Yes, black gold that is, but this ain't Texas and we are not talking tea. We are talking about Tadesse Meskela’s battle of the bean in Black Gold, a documentary shadowing Meskela as he fights for fair coffee prices and distribution on behalf of his 74,000 Ethiopian farmers. We've just learned that the film opened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and is scheduled to open in the UK and Ireland in June. Meskela, general manager of Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, spent the last several years trekking about the globe courting multinationals, challenging the goliath policies of the World Trade Organization and other government ministers to consider Ethiopian farmers as equals in trade as opposed to an inexpensive, abundant workforce.
Although the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia has endured two famines in the past 30 years while boasting the highest grade of coffee bean. Poignantly absurd, but a common story amongst many countries that boast highly desirable and profitable resources such as diamonds, rubber, cacao, and oil. Directors Nick and Mark Francis seek to show Westerners how consumption of such products affects all parties involved, as well as use the film to portray Ethiopia, and the continent in its entirety, in a more dimensional manner.
“Trade is more important to us [farmers] than aid,” says Meskela and we hope that efforts and advocacy surrounding this film will merit such reciprocity. Be sure to check for Black Gold screenings and discussions in the U.S. and elsewhere.
When Fox News asked then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the numbers of dead in Iraq, he told them "We don't do body counts on other people." Well some folks do. Now, in addition to that mother of all body counts, we've been alerted to the launch of Rio Body Count, which attempts to track the number of dead that litter the streets of Rio de Janeiro in what has become a virtual war zone.
According to Brazzil Magazine, the authors of the site are Vinicius Costa, a 25-year-old systems analyst and André Dahmer, a 32-year-old cartoonist, and they were indeed inspired by the Iraqi body count web site. The two consider themselves fiercely independent, making it known that they are affiliated with no institutions, NGOs, or political groups. We think this site acts as a hard-facts back end to films we revere, such as City of God, which use the violence of Rio as both scenery and plot point.
With the help of 5 additional volunteers, the organizers scan media reports and collect the details of drug deals gone bad, mistaken police shootings, revenge killings, and random muggings. From February 1 through yesterday (March 28), the city has witnessed 523 deaths. Rest in peace.
Call for Proposals: Moving
Walls 14 Documentary Photography Exhibition
Editorial Photography Grants Program
Getty Images
Social Science Fellowship Program
Economic and Social Research Council
Call for Proposals: Create Change
The Laundromat Project (PDF)
Open Call
National Black Programming Consortium
Call for Films
Chica Luna Film Festival
Call for Application
Shatana International Artist Workshop, Jordan
Call for Exhibition Artists
Intermedia Arts
We're glad Atlanta's own Oronike Odeleye keeps us posted on what Taller Portobelo Norte is up to both stateside and in Panama, that narrow neck of land connecting North and South America. The organization has recently announced a call to artists for project proposals for work to be developed during the 2007 10th Annual TPN Summer Art Colony and ArteFeria Exhibition.
We've been hearing lots of talk lately about artistic ecologies and intentional communities, and think that TPN's efforts are a part of continuing that zeitgeist. According to TPN, the organization "aims to provide a space for visionary artists whose work stimulates ideas and expands artistic boundaries and conventions." They plan to accomplish this through this summer's residency, which is designed to support works in progress. Work made during the residency may be considered for the ArteFeria de Portobelo, scheduled for June 23.
TPN began informally in 1997 when Dr. Arturo Lindsay of Spelman College used his Lila Wallace grant to travel to Panama and study sculpture. Once there, Lindsay joined with photographer Sandra Eleta and artist Yaneca Esquina to explore African cultural retentions and to begin building a bridge between Portobelo and Atlanta.
Artist proposals must be in by April 2.
We only have a few clues to who this brotha is--his website is decidedly opaque on the matter, but we decided we'd go ahead and give him a nod and figured maybe he would find us.
A project supported by the National Black Programming Consortium, Afrogalactic Postcards is the serial web project of a space traveler, philosopher, and generally out-there artist who has condensed his vision into small visual capsules playable online. We like the Afrofuturistic impulse and wouldn't mind seeing this guy riff with Rammellzee or maybe Beth Coleman at MIT.
Among his "Cool Facts About Intergalactic Matters":
And how come my postwaves travel farther when my pet goldfish is nearby? It's a mystery.
How come I can hear cabbages cry and the incubators can't?
How come the mothership always knows when I fall in love?
The cosmos is so vast. I am so small.
The mothership takes for ever to make an orbit; and by the time it reaches its destination, no one even remembers why they took the journey in the first place.
We say keep traveling the galaxy and don't forget to write.
We've been keeping our eye on indie filmmaker St.Clair Bourne lately, especially since various groups, including BAD-West have seen fit to sing his praises so loudly.
He let us know he's been on the road lately, but has been steadily at work on a new documentary: Pictures Tell the Story is slated to be a life and times portrait of Ernest Withers, a self-employed photographer best known for having captured pivotal moments of the civil rights era. His self-published book Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case not only documented the Emmett Till murder, but served as a catalyst to mobilize civil rights action throughout the U.S.
Bourne is currently in the research and development phase and is also spending time shooting enough footage to create a sample reel. The film will not only document Withers's photography, but will provide a social history of Memphis, music, and the civil rights era in general. We like the main message Bourne is trying to get across in the film: heroic acts are often performed by those who think of themselves as "doing their job." A call-to-arms for the artist if there ever was one…
What's cooking? Well, a lot of things are on simmer, but we would like to sample a dish from NYC's The Kitchen as they serve the Just Kick it Till It Breaks collective exhibition curated by Debra Singer and Matthew Lyons through April 28.
It seems like Singer and Lyons, Executive Director and Assistant Curator respectively, also have their ears to the streets only to witness a tepid silence or maybe observe that emerging political resistance movements being absorbed into the mainstream for consumption. Thus, they organized an exhibit and corresponding performance art series where artists employ visuals from the immediate environment addressing the "political" by using familiar methods to create subtle messages and examine the upstaging of underground movements. Just Kit It Till It Breaks features works by Fia Backström, Carol Bove, Bozidar Brazda, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Adam Helms, Scott Hug, Corey McCorkle, Dave McKenzie, Josephine Meckseper, Michael Phelan, and Meredyth Sparks.
Images like those of Adam Helms and Dave McKenzie are displayed in such a manner that it moves viewers to question what is in front of them, as well as offers multiple perspectives on the culture of the political. We at Code Z are happy to hear that folks at The Kitchen are still kicking and screaming in hopes of breaking something--we just hope it is not the oven.
As many of our cities start to show the remnants of spring, our inboxes have been chockfull of e-mails listing residencies, fellowships and grants with corresponding deadlines in March, April and May. In response, we'll hit you with more of these opportunities next week. 'Tis the season.
Artist-in-Residence Program
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Fulbright-MtvU Fellowships
Fullbright
Artist Residencies
Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences
Workspace
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
Artist and Writer Residency
Santa Fe Art Institute Residency
Fall Artists Residencies
Ox-Bow
2008 International Artist-In-Residence Program
Artpace
Artist In Residency Program
Center for Contemporary Printmaking
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the emotions associated with such photos are surely innumerable, not unlike the word "home." Down home, Old home, back home--all variations on a theme. All references to a familial and spiritual place of residence. To flip a lyric spit by Rakim, life is as much about where you're from as it is where you are. Code Z knows this, the good people at NPR know this, and the Brick City knows it as well.
Through April 6, the WBGO Gallery in Newark NJ is presenting the photography-based work of five artists in Recollections of Once Hidden Histories. While DuBois spoke of double consciousness, in '07 we're specifically talking about dualities and dichotomies that manifest from Westernization, globalization, and multi-lingua inherent in today's society. This cultural dexterity is explored via the personal and often provocative works of Derrick Adams, A. Olusegun Fayemi, Leslie Hewitt, Yolanda Skeete, and Deborah Willis.
In the spirit of storied photographers Albert Chong, James VanDerZee, Coreen Simpson, and Seydou Keita, to name a few, Recollections shows us what it (and we) really look(s) like. Even if we don't hyphenate, ideologically many of us see ourselves as brothers and sisters from another (mother), that "mOther" being Africa, in this case.
Recollections, curated by Victor Davson and Rose Oluronke Ojo, invites us to consider our otherness as we straddle an expansive history bridged by memories and materials. And as many of us juggle being Africans in America, Europe, and elsewhere, we are reminded that where we're from informs where we're going.
Comics--often called The Boondocks, the Sunday-paper funnies, anime, manga or, formally, sequential art--no longer merit a simple smirk or chuckle to escape reality, but is aggressively addressed it at MoMA’s Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making exhibit. Employing the works of thirteen contemporary artists, the exhibit examines the way artists use their works as platforms to address social ills and problems while skillfully balancing abstraction with humor. Artists like Julie Mehretu and her chromatically-defiant canvas-scapes and Ellen Gallagher’s repetition and inversion use their work to strip down the complex issues that surround and interest them.
What we at Code Z find particularly unique are the varying methods and processes used by the featured artists to articulate their work. “I work with source material that I am interested in conceptually, politically, or even just visually," explained Mehretu in a MoMA interview. "I pull from all of this material, project it, trace it, break it up, recontextualize, layer one on the other, and envelop it into the DNA of the painting. It then becomes the context, the history, the point of departure. It becomes the place of the painting.” Gallagher’s Oh! Susanna also uses the allure of abstract art to challenge the ideal of race as a fixed identity through the use black caricatures and an old slave song.
Comic Abstraction affirms the notion that artists play an integral role in serving as society’s mirror that lends visual and conceptual commentary to the current social climate.
Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image-Making is at MoMA in New York until June 11. If you miss Mehretu and Gallagher at MoMA, be sure to check for them here and here.
Not that anyone can really do it, but we try to keep up with the global meanderings of DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, and though he has turned up left and right in collaborations with the likes of Killah Priest and Lee "Scratch" Perry, Paul seemed especially proud when he told us about his latest gambit with longtime idol Yoko Ono on her new release Yes, I'm a Witch on the Astralwerks label.
Spooky's track is called "Rising" and is based on Yoko's poem of the same name. The track also features Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth on guitar. It is available--of course--on his MySpace page. Other tracks on the album feature Cat Power, Hank Shocklee, and The Flaming Lips.
Aside from this latest release, we note that in March, Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation will be screened at Teatro Circo at the 8th Abycine Film Festival in Albacete, Spain, and that he has just been added to the bill for the Old Knit (Knitting Factory) 20th Anniversary celebration at Town Hall in New York City.
By plugging into Code Z you are living affirmations that we are not a monolithic people solely motivated by popular culture and the like. This week’s job listing coveys that sentiment with an all you can eat buffet-style offering. Acknowledging that we’re preaching to the choir, let’s just cut straight to the pounds that precede the church announcements and visitor welcomes.
Film Arts Adminstrator
The Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film (Charleston, NC)
Director of Development
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Assistant Professor, Sculpture
Indiana University
Executive Assistant to the Director
UCLA Hammer Museum
Art Handler/ Senior Preparator
Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, NY)
Executive Director
Art for Change (New York, NY)
Archivist (2)
David Zwirner Gallery (New York, NY)
Exhibitions Adminstrator
American Federation of Art
Public Art Program Manager
Sprout Fund (Pittsburgh, PA)
Director of Education
Blackrock Center for the Arts (Germantown, MD)
Long before Sun Ra packed his bags and moved to outer space and back, he spent a good part of the 1950s preaching on a street corner on the south side of Chicago. We would have liked to have seen that.
Fast forward to 2000 and someone (it's left mysteriously vague who it is) stumbles across a folder labeled "One of Everything," which is on the verge of being destroyed. Turns out the folder contains the original typed manuscripts of 46 of Sun Ra's proclamations--no, “detonations”--from those early street-corner days. John Corbett, writer, producer, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Adjunct Associate Professor, compiles the manuscripts, transcribes them and the result is the Whitewalls release The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets.
We mostly love the first half of the book: all 46 manuscripts, reproduced in color (though mostly the colors are beige and cream), showing Ra's scratch-outs, margin notes, and... uh... idiosyncratic typing style. The second half of the book comprises the same set of manuscripts cleaned up for easier reading. Collectively, the broadsheets treat racism, class, and America's historical destiny all in the context of a critical re-reading and reconfiguration of the Bible. We find in them a healthy dollop of interpretive genius with a generous sprinkling of crazy-man rambling. Just like Ra himself.
Among the notable passages, this one leapt out at us: "You are the key to the world's confusion. If you turn again, the door to life will open. It is better to have the right key to open a door than to knock for an eternity and never be welcomed inside." True dat.
It looked dicey there for a minute. The folks over at the Cadre biannual grant for visual artists--Deirdre Visser and Code Z affiliate Carla Williams--even extended the deadline for applications in order to make sure word had gotten around about the new grant.
In the end nearly $4000 was granted to 6 visual artists in amounts ranging from $144 to $1066. Deirdre told us last fall that the whole point of the grant program was to establish a self-sustaining ecology of artists who both contribute to and benefit from the fund. Visser and Williams have been collecting small donations from around the art community (most donations were in the amount of $10), the idea being that both the giving and the granting would become an ongoing, sustainable practice that doesn't depend on some Mr. Bigbucks tucked away somewhere in Massachusetts.
In this first round of granting, we're particularly interested in Ifetayo Abdus-Salam who will use her grant to help fund a video that will integrate some 20 existing interviews with women and scholars in an "in-depth examination of the stereotypes of Black women in American society." We find this consonant with the work of Deborah Roberts and Floyd Atkins, which we're currently noting in Chicago, and of course Cristal Chanelle Truscott whose work on similar themes we recently heard about from PRH in Houston.
Among the grantees we also find Jessica Ingram who is continuing a photography project focused on sites of racial conflict and violence in the American south. Other grantees include Andy Fraser, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jessamyn Lovell, and Collaborators Guide, an art collective in London and Tokyo that will stage a participatory fundraising project whose proceeds will be redonated to Cadre. See that? Self-sustaining. They meant what they said.
It goes without saying that the African Diaspora is pretty far reaching. So while you’re walking the streets of Cincy, or H-Town, give a thought to your relatives (that may or may not be) kickin’ it in Hawai'i. That’s right, Hawai'i.
Thanks to the peculiar institution known as the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, you and your folks most assuredly have fam’ scattered hither (Paris) and yon, "yon" being anywhere between Mexico, the Pacific Islands and beyond.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, more African Americans--like Ernest Golden--decided to call the Big Island home. With a relationship dating back some two hundred plus years, someone has to have some photos at hand. At least, that’s what Hawai'i-based poet and performance artist Ayin Adams is hoping for.
Adams is presently compiling photographs and biographies for a photo journal titled African-Americans in Hawaii: How You Living? If you want to contribute, or know someone who may, hit up Ms. Adams directly for the fine details. And feel free to tell her that Code Z sent ‘cha.
Sweat: to manipulate or produce by hard work or drudgery, or to excrete moisture in visible quantities through the openings of the sweat glands. Or perhaps, the process, then product, of energy exerted to construct.
In Big House/Disclosure, Mendi+Keith Obadike's intermedia suite commissioned by Northwestern University’s Art Theory and Practice Department, the artists produce, manipulate and perhaps excrete sweat, as both product and process. In observance of 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British Slave trade in 1807 and Chicago’s pioneering of the Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance in 2002, this intermedia suite layers Chicago’s voices about slavery and the city’s slavery ordinance with live visual art and music performances and Chicago house music in a 200-hour house suite broadcasted in real time March 1 through 8 in Northwestern’s Krestge Hall. Intermediary artist/poet and sound artist/composer, respectively, Mendi and Keith flirt with the concepts of technology, sound, culture, to excrete the voices of Chicagoans and explore the profound effects of slavery in modern society. The concept, visible in Toni Morrison’s concept of music as healer, Big House/Disclosure employs music and sound as a structural base to teach, speak and possibly heal.
Employing a variety of media and toying with the idea of “disclosure" proves to be an engaging, yet palatable vice for M+K: In Big House/Disclosure, citizens air their perspectives on the Slavery Disclosure Ordinance, a law requiring organizations working with the city of Chicago to disclose if they have ever profited from slavery. Meanwhile Keith ceased to disclose much in his net.performance of selling his modifiable blackness on ebay in 2001. Mendi’s book of poetry, The Pink of Stealth also plays on disclosure with varying shades of pink to challenge the language of color and all its complexities.
If there is an inkling of truth in music and sounds as a healer, then stopping by Northwestern’s Krestge Hall in Chicago or logging on to the Big House in hopes of working up a black sweat is worth the while--a bit of soul warming never harmed the ozone or Al Gore.
Due to the e-mails and random hollers at museums, concerts and restaurants (shout out to the folks at Power Plant), we’re here to say, “we hear you. A post on web-related gigs and opportunities is on the way.” In our attempt to give up the goods, cue the credits below:
Call for submissions
SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival
Web Developer
Arts Engine, Inc.
Internet Project Coordinator
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Creative Art and Design Studio Assistant
Jonas Everets Design (New York)
Computer Animation / Film / VFX
Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF)
Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts
Media Art Research Award
Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF)
Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts
Hybrid Art
Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF)
Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts
The Next Idea - Art and Technology Grant for Media Technology, Media Design and Media Art
Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF)
Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts
Digital Communities
Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF)
Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts
Ok, at first we thought maybe it was some new hi-tech window coating to keep the sun out and the ride fly, but no, turns out UVC stands for The Urban Voice in Comics, the new mag that highlights comic book characters of color, which officially debuted at the last New York Comic Con (February 23-25). UVC calls itself "a hip, exciting, bimonthly entertainment magazine" that champions "the independent comic book publishers out there on the grind." And being of a similar aesthetic, we, of course, champion anything that champions the independent.
UVC is the work of editor Rich Watson--known as the man with his ear always to the ground in the world of black comics. Formerly the editor of Glyphs and now a regular blogger over at Pop Culture Shock, Rich had been wanting to get his knowledge of Black comics into regular print for a while. Enter President and publisher Ron King. The two together, along with other collaborators (including Omar Bilal, founder of Blacksuperhero.com) have created the magazine, which they see as filling a void in the ever-diversifying world of comics and sequential art.
UVC is free, full-color and available around the U.S. in comic book shops, record stores, and urban lifestyle stores.
Kara Walker, one of the youngest artists ever to receive the MacArthur "genius" grant, has gotten in plenty of hot water for the uncompromising use of perversion, scatology, and violence in her signature works. So it was no surprise that Reggie Prim, community programs manager at the Walker Art Center, figured there would be some work to do in the community before their Kara Walker retrospective went public on February 17.
Reggie told us, "My first reaction was, like, whoa!" when he saw the work about a year ago. That's when he set about to take the pulse of the community and get a sense of how Kara's work would be received in the notoriously liberal-yet-anal city of Minneapolis. Reggie and his cohorts gathered a couple dozen-community leaders--mostly Black--from a wide spectrum of arenas: artists, business people, media representatives, academics, historians, activists... and asked them what they thought.
There were some surprises.
Although it was an older generation of artists who first reacted against Kara back in the day (remember the Betye Saar flap?), Reggie found that the older generations in this group tended to show more tolerance and interest in the work, while younger generations flipped it the bird. Six hours worth of discussion later, the group proposed a raft of recommendations, many of which have been incorporated into the retrospective.
For example, tour guides and docents have been given extensive training on issues of representation, the history of the Walker, even the racial makeup of the Walker's board. Also, the work has been contextualized in a more robust way than usual, including a video interview of the artist that visitors encounter before seeing the work and accompanying works by other artists working in similar veins. Plus there are the usual lectures, discussions, and educational resources the Walker is so good at. We're hoping the show at least gets some discussion going in the broader community as it blows a hole in the status quo. After all, that's what art is supposed to do.
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love opened February 17 and closes May 13.
At the start of his funky groover "Mind Power," the late Godfather of Soul, James Brown, said “It is what it is.” And we here at Code Z believe that The Postmillennial Black Madonna: Paradise & Inferno, a two-venue multimedia exhibition by 23 Artists is it--or at least the beginning of it. Artists Renee Cox, Wangechi Mutu, and Rush Arts Gallery founder and president, Danny Simmons have joined up with Brian D. Tate to bring us a meditation on the world that we live in. All of this is presented through the lens of the orisha, the Black Madonna.
On display until May 2007 and split between the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) (February 22-May 13, 2007), and the Skylight Gallery (March 15-May 5, 2007) Postmillennial is an all out assault on comfort. This pursuit of life’s inevitability includes new and recent works by such artists as Xaviera Simmons, Ayana V. Jackson and ATL’s coveted love child Sanford Biggers.
“… The Black Madonna may be considered the artist's patron saint. She is a beacon to the defenseless and the defiant, the cast-aside and the changed,” according to Tate. And it is the changes that we have witnessed since the dawning of our new millennium that these 23 artists intend to lay bare.
In the double-o-seven, Postmillennial reminds us that more, not less, is more. Between the two venues, where MoCADA represents paradise and the Skylight Gallery is deemed Inferno, each artist will contribute two works to this mixed/multi media exhibition. We are presented with double the art from dangerous minds whose thoughts are of the mortal coil and beyond.
If the previous six years are any indication, our postmillennial tensions will need this release. So, if you’re going to be in the BK, check out the show, set yourself free and give us your testimony.
Every once in a while, something strikes us in such a way that we just have to highlight it even though it's already passed. Like this for example:
The discussion of the world's multifaceted attraction to or love/hate relationship with the Black body will always be relevant as long as the Black body continues to be portrayed and projected from a manipulative standpoint. That's why we are glad that Temple University in Philly has chosen a group of artists and scholars to de-tangle the issues associated with the Black body.
Curated with visual artist, collagist, painter, Sophie Sanders, From Taboo to Icon: Images of the Black Body was a town-hall meeting, if you will, of artists who reflected on the racial implications of the Black body in contemporary art. Hosted by Temple University's Tyler School of Art, the panel was charged with honing in on this topic specifically from an African diasporic -based point of view. Panel members included Naomi Beckwith, Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Allan L. Edmunds, artist, educator, founder and president, Brandywine Workshop; Lonnie Graham, artist, cultural activist and professor of visual art, Pennsylvania State University; Emily Hage, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow of Modern and Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Deborah Willis, artist, scholar, chair and professor of photography and imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. The panel was moderated by Dr. Susanna Gold, art history professor at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and is part of the African Impressions / Contemporary Art symposium series.
