Rashida Bumbray, former Exhibition Coordinator with the Studio Museum in Harlem has switched gears to head downtown to The Kitchen. Rashida makes this move after five and a half years serving the long-time Harlem arts institution first as a curatorial assistant and later as the exhibition coordinator. During her tenure at the Studio Museum she has overseen and co-produced acclaimed exhibitions such as Seeds and Roots: Selections from the Permanent Collection, 2004, co-curated with Thelma Golden and Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 with Kellie Jones.
At The Kitchen, which was created in the 70s by new media artists, Rashida will serve as Assistant Curator, a role that will utilize her love for experimental practices in visual art, music, dance, and theater. She'll work alongside executive director and chief curator Deb Singer, former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Speaking of theater, the renaissance woman is also a member of Progress Theatre, an ensemble whose mission is to create work that interrogates society and inspires transformation. The theater group just completed a sold-out run at Harlem's Apollo Theater last April. Rashida's next project is a response to the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. Entitiled "Sign of the Judgement: A Ring Shout for Katrina," she will install praise/shout houses for the "ring shout" ceremony as a method of healing for Katrina survivors in Houston.
I can't believe we forgot to note Chicago's African Festival of the Arts on September 1st through 4th in Washington Park! We're just glad George Clinton and Funkadelic will be there to stink up the place on the Dee Palmer Woodtor Main Stage at 8pm on Sunday. We're also clocking Dionne Farris and Muntu in the same venue.
New media and installation artist Stan Woodard is into numbers. When he describes his upcoming installation at Atlanta's Spruill Gallery, his speech is littered with figures: 100 images of famous and not-so-famous black people projected in the gallery space, 25 black citizens killed in the Atlanta race riots of 1906, 13% of the US population carrying out a disproportionately large impact on popular culture.
Stan's new exhibition, titled "I see no one, no one sees me" consists of two separate works in two separate rooms of the gallery. In the first room, images as selected by visitors are projected in a dark space. Visitors can choose from 100 images ranging from Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey to Willie Horton and O.J. Simpson. The artist hopes the selection process will cause viewers to be conscious about whom they literally choose to see and choose not to see. Stan told us he wanted to deal with the phenomenon of people who would cross the street to avoid an unknown black man, but trip over themselves to get close to Michael Jordan. Although the piece is not a direct reaction to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, it was partly inspired by the event and its upcoming 100-year anniversary commemoration. Wherever possible the images in the front-room piece are taken from web downloads, yet another way of interacting in and with public space in Stan's view.
The second room draws on Stan's archeological approach to found materials, amalgamating fabric, concrete, and rusted metal with light and audio elements to suggest personal impulses of simultaneously hiding and showing off in the context of a fatalistic world of materialism and materiality. The show opens on 21 September and runs until 4 November.
We've heard estimates ranging from 1600 to 1800 souls lost a year ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Whatever the exact number, most of us agree it was far too many. According to the demographic research firm Claritas, the overall population of New Orleans still remains at only 47% of the pre-Katrina total. Moreover, the city that had been 37% black is today only 22% black. (This is true even despite the fact that the decimated St. Bernard Parish has more than doubled in population in the first half of 2006.) A Mediaweek report notes that many media companies and agencies set up shop in Baton Rouge, Atlanta, and other hospitable cities just before the hurricane. Some have returned, some have not.
We've noticed several art events related to the 1-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Here are three:
In Washington, DC, the Royal Netherlands Embassy is presenting "Seeing is Believing, Seeing is Healing," featuring 24 paintings and photographs of New Orleans made by 4 artists from Louisiana and Mississippi.
"Faces of Katrina" in Shreveport, Louisiana features the stories and photographs of more than 100 Katrina evacuees and the volunteers who helped them.
The Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a Louisiana environmental health and justice organization, has assembled an exhibition titled "St. Bernard Parish Photo Exhibit: Life in the Wake of Katrina" that features photographs taken by 18 St. Bernard Parish residents and four visiting photographers. The traveling show is currently at the Galveston Arts Center.
We recently called out Minnesota's black artists for claiming they were out of the loop on black visual culture. Now we've got more evidence that they are right where the rubber meets the road with new ideas coming from black artists. To wit: LA artist and SMH Frequency alumnus Rodney McMillian, is one of three artists to examine the everyday made extraordinary in the Walker Art Center's Ordinary Culture, which opened recently at the Minneapolis venue.
The show was curated by Korean-born curator Doryun Chong and attempts to examine the all-encompassing concept of culture by dissecting and manipulating mundane and ordinary things, almost in the manner of field anthropologists more than gallery artists. We think this makes sense given McMillian's contribution to Frequency: a dilapidated chair, seemingly reclaimed from the garbage and displayed in the museum as a readymade.
McMillian's Ordinary Culture contribution similarly includes a salvaged-looking piece of patterned linoleum hung on the wall as though it were a painting. A short distance from the wall, a collection of about 50 slate gray, cloth-wrapped columns stand at attention near a video of McMillan delivering Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” speech from 1964.
We see a trio of ideas that have been much in evidence in recent contemporary art in the US: the return of the readymade, the use of a collection, and the evocation of 60s-era political tactics. Other artists in the show are Minnesota's Jay Heikes and New York's Adam Helms.
They say you can never go home again, but Houston native Charles Huntley Nelson will be doing just that when he returns to his home city to install his work at Project Row Houses (PRH) in October. Charles was selected as one of five artists to participate in the next round of installation projects at the Houston locale that has become an important launching pad for emerging artists.
Charles will be installing his work "Why Not on TV," which reproduces a black, middle-class, American living room environment with all the trappings of sofa, entertainment center, and wall-mounted photos. Playing on the television however, are the decidedly untypical images of a Zulu robot come stridently back to earth set to the poetry of James T. Trotter.
This project will be Charles's first major exhibition in Houston, and what's more it takes place in the Third Ward, Charles's childhood home. Which turns up the pressure a little. But Charles assures us that this exhibition will be "all out," a necessary tactic for representing on the home front. Charles currently lives and works in Atlanta. PRH, meanwhile, is all about the interactive and the interdisciplinary, so Charles's installation is designed to be sat in, walked through, and added to. Visitors will have a way to add their own photos to the photo wall and shouldn't feel shy about plopping down on the sofa.
PRH artists install their works in renovated row houses in Houston's previously blighted Third Ward. Artists have about 500 square feet to play with and receive a $2500 honorarium for materials and stipend.
Roz Payne has more black historical documents stuffed under her bed than most of us will probably ever lay hands on, much less own. As a founding member of the Newsreel organization, Roz began photographing, audio taping, filming and documenting the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the late 60's and essentially never stopped. The result is 40 some odd years of images and documents that Roz is currently compiling on a 4-disk DVD set soon to be published by AK Press.
"I'm a collector," Roz told us off-handedly. This is what we call an understatement, boys and girls. Her personal collection contains 350,000 unabridged, unedited FBI civil suit documents, 12 hours of film footage, plus untold numbers of still photos, audio recordings, leaflets, posters, and books. The DVD set will contain a large portion of this material as video files, audio files, and PDFs. Much of the material was sorted, processed, and coded by students at the University of Vermont, near Roz's home.
Along with familiar protest images, Roz's Newsreel footage also includes less familiar material, such as interviews with original Newsreel members, an interview with the widow of Fred Hampton, and an interview with Special Agent WAC who first opened the FBI's case file on the BPP. Roz stresses that her personal archives are by no means comprehensive of the entire BPP story, and that the material on the DVDs represents only those items that she personally happened to collect and keep.
Roz and her publisher are currently working out technical glitches, but she hopes to have at least part of the set complete for the Panthers' 40th reunion in Oakland on October 13, 14, and 15.
Complete chapter listing of Roz Payne's Newsreel archive DVD
1) Off The Pigs [13:00]
2) Mayday [13:00]
3) Repression [13:00]
Newsreel Interviews
Newreel members talking about making the films, working with the panthers and Newsreel
5) The Falk Family [NY and Boston Newsreel)
6) Cindy Fitzpatrick [LA newsreel distributer]
7) Dozie and Gay [SF and NY Newsreel]
8) Gail Dolgin [NY and SF Newsreel]
9) Marilyn Buck [SF newsreel filmed in prison]
10) Roz Payne (with John and Jane) [ Founding members NY Newsreel and Vermont NR distribution]
Excerpts from the Wheelock Academic conference on the Black Panthers
12) Young Lords [Audio Only]
13) Huey and Gay Liberation [Audio Only]
14) Ahmed Rahman [Audio Only]
15) Wheelock Conversation: an extended conversation between Academics, Panthers, and Academic Panthers about a multitude of issues including violence and self-defense, specific local chapters, and historiography
16) Roz's paper on Agent WAC, case agent who opened the original files on the BPP, and ensuing conversation
Excerpts from the BPP 35th Reunion
13) Reunion intro
14) Althea
15) Jericho Prison Movement
16) Jericho Table
17) Kathleen on East-West split and Cointelpro
18) Louisiana Woman 2: New Orleans shoot-out at Panther HQ
19) Orange shirt: effect of split on lower echelon and panther inprisonment
20) Bigman [Audio Only]
21) Bob Boyle: cointelpro [Audio Only]
22) Bob Boyle 2: cointelpro
23) Akua Njeri: widow of Fred Hampton describes assassination
24) Gail Shaw: Panther Clinic and support work
25) Louisiana Woman [Audio Only]
26) Philly Chapter [Audio Only]
27) Reparations [Audio Only]
28) Safiya Bukhari: Prisoners [Audio Only]
29) Bobby Seale [short shot then Audio Only]
30) Kathleen Cleaver Dinner: the Panthers 35 Years reunion
Movement Lawyers tell stories about BPP legal cases
31) Liz Fink, includes discussion of Martin Sostre, Attica, and winning Dhoruba bin Wahad's freedom
32) Bob Boyle: Dhoruba and Panther prisoners
33) Bob Bloom: Panther 21 and Geronimo
34) Jessie Berman: BLA and other legal cases
35) Beverly Axelrod: Movement Lawyer: Got Cleaver out of jail, Panthers, Soul on Ice and AIM
36) Jerry Lefcourt Panther 21
The FBI Special Agents
37) FBI agent Westley A. Swearingin: testified in court to get release of 350,000 FBI documents on Panthers in the case of Dhoruba bin Wahad. One of the only interviews he has given.
38) Special FBI Agent WAC: Original Case Agent on the BPP, opened case on the BPP, wrote THE semi-monthly reports with special sections including racist and sexist gossip. This is the only interview with FBI agent DC and Marty Kenner.
39) Donald Cox: Original Field Marshall, in charge of military training, now in exile in france, wanted on charges in the US.
40) A cup of Coffee with Marty Kenner: Huey confidante and chief Panther fundraiser
Additional Scanned Material:
Roz's Photos
Other photographs (including Steven Shames and David Fenton)
FBI Cartoons (Cointelpro defamation of Panthers)
Best of FBI Docs
WAC's Report to church committee
BPP Newspaper excerpts
Movement papers (leaflets, posters, small press, other propaganda excerpts)
While we're on the subject of comics, we thought we'd mention illustrator Jamal Yasseem Igle's recent announcement that he'll be joining the teaching staff at the Art Student's League of New York this September. Igle is himself a graduate of the League (as well as of the School of Visual Arts).
We note that Igle will be joining the ranks of several artist staff members whom we recognize and respect, including painters Costa Vavagiakis and Harvey Dinnerstein, as well as sculptor Peter Reginato. Given the League's long history of playing fast and loose with the boundaries of art, we would have thought they'd have offered a sequential art class by now. (The school began partly as a reaction against an Academy deemed too conservative by art students at the end of the 19th century.) But no. According to Igle, the League "has never had a class that concentrates specifically on the comics medium." So this will be a learning experience all around.
Igle's classes will be offered on Sundays, and anyone 12 years old or older may register.
Comics writer Brandon Easton has been on the downlow for a minute, but he's stepped back into the game with a new project that he's hoping will inject some new life into the comics industry in general and into black-created comics in particular. He introduced his new project ShadowLaw at Chicago's Wizard World earlier this month, receiving immediate interest from publishers. We couldn't get him to spill who he's in negotiation with at the moment, but he plans to announce details of his new publishing contract in early September.
ShadowLaw, set in the not-too-distant future, follows the story of soldier Rictor Caesaro, sentenced to a concentration camp that we eventually learn is a farm for feeding humans to a powerful vampire cult.
Brandon started out in comics working on Arkanium with current wunderkind illustrator LeSean Thomas, as they both shared a love of old-school Marvel Comics and Japanese animation. Now he hopes to inject new life into a medium that is caught up in racial politics too constricting for Brandon's taste. Even given the industry's "unchecked racism," too many black writers and illustrators feel pressured to limit themselves to specifically black-only stories, Brandon contends, and many creators take much grief for straying from those narrow confines. Brandon hopes that his stories can operate at a number of levels, dealing with race and many other issues besides.
ShadowLaw is currently planned as a 4-issue comics release, and Brandon is working on a novelization that would deepen and widen the ShadowLaw universe.
This one's been sitting around the Code Z office for weeks perched on the horns of a moral dilemma. How to discuss a new social networking site that's devoted to a long list of unimpeachable social causes and laudable charity work, while simultaneously presenting us with a website and press materials whose only images of black folks are the same predictable images of starving Africans so popular in the West for decades? How to highlight the work of a group whose administrative structure is so markedly white and yet who traffic in cultural symbols (e.g., the giant graffiti mural) so markedly black? We didn't know quite how to approach this sticky wicket. We're hoping our readers have some thoughts.
We've decided that New Jersey-based Noelle Lorraine Williams is not so much artist as she is one-woman industry and shamanistic visionary. Under the moniker of REBORN (yes, all caps), Noelle and her collaborators "innovatively address the most challenging individual, collective, and environmental current fears of living in community." How's that for a job description?
REBORN's next effort, Enchanted Being, is a six-week visual art and spoken/written word exhibition that proposes everyday rituals, magic, and enchantment as a response to HIV/AIDS infection and its reverberations through the Newark, New Jersey community. The roster of 6 emerging and established artists have all been affected in some way by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Noelle graduated from the New School for Social Research with a degree in Social and Historical Inquiry (which makes us say, "a-ha! now we get it!"), and we're looking forward to the REBORN print magazine scheduled for this fall.
Enchanted Being opens on September 8 at the Social Justice Center Community Gallery in Newark.
Hip-hop these days serves as more than just simultaneous low, middle, and high art for the masses. It has come to serve as an all-purpose inoculation against obsolescence and irrelevancy, as scores of museums and art festivals mainline the hip-hop experience to achieve the rush of youth and vitality.
Thus the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival has teamed up with the Mount Vernon Hip-Hop Arts Center to present a program of global hip-hop visual fare for its 30th anniversary outing, tapping MVHHAC's Erika Dalya Muhammad to curate the project. We've been watching Muhammad since she threw down at MIT for the first Race in Digital Space show in 2001 that subsequently toured the East Coast. Now Muhammad brings her expertise in black electrocultures to Mount Vernon, New York as she helps to build its various programs.
Final decisions for the festival (November 8-12) are not yet complete, and Muhammad is still seeking further entries. The festival will be focusing on hip-hop related documentaries, shorts, experimental films, and music videos with a specifically international flavor; so far Muhammad is considering films and videos from Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Cuba, the U.S., and elsewhere.
Artists interested in being considered should contact the Center for more information (erika at hiphoparts dot org). Artists need to move fast, as she is within days of finalizing the program. All work should have a production date between 2004 and 2006.
Nontsikelelo's Fashion Photography
A fashion photographer whose subjects are galore in the ever-busy streets of Johannesburg, Nontsikelelo Veleko, known as “Lolo” amongst her friends and family members, has made the city’s streets her home as she searches for the fashion crazy minds and souls decorating the bustling streets.
via AfricanColours.net
LeSean Thomas Hypes Nervous Breakdowns With PopCultureShock
LeSean Thomas holds a special spot in comicdom. Considered by fans to be one of the comic-book industry’s rising stars, Thomas has managed to nimbly weave successful careers between the mediums of animation and creator-owned funny-books.
via PopCultureShock TV
So I thought we would write a post about hip-hop expressionist painter Fahamu Pecou's new ventures in music production, but along the way we unpacked more than we had bargained for. Fahamu is known for 2 things: (1) large, painterly canvasses that play with notions of fame, image and black masculinity in a hip-hop context, and (2) his ubiquitous "Fahamu Pecou is the Shit" PR campaign, complete with t-shirts, posters and other shitastic paraphernalia.
Taking his preoccupations of image and hype to another level, Fahamu has discovered MySpace as a new canvas for his games of personality manipulation. He has shown up on the site as "Sex Choc if Ya Nasty," and has released music under that name. The tracks, including "Sex Choc's Theme" and "Pillow Talk," are available for download in a rough edit format only on MySpace.
But because MySpace has no outside edges, Fahamu has invented multiple personalities that live only on the site. He's asked us to keep it hush-hush, but if you are a MySpace denizen, chances are you've been approached by one of Fahamu's personalities and probably rejected his friendship request.
Fahamu's next show, "Neopopular Demand," opens at Michael Martin Galleries in San Francisco on September 20th.
I've gotten swept up. I haven't seen the Oscars since 1999 and don't remember ever once seeing the Emmys, but I am keeping a close eye on The 2006 Black Weblog Awards. That's why Code Z has just donated a prize for the winner in the Best Video Blog category. The winner will choose either a copy of Conoa EasyFX (a set of plugins for Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro) or a copy of Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus.
By the time you read this, nominations will most likely be closed (they close at 7am Eastern Time [US] on Tuesday, 15 August), but voting begins on Wednesday the 16th. Winners are announced on 3 September.
If you doubt the need for such a program, just throw an eye at the overall lack of brown skin in evidence over at the Bloggies, the major, mainstream vehicle for recognizing excellence in blogs on the amazingly self-organizing internet. The Bloggies sit somewhere between parody and sincere homage; the Black Weblog Awards, however, are serious bid'ness from beginning to end.
We at Code Z have been taking note of the explosion of film festivals around the world. Even tiny Gregory, South Dakota, USA (pop. 1300) has a film festival celebrating pioneering black independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.
Not to be left out, In The Life Atlanta, an organization founded to serve Atlanta's LGBT population, has announced the return of its annual film festival, See Us in the Life, this coming September 2nd and 3rd.
Organizers will be screening approximately 20 films and have made great efforts to cover a wide range of aspects of the queer experience, hoping to fill the void currently left wide open by mainstream media.
Films will include "Pick Up the Mic" addressing queer hip-hop artists and Maurice Jamal's "Dirty Laundry," winner of two awards at the American Black Film Festival in Miami.
This is the first year the See Us in the Life Film Festival will be competitive, offering a $2500 prize for the Audience Choice winner.
Brazil is second only to Nigeria in the size of its black population, which is part of the reason we’ve been following the bill introduced into the Brazilian parliament regarding journalists in that country. (That, plus we are raving Brazil-o-philes.) The bill, just vetoed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last week, would have created a governing body that would give official recognition to some of Brazil’s journalists but not others, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The bill would also have applied to illustrators, graphic artists, photographers, and Web designers. So, yes, that hits a little closer to home. Those with journalism degrees would continue practicing, while all others would be officially barred from doing so via a government regulatory body.
Brazilian journalists themselves have been split, with some favoring the protection and prestige that comes with official recognition and others fearing that this would lead the way to state-controlled media.
Although true state-controlled media may be a bit of a Chicken Little scenario at this point, this writer, for one, is glad to see that for now all manner of journalists and visual creatives are still allowed to practice their trade, whether “official” or not. The bill now goes back to the parliament for reconsideration.
Bill Cottman is keeping up with artists half his age in incorporating new media and technology into his work. Scratch that: he's surpassing a good number of them. In any case, the photographer and multimedia artist has joined five other photographers whose work, according to Sean Smuda, "explores the parallel creative environment of choreographed movement" at the Minnesota Center for Photography. Together the photographers contemplate stillness and motion, performance and image.
Cottman, who has also produced a series of cell phone camera photos, identifies the late Gordon Parks as a reference, and when we look at his work we also see Pamela Z and a hint of the Obadikes.
We're noticing some hand-wringing on the part of black Minnesota artists who feel "out of the loop" of black art. Yet we see consistently interesting work both in Minneapolis and coming from Minneapolis among black artists. After all, Minneapolis is the home of the excellent Black Bloggah, as well as the residence of painter Julie Mehretu in 2000 as artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center.
Speaking of Africa, we've lurrved AfricanColours.net for years and have admired their attitude of being the bulwark for contemporary art on the Continent. Director Andrew Njoroge announced last week the completion of their first cooperative mural project in which they coordinated a US muralist and a group of Kenyan painters to raise the profile of contemporary art in Nairobi.
AfricanColours was instrumental in bringing Kenyan artists John Kamicha, Simon Muriithi, Faith Nancy, and Jeff Wambugu together with Boston-based muralist Alex Cook to create the cross-national project.
This project continues the site's history of support for contemporary art. "We want to be involved in building the creative community in Kenya and throughout Africa," says Marketing Director Tereneh Mosely. "Historically we have worked with local museums, galleries and cultural institutions on exhibitions, events and other activities focusing on contemporary art in Africa and we will continue to do so."
Following on the heels of the group's two murals (one at the Kabete Children's Home and a second, temporary piece on River Road), AfricanColours hopes to see more community-based projects arise from communities themselves, and not only from art institutions or artists. (But hey, we want to remind AfricanColours that artists are part of "the community," too!)
We wish we had gotten Code Z running a few days earlier so we could have announced the August 6th opening reception of "She Shootin'!" at Harriet’s Alter Ego. The Brooklyn store-slash-gallery is currently featuring the photography of Nsenga and 5 other emerging Brooklyn-based photographers. [Full disclosure: Code Z editor Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is also repped in the show.]
Nsenga, meanwhile, continues to explore the subject matter that’s been slowly putting her on the map over the last few years: sensitive portraits mostly of black American Muslims and Caribbeans, as well as environmental abstracts drawn from similar psychological sources. Got that?
We’re noting Nsenga’s spiritual approach to photography. Her recent trip to Senegal included taking photos at the town of Medina Baye, Kaolack, which though it looks like a landfill (we hear), nevertheless attracts spiritual pilgrims from all over (see below).
Nsenga was featured in the Small Works show at NYU earlier this year (spotted by Jack Shainman) and is currently working on a project for the Museum for African Art in New York curated by Enid Schildkrout. Nsenga wants her work to witness communities that are seldom portrayed in any other way. Witness the work at Harriet’s Alter Ego until August 26th.
Call it part of the new South Africa. As that subtropical nation continues to change its global reputation, Spier Holdings (a leisure and wine company) recently announced the end of the first stage of its Southbank Architectural Competition having received over 500 final submissions. The competition solicited architects, artists, and designers from around the world to design The Africa Centre--a multi-sited, multi-use space for artists, performers, intellectuals, and scholars from throughout Africa. The centre is to be located on virgin land near Stellenbosch in the Western Cape.
A team of architects, art historians, and engineers (oh, and of course the Spiers CEO Adrian Enthoven) will review the submissions and will announce a winner in January 2007. The submission process has been completely anonymous, so it is impossible to say how many designs were submitted by black architects or black-owned firms. Organizers can say, however, that 25% of the initial registrations came from Africa, representing 17 different African nations. Usual suspects the United States, Germany, and the UK also produced large numbers of entries.
Spier envisions an integrated space for residencies, exhibitions and other arts programming that will unite artists from across the continent. We like what the "new" South Africa is producing, and wouldn’t mind seeing a new rest-of-the-world, too.
University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Tony Bingham is taking a learn-by-doing approach to teaching African American film history to his students. Part of his "Black Image: Screen and Television" class for the spring 2007 semester will have students make their own documentaries using local history and personal interviews as a foundation.
To help his students get over the hump of first-time film production, Professor Bingham is seeking to acquire documentary films made by other black film students from around the world. He hopes the peer-to-peer approach will prove less daunting for his students than concentrating only on works by established filmmakers.
Bingham hopes to receive 20 to 30 student films for his students to consider. Although the class will focus on films that explore community history, a broad range of subjects is needed to explore all the technical and creative aspects of filmmaking.
"I like the idea of observing how visual ideas are being worked out all across the land by African American film students, " says Bingham. "This generation is the first to comfortably embrace video production and documentary production as a means of personal expression."
In a sign that the Yusef Jackson-financed Radar Magazine may stand a chance at stability, the magazine has hired both a publisher (Katherine Rizzuto from Vogue) and an ad director (Anne Perton from House and Garden). Radar Magazine, the gossipy celebrity rag, is scheduled to launch in mid-August for the third time, financed this time by chief investor Yusef Jackson. Jackson, the son of teflon-coated civil rights mogul Jesse Jackson, says that he and his investor group have poured enough cash into the troubled publication to keep it solvent for five years.
Radar will start as a (ahem) web-only publication and will go into print in the spring of 2007. Mr. Jackson also claims that this is the start of a media empire and is looking to purchase other properties (again, ahem). We recall that Jackson attempted unsuccessfully to acquire the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004.
Let’s clear one thing up: this isn’t Radar’s "third rebirth" as the New York Post claims. It’s only the second rebirth, the first time was just a plain old birth.
Hello friends. I am happy (and exhausted) to bring you the first issue of Code Z: Black Visual Culture Now.
As I have been spearheading this effort over the past several months, letting others in on the plans and visions, I've been hearing the same comments again and again: "It's about time," "We've been waiting for this for so long," "This type of thing is way overdue."
It's true. Young, critically-engaged black artists have been conversing among ourselves in a whole new way for the last 10 to 15 years, and yet no forum has emerged to encapsulate that in a broad-based way. No forum seems to address that generation of visual creators, and to do so in an accessible, smart, dynamic way. These became my goals in building Code Z.
That's exhilarating, but it makes me nervous, too. I want it to work. I want it to be received well and to further the conversation about black art globally. Those are big goals, but ones that I think are reachable.
I can't do it alone, however. So I turn to you to help reach those goals. Read, participate, and tell others about it. We're all in this together.
I want to thank many people, without whose support this bird could not have gotten off the ground: my family, my business partner Alex Burger, Beatrice L. Thomas, Arturo Palacios, Valerie Cassel-Oliver, Carl Tyson, Mark Schnug, Rainey Knudson, Jacqueline Rush-Rivera, Bob Lum, Brian Yanish, and probably a ton of other folks I'm forgetting at this late hour of the night. Each of them has given me specific support and feedback during crucial points in the development of this project.
The other editor-members of Code Z have been outstanding in their engagement with the project. I'd like to single out Carla Williams, Laylah Amatullah-Barrayn, and Ayize Jama-Everett. Look for lots of writing from them in the coming months.
A special thanks goes to Roderick Southall and Obsidian Arts. Roderick was first in line to see the importance of such a project and to insist on its being undertaken.
Finally, thank you to the wide community of artists that has seen the need for Code Z and who have expressed your excitement and enthusiasm for the project. I hope that together we have many years of exploring new territory and mining new ideas about art. Oh and having a blast in the process.
