Speaking of Nigeria, there are those who by the mere mentioning of their name elicit wild responses. Crazy, genius, pioneer: Fela. This year, on World AIDS Day (December 1), The Brooklyn Academy of Music will present Red Hot + RIOT LIVE!, a benefit tribute to the musical spirit of Fela Kuti.
Since he entered the music scene in the late 1950's, Fela Kuti willingly and wantonly did things his way. From combining Jazz and Funk with African rhythms, to singing in a Nigerian-inflected Pidgin English, he was on the cutting edge. His style of music came to be known as Afrobeat, and he became known as an activist. Through his music, he boldly tackled local, national, and global political issues. Criticizing world leaders, breaking down the Middle East conflict, and issuing a wake-up call to the military minded with the album Zombie are but a few of Fela's claims to fame.
Having lost his life to AIDS related complications in 1997, Fela's legacy is carried on by his son, musician Femi Kuti. His untimely death has been a touchstone in AIDS/HIV activism, most notably represented by the Red Hot + Blue music and concert series, which began in 1990.
Originally released in 2002 as a tribute/remix project, Red Hot + Riot featured a veritable who's who of jazz, hip-hop, R&B, soul, and world music. So, this weekend, we expect some of that same spirit. Embodied by artists such as Les Nubians, Yerba Buena, Dead Prez, and Meshell Ndegeocello, we find the lineup particularly appropriate to pay homage to the late musician's legacy.
Activities will wrap up on December 2, with a second concert and multiple screenings of the Jaheed Ashley documentary, Fela! Fresh from Africa.
While we peep the recently-published graphic biography of Malcolm X and SMH's current Africa Comics show, all while eagerly awaiting Aaron McGruder's return to The Boondocks, we can also check Nigerian graphic artist and illustrator Ghariokwu Lemi's first solo show, Political Cartoons from Nigeria at SOUTHFIRST in Brooklyn. In this show, Ghariokwu, a self-taught artist who blessed 26 album jackets for political activist and Afrobeat ambassador, Fela Kuti, brings his vivid graphics stateside. Not the first time Ghariokwu's work has been seen on U.S. shores, we remember his 13 pieces in 2003's Black President on which occasion certain MTV top brass commissioned him to make his first painting on U.S. soil.
Ghariokwu's cartoons, originally for a Nigerian audience, display political figures such as President Olusegun Obasanjo, government corruption, and good ol' American foreign policy made between 1975 and 2006. Political Cartoons from Nigeria also highlights Nigeria's evolving culture through the eyes of two young Nigerian cartoonists: Comfort Jones and Lordwealth Ololade, showcasing their views on Nigerian politics and the role of women.
Political Cartoons from Nigeria is on view at SOUTHFIRST in Brooklyn until December 17.
Quick, what do you think of when we say "Le musée du Louvre," or simply The Louvre, as the French-challenged among us call it? A few things usually come to mind: Paris, the Mona Lisa, and the breathtaking architecture for starters. This month, however, slam poetry has been the non-traditional artistic addition to the famous museum. We think this betokens an increasingly evident U.S. influence in Paris and may be a tip of the hat to the many Americans who visit the Louvre each year (more than any other nationality).
The Louvre invited the poets to rap about paintings. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will serve as the guest curator. She assisted the museum in creating a series of readings, films, lectures, and concerts that all tie into her theme, "The Foreigners Home." This theme riffs on the idea of belonging, exile, and national identity. The presentations will continue through November 29, 2006.
The artists along with Morrison will visit one of the troubled suburbs that was affected by explosive riots one year ago. The riots stemmed from anger about discrimination toward French teenagers who are immigrants of African and Muslim North African descent.
Other artists participating in the series are writers Michael Ondaatje, Edwige Danticat, musician Toumani Diabate, video artist Peter Welz, choreographer William Forsythe, and filmmaker Charles Burnett.
As each year passes, many are considering South Africa one of the top five destinations for visual art, music, theater and television. So we weren’t surprised when we heard that after rave reviews in Cape Town, Distant Relatives/Relative Distance has traveled to Johannesburg at Standard Bank Gallery and will be on view until December 2, 2006. Plus we're glad to see our old friend Joost O. Bosland, curator of the show, is continuing to bring us some of the most boundary-busting new art being shown in South Africa.
Bringing together paintings by Odili Donald Odita, Senam Okudzeto and Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah, prints by Julie Mehretu, a video projection by Wangechi Mutu and an installation by Barthélémy Toguo, Distant Relatives seeks to link each artist to one another as “socially and physically displaced persons…under globalization.” Covering subjects that range from Hurricane Katrina and identity to travel/migration and AIDS, Distant Reletives doesn’t merely present the complications of geographical classifications/assumptions, but also illustrates the artists’ negotiation of their relation to Africa and the rest of the world.
Try not to miss us too much, but we're going to be taking a little time for rest and relaxation for the next week. Code Z will resume publication on Monday, 27 November with all the insightful observation and flippant asides you've come to expect from us. In the meantime prepare yourself for the December extravaganza also known as Code Z's Top 20 Moments in Black Visual Culture: 2006 Edition, where we'll be counting down the year's most inspiring, mystifying, and downright dreadful moments in visual culture from around the world.
Oh, admit it: you just can't wait, can you? You just... can't... WAIT! See you soon!
It's the culinary manifestation of the sweet sounds of soul music. Chocolate truffles, each with its own interpretation various genres of Black music, are the new addition to Vosges Haut-Chocolat. The owner and couture chocolatier, Katrina, was inspired to create the box set of chocolates and CD's from her love of music and cooking. She produced a paper as an undergrad at Vanderbilt University on rock and roll's roots in gospel and the blues which in part inspired this innovative ode to Black music.
The Groove Collection is a box set of truffles with a booklet packed with the history of the African American influence on music. There's also a CD with music ranging from R&B to work songs. The actual chocolates take their direct recipes from the musical genres; here are some of the flavors:
Field Songs: yams + maple syrup + grains of paradise
Gospel: caramelized pecan praline
Rhythm & Blues: Jack Daniel's whiskey + sugar cane
Hip-Hop: champagne + edible gold leaf
Bebop: Middle Eastern sumac + fresh mint
You can also purchase an upgraded version of the chocolaty compilation, which is called The Groove Lux Collection. This set comes in a sparkling, custom-made lucite box showered with Swarovski crystals. Ten percent of profits from sales of The Groove Lux Collection goes to Little Kids Rock, which helps restore music education in US public schools.
Thursday, November 16, you can get a sampling of the music and, of course, the chocolates of the Groove Collection. Music courtesy of DJ Reborn, join the reception at SoHo Vosges Boutique in New York City.
In what has to be an unprecedented move for any municipality, the various arts bureaucracies of Houston have elected to reduce and streamline themselves by turning 3 disparate organizations into a single entity. We note that PRH founding director Rick Lowe and Paul J. Matthews of the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum are 2 of the 29 arts leaders to serve on the inaugural board of the new Houston Arts Alliance (HAA). The HAA is composed of what was previously the Cultural Arts Council Houston/Harris County, the Municipal Art Commission, and the Civic Art Committee.
According to the Alliance, the new organization will "fund, advocate, preserve, and promote the arts in the Houston and Harris county region." The area includes over 500 arts organizations and 12,000 artists. The Alliance will further be responsible for acquisitions, conservation, and preservation of the City of Houston's public art collection now numbering some 400 pieces.
PRH, a city of Houston arts fixture, recently exhibited the work of Rashida Bumbray, Ingrid Pollard, and Charles Huntley Nelson among others in its prestigious Third Ward site-specific installation program. The new Alliance will be overseeing approximately $8.25 million in allocations to artists an arts organizations.
Exit Art opens the season with three exhibitions and several public programs that explore various media that range from installation, poetry, and collage to video, painting, and performance art. Beyond City Lights: Neonart, which contemplates the medium of neon light, and ¡Viva La Música!, a visual exploration of Latin history, aesthetics, and culture via over 400 album covers, we are especially interested in the four-person group show titled Interplay. Responding to the selected artists' consistent use of various materials, Interplay provides an exciting look at how these emerging artists use a variety of media to, in the words of curators Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman, "form comprehensive artistic statement[s]." And speaking of media, featured artist William Villalongo's recent mixed media sculptures will definitely provide an ideal example of the show's premise.
Interplay will be on view until November 25. The next upcoming public program, Serious Games, is scheduled for Saturday, November 18.
Several film festivals have come across our desks this week many of which we deem mentionable.
Planning to begin 2007 with a new name, the Women of Color Arts & Film Festival (WOCAFF) announced its call for submissions to the third annual film festival scheduled for March 22 through 25, 2007. Expanding the festival to include a musical component, WOCAFF will also be accepting musical selections.
Having just wrapped up on November 11, The International Film Festival of Zambia in Lusaka was the first of its kind in the country’s history. Organized to celebrate Zambia’s culture with productions completed within the past ten years, The International Film Festival of Zambia offered a diverse selection of compelling films that provided an impressive catalog to add to the canon. This year's theme was "Time, Talent, and Teamwork" (from a report at www.africancolours.net).
Code Z would like to pause for a moment in memory of Benny Andrews (1930-2006), one of the forefathers of modern Black visual culture in the U.S. We had recently begun a correspondence with Mr. Andrews and wish that it could have gone further. We note an thorough and varied summary of his life and work here.
This event is dedicated to anyone who’s considered the idea of public art as an agent for social change. Noting Robin Kelley’s seminal text Freedom Dreams as a source for inspiration, co-founder of the Laundromat Project, Risë Wilson asserts that self-determination and social transformation exist within creative exploration.
Using this blueprint, The Laundromat Project will host its closing reception for its first program, Create Change, Friday, November 10. Developed to “provide genuine opportunities for emerging artists of color and their neighbors to connect,” Create Change commissions artists of color to create site-specific installations at their local laundries. The first year’s artists, media, and locations are:
• Miriam Neptune, documentary video, Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights
• Rudy Shepherd, drawing and sculpture, Harlem
• Shinique Smith, book arts and fabric, Clinton Hill
Given our recent mention of the new Bling book by Ossé and Tolliver, we wouldn't want to leave the impression that we've gone all materialist on you. The darker side of the hip-hop jewelry obsession is chronicled in Kareem Edouard's Bling: Consequences and Repercussions, one of three films scheduled to be screened as part of the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Kareem's film investigates Africa's illegal diamond trade and the carnage that often flows from it. Other films in this portion of the festival include Meredith Danluck's Roots, an experimental video featuring The Roots' Questlove and Black Thought at the nexus of hip-hop and high art; and Femke Wolting's Sneakers, chronicling the history of the ubiquitous street footwear.
The Mead Festival is the U.S.'s longest-running film festival and is currently celebrating its 30th year. In a bid to boost the festival's diversity and youth cred, organizers tapped electrocultures expert and shameless afrogeek Erika Dalya Muhammad of the Mount Vernon Hip-Hop Arts Center to curate the special hip-hop related program. Erika tells us the program is designed to give folks new perspectives on hip-hop, including an awareness of what it means to consume it. The films will screen on November 10.
The program also includes a Q&A session also at the American Museum of Natural History on November 10 with Meredith Danluck and Doreen Remen of the Art Production Fund. The films will screen again on December 1 at the Westchester Arts Council. Again, Danluck, Remen, and Erika will be in attendance, this time with filmmaker Art Jones.
We're glad to see that St. Louis's original gun toting bad boy is coming home. After nearly a century of growing folk legends and songs, the criminal minded Stag Lee is coming to raise hell in a St. Louis bookstore. Stagger Lee, a graphic novel by writer Derek McCulloch and artist Shepherd Hendrix, is currently making the rounds in signings across the United States, and the pair's next stop will be St. Louis's Star Clipper Book Store on November 11. Those that attend wearing the coveted Stetson hat of western antiquity will receive a special prize.
Based on true events, this novel recognizes a Black character among the infamous ranks of Dirty Harry and Billy the Kid. The tale of two Black men engaging in a deadly brawl over a hat is only the launching point of this highly stylized graphic novel. At its heart the tale is less consumed with the actual violence nestled in the collective unconscious of Black America, and more focused on the attempts to make such violence conscious through the mechanism of music. From Mississippi John Hurt to Neil Diamond, the tale of the original Gangsta, Stagger Lee, has been told in a variety of ways, yet this is the first time it's been made visual. Each musical version gives artist Shepherd Hendrix a chance to re-organize the source material into new sequences. The choice of sepia tones gives the book an aged feel reminiscent of one of the better episodes of Deadwood. Hendrix's illustrations run the gamut from comic to tragic, while writer Derek McCulloch bounces between the historical reality of Stagger Lee and the songs about him.
We've noted similar care given to African American popular culture in efforts such as Ho Che Anderson's King and Kyle Baker's Nat Turner in the medium of the graphic novel, and the current offering from Hendrix and McCulloch appears to continue the tradition of the brainy comic.
BONUS: Code Z's Afrogeek spoke to McCulloch and Hendrix at length.
We've recently learned that our friend Wangechi Mutu is among the over one hundred women artists to be featured in the Brooklyn Museum's spring exhibition Global Feminisms, which is really no surprise given that Wangechi is pretty much everywhere at the moment. The show, which will open in March 2007, is being hailed by the museum as the first major show to examine and present feminist art (or "gender-aware" art as the curators also say) from an international perspective. The exhibition is co-curated by Dr. Maura Reilly and feminist scholar Linda Nochlin.
Global Feminisms also marks yet another major change in departments at the Brooklyn Museum; the exhibition will act as an inaugural reception for the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Reilly will act as permanent curator of the center.
Back in 1977, the Brooklyn Museum hosted the touring exhibition Women Artists: 1550-1950, the first exhibition that surveyed the art created by Western women. That show was organized by Linda Nochlin with Ann Sutherland Harris. The Brooklyn Museum is seeking to make Global Feminisms an extention of that effort.
The show also includes Kenyan countrywoman Ingrid Mwangi whom we've been keeping an eye on lately. Approximately 11 of the artists are US-born. Among the range of media represented are photography, sculpture, installation, and web-based art.
Given that artist Cauleen Smith and poet A. Van Jordan both had a love for the language of cinema, their collaboration on an installation was probably inevitable. The two artists opened I Want to See My Skirt, a collaborative installation inspired by the highly formal work of Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, on 5 November at Testsite in Austin, USA.
The contemporary art space, located in a central Austin private residence has gained a national reputation for its provocative approach in which artists pair with writers to create original, site-specific works. In this case, both Cauleen and Van were interested in the poignant relationship between Sidibé and his subjects. Likewise, Cauleen tells us, the piece became an investigation of the relationship between themselves as young, black, American artists and Sidibé, a francophone, Malian artist from a previous generation.
She tells us that suddenly the spaces "in between" became very important, and we note that that idea carries through the entire installation-- including a pile of bean bags each made in the shape of the trade route space between North America, South America, and Africa, and music that includes work made by a Dutch musician traveling in Mali. Hybridity, indeed. The media-rich installation also includes 2 projections, 4 monitors, and a portable DVD player, all featuring Van's poetry in oblique and direct ways. Van, who normally writes about 10 poems per year, wrote 8 poems in 2 weeks for the installation.
I Want to See My Skirt closes on 14 December.
In celebration of the wide-ranging legacy of interdisciplinary collaborations found in August Wilson's plays, we have several events that have come across our desks in the past few weeks. Shortly after Pittsburgh's African American Cultural Center took on the name of its native son and became the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, the arts organization has hit the ground running with building projects and unique public programs. Raising over half the money needed to build the contemporary multi-million dollar facility, the Center recently broke ground on its confirmed site in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh this month. Designed by San Francisco-based architect Allison G. Williams (who also worked on Baltimore's African American history museum and San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora), the August Wilson Center for African American Culture includes a 500-seat theatre, enhanced classrooms, a community center, street-level gift shop, permanent gallery spaces and a 200-seat performance space.
With less than a week separating the two, award-winning actor and playwright Will Power presented, for a limited engagement, his one-man autobiographical performance titled Will Power: Poet to Playwright. Employing the talents of tastemaker DJ Reborn, Poet to Playwright succeeded in re-capturing their amazing energy initially seen in Flow.
Inspired by Wilson's personal charge to young playwrights to "tell your story," the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland College Park, is accepting proposals for their conference by the same name on the work of August Wilson. Scheduled March 9 through 11, the conference's aim is to bring playwrights, scholars, dancers, visual artists, actors, and a host of others to the table to discuss the various intersections between their practice and Wilson's work.
Not that we don't like surprises, but being of a certain temperament we're often happier having at least a hint about what's coming next. So imagine our sheer astonishment and utter delight when we heard Bill Gunn's 1973 gem, Ganja and Hess, underwent a major facelift and was re-released on DVD early this month. Why are we so excited? Beyond offering a stream of consciousness meta-narrative on cultural difference, love, betrayal, and addiction, Ganja and Hess, considered one of the most hard-to-find independent films of the 1970s, now includes an extra three minutes of dialogue in the film's original cut that has been missing since its release on video for the first time in 1998. The animated photo gallery, film essay by Tim Lucas and David Walker, and featurette examining select sequences in detail add to the extensive offering of special features, but the clear standout has to be the revised audio commentary. Joining producer Chris Schultz, composer Samuel Waymon, director of photography James E. Hinton and co-star Marlene Clark, the most recent DVD release provides a conversation steeped in reflection, preservation, and inspiration.
We've always thought of Austin, USA as a do-it-yourself town, which is why it makes sense to us that University of Texas senior Ozii Obiyo would take it upon himself to create the first Africa-themed television show for the university's student-run television network, TSTV.
AfroFantastic TV made the jump from radio to television in February 2006 and now enjoys a weekly half-hour time slot on the rough-n-ready lo-fi station. Ozii told us that he's an "avid media consumer," but became fed up with typical representations of Africa in the mainstream media as backward, war-torn, disease-ridden, and starving. Though Nigerian-born Ozii is quick to fess up that those problems still do exist on the continent, he wanted to give equal time to the prosperous, progressive, beautiful, and thriving parts of Africa as well. (We think he should hook up with Charlayne Hunter Gault in this endeavor.)
Ozii's show is co-produced by Christopher Rusch and Donavan Starghil, and aims to tackle the issues of stereotypes and perception in a light-hearted way. We asked him about the future of the show, and he let us know that he's shopping the concept to Africa-focused TV stations nationally. We've even heard that some television stations on the West Coast are showing interest.
