. From this kind of recognizable collective, powwow is where the individual can rise and be flamboyant and be on show.

Sometimes she’ll use color to highlight words within different phrases. The first time I saw damn everything but the circus I only saw an image of “everything.” Highlighted in a different color in “everything” are the words “very in.” In 2015/2016 gay culture, people often said, “everything” and “it gives me everything.” I researched that word deeper and learned that it goes into a Southern and African American religious culture and speaks about God and spirituality. The same thing with the word “living.” I am living. It gives me everything. You give me life. This is also going back to notions of God.

People . . . can read something they’ve already read, something they already believe in, and it’s in this new context. It’s in a new color. It’s in a new script. It’s also somehow confrontational, but you have no reason to resist it.

In the way that we talk about identity, we isolate “gay and lesbian” over here. We isolate “Native American” here. We isolate different communities by really reductive standards. The truth is in my life all of these things converged in the first twenty years, and then as an adult I started having to unpack and defend and justify. Corita’s work answered a lot of questions for me. She shows how to combine all of these ideas into one thing. Color is subjective, but it also begins to lean objectively in different contexts. Red, white, and blue to a French person is going to represent France, to an American person it’s going to represent the US, to a Puerto Rican person, it might represent Puerto Rico.

In Corita’s work, the neon color is reflective of the excitement of the ’60s and of political and social movements that were quite positive, like love in the face of war. There’s this celebratory embrace of light, of a kind of intentional-seeming whimsiness, which is difficult to do, but of the time period. The prints are very complex, and color unifies them in many ways.

BRR You mentioned powwows. In my culture, I think of Día de los Muertos as an event with super-bright colors. My

mother worked in a Native American college in the ’90s, where I would hang out a lot, and powwows saw bright colors, but it was also a time when youth were bringing in their own culture, or Americanness, to the powwow. Michael Jordan sneakers were challenging tradition. Día de los Muertos, same thing; culture changes. Corita was trying to do that within the church as well. How do you see her work as pushing that redefinition of what tradition or authenticity is? Do you see her work challenging the traditionality of the church?

JG Corita used Biblical text directly on the surface. In no way could you deny that a nun couldn’t use the Word of God and distribute it; you preach and you distribute and you convert and you spread the Word. I think the initial impulse to create posters to spread the Word was the most important thing. People feel that Biblical text right on the surface is their access point. They can read something they’ve already read, something they already believe in, and it’s in this new context. It’s in a new color. It’s in a new script. It’s also somehow confrontational, but you have no reason to resist it. It’s fluorescent pink—that’s a reason to resist it? No, it’s the Word of God. Also, if you’re not someone who understands this is the Word of God, the texts so easily apply to society, even today. You’re able to see the words in a way where you think, I need grace. I need saving. The world needs saving. The world needs a savior. I think that that’s the most amazing thing with her work.

Lisa Moran Could you talk about what it’s like to be taking this role as the voice of an oppressed or underrepresented group in the fine art space or in a public space, and what that is like when you’re drawing from your own experiences? Where is the line between showing your identity and your experience versus presenting something that others can relate to as well?

JG When I first started using text, the words were very much about me. The first text was on a punching bag—“believe, believe”—and it was in a moment of feelings of self-deprecation coming in and getting absorbed and weighted down. I had a lot of questions about faith. I had just come back from meeting traditional Native artists who were making earrings and silversmithing and quilting with the belief that they were saving their culture. I came back to Brooklyn and I thought, oh my gosh, we’re just whining; these are people who are trying to really believe in things. I thought, well, Jeff, you have to believe, believe, believe, believe. That’s what became my first text piece.

It was me speaking to me, but we’ve all had those moments where we feel like we’re losing belief, or our faith systems are failing us and we’re struggling to try

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to find something to hold on to. If you allow yourself to show vulnerability and you trust that other people have experienced vulnerability, that’s where an audience is formed. People began to see what I was speaking of as my personal relationships as having political resonance and speaking about community.

BRR I perceive a conversation in Corita’s art, and not just between her and one viewer, but a conversation among many people. I see parallels with some of the work that you made with the punching bags. I can see it as an individual statement but also see it as declaring a need to talk about something. Could you speak about Corita’s involvement with community, social activism in the art itself, and how that influences your own work?

JG When Corita first started making prints, I don’t get the impression that she was making them as art. I think there was an enthusiasm and enjoyment, and then something clicks and she starts seeing it as a modernization of scripture and a way to connect. A lot of faiths talk about getting young people involved. How do we get them to pay attention? It was very much in the practice of being a servant of God when she initially began to make prints. Then she opened up to the public; she’s this radical nun who’s leading classes and talking about the pop world. She attracts some counterculture movements that come in and people are making prints with her in DayGlo colors to move forward their own agendas.

When I’m looking at Corita’s prints, I see the shift in her voice from speaking on behalf of God to speaking of the world. And when she’s speaking of the world, she’s speaking of the world through a lens of religion, and that religion has some sense of ethic, but she’s really holding the bar very high. She’s not excluding herself or anyone else from what’s right, what’s evil, what’s good. She’s placing us all on the same judgment table. There’s an unusual generosity on her behalf of welcoming anybody into this conversation.

Corita Kent (1918–1986), yes people like us, 1965 Serigraph, 35 � 28 ³⁄₄ in.

Courtesy Corita Art Center, Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson, a painter and multimedia artist, grew up in cities in the United States, Germany, Korea, England, and elsewhere and is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is half-Cherokee. These global cultural influences inform his work, which can be found in the permanent collections of major museums throughout the United States. He is on the faculty at Bard College and has been a TED Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant.

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“Outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol,” David Hammons once said. Here, the artist has paired a 1997 softcover edition of Arturo Schwartz’s The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp with a slipcover and binding typical of—as stamped in gold on the spine—the Old Testament of the Holy Bible.

David Hammons (born 1943), The Holy Bible: Old Testament, 2002 Artist’s book with slipcover, 2 � 10 ¹⁄₂ � 13 in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2014.7.10a-b

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