In providing a context for this week’s cycle of posts, we contemplated several phrases, but no other hit the nail on the head so perfectly than “imaging the image.” In recognition of those professions that seek to re-evaluate and re-present visual images and engage arts culture, we selected a couple gigs that reflect those principals.
African Continuum Theatre (Washington, DC)
Artistic Director
Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce, Puerto Rico)
Associate Curator
Rubin Museum of Art (New York, NY)
Production Coordinator/Assistant Graphic Designer
New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY)
Webmaster
Dance/USA (New York, NY)
Director of Programming
Children’s Museum of the Arts (New York, NY)
Teaching Artist
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (New York, NY)
Artistic Advisor
If you get out of the house on occasion, chances are that someone somewhere will do or say something that will agitate, confound, or inspire you. Counter-Intuitive: Engaging Racial Stereotypes aims to do just that. Echoing the sentiments of the esteemed Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, Chicagoan Floyd Atkins, and Texas native Deborah Roberts (who Code Z hipped you to here and here) have joined forces for this exhibition. Both artists, referencing stereotypical imagery, set out to deconstruct the perceptions and institutions that perpetuate said images. Things do fall apart.
In the Age of Apologies, and shadow of our crusades to ban words and rampant political correctness, Counter-Intuitive: Engaging Racial Stereotypes willingly opens dialogues that tackle those thorny issues that rub many people the wrong way, especially on the visual arts front. While this may be seen as antagonistic and counter-productive, Deborah reminds us that “Our (collective) identity is tied up in how we are perceived and the misconceptions that have imprisoned our growth.” A fact reiterated by this exhibition.
Coming ahead of Obsidian Arts Inc.’s Exploding Language, Counter-Intuitive whets our appetites for the possible sea change that identity and issue-based art may see in the double-oh-seven. There’s no time like the present. Time to unlearn.
Counter-Intuitive ends April 7 at Chicago State University’s Presidents Gallery.
We know you. You're the kind of person who respects their elders, learns from history, and is ever moving forward. Are we right? And you're probably a new-school head with trump-tight, old-school sensibilities. Right again? And you probably think that you've got what it takes to run with the big dogs. Well, the good people at Obsidian Arts, Inc. in North Minneapolis are waiting to hear from you.
In what can best be described as a proactive effort to deconstruct the past--for the sake of the future--Obsidian is rolling out Exploding Language, a multimedia/new media public art exhibition. In the tradition of the Mexican muralists, and the Watts Towers, this show is all about the community at large. Scheduled to inhabit six blocks of North Minneapolis, Exploding Language is taking it to the people in the realest sense. Activities include training community docents, and hosting art history workshops.
Using the Black Arts Movement as a jumping-off point, artists are invited to submit proposals that successfully interrogate, reinterpret and contemporize BAM artistic and intellectual sensibilities for Generations X, Y, and all that come after. This is an opportunity for 20 emerging artists to literally rewrite history, and build some bridges (digital and otherwise) in the process.
If you got game, give O.A.I. a call; and don't come half-steppin'. They're talking about a "cultural revolution of ideas." So give it all you got, but make it plain. Proposals are due April 15.
Exploding Language will run from July through September 2007.
Seydou Keita + Nontsikelelo Veleko = FASHION. Focus. The left eye takes in Bamakois in black and white circa post-independence Mali and the right wanders through the vibrant colors and temperaments of Johannesburg youth as they glare with reckless abandon and grace. Fashion, currently showing at The Danziger Project, fixes its lenses on works of the late Malian portraitist Seydou Keita and Nontsikelelo Veleko, or Lolo, a souls-rising, South African visual artist.
The portraits fuse Africa-old with Africa-new, dispelling any lingering Afro-pessimistic myths that the African creative is exclusively tribal antiquities and masks, or photos of villagers in the native, but an expanding dimensional prism of diverse perverse perspectives as exemplified in In/Sight: African Perspectives, 1940 to the Present at ICP last spring and other recent exhibits. Keita’s controversially authentic studio portraits showcase recently urbanized Malians in their mix of traditional and western threads and sentiments allowing the subjects’ vitality to tell its own story. Balancing Keita’s chromatic images are Veleko’s fabulously donned youth captured in their kaleidoscope of color and cityscape exuding a defiant style visible in the eyes of young city dwellers worldwide--freedom, identity, and purpose. A pleasant compliment to Veleko’s graffiti images highlighted Elsewhere Online last August.
We at Code Z are happy to see more Africa hot, and look forward to upcoming exhibits and what they have to say for themselves.
Fashion is at The Danziger Project in New York through February 24.
When talking about racism in the workplace in the U.S., we tend to think about the professional usual suspects: corporate businesses, law firms, academia. However, we tend to overlook that those same problems are found in city planning, fine arts, historic preservation, interior design, and landscape architecture. An upcoming conference on the subject caught our attention: Unspoken Borders, sponsored by PennDesign Black Student Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking place March 30 and 31, this conference aims to inspire discussions on the historical and current barriers that exist within the design professions by investigating the tangible and intangible effects of racism on various aspects of these professions, and how they affect existing boundary conditions within cities. In an effort to combine theory and practice, the conference will also facilitate a design competition for participants.
In light of recent events that highlighted the lack of thought to racial and socio-economic diversity in city planning (can we say the "rebuilding" of New Orleans), this conference could not have come at a better time. Racism affects every aspect of American life and it is surprising that dialogue centering on professions that literally shape our everyday life occurs so infrequently. PennDesign Black Student Alliance's goals are to have participants be cognizant of form, function, outcomes, and unintended effects of design, or lack thereof, on minority communities.
The two-day conference will include keynote speakers Walter Hood (landscape architect and principal of Hood Designs) and Mitchell Silver (director of Raleigh, North Carolina Department of City Planning and Raleigh Urban Design Center). The conference will take place at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Design and is a free event.
Given that we'll soon be hitting a number of academic-related art events, we thought "operation infiltration" would be a fitting theme for the jobs listed below. Check out these vacancies in academic and for-profit institutions:
The Cooper Union
Assistant Professor-tenure track, BFA Program
Sotheby's Institute of Art
Director, Contemporary Art Program
Alabama State University
Assistant/Associate Professor of Art (Two Positions)
Pittsburg State University
Assistant Professor of Art History
University of California, Santa Cruz
Dean of Arts (PDF)
Indiana University
Assistant Professor of Sculpture
University of Montevallo
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
Sarah Lawrence College
Drawing-Guest Position
Visual Arts/Digital Media-Guest Postition
Last time we at Code Z checked definitions, cool went something like "cooler than the other side of the pillow," or "turning desire into deed with a surplus of ease" according to Donnell Alexander. Common knowledge?
So we were particularly miffed, then annoyingly amused, to read standardized cool illustrated in, "Truly Indie Cool," a recent article in the New York Times. Jessica Pressler references the Urban Dictionary's blipster, "a person who is black and also can be stereotyped by appearance, musical taste, and/or social scene as a hipster."
So, black, plus stretch jeans, gently worn cowboy boots, a mohawk and a BLOC PARTY play list equals blipster? Interesting. According to our arithmetic, the equation seems blemished, or could that be the reason for publishing the article?
"I'm cool like this: I read fashion magazines like they're warning labels telling me what not to do," said Alexander. And although he and Digable Planets go on to further articulate cool, Pressler's article--her most emailed and blogged--produced blogger retorts, questions, and then discussion among the community. Maybe the article warns what to expect during black history month. Even so, it preempts a dialogue, or at the very least, acknowledgment of black rock and rockers, its synonymous supporters and catapults the so-called blipster phenomenon aboard the mainstream culture express. Or is it possible that the sole purpose of Pressler's article is to create a buzz, forcing the word on the tongue and into the fingers despite its sour taste? Possibly maybe?
The birth of blipster and "truly indie cool" implies a surge of black rock and rockers on the scene. When melanin sprinkled bands like TV on the Radio and The Crooners leave university radio stations and Parisian street corners to don the covers of SPIN and The Fader, people are forced to question why the bands are not reflective of their audiences Or are they?
This month's feature article at Code Zexplores Raymond Gayle's film Electric Purgatory, which highlights the story of black rockers. In exposing the pleasure in and plight of the black rockers, can future enthusiasts rework the hip-hop trend with a possible rebirth of cool amongst black, looking back on the likes of Fishbone, Living Colour, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and TV on the Radio as the standard--and return to creating cool again? Maybe the alleged isolation will forge a fiercer, more defiant riff in rock?
Maybe like Gayle and his film, the creatives will focus on creating--in any method or scope--and worry about cool when it is defined.
First we want to say that we know what it's like to be sleep-deprived, so we're all the more grateful to Kenyan artist Jimmy Ogonga for staying up waaaaay past his bedtime to let us know how the opening for My Vision went in Mannheim, Germany on February 3. Jimmy collaborated with IngridMwangiRobertHutter (the husband and wife collective) on an installation for the show.
The show, titled My Vision: Ideen für die Welt von morgen, is mounted in Anna Reis Hall at the Reiss Engelhorn Museum, and the MwangiHutter/ Ogonga collaboration consists of video depicting one near-anonymous figure carving hatch marks into the back of another near-anonymous figure. We were reminded of similar depictions of scarification by Carl Pope in the 2000 WhiBi. Jimmy told us that the video grew out of ongoing conversations between the three artists--conversations that eventually arrived at the difficulty and pain around the idea of multiculturalism. Says Jimmy, "It is important to note that multiculturalism is the product of a clash, not a comfortable convergence."
The current piece, called "Conscious of the Wall," extends the work all three have done on loss, displacement, and trans-location. In fact, it was through a show on these ideas that we first started noticing Mwangi late last year.
Although the three have no specific plans to collaborate in the future, we've heard that coincidentally all three will be in Bamako, Mali in April for a video workshop titled Faces and the City, and that anything is possible from that confluence.
My Vision closes April 15.
Artistic collaborations are a wonderful way to support and nurture the creative community. LAXART understands and celebrates this theory. This Los Angeles non-profit contemporary art space offers a broad range of architecture, design, and visual art. The eclectic organization has a new project with Uber.com called Ten by Ten.
The Director and Curator, Lauri Firstenberg--who has worked with artists such as Ike Ude and Isaac Julien--put her head together with artists Glen Kaino and Daniel Joseph Martinez to establish Ten by Ten, a monthly dialogue between 10 artists and 10 writers. Each artist has designed an Uber page and the writer will critique the work that will create dialogue and bring awareness to the work. Each artist and writer's Uber page is linked to the Ten by Ten space. The creative minds for the premiere edition include Daniel Chamberlin on Brian O'Dell, Anjali Gupta on Saul Alvarez, Gean Moreno on Aaron Sandnes, and Laura Richard Janku on James Melinat.
LAXART celebrates contemporary art, architecture and design with the concept of creating interaction and discussion among participants and visitors. We've noted LAXART's more than casual commitment to artists of a wide variety of cultural backgrounds; specifically, we remember from last year Kalup Linzy, Mark Bradford, and Leslie Hewitt, among others. We've also been alerted to Angelino Rodney McMillian's upcoming gambit with Olga Koumoundouros in the space this March. Title: On the Porch.
On jobs in the arts, some view the omission of words like "health insurance" and "paid vacation" as coming with the territory; we see it as a sign for more work to be done in terms of arts advocacy. Taking the temperature of already existing web-based employment search engines, we decided to stick our pinky toe in this pool [sorry... U.S.-only for now. -ed.] by using Wednesday, the step-child of Friday, as a day of celebration in securing that job, gig, freelance opportunity, residency…
Each week we will highlight a different area of specialization, be it faculty appointments or exhibition design projects. This week it's all about the fellowship and intern experience. Here's to crawling before starting that 500-yard dash.
Program Fellow
San Franscisco Foundation
San Franscso, CA
Newhall Curatorial Fellowship
Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY
Artist Gallery Internship
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA
Curatorial Fellowship
Yale University Art Gallery
New Haven, CT
Center for American Art Fellowship
Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowship in Photography
Curatorial Fellowships—Print, Drawings, Photography
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Romare Bearden Minority Museum Fellowship
Saint Louis Art Museum
Saint Louis, MO
Although we doubt the King of R&B will grace the place, Sharon Bridgforth, an award-winning performance artist and writer, invites Austin massive to Sexy Sundays, to step in the name of her love conjure/blues. Love conjure/blues, an award-winning novel and piece of performance literature, was originally published by Red Bone Press. Bridgforth is currently embarking upon fusing her novel embodying the jazz tradition with a menagerie of stellar stage, visual, and vocal creatives to create a film celebrating the oral tradition. The film will be submitted to national and international film festivals, while Bridgforth takes the digitally interactive performance to theater. We recently checked Bridgforth in our "Deep in the Heart of Texas" January feature story as one of five female artists in Austin demanding a space to create.
Sexy Sundays is a monthly dance and community series that supports Bridgforth's works and seeks to unite the Austin arts community. February 25 marks the next opportunity for you to Bus Stop or one-two step for a creative cause. If not, check the web site for more information on the series and film project.
Marissa Arterberry is a young designer we've been keeping an eye on for a while; a fav, as she seems to be making a whole career out of busting stereotypes particularly in the realm of gender and gender representation. Her new zine Girlblue is a slim, 12-page teaser for her upcoming book devoted to the out-of-the-ordinary black female experience. After a few false starts with the printer, we're told the zine has finally shipped.
Through photos and essays, the Girlblue book will profile all manner of black women who don't quite fit in--from Tamara in Owings Mills, Maryland (more widely known as the 'net celebrity "Bitchface"), whose personal style is an idiosyncratic transmutation of Japanese street culture to Zombie Baby Doll, a Lawrence, Kansas artist who specializes in imagery of hypodermic needles made all cute 'n' cuddly.
The Girlblue zine and follow-up book explore these women's stories, how they grew up, and where they are now.
A play a day keeps the creativity at play. And with no pun intended, Code Z rarely doubles back, but we were forced to return to 2002 and Suzan Lori-Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays, after peeping her works at The Warehouse in Washington, DC. Three hundred sixty-five days later it's 2003 and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter, Suzan-Lori Parks manages to document her daily aspirations, observations, and interactions birthing 365 Days/365 Plays. Her collection--pregnant with humor, disturbing, thought provoking, and courageous--is the result of Parks spending 2002 writing a play a day. Local DC performance artists from Sol & Soul, The Black Women Playwrights’ Group, and writer and performer, Holly Bass presented 14 of Parks’s January pieces. Although each play is unique to its day and circumstance, with varying lengths and themes, each carried a sense of singularity and continuity reflected in the stream of consciousness of everyday people. The two weeks of plays tackled the race issue, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, womanhood, incest, and a host of other themes, but as each actor exhaled and exited stage right, the audience was tasked with inhaling the last breath to continue the conversation that Parks initiated. The DC troupe translated Parks's open works, invoking a unique remix to her nth day.
In that same spirit of community continuity, Parks's works will meet the public in over 600 theaters nationwide until November 17, making it the largest theater collaboration in U.S. history-free of charge. At the hands of the public, Parks takes a risk, presenting her humanity to the public and ultimately leaving the curtains up and stage lights on so the people can live their own endings.
Although the performance spent only one night in DC, the plays are taking place across the nation, so be sure to check for your zip code, if it is not there, maybe you can do something to bring it there.
In the between, we will check where Topdog/Underdog took Mos Def, but Code Z always maintains bit of anonymity, so look for more in February's music issue.
Corey "CJ" Jennings, CEO of Next Generation Awareness Foundation told us some time ago that one of NGAF's missions is to bring independent film to U.S. cities that aren't used to getting the pick of the cinematic litter. And although Washington, DC isn't exactly a cultural backwater, it's also not New York or Los Angeles.
That means we're even more interested in the films selected for this year's Film & Discussion Series, which focus on young filmmakers and youth culture. Films include Aspen Shortsfest Award winner Antonio's Breakfast and the 2005 documentary Schooling Baltimore Street, which chronicles the political efforts of Baltimore teenagers protesting budget cuts and teacher shortages.
We've also got our eye on Chantel Woolridge whose film All Falls Down will be screened at the Series. Chantel wrote the film at age 15, and the script was selected by Scenarios USA to be produced with the aid of a professional film crew. According to Chantel, All Falls Down is the story of a group of teenage girls who encounter a group of teenage boys on their daily subway commute; and, well, you know what happens when teenage boys and girls run into one another. Let the peer pressure begin. Director David Koepp was drawn to the film for what he calls its "authenticity and heart," and several of the actors report getting into the film's "realness."
The youth films screen at the Film & Discussion Series on February 10 in Washington, DC.
Okay, we can't imagine how this has slipped through the cracks, given that our friends at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco's Mission District have been bugging us about it for weeks. We're just glad we've finally come to.
Seems Bay Area conceptual artist April Banks has been doing some traveling--to cacao farms in Ghana and Cuba and to the New York Board of Trade--and has come back with... chocolate. April's first solo exhibition, Free Chocolate traces cocoa's global journey from farmer, to trader, to chocolate lover. Along the way, her multilayered, multimedia installation traces the complex ways in which we participate in global economies.
The global movement of consumer products has been much in our sites lately. Remember that film about Ethiopia and the coffee issue? And how about the growing outrage over diamonds? Likewise, April is also dealing with how our personal cravings, desires, and indulgences carry global consequences. We're told the exhibition features, among other things, photography, custom chocolate bars, and a panel discussion on fair trade. Free Chocolate runs at Intersection for the Arts through February 17.
By the way, now that our consciousness is raised, we've decided not to demand our... ahem... gift box.
Film is a surface art. Light on the water, shadows on the pavement, white snow on black skin--the illumination of contrasts. British-born filmmaker Isaac Julien plays these surfaces like a chess game, plotting images in calculated quadrants across art gallery walls. From the expansive vistas of the American southwest to the opaque angles of a foggy London corner, Julien's films map territories of emotional transit. Films like The Long Road to Mazatlan and Looking for Langston evince notions of elusive possibilities. Reinventing fabled locales, such as the renaissance-era Harlem of Langston Hughes, Julien gives new witness to tales of longing, lust, and liminality.
But film art, with its multiple projections, fragmented narratives, and sparse dialogue can be disorienting. Perhaps less disorienting then is the film-inspired photograph. For Currents 99: Isaac Julien at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Julien exhibits a group of photographs from the True North series. The photographs were taken in advance of Julien's 2004 film of the same name. Described as a meditative commentary on the sublime, the film muses on the story of Matthew Henson, the African American guide who traveled with explorer Robert E. Peary on a pioneering trek to the North Pole. In both the film and the photographs, Julien once again engages an idealized landscape as the setting for reimagined realities. Unlike a film still, which freezes motion into stasis, this photographic suite of wintry scenes allows you to create your own sequence of events. On February 15 let the artist be your guide. That's when Julien will talk about his work with exhibition curator, Robin Clark, followed by a screening of True North and an exhibition viewing. Currents 99: Isaac Julien is on display at SLAM through March 11.
Back in our December countdown, we offhandedly suggested that Julie Mehretu might be one of the single most important artists of the 21st century. We may have overstated the case, but the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has just announced a $50,000 grant to Detroit's DIA earmarked to commission new work by the artist to be installed at the DIA in the fall. The work will share space with Diego Rivera's 1932 Detroit Industry murals and will address similar themes of urban space and the social and political issues that follow from it. The project's title: City Sitings.
We note that Julie's ties to the American midwest are more than skin deep; the Ethiopian-born painter was raised in East Lansing, Michigan and is also a former Walker (Minneapolis) artist-in-residence.
The Joyce Awards are made annually to support midwest cultural institutions to commission new works from artists of color. Part of the 50 grand will also fund a workshop, partly of Julie's design, that will connect Detroit public school students with their experience of the city and of the work. City Sitings is then scheduled to travel to three additional cities after its DIA debut.
Standing in the shadow of Hollyweird is the City of Angels. Historically, Los Angeles is home to gold--both black and the kind that manifest destinies are built on. The Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers-West will soon present a natural/national treasure of another sort. Filmmaker, and BAD-West founder, St. Clair Bourne will be honored. With impressive forty-plus projects under his belt, Bourne doesn’t appear to be slowing down. He was most recently responsible for producing Thomas Allen Harris’s Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, which premiered on PBS last year and is currently available on DVD.
With a history that includes documentaries covering the lives of John Henrik Clarke, Paul Robeson, and Gordon Parks, Bourne is said to be prepping a four-hour documentary on the Black Panthers. If it’s anything like his previous work, we know it’s gonna be the joint. So, if you find yourself out Cali way on February 7, swing by the Writers Guild of America and enjoy BAD-West’s Tribute Evening to St. Clair Bourne.
The festivities will include a reception, followed by a compilation screening of Bourne’s work, and a rap session with filmmaker Julie Dash.
