Accelerate: Access & Inclusion at The Tang Teaching Museum (No. 2)

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Letter from the Director Ian Berry

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Black Theater and White Walls: Eunice S. Ferreira on Performing with the Museum

Uplifting Truth through Making Syd Carpenter and Leah Penniman

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Accelerator Series: Memory and Monuments: (Re-)Claiming Public Space Isolde Brielmaier, Dan Borelli, Titus Kaphar, and Karyn Olivier

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Miguel A. Aragón on Printmaking and Depicting Death in a Border City Interview by M Brohawn ’20 and Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18

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Sonya Clark on Being invisible and without substance

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Dawoud Bey, Harlem, U.S.A. series Dayna Joseph ’19

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Susannah Mintz and Nicholas Junkerman on Disability and Photography

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Dario Robleto on Sampling and Manipulating Objects into Art Interview

by Teague Costello ’19 and Emily Cooper ’19

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Dario Robleto Meets Elementary and High School Students Ginger Ertz

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Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18 on Self Help Graphics & Art

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Corita Kent, G O greatest show of worth Molly Channon

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Metamorphosis: A New Dance by Jason Ohlberg

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Malick Sidibé, Des chaussures pour aller danser Isolde Brielmaier

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby on Malick Sidibé Interview by Ian Berry

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Carl Van Vechten Ajay Sinha

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Four Frames of Carl Van Vechten Caryl Phillips

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Accelerator Series: Technology, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Representation Isolde Brielmaier, Amir Baradaran, Farai Chideya, and Michael Joo

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Three Decades Too Late: Cecilia Aldarondo on the Films of Ana Mendieta

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Nancy Chunn, Study for Nicaragua: No One Has the Money, Everyone Has the Guns Jordana Dym

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Sarah Day-O’Connell on Seminar as Schubertiad: Or, a New Journey for Schubert’s Winter Journey

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See the Invisible: Performances by Howard Fishman, Osei Essed, Dina Maccabee, and James Harrison Monaco

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Michael Joo on Science, Art, and the Symbolism of Crane Legs Interview by Abigail Fuess ’18 and Sophie Heath ’18

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Musicking the Collage: Charles Lwanga on African Music, Dance, and Art Wendy Red Star on Dioramas and Representations of Native Culture Interview by Rebecca McNamara and Ian Berry

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Jill Sweet on Wendy Red Star

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Wendy Red Star and Beatrice Red Star Fletcher Rebecca McNamara

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Nikki S. Lee, Project series Rachel Seligman

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Deborah Roberts, Glass Castles Latisha J. Barnett

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Deborah Roberts on Black Girlhood and Fighting for Your Identity Interview by Rebecca McNamara and Ian Berry

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Syd Carpenter, Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas Rose White ’20

102 Lari Pittman on Painting, Language, and Identity Interview by Heather Galloway 106 Heather Galloway on a Forensic Reading of Lari Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 108 Give a damn. Rebecca McNamara 112 Amon Emeka and Adrienne Zuerner on the Black Panther Party Archive 120 The Artist Interview 122 Accelerator Series: Mass Incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex Isolde Brielmaier, Elizabeth Hinton, Duron Jackson, and Johnny Perez 123 Accelerator Series: ∆feminism? – Activism and Agitation in the Digital Age Isolde Brielmaier, Kimberly Drew, Natalie Frank, and Amy Richards 124 Art in Conversation: Paul Sattler and Mallory Perry ’20 Respond to Kerry James Marshall

Titus Kaphar (born 1976), The Faithful, 2008 Oil and tar on canvas, 20 � 16 � 1 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of The Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection, 2017.22.15

Accelerate # 2 2018

Published in 2018 by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College

Editors Ian Berry, Dayton Director Rebecca McNamara, Mellon Collections Curator

Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum is a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Assistant Sophie Heath ’18

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

Design Linked by Air Photographers Jean Egger Arthur Evans Laura Frare Jim Gipe & Stephen Petegorsky Shawn LaChapelle

Jeremy Lawson Megan Mumford Andrzej Pilarczyk Cindy Schultz Nick Spadaro Raymond Stockwell

Printer Shapco

All artwork is copyright the artists.

Cover image Wendy Red Star (born 1981), Indian Summer (from Four Seasons), 2006 Archival pigment print on Sunset Fiber rag, 21 � 24 in.

Purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.27.4

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

Inside cover images Installation view, Give a damn.

Postcard design by Jean Egger

© 2018 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College

Move Up

Move In

Move Out

Ian Berry Dayton Director This year we experimented with ways to move in to make new connections in our community and craft pathways to understanding around provocative ideas and urgent issues. Some amazing things happened. Our second year of Accelerate projects was marked by deep looking and listening and was fueled by anger, reflection, curiosity, and vulnerability.

We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for supporting Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum, a three-year project at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. This publication is a document of our second year and an archive of exploratory uses of museum collections on a college campus.

This year we invited faculty from a wide variety of disciplines to join the project, welcomed an impressive group of diverse artists, and debuted many new acquisitions.

We completed extensive conservation research, documented timely conversations, supported innovative teaching, and provided a stage for our students to share their stories.

The second year of the Accelerator conversation series addressed issues such as mass incarceration, feminism in the digital age, and monuments and public space, and the participatory exhibition Give a damn. encouraged visitors to be activists themselves. In this volume, you will also read about how Skidmore faculty created ambitious syllabi around collections and how our museum staff rallied around shared ideals of access and inclusion. You will see how students took over spaces in the museum for theater, dance, and musical performances, and how they created new primary source archives through interviews with renowned contemporary artists. Essays and artistic responses by Skidmore faculty and students as well as visiting scholars reveal new ways of thinking and knowing about key collection works—bringing objects to life for different corners of our campus.

Special thanks to several donors who honored us with major gifts that provided unparalleled teaching experiences: thanks to Peter Norton for Lari Pittman’s masterwork Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1, which led to conservation analysis and the debut of a dance performance in the gallery; to Joseph B. Hudson Jr. Esq. for the monumental power up, which has become a signature work for the Tang and key to our continued exploration of Corita Kent’s inspiring life and work; and to Jack Shear for helping bring Claude Simard’s Black Panther archive to

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campus, which has engaged new audiences at Skidmore and prompted stories and research connections that we will build on for years to come.

Thanks also to the many collection donors whose generosity was key to our work this year, including Charles Hayward and Betsy Senior, Eileen and Michael Cohen, Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, the Hort Family Collection, Peter Chatzky and Susan Hamilton Chatzky, Penny Kaniclides ’59, halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, Ruth and William S. Ehrlich, Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, Jack Shainman, Andrea Rosen, Leslie Tonkonow ’74 and Klaus Ottmann, and Harry Hambly.

Thanks to our colleagues in the New Media Arts Consortium, a collaboration of the art museums at Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Brandeis and Skidmore, which helped bring Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Sangrienta to our collection, and very special thanks to artists Syd Carpenter, Donald Moffett, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. for their generous gifts.

Lastly, a moment of loving reflection and appreciation for Tim Rollins, who passed away in December 2017.

His visit with Sarah Day-O’Connell’s students, featured in this publication, was one of many inspiring visits to the Tang over the years, and sadly turned out to be his last public event. His life was fueled by a fierce passion for justice through art and learning. Tim was an electric teacher and a truly collaborative artist dedicated to making the world a place of exuberant love and committed action. His persistent teaching model that began with the junior high kids of I.S. 52 in the South Bronx, New York, is a unique and powerful example of an integrated and harmonious dedication to access and inclusion. We dedicate our efforts in his honor.

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BLACK THEATER AND WHITE WALLS

On December 12, 2017, students in Assistant Professor of Directing, History, and Theory Eunice S. Ferreira’s Black Theater course presented “Black Theater Poppin’ at the Tang,” an evening of performances in the museum. Students created original works and staged interpretations of plays in conversation with artworks on view. Performers invited the audience to follow them as they moved through various galleries.

The Tang elevator doors open to a crowded bar scene.

An interracial couple is arrested in the gallery.

A DJ spins records and schools the crowd on the history of hip hop.

Chessboard pieces come to life in an improvised dance.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby—Predecessors; Tel_; and Other Side: Art, Object, Self. A semester-long collaboration with the Tang challenged students to consider not only what they were looking at but also how their own looking may have changed since the beginning of the course. Students critically examined their relationships to art and how art related to their own intersectional identities. After two sessions at the Tang, students wrote reflection essays, posted responses to social media as part of the museum’s #tangcollectivecatalog initiative, and imagined performative responses to the exhibitions.

In the Tang’s exhibitions, students recognized tropes from early African American plays and discovered ways in which different artworks evoked transnational black identities. They analyzed how museum spaces “frame” racial representation. How do the qualities often attributed to museums contribute to the framing of works by or about black lives? What matters?

In redesigning my syllabus to collaborate with the Tang, I remembered my own undergraduate experience of going to an art museum for the first time when a professor required that we visit Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The assignment granted me permission to enter a space I previously considered irrelevant or inaccessible.

The white neoclassical building sits like an Olympian temple on Huntington Avenue. I felt literally and figuratively small as I entered its historic foyer and moved through the antiquities wing to halls of European paintings. My friend and I posed for photographs, making

Eunice S. Ferreira on Performing with the Museum Each time I teach the course Black Theater, the students and I build a unique and dynamic learning community. In fall 2017, seventeen students from different majors took intellectual, personal, and artistic risks—the highlight of which was “Black Theater Poppin’ at the Tang,” their final creative project and the course’s culminating experience. Although Black Theater is not a performance course, I employ “performance as research” strategies in and outside of the classroom. The course focuses on theater history, theory, and dramatic literature and embraces intersections with sociology and other fields related to black studies. During the semester, students discuss and analyze the centrality of image in the creation, function, and reception of plays

by African American playwrights.

The Tang enriched our exploration of these ideas with four exhibitions that prominently featured the work of artists of the African diaspora: If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day: Collections of Claude Simard; Opener 30:

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interventions with sculptures, paintings, and other objects. I like to imagine that what we were doing was not merely playful engagement, but that, as women of color, we understood that we needed to point the camera toward our culturally marginalized bodies in order to create our own visual narratives.

The students in Black Theater were invited to reflect on their own museum experiences. They identified economic, class, and cultural factors that positively or negatively impacted their relationship with art museums.

As a scholar-artist, I wanted to challenge the students to transform their personal responses into critical interventions. How can we move beyond the customary object-spectator model of museum viewing to a more dynamic exchange of object and spect-actor? I borrow the term “spect-actor” from Augusto Boal (1931–2009), visionary Brazilian theater artist, political activist, and founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, an international

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movement that promotes theater as a tool for social change. Boal believed that audiences should not be passive observers but active participants in drama in order to be equipped and compelled to act in “real life.” Can we thus become museum spect-actors? During our visits to the Tang, students selected artworks on view and brainstormed how they might use other forms—poetry, film, music, dance, drama—to imagine a performative response.

Celeste Muñoz Perez ’19, dance major and computer science minor, designed a participatory dance workshop inspired by Willie Cole’s To get to the other side (2001), a massive chessboard with lawn jockeys as chess pieces. Cole’s sculpture ignited discussions on transnational black identities, the contested significance of lawn jockeys, Yoruban spirituality, and the artist’s act of reclaiming and repurposing objects. Muñoz Perez wanted to create a dance piece, and when faced with the challenge of analyzing Cole’s work, she turned to her other training: “In my computer science classes, we take simple statements or procedures and dissect them to find ways in which we can make code to result in the same outcome—something that is visible and straightforward to the eye but readable and explicit to those who dig in deeper. In a way, I thought of [Cole’s sculpture] like code.

In order to fully understand it, I needed to dig deeper.”

Pawns, considered the weakest pieces, are placed on the front line of battle. Just as Cole elevated servile lawn jockeys by reinterpreting them as Yoruban deities, Muñoz Perez wanted to empower the oft-sacrificed pawn.

In her dance “No Way Out,” the chessboard was a world in which a game of power is infinitely repeated with no clear victor and no way to exit the game.

Maryam DeWitt ’18, social work major and documentary filmmaker, wrote and performed “An Ode to You and the Apology,” an imagined poetic dialogue between John Ahearn’s Formal Portrait of Tracy (c. 1984) in If I Had Possession and Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait HeVi, Oslo (2016) in Other Side. DeWitt gave voice to Ahearn’s sculpture in a hundred-line poem, creating a fictional familial bond to Muholi’s self-portrait. In DeWitt’s imagination, the women were enslaved on a Southern plantation. Dressed in off-white shades of raw cotton, DeWitt stood in front of Muholi’s striking photograph and recited her poem in a Southern accent. As she described the character of mama, our gaze inevitably veered toward Muholi’s HeVi, Oslo: they talk about how her skin was dark as night her eyes white as winter and her hair blended in with her skin and ran far from her head as though it was reaching toward the sky or somethin

Ziggy Schulting ’18 and Silas Shah ’20 presented a scene from Don’t Smoke in Bed (2016) by Aurin Squire, a play about an interracial couple who embarks on a series

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of bedroom interviews, in the exhibition Tel_ by Kamau Amu Patton. Schulting, a theater and English double major, related her experience of performing in that space to our study of black theater: “This ever-changing community space seemed the perfect place to contemplate and study these serious issues of race in our contemporary society. Since it is impossible to look at current-day race relations without the consideration of our country’s history, it seems perfectly fitting that we performed in a space that is all about the layers of history.”

Bree Hassell ’18, social work major and aspiring screenwriter, adapted her original screenplay The Colors of Astronomy as a site-specific theater piece. Hassell tells the story of a young interracial couple in 1950s Louisville, Kentucky, “who find out the true meaning of the universe keeping them together.” In her museum-as-theater adaptation, Hassell ushered us to five different locations—from the atrium to the bookstore to the elevator to the mezzanine and ending in the Predecessors exhibition on the second floor. In the final scene, the young African American wife was ripped away from her white husband and taken to jail. In a poignant tableau, Hassell directed the husband to kneel in front of Akunyili Crosby’s Ike ya (2016). The large painting depicts the Nigerian artist seated on a couch while her white husband kneels at her feet, his head nestled on her chest.

Audience members gasped as they took in the multilayered effect of Hassell’s inventive staging.

Prior to coming to Skidmore, I had not integrated teaching with a museum in my course designs. Teaching with the collection and exhibitions enhances the hybridity of my pedagogy as I continue to invite students to integrate the personal and political as engaged citizen artists and scholars.

Eunice S. Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Directing, History, and Theory at Skidmore College, is a scholar-artist whose research and artistic practice focus on the intersections of theatrical performance with issues of language, race, class, gender, culture, and national identity. She has published articles in English and Portuguese, including “Crioulo Shakespeareano & the Creolising of King Lear” in African Theatre 12: Shakespeare in & out of Africa.

Accelerate

Malick Sidibé Des chaussures pour aller danser 1963

Isolde Brielmaier Curator-at-Large For many, the photography studio can be likened to a sort of “chamber of dreams.” It is a space in which people can experiment with and perform different aspects of themselves both real and imagined.1 For Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, who moved fluidly between the streets, dance halls, parties, and his studio in Bamako throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the photography studio was also a place where people arrived with intention and created one-of-a-kind memories.

Many did so by calling forth something special of themselves, with Sidibé’s urging and keen eye, onto the studio floor and out in front of his lens so that he could capture their energy and that essential element that made each person stand apart from the crowd. Making certain each sitter’s personality was evident in every photograph was critical for Sidibé. “People who have life need to be positioned [in a certain] way,” he has said.2 His aim, therefore, was to create portraits that reflected the inner lives of his clients and ultimately provided each person with images that she/he could look back upon and be reminded of the beauty of her/his life.

Over the course of the last six decades or more, Malick Sidibé focused particularly on capturing the lives and leisure activities of young

people in and around Bamako during the period of independence when the country’s political, economic, and social landscape was shifting and transitioning quickly. The youth at this time were discovering a whole new world and in this historical moment they embraced not only their own changing culture but also the music, style, and political ideologies of the broader African diaspora.

Sidibé believed that the young people of Bamako were the pulse of his country and that they embodied its future. With this unwavering passion, he photographed people both in public and private spaces as well as in the studio, essentially and perhaps unknowingly creating an enduring and lasting archive and social history of Bamako popular culture and public life.

1 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Lives of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

2 Malick Sidibé, interview by Jerome Sother for www.gwinzegal.com, Rouen, France, 2008; reprinted in LensCulture, https://www.lensculture. com/articles/malick-sidibe-interview-with-malick-sidibe, n.d.

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Malick Sidibé (1936–2016), Des chaussures pour aller danser, 1963, printed 2008 Gelatin silver print, 13 � 13 in.

Gift in memory of Claude Simard, 2017.36.1

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Malick Sidibé (1936–2016), all works untitled Left page, clockwise from top left: 1970, printed 2003, 7 ¹⁄₈ � 5 ¹⁄₄ in.

1984, printed 2004, 10³⁄₈ � 7 ¹⁄₄ in.

1974, printed 2008, 10 ⁵⁄₈ � 7 ⁷⁄₈ in.

Right page, clockwise from top left: 1979, printed 2003, 5 ¹⁄₄ � 3 ¹⁄₂ in.

1975, printed 2003, 7 ¹⁄₈ � 5 ¹⁄₈ in.

1967, printed 2004, 8 � 10 ³⁄₄ in.

Gelatin silver prints, most with glass, paint, cardboard, tape, and string Gifts in memory of Claude Simard 2017.36.4, .11, .5, .2, .6, .9

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby on Malick Sidibé

On the Sunday morning following the opening reception for Opener 30: Njideka Akunyili Crosby—Predecessors at the Tang Teaching Museum, the artist and Dayton Director Ian Berry looked at the museum’s collection of photographs by Malick Sidibé. Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and moved to the United States in 1999. Her work examines multiculturalism and ideas about family.

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby I love thinking about these people and seeing the traditional outfits and this guy wearing Western clothes, signaling his connection to life outside the country. In old photographs from different parts of Africa there is a constant mix of the old and the new.

It always seemed like the women were the ones who had to carry tradition. The men started dressing very Western but the women rarely ever did. In almost every picture the men are wearing Western outfits and the women are not. When I think of my parents, whenever we went out, my dad was in a suit and my mom was in her traditional outfit. How come the burden of bearing culture always rested on the women? It could be because men were educated first. The more educated you were, the more anglicized you became.

Ian Berry There are several here that have the same backdrop.

NAC I was looking at that to see if they were in the same studio. Sometimes you can see the same pattern repeating in a number of his pictures.

IB Do these images feel akin to your work?

NAC Yes, some of them. I like feeling connected to these people from another era. I don’t know if they are still alive, but for a brief moment you’ve been given entry into their lives. This kind of outfit she has on with this particular type of embroidery was really popular when I was growing up. My mom and all her friends had it.

IB Those earrings crop up in a couple of different photographs from the collection. Look at this baby!

NAC I don’t know that I’ve seen a Sidibé of a baby before. I’ve seen a baby with the mother but never just the baby. We’re probably age mates. I was born in ’83, and this is dated ’84.

IB This could be your baby picture.

NAC I don’t have any pictures of me as a baby. I know Mali is different and far away from Nigeria, but it just wasn’t a big deal to take pictures of babies. I’m fascinated by that picture. Were they wealthy? Was that someone related to him? Why this picture?

Photography was expensive. It was something you

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only did once in a while for special occasions.

Maybe they wanted to send the picture to someone abroad who hadn’t seen the baby?

IB When did you first see photographs by Sidibé?

NAC I started looking at him intensely when I was in graduate school. There were a number of artists I started looking at more—Kerry James Marshall was in that group with Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and Yinka Shonibare. It was the first time I started seeing work that resonated with me.

I had studied art for years. I had been to many big art museums around the world. I had seen art. I could explain it to someone, but I never really had that intense feeling of, “I know what’s going on,” or “I see myself,” or “This is a life I understand.” I always felt outside, kind of looking into the space that I’ve been taught to understand.

That’s what our education is, especially if you’re getting your education in the United States, but it wasn’t my space.

Once I started looking at Sidibé and Keïta, it was a feeling of spontaneous recognition: “I know this.” I grew up with photographs similar to this in my grandmother’s house. Pictures of my grandparents, their kids, their cousins, their relatives. I know these pictures. I’ve seen my own version of them multiple times. Seeing Sidibé really made me think more about making work out of that space that I know and I recognized.

Making work about a life I’ve lived, about people I grew up with, what images from my life look like.

IB What do you think about this group picture? This looks like a party scene, not a studio setup.

NAC This is the kind of image that inspired me to do the social images. My work breaks down into groups: the couples, the interiors without people, some with plants, and the social pictures where people are partying or having a get-together at home or dancing.

I love the social ones best. You’re presenting yourself and it’s very constructed and deliberate.

People are coming with their radios and their motorcycles and their fancy gadgets. It’s about how you want to exhibit yourself and something about the social scenes seemed fresh to me. These people are hanging out and Sidibé’s there capturing it.

You feel the energy of the space more viscerally than in the staged ones. I borrowed that from him.

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Carl Van Vechten

Ajay Sinha Chair and Professor of Art History, Mount Holyoke College In 1932, Carl Van Vechten acquired a Leica camera and turned his New York City apartment into a photography studio. By that time, he was already a reputed novelist and a dance and music critic for the New York Times and lifestyle magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. The photography practice evolved from his long association with musicians, writers, dancers, and theater and film actors.

The William Earl Collection of photographs

by Carl Van Vechten, 429 photographs printed on postcard stock now housed at the Tang Teaching Museum, captures the artist’s social connections.

The poet Gertrude Stein stands next to a rosebush at her home in France in 1934.1 The dancers Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade hold hands and smile on their wedding day at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut, in 1955. That same year, Lavallade also poses in a studio against a printed fabric with a mango tree and a myna bird perched where her raised hands hold a piece of porcelain fruit. Outdoor images are candid; indoor images, which compose the bulk of the collection, are choreographed. Backdrops, props, and studio lights give Van Vechten’s subjects a magical quality. One example of this effect is a photograph of ballet dancer Hugh Laing sitting naked in a lotus position against an Art Deco–style printed fabric that flattens the image. Shadows created below the figure through masking and burn in the darkroom make the dancer levitate like the Buddha, as the inscription on the back describes.

The Earl Collection also captures private conversations. Van Vechten communicated with friends using homemade postcards printed from his negatives, ink-stamped on the back to separate

the correspondence section from the address. One card is particularly significant in this regard. The image reproduces an 1868 lithograph by Édouard Manet, Le rendez-vous des chats, now in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.2 On the back, the photographer writes: “Dear Bill, I am devoted to you and will be until you throw me out and probably will be even then! You must have your box before Christmas. I can’t come to you. Can you stop here some day anytime except late at night. Telephone me if you can and I will see you and explain the contents of the box. Love to you, Carlo.” The box, then, is a souvenir of a relationship that resonates in the “cats’ rendezvous.”

Between November 1960 and March 1961, Van Vechten took several photographs of the ballet dancer William “Bill” Earl in his apartment-studio at 146 Central Park West in New York City. Eleven photographs of Earl, dating to November 14 and December 19, 1960, are included in the collection.

The November images communicate casual sociability. The young dancer sits on a low stool, wearing a T-shirt and nursing a tall glass.

He also poses in his role as the Poet in George Balanchine’s ballet La Sonnambula. In December, softly lit images showing Earl in wistful and contemplative poses recall Victorian photographs of artists and writers. Then, evidently after receiving the box during the Christmas mentioned in the photographer’s note, the dancer poses for an elaborate shoot on March 27, 1961. Images held in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of that date show the dancer first in the costume of George Balanchine’s The Figure in the Carpet and then posed nude against a lightly printed fabric. The chronology of the photo sessions indicates that the box frames an invitation for the dancer to belong to an intimate archive of luminaries created through Van Vechten’s desire.

1 The dates for these and other photographs discussed in this essay have been established by comparing them to large-size copies dated by the photographer available in the Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

2 On the back of the postcard, the image is identified in red ink as a poster by “Steinlens” (Théophile Steinlen), best known for his 1896 poster for a Paris cabaret, titled Tournée du Chat Noir, with which Van Vechten might have mistaken the Manet lithograph.

Clockwise from top left: Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), Carmen de Lavallade, 1955 Alicia Markova, 1948; Alice B. Toklas, 1934; Gertrude Stein, 1934 Gelatin silver prints, 5 ¹⁄₂ � 3 ¹⁄₂ in. (each, approximately) Gifts of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography 2017.41.476, .684, .798, .783

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of Carl Van Vechten

Four Frames

Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a music and dance critic, novelist, and photographer in New York City beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century. As part of his interest in promoting black artists, writers, and other creatives—as well as being a part of their world during the Harlem Renaissance—he began taking portraits. As a white, privately wealthy photographer, Van Vechten’s interest in black life has been cause for celebration and controversy.

He produced extensive documentation of the culturati of the Harlem Renaissance and advocated for the work of figures as important as Langston Hughes. Yet in 1926, he wrote a book called Nigger Heaven and he has been accused, both today and in his own time, of cultural tourism and similar offenses. In the texts that follow, writer Caryl Phillips unpacks Van Vechten’s work through the fictionalized eyes of the photographer and his subjects. —RM

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by Caryl Phillips

Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), Joe Louis, 1941 Gelatin silver print, 5 ¹⁄₂ � 3 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography 2017.41.615

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The jackass smiled and told me to stand up and take off my shirt in that high-toned voice of his. Just before the fellar arrived from the city with a camera in his hand I asked my manager, “Mr. Jacobs, why I got to spend any time with this man, let alone a whole hour when I’m supposed to be up here at Greenwood Lake training for the Lou Nova fight?” Everybody telling me the army’s fixing to draft my tan ass so I figure Nova might be my last fight and I ain’t ready to go out with no loss chalked up against my name. Mr. Jacobs slipped an arm around my shoulders. He said, “Listen Joe, this big shot is some kind of friend to the colored race. You be a good boy and do whatever the man wants you to do and then we’ll get Mr. Fancy Pants the hell out of here and you can go back to work. That okay by you?” I nodded. “Yes sir, Mr. Jacobs.” But hell, why I got to take off my goddamn shirt? I was waiting for Mr. Jacobs to step in and tell the city swell to quit fooling and hurry it along with his damn pictures and go, but Mr. Jacobs just cutting his eyes at the man, and then he takes another long pull on his fat cigar, but he didn’t say nothing to the fellar.

Shit, ain’t nobody tell me nothing about stripping off my shirt for this man.

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Before we got in the car to go to the church, Mama took me to one side and whispered, “Child, you better smile for the camera because you’re only going to have the one wedding day, and it’s this man’s photographs that you’re going to be looking at when you’re sitting on the porch in your rocking chair with your grandchildren bouncing up and down in your lap.” Mama lifted up my chin with the underbelly of her forefinger. “Photographs ain’t like quilting. You can’t just unpick them and then begin again like they never existed. I want you to look into the white man’s camera and smile.” But even as I climbed into the car and settled into the back seat for the short journey to the church, I knew that this man was only bringing his camera to the wedding in order that he might take pictures of my Geoffrey. Tall, handsome Geoffrey who liked to act like he didn’t know what kind of thoughts were running through the man’s mind. “Mr. Carl got our backs, Carmen. Every colored performer in America owe him something.” Owe him what, Geoffrey? But I never said a thing, and on my wedding day Mama’s words were dancing about in my head, and so I busied myself smiling ’til I started to worry that henceforth smiling might be the only expression that I would ever be able to offer up to the world.

I never let my wife know where I was going because I knew she would have plenty to say about it. “You’re going where?

And for what? To just dress up like a damn fool for that man, and he ain’t even paying you.” But I didn’t give her a chance to say a thing, and I made up some phony appointment and then hustled my way across Manhattan to Mr. Van Vechten’s studio. First time it was normal dance posing in stage costumes, and then he asked me to come back again the following week. Second time he starts in telling me about all the famous colored people he’s photographed, but I already know about them. And even if I didn’t know, I ain’t blind. I can see their pictures up on the walls. Then he gets all sugary and begins questioning me about when I was touring in Africa with the School of African Dance, but I quickly figure he ain’t so much interested in the dancing now. It turns out Van Vechten wants me to dress up like an African man sitting in a market trying to sell vegetables or some shit. Makes me put on a little hat and squat down, and I get to thinking, hell, maybe my wife is right; no reason for me to come back here again to do no more dressing up. I don’t care how many famous colored people the man’s photographed, I ain’t no market salesman, I’m a dancer, and when I try and remind him of this he just smiles to himself like he ain’t heard a damn thing, but I know he heard me loud and clear.

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Caryl Phillips is a prolific playwright, novelist, and nonfiction writer.

Born in St. Kitts, he moved to Britain at the age of four months, grew up in Leeds, and studied English literature at the University of Oxford.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award, among others. His work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and his novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University, he is presently a professor of English at Yale University and an Honorary Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford.

As a young woman I was a wild damsel who habitually indulged in behavior that so-called decent people were simply too frightened to talk about. Now, in my late autumn, my friend no longer wishes to remember how I was. It seems to me that Carlo is somewhat keen to turn giddy Nora into a little old church lady and pretend that our antics in Harlem during the drunken twenties, and my subsequent, somewhat aberrant, twelve years in Europe and Asia singing and dancing at extravagant nightclubs and private parties, never happened. However, I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a fast girl. After all, by the age of fifteen I was already married, and four marriages followed that one, but none of them truly worked out for no man could ever turn crazy Nora into a little obedient stay-at-home wife. Carlo knows full well that at a lot of the Harlem parties I liked nothing better than to peel off my clothes. Why not, I had no worries about the way my naked body looked, and men seemed to enjoy ogling me, and that was all fine and dandy as far as I was concerned. I had a bachelor’s degree, and a master’s, and I could be as respectable as a nun if I chose to be, but I could also flap with the best of them and if ever there was a time for flapping it was back then in the twenties. But look at what my friend is trying to do to me. It makes no sense that Carlo now appears to be

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determined to present his Nora as some harmless spinster lady, for he was right there with me at all the outlandish parties—and a good number of them were thrown by Mr. Van Vechten himself. Dear Kooky Carlo, with your big, toothy smile, are you ashamed of how we besported ourselves back then? Do you want the world to think differently about you now, Carlo? Is that it?

Left to right Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, 1955; Charles Blackwell, 1955 Nora Holt, 1953 Gelatin silver prints, 5 ¹⁄₄ � 3 ³⁄₈ in. (each, approximately) Gifts of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography 2017.41.483, .455, .512

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Accelerator Series Technology, Visual Culture & the Politics of Representation

Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier moderated a discussion about technology, virtual realities, and media as they relate to art, visual culture, and the politics of representation for the fourth iteration of the Accelerator Series on November 10, 2017.

Isolde Brielmaier I think we can all agree that in the present day, technology is developing at light speed. Technology touches almost every aspect of our lives. For this conversation, I want to think about the important and critical implications of technology on the various sectors of art, art making, and media— and how it intervenes and intersects in these sectors for the artists, storytellers, and creators who work and exist within those spaces as well as discuss ideas around representation and engagement.

Amir, can you give us an elevator pitch definition of some of the technologies you use?

Amir Baradaran With virtual reality, or VR, imagine if you put a headset on, and you’re thrown into a fully imaginary computergenerated world with a butterfly. Augmented reality would use the same kind of headset. And that butterfly would exist and would understand the space in which we all are, and it would come and sit on your shoulder. If you move your shoulder, that jittering would force it to move away because

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a real butterfly would move away. The juxtaposition of virtual content upon real time streamed live is called augmented reality. For those who know post-production, imagine everything you do to a photo after it has been shot, and then imagine all of that being done live as you see through your camera; this is what you see in Snapchat.

IB Chris Milk, founder and CEO of Within, a VR media company, has argued that VR can be used as an “empathy machine.” I’m interested in this notion of technology and empathy and the emotive qualities of technology. Milk states, “In all other mediums, your consciousness interprets the medium. Yet with VR, your consciousness is the medium.” With this in mind, we know that the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and other media outlets have been incorporating VR and AR technology as a new tool for storytelling.

Farai, as a multimedia journalist and storyteller, tell me about your thinking on Chris’s quote, and how you felt early on about the importance of utilizing technology?

Farai Chideya I do think that there’s a level of empathetic storytelling. I’m a fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and I’m studying virtual reality and how it applies to journalism. There are not a lot of women in VR overall, but I find that in VR journalism, there are actually quite a lot. Lynette Wallworth just won an Emmy this year for her piece about an atomic test on aboriginal lands in Australia. You view her work with any number of headsets of varying quality and price that you use with your iPhone. But Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer in

VR journalism, creates work that is used on elaborate museum-quality VR, with wires going to cables in the ceiling.

And it’s a much more immersive experience. In one, you can have a much broader audience, but it’s somewhat less immersive. And the other, it’s super immersive but you have to go to the museum.

One of the things that Nonny de la Peña did was re-create children’s perspectives on a bombing in Syria. And people are literally falling to the floor because they’re wearing the headset and all of a sudden are there with a concussive sound. And if you get the right mix of sound and sight and haptics, then your brain says, “Oh, crap. I’m being bombed.” And it doesn’t matter that you’re not being bombed for that instant, and that definitely gives a different perspective than watching someone from across a room on TV. She tackles really tough stuff. People react physically.

The question I have is not, does this get into questions of empathy? It certainly does. The question for me is, what is the role of empathy in news? There’s a lot of evidence that shows that people who consume news that provokes momentary empathy don’t necessarily have a greater long-term understanding of the issues. You can have momentary empathy for children who have been bombed in Syria, and then say, “Okay, what’s for dinner?”

AB There is something to be said about our interaction with the subject matter. If you’re reading a book or an article, watching a video or a film, you’re engaging with that topic in a particular way. What you are prompted to do as a step after that experience has to do with how much you were moved,

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how many tools are around you to take it further, how much you have that desire to take it further.

I don’t know if a full-on 360-degree immersive experience is more useful in creating empathy toward action or if it actually inhibits the user from taking that extra step.

If you’re reading an article, it leaves you almost desiring more. You’re unsatiated; you haven’t fulfilled that desire.

But if you are fully immersed and you “lived” it, you might think, I’m done. I can move to the next task.

IB In terms of the media and your practice as a journalist, is there one method that you feel is more useful or more effective at telling the kinds of stories that you specifically want to tell?

FC There’s promise in all of it. But one of the things that strikes me is that the most durable artifact we have that transmits information is paper or a stone wall. You can keep reproducing and recopying and reformatting, but anything digital that we create is much more likely to become obsolete. Let’s be really clear about that. We’re living in a moment when we’re creating technologies that are definitely going to be obsolete. So let’s play in the playground, but let’s not think that this is the invention of paper.

Michael Joo A piece of stone or rock, a piece of landscape, in geopolitical terms, has a lot of value and is potentially contested, potentially desirable, but it also means something else to the people that might live on it, to people that might access it. So it has these multiple identities. It’s not just a fossil: potentially it’s the bedrock under which the layers above it have been built. Once it’s taken out of that status, which is kind of abstract, it’s something that goes to an institution.

To me, there’s something valuable in seeing material through the use of technology—that’s how you access this stuff or even find out about it, through GPS locators, technology to get there, technologies to communicate, to negotiate, ultimately a smile and handshake to actually extract. But along the way, all of this material is generating or acknowledging its own place in the world.

IB The space of technology is not particularly diverse. I was at a big conference in Silicon Valley with predominately white men. How is that impacting production or what we’re seeing? What are the conversations about opening up some of those behind-the-scenes spaces?

FC There’s a whole group of people who are emerging who have interdisciplinary experience. Anecdotally, I find women tend to be more in that cluster. But the level of gender bias in the technology industry is grim. The first computers—that was a job title—were women. There’s no reason that women shouldn’t be well represented in the technology industry.

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It’s become normal for men to dominate programming jobs, but it was not always normal. We don’t know how it affects storytelling; we can only surmise.

Harry Potter is a franchise that has really good gender diversity in its fans. But for a lot of video game franchises, they’re looking for products that appeal primarily to teenage boys, and they assume that the only people who can make those products are young men, and often young white men.

People never ask, “What would a teenage girl want from a video game? What would a black person or an Asian American or an immigrant want?” Maybe not anything different, but shouldn’t we ask the question? And there’s not really consumer-driven research into diverse content development because people just don’t ask the question.

AB I call my students, engineers, and computer scientists my poAIts: p-o, capital A, capital I, t-s. It has two goals. One goal is to say our technologists are also our poets of the day in a way that we forget. The second is the language that’s being created and the text that’s being produced through coding looks like modern poetry. They use syntax, words, letters, spacing, symbols, punctuation. All of this together makes up the components of good, modern poetry.

The same way poets pour themselves into their texts, so do programmers who put their lived experiences, value systems, and everything that comes with their lives into their texts. Even though it has to do only with zero and one until we hit quantum computation, there’s nothing neutral or objective about the text that’s being produced. And if there’s nothing objective about it, then let’s talk about its subjective nature and the knowledge that’s produced.

When Pokémon Go came out, it became the most used app in the world. It’s augmented reality. You have to be mobile and go around and catch monsters in different places. As a person of color, if I wear my hoodie, and if I wanted to catch monsters, do I really have that privilege of mobility through my colored body to be able to catch as many monsters that are available to other bodies? As a

The creation of technology is not value-neutral; there’s always money and power going upstream.

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person of color, there are many places that are not safe for me. But the people who wrote those codes didn’t think about that because it was not part of their lived experience.

FC Augmented reality definitely raises questions of safety, but not just physical safety, also psychological safety. People are questioning, for example, how young is too young for augmented reality? Because part of the job of childhood is to teach you to distinguish between dreams and reality.

MJ I’m very interested in the idea of ethical development and programming. To me, it speaks to these ideas of introducing disparate elements from interdisciplinary thinking fields and markets, putting them together in a potent mix, but not really knowing the impact because the research is not being done; it’s ahead of itself. This is where technology is ahead of the results and the endgame impact. Anything that has subjectivity that Amir’s talking about is a place where we’re really heavily into that. There’s an access across lines: who can get that content, or who can get access, and what is the kind of potential content delivery, and the goal of that content? This idea of programming being very subjective means there is an agenda sometimes to me.

Audience How do we coalesce around a central identity as a society, and how can we use technology to foster that? In regard

to gender, there’s a lot of technology about immersive experiences of war games and violence, and all of that is part of what particularly young males identify with as defining what it means to be a male—conflict and aggression and so forth. How do you see our ability to tackle the question of what kind of society do we ultimately want to be?

AB I don’t know how much agency we have to define society when it comes to the question of technology. To do the kind of work that I do, I need programmers that have their doctorate degree in a specific technology. Hard-core, heavyduty hardware is expensive. HoloLens, the augmented reality glasses by Microsoft, are $3,000 to $5,000. We’re talking about major financial restrictions toward access to these things. So who gets that privilege to have access?

More and more the investors in artificial intelligence are the big corporations that can afford it.

As practitioners, museum institutions, arts institutions, educational institutions, we have a responsibility to say, AI takes a lot of money to get into. Is it worth getting into? Do we have the capability? And if so, at the expense of what? Or do we leave it to Facebook, to Uber? The real valuation of Uber is on the fact that they’re aggregating so much data to feed to their machines. Then they can create an AI machine that outdoes IBM’s Watson based on our information.

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FC It’s not “our” information. It’s being sold even as we speak.

Paying in cash is considered a flag for terrorism. I covered big data for the Intercept and did a bunch of stories on the sale of commercial data. It’s sold to political marketers, to pharma companies, to any number of entities that I have no control over. A credit card is basically a very flat surveillance device. It’s not just about the money. The creation of technology is not value-neutral; there’s always money and power going upstream.

IB This is actually not the kind of society that we want, but it’s where we live.

FC Yes, exactly.

IB The question then becomes, if this is what we are engaged with and dealing with, how do we navigate? Where do the ethics, the morals, come in? Where can the changemakers step in and impact in some way?

FC What about using AR for police accountability? What if you had a badge number seeker? It didn’t record anything except that you saw this police officer at this location. And if anything happened, you would have a crowdsourced record of where officers were. You’re being surveilled by any number of entities that are recording your presence everywhere. So I don’t view it as an escalation to be able to surveil back. AR could provide a means for doing that. It’s unfortunate to think of equality coming from mutually assured surveillance, but that may be the only way to go.

MJ It does speak to the idea of what society would we propose.

We are on the consumer part of the collective. The proposal would be, are you part of the collective that is the consumer part that is uploading, uploading, uploading, or are you able to turn that around and start rethinking about yourself as a collective on the other side with a certain amount of agency? What do we do with that access?

When I did a residency at the Smithsonian, I was given some research access. I wanted to work with digital technologies and imaging and representation across a huge archive of our society: objects, things, parts of visual culture, parts of objects, parts of historic significance, markers of what we’ve done, our accomplishments, who we are.

Is it more important to look at a mummy and see its place in a macro sense of history and what place it played in society?

Or is it as interesting to say, who is that mummy? If we go in with a CAT scan and explore its guts and see the quality of the removal of organs, would we know more about whether this was a higher-class person, whether or not that particular society had different values? Interrogating things at every level is a possibility and to reexamine what role and what part we’re on.

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Amir Baradaran is the Creative Research Associate at Columbia University’s Computer Science Department (CG and User Interfaces Lab) and a New York–based Iranian-Canadian performance and new media artist. His pioneering augmented reality {AR}t works question the role of machines and the promise of artificial intelligence in our everyday life.

Farai Chideya is a multimedia journalist, radio host, political and cultural analyst, and novelist. Now the journalism program officer at the Ford Foundation, she covered the past six presidential elections for outlets including FiveThirtyEight, NPR, and CNN and is a fellow at the MIT Media Lab. Multimedia artist Michael Joo has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Joo represented South Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and was awarded the grand prize at the sixth Gwangju Biennale in 2006.

In 2012, he was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, studying 3-D scanning and the relationship between art and technology.

He holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Yale University.

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three decades too late cecilia aldarondo on the films of ana mendieta

Over the course of her lifetime, Ana Mendieta made more than eighty films in which she toyed with ritualistic death-like rehearsals: the films are replete with cemeteries, burials, bodies, and viscera. Sometimes Mendieta’s body is visible.

Sometimes her body has disappeared, its recent presence registered by an outline, an indentation, or a pool of blood. In Black Ixchell Candle Ixchell (1979), she lies prone, hidden underneath a black shroud tied up with ribbons and bordered by ash, a black candle burning in the middle of a hand emblazoned on her chest. In Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (1976), an effigy in the shape of her body’s silhouette explodes in a burst of pyrotechnic glory, then burns out as quickly as it began. In these films, blood flows. Candles burn. Flowers float.

Earth and ash remain.

Assisted by these ritual elements, Mendieta appears to be staging mortuary acts of sacrifice, commemoration, and resurrection. In the most potent of these films, Mendieta blurs the line between presence and absence that separates death from life, and experience from memory. Silueta Sangrienta (1975) begins with Mendieta lying face-up on the rocky shore of a body of water, sun dappling her nude body. Approximately forty-five seconds in, a cut: Mendieta abruptly disappears, leaving an impression of her absent body in the mud. Three seconds later, another cut: the silhouette is now filled with a vivid red liquid. After a minute, Mendieta reappears just as suddenly, lying face-down until the film ends.

There is something terribly poignant about seeing this hale and healthy woman suddenly disappear from the frame. The artist has been dead for thirty-three years. But here in this film, she is alive. Alive, playing dead. Dead and alive at once, material and immaterial, body and blood. Mendieta scholar Jane Blocker has written, “Few historians have been able to accommodate the mortality staged by such art.”1 Although Mendieta is best known for her work in performance and sculpture, this “staging of mortality” is most visceral in her films, not least because of an event that has hovered over her work for more than thirty years.

In 1985, Mendieta fell to her death from a thirty-fourth-floor Manhattan high-rise; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was ultimately acquitted of her murder. The story of Mendieta’s fatal fall has been told and re-told over the years: the circus-like atmosphere of the murder trial, in which Andre’s defense lawyers painted Mendieta as a death-obsessed, hot-blooded Latina who was clearly suicidal; how the defense was bankrolled by art world power brokers who facilitated his acquittal; how Andre first told a 911 dispatcher that they’d been arguing about their art careers when she “went out the window,” only to claim years later that he’d been asleep when she died. 2 Thirty-plus years on, Mendieta’s death continues to be a raw, unresolved point of contention. It is still a touchy subject, a wound that never healed properly. 3 For those who respected Mendieta as both woman and artist, the reduction of her formidable body of work to an eerie prophecy of “a death foretold” did not simply tarnish Mendieta’s reputation, it effectively erased her contributions to art and politics; as Irit Rogoff says, “The complex drama of a third world woman’s life in the heart of the West’s art world becomes reduced to a saga of sex and violence.”4 Furthermore, such sensationalism spurred a “whisper campaign” in the art world establishment that sought to discredit the “loony Cuban” and rally around the more powerful Andre. This protracted, public dragging of Mendieta’s life and work through her own blood devastated many people: not only the family and friends who knew and loved Mendieta intimately, but also an extended community of supporters who felt that Andre’s acquittal and subsequent art world success constituted a miscarriage of justice of the highest order.

Given the way that this crude conflating of Mendieta’s biography and her art has worked against her, it stands to reason why art critics have tended

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Stills from Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) Silueta Sangrienta, 1975 8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent, 00:01:51 Tang purchase in partnership with the New Media Arts Consortium, a collaboration of the art museums at Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Colby College, Middlebury College, Mount Holyoke College, and Skidmore College, 2017.19 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong

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to treat her death with kid gloves, sidestepping the scandal in the pursuit of disinterested “serious” appraisal. 5 But Mendieta scholarship has pivoted.

Renewed interest in Mendieta’s art has coincided with a slew of late-career retrospectives of Andre, who is currently being lionized as an elder statesman of American Minimalist art. This heightened attention on Andre—compared to Mendieta’s relative absence from many museums and exhibitions—has rekindled old resentments and spurred protests and Mendieta homages around the world.6 In the face of this renewed scrutiny—and symptomatic of cultural shifts at work well before the current #MeToo movement—it has become increasingly difficult to separate Mendieta’s work from her mythology.7 I am less interested in the quality or nature of these recent homages to Mendieta than I am in their efficacy. If we accept that Mendieta has morphed from mere mortal into artistic legend—if we recognize the long shadow of her death, rather than attempt to salvage her art from it—what might we gain from such a shift? This question is particularly potent when analyzing Mendieta’s films, which are now being exhibited after many years in storage. 8 To encounter a Mendieta film is, unavoidably, to confront the fact that she once lived. Film has a uniquely commemorative quality, an ability to capture time as it unfolds and hold it in reserve for the future. Film operates like a repository for lived experiences that, when re-encountered generations later, seems to erupt into the present moment with anachronistic splendor. In Mendieta’s films, her liveness is as undeniable as it is terrible. Watching her films, we cannot help but circle around a truncated mourning, a sense of unfinished business.

A Mendieta film is an exercise in belated witnessing; an inherently residual medium such as film enables the continual repetition of onscreen aftermath for years to come. It is as though each time the film plays for a new set of viewers, the same catalytic clues of missing violence are reenacted, thereby recontexualizing the work’s ethical quandary in historical terms. It is rather like reopening a criminal case when new evidence arises several decades later.

In this sense, Mendieta’s films underscore a theme that courses throughout her entire body of work: the power of residue to facilitate intergenerational transmission. Residue forges a moral pact between the dead and the living.

It is an injunction to remembrance, a call from beyond the grave: Find out what happened here. Remember me. Avenge me.

1 Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 23.

2 Journalists writing about the case frequently indulged in luridly racist and sexist characterizations of Mendieta, and during the trial, Andre’s defense lawyers further assaulted her character, making much of Mendieta’s artistic uses of blood, burial, and Santería in a Salem-like attempt to paint her as superstitiously death-obsessed (and therefore clearly suicidal). In his account of the trial, Robert Katz refers to the defense’s strategy as the “death foretold approach.” See Katz, Naked By the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 329–31.

3 See Mira Schor, “Still ‘Naked By the Window’,” A Year of Positive Thinking (blog), May 5, 2014, http://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2014/05/05/ still-naked-by-the-window. Schor, a contemporary and friend of Mendieta, writes, “It is an old story that some very good art is made by some very awful people and that people are both good and bad, but it is really important that the story be told, not just that it happened, but the way Carl Andre was protected and continues to be.”

4 Irit Rogoff, “Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 64.

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5 For example, Charles Merewether writes, “how are we to read or look back upon the work of Mendieta without the informing presence of her violent death surrounding us, lapping across the shores of our perception?” Similarly, a 2004 article in ArtNews bemoans the way that “her art was reduced to a grisly omen of her death,” while an exhibition review from 2010 states, “a shadow was cast over her art by the trial of her death, which was as absurd as it was controversial.” Charles Merewether, “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Consumption in the Work of Ana Mendieta,” in Ana Mendieta, ed.

Gloria Moure (Galicia, Spain: Centro Calego de Arte Contemporánea and Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1996), 83; Hilarie M. Sheets, “Unraveling the Story of Ana Mendieta,” ARTnews 103 (Summer 2004), 48–50; Adriana Herrera Téllez, “Ana Mendieta Revisited,” Arte al Dia, November 2010, 34–39.

6 For accounts of some of these protests: Jillian Steinhauer, “Artists Protest Carl Andre Retrospective with Blood Outside of Dia:Chelsea,” Hyperallergic, May 20, 2014, https://hyperallergic.com/127500/ artists-protest-carl-andre-retrospective-with-blood-outside-of-diachelsea. Carolina A. Miranda, “Why protestors at MOCA’s Carl Andre show won’t let the art world forget about Ana Mendieta,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2017, http:// www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/ la-et-cam-ana-mendieta-carl-andre-moca-protest-20170406-htmlstory.html. For an interesting

Cecilia Aldarondo, Assistant Professor of English, is a filmmaker and scholar whose work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, the MacDowell Colony, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and many other organizations. Her debut feature documentary, Memories of a Penitent Heart, premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on POV in 2017. She is a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2015.

Sophie Heath ’18, research assistant to Cecilia Aldarondo, graduated from Skidmore College with a major in classics and minor in gender studies.

critique of the feminist mythology of Mendieta fueling these protests, see Jane Blocker, “The Judge as Historian: Knowledge at the Limits of Doubt (A Response to Jacqueline Rose’s ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence’),” Cultural Critique 94 (Fall 2016): 26–31.

7 Several critics have argued that the tidy separation of Mendieta’s art and life is as immoral as it is unsustainable. See Maya Gurantz’s 2017 essay “‘Carl Broke Something’: On Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta, and the Cult of the Male Genius,” in which she unpacks the way that critics and curators intent on protecting Andre’s “genius” have deliberately sidestepped any notion of “responsibility,” cleaving instead to a notion of the museum as a disinterested space operating independently of justice. Gurantz, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/carl-broke-something-on-carl-andre-anamendieta-and-the-cult-of-the-male-genius.

8 The first major exhibition dedicated to Mendieta’s films is documented in the exhibition catalog Howard Oransky, ed., et al., Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta (Berkeley: University of California Press and Minneapolis: Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, 2015).

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Nancy Chunn Study for Nicaragua: No One Has the Money, Everyone Has the Guns, 1986 Jordana Dym Professor of History If you lived in the United States in the 1980s, stories of war in Central America appeared often on the evening news and in major newspapers.

When the people of Nicaragua rose up in 1979 to topple the Somoza dictatorship, many worldwide cheered the rebels’ socialist ideals, rooted in liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor,” literacy movements, and cultural and artistic programs. The US government, however, fearing that Soviet influence would spread from the popularly elected Sandinista National Liberation Front, devoted extensive and illicit resources to attempt to topple it, imposing economic sanctions and funding an armed counterrevolutionary insurgency based in neighboring Honduras.

American artist Nancy Chunn’s 1986 painting Study for Nicaragua: No One Has the Money, Everyone Has the Guns takes this moment of Nicaragua’s experience as her subject.

When I first moved my eyes around this dark image, before looking at the title, I drew on my training as a historian who has specialized in Central America’s past and in the history of cartography. What did I see? A deep-brownishpurple triangular area with irregular edges dominates the canvas’s center, enclosing a speckled black oval. Wavy lines of varying lengths are etched across it, revealing a layer of red paint under the top coat. Three more triangles surround the center to complete the square; black chain-links march across flat surfaces of yellow, blue, and brown, stopping only when they reach a border of the central shape or the canvas edge.

Yes, a border. Putting aside the pleasing-tothe-eyes geometry, I began to understand the painting’s assertion of abstract mapness and Nicaraguan political history. Thinking of the black oval as a lake (with two islands) led me to specifics: Lake Managua, and therefore Nicaragua and the areas along its border. But Nicaragua’s geo-body is

not particularly distinctive.1 Isolate that shape, and few would immediately connect it to a small country locked between Honduras to the north, Costa Rica to the south, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east. It might just as easily be a manta ray, a splayed heart, or a geometric design.

Having found the map in the painting, I could begin to imagine the artist’s vision.

Maps have served as background and foreground in Western painting since the Renaissance, displayed on walls and unrolled on tables to symbolize a leader’s, architect’s, or traveler’s relationship to a territory conquered, designed, or visited: “I governed here.” “I built this.” “I went there.” By the mid-twentieth century, paintings of maps abstracted the world, challenging, parodying, inventing. In the words of scholar Ricardo Padrón, such a map is “converting the [real] world to its imaginary double.”2 Viewers understand that such artistic depictions (like the geographical maps that inspire them) are both real and unreal. The map is not the place; it is a selective representation of spaces that, as viewers apply the rules of “mapping,” tell a story.3 Chunn’s work draws viewers into Nicaragua’s imaginary double by annotating its present conflict onto national territory. The parts: a dark palette; chains shown locking in, constraining; surrounding or behind the country, red rivers.

Without a guiding text, generally part of a geographic map, each element lends itself to interpretations based on the place and time depicted, raising as many questions as answers. The rivers run red—with blood? The blood of a nation at war with itself and with its neighbor to the north?

Or of a bleeding heart? The fence of chains—does it underline the imprisonment or enclosure of the country isolated by an embargo? Did the artist intend the chains to summon thoughts of shackles made and used to transport enslaved Africans? Nicaragua’s geo-body is the only area

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Nancy Chunn (born 1941) Study for Nicaragua: No One Has the Money, Everyone Has the Guns, 1986 Oil and wax on canvas, 31 � 31 � 2 in.

Gift of James M. Pedersen, New York, 2008.7.11

free of chains—a nod to the revolution, hinting at liberty within the borders or total containment?

It is worth noting how the use of abstraction in this work of conceptual art, comparable to what scholars consider the “silences” in traditional maps, keeps analysis on the country as a whole.

Without text indicating place names, scale, or features, and removing Nicaragua’s prominent mountain chains, volcanoes, cities, roads, farmlands, and monuments, Chunn’s painting does not invite viewers to access specific experiences of individual Nicaraguans who fought off internal and external efforts to control political destiny.

This work, a study for a larger painting, is one in a series that “depict[s] struggling nations where human freedom is enslaved.”4 This place and the others collectively capture the angst of the fourth decade of the Cold War in which the main antagonists, the United States and Soviet Russia, refrained from using nuclear weapons on each other while they fostered proxy wars around the globe. Considered with others in the series— Haiti: Terror in Paradise, Kurdistan: Unending Beginnings, and Ethiopia: Wax and Gold—the artist’s political message is more easily legible.

In the collective story, each country, identified by its national territory, shares the attribute of being hemmed in, imprisoned, damaged by being part of a global order. The artist criticizes the forces wreaking havoc. The series shouted for change at home, an end to big countries’ interventionism.

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It’s an important message to bear in mind today.

As a stand-alone work of art and activism seen thirty-plus years after it was made, this painting could just as easily be telling a truth of revolutions transformed into dictatorships, a recurring theme of Nicaraguan history dating back to the midnineteenth century and forward to the present.

In the spring of 2018, this work speaks directly to Nicaragua today. The country is once again front-page international news as streets fill with people rising up in protest against Daniel Ortega, a hero of the 1979 revolution who is now deep into the third term of an administration many see as authoritarian and unconstitutional. Once again, government forces gun down Nicaraguan citizens—only this time in the name of a revolution that looks increasingly like the dictatorship that galvanized nationwide protest and activism.

11 Thongchai Winichakul coined the term “geo-body,” now widely used, to describe how the government and people of Siam deployed a territorial shape as a shorthand for national identity and belonging, in Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

2 Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” in James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 284.

3 3 Robert W. Karrow Jr., introduction to Akerman and Karrow Jr., Maps, 6.

See J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) for influential essays that shape modern scholarship on this question.

4 4 Carla Maria Verdino-Sülwold, “The World in Turmoil,” Crisis 96, no. 7 (August/September 1989), 13.

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Sarah Day-O’Connell on Seminar as Schubertiad

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Or, a New Journey for Schubert’s Winter Journey In summer 2017, Associate Professor of Music Sarah Day-O’Connell interviewed Tim Rollins and senior K.O.S. members Angel Abreu and Rick Savinon about their twelve-panel painting Winterreise (songs XX–XXIV) (after Schubert), a study for a seventypanel work, from 1988. She was, in part, preparing for her fall course “Music 344: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,” which focused on how European composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw music as a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, integrally connected to other fields of inquiry throughout the arts and sciences.

In that spirit, she assigned students to create multimedia responses to the Tim Rollins and K.O.S. work, itself a visual response to Viennese composer Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), 1827, which uses Wilhelm Müller’s poems of the same name. Students performed these responses on November 16, 2017, in the exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self, where the artwork was on view.

Detail from Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (established 1981) Winterreise (songs XX–XXIV) (after Schubert), 1988 Acrylic and mica on music pages mounted on linen, 12 � 132 in.

Gift of Ruth and William S. Ehrlich, 2012.18a-l

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Twelve music majors enroll in a seminar about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. We’ll analyze scores, of course. We’ll listen to recordings, of course. If we’re lucky, we’ll go to some concerts.

Concerts. Music majors love concerts. A group of performers, the specialists, gather on one side of the room to play music they’ve rehearsed and polished.

Another group occupies part of the same room, but it’s a separate space. They are the audience; they listen.

All music majors have been both, many times: performers and audience. But not at the same time, of course. You can’t be in two places at the same time.

Yes, in this class there are scores and recordings— loads of them. But there are also other primary sources, the traces left by the composers and their contemporaries: letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and treatises. There are contemporary accounts of concerts, but the picture that develops is just as clearly one of circles of friends and families who are simply gathering to play music together—to discuss it, interpret it, argue about it, reinterpret it, and play it in many different ways.

They are performers and audience—at the same time.

Franz Schubert’s circle met in literary and musical salons; they had discussion parties. The nickname for their version of non-concert musical gatherings: “Schubertiads.”

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1827

1988

According to a friend, Schubert’s mood was “gloomy.”

Pressed, the composer explained, “Well, you will soon hear it and understand.” At the next Schubertiad, “I will sing you a cycle of chilling [schauerlicher: horrifying, gruesome, eerie] songs.” So the friends gather and Schubert sings the entire song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) “in a voice wrought with emotion.” “We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs.” Schubert notes the reaction. “I like these songs more than all the rest,” he says. “And you will come to like them, too.”

Tim Rollins and K.O.S., a group of renowned visual artists who happen also to be a teacher and a bunch of teenagers, are studying Winterreise—reading the lyrics by Wilhelm Müller, listening repeatedly to Schubert’s setting for voice and piano, and identifying with the protagonist, a lonely, lovelorn Wanderer. Spurned, yes, but his crisis seems to be utterly existential. Who am I? Why am I here?

He is a misfit, an outsider. I came here a stranger / As a stranger I depart. There are accented dissonances in Schubert’s introduction, but they subside as the Wanderer speaks to himself, coaches, peptalks himself.

What can he do but walk, move forward, set one foot in front of the other?

It is not a pilgrimage, exactly, but a journey of self-discovery.

“Keep marching,” says Tim. It’s cold: snow turns to ice. Ah tears, my tears, / And are you so tepid / That you freeze to ice / Like cool morning dew? / Yet you burst from your source / In my heart so burning hot / As if you wanted to melt / The entire winter’s ice! Melodic motives and second-beat accents repeat in persistent agitation. Is he frustrated with himself, his inability to express what he feels inside? The teens recognize this frustration.

They recognize themselves; they confess that they recognize themselves. The Wanderer keeps going: Walking kept me going strong / On the inhospitable road.

“Keep marching,” says Tim. Sometimes the Wanderer despairs: The frost has spread a white sheen / All over my hair / I thought I had become an old man / And was very pleased about it / But soon it melted away / And now I have black hair again / So that I am horrified by my youth / How long still to the grave!

The last line is rendered in a haunting, solitary unison by voice and piano, unharmonized, unadorned, like the long, lonely life stretching ahead of him.

Student performers:

“This is slow-burn suicide material,” Tim says to the teens.

Samantha Abrams, William Bresee, Alastair Canavan, Rachel Chang, Olivia Cox, Taylor Fohrhaltz-Burbank, Brennan Mitrolka, Caroline Moe, Nicole Mooers, Rachel Perez, Jordan Shedrofsky, Rebecca Sohn Sarah Day-O’Connell is associate professor in the department of music at Skidmore College. Her courses combine musical analysis with interpretation of literary, visual, and material culture in order to explore how musical activity has historically reflected and shaped broader social concerns. She has published on late eighteenth-century music history, historiography, culture, and aesthetics as well as theories of performance, and she is coeditor of The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (due to appear in December 2018).

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“Keep marching,” he says.

For some of the kids, this is their introduction to classical music. Tim takes them to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York to examine the manuscript. But it’s not a pilgrimage. “Don’t go to gawk,” he says, “or to have a religious experience, you know. It’s good to have an experience, but we’re really going to steal.”

Back in the K.O.S. studio, the Schubertiad reconvenes.

The studio is filled with color, color for the ears— with timbre, tone color, piano, and voice. The lush velvet maroon of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s lyric baritone, the silver-shimmer-teal of Gerald Moore’s piano accompaniment.

And then I tell them about my upcoming seminar, my hopes for a class project that is not a concert but a present-day college-music-major Schubertiad.

Dialogue about and with and through the music and the poetry and each other and Schubert himself.

And with Tim and Angel and Rick. Performers and audience all at once.

“We’ll be walking over to the Tang to see your Winterreise,” I tell them. But it’s not a pilgrimage, I say.

We’ll be there to borrow and steal and discuss and reinterpret for our journey.

A new journey for Schubert’s Winterreise.

But the paint on the artists’ brushes is white, all white.

White with flecks of white mica, like ice crystals in snowflakes. Seventy panels of Schubert’s Winterreise score, each painted marginally but perceptibly whiter than the last. Finally, opaque.

Assembled on the wall, the panels stretch for fifty-eight feet. To take them in, you walk. You take the journey with the Wanderer. “Keep marching.”

Toward the end, the Wanderer considers the nature of courage. When the snow flies in my face, I shake it off again.

Major and minor tonality jockey one another.

He thinks of resting but is turned “unmercifully” away.

A return to the tonic major, and the vocal range sinks lower and lower. Resignation? Comfort?

Well onward then, keep marching, my loyal walking staff!

2017 Tim and two members of K.O.S. visit Skidmore to discuss their Winterreise (songs XX–XXIV) (after Franz Schubert), now almost thirty years old. Angel Abreu recalls: “We come together as a group and decide what it means to us, what it could mean to the author or composer, and what it will mean in the future.” Schubert’s “OK with the way we’ve interpreted it,” he says. Rick Savinon adds, “It’s like the work is holding on to you. [ . . . ] There’s no ending to the story, or the journey.”

Tim concurs: “We’re here and we’re working again and Schubert comes right on down and he’s looking at us with a big smile on his face—for once, right—and I know what he’s saying. He’s saying, ‘Listen, I didn’t write this music just for conservatory students, I didn’t write this music for people that can afford to go to the symphony every week; I wrote this music for people like you.’ And he’s right, and we say, ‘Thanks a lot.

OK, see you.’ [And we] get to work.”

“That was a Schubertiad!” I tell them.

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Bibliography Bostridge, Ian. Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession. New York: Knopf, 2015.

Gibbs, Christopher H. The Life of Schubert. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. von Spaun, Josef. “Aufzeichnungen über meinen Verkehr mit Franz Schubert (1858)” in Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1957). Translations by author.

Youens, Susan. Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s “Winterreise”. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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See the Performances

by Howard Fishman, Osei Essed, Dina Maccabee, and James Harrison Monaco

On November 30, 2017, celebrated composer, guitarist, singer, and bandleader Howard Fishman and three members of his touring company for A Star Has Burnt My Eye, Osei Essed, Dina Maccabee, James Harrison Monaco, performed musical and storytelling responses to a selection of photographs from the Tang Teaching Museum collection. Their selections included images of mid-twentieth-century New York City life by Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and N. Jay Jaffee; cityscapes by Joseph Pennell and Jessie Tarbox Beals; a 1907 mug shot photo; and rural portraits by Mike Disfarmer.

Invisible

A multiplatform artist based in Brooklyn, New York, Howard Fishman is a composer and international performing and recording artist who has released eleven albums and headlined in venues ranging from Lincoln Center to basements in rural Romania.

His play A Star Has Burnt My Eye had its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2016 and was performed at Skidmore College in fall 2017.

Osei Essed is a film composer and singersongwriter. His composition credits include the award-winning films Tower (2016), Jim: The James Foley Story (2016 Emmy winner), and Finders Keepers (2014). In addition to scoring documentaries and feature films, Essed leads the Brooklyn-based bands The Woes and Big Hands Rhythm & Blues Band.

Dina Maccabee specializes in experimental and traditional approaches to viola and violin, creative songwriting, and using voice expressively in both narrative and non-narrative modes. She performs with the Real Vocal String Quartet and has recorded three albums of original music: Who Do You Suppose You Are? (2010), Songs 4 Violin + Voice (2012), and The World Is in the Work (2017).

James Harrison Monaco is a writer, storyteller, and musician based in New York. His work is a blend of live music, literature, and theater. His recent show, built with composer Jerome Ellis, Aaron/Marie was first presented by Under The Radar in August 2013.

His solo show Reception was selected by HERE Arts Center to run as part of its Spring Artist Lodge in March 2012.

Ever since we met the world’s been upside down And if you don’t stop troublin’ me you’ll drive me out of town But if you go away, as trouble ought to do Where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?

Connie Converse (1924–?), Trouble, performed by Howard Fishman

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MICHAEL JOO on Science, Art & the Symbolism of Crane Legs On November 10, 2017, Skidmore students Abigail Fuess ’18 and Sophie Heath ’18 interviewed artist Michael Joo as part of the course “The Artist Interview,” led by Dayton Director Ian Berry. Joo’s work Untitled (DRWN) (2012) from the Tang collection was on view in the fall 2017 exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self.

Michael Joo (born 1966), Untitled (DRWN), 2012 Cast graphite-embedded urethane, dimensions variable Gift of Ruth and William S. Ehrlich, 2014.18a-b

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Abigail Fuess ’18 You have a science background, and both your parents were scientists. Could you talk about growing up in that environment in terms of science versus art experiences?

Michael Joo My mother likes to joke that I grew up in the labs before I was born. My parents were involved in food science and food production. They were from Korea, then came over to the States in the late 1950s/early 1960s. My dad was a cattleman and my mother was in seed science, so the labs I grew up with were hard-science labs as in my mother’s lab, but also farms, ranches, animal husbandry, breeding, things like that. So there was a really practical, pragmatic side to the abstraction in the laboratories.

In many ways, everything was really specific: there was measurement, there was data, there was information.

But it was really hard to see what was being pursued; a lot of things were invisible, but it leaped from the very specific to interpreting what’s going on. That might have something

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to do with how image and specificity and abstraction function in my own work.

AF Do you find that your scientific background is something that holds your art back or allows you to express yourself in a unique way?

MJ I think of that idea a lot. In some ways, whatever you might call “science” in my work is just part of a language, either a methodology or an attitude, that I grew up with and can’t help. It informs some of the ways that I frame how I look at things. And sometimes it is a lead-in to how I might make sense of something. In grappling with it, I’m very conscious of it as a language, and it’s a language of authority. My art practice is informed to some degree by a certain amount of skepticism and questioning and interrogation of things. So what better thing to turn around and try to dispel or dissect than authoritative language such as in science.

AF Could you talk about your artistic process with Untitled (DRWN), which is in the Tang collection?

MJ This work, in many ways, is emblematic of a lot of my sculptural practice, which often involves not an image, but a physical, sculptural, or manifested kind of material—in this case, casts of endangered crane species from Africa. Often with sculptures, their material qualities and their material properties are married with the form and don’t, in and of themselves, indicate an end to the life of the work—that is to say, the sculptures themselves don’t stop at the image or they don’t stop at the material. They often are an initiation of the question or an action that’s meant to be rejoined either by myself, the viewer, or maybe by time or space.

MJ I like the title to be open-ended. I definitely thought of it in all those ways. As an acronym, it implies that there’s a larger set of words potentially attached to this title. But it’s a little more physical. With a lot of my work, if you describe the materials or the way the work’s installed or even what it’s made of in a sentence, it might create a group of words that reads like concrete poetry. “Darwin” suggests an evolution, that the piece is always evolving. The work’s material is partly made of graphite that’s been stabilized with another material that binds it. So it’s a large marking instrument. It gets drawn every time it’s installed, and part of it’s left behind. If you do it enough times, this work would eventually disappear. Or maybe the piece evolves to nothingness, just like the idea of this particular specimen on which the sculpture is based might have a kind of transient or fleeting time in a larger picture as well.

SH Untitled (DRWN) is one set of crane legs, and you have similar works that are multiple sets of crane legs. What is the meaning of multiples in this work?

MJ The crane leg came from a biologically collected specimen by scientists. I was allowed to cast that specimen, but it was only one leg. I cast one leg of that crane and then laser scanned, or digitally scanned, the actual leg. So there was one casting happening on a material level, and then there was image making on a digital level, and then we took that into the computer, flipped it around and made a carbon copy—or a clone, or a facsimile, however you want to see it—of that original leg. If you look at the two of them, one is softer in nature because it’s a rendering. I was interested in some of that softness. It’s second generation. And in some ways, the data it carries is accurate, but only as accurate as the original. And then the two of them were cast again, made into molds. With this particular piece, the idea of the individual disappearing was important.

AF What is the significance of the legs of the crane? Why did you choose that part specifically?

MJ The way that we understand cranes is partly in flight and partly on the earth. The legs are left after the fact and are only part of the equation of this animal and its identity. And the other part is that it does touch the material plane. It’s the thing that we can relate to the most in some ways, and it holds up the body. It’s the base and the terms of movement.

In my work, movement and energy and such are together; that movement is another part of motion and choice.

Sophie Heath ’18 The title can be interpreted in different ways. With the acronym DRWN, it could stand for “drawn”; it could stand for “Darwin.”

SH You’ve talked about the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea and how seeing cranes in a natural habitat there as well as

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seeing all of the species that survive there was inspiring to you. You described it as another world or a paradise.

MJ When you go to the DMZ, you cross over into an area called the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) first. That’s a kind of soft area where farmers actually farm the land, and people with special permission can go there. The actual DMZ is pretty hard-core and, literally, your backs are to guns that point into the DMZ. Once you cross that threshold, you’re looking at the edge of an area that is not only off-limits, but that maybe doesn’t really exist, a band that doesn’t have the identity that’s fixed.

Coming up to that area, I take all that with me in theory and in concept. It’s backed up by a landscape that really hasn’t been groomed or touched or affected because there’s so little intervention on the visual plane. Its profile, the species, the trees, everything is a little bit different than what you’ve just experienced in the rest of the country and on the peninsula.

I’ve collected samples of volcanic rocks from the edge of that to engage in stories of where those rocks might come from. Is there a volcano in the DMZ? That’s another question. And if there is, there’s this very hard, factual rock talking about some kind of mythological piece of geology.

In some ways, that’s largely how I think about Korean nationalism or ideas of nationalism. I’ve been interested in ideas of whether nationalism is a virus or a recessive gene or trait. So the ways that we look at some of the feelings we have, some of the things that we assign to our own view of place and identity in that environment was of interest to me.

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AF The DMZ has this very puzzling aspect of being a product of man’s most impulsive, destructive qualities yet it has preserved so many lives of animal species. Does this juxtaposition show up in your work in any specific ways?

MJ Definitely, yes. The DMZ is the most heavily guarded wildlife preserve around. But I don’t know if those qualities are contradictions as much as they are intersections and collisions of what we’re capable of. Usually we manicure all the edges of how things meet; we’re quite good at that as people, as a species. In this case, it’s one of those zones of slippage where we have a lot of these collisions. Usually, we only see them at times of utter crisis, natural disaster or war or oppression. But in this case, it’s been somewhat restrained and controlled and carries a certain tension to it. I could only hope that some of those things are part of the work for me.

Multimedia artist Michael Joo has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad.

Joo represented South Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and was awarded the grand prize at the sixth Gwangju Biennale in 2006. In 2012, he was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, studying 3-D scanning and the relationship between art and technology. He holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Yale University.

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Charles Lwanga on African Music, Dance, and Art

On Thursday, April 12, 2018, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Charles Lwanga directed students from his “African Drumming and Dance” class in a performance that examined cross-cultural influences on identity. The performance used Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté’s Métamorphose de papillon (2017), a recent Tang acquisition, as a catalyst.

Student performers: Maddy Carre, Jack Galardi, Shelby Gmable, Cris Gil, Allison Hands, Reshma Harripersad, Laura Heinlein, Caile Holland, Zoe Islar, Sayeed Joseph, Sindi Mafico, Mandee Mapes, Meaghan McDonald, Alyssa Morales, Patrick Morton, Amanda Muir, Emily O’Connor, Mike Park, Anna Parsons, Ricky Rios, Tim Spenser, Chidubem Udeoji, Inigo Ugarte

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Abdoulaye Konaté is a Malian artist whose colorful fabric collages are inspired by costumes of Senufo musicians and rituals within the Ségou region in Mali and by the social complexities of postcolonial Africa. In Métamorphose de papillon, Konaté abstracts the butterfly (papillon), a common motif in his work, to serve as a symbol of fragility and transformation, which speaks to postindependent realities in several African states. These themes inspired my spring 2018 “African Drumming and Dance” class.

Throughout the semester, my students and I worked on blending traditional and modern/contemporary performance styles in order to articulate the effects of colonialism in Africa. On April 12, 2018, we presented a concert titled Musicking the Collage: African Music, Dance, and Art at the Tang Teaching Museum.

Influenced by Konaté’s Métamorphose de papillon, the concert featured two Afropop songs, my own art music composition for violin and djembe, three Afropop drumming pieces, and two Afro-modern dances. Apart from my composition, each piece included a combination of African costumes (in multiple colors and designs), singing, drumming, and dancing that resonated with Konaté’s artwork, which was displayed in the performance space. Moreover, the concert represented performance practices of Africa as a constellation of arts rather than as individualized art forms.

The performances articulated the African continent’s diversity, but while each entailed a sense of “Africanism,” none was purely “African” in style or choreography. In the first song Tweyanze (We Thank You), for instance, we blended Luganda, an indigenous language of the Baganda people of Central Uganda, and English, a colonial language. The song was about indigenous spirits that give life, good health, and success to loyal mortals. The song’s accompaniment was an electronic track that a student, Chidubem Udeoji, and I worked on during the semester. It was accompanied by two dancers who performed

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Baakisimba, a dance of the Baganda people, which was historically performed by women while men played instruments.

In another song, Avulekile (The Heavens are Open), performers sung both Zulu, an indigenous language of the South African Zulu people, and English. The song, which has become popular among gospel choirs in South Africa and beyond, is sung during celebrations including weddings and funerals. During our concert at the Tang, it was accompanied by backup singers, a synthesizer, ukulele, and a Western fiddle. Meanwhile, the backup singers performed choreography reminiscent of modern dance styles.

My duet with Skidmore Lecturer Josh Rodriguez—I on the African djembe and he on the violin—was called N’golo N’golo. Inspired by a traditional fishing song from Buganda (Uganda), it is based on two nonsense syllables used by a lead fisherman to call upon others to fish. It was an amalgamation of African and Western musical idioms. The violin simulated a traditional fiddle of the Baganda people by playing near the bridge. At various moments, we engaged in nonverbal conversation reminiscent of master musicians in multiple African societies who use drums to speak to one another.

Three drumming pieces were presented. Manjani is a West African drumming piece that accompanies dancing during celebrations such as the naming of a newborn. Yankadi, common among the Sousou people

of Guinea, uses rhythms that mean “it is good to be here” and accompanies a seduction dance performed by men and women in formations of two lines facing each other.

Third was Kassa, which accompanies harvest among the Malinke people of Guinea. During harvesting, farmers camp in the fields. While women harvest the crops, musicians (mostly men) play Kassa as demonstration of their support. The climax of the harvest is celebrated with a party in the village during which music and dance are performed. All three works featured multiple drumming techniques accompanied by modern body choreography performed by the drummers themselves.

The concert also featured two dances, including Sinte, which is a music and dance style of the Nalu people who live around the Boke region in Guinea. The other was Djole, also a music and dance piece, from the Temine people, who live along the border region of Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Charles Lwanga is a composer, scholar, and educator whose research in ethnomusicology examines the participation of popular music in the transformation of postcolonial Uganda into a more participatory public sphere than before. His creative compositions blending African and Western/European idioms have been read, premiered, and performed in Sweden, Brazil, Norway, South Africa, and the United States. He has a PhD in music composition and theory from the University of Pittsburgh and defended his doctoral degree in ethnomusicology there in summer 2018.

Lwanga also holds an MA and BA in music from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, a diploma in law from the Law Development Centre in Uganda.

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Abdoulaye Konaté, Métamorphose de papillon, 2017 Textile, 85 ⁷⁄₈ � 72 ⁷⁄₈ in.

Tang purchase, 2018.4

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WENDY RED STAR

on Dioramas and Representations of Native Culture

On July 13, 2018, Dayton Director Ian Berry and Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara talked to Wendy Red Star about her four-part photographic series Four Seasons (2006), which was displayed in the exhibition Give a damn.

Rebecca McNamara Can you talk about the story behind creating Four Seasons?

Wendy Red Star I created Four Seasons in 2006 when I was a graduate student at UCLA. I was feeling homesick for my community, so I went to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County because I knew that I would be able to find Crow objects there. And I know that sounds messed up, and it is messed up, but I knew the one place that I could find anything of my community would be in the Natural History Museum.

The way that the building was set up, you walked under this big brontosaurus and saw all this extinction, and then you entered the Native galleries. It set people up to think of Native people as extinct. I’ve always loved dioramas, but it was uncanny how much the museum’s dioramas looked like Montana, where I’m from, but there was this sense that everything was dead here. I wanted to re-create that scene in a way where I could grapple with those feelings but also encourage viewers to step back and really think about what they’re seeing.

RM Describe the dress you wear and your hairstyle in these photographs.

WRS In Four Seasons, I am dressed exactly how my grandmother dressed me and how I was raised to present myself as a Crow woman. The hairstyle that I am wearing, that all Crow women wear, is to part your hair down the middle and then braid your hair over your ears. The dress is an elk-tooth dress or iichíilihtawaleiittaashte.

The elk-tooth dress is really important to Crow women.

It’s a status symbol. What we’re saying by wearing the eyeteeth of an elk—there’s only two per elk—is that we have really good hunters in our family. We’re showing off the men’s ability to hunt or to trade. Or, if you’re from a wellrespected family or you’re an older woman, elk teeth may be gifted to you.

During the reservation period, Crows were no longer allowed to hunt and elk were becoming extinct, so Crows started to carve the teeth out of wood or bone. Now they’re made out of resin, plastic, or sometimes glass, but they still hold that same status symbol.

RM You’ve created these highly artificial dioramas with inflatable elk and Styrofoam snowballs, but you’re wearing your actual Crow dress. Can you talk about your use of artificiality and authenticity?

Wendy Red Star (born 1981), Fall (from Four Seasons), 2006 Archival pigment print on Sunset Fiber rag, 21 � 22 in.

Purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.27.1

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WRS I grew up on the Crow Indian reservation, and a few years ago, it dawned on me that my family and my community is really poor. I had never associated us with poverty, but a lot of my aunts and uncles never went to college, and they’re

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I feel like humans crave nature and beauty. In urban areas we have parks so you can get away and be in fake nature.

In Four Seasons, I used fake nature to pull people in. That’s where people really grapple with the piece. They see that everything else is fake, but this outfit that this woman is wearing looks and feels very real. You don’t see this outfit in Hollywood or Disney movies; the Indian princesses are not wearing elk-tooth dresses. So people realize, wait a minute, there’s something that is different here that I can’t just disregard. That’s what creates the tension in the work, when people recognize that there is something very real about this person in this fake nature.

RM Do you want to see Native culture removed from natural history museums?

Wendy Red Star (born 1981), Winter, Spring, Indian Summer (from Four Seasons), 2006 Archival pigment print on Sunset Fiber rag, 21 � 24 in. (each) Purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.27.2, .3, .4

on welfare; if you drive through our reservation you’ll see rundown houses. I think the biggest reason I didn’t think of us as poor is that we’re so culturally rich. I feel like we’re the richest people because we have our culture. Every third week in August, we have an event called Crow Fair that’s been happening since 1904. This year is the 100th Crow Fair. And you’ll see us all don our finest regalia, parade on our horses, and set up camp. It’s known as the “teepee capital of the world,” and it’s just the most beautiful thing, and it’s full of power. For me, the elk-tooth dress embodies that cultural richness and that power.

WRS It’s important to acknowledge the institution and the history of the institution. I’m not someone who says that things should be taken out or erased, but I want Native people to have their voices and opinions inserted in those institutions. It’s a puzzle, and the museum is missing these other pieces of the puzzle by not including Native voices.

When I walked into the Natural History Museum more than a decade ago, I realized there was no Native voice in this institution. Everyone walking into the institution was set up to take things at face value. Our community is so small that if I would have known the name of the original owner of the Crow moccasins that I saw there, I could have known that I was directly related to them or went to high school with one of their descendants. I never want to forget history or places, even if they’re bad. I want to build off of what’s there.

Ian Berry What do you think about Edward Curtis and other photographers who were setting up things for their own particular messaging and using photography as a way to present an idea of the “true Indian”?

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WRS Edward Curtis’s body of work is so important. I’m really happy that he did it even if the circumstances were of the time that he was living in. Without that work, we would be missing a large chunk of the puzzle. He went to my reservation in the early 1900s, and he took a bunch of photographs of my community. And I’m really happy he did that because I want those photographs. I want to see my community. And the beauty of it is that I can now use those photographs and put in other parts of the puzzle that are missing.

IB How do you feel about contemporary non-Native people putting on Native dresses and setting up situations for photographs?

WRS There are camps in Russia and Germany where they dress up as Native people. There are pictures of this woman from Russia dressed in a Hot Dance outfit, which is a Crow man’s outfit. And I was astonished because she did a really good job. How did she get a Hot Dance outfit all the way over in Russia? It’s sort of obscure.

I see that, and I want to talk about it. Can I meet this woman? There’s something to be said, there’s sort of her unknowing of things but her also picking up things. Even that is part of the puzzle of how Native people are viewed and how our stuff is used.

IB So is there any type of use that you would label a misuse or that isn’t okay?

WRS I’d like to get down to the bottom of her wearing that outfit for sure. There’s this whole idea that Native people or Indians or whatever are one homogeneous thing, and we’re not.

When capitalism gets involved with anything, that’s when the intentions become harmful. For this woman in Russia, it’s not about capitalism; she has a passion, and I can’t fault her for that. But also I have some information that she doesn’t know and maybe if we got together, then maybe she would feel differently about wearing a man’s Hot Dance outfit.

J ill Sweet Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Wendy Red Star’s humor is never far from her creations. Red Star, who is half Crow Indian, draws much of her inspiration from traditional Crow performance, ritual play, and dance. In Four Seasons, some of her scenes are reminiscent of old dioramas of Indian life still found in natural history museums today. In Fall, one of her most striking prints, Red Star sits in front of a lifesized plastic elk decoy about the same size as she is, in her traditional Crow dress, among artificial wildflowers.

Throughout Red Star’s art the number four is significant as it is among many Native American groups. It is a sacred number that denotes the four seasons and the four directions. The number four helps one to find the center or the middle.

Wendy Red Star is a multimedia artist who was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana and currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Her work explores intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. She holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

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Wendy Red Star and Beatrice Red Star Fletcher

Rebecca McNamara Mellon Collections Curator What does it mean to be on display? This question is one of many raised by Wendy Red Star’s Four Seasons series in which the artist wears her traditional Apsáalooke (Crow) elk-tooth dress in four overtly artificial installations. In putting herself in a diorama-style environment, Red Star further addresses habitat diorama portrayals of historic and contemporary Native life.

The first habitat diorama is typically credited to taxidermist, hunter, and sculptor Carl Akeley (1864–1926), who, in 1889, created a glass-enclosed three-by-four-by-two-foot scene of taxidermic muskrats in a marsh for the Milwaukee Public Museum.1 Over the next few decades, such dioramas became staples of natural history museums as part of broader efforts to educate the “lower classes,” bring nature and faraway environments and animals to urban populaces, and inspire viewers to support preservation efforts.

They typically include skillfully painted backgrounds, faux flora, and taxidermy. With intentions of scientific veracity, dioramas are important examples of artist-scientist collaborations, and today, many offer views of environments forever altered by human settlement and its effects.

Human civilizations, too, have been subjects for habitat dioramas. When dioramas featuring Native communities exist in the same museums that display taxidermy and dinosaur fossils, they evoke the dehumanization Native people face(d) by postcontact Europeans and US governmental powers. Further, that positioning of Native people as parallel to hunted and stuffed animals seeps into the subconscious of visitors—notably schoolchildren, tomorrow’s future decision makers.2 In 2006, Red Star visited the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where she sensed

“that everything was dead”—until, that is, she came across artifacts of people she knew to be very much alive—those of her own Crow community.3 Images and objects of Native people are found in natural history museums in part through imperialistic fluke: archaeologists looking for fossils happened upon Native artifacts and brought those findings back to their institutions. The European/ American ethnocentric view of Native people as “primitive” and “vanishing” compelled natural history museum curators to save these artifacts for their permanent collections. Further, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, “exotic others” performed scenes of daily life in “living exhibitions” at world’s fairs and in museums—Native people, then, were already considered objects for display.4 By placing herself in a diorama of her own creation, Red Star not only states that her community is alive, but also encourages viewers to recognize that despite whatever scientific veracity might exist, dioramas are artificial environments and artistic creations embedded with notions of imperialism and empire.

For the Tang Teaching Museum’s annual Frances Day celebration, Red Star and her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, installed a life-size diorama-style environment in the museum. It was colorful and charming and silly with a hunter’s deer decoy and fake flowers and Astroturf and manufactured mountainscape wallpaper. It approached the ridiculous, but isn’t there a ridiculousness to habitat dioramas of living people? Visitors were encouraged to pose with photo booth props and have their Polaroid picture taken by Red Star Fletcher. With intrigue and laughter, visitors entered the installation and put

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themselves on display. They felt the effects of a camera’s flash but not the entrapment of glass or bars; when they wanted to be done, they left, bringing their photograph with them, remaining the voyeurs of their own lives.

It was an activity devised to be fun and welcoming. There were no explanations of the project unless one was requested. It was left to the viewer to find the significance in it—if not in the moment, then perhaps later that evening, or perhaps the next time they saw a diorama of a human civilization. Being on display— turning oneself or having one’s image made into an object—is an idea we must constantly interrogate.

1 Stephen Christopher Quinn, Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Abrams and the American Museum of Natural History, 2006), 15.

2 Frank Ettawageshik of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians explains: “When put in the full context of the museum, the diorama trains young students where to put Native Americans in their thinking—in the past, somewhere between dinosaurs and minerals […] Then, when those students are in leadership positions in government and business, they think of us the same way.” Quoted in “Removing Dioramas Provokes Debate,” October 6, 2009, arts.umich.edu/ news-features/dioramas-debate.

3 Interview with the author, July 13, 2018. For a condensed, edited version of this interview, see pages 48–51.

4 Laura Browarny, “Art, Artifact, Anthropology: The Display and Interpretation of Native American Material Culture in North American Museums” (master’s thesis, Seton Hall University, 2010), 5–12.

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Nikki S. Lee Project series, 1997–2001 Rachel Seligman Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Between 1997 and 2001 Nikki S. Lee created the Project series, in which she assumed the outward aesthetic and some of the observable behavioral mannerisms of a subculture, ethnicity, or demographic from within the United States. She first researches a group, then immerses herself in it for several months before asking another person to take snapshots of her within the group. Lee reportedly neither hid nor made a point of the fact that she was making art. Although someone else snapped each picture, Lee managed what moments were photographed, and made the final decision about which images were included in the series.

Project presents the viewer with provocative questions around identity and selfhood, performance, and appropriation; and the opportunity to grapple with these questions is challenging and vital.

Lee’s work is often discussed as an exploration of the nature of identity and how it relates to social behavior, as well as a questioning of stereotypes. By appropriating the visual language and behaviors of various ethnic or cultural groups, Lee moved in and out of different selves, creating a fluidity that asks us to question the Western tendency toward essentializing identity. Born and raised in South Korea, she notes that she perceives identity not so much as a fixed and unchanging monolith, but as a function of the groups around her, whose attitudes, interests, and behaviors shape her own. She observes, “We all have many different personas and I want people to think about the range that they occupy. [ . . . ] Each is affected by the context and each shows a gap between inside and outside. Each is a personal performance.”1 In Project, Lee performs social mimicry, adjusts her wardrobe, and otherwise styles and adapts herself. However, in doing so, does she reduce communities (formed around race, ethnicity, gender, age, geography, etc.) to a set of stereotypes? Does Project call into question representations of how identities are embodied, or is it a visual appropriation that caricatures them? Does the expression of a fluid

selfhood—the complication of Lee’s identity through this project—come at any expense of oversimplifying others?

Visual markers of difference are a frequent strategy people use in order to differentiate themselves from others and to form community, but they are also a way to pigeonhole people into categories that can distract us from making a deeper or more nuanced consideration of an individual. We must consider the identities of those who appear with Lee in these images: they perform a critical role in her work, legitimizing and authenticating her. How do we understand their participation? How might they have understood their participation? And when we consider these projects with their titles—Hip Hop or Ohio, for example—what do we learn about the artist’s understanding or interpretation of her subject? Finally, Lee has the ability to move in and out of these communities. When we examine the relationship between Lee and the other people in these images, how do we understand her position of privilege within the context of Project?

How do we reconcile our own gaze in looking at them both?

1 Nikki S. Lee in conversation with RoseLee Goldberg, “Only Part of the Story,” Parts (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 47.

Clockwise from top Nikki S. Lee (born 1970), The Hip Hop Project (1), 2001 Fujiflex print, 15 ³⁄₄ � 23 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of the Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection EL2017.4.2 Nikki S. Lee (born 1970), The Punk Project (1), 1997 Duraflex print, 15 ³⁄₄ � 23 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of The Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection 2017.22.6 Nikki S. Lee (born 1970), The Seniors Project (13), 1999 Fujiflex print, 15 ³⁄₄ � 23 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of Leslie Tonkonow ’74 and Klaus Ottmann, 2008.14 Nikki S. Lee (born 1970), The Ohio Project (7), 1999 Fujiflex print, 23 ¹⁄₂ � 15 ³⁄₄ in.

Gift of The Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection EL2017.4.3

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Deborah Roberts Glass Castles, 2017 Latisha J. Barnett Director for the Office of Student Diversity Programs A letter of gratitude As I contemplated my response to Glass Castles, I was moved by a deep connection I felt with your work. Glass Castles drew me in from the moment I viewed it, resonating with the little black girl in me. Youth was a time when I felt joyful, imaginative, full of life, and positive. I can see myself in your work. For this reason and many more, thank you, Deborah Roberts. You have provided a platform to black girls who are often viewed as unworthy of being recognized in this way. When speaking about your work, you have proclaimed, “I want you to have an intimate relation with these girls [ . . . ] To see them, because there’s no place to look away.”1 I am thankful that you challenge societal norms and stereotypes that have been harmful to black girls, and you have taken a bold stance against the sexism, racism, and gender bias endured by black and brown girls. I have internalized those norms and stereotypes and the limitations caused by them. Writing this letter has been liberating. Looking at Glass Castles, I chose to abandon that internalized oppression and become completely vulnerable.

Your use of body parts and images pieced together is fascinating. The collage offers a glimpse of the complexity of what it means to be a black girl. I was especially struck by the eye in Glass Castles. The girl appears to be in profile, but the eye is always looking forward. I wondered if it was meant to represent the girl’s eye or someone else’s. Perhaps it represents the lens that boxes in black girls. The eye also reminded me of the phrase “white gaze” and the ways in which black women have been “othered” to justify mistreatment.

In your artist statement, you say, “otherness has been at the center of my consciousness.”2 Your work challenges stereotypes about beauty and creates a platform for the voiceless to be heard. Additionally, you have proclaimed, “the girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still

unfixed in their identity.”3 This is such a powerful statement. In a world that views us as “other,” your work paints a positive narrative for black girls and women. The boxing glove pushes back against the often negative connotation of strength when attributed to black women. It could represent the reclaiming of an image meant to harm.

The image of a literal glass castle is so jarring; it feels invasive. No matter the angle, you are constantly visible to the outside world, creating an unimaginable vulnerability. The film by a similar name, The Glass Castle, posits, “people [ . . . ] have the right to stone their own homes in order to be free.”4 In essence, you have created a sense of freedom. You have allowed black girls the opportunity to envision themselves without the boundaries put on them by the dominant culture.

You have unapologetically created work that shines a spotlight on black girls’ experiences in the world. This is so empowering and may indeed have a lasting effect on how black girls in their formative years view themselves! It also helps me envision new ways to advocate and support.

Glass Castles inspires me to continue doing work that supports girls and advocates for gender and racial equity.

With sincerest gratitude, Latisha J. Barnett

1 Deborah Roberts quoted in Siddhartha Mitter, “Deborah Roberts Conjures Black Girl Magic,” Village Voice, December 6, 2017, https:// www.villagevoice.com/2017/12/06/ deborah-roberts-conjures-black-girl-magic.

2 Deborah Roberts, Artist Statement, http://www.deborahrobertsart. com/artist-statement.

3 Deborah Roberts quoted in Antwaun Sargent, “The Artist Changing the Face of Black Girlhood,” Vice, March 6, 2018, https://www.vice.com/ en_us/article/59kapb/the-artist-changing-the-face-of-black-girlhood.

4 Helen Herimbi, “Stoning Their Own Glass Castle,” IOL, September 8, 2017, https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/ stoning-their-own-glass-castle-11136672.

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Deborah Roberts (born 1962), Glass Castles, 2017 Mixed media on paper, 30 ďż˝ 22 in.

Purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.52

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Deborah Roberts

on Black Girlhood and Fighting for Your Identity

On June 22, 2018, artist Deborah Roberts joined Dayton Director Ian Berry and Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara for a conversation about her work Glass Castles (2017), which was on display in the exhibition Give a damn.

Rebecca McNamara Tell us about the girl in Glass Castles. Who is she? What’s her story?

Deborah Roberts She’s a little girl who’s fighting for her independence. She’s looking fierce, and the eye looks directly at you. Her arm is cocked—she’s ready to take on whatever battles that she needs to. There are glass ceilings for her, but she can rise above everything. She’s ready to do battle in her little striped dress.

One of her arms is Willow Smith’s arm. I love the long, skinny limbs on the little girl to show that they’re not yet fully developed. I love the colors in the crown and its goldness. The girl is dark-skinned, which is very important to me, because within the black community, we have this idea of colorism, that sometimes the lighter you are, the more you get.

I want little girls, especially girls of color, to see themselves in this work and to know that they can be sassy and strong and innocent, too. This little girl is about nine years old. At that age, your independence starts to come through.

Ian Berry What happens to girls at that age?

DR I’ll use myself as an example. I think I was in the third grade, and I had two little ponytails. I was going to school and

people started to get on my case because every day I had two ponytails. I remember on Sunday when I was getting my hair done, I asked my mom, “Can I have three ponytails?” I don’t know why I wanted it. She didn’t do it the first week. I asked the next week. She didn’t do it. The third week, she finally did it. I was so happy to go to school with three ponytails, until the little kids called me “Tricycle.” But I stuck with it.

I have three other sisters so I would get hand-medowns. I used to shape my clothes differently because I was a little bit more rugged. At that age, I was asserting more of my independence. I knew I wanted to be an artist. I started drawing. I wouldn’t let anyone tell me about my work, what I was supposed to do. I think it was a time when Debbie was becoming Deborah.

At that age, you get more responsibility. Your childhood is shortened. You take on this persona that nothing can hurt you, which is untrue. I think that your silliness is seen as threatening, and sometimes when you’re loud and out of control—not physically out of control, just loud and excited—that’s stereotyped.

RM When you’re making these collages, are you putting yourself or your story into the work? Do you see these little girls as versions of you?

DR Some of it, not a lot of it. I don’t think that I deal with pain in my work enough. I want to move forward in that more.

Where I see most of me in this work is with the colorism.

That has zero to do with the vulnerability of blackness. It has to do with community. I’m a dark-skinned person, and we get a certain type of teasing. Why is this even an issue within the black community? Black is black.

I just noticed the other day that I’ve been putting the dark-skinned parts of my collages on the bottom and the

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lighter ones on the top. It’s something that I wished I didn’t do. Going forward, you’re not going to see that. Somehow I was giving a hierarchy to skin tone within my work.

When it comes to the red glove, that glove of power, that’s part of me. I was always a fighter. You have to sometimes fight for your identity, who you are. It’s about carving out your life, what direction you want to go.

RM Can you talk about your process in creating these collages?

DR Most of the faces are of little girls from Haiti. There is a uniquely wonderful, beautiful innocence that comes out of those faces that have not been touched by pop culture and have been touched by tragedy, but the innocence of a child still exists in that face, and I love it.

When I look for faces, and I come across “the one,” I know it. I take that face, and I print it out, and either I make it darker or lighter and then I take that face and take other pictures and collage those to create a new face. But that one beautiful, innocent face exists underneath, and that is what I hope people get to. From all the rest, they get to that innocent face, because that’s humanity.

Once I get the face, the body comes relatively easily.

In the work I talk about black culture, pop culture, American history, and art history. I look at black culture, the colorism that’s in the work; there’s the texture of the clothes, which has to do with pop culture, and the yellows against the dark skin. There’s a notion that there are no black princesses in

America. So she has the crown on her head. All those things are merged together into that work.

IB We need more black princesses!

DR Oh, god, yes. I’m the queen! We need more princesses.

When you see sisters, they say, “I’m a queen.” You know? We take on that role. I’m fascinated with Queen Elizabeth II. I think she is a strong woman. She came in at twenty-five years old and took over that country, and now she’s going to die in that role as queen. She’s not going to relinquish the crown, and I love that.

Every little girl is a princess. But when I attach rap music to that idea . . . You have people who say their mothers are queens, their daughters are princesses, and then they go into a recording booth and call every other woman bitches, hoes, and skanks. Well, what’s the difference? How can your mother and your daughter be a queen and a princess, but every other woman that you talk about in your music is something degrading? So that’s why if you say she’s a princess, all of us are princesses.

RM What made you want to engage with politically driven topics in your work?

DR Because that’s my life. I see a lot of injustices. And how could I talk about them? I started reading The Cornel West

Installation view, Give a damn.

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Reader (1999), and he talked about black bodies in a way I’ve never heard about. I never heard before how political they were. I said, “This is the direction for my work.”

When I look at a person like Philando Castile, who had done everything that they tell you to do . . . He drives by in a car, and a police officer sees that he has a wide nose like some criminal they’re looking for. One of his taillights is out. So he stops him based on that. Castile says everything right as far as having a gun, a permit. He has his partner and baby in the car, and he gets shot to death. No one comes to his defense, not the NRA, even though they promote owning guns.

That type of anger builds in you. How do I get it out?

I’m asking people to see my humanity first. See me as a person first. My work helps me get through this stuff of being reduced to criminality because we are clothed in dark skin.

Dialogue is very important. Once we start talking to each other, we realize we have more things in common than not in common. When we start trying to divide people into categories, that’s when we get into trouble. There’s no profit in us getting along. There’s more profit if we’re divided.

It’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

RM Thinking about the eight-to-ten-year-old girls in your work . . . Is that the age when you first learned about racism and the injustices of the world?

DR No, I didn’t. One thing about being bussed, if you missed a bus, you didn’t go to school. So I would hide behind the 7-Eleven stores and let the bus go by, and then I would come home and say, “I missed the bus.” My mother was going to work. She couldn’t take me. So I would stay at home. I missed a lot of school that year.

The teacher talked about black bodies. There’s one story in particular—I’m just realizing it, but I guess this is why I talk about bodies in my work. We started talking about sex ed. She asked me to leave the classroom. So she told me to go to the library, and any time away from this teacher I was happy. So I went to the library, and I was reading some book.

I remember the other girl coming and getting me, and she said, “She’s been talking about your body, and she wants the kids to look at how well developed black people are.”

She said that we’re really sexual and that I probably have had sex already. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” So I had to walk in the classroom with all the kids looking at me.

I think that has something to do with the work that I’m doing, especially when I talk about the body and how it’s overly sexualized.

DR I learned at twelve, and it was rough. We were bussed from an East Austin school to the West Austin school, and the teachers were horrible to us. We went from people who loved us, who knew our families, who cared about whether or not we acted right, to people who didn’t know us, didn’t care about our existence, who said that we ruined their whole lives, and that’s when I found out about racism.

I didn’t know about it before that because everyone in my neighborhood looked like me.

RM Do you still think about that time?

DR Oh, my god, all the time. The second day of school in West Austin, the teacher said, “I hate that you’re at this school.

I don’t know why they brought you guys over here,” and blah, blah, blah. I haven’t been able to incorporate this in my work, but she had notecards with all the students’ information on it. She told me why I couldn’t sit by any of those kids. One right after the other. She put me and another girl in this little minority section of the classroom by the bathrooms, and that’s where we stayed the whole year. We never got to sit with the other kids, like we did something wrong.

Luckily, it was only a year.

RM Did you have the language then to talk about that trauma when you went home to your family?

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Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts works in painting, installation, and mixed-media collage. Her work challenges notions of otherness and critiques ideals of female beauty.

She earned her MFA from Syracuse University in 2014 and has received numerous awards, including a PollockKrasner Foundation grant in 2016.

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Syd Carpenter Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas 2009–2010

Rose White ’20 “If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will, and it’s not always the version you think is the most accurate,” Syd Carpenter told Olivia Golden ’18 and me when we sat down to discuss the artist’s sculptures and questions of history and identity.1 In this quote, Carpenter describes how one’s words and actions can be skewed by others and the desire she feels to tell her own narrative.

Carpenter speaks through her sculpture. She is most well known for her series Places of Our Own and More Places of Our Own, which use as inspiration maps of African American farms from the book African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South by Richard Westmacott (1992). One of her early works from the former series is Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas. The sculpture, like the others in the series, responds to Westmacott’s maps.

At first glance, the sculpture looks like an abstract patchwork of different shapes and textures, but once its source material is known, the landscape becomes clear. Carpenter begins the process of making these sculptures by conceptualizing “what a flat form looks like when it inhales.”

From there she plays with the composition like a collage, moving different pieces around until they fit. The addition of texture, corresponding with the maps but guided by her conversation with the clay, breathes additional life into the sculpture.

Reinterpreting these topographical maps transforms them into sculptures that are inviting, that beg the viewer to examine them closer, and that can exist as works of art independent from the maps.

What drew Carpenter to Westmacott’s book “was that it was one of the first actual documents that really examined the history and legacy of

African American farmers, something that is an obscured history and legacy. When we think about farming in this country, probably the last image you come up with is of an African American farmer.” By creating these sculptures, Carpenter reminds us of an often-unseen American farmer who is not the white man holding a pitchfork as in Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), but a highly skilled dark-skinned worker with an ancestry of farming expertise. Even though she is not depicting the farmers’ faces, she pays homage to their work and legacy.

Carpenter herself is an African American gardener and the discovery that her grandmother had a victory garden during World War II that helped feed the community further showed her how truly connected she is to this shrouded history.

Carpenter’s family history of working with the land gave her a sense of urgency to create work that honors people who have gone unrecognized.

Through her art, Carpenter draws attention to the obscured history of African American farmers and gardeners with the hope of shedding a light on this history and creating a dialogue about it.

By doing so, she takes control of the narrative, telling her story and the stories of others like her.

1 Quotes are from an interview with the author, October 27, 2017.

Syd Carpenter (born 1953), Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas (from Places of Our Own), 2009–2010 Earthenware, acrylic, and graphite, 26 � 20 � 8 in.

Gift of the artist, 2017.30

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Uplifting Truth through Making Syd Carpenter & Leah Penniman 64

On October 27, 2017, farmer and food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman and artist Syd Carpenter sat down for a conversation about the importance of land in American history, its role in African Americans’ lives historically and today, and the intersections between art and farming.

Syd Carpenter What brings us together is one important element, and that is land. I can’t emphasize how much land—as an idea, as an experience, as content—has been important to my work on so many levels.

One of the most profoundly disorienting, disruptive, and devastating events in the experience of any person or group is to be forcibly removed from the land you call your home. Having roots in that place is your sense of belonging.

Without that place, you are adrift, vulnerable and perpetually agitated, and at risk—a state all too familiar to America’s indigenous peoples, African Americans, newly arrived immigrants, and the undocumented. For this reason, land ownership becomes paramount in sustaining those essentials to well-being, allowing for deeper roots extending over generations, and assuring a firm cultural footprint that, in turn, contributes to the broader narrative of humankind.

I see land as being viscerally a part of my ability to feel sustained, to feel as if I have a stake in the general narrative that we think of as culture.

Leah, watching what you do, the way you have broadened that attachment to the land to include issues around well-being and sustainability, access to good food, and community—your project, to me, is enormous. It has allowed me to react to it as an artist, because that’s what artists do. We react, respond, and provide tangible content that can be used over time to document what we, as a people, have done at any given time. I see you as an artist because of the creativity, the initiative, and the constant need to solve problems, which is what I do as an artist. But also seeing you as this black female farmer, to me, is so inspiring and amazing, and it’s people like you that give me the root to do my work.

Leah Penniman You’re so generous to include me in your definition of “artist.” I don’t think of myself that way. But I do deeply resonate with the idea that we’re both motivated and inspired by our love of land and an understanding that land is the foundation of our culture, our belonging, and our sense of wholeness. I’m both devastated and motivated by the fact that we, as black people, have been robbed of almost all the land that we’ve held in stewardship in the history of this country.

From the turn of the century to 1910, our people had almost sixteen million acres of farmland and composed 15 percent of the farming population. Now we compose less than 1 percent, having lost fourteen million acres of land.

And that wasn’t an accident; that wasn’t a choice. Our own

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federal government, the United States Department of Agriculture, systematically discriminated against black farmers. Farming is a highly subsidized industry, and when the cotton boll weevil epidemic came or when there was drought, black farmers didn’t get relief when white farmers did. Over time, that compounded and compounded. Black farmers owning their land was a threat to sharecropping and tenant farming. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, oftentime who were part of the government themselves, would target black landowners with violence, burning crosses, and the “strange fruit” hanging from the tree. And that drove our people farther out. So, it’s not an accident.

You can look at the issues from an economic standpoint of who’s producing food and what that means for the economy and for black people’s abilities to sustain ourselves. And that’s important. But I also believe that when we were exiled from the red clays of Georgia to the paved streets of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Boston, there was a piece of our souls that got left behind. And there’s a little emptiness that we’re looking around and trying to fill and that we can’t quite name.

In my experience of farming in the past twenty years, when black folks come back to land and experience the tilling, the harvesting, the reaping, the sharing food, that unnameable emptiness, which has been empty for generations, is filled. And that’s what keeps me going; farming is not easy work. But to see a deeper healing, a reclamation of our ancestral right to belong to the land and have agency when it comes to food and land is profound. And for you to take the time and visit black farmers and listen to them all across the South and then turn their stories into beauty to share with the world is really profound.

SC One of the insidious results of the Great Migration, and that not being an accident, is that black people were repulsed by this agricultural history, which is probably the greatest thing that we need to try to reverse. There was this idea that any association with agriculture and farming was a reminder of the indignities that were endured during slavery and the Jim Crow era. It was considered repulsive.

But we were on that land because of our expertise, not only because of our labor, which is often overlooked.

We were there because of our skill, especially in terms of growing rice, indigo, and cotton in very difficult locations.

Now we’re in this place where there is a rediscovery of that history. And you see folks manifesting it in the need to have urban farms. Reclaiming that thing that was repulsive and made you feel shame is becoming a source of feeling agency and pride and forward movement.

I garden an ornamental garden in Philadelphia. I looked around to see who else looks like me who’s doing this. That made me start to think about my own history, and I learned that my grandmother, Indiana Hudson, was a gardener.

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She had a well-known victory garden in Pittsburgh in the 1940s, and it was productive. She had seven children, five of her own and two that she adopted, and she fed that family from that garden. My mother, her daughter, was also an amazing gardener. I grew up in a house that looked like a botanical garden. That took me on this path of trying to find other African American farmers and gardeners.

I found this wonderful book by Richard Westmacott, a professor of environmental design at the University of Georgia. It is an ethnographic study of about forty-seven African American farms and gardens in Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia [African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (1992)]. He made these beautiful maps, interviewed farmers, and documented just about everything. It was the first time that I discovered someone

When we were exiled from the red clays of Georgia to the paved streets of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Boston, there was a piece of our souls that got left behind. looking at this legacy in a way that valued it and saw it as important information in the narrative of American agriculture. And I made a series of works, from which Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas (2009–2010) in the Tang collection was one of the earliest. Then, I took a trip driving through South Carolina and Georgia and the Gullah Islands. That was restorative for me and helped reconnect me to my own history. There was this whole history that was beyond just the narrative around slavery.

LP I agree with you that the food system has been rooted in traumatizing people, from the exile of indigenous people to the enslavement of our folks. I’m so grateful for the way you uplift the fact that we have thousands of years of history of relationship to agriculture that’s not rooted in colonialism or trauma, where we were agricultural experts. Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff’s book In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (2009) talks about how expert agriculturalists were targeted for kidnapping from the shores of West Africa. It wasn’t just a roundup of labor. Europeans didn’t know how to do subtropical agriculture, so they grabbed rice growers and herders and farmers who knew how to deal with the climate of the Southeast and the Caribbean and Brazil.

When black folks come to our farm, I do a word association. I say, “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think ‘farm’?” Ninety-nine percent of the time, the

answer is “slavery.” In our training program, the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion, we do an activity called “silent hands on the land.” We weed or do some kind of rote task in silence for an hour and meditate through that motion. And one day, one person stood up and saw about twenty black and brown bent backs over the land and just started weeping.

She said that the only images she’d ever been fed of our people bent over on the land were images of enslavement, of sharecropping, of penal farms. And to see folks by choice and in their joy connecting to the land was such a profound counternarrative that it brought her to tears.

When I look at your work, I think that it is absolutely stunning and beautiful. And it’s not about trauma; it’s about reclamation. What do you hope the response is to your work?

Is it for the black community to move through our trauma and reconnect? Is it to uplift conversations about land in America in general?

SC I would like my work to shed light on these ideas. Rather than making images of actual people, I’m making portraits of the places that are the sustaining root-based origins of that sense of identity, that sense of ownership, that sense of pride.

Our educational system is content with a high level of ignorance in its students and in incomplete stories, especially around how our country has developed and who has contributed to that development. Many voices must be garnered to respond, whether it be through art or activism, to penetrate that blanket of ignorance within our educational system.

Folks have been victimized by this intentional lack of disseminating the truth. Why wouldn’t there be well-being for all if all were informed? I see the work I’m doing as shedding some light on this obscure legacy.

LP It’s fascinating how you talk about your work shedding light on locations of obscurity because it seems counterintuitive that the food system would be obscure and that farming would be obscure. There’s probably nothing more universal about the human experience than our reliance on food and land. And yet it’s outside of the public conversation and certainly outside of art discourse.

In African tradition, our storytellers are called “griots,” the truth tellers, the history keepers. And as you speak, I’m thinking about you as a griot using art as your medium to tell the story and uplift the truth about our people and about justice and about society. And it’s a way that I also think about my work. I use voice and I use the land herself, with her consent, to tell the story of who we are.

Even in the food movement of folks who purport to care deeply about sustainability, the co-opted word, and about agriculture, there’s been a complete erasure of the contributions of black and brown people to that discourse and to that knowledge. Who invented community-supported agriculture? It came out of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; it was Dr. Booker T. Whatley. Who was the first person to write a book about organic farming? It was Dr. George

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Washington Carver out of Tuskegee. The Sherrods, a black family in Georgia, together with fifty other families, amassed six thousand acres and created the first Community Land Trust. Fannie Lou Hamer put forward the Cooperative Movement. She wasn’t just a political figure, she was an agricultural genius.

I am so grateful to you for uplifting the truth that our people have contributed to this knowledge in really positive ways. It’s not only a narrative of oppression and lack, it’s also one of genius and creativity and contribution. What is the process of creating these works like?

SC I started out in my art practice drawing because I went to art schools as a child where painting and drawing in a European style were prevalent. I was one of a few African Americans in my college, Tyler School of Art, and there wasn’t the sense of having a story to tell around art. It was art for art’s sake.

It wasn’t political. I wasn’t aware of the Black Arts Movement taking place at that time. I was making things and getting credit for making them look nice. There was a kind of emptiness around making. My practice changed when I started to have conversations with other artists and people in other fields. At Swarthmore College, where I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years, I have access to anthropologists, writers, mathematicians, and biologists. I hear dialogue about what is essential and important in all those disciplines. It really ignited something in me as a maker.

Is there an artist presence on your farm, or a residency where someone could just be and react to your farm and be part of those conversations? Do artists come on their own because they know about you and want to make art there?

LP Certainly many artists compose our community of folks who come to the farm for the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion or other programs. We have a rule that anyone who comes to the farm needs to touch the land, preferably before they eat or take anything, because there’s a giving.

One artist, there on a retreat, was so inspired by the experience of hands on the land that she stayed up one night and painted a mural inside of our barn of a black woman with seeds braided in her hair. The reason for this image is a story that I tell visitors that gives me hope and strength.

My grandma’s grandma’s grandma, Susie Boyd, was kidnapped from the Cape Coast region of West Africa. Before she and other women boarded transatlantic slave ships, they had the audacity and courage to take the seeds of okra, millet, rice, and sorghum that they’d saved over generations and braid it into their plaits and into their children’s hair. Nobody knew where they were going or if they would survive. There were rumors that white people were cannibals and were rounding up folks as food, which is true, metaphorically speaking. But they believed against odds in a future on soil, and they didn’t give up on their descendants.

When I think about what we face in these times, I know that I can’t give up on my descendants if my ancestors

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had that faith in me and in the seeds. Now we have this beautiful mural. It’s probably a growing edge for us in thinking about deepening the conversation between the farming-activist community and the arts community.

SC There is a need for the word to get out. What are the ways that the word can get out? It’s through art making and interdisciplinary conversations between a farmer and a poet and a musician and an engineer. All of that, to me, is another form of art making. At a certain point, truth has to emerge.

Those varied and imaginative possibilities that come from these intersections of knowledge that include artists, to me, that’s the hope. That’s my hope.

Artist Syd Carpenter creates sculpture focusing on the history of African Americans’ relationship to the land.

Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions across the country and is in numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad. She is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Leeway Foundation. Carpenter received her BFA and MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and is a professor of studio art at Swarthmore College.

Leah Penniman is codirector and program manager of Soul Fire Farm, which she cofounded in 2011 with the mission to reclaim the inherent right of black and brown people to belong to the earth and have agency in the food system. She has over twenty years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereign, having worked at The Food Project, Farm School, Many Hands Organic Farm, Youth Grow, and with farmers internationally in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico.

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Accelerator Series Memory & Monuments: (Re-)Claiming Public Space 68

Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier moderated a discussion about memory, monuments, and public spaces for the final Accelerator panel of the academic year on February 26, 2018.

Isolde Brielmaier It’s a treat to have three artists here to look at the contentious debate over whether or not to remove public monuments. I think one of the reasons this topic fuels passionate discussion is that it pertains to our sense of history and memory as well as what composes and should exist within public space.

How do we construct and contend with our history, specifically here in the United States? How have these histories been visualized, concretized, and memorialized? By whom, and for whom? What events and communities have been commemorated? What has been overlooked? When these commemorative monuments and symbols in the forms of statues, plaques, flags, and other objects are removed, are we erasing these histories, or can this alternatively be seen as a space-clearing gesture that lays open new ground for inclusion and the rewriting and expanding of our historical narratives?

Titus, you have consistently engaged with ideas of traditional art history, the European canon, as well as with history, memory, and representation—and specifically, the rewriting of narratives, the reclamation of narratives, or the appropriation of narratives. Could you tell us about your practice as it relates to this conversation?

Titus Kaphar There is a body of work that I’m doing now, Monumental Inversions (2016–present), which speaks directly to what we’re talking about. My work has always been about narratives and the characters in existing compositions who are not the central figures. I give myself the freedom to explore and investigate without any sense of obligation to the original, or in some cases, even the facts or the origin of a particular piece. I take an existing work as a foundation, and wherever the piece takes me, that’s where I end up going. I give myself that freedom because I recognize that in all painting, in all representation, there is fiction. As I say, “All depiction is fiction; it’s only a question of degree.” If that is true, then I can give myself the freedom to explore in any way.

Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) is not a historical painting, but we treat it like one.

When we think of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we look at John Trumbull paintings, and those paintings become the visual representation of those moments, but those moments didn’t look like that. All of those folks in Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (1786–1820) weren’t in the room when that was signed. But in order to tell this narrative in the way that Trumbull wanted it to be told, he altered the facts.

Even our memories function this way. When we remember things, we’re not remembering the incident

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itself, we’re remembering the last time we remembered that thing, and we pull it out of our file case and begin to have a conversation about it and don’t realize how we’ve altered that original memory.

Karyn Olivier The past is all legitimate and real, but your history or memory of it is going to be subjective.

IB It’s constructed. Karyn, could you share a little bit about your work?

KO Over the last five years, I’ve been thinking about how to intersect and collapse conflicting histories and what those histories mean in the present moment. I often think about blind spots or the underconsidered spaces that exist and how I can insert something into that. I think about rearticulating spaces that could allow for a claiming or reclaiming of narratives. I think about invisibility and how I can use invisibility to actually reveal—I don’t want to say “truth” because “truth” is such a bad word—but to reveal what we didn’t want to see or didn’t want to recognize.

This fall, I was invited to participate in Philadelphia’s arts project Monument Lab, where the city tries to reckon with what’s an appropriate monument for Philadelphia.

I live in Germantown, a historic neighborhood that is now predominately African American. There’s a monument in the far corner of Vernon Park dedicated to Francis Daniel Pastorius (1917), a German settler who led the first Quaker protest against slavery back in 1688, so almost two hundred years before slavery was abolished. During World Wars I and II, they boxed over this monument.

At the center of the park is the Battle of Germantown Memorial (1906), dedicated to George Washington. It was the only battle fought in Philadelphia, and it was a failed battle, but power structures allow for monuments to exist based on the person. I thought it was interesting that George Washington was fighting for America’s freedom while owning slaves, while this foreigner, this immigrant, was fighting for black people to be treated as citizens.

I wanted to engage that history and these two different time periods. I decided to box over the Battle of

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Germantown Memorial, which on some level was irreverent.

But I knew in the act of boxing or shrouding and making it invisible, people would remember that it was even there.

I created the box out of panels of mirror to reflect the current landscape. Now instead of white faces, it’s black faces shown. If no one’s in the park, the landscape, the trees are changing; it’s never sitting still. I like the idea of this monument that has this certain verticality and static nature and all of a sudden, that dissolves. I think monuments today should be temporary. Often the monument’s static and heavy and impenetrable, and it’s almost like a period at the end of the sentence. And monuments can never be periods of a sentence, that’s where we go wrong.

IB And creating conversations among people on a community level—that’s where it goes back to that space-clearing gesture, right? Where we clear the space for people to engage and think and consider history differently. Dan, your work around this topic?

Dan Borelli I’m from Ashland, Massachusetts, the second town on the Boston Marathon route. In the center of town is one of the first ten Superfund sites, part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s program to remediate contaminated sites. I was working on developing my own color theory and mapping the history of color and how color has fallen out of architectural discourse when I discovered the source of contamination in my hometown was color. It had one of the first color plants in the United States to synthetically produce dye for the textile-manufacturing industry. All of a sudden, I go from color phenomenology to color ecology, color as seducer to color as carcinogen, color as cancer. I grew up with friends who passed away from the pollutants of color. In response, I created The Ashland-Nyanza Project (2010–present). It’s a multi-year, three-part project, and I’m on year seven.

I started the project by going to whom I came to call the culture of loss: the moms, the sisters, the siblings, and I said, “How would you feel, in your gut, if I were to treat this artistically?” Not what do you think, but how do you feel?

And this is where I think artists strive; we get to the “how you feel” and we make that feeling public. I needed to tell

the story of the history of the contaminated. If a place like Ashland forgets about the people that it’s lost, then we have created social amnesia.

The Ashland Public Library is where the EPA’s documents reside. The negative impact, the cancer cluster, the deaths are not marked anywhere else in the town. I restaged the library with interviews, with people giving their testimonials; I recontextualized. I made physical models, I made an interactive sequence of mappings, I used every representational trick I could. Then, I used EPA documentation to map where the contaminants are today to the nearest streetlight.

I put gels over the streetlights, and I lit up the entire town for a month so people could walk and viscerally feel where the contamination is today.

IB It’s like a living, breathing memorial. At the center is loss and not victory.

DB It really was a gut punch to people that had, for years, been ignoring it.

IB We saw this big ramp-up in 2015 after nine African American churchgoers were murdered at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a domestic terrorist who had posted numerous images of himself donning the Confederate flag. About a week and a half later, filmmaker, activist, artist, and producer Bree Newsome climbed up a flag pole and removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state grounds, and she was arrested for that action. And I feel like that was one of the first instances where we really saw this debate take center stage. But why now? What strikes you?

KO I’m going to say something that will sound crazy. I think it’s partly Beyoncé. I think it’s her and Lemonade and that Black Panther Super Bowl performance. I think it’s Black Lives Matter, I think it’s Trump, I think it’s Black Girl Magic.

I think it’s the combination of these things that’s allowing this to happen.

IB It’s actually not that crazy in the sense that, in order for these discussions and debates to take off, they need to extend out into the realm of popular culture.

TK I think it’s important to recognize that this is not just happening right now. There are folks down South who have been having this conversation for literally decades.

IB But it’s so visible and loud right now.

TK What is different about this particular moment is how an individual voice can spread so quickly. You can’t ignore how technology’s impact on these community conversations can

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take them from inside the community to outside the community instantly. I made a piece that spoke to the sculpture outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and that got a whole bunch of attention. But David Hammons had addressed that sculpture decades ago. It’s important for us to recognize that there are a lot of people who were doing this work who haven’t been heard until now, but they still have been in the trenches.

IB Let’s talk about this idea of existing monuments: what do we do? I’ve seen on social media the option to “Check yes or no,” and the question, “Do we remove; don’t we remove?” How do we get out of that binary conversation?

How do we see the role of the historian and the artist in that equation?

KO Sometimes it would make sense to make something that’s in conversation with an existing monument. Another time, maybe it makes sense to put a monument in a museum. But if we say it has to be one thing, we’re going to fail.

TK We go to artists; we let the people who make things address these questions. I feel very strongly that artists of this moment need to make new works that address older works.

Those artists, myself included, need to recognize that in our making in this moment, there are things that we are going to forget. As Karyn said at the beginning, these monuments shouldn’t be periods, they should be many, many, many commas. Just taking something down doesn’t even begin to address the problem.

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IB There’s still the history and what led to the culture in which these monuments exist.

TK There’s something about monument making itself that we’re buying into by thinking that these things are powerful simply because they are where they are. In other words, just because an object is on a pedestal doesn’t mean that it deserves to be esteemed, doesn’t mean that it’s a valuable piece of art. The truth of the matter is most of these monuments, unfortunately, are not made by our national Berninis.

If you give contemporary artists the opportunity to say, “Let’s do battle. You put yours up, I’ll put mine up,” I guarantee the contemporary conversation will be stronger.

Because as contemporary artists, we have a whole arsenal of materials that weren’t available in the past; and we have the ability to speak to the people in our communities directly.

KO I make temporary monuments, and, for me, the idea of permanent monuments just makes no sense anymore.

IB Think about the notion of power and structures of power and history and how they are intricately bound up in one other. So many people hold on to that painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware as a monument to this man, to the founding of this country.

KO But do you think part of it was wanting us to have something

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that we all can believe in? I don’t think it was all malice; some of it was about citizens needing a story.

IB That’s “the danger of a single story.”

IB Of course. That’s part of national identity.

Sarah Goodwin (Audience) There’s a new archive created by scholars at John Jay College of Criminal Justice that documents the presence of enslaved people in the Capital Region. We’ve known that there were enslaved people in the Capital Region, but there hasn’t been easy public access to these histories. My question is, wouldn’t we want a more permanent monument to the enslaved people, that is, lest we forget? In Germany there are brass bricks in front of the houses where Jewish families lived. I’m fascinated by what you’re saying about temporary monuments, but I also have a hunger for something more permanent, and I wonder if you might comment on that.

DB But there’s an attitude that you can’t question certain founding myths.

TK This is part of the challenge. We are far into postmodernism, and we’re questioning all kinds of things. What we held as truth yesterday, we question today—that’s a given. In terms of addressing monuments, we have to be able to hold in our hands two things that are opposites. George Washington was an amazing historical figure; George Washington enslaved people. Jefferson was an articulate, poetic, amazing individual, and he stole liberty from hundreds and hundreds of people. We’re going to have to figure out how to have these monuments, whether they’re temporary or permanent—I like temporary better—hold these two diametrically opposing ideas in balance.

IB Both the victory and the loss.

DB What’s missing around the object of the monument is a discursive space.

KO Absolutely. It’s that single perspective. It’s not necessarily that it’s false, but it’s only one perspective.

DB The House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin is easily the most powerful exhibition experience I’ve had. There’s a permanent exhibition that has made public all of these little tiny government pieces of paper and memos that showed just who was involved in decisions about the Holocaust.

This country hasn’t done that yet. We haven’t made public this insane archive of the Founding Fathers, the bureaucratization of enslavement.

IB Before you can commemorate and memorialize, you have to actually acknowledge. We haven’t done that work as a nation to contend with and acknowledge our history. That’s incredibly difficult work. I like this temporary idea, but I do, to your point, hunger for that monument that says, “We

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implicate ourselves. We exist on the backs of many, many people, and we are paying homage to them.”

TK I think there’s a distinction between the kinds of monuments or memorials that remember and try to deify individuals and those monuments or memorials about a moment in time where many people were affected by a thing. Whether we’re talking about the Holocaust or the indigenous people here, whether we’re talking about the enslavement of black people, those are different kinds of things. Maybe the ones where we’re trying to reckon with our tragic history and its impact on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe those are the spaces where these things are permanent. But this idea that we glorify a single individual, that we put George Washington on a pedestal, maybe that we get rid of.

Maybe we decide we’re not going to do that anymore.

IB No two monuments are alike.

TK I wonder if there’s a space for believing in democracy to work. To what degree do the people who live in a community have a say as to whether that thing stays or goes? Is there some way to engage that? What I think right now is these decisions are made from up high and the people on the ground aren’t really asked for their opinions.

Dan Borelli is an artist and director of exhibitions at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2010, as part of his MDes studies at the GSD, he started an art-based research inquiry into the Nyanza Superfund Site in his hometown, Ashland, Massachusetts. His project makes public hidden narratives of cancer clusters, human loss, activism, and ultimately regeneration.

Titus Kaphar uses painting and sculpture to interact with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums and then altering the work in a nod to hidden narratives and unspoken truths about the nature of history. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and his work has been exhibited at the Savannah College of Art and Design, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and elsewhere.

Installation artist and sculptor Karyn Olivier creates work that engages the “blind spots” of public spaces and histories, including in Philadelphia’s historic Vernon Park for Philadelphia’s Monument Lab program and New York’s Central Park for Creative Time and the city’s Percent for Art program. Her work has been exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennales, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and elsewhere.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Olivier earned her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BA at Dartmouth College and is an associate professor and program head of sculpture at Tyler School of Art.

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MIGUEL A. ARAGÓN on Printmaking & Depicting Death in a Border City On November 17, 2017, Skidmore students M Brohawn ’20 and Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18 interviewed artist Miguel A. Aragón as part of the course “The Artist Interview,” led

by Dayton Director Ian Berry. Aragón’s print Aplacado (Siete cascos percudidos) (2016) from the Tang collection was on view in the fall 2017 exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self.

M Brohawn ’20 War strongly influences the subject matter of the prints in your ongoing series Retratos de pérdida por el Narcotrafico and in Aplacado (Siete cascos percudidos). When did you begin focusing your work in this way?

Miguel A. Aragón What’s happening in Mexico has been happening since the early 1990s in Ciudad Juárez, where I’m from, and so it was always on my radar. When I was studying for my bachelor’s, I started paying attention more to what was happening in the streets. Every single day there would be at least one case

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of a body being found somewhere, and I started collecting the stories. Eventually, I decided to use this in my work.

At first, the work wasn’t good; I was still learning.

When I did my master’s, I found the perfect medium and technique to explore these ideas. In 2006, when the official war on drugs was declared in Mexico, then things exploded and it wasn’t just local news anymore, it was national and international news. This made it even more crucial for me to explore it.

Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18 What was the first series you made that you feel expressed these ideas?

MAA The Memoria fracturada series. They are white on white, very subtle tones on the paper. I made screen prints, etchings, and wood cuts, and I was never satisfied. Nothing really seemed right to me, like something was missing. During my master’s studies, I heard about a laser engraver in the architecture department. As soon as I saw it I knew that that was the right tool. It took some experimentation. It was about finding the right image or how to create the image, and eventually I had all the right materials to come up with a successful body of work.

MB You mentioned that the war on drugs affected your interest in your subject matter. How has it done so?

MAA Yes. The war on drugs affects many different points, political, social, economic, and it is the basis still for my research, but also it’s influenced me to broaden my research and explore the subject from different points of view. For me, the very essence of my work is the loss of life and the generations that we’re losing in Mexico. It’s mostly young men that are getting killed, and there’s just too many of them. The country is losing generations, and this is going to affect the future.

Just the loss of life is what makes it so difficult for me.

I don’t know if this is apparent in my work, but it is important to me that I’m not placing any judgment on the people being murdered or executed. Regardless of their decisions, they were somebody’s brother or somebody’s friend,

somebody’s parent, probably. And they chose the wrong path, but they shouldn’t be erased out of this world just because of that. This is happening so much and so often; I think people lose sight of that.

MB The border on which Juárez and El Paso lie is a bridge from one nation to another. Can you describe the relationship between these two places and your relationship with them?

MAA They’re home. I was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, but I actually feel that El Paso, Texas, is also my home because they’re sister cities. The only things that really divide us are the Rio Grande and the border-crossing bridges. Within a minute you could go from one nation to the next if there was no traffic or inspections. It’s a very different experience, I’ve learned, to grow up in the border region. We’re like our own country because we’re exposed to two cultures, two languages, and the city becomes a hybrid of both. We’re bordeños, which derives from the word “border.”

Within my work, having these two different experiences of cultures and languages and multiple identities has made me more open to try different things. It’s pushed me within my work to try to make a combination of techniques that were not explored so much.

AAW I’m wondering about your thought process behind material choices in the work that you’re doing. In Aplacado (Siete cascos percudidos), there are some really interesting physical textures.

MAA Connecting the idea with the technique and materials is important. I knew that my work had to be connected to the idea of the multiple because these events are multiplied.

The more I looked at the images, the more I realized that the photographs repeat. There were different people, different scenarios, or different landscapes, but in the end, they looked very similar, and so that makes a connection to the idea of the multiple, which is a concept in printmaking.

And the process has to use erasure that is subtractive in a way. For me erasure is not about trying to forget something or trying to get rid of something but rather it’s more of a cleansing.

For the hand-drilled portraits, as in Aplacado (Siete cascos percudidos), I was looking for a material that allowed for flexibility. Paper is one of the most flexible materials that is also really strong. I was thinking about the fragility of our bodies; we can break bones easily, but at the same time bones are strong, so that was my connection with paper. You can create interesting objects with paper that make it really strong so that you can’t just tear it with your hands, but then, depending on how paper is created, you can tear it pretty easily.

After moving to Austin, I had a realization that many of the immigrants who come into the United States from

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Mexico work in construction. So there’s also the connection of those immigrants using these materials like the drill.

AAW Why did you decide to create matrixes and images that are not immediately recognizable as figures?

MAA That was by choice, making them abstract. Shock value is not the goal of my work, and that is because those photographs exist already. I’m appropriating images from the media. Some of these photographs were on front pages of the newspapers. Shock value is not going to help me because even though the newspapers did sell because of shock value, people were looking at them only for three seconds and then immediately closing them or changing the page. Also, people try to forget the image right away because who wants to live with those images in their brain? I realized that I needed a different approach. I needed to do something that actually lured the viewer in and made them slow down to see the image and to realize what is happening. Then it would make a bigger impact, at least that was my hope.

After appropriating these images, I altered them

digitally to remove color and abstract them to the point where they become almost unrecognizable, but I’m still leaving enough details that can, over time, redefine the figure or the image itself. And when the viewer slows down and actually looks at the piece, they’re not going to see anything other than perhaps landscape or an abstraction in textures, but eventually the image reveals itself. And when that happens, the viewer cannot unsee it, and it makes a greater impact than a gory image. This approach is the only way to really captivate the viewer and keep them there and make a strong connection.

AAW It’s about invoking care and empathy for the community that’s in the images that have been produced and that you’re using in your work.

MAA Exactly. I’m not trying to take advantage of these events.

It’s all about the lives that we’re losing in the country.

The figures, or the cadavers, that I’m using for my images, they’re cartel members, they’re members of the law enforcement, and they’re also bystanders.

Miguel A. Aragón’s work, influenced by his native city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, interrogates questions of violence, memory, and erasure.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and is included in several public museum collections.

His awards include a fellowship from Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, The Print Center’s Honorary Council Award of Excellence, the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Contemporary Artist award, and he was named “Artist of the Year” by the Austin Visual Arts Association and Austin Critics Table Awards in 2012. He is an assistant professor of art at the CUNY College of Staten Island.

Miguel A. Aragón, Aplacado (Siete cascos percudidos), 2016 Aquatint on Rives BFK paper, 51 ¹⁄₈ � 38 ¹⁄₄ in.

Tang purchase, 2017.21

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Sonya

Clark

on Being invisible and without substance

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Artist Sonya Clark responded to two works in the Tang Teaching Museum collection—an African hat and an ambrotype of an African American girl—by creating a new sculpture based on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).

Have you seen those pinhole eyeglasses, the ones that look like shades but have opaque plastic lenses perforated with tiny holes? The little holes are intended to help you see. I remember my mother bought a pair. I thought they were silly but then they worked. Somehow those little apertures helped to focus the eyes. They obscured and focused simultaneously.

“Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?

What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?”

— R alph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

This African hat, hand-stitched with its tiny eyelet holes, brought those pinhole glasses to mind. The surface of the white cotton was wounded with each puncture, the space marked with a masterful encirclement of silk thread over and over again. What unnamed artist wielded a needle with such grace and embodied knowledge? And if the head for which the hat was intended was an eye covered with this beautifully embroidered hat, it, too, would have sharper focus.

And then there is that particular precious child, winked at by the camera. A mechanical pupil captured a moment in light and lens of someone anonymous to us. An ambrotype, an immortal impression, made possible by one precise occasion of looking through one singular oculus. It is a tiny image of a tiny child but somehow also monumental, formidable, a flash of wholeness or fullness in a blinding era of negation and emptiness.

How do I see these two objects? I see that in their anonymity and preservation there is a knowing of unknowing. Whether with the shutter of a lens or the repetitive piercing of a needle, there is evidence through orifices. Blinking eyes and steady stares make visible the invisible. When looking through, something larger emerges.

The holes make a new kind of emergence and awareness. We feel what is lost. Endless oculi penetrate, perforate, and demonstrate in the substrate what we would not otherwise see. The periphery illuminates the absence.

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Artist unknown, title unknown, n.d.

Ambrotype, 3 ⁵⁄₈ � 3 ¹⁄₈ in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography 2017.41.12 Facing page: Artist unknown (possibly Kenyan or Tanzinian), hat, n.d.

Thread and fabric, 5 � 6 ¹⁄₂ � 6 ¹⁄₂ in.

Gift of Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium, 2007.8.141

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Sonya Clark (born 1967) Being invisible and without substance, 2018 Altered copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 2 ¹⁄₂ � 6 � 8 in. (closed), 1 ¹⁄₂ � 11 � 8 in. (open) Courtesy of the artist

Each of my manipulated pages are rendered as a porous membrane of illegible text.

A book of skins without a body.

Pages and layers of dermis become a body. We breathe though our breath is taken. Aerated by an act of emptying, our lungs filled to capacity.

Disruption shifts to oxygenation.

Like spores, what is removed, what is undone, generates nonetheless.

Absence made present like alveoli exhaling the story, the seeds of the tempest bear witness to struggle and strength.

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Sonya Clark, born in Washington, DC, to a Trinidadian father and a Jamaican mother, is Distinguished Research Faculty in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where she holds the title of Commonwealth Professor. She is also Visiting Professor at Amherst College. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Amherst College, where she also received an honorary doctorate in 2015.

Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museums and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a United States Artists Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and others.

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Dawoud Bey Harlem, U.S.A. series 1975–1979

Dayna Joseph ’19 Born in Queens, New York, to Harlemite parents, Dawoud Bey spent much of his childhood in Harlem. Bey first began thinking about the neighborhood from an artistic perspective when he journeyed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind.

A collection of photographs that purported to represent daily life in Harlem, the exhibition was protested by activists who argued the display was ill-researched and presented a series of ethnographic documents instead of a creative celebration of life in Harlem.

Fueled by the Met’s exhibition, Bey began traversing Harlem’s streets, reacquainting himself with the neighborhood beyond his childhood encounters. Beginning in 1975 and throughout that decade, he captured the community with his handheld Leica camera, gifted to him by his godmother. While the twenty-five portraits that became Bey’s Harlem, U.S.A. series (1975–1979) and the works in the Harlem on My Mind exhibition share a common subject—daily life in Harlem—Bey’s photographs radiate with a more credible authenticity. They made their public debut in 1979 at The Studio Museum in Harlem, which, unlike the Met’s show, surrounded by the Upper East Side’s predominantly white and wealthy community, resonated with the photographs’ subjects. Exhibited in the environment in which it was conceived, Harlem, U.S.A. was within reach of the subjects themselves.

Bey’s street photographs honor the ordinary lives of Harlem and its residents. The photographs present Harlem as it was in the 1970s, retaining the characteristics that made Harlem’s streets unique to any other part of the city. In A Man and Two Women after a Church Service (1976), for example, two women, decked out in their fine furs, decorative hats, and leather

shoes, exude grace and pride standing on a garbage-stained street. Here, elegance exists because of imperfections, not in spite of it.

Finding beauty in what others might edit out permeates throughout Bey’s work and parallels many of my own experiences in Harlem. My parents spent years growing roots in Harlem with their extended families, but moved to the suburbs after I was born. Like Bey, I spent the majority of my childhood in Harlem, despite living elsewhere, because that was where I found family and friends. In retrospect, Harlem represents home to me in ways other places I have lived never could, despite the crime, violence, and hopelessness that often plague its reputation, all of which I have experienced personally. Comparably, in Harlem, U.S.A., Bey avoids focusing on the neighborhood’s difficulties. Instead, he highlights the strength of two young black men relaxing on a stoop, the innocent sass of two little black girls posing in front of Lady D’s Ice Cream, and the pride of a professional standing self-assuredly in his barbershop. These enduring images feel just as comfortable to me in 2018 as they did to Bey and his contemporaries when they were first printed nearly forty years ago; they feel like home.

Bey admits today that change in Harlem is unavoidable.1 The neighborhood’s establishments and people continue to transform and thrive despite decades of mistreatment, subjugation, and gentrification. At its core, Harlem today, just like in the 1970s, focuses incessantly on the idea that good is enhanced by bad, and what some may call undesirable to others serves as a reminder of progress made and future potential. The essence of Harlem, U.S.A. reflects the longstanding qualities that continue to make Harlem an exceptional place.

1 Dawoud Bey, Dawoud Bey: Harlem, U.S.A., ed. Matthew Witkovsky (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 79.

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Dawoud Bey, Two Girls in Front of Lady D’s, 1976, printed 2017 Gelatin silver print, 8 ¹⁄₈ � 11 ⁷⁄₈ in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2017.40.4 Dawoud Bey, A Man and Two Women after a Church Service, 1976, printed 2017 Gelatin silver print, 8 ¹⁄₈ � 11 ⁷⁄₈ in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2017.40.1

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Susannah Mintz and Nicholas Junkerman on Disability and Photography Professor and Chair of English Susannah Mintz and Assistant Professor of English Nicholas Junkerman discuss disability in the Tang Teaching Museum’s Jack Shear Collection of Photography, particularly in August Sander’s Children Born Blind (c. 1930).

Nicholas Junkerman I’d like to start with what the hands are doing. The joined hands are dead center in this photograph—the image radiates out from that connection. What I want to know, if we’re thinking in terms provided by disability studies, is what kind of connection that might be and how its presence in a photograph alters/reframes the connection. The more I’ve looked, the more I see intimacy and privacy. Privacy not in the sense that we can’t see this gesture, but privacy in the way that holding someone’s hand is always private, always knowable only to the two people whose skin is touching. There’s also that hint of particularity, the way in which she pulls him in a little, a dynamic of protection, older sisterliness, etcetera.

But then what about her raised hand? What about dirty clothes and brick walls? We know that Sander’s photographs of the blind were taken at the Institute for the Blind in Düren, near Cologne. What does the context of the institution do for this image?

Susannah Mintz I’ve been thinking about hands as one of the body parts most associated with the status of human, capable of uniquely

human gestures. Think of God’s hand reaching out to Adam’s in the Sistine Chapel; the raised hand as a symbol of human solidarity; handwriting as the mark of individuality; and our many words in which handedness is coded as equivalent to mastery and control (manipulation, manufacture, and so on).

I’ve also thought a lot about hand-in-handness as a particularly subtle way of indicating reciprocity, a lateral, side-by-side equivalence that disrupts hierarchical dynamics of power. Adam and Eve hand-in-hand as they exit Milton’s Eden. The intimacy and privacy you mention. And the all-important skin-on-skin effects of touch. Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price have written extensively about the implications of touch in the context of disability—that willingness to reach out, literally, and touch someone, breaching the boundary, making that kind of tactile contact.1 Touching as caregiving (though it can also, of course, be inflected with cruelty or disregard or pain). There is no way to touch without activating the threshold of ourselves.

In this photo, then, an intriguing tension happens.

The subjects of the photo cannot look back at viewers, cannot return the gaze. They are framed by the wall, the street, the edges of the picture—hard lines that seem to strictly demarcate their movements, calling attention to their sightlessness (associated with immobility, of course). At the same time, the eyes connote the inwardness of blindness; the children are physically or geographically stuck, but we can project upon them all kinds of fantasy about their inwardness/ insight because they don’t look back.

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August Sander (1876–1964), Children Born Blind, 1930, printed 1990 Gelatin silver print, 10 � 7 ¹⁄₄ in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2015.1.265

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But the hands, maybe, cut through all of that. The hands are not about being blind but about being connected; the hands are not about “the blind leading the blind” but about embodied communication—knowledge is at stake. The two hands touching equalizes and disrupts a sighted viewer’s desire to protect, envelop—they don’t need us. The raised hand plays a role, too—it draws our attention, it signals a point being made, it suggests directionality, emphasis, import, knowledge, authority. A different line of “sight” emerges, from held hands to raised hand, that these blind children command (rather than passively receiving). They’re onto something, and they don’t care if we can understand or not.

Is it possible to photograph children of any sort in a way that doesn’t smack of exploitation? How do we feel about “looking in on” these two? We do so for what, pleasure? Interest and curiosity? Edification?

For what reasons has this photograph been taken?

What effect is it meant to have?

NJ I agree on the point about photographing children and the threat of exploitation in photography. From my own anxieties about how photos of my daughter circulate online to controversies around Sally Mann’s photographs of her children, I think we’re primed to think of children as somehow both favored subjects for photographs and potential victims. Maybe another way to say that (and here I’m following the line of thinking you laid out) is that a photograph of a child can feel like the record of an imposition of adult desires, from the relatively benign (“smile!”) to the violent and frightening.

Clearly there’s a link here to cultural anxieties about the disabled subject, too. Because of that intersection I think it’s appropriate that we’re focusing on the word “children” as well as the word “blind.” Those words work together to raise our anxieties about exploitation—both subject positions, “blind” and “child,” can invite a false, totalizing sense of vulnerability and dependency. The effect is only multiplied when they come together. That’s why I’m particularly attracted to your idea that, with their hands, “these blind children command.” It helps me think about what is in this photo that partly evades the obvious sentimental/ exploitative/stigmatizing possibilities of the situation.

Maybe another way of thinking about that is to consider the other half of your final question, that is, for what reasons has this photograph been taken? What effect is it meant to have? One answer to that question is that these children are meant to be anonymous representatives of a larger group, an archetype. In part, that’s inseparable from Sander’s larger project, in which individual photographs were assembled into a catalog of the social, human world of twentieth-century Germany. Sander places these children in a group of images he called “The Last People.” This concluding group also features images of people who have been badly burned, corpses, the elderly, and the death mask of his son. There’s an interesting tension between the Adam/Eve link we’ve been tracing and the idea that these are some of the “last people.” One of the first things you notice when you look through Sander’s portraits, though, is how difficult it is to sustain that representative perspective once you see the faces and bodies of individual humans. Immediately we start thinking of missing names, relationships (are they brother and sister? friends?), narratives (what brought them here? what was their life like before and after this moment?). In that feeling of seeking I think we start to break down the essentializing logic of the “representative” blind children.

Or at least partly. I hear also in your question about exploitation a note of caution, that maybe some of the negative associations that we think might be there really are, in fact, there.

SM In this photo, the subjects are not both facing the camera, not so obviously physically staged for the shot. They’re kids before they’re disabled, engaged in their own activity rather than merely posing. This is an effect of the photo, of course— it allows us that sense of looking in on something that doesn’t involve us, rather than more blatantly staring at passively situated objects. And I’m struck by the expression on the little boy’s face (is he thinking hard? Skeptical?

Annoyed?) and by the girl’s stance—a little fireplug, not a feminine position.

In all of that, of course, I’m doing exactly what you describe above—providing a narrative in the absence of one, filling in blanks that are created by lack of context, imposing my wish for this photo onto it. Can I take myself out of a contemporary disability perspective, or is it fair to suggest that these children are born in this photo, rather than made by it? Does the congenital nature of their bodily condition interrupt an impulse toward pity? Is that distinction just deconstructive quibbling? How might being born interact with injuries caused by fire or war?

For all that it is postured, this photo seems more mobile than others in Sander’s images of the blind—the turning, the scowl, the raised hand, those clasped hands in which there is tension and grip. Something is happening here, and the photo gives us few clues about what that might be.

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NJ Yes, and that sense of a missing story, of something being in progress is key to the attraction of this photograph for me, its suggestion of a mystery without many clues. It might also lead us back to the complexity of photographic objectivity.

In describing his plan for the larger project that this image comes from (People of the 20th Century), Sander speaks of a document aiming at a kind of neutral, objective sociological truth.2 The photographer and critic Allan Sekula connects Sander’s vision to a liberal, egalitarian idea of physiognomy—that photography could become a transparent, universal way of reading human truth by looking at the surfaces of bodies.3 This seems to me to be a version of the kind of “reading” that disability activism opposes—the idea that human truth could be knowable from, and reduced to, the fact of a visible impairment. At the same time, as Sekula points out, this liberal positivism was opposed to, but not entirely separable from, Nazi racial science and eugenics.

Disability activists and scholars know well the ways in which the presumptions about bodies and their social roles fueled a campaign of sterilization and extermination that directly targeted the disabled.

I don’t bring this up in order to link this image to Nazi crimes or to make assumptions about what happened to these children. From our vantage point, however, that history seems especially relevant when we think about what we can and can’t know by looking at images of disabled individuals.

I wonder if all this talk of representatives and individuals might help us to think about the representation of disability not just in Sander’s project, but in photography collections more broadly. This image is chosen from a large number of works in The Jack Shear Collection of Photography at the Tang, the vast majority of which are not explicitly concerned with representations of disability. What kinds of meanings/associations are we privileging here? What does it mean to pick out an example that is plainly exceptional?

There were a couple other images that we considered writing about. How should we think about the diversity/limitation of disability representation in photography? And finally, is this undergirded by a too-singular focus on the visual representation of visual disabilities?

SM Disability studies has trained us to interrogate images that have a supposedly objective (medical) function, just as we interrogate the circulation of other bodily tableaux, like “freak shows” or Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum of “oddities” and “specimens” or the stabilizing of representative “truths” in bodily detail for political/ideological ends, as you lay out above. You’ve called us back to both the historical and aesthetic situations of Children Born Blind as inseparable from whatever we take to be its “meaning.” Your question about other photos—say, Frederick Sommer’s still life with a prosthetic leg that resembles an aerial shot of a landscape, or George Dureau’s portrait of B. J. Robinson

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with a profound congenital deformity staring boldly at the camera—reminds us that interpretive context directs our looking in the moment; can we think of what you and I are doing in relation to Sander’s single photograph as creating an alternative context around it that interrupts the likelihood of a more ableist staring? Whatever Sander’s own pretentions toward neutrality might have been, is it too easy to cry foul on these children as merely pinioned in the frame? Have we not been engaging those bodies as subjects, bodies with agency—handed, touching, thoughtful, kinetic, blind but somehow incidentally so? Is that, too, a legitimate tale to tell?

1 Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability,” in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2002), 62–75.

2 Andy Jones, “Reading August Sander’s Archive,” Oxford Art Journal 23, no. 1 (2000): 3–21.

3 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 83–85.

Nicholas Junkerman, Assistant Professor of English, specializes in early American literature. He teaches an introductory course on disability studies and researches historical representations of disability in literature and visual art. His article “‘Confined unto a Low Chair’: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Early American Literature.

Susannah B. Mintz, Professor and Department Chair of English, is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity, Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, and Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body. Her current project is The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction. She is coeditor of a critical collection on the essayist Nancy Mairs. Her creative work has received special mention from Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize. She won the 2014 South Loop Review National Essay Prize and has been a finalist for the William Allen Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Epiphany Chapbook Contest. Her memoir Match Dot Comedy was a Kindle Single.

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DARIO ROBLETO

on Sampling & Manipulating Objects into Art

Dario Robleto (born 1972), You Make My World a Better Place to Find, 1996–1998 Lint, thread, various debris and particles, the artist’s grandmother’s antique wooden spool For the past two years I have been secretly collecting lint, thread, etc., from friends, acquaintances and strangers (for example a piece of lint on someone’s shoulder, a hair hanging on a forearm). I have connected all this debris into one long thread which I then spooled. From this spool of debris, I have repaired a blanket, a tiny pair of mittens, sewn buttons back on, repaired tears in clothes and various other things.

Dimensions variable Gift of Peter Norton, 2014.7.18

On December 1, 2017, Skidmore students Teague Costello ’19 and Emily Cooper ’19 interviewed artist Dario Robleto as part of the course “The Artist Interview,” led by Dayton Director Ian Berry.

Robleto’s You Make My World a Better Place to Find (1996–1998) from the Tang Teaching Museum collection was on view in the fall 2017 exhibition Other Side: Art, Object, Self.

Teague Costello ’19 Could you start by discussing growing up, your influences, and becoming an artist?

Dario Robleto I was a very curious kid. I still am a curious man. I have a deep passion for many subjects: music, science, history, poetry. I became a biology major, but I realized early on that art was the road to pursue if I couldn’t choose a passion, and I just couldn’t. Art is this umbrella term for me that allows me to pursue them all. And that has evolved into a practice that’s wide-ranging as far as what I do and what I think an artist can or should do. I always make objects; I love materials. But my practice extends more broadly out and that comes from a deep-rooted, wild, broad curiosity as a little boy.

I’m really lucky to have had my mother and my grandmother, two beautiful, loving women, in my life. I like to say that whatever is good about me as an artist is because of my grandmother. When I was a little boy, my mother ran a honky-tonk in Texas. On occasions when she didn’t have anybody to look after me, I would go with her and she would hand me a bunch of coins and I would plant myself next to the jukebox. As a six-year-old, I was choosing what songs to play in that honky-tonk.

This core thing I had learned—I couldn’t have articulated it then, of course, but later I realized it—is that the lyrics coming out of the jukebox were not only metaphor, they were life, exactly what I saw happening in the honkytonk. The lyrics were dictating broken hearts, cheating, crashing a truck, whatever, it was all right there, and a pretty dark side of it, too. I’m glad I saw that because I think then I realized art is life.

My mother moved on to running a hospice for twenty years, which also left a deep mark on me and my attitudes about art and art making. So somewhere between this honky-tonk and a hospice, I formed my worldview of art, and I’m still trying to uphold the values I learned from those experiences.

TC Early on you did some deejaying and sampling with music.

By becoming an artist, you still employ deejaying in some sense.

DR I never let go of any passions; they are all still moving at some level. Some, like deejaying, have mutated into my practice as an object maker. Becoming a DJ started to form a

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worldview that was technical like mixing two records together, sampling, splicing, song sequencing. There’s an artistry to all those things of course, which I wanted to explore as a creative expression. But it became more of a worldview, especially sampling. Everything around me has a possibility to come to life again with some reorganization, some manipulation, some alteration. Hidden inside a groove of a ten-cent record at the bottom of a dusty record bin in a thrift store, if you know how to manipulate it, there is a whole universe to unlock. And that was a bigger principle: why not apply that to all of life?

TC Can you speak about manipulating music and lyrics into a physical object?

DR Early on I learned skills at a technical level, like scratching a record or splicing or beat matching—things that any DJ needs to know—and I brought that technical skill set over to the sculptural world. So, for example, I thought, what if I kept scratching a record until it literally turns to dust? Patsy Cline’s voice just moving back and forth over and over until the stylus disintegrates her voice into powder? And then sweep up the powder, hold it in my hand, Patsy Cline’s voice in my hand, all that she represents, all her power and beauty.

At its core, I was still sampling. I took one thing and through manipulation, I changed it into something else.

But new meaning arose from the alteration, and that is the beauty of sampling to me, that you can tease something out of it in this unexpected way when you change its material composition. So it was pretty crucial to my early work to have that DJ background.

Emily Cooper ’19 You Make My World a Better Place to Find is made by gathering an assortment of materials and then combining them into a single strand of thread. There is a subsequent scattering as you use the thread to repair mittens and other things. Could you speak to the relationship between the additive and reductive themes in your work?

DR It’s one of my earliest sculptures, and it arose from this problem many artists face—one I still face—which is whether your skill sets match the ambition of your idea.

Early on I had such big ideas, and I did not know how to make them happen. I identified core strengths that I already possessed. For example, I have a lot of patience, and I thought, how do I harness my patience as an artistic tool?

That piece arose from a series of maybe fifty works that I called “Actions,” and they were my attempt to grapple with this idea that I wanted art to change the world, but I didn’t have any skills to do it, so how do I proceed?

I did these small, incremental things that really anybody could do. It was very important to me that in principle anybody could do these.

A simple daily observation I noticed is how often we

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carry lint on our shoulder, our jeans, wherever on our bodies, or a piece of thread that was kind of swept up with a ball of dust in the corner. It’s just the residue of life around us. I started secretly picking the thread off of friends or strangers. Sometimes it’s done as a caring act, and I did it that way as well. It took about two years, but I finally had enough to make this really long string and through the touch of glue, just barely any at all, I wrapped them together and spooled the thread around one of my grandmother’s spools. But then to activate it into life I used it. I wanted it to be useful again. I’d fix a hole in a pair of socks or sew a button on a shirt.

I like to say that I’m a tragic optimist. And adding and subtracting fits along those lines. If something’s gone then I’ll replace, if there’s too much I’ll take away. I remember being startled that some of the early criticisms of my work interpreted it as destructive, and that made me think

about how we define the difference between construction and destruction.

There can really be culturally biased ways to define an action. If I turned Billie Holiday’s records into buttons that I sewed on shirts all over town, technically I lost something in the melting, but my focus is on what I gained. What I gained was honoring her voice in a brand-new way and giving it a new function in the world that wasn’t just auditory.

It was something as simple as keeping your pants up or holding your shirt together. In my mind, nothing can be destroyed. Matter and energy are always just changing. This is a fundamental law of all matter in the universe.

So to say that we’ve destroyed something becomes a very specific human interpretation and loses sight of what was gained in the process. My work is not about vandalism.

It’s about this point of teasing out new meaning through the alteration. Always, to me, it’s construction, not destruction.

Dario Robleto (born 1972), Falsetto Can Be a Weapon, 2001 Arrow: melted and carved vinyl record of The Carpenters’ “Hurting Each Other,” carved wood, turkey feathers, sinew Spears: hand-carved fossilized mammoth ivory, each tip laced with melted vinyl record from Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” carved driftwood, leather pouch, twine Boomerang: melted and carved vinyl record of Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” Hand knife: melted and carved vinyl record of Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill,” carved antler, sinew Tomahawk: melted and carved vinyl record of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” wood, beads, fur, teeth, hair, sinew 27 � 32 � 3 in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2014.7.19

on the tip of each carved mammoth-ivory blade, I dipped it in her voice, melted vinyl, as if it’s the poison. And so some of it’s humorous about standing by your man while you’re shooting him with poison. Who knows how much has been written about Stand By Your Man, but no one’s ever talked about it as poison at the tip of a mammoth-ivory spear. And that’s where art can go somewhere different.

EC You incorporate performative, mathematical, and scientific aspects into your work that bring in a more contemporary perspective. How does your work fit into changes in the art world? How do you think the definition of art is changing?

TC There’s a side of your work that lies within the beauty and poetry of the title.

DR I operate a little backward here in that the language comes first to get to the object. I generally don’t feel I’m ready to get to the construction of an object until I have a lot of the language worked out. I will write materials that I imagine may exist. I don’t even know if they exist, but it doesn’t matter at that point because I’m just trying to write an interesting word. And then that will lead me to wonder if this really exists and I’ll go look for it—all because I pushed myself to write that poetic phrase.

I remember something that sounds simple but so beautiful like “Icelandic lava,” and I just wrote it down one day. I love it: Icelandic lava, you know? Hot and cold. And of course, there is Icelandic lava and I got some and I used it.

But I don’t think I would have stumbled on that. Or I’ll write a more complicated phrase like “men’s wedding ring finger bones coated with melted bullet lead from every American war.” It’s just something I’m writing as a sentence. And then I go out and see if this is true, if I can do this, if I can find it and make it happen. So language always opens a door for me.

DR That an artist can freely operate across different disciplines is in itself not so new anymore, but in the grand arc of art history it’s pretty radical. And it could be even more radical going forward. In my practice I try to get away from referencing another field. Many artists use science as a reference point in their work, and I’m not against that. But to me, the more difficult and interesting question is, How can I actually change heart surgery by interacting with art? How can my practice in the studio change by interacting with a heart surgeon, or an astronomer, or a neuroscientist?

I have examples in my own practice that I can point to, to say that science actually changed because of something I asked. It’s really hard to get there, but I love it because it’s difficult. I think in our time and moving forward, that the types of problems we have ahead, you have to have multiple points of views on a single problem. You have to inject problems with a different energy to solve them.

EC Could you talk about Falsetto Can Be a Weapon (2001), another work in the Tang collection?

DR It’s an early vinyl work. I’ve always been intrigued with the male falsetto because of its complicated gender issues.

It seems effeminate for a man to be singing that way, but it also can be really radical. That’s where the title came from.

The piece is this series of weapons, a tomahawk, little spears, a knife, a boomerang, other weapons. In each case, the blade or the source of the violence has been remade with melted vinyl records. Each song I chose for very specific reasons, not only because of the texture of the singer’s voice, but also the radical nature of what they were singing about and when they were singing it.

For Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man (1968), there’s a little spear gun carved from mammoth ivory, and

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Dario Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972 and received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Robleto has had numerous solo exhibitions, including, in 2008, a ten-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, organized by the Tang Teaching Museum, and group exhibitions across the country. He has received the International Association of Art Critics Award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the United States Artists Rasmuson Fellowship, and in 2016 was named the Texas State Artist Laureate, among other awards. He is artist-in-residence in neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering and artist-at-large at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art.

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Dario Robleto Meets Elementary and High School Students Ginger Ertz Museum Educator for K–12 and Community Programs

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In December 2017, artist Dario Robleto met with art students from the Sayles School of Fine Arts in Schenectady High School, in Schenectady, New York, and a group of mixed-grade elementary school students who live in a mobile home park in the affluent town of Clifton Park, New York. Each group gathered separately at the Tang, and students had conversations with Robleto about his artwork and about their own experiences as artists.

The Schenectady High School students are in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which encourages students to work toward global-mindedness. IB learners strive to be, among other things, reflective thinkers, good communicators, and risk-takers. While Schenectady struggles with many contemporary inner-city challenges, the students in this program tend to excel in college and beyond.

This group was invited to meet with Robleto because of their interest in communicating messages through art in innovative and non-traditional ways.

Their teachers, Natalie Boburka and Tom Sarnacki, discussed Robleto’s work and assigned students to research his life, processes, and materials prior to their Tang visit. They came with well-thought-out questions, and the conversation eventually turned to their concerns about how to be taken seriously as artists instead of being tossed aside as “too young.”

Students of color in particular, wanting to be heard, talked about social justice and political issues of our time. They were grateful for Robleto’s honest and open responses and enthusiastic about the opportunity to talk candidly with a “real” artist.

Robleto also met with a group of younger students from Cheryl’s Lodge, which provides daily after-school creative opportunities for less privileged children that keep them active and learning.

The Tang education staff brings images and projects to their community center several times each school year. These kids are extremely creative, social, and fun to work with. As with the Schenectady students, having the funding and opportunity to bring them to the Tang was a very special and exciting event. They, too, had lots of questions for Robleto.

We had a fun and active conversation about his materials and ideas—they couldn’t believe the combinations of materials that the artist used to create his work.

A special and unexpected outcome from this field trip occurred about a week later when we were visiting the children’s elementary school. We brought images and a project related to the exhibition Opener 30: Njideka Akunyili Crosby—Predecessors, which they had the opportunity to see in person and discuss after our talk with Robleto. It was a rare occasion where the Cheryl’s Lodge students were the “experts” in their class, the ones with a bit of an

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upper hand in their knowledge of the artist and the work, which was a great self-esteem builder.

The high school students said of the visit:

Robleto’s comments on millennials’ tendency to keep their thoughts hidden were really interesting and not often discussed.

I loved meeting a successful artist and it gave me hope for my future career as an artist!

I really enjoyed the fact that we had an extremely detailed and relevant conversation with an artist. It helped me understand many things I should just accept within my own artwork.

I loved the open discussion and less formal interview with the artist. I enjoyed how helpful he was in answering our questions and helping us with our own art.

And their teacher Natalie Boburka said:

Wow, my students were absolutely riveted during the discussion with Dario Robleto. The conversations were varied and in-depth into not only Dario’s artwork, but also how to be an artist and thrive, to be resilient and driven, and to accept the challenges that come with putting your artwork out for the public. He was respectful of the students and interested in their thoughts and conversed thoughtfully in a manner that had them completely engaged. This was a phenomenal opportunity for my International Baccalaureate visual art class as we look at artwork firsthand and interpret it and research it. The ability for students to actually converse with a professional artist of Dario’s stature was invaluable in adding to their insight into his work. With Dario’s work being varied from writing to sculpture, students were able to see how concept and medium work hand in hand, and how research informs and enriches ideas and artistic goals.

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Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18 on Self Help Graphics & Art

Leo Limon (born 1952), Untitled, 1982 Printed at Self Help Graphics & Art (established 1970) Serigraph, 19 � 25 ¹⁄₈ in.

Tang purchase, 2018.5.4

It is hard to define what it is to be a printmaker without addressing community. Creatively oriented spaces like Self Help Graphics & Art are sustained by the continued support of those who love and value the neighborhood and the people in it. The genuine power of community is not only to unite but also to foster individual growth.

With a strong foundation in community, communication can often become easier on a number of levels.

The collection of SHG prints in the Tang Teaching Museum collection announce a celebration or gathering.

This seemingly mundane act is made rich and lively by the artists’ imagery. These prints fundamentally reflect the artists as belonging to a community. At the same time, they raise awareness for and reflect the community.

They embody the legacy of the Latinx populace in Los Angeles and contribute to the art of printmaking.

Thinking about the traditions of SHG, I made a print of my own. Cara(s) de la Comunidad (Face(s) of the Community) reflects upon the elements of power in community, communication, and the creative act.

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Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18, Cara(s) de la Comunidad (Face(s) of the Community), 2018 Woodblock print, 22 ¹⁄₂ � 15 in.

Courtesy of the artist

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Corita Kent G O greatest show of worth, 1968

Molly Channon Curatorial Assistant Artist and one-time Roman Catholic nun Corita Kent is perhaps best known for her bold and colorful prints that carry inspiring and uplifting messages. A prime example is Kent’s 1968 circus alphabet series. For each of the twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, Kent made a serigraph that featured a variety of symbols: playbill fonts, the big top tent, a hot air balloon, and iconic circus performers, including an equestrian vaulter, clowns, trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, and trained animals. In her usual fashion, she paired these images with the activist, literary, lyrical, and poetic words of luminaries such as Joan Baez, e.e. cummings, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Adlai Stevenson, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Theodore Roethke, among others.

As bright and playful as the circus alphabet is, Kent’s notes and research materials for the series reveal that she was thinking about the circus in a more serious light. She kept a collection of circus-themed articles and poems torn from magazines and copied from books, including an essay by Franz Schneider for the Catholic magazine America.1 Kent heavily underlined and scribbled notes in the margins of Schneider’s essay, which draws parallels between the circus clown, the Christian, and the human race. “Like the clown,” he writes, “[man] is without identity and without defense against the inhuman forces that surround him.” Perhaps the most poignant line for Kent, however, is a string of words that she marked with an arrow: “the circus as an expression of a spiritual hope in something as yet unrealized.”

The G and O prints are exemplary of how Kent captured the joys and sorrows of the circus.

On the left side of G is a handwritten quote from Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 fantasy novel, The Last

Unicorn: “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.” On the right side of G is a cropped sliver of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey slogan, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which then continues onto O. However, Kent manipulated the slogan from “on Earth” to “of Worth.” Handwritten words along the lower edge of O cite the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize–winning Belgian-Dominican friar Georges Pire (known as Abbé Pire): “What matters today is not whether people believe or don’t believe but whether they care or don’t care.” When viewed separately, each print contains text that can be interpreted as a visual element or as a play on words. When joined together, they offer an entirely new way of looking. By adding and shifting the way we see the letters and words, Kent’s own message of circus-borne hope becomes clear: Go—show your worth.

1 Franz Schneider, “All the World’s a Circus,” America, December 24–31, 1960, 425.

Corita Kent (1918–1986), G greatest show of worth (from circus alphabet), 1968 Serigraph, 23 � 22 ⁵⁄₈ in.

Gift of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios, 2016.14.9 Corita Kent (1918–1986), O greatest show of worth (from circus alphabet), 1968 Serigraph, 23 � 22 ³⁄₄ in.

Gift of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios, 2016.14.7

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A New Dance

by Jason Ohlberg

Assistant Professor of Dance Jason Ohlberg’s Metamorphosis, choreographed in response to Lari Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 (1997), debuted on September 20, 2018, in the exhibition Give a damn., where Pittman’s four-panel painting was on display. The dance was performed by Ohlberg and Lecturers in Dance Erika Pujič and Christin Williams and featured a newly commissioned score from Music Director Carl Landa and costumes by Eric Rudy.

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As a choreographer, I am honored to have the opportunity to respond to the work of an artist such as Lari Pittman, whose paintings compel me to become lost in their intricate worlds of colorful subtext and imagery.

Any response I create to the work of another artist is just that: my response, my interpretation. This is especially important to note with a painting as bold and complex as Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1. While on one hand a vibrant reflection on modernity and urban life, I believe this work also asks us to contemplate mutability and identity. In blurring interior and exterior spaces, Pittman places a towering metropolitan landscape—perhaps symbolic of human ambition and achievement—as a backdrop to the maze of the city’s literal and metaphorical inner workings. I’m intrigued by the fact that an object signifying our most base human function is given the central altar space and is surrounded by identity-less acrobatic figures, floating or falling in crucifixion-like postures while tethered to symbols of their ideals. The only discernable simulation of identity I can see seems to be superficially imposed upon egg-shaped heads with tails that are clearly built for swimming—or perhaps for creating. Yet, follow the city’s plumbing, and it’s no longer clear if what these figures are consuming helps construct identity or strip it away. In my mind, the painting poignantly speaks to the super-human feats required to navigate survival in the modern world, and celebrates the wounds acquired along the way.

When creating my own work, I am primarily concerned with physical narratives and ways of reading movement that can transcend story or plot.

I’m interested in how movement can trigger embodied understanding and kinesthetic knowledge. In responding to Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1, I find myself confronted with the concept of metamorphosis. As we shape and create our urban landscape, does it in turn shape and create us? While navigating the complexities of modernity, does our seemingly inexhaustible ability to adapt enable us to survive at the cost of identity? Are these identities—gender, race, religion, sexuality, nationality—in danger of extinction, or are they the thing tethering us to ideals that are destined to be discarded? What, if anything, does this painting suggest about how we are to relate to one other? Are we creating and being born to a superior version of ourselves, able to withstand our self-made constructs, or are we heading back toward a womb of isolation?

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Assistant Professor of Dance Jason Ohlberg has danced professionally with numerous companies, including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Dance Kaleidoscope, and Chamber Dance Company. He attended State University of New York at Purchase and completed his BFA at Cornish College of the Arts. He earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 2015. He has served on the faculties of Barat College, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Spectrum Dance Theater, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, University of Washington, and Cornish College of the Arts.

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Lari Pittm on Painting, Language, and Identity

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man Lari Pittman (born 1952) Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆ 1, 1997 Alkyd, acrylic, and spray paints on luan panel with one attached framed work on paper and three attached framed works on panel, 96 � 256 in.

Gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.13a-d

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Conservator Heather Galloway visited the Tang Teaching Museum in June 2018 to finish her second round of conservation work on Lari Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 (1997) before it would be displayed in the exhibition Give a damn.

While completing this work, Galloway recorded a conversation with the artist.

Heather Galloway Could you talk about the impetus for the painting Once a Noun, Now a Verb #1 and how the title relates to the work?

Lari Pittman Looking back at 1997, we were very much involved in the culture wars in which we find ourselves once again. And I was looking at language and identity and how they might intersect. The title, Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1, discusses the possible mutability of language. We have many examples in our current language of making nouns into verbs. How does a noun become a verb or become a transitive verb?

I’m always interested in that idea because it shows the mutability, porosity, and evolution of language.

At that time, I was also thinking about the mutability of my identity or the possible mutability of all identities. In those days, we wouldn’t have said queer identity; it was still

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called gay identity. And I was looking at how I could discuss that in the scale of a history painting. It was very much about asking, How do you look at the history of painting and try to put things into a painting that maybe historically weren’t there?

One of the beautiful things about a painting is its incredibly absorbent surface—“absorbent” in the sense that it absorbs the world around it at any given moment. In a funny way, I guess I have always been somewhat of a history painter but without necessarily being didactic. I’m interested in showing the history of the moment and all of its pathology as well as its wellness, and showing that one doesn’t trump the other; there’s a simultaneity of events, or a bittersweet nature of life where things fit side by side in complete contradiction, but they’re still part of the fabric of daily existence.

What I tried to show in the painting was the vitality of life. The painting is, first and foremost, celebratory. The challenge for me is, how do I make a painting that is fundamentally celebratory when showing that one of the main protagonists is a toilet? I wanted the toilet not to be an abject idea, but to show that it was part of life, as are the telephone poles, the plumbing, the lightbulbs, all the mechanisms, the chandelier, the wallpaper, the cityscape. All of this is fully integrated in a kind of holistic totality. Personal desire is also completely integrated into the holistic desire of a cityscape.

HG There is a celebration, but as I mine between cobwebs and all of the other things, there are acrobats who have scars, or slices, and other moments of discomfort.

LP The scars on the acrobats are not necessarily macabre, but well-earned somehow. I think the fundamental optimism of the painting is in the face of some sort of either personal or cultural pathology.

HG I absolutely appreciate the idea of moving beyond scars. I hold all of mine dear to me at any moment of challenge.

Let’s look at the painting from the ground up. You begin with solid-colored panels. How do you see your way through to getting the unified composition? How do you start?

At that time, AIDS was a shadow over our culture as well as the world. I was very anxious about how one proceeds with establishing oneself as a person with complete cultural centrality, given that a lot of the prevailing discussion was about pathology as relating, incorrectly, to a specific part of the population. How do I put forth an idea of a happy, productive, fully integrated life as a gay person while at the same time, culture is overlaying blame onto my endeavors?

I think those issues still occur. How do people of color in the United States feel about trying to put forth their best and be prosperous and live well and happy when a shadow is cast over them as criminals? It’s not a new idea, it’s just that I happened to be facing it at that time.

HG As I’ve worked across the surface, I am crossing paths with lightbulbs, with toilets and plumbing, cityscapes. There are all of these heads with sunglasses on, with tails, so I start to think about sperm. I’m not positive I’m reading that correctly. There are roses and these trails of raised green decorative elements that move up and down. Can you talk about some of this imagery?

LP The way you are describing it, you are describing all these nouns having the qualities of verbs. All these things that are connecting, that are crossing, that are communicating.

LP Maybe this comes from my training at CalArts. I’m not a prep drawer. I make notations just on a piece of paper. So, the first concern is how to create a city skyline in the background. Then, I wanted to carve out interior spaces, which is where the chandelier and the toilet are. And that’s almost like a stage set but indicates an interior. The final attachment of the framed pieces would be asking, How do I further decorate both the cityscape and the interior space as if the whole thing were one continuum—like a single wall? In other words, it becomes one huge room, the city skyline and that interior space.

HG So you had a conception that the framed works would be there?

LP Yes. Although I’m not a religious person, I love how Western European religious painting is constructed to advance a tight narrative. I like the function of the predella in altarpieces where you have the main event, which would be an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary, at least in Catholicism. And then at the lower level, you would have the smaller sequence of paintings, which shed light on the mystery of the main image. The attachment of these framed drawings on top of the painting comes out of this idea of the religious convention of the altarpiece where you have a predella either below or next to the larger visual event.

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HG It’s interesting that you have this association with religious paintings in the altarpiece because there are things that your work shares with that tradition, whether consciously or not.

A lot of those works have to be conceived mentally and planned out. There’s not a lot of room for mistakes. The types of paints they were using often were flat colors, much like your own work. And there’s not a lot of room for mistake in your own work.

LP Well, it’s interesting what constitutes a mistake. There are mistakes in the painting. I don’t like pentimenti. I like it in other people’s work, but as a young painter coming of age when very few people were painting in graduate school, I wanted to kind of eschew all the overtly sentimentalized or unnecessarily humanized ideas of what constitutes a painting or a brush stroke. I wanted to erase all of that and make the work purposely look a bit mechanistic.

HG Thinking about how history or canons are written, how do you imagine the work being received today in a very different social climate? You alluded to how we are headed into a divisive time in our country, but we are also living through a time when gender is discussed much more than ever before.

LP I was always interested in dismantling the gender binary as well as the binary of sexuality. Now, it’s interesting that young kids look at the work and immediately apply the kind of polemics of queer culture or transgenderism or nonconforming gender identity. I love that the work can absorb and continues to absorb these newer cultural nuances. So I’m really happy about that. It makes me very happy. It means that the paintings are still alive.

HG You have all of these raised drops of paint that create the green bands of decoration—applications of liquid paint upon liquid paint, which have to be done when the panel is flat, correct?

LP Yes. I never really learned how to make paintings completely on the wall, so I put them on tables. Those raised areas were a way of embroidering or embellishing the surface physically. They were accomplished by putting paint in a Styrofoam cup and then slowly pouring one after the other after the other. And I would get into a zone when I could pour them almost perfectly, almost in the way that a baker would apply a rosette with a pastry nozzle.

HG They have an amazing consistency. What about in the first panel where there is paint that’s very fluid, and it looks like you just never stopped, you just keep brushing it out like creating ferns. Is that with a brush?

LP I’m glad you point out that pattern detail. I’m from the Pictures generation, and very few people in the Pictures generation painted. So I was looking at applied art, decorative art, furniture painting, textile design, pottery design and glazing, wallpaper, and needlepoint as ways of resuscitating painting or giving painting CPR of sorts. And in those details, that’s a type of painting technique that you see all through Latin American pottery and in Eastern Europe. You see it in every culture, that type where you take a rounded brush, fully loaded, put it down and pull it up away from the surface to give it that perfect, tangled ending. A lot of those preoccupations come out of my study of things that weren’t part of the canon of fine arts or modernism. It was very purposely, on my part, to signal that I was taking my cues and clues from other areas.

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Conservator Heather Galloway, a peer-reviewed Fellow in the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, has over twenty years of conservation experience working in museums and with private clients.

Galloway has a BA in fine arts from Middlebury College, an MA in art history from Williams College, and a Certificate in Conservation from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Los Angeles–based painter Lari Pittman looks to decorative arts, commercial signage, and other areas that exist outside of the mainstream canon of art history for his large-scale, complex, and graphic paintings. His work is in public and private collections around the world, and he has received numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the International Association of Art Critics, among others. He received his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Since 1993, he has been a professor of fine arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Heather Galloway on a Forensic Reading of Lari Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆ 1

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Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 (1997) invites the viewer in with a riot of color and imagery. The painting is large and complex and so densely packed with detail that even when standing back it is a challenge to fully take it in. A clear blue cityscape creates a backdrop silhouetted against a hot pink sky. Chandeliers adorned with bulbs, both lit and burned out, hint at interior spaces. Egg-shaped heads wearing reflective glasses and red-lipped smiles sprout from thorny stems that grow upward while buff gymnasts vault and dive across the scene. Toilets, plumbing, power lines, and signpost arrows crisscross the terrain, knitting together pattern and image to create a richly decorated field. Lari Pittman began his painting with written notes— sentences that set the stage. This audacious internal vision for Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 exudes confidence.

Executed on wood veneer panels, the work is comprised of four separate panels hung together to create a unified image. Pittman prepared them with a white priming layer and then a solid opaque color. For Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 he alternated two colors on the four panels with the first and third painted a light brown and the second and fourth a blue. These initial paint layers are applied with a roller, imparting the familiar dimpled texture of a domestic interior wall throughout.

From this base, the forensic reading of both the means and the chronology of how the imagery was layered can easily be confused: there are moments of clarity and moments of uncertainty, a fact that Pittman welcomes. The diverse techniques employed in building the subsequent images included masking, templates, fluid brush work, dry brush work, poured paint, and spray paint. “In other words,” says Pittman, “however it is that you can apply pigment, I’ll use it. [ . . . ] I’ll use any device to make a painting.”1 His guiding narrative, or notes, for this work included the cityscape and a domestic space setting up a relationship between interior and exterior. His scene is also punctuated by four additional framed paintings, one mounted onto each panel, in what Pittman considers a further act of decoration. Just as nouns transform into verbs, Pittman is interested in mutability in many forms, and his paint application unfolds in a similar fashion.

Take, for example, the paint buildup in one small section of the fourth panel where a blue gridded tower rests against a brown-umber background. A close look at a detail of the paint texture reveals that the light-blue tower was actually applied to the area first. Pittman then applied a mask in the shape of the blue gridded tower over the blue paint and then applied the brown of the background. Once the mask was removed, tape was used to draw the edges of a crisp, black horizontal line that lies on top of both colors. Each color application edged by the depth of the tape or template used stands out in three dimensions while revealing the texture of the layer below. Just as one feels they can track the movement of the artist, new layers are discovered. As the eye moves

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to the lower right corner of this detail, the density of the blue paint application starts to skip, and in the voids are revealed an even earlier layer of the brown paint— the brown applied over the blue becomes the blue applied over the brown.

One is also reminded at the sight of the skipping roller application of paint, which introduces both halftones and a painterly effect, that Pittman is using conventions in surprising ways. The even coat of flat color defined by crisp, masked edges suddenly becomes painterly, subverting the stereotypical rationality of classic hard-edge geometry. In a similar fashion, Pittman turns the pouring gesture of the abstract expressionists on its head. Within the white plumbing and the egg-shaped heads, Pittman has embellished these surfaces with raised drips of poured paint that have hardened into domed shapes, which he likens to cake decoration or embroidery. Pittman hand pours these shapes onto the painting while it is lying flat. The consistency in these patterns recalls the frequently underappreciated and labor-intensive requirements of decorative craft practices.

By the time that Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1 entered into the collection of the Tang Teaching Museum in 2015, it had traveled in Europe to acclaim, including to Kassel, Germany, for its debut at documenta X (1997).

With the passage of time, some cracking in the paint had developed along the center axis of the work where the wood panels were joined. Yet despite this sign of change the work remains both visually and historically important in the artist’s body of work and acts as an answer to Pittman’s query in the face of pathology: “How does one come out triumphant?” While conversations between artists and conservators can often be bittersweet, reminding participants of passing time and change, they also help attend to the future. Pittman is remarkably philosophical about these interactions and sees parallels in the human condition with both pathology and wellness.

Perhaps it is his well-documented brush with violence, when he was shot during a home break-in, and its ensuing recovery, or perhaps it is his experience as a gay man living at the genesis of the AIDS crisis that has led to a level of sensitivity and acceptance of frailty in both the human and artistic conditions. More likely it has to do with the confidence and soundness of his craft, the strength of his vision, and the continued vitality of Once a Noun, Now a Verb ∆1.

1 Quotes and references to Pittman’s process and inspiration are from an interview with the author, June 25, 2018. For a condensed, edited version of this interview, see pages 102–105.

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Give a damn.

Give a damn. presents art and politics from the Tang Teaching Museum collection. Included in the exhibition are artists diverse in race, sexual orientation, gender, age, and nationality, active from the mid-twentieth century through today, who protest injustice through their work.

They bear witness to marginalized people and politically charged events, interrogate historical narratives and question stereotypes, advocate for freedom, equality, and understanding, and importantly, inspire others to do the same.

Beyond an exhibition title, Give a damn. is a call to action.

A 1969 Corita Kent print asks, “Why not give a damn about your fellow man?� Visitors are encouraged to take action on the issues important to them by writing postcards to their political representatives. The museum provides postcards and pens as well as guidance on finding representatives to contact about different issues.

Postcards are stamped and mailed in support of an ideal democratic process in which all voices are heard and all voices are equal.

Give a damn.

110 is curated by Mellon Collections Curator Rebecca McNamara

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AMON EMEKA AND ADRIENNE ZUERNER on the Black Panther Party Archive

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We Want Black Power

Amon Emeka Associate Professor of Sociology What a joy it is to behold bits and pieces of my people’s history. What an honor it is to be asked to contribute to our understanding of those bits and pieces. I am referring here to the recently acquired collection of Black Panther objects now housed at the Tang Teaching Museum. Neither I nor my parents, brothers, or cousins were members of the Black Panther Party. Still, I count the Panthers among my people and I take comfort in their objects. They remind me of the power and potential of my people. At the same time, I am struck by how similar their fifty-year-old yearnings are to my own. We want Black Power: the power to dream our own dreams and pursue them unmolested by racist strictures of the past or present, the power to make our own futures.

As a practicing sociologist, I am in the habit of thinking more about what is than what ought to be in society. I teach classes and carry out studies to impress upon my students and compatriots just how hard it is to be Black in the United States . . . still. I am dispassionate— even cold—in my measurement, interpretation, and presentation of Black disadvantage to the audiences I address. The sociological patterns I shed light on are terrible—they are hard to explain and even harder to swallow—but when I am doing my job, they are just facts, evidence. I share what I know, less often what I think, and least often what I want. The Panther collection tugs at my heart and my head because I, too, want Black Power.

The objects in the collection embody what I admire most about the Black Panthers. They seemed to know exactly what they wanted—what the people needed—and they were not afraid to tell anyone. They had done the analysis, developed a plan, and proceeded to carry it out. No pretenses, no niceties, just action! Emory Douglas’s iconic Warning to America (1970) gripped me from the moment I laid eyes on it. The image speaks a thousand words, and the two written lines that head it speak thousands more.

WE ARE FROM 25 TO 30 MILLION STRONG, AND WE ARE ARMED. AND WE ARE CONSCIOUS OF OUR SITUATION. AND WE ARE DETERMINED TO CHANGE IT. AND WE ARE UNAFRAID.

Emory Douglas (born 1940), Warning to America, 1970 Silkscreen, 22 ³/₄ � 15 in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2017.45.4

The subtext of these lines is open to interpretation, but it seems clear to me: we are a century removed from our bondage but still not free; it has been made clear that our freedom fight will be met with deadly force—that soul force may only go so far when we are faced with physical force—and we must proceed with that knowledge if we are to get our people free.

Look at this warrior! She is upright and forthright in her conviction to protect herself and us. We want freedom!

She is unflinching and unflagging. We want full employment! She will not be outgunned. We want education!

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In Stephen Shames’s photograph of Panthers lined up at a Free Huey rally in Oakland: Look at those soldiers! They will be neither deterred nor denied. Black Panthers, Black Power, circa 1968. On April 4 of that year my father woke to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, but before he could get to it everything changed; Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated—our prince of peace gunned down in broad daylight. For my family, as for many, it was a year of consternation and soul searching. I was born late that year to a mother and father whose marriage across the most intractable of racial divides was not recognized in a third of the states at the time it was consummated. Days after my birth, my father—one of the most gentle men I know—wrote a letter to his favorite auntie announcing my birth.

The tone was characteristically appreciative and celebratory but veered in a different direction as the letter ended.

Pop wrote:

. . . I’m not too hot on organized religion anymore. Too long religion has tended to discourage us as a people from fighting to win our freedom. We figured that Christ would make the White man take his foot off our necks, and as long as we figured he would do it for us we could endure the rough times and continue slaving for the man. But I believe that religion should serve as a source of inspiration to cause us to struggle for our freedom while we’re right here on Earth instead of waiting to tell it all to the Father when this life is over . . .

descent. I feel strongly about this, as it is an attempt to in a small way identify with my past . . .

Black Power! You will call me by a name that I wish to be called! You will call me by a name that I have chosen: a name that lifts up a history that I want to recall every time I hear it and I want you to wonder about every time you hear it. In this act, my parents seized a bit of Black Power for me. But they knew, the Panthers knew, as I now know, that our Black Power is not without its limits. It affords me a priceless sense of self-worth that is rooted in an enhanced self-knowledge but does not provide me perfect protection out in the world, nor does it provide my daughter perfect protection on her school playground.

I still long for Black Power for my community, my family, and myself as the Panthers did. That’s why the Panther archive pulls so hard at my heart and my head. Some may see these objects as relics, but they are not. They are material reminders of what we need, what we want, and how to get it—Black Power, Black Liberation, Black Resolve. Their presence in the Tang Teaching Museum is an inspiration to me and a gift to the entire Skidmore College community.

In my forty-plus years, I never heard him voice exasperation in quite this way. He must have just swallowed it and “pushed on” like so many of us do.

He finished that letter by explaining that he and my mother had taken an African (Ibo) surname that is now mine, and my children’s and my nieces’ and nephews’.

. . . I made this change because I want my last name to be African, therefore reflecting the fact that I am of African

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Adrienne Zuerner Associate Professor of French “That’s where Huey Newton lives.” My mother pronounced these words every time we circled Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland and passed the high-rise building where Newton lived in a penthouse apartment.

I was seven in 1966 when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, where I grew up. My mother’s remark, disapproving and wary, remains the most conscious childhood memory I have of the Panthers.

Yet the presence of the Black Panthers in Oakland and their continued activism through the 1970s created the unique circumstances in which my sense of race and racism first took shape.

The Tang Teaching Museum’s archive of Black Panther photographs and ephemera constitutes an extraordinary material evocation of an era, and viewing these historical artifacts reminds us of the legacy and importance of the Black Panther Party. Photos by Stephen Shames and others, a poster by Emory Douglas, and flyers produced by the Panthers in Oakland, Philadelphia, and elsewhere populate this jewel of a collection and bring to life the politics, ambitions, and contributions of the Black Panthers to the United States’ long contests over racial equality.

My connection to these objects is deeply personal and inextricably bound to the formative years of my life and to my identity and self-understanding as a white woman. I view the collection not as a race scholar or historian but rather as someone at once raised in a hub of the Black Power movement and undeniably separated from the police violence and other urban injustices the Panthers sought to remedy. Although blacks comprised 30–40 percent of Oakland’s population, very few resided in Montclair, the district where I grew up; de facto racial segregation structured my everyday life, as it still does for many Americans. But I knew that my hometown was multiracial, because we frequented other districts.

Further, the junior and senior high school I attended in the Oakland Hills reflected the racial demography of the city. In retrospect, I think that this school experience engendered in me an idea, on some level, of my whiteness, even as I understood the racial asymmetry that favored me as a white person. This time also awakened a sense of the disconnect between my experience interacting with black students and the dominant narratives of race I absorbed at home and from the larger culture.

I wonder about the extent to which my black classmates were shaped by the activism of the Panthers.

Had they already absorbed messages of Black Power and the Panthers’ “education for liberation” mission circulating in Oakland? Had they seen or read the Party newspaper, The Black Panther, produced in Oakland and sold on its streets? Did they unabashedly lay claim to equal space

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Stephen Shames (born 1947), The window of Black Panther Party National Headquarters at Grove and Forty-fifth Streets in Oakland after shots were fired by police following Huey Newton’s murder trial verdict, 1968 Gelatin silver print, 9 ¹⁄₈ � 6 in.

Gift of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2017.45.3

and pride of place in the high school because they knew, better than I did, the ways in which the Panthers were disrupting the racial status quo in Oakland? At the time, I did not think to formulate such questions, for the ambient racism of white Oakland tainted everything and everyone. But the Panther movement aimed to transform this fraught cityscape. For me, then, the Black Panther artifacts call to mind the adolescent lenses through which I tried, consciously and unconsciously, and no doubt naively, to make sense of race; they recall a city I considered home and yet, in some ways, scarcely knew.

Of course, the value of the Black Panther archive in the Tang Teaching Museum transcends the personal history and subjective recollections of any one individual.

The objects speak to us about the world we inhabit today; they furnish tangible evidence that the Panthers’ demands for social, political, and economic justice are as salient now as they were in the twentieth century.

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The Tang collection provides a starting point for discussions about contemporary inflections of US racial dynamics, in addition to such topics as gun rights and the role of art in political protest. For instance, the flyer headlined “People’s No. 1 Enemy,” which addresses police brutality head-on, anticipates the language of Black Lives Matter activists when it accuses officers of having “no regard for law or justice; or the rights of the people.”

Equally pointed is the flyer’s statement that the police masquerade “as the victim of an unprovoked attack,” eerily echoing the justification given by some law enforcement officials today in the aftermath of their shootings of unarmed black citizens.

Haunting also is Stephen Shames’s photograph of a poster of Huey Newton after an attack on the Panther National Headquarters by the Oakland police (1968).

Read symbolically, the photo within a photo, what scholars refer to as mise en abyme, figures the core racial conflict that has divided the United States for centuries.

The image features the now-iconic portrait of the black-bereted Huey Newton, seated and directly facing the camera, a spear in one hand, a rifle in the other.

The portrait embodies a version of Black Power and its legitimate demands for racial justice; it attests to the Panthers’ recourse to armed defense of black lives, an undertaking the founders Newton and Seale grounded in the Constitutional right to bear arms. At the same time, Shames’s photo bears witness to the violent repression directed against the Black Panthers by local and national law enforcement: the poster is riven by bullets and

marred by gaping holes; the glass window in front of it is now shattered or missing. Shames’s photo stages a visual narrative of race in the United States, at once recording a single moment in 1968 and evoking the longer history of racial protest and police and government reprisal.

Emory Douglas’s poster Warning to America (1970) also registers themes of revolution and self-defense. As the Party’s Minister of Culture, Douglas was the visionary for the graphic unity of the Party, including for its newspaper, The Black Panther.

This arresting image—a female figure in profile bearing an outsized rifle—is characteristic of the Panthers’ militant politics and iconography. It invites viewers to consider questions of race, gender, gun rights, the role of women in the Black Panther Party specifically and in Black Power movements generally, and in view of the Panthers’ embrace of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist thought, of women’s activities in global freedom movements.

The significance of the Tang’s archive lies in the range of ideas and phenomena it encompasses. As we know, the Black Panther Party did more than promote armed self-defense. The organization aimed to show “the black community how to take control of its own destiny.”1 Its Ten-Point Program outlined “what needed to be done to end racism and bring a greater degree of economic justice and power to ordinary people.”2 The archive documents many of the group’s grassroots survival programs, thereby encouraging discussion of grassroots campaign organizing before the advent of the Internet, art as instrument of education and revolution in marginalized communities, intersections of national and global struggles for justice (the Panthers brought to bear a distinctly postcolonial analysis of the oppression of blacks), and coalition work as the Panthers sought to forge alliances with other progressive groups, including white leftists. Studying the material in today’s social and political climate vividly evokes the still unmet demands for equality of opportunity. It offers inspiration for the ongoing, difficult work of creating more just and liberating worlds.

1 Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abrams, 2016), 10.

2 Ibid., 12.

Above and facing page: Artists unknown, Black Panther Party flyers late 1960s to 1970s Ink on paper, 11 x 8 ¹⁄₂ in. (each, approximately) Gifts of The Jack Shear Collection of Photography 2017.45.24, .23a-b, .21, .17, .15

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The Artist Interview

In fall 2017, Dayton Director Ian Berry taught a course called “The Artist Interview” in which Skidmore students interviewed internationally renowned visiting artists. Below are selections from some of those interviews; longer versions of others are published throughout the magazine.

Zanele Muholi

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Interview by Nola Donkin ’18 and Dayna Joseph ’19

Interview by Maya Ling ’20 and Qilin Zhao ’18

“I use photography to heal the inner being that is troubled.

Art is a practice but photography is a healing tool. I don’t use it for show. I don’t use it for fine art. It’s beyond just that for me. It’s my own means of articulating, and it works in so many ways. My work as a visual activist is to change the agenda and create content that will speak specifically to mainstream communities and speak from a point of view of black LGBTI people, meaning black lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender persons, and intersex people.”

“When I first came here, it was a shock. I grew up in a very small, homogeneous town in Nigeria. Everybody was Igbo, which is my tribe. I went to Lagos for secondary school.

That was my first taste of a culture shock. Lagos is one of the biggest cities on the continent, and that was my first taste of a cosmopolitan life. Coming to the United States was part two. What was challenging is being an immigrant there’s this dual existence you constantly have to navigate.

You’re always seeing the world through two selves. I’m simultaneously a Nigerian and American, and I’m navigating the world through both lenses, constantly shifting from one to the other.”

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Syd Carpenter

Jamal Cyrus

Interview by Olivia Golden ’18 and Rose White ’20

Interview by Rachel Rosenfeld ’18 and Ariel Saloman ’19

“I’m taking things that are flat—maps—and pretending as if they’re inhaling air, and they expand in ways that maybe are unpredictable but still expressive and demonstrative of what they were. The outcome is that you get something that is in many ways referential but has its own kind of formal autonomy to it. And that’s what’s exciting to me about making these sculptures.”

“Many black artists talk about the connection between their work and black music. For a long time I was a lover of music but not a musician. At some point, I started looking into what people call alternative musical scores.

It’s a way of representing sound that doesn’t require knowing scales or knowing how to read music. I’m trying to contribute to the world of sound and music without being a musician.”

Joachim Schmid

Paula Wilson

Interview by Katherine Berg ’18 and Michelle Cohn ’20

Interview by Serena Hildebrandt ’20 and Lindsey Poremba ’18

“People are super happy when they open a pyramid and they find crown jewels, but that doesn’t tell you anything about life in Egypt. You learn about life in Egypt when you find the trash bin, and the same is true for any culture.

Of course it’s wonderful to collect, to find photographs in museums, but it doesn’t tell you a lot about society’s use of photography. If you add samples of what people who are not considered artists do with photographs, we get a much wider understanding of that medium, what’s so fascinating and what’s so disturbing about it. By picking up discarded and torn-up photographs from the street, I add a layer of understanding to the medium of photography as it’s practiced in society by anonymous people.”

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“I can’t afford to buy the types of rugs I want to have so I make them. It’s really important to create the things that you want to see and have in the world, and so there’s a real desire for me to collapse what’s functional, what’s high art, or what’s low art. I love the way museum spaces are like temples. But given the choice, I’m more drawn to what happens in a tapestry shop or the way things are displayed in an environment where things are layered on top of each other, and price tags are hanging from pieces. I think we need more situations that alter this white cube.”

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Accelerator Mass Incarceration & the Prison Industrial Complex The third panel in the Accelerator Series—and the first of the academic year—was held on October 6, 2017. Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier moderated a discussion with Harvard University historian Elizabeth Hinton, artist Duron Jackson, and activist Johnny Perez on the subject of mass incarceration, ideas of mobility and immobility (social, economic, political), and the prison industrial complex.

Duron Jackson When you think about the media and the narratives around mass incarceration created through visual culture, stories about black and brown men are continuously perpetuated.

Elizabeth Hinton Some visual representations and cultural assumptions suggest that certain groups of citizens are more violent and more criminal, and that’s why they’re in prison. No, that is not the case. This is the outcome of sets of decisions and a path pursued by policymakers when they had alternatives presented to them. So, if mass incarceration and the kinds of criminalization that we see today are the results of decisions and votes at all levels of government, there was a path to this outcome, and there is a path to undo it. Policy is malleable.

It’s not static and it can change.

Johnny Perez I’m on the New York State Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. We were looking at NYPD police practices that were having a disparate effect on communities of color. We interviewed about seventy or so people, including advocates, social workers, former police officers, and current police officers. Something brought to our attention is how people of color are depicted in police manuals; they are about 80 percent of the criminals. So if you’re trained at the Police Academy that this is what a “criminal” looks like, then no wonder once you get inside the neighborhood you’re trigger-happy. I’m going to make a recommendation that we overhaul the entire police training manual. At the very least, it taps into the root cause of some of these interactions where the end result is a white police officer killing a black person.

Isolde Brielmaier Because he fits that visual profile of the suspect.

JP It’s already in his head.

DJ When I think about these issues, all I can do is make art about it, create narratives or re-create narratives around what and who black and brown men are in society. That hopefully changes someone’s perception of who we are.

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Series ∆feminism?— Activism & Agitation in the Digital Age For the fifth panel in the Accelerator Series, held on January 29, 2018, Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier moderated a discussion on feminism, activism, and agitation in the digital age with panelists Kimberly Drew, a writer, curator, activist, and social media manager at The Met; Natalie Frank, an artist whose paintings and drawings revolve around women, their bodies, desires, and narratives; and Amy Richards, a writer, producer, and organizer who cofounded the Third Wave Foundation.

Kimberly Drew I grapple with feminism all the time because I think, in any circumstance, the invisible labels that are set upon us can be really difficult to navigate. Feminism is such a flawed concept because it’s about equality and equality is not imaginative. It’s more about the radical possibility of what women can do. When I think about feminism or women-specific spaces, I think about spaces for empowerment but, at the same time, I’m thinking about what gender even means, and if it’s relevant or important. I wonder, does feminism have a place in the future and the ways in which we’re conceptualizing larger issues? It’s useful and not useful, and it’s something that I’m happy to continue to interrogate.

York and photographing dominatrices or bringing back seventeenth-century women fairy tellers and world historians who have been overlooked. It’s how I was drawn into art—from artists who use personal narratives and made them political. It was never just about women for me.

Amy Richards The fourth wave of feminism is the first time where we can better imagine a way forward. The first wave was about the right to citizenship, and the next wave was about legal equality. And the third wave was an enactment in that, for instance, rape was made illegal but it still happened, and so the question was, how do you change behavior to combat something that the law didn’t fix? But if there’s a fourth wave, the question is, how do you imagine beyond confronting a system to creating a system? The equality frame doesn’t work because essentially, we’re going to rush to fill placements and put people into systems that are oppressive. We are not changing culture.

KD Some people are quick to critique the way that digital technology and activism intersect, as if knowledge and awareness isn’t a form of activism. When I think about the future of feminism, it’s about acknowledging how many things are wrong. This last year has shown the realization that there’s a lot that we’re quiet on. People are having this moment of awakening.

Isolde Brielmaier That continual interrogation is really important. There’s been a lot of critique over the term and the idea that it is structured around a heteronormative notion of gender and what it means to be a woman. But if we’re talking about intersectionality and being forward-thinking, to your point, Kimberly, we may need new terms. Or maybe we don’t need terms at all?

Natalie Frank For me, feminism has always been a subset of humanism and it’s about respecting individuals’ ability to express themselves and their own narratives. I’ve always made work about that, whether it’s going into dungeons in New

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Art in Conversation

PAUL SATTLER & MALLORY PERRY ’20 RESPOND TO KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

Paul Sattler Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Schick Art Gallery This spring, I found myself, as if in a fever dream, walking through the rooms and backyard of my childhood home located in the still-struggling inner-city neighborhood of Sherman Park, Milwaukee. This, in addition to a recent remarkable first viewing of Kerry James Marshall’s Vignette (Wishing Well) (2010), created a kind of commingling of source and experience that I have, over many years of growth, learned to accept with gratitude and openness.

Marshall, born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and now living and working in Chicago, has established himself as one of the paramount voices in American contemporary art. For his entire career, Marshall has painted “blackness” and contemporary African American life with a razor-sharp awareness of how such blackness appears in or has been absent from the history of Western art. This mission has consistently been to promote an environment where African Americans can define themselves and populate, one artwork at a time, the walls of the great museums of the world. One ingenious tool that Marshall employs to bolster this agenda is referencing the very artworks and artistic periods where there is a vacancy of black figures and perspectives. Since 2003, Marshall has produced some of his most poignant and memorable work, which pointedly responds to art of eighteenth-century France, specifically the works of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), who have a preponderance for themes of flirtation and romantic love.

With eyes buzzing and mind spinning after my first thorough absorption of Marshall’s Vignette (Wishing Well), a synthesis developed for me from age-old motifs and modern human dilemmas. The fusion provoked personal connections with Marshall’s stories and his use of water and my own youthful experiences. We often see Marshall’s lovers’ pursuit of romance in urban US settings—chain-link fenced yards and city public parks— and in underrepresented scenes of black domesticity.

Now alert to these Vignette elements and Marshall’s connection to Chicago and Midwest urban life, I felt familiar urgency while driving through my old Milwaukee neighborhood. I was, suddenly and unexpectedly, touring my childhood block, alley, backyard, and rescued-byrenovation home. Despite an archive of pleasant childhood memories growing up in this multiethnic neighborhood, I can’t deny hardships as well—repeat break-ins, muggings, and other painful episodes. During a previous visit, my former home was sadly boarded up, foreclosed and condemned. I was shocked to see our empty, rusted swimming pool—what was once a neighborhood oasis for me and my friends, our “wishing well.” Reeling from the pilgrimage, I repeated Marshall’s decision “not to give in to all the promises of this decadent

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Kerry James Marshall (born 1955), Vignette (Wishing Well), 2010 Aquatint etching and collage, 53 ďż˝ 41 in.

Tang purchase, 2017.3

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Mallory Perry ’20, Temptation, 2018 Pastel on paper, 28 � 28 in.

Courtesy of the artist

[Rococo] genre,”1 by adopting sober and theatrical blacks, whites, and graphite grays for my responsive drawings.

The achromatic mode regulated the sharpness of my dreamscapes with the faded edges of the vignette, a further unexpected merger with the ever-generous Marshall/Rococo enterprise.

Mallory Perry ’20 also created a rich body of visual responses to Marshall’s Vignette (Wishing Well) and its link to eighteenth-century French art. Emboldened by her need to respond to Rococo’s stereotypical depictions of passive female figures, Perry’s pastels liberate women, without male suitors, to fully engage with their landscape

environments. Perry merges bodies and natural forms through an inventive system of highly chromatic patterns and transparent, water-like screens. Her pastel application is celebratory, surprising, and challenging.

Alluding to other fables, including mythological Maenads, Perry’s figures not only dance with an ecstatic frenzy but actually become nature in the manner in which Poseidon, for example, does not just control water but embodies the sea.

1 Q uoted in “Vignette ∆2,” M HKA Ensembles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, http://ensembles.mhka.be/items/8099?locale=en.

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Paul Sattler, Cannonball, 2018 Graphite on Yupo, 20 ďż˝ 25 in.

Courtesy of the artist

Paul Sattler, Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Schick Art Gallery, is a nationally exhibited artist, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has taught painting and drawing since 1994. Represented by Alpha Gallery, Boston, Sattler was the inaugural recipient of the SACI Consortium Residence in Florence, Italy, and was awarded the Wallace Truman Prize by the National Academy of Design, New York.

Mallory Perry ’20 is a studio art major at Skidmore College with concentrations in painting and drawing.

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Vivane Sassen (born 1972), Etan/mint 12:00, 2013, printed 2017 Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum, 17 ¾ x 12 in.

Purchased with generous funding from Nancy Herman Frehling ’65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond ’96, 2017.51.1

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About the Tang The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region and a model for university museums nationwide, the museum aims to awaken the campus and broader community to the richness and diversity of the human experience through the medium of art.

Through a rigorous exhibition and publications program and the preservation and display of an expanding collection, the museum provides opportunity for creative thinking and critical study based on the principle that art can advance knowledge across disciplines. Direct experiential opportunities for Skidmore students to participate in integral aspects of museum practice and deep engagement with Skidmore faculty are hallmarks of the Tang’s role as a teaching museum.

About Accelerate Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at The Tang Teaching Museum is a three-year project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It aims to enhance academic excellence, build broader and more diverse audiences for museum exhibitions, and strengthen an appreciation of, and facility for, humanistic inquiry. It further drives collaborations with Skidmore faculty, artists, and visiting scholars, whose diverse perspectives on the Tang Teaching Museum collection offer fresh interpretations of artworks and enhance scholarship. This publication is a document of the grant’s second year and is a model of interdisciplinary and collaborative learning and thinking in the academic museum.

the frances young tang teaching museum and art gallery at skidmore college

815 north broadway saratoga springs, ny 12866 518 580 8080