Wanda’s Picks January 2020
Happy New Year Everyone! I am certainly happy to be in 2020. It promises to be such a fabulous year. For one, we get an extra day in February, two it’s the 30th Anniversary year for the Celebration of African Americans and Their Poetry, Saturday, February 1 and the 25th Anniversary of MAAFA San Francisco Bay Area Ritual, Sunday, October 11. June 20 at the Capitol will be the Poor People’s March on Washington, DC, a continuation of Dr. King’s legendary campaign led by Rev. Dr. William Barber. It is also a call to all of us to practice what bell hooks calls a “love ethic a necessary ingredient in what King called “the beloved community.”
Here is a link to Events on Dr. King Day, Monday, Jan. 20, 2020
Call for submissions
If you have participated in the African American Celebration through Poetry in the past 29 years or would like to participate this 30th Anniversary, we are publishing an anthology. Send poems (5 or 5 pages), plus a bio and photo to racewoman@gmail.com or Poetry Anthology, P.O. Box 30756, Oakland, CA 94604. Deadline February 1. No profanity, which includes the n-word. No overt sexual themes or content.
If you would like to participate in the Celebration of African American Poets and Their Poetry (recent name or program), this 30th Anniversary Year, Sat., Feb. 1, 1-4 p.m., at the West Oakland Library, send submissions to the branch attention: W. Sabir, Poetry Celebration, 1801 Adeline Street, Oakland, CA 94607, 510-238-7352. We have a rehearsal on Sat., Jan. 25, 10 a.m. to 12 noon. The theme this year is “400 Years of California African American History” (1535-1872—slave state to now.) We are also looking at Association for African American History and Life’s (ASALAH) theme: “African Americans and the Vote.” All themes are welcome. The event is family friendly. No profanity, which includes the n-word. No overt sexual themes or content.
New Year’s Eve Reflection @ the Fillmore
Though I was disappointed that I didn’t get a Madri Gras umbrella at 12 a.m. I was not disappointed to be at the Fillmore for the marvelous concert featuring Lakou Mizik from Ayiti and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans. Whenever I am at the Fillmore I am transported back to Mosque 26 and Muhammad University of Islam. It is an easy trek into the past where I see Sister Isola and Captain May Helen and Sister Verta B. It’s funny how where security checks purses and wands men, is the same place where security stood back then. Upstairs where the bathrooms are and the bar were checkrooms where women and men were more thoroughly checked and extra clothes were available for people who were not dressed appropriately for the meeting.
When I look up at back stage I see the Minister’s office from Minister Majied to John Muhammad and Usman Mekki. The VIP area where we had classes was blocked off.
Upstairs in the dining area we’d have meals after each service with a big meal on Sundays with Sister Izola cooking up something yummy. Not one artifact from that time remains except memories I hold and others might hold. Given the look of the audience, not many people of African descent attend gatherings here. The promoters, Another Planet Entertainment (APE) are not friendly to Black press. I was there that evening because the Cumbuncha publicist reached out to me and the band manager put me on the list. $70 was a bit steep for me. Similarly, with First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to San Jose last year, by the time APE said no, the tickets were in the hundreds of dollars. Then Bill Graham Presents, now APE has no love for independent Black media. As Paradise says so eloquently in his poem, “They love everything about you, but you. . . .”
Even though Africans were not the majority Dec. 31-Jan. 1, those of us there enjoyed the ensembles. We knew Lakou Mizik were invoking Black gods and that New Orleans Preservation Hall stood for a tradition that was African, not white. PHJB is integrated, yet Walter Harris, drummer, Kyle Roussel, pianist, Ronell Johnson, trombonist and Branden Lewis, trumpeter are African, Clint Maedgen, tenor saxophonist, Ben Jaffe on tuba and bass are not. I believe Jaffe’s father incorporated the PHJB as a nonprofit and Ben, now PHJB Creative Director, created the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund to help artists displaced after the Great Flood—return home.
Nonetheless, it would have been nice to see all African men cover the stage playing our sacred music. Similar to the Lucumi and Santeria traditions out of Cuba, New Orleans and Ayiti are of this same caldron filled with sacred rituals and traditions that have sustained New Africans in this hemisphere for hundreds of years. There is a reason why when Lakou Mizik played NOLA Heritage Festival in 2017 and walked the streets of the French Quarter they saw not just colonial markers, they also felt General Henri Christophe’s resistance at the Citadel in Cap-Haïtien, Nord, where Napoleon’s army was toppled. When I visited this city and others in Haiti, I saw colonial and African New Orleans. If NOLA is the most African city in this nation, certainly Ayiti is the Caribbean’s most African nation.
It’s a shame that for African Diaspora artists to make money and to have international recognition it takes a nouveau-Columbus to plant its flag and in this case pick up an instrument before said artists can get out of town gigs. What is wrong with Blackness? We see evidence of its opposite all the time cross genres—music, film, stage, politics, education –
We also see the perils of integration in activist circles too – white people, many time white women, Asians—others othering, saving Black people. The colonizer might not see itself in such a light, but if a person does not look like the object of his or her or their concern, there is something wrong with this picture and it wreaks havoc on the objects’ psyche. How is self-love possible when one does not see oneself? How is power activated when one is powerless?
Even if the trend continues, be aware of its consequences and think before allowing others into one’s intimate circles. Whiteness is like a viral infection; it never goes away. This is why when Black people are present, there is usually a “leak” (read snitch) in the building.
This is the foundation of the Jesus Complex and why in the World Community of Islam, Imam Warith Deen Mohammed focused on looking at the legacy of images that illustrate the divine and how this imaging undermines African Diaspora notions of self. We worship whiteness because our deities look just like these aliens in the majority institutions across western culture. Slavery might have ended, but the systems with which slavery is based and founded did not cease. This is why Black death is acceptable. White shooters are treated as people, similar to the way Nazi soldiers who were the enemy rode in front of African American soldiers. Even white killers get better treatment than innocent African Americans whether this is shorter sentences for the same crime or permission to live to tell their story in court. Black people are killed before they can testify. What happens to the protagonists in the film “Queen and Slim”? Shot down in cold blood, for what?
When the white boy killed all the parishioners at the historic Black church in Charleston, SC, the arresting officers stopped by a fast food restaurant and bought him take out. He lived. Flip the scenario and let the shooter have been African and the church members white, he’d be killed on the scene. I am just saying, on the eve of the largest slave revolt in US history along the German Coast of Louisiana, January 8-12, 1811 where over 500 Africans were set on taking Orleans Territory to end slavery, starting with New Orleans, African America needs to reevaluate its priorities. “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until its won.”
As members Slave Rebellion Reenactment Army Nov. 8-9, 2019, marched in ancestral footsteps along the River Road towards New Orleans, shouting “On to New Orleans! Freedom or Death! Brandishing cane knifes, pitch forks, and other farm instruments . . . most of the 300+ on foots quite a few on horseback though our feet were tired and our bodies cold and weary at the end of the first day most of us felt honored to be able to participate in Dread Scott’s artistic staged reenactment of the largest slave rebellion in US history. These brave Africans who didn’t make it into NOLA as we did Nov. 9, nonetheless fought bravely and died on the battlefield. Their audacity so terrorized white slave owners that Claiborne, the eventual governor of Louisiana, ordered this history buried and the leaders’ reputations maligned as their bodies were left to rot along River Road, their heads lining the path we walked. The SRR Army was an opportunity to honor the veterans of an historic resistance movement that continues into 2020 and beyond.
Many traveled from outside NOLA to participate in the Slave Rebellion Reenactment. It was living theatre—we were not acting and the compensation, while a welcome surprise, I would have paid to participate. This attitude was no understood by those who were working the “gig,” the support staff in costuming, logistics, the film crew, even the intrusive massive news media.
There were too many white people, especially white men yelling and moving masses of Black people. Yep, the historic similarity was not lost on quite a few of us, but once the army was in its ranks, white people had to keep their distance because they were not a part of the army. Plantation owners were shot and killed and in the one battle between the Americans and the Africans where we lost, it felt minor in light of the larger aim of the rebellion.
January 1811 was an assertion of our humanity, something this battlefield where we are outnumbered could not erase. Sometimes victory is not present in a body count. Those 100 head along the road infuriated Africans. It didn’t make them afraid. Those mutilated Africans’ bodies just reinforced the barbarism of plantation owners, white people who would do something like this to another human being.
David Bruce Graves‘s Heaven and Earth at Joyce Gordon Gallery has been extended through Feb. 28. His artist talk is Friday, Jan. 17, 7-9 p.m., 406 14th Street, Oakland. Visit joycegordongallery.com
Author Event
Kiley Reid’s “Such a Fun Age”
The recently published book, “Such a Fun Age,” by Kiley Reid is a conversation about all the nuanced racialized aggression Black youth now find normal. Hostilities are in the open and guns pointed and ready to fire. Black people are guilty until their white people vouch they are safe. Sometimes this happens too late in the story or there is no “good white person” available. Even the more well-meaning white people participate in behaviors that pathologize Blackness.
If Claudia Rankin’s “Citizen: An American Lyric” had a sequel, Reid’s “Such a Fun Age,” would be it. There is even an updated soundtrack.
In “Fun Age,” Reid could be speaking of how fun it is to be single and young and free like Emira Tucker, 25. Emira’s a Temple University graduate, living frugally on her babysitting salary combined with her part time job at the Green Party Office in Philadelphia. Emira is trying to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her life as her parental health benefits clock ticks away. She loves two-year-old Briar Chamberlain and enjoys her work at the Green Party. She also has girlfriends she parties with who are all in grad school getting ready to start their adult lives.
One evening Emira and Briar are at a neighborhood store where a white security guard accuses the adult of kidnapping Briar as he points his gun at her. This incident, which Emira sees as just another Black rite of passage, sets in motion a series of scenarios so imaginative once unraveled the reader just wants to sit down and catch her breath or toast the author. It is such a whirlwind.
“‘Okay, ma’am?’ The security guard widened his stance to match hers. ‘You are being held and questions because the safety of a child is at risk. Please put the child on the ground—’ ”
“ ‘Alright you know what?’ Emira’s left ankle shook as she retrieved he cell phone from her tiny purse. ‘I’ll call her father and he can come down here. He’s an old white guy so I’m sure everyone will feel better.’ ”
“. . . Emira typed the first four letters of ‘Peter Chamberlain’ and clicked on his bright blue phone number. Against Briar’s hand, she felt her heart bounce underneath her skin.”
“ ‘How many are you, honey? The woman [who alerted the guard to the potential kidnapping] asked. ‘Two? Three?’ To the guard she said, ‘She looks about two.’”
“ ‘Ohmygod, she’s almost three,’ Emira muttered.”
“Ma’am?’ The security guard pointed a finger at her face. ‘I am speaking to the child.’ ”
“Oh right, okay. ‘Cause she’s the one to ask. BB, look at me.’ Emira forced a gleeful expression into her lips and bounced the toddler twice. ‘How many are you?’”
“ ‘. . . Emira looked back at the security guard and said, ‘You good?’ In her cell phone, the ringing stopped. ‘Mr. Chamberlain?’ Something clicked in the earpiece but she didn’t hear a voice. ‘It’s Emira, hello? Can you hear me?’”
“ ‘I’d like to speak to her father.’ The security guard reached for her phone.”
“ ‘. . . Don’t touch me!’ Emira turned her body. At this motion, Briar gasped. She held Emira’s black synthetic hair against her chest like rosary beads.”
“ ‘ . . . You are not even a real cop, so you back up, son!’ And then she watched his face shift. His eyes said, ‘I see you now. I know exactly who you are,’ Emira held her breath as he began to call for backup.”
“ ‘Mr. Chamberlain? Can you please come to Market Depot?’ In the same controlled panic that started her night, she said, ‘Because they think I stole Briar. Can you please hurry?’ He said something between ‘What’ and ‘Oh God,’ and then he said, ‘I’m coing right now.’”
Mr. Chamberlain’s arrival interrupted the silence that followed the call: “ ‘ That’s Dada.’ Briar pointed with one finger’” (14-15).
This book packs quite a punch, both in writing and in character development. You have to love Emira and her girls especially Zara and little Briar.
There are white folks and then there are the Chamberlains, Emira’s white folks—Peter and Alix, the husband a TV anchor and his younger wife, mother of two, an entrepreneur. They are all too original to be simply a figment of Reid’s imagination. Perhaps at best this family and the world they have created absent Emira are a functional composite—these characters can and do exist because they can. However, Emira and friends interrupt the flow, if only for a moment.
I suggest white people run, don’t walk and get a copy of this novel especially white men who date Black women and families that employ nannies and anyone who wants to take a peek into a world you might not be able to visit outside this fictional account. Othering is a phenomenon whiteness fosters.
Catch the author at A Great Place for Books, January 16, 7 p.m.
The Art of the African Diaspora, January 14 – March 13, 2020 at the Richmond Art Center
Art of the African Diaspora (formerly The Art of Living Black) is a non-juried group exhibition featuring work by over 150 artists of African descent. The exhibition will be held at the Richmond Art Center and satellite locations around the Bay Area. Recently the steering committee announced the event name changed to the Art of the African Diaspora. Opening Reception: Saturday, January 25, 2:00 – 5:00 PM Art of the African Diaspora 2020 Exhibition Information
http://richmondartcenter.org/exhibitions/art-of-the-african-diaspora-2020/
“Just Mercy” Free Screening and Fundraiser
Just Mercy Screening and Fundraiser for California Coalition for Women Prisoners
AAPI Women Lead, Asian Prisoner Support Committee, and New Breath Foundation host a free community film screening of “Just Mercy,” January 17, 6:30 (registration), 7 p.m. (screening). The film, which features, Michael B. Jones as Bryan Stevenson, Civil Rights Attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery. He also with RJI developed the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. A panel discussion follows the screening. Visit womenprisoners.org for more information about CCWP. The Grand Lake Theatre is located at 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland.
Soul of a Nation Exhibit at the DeYoung Museum’s Koret Auditorium presents:
In Conversation: Dr. Robert King + Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3 with Artist, Rigo 23, January 11, 2020, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
How can art be used to advocate for human rights? Hear Robert King and Albert Woodfox of Angola 3 in conversation with artist and activist, Rigo 23, about the unique ability of art to bring awareness to social injustice.
This program is part of our Free Saturdays celebration of the exhibition, Soul of a Nation.
Dr. Robert King is a prison reform activist and the first of the Angola 3 to win his freedom after serving 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. He was a member of the Black Panther Party in Angola, LA., the only official chapter of the BPP in the country. In the 17 years since his release in 2001, King’s focus has been to campaign against abuses in the criminal justice system, the cruel and unusual use of solitary confinement, and for the freedom of the remaining imprisoned, Angola 2.
Albert Woodfox is the last of the Angola 3 to be released. He was released in 2016 after his conviction had been overturned three times, spanning the years between 1992–2015. Woodfox continues his activism and advocacy on behalf of all those wrongfully imprisoned due to the multiple abuses of the criminal justice system; prosecutorial misconduct, missing or false evidence, bad science, and racism. As a former member of the Black Panther Party, he hopes to be a voice for the voiceless, suffering under brutal prison conditions.
https://deyoung.famsf.org/calendar/ee-saturdays-rigo23-conversation-angola-3
General admission is free on Saturdays at the de Young and Legion of Honor for all residents of the nine Bay Area counties. Tickets do not guarantee entry to screening. Seating for this program is limited and first-come, first-served. Seating tickets will be distributed an hour before the event begins in front of the Koret Theater. Admission to Soul of a Nation is free on the second Saturday of each month from November through February.
On the Fly:
Such healthy lifestyle factors are included in things that are not smoking, not on line viagra consuming much of alcohol, performing exercising regularly, and having a healthy and consuming balanced diet. Obese women are less likely to generic viagra in canada robertrobb.com have erectile dysfunction that is irreversible. For the most part, a buy cialis chemical known as sildenafil citrate. Well, she is a hypnotist doing some really kinky things, but levitra generic online contacted her, asking some questions and she responded immediately. Tape Music Festival in San Francisco, Friday-Sunday, Jan. 10 (8:30 p.m.); 1/11 (7 p.m.); 1/12 (7 p.m.) at the Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th Street. Visit http://sfsound.org/tape/ “The Prison Within,” directed by Katherin Hervey, debuts at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Fiesta Theatre, 916 State Street, January 16, PST, 10:30 a.m. The film looks at victim and harmer dynamics through a program that unites the two at San Quentin State Prison. Untreated trauma is devastating on the harmed and harmer who often acts out of this void. After the screening the director will be joined by cast who include: Sonya Shah The Ahimsa Collective; sujatha baliga, The Restorative Justice Project at Impact Justice; and Troy Williams, a formerly incarcerated prisoner at San Quentin, is the co-founder of the San Quentin Prison Report (SQPR) and a current Soros Justice Fellow. There is a second screening, January 18, 2020 at 5:00 p.m. PST at Metro Theatre, 618 State Street, Santa Barbara. Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Third and Mission in SF, Picks for January: January 14, 6-8 p.m. Opening Reception for “Black is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite,” “Don’t Shoot: An Opus of the Opulence of Blackness,” and “Baye Fall: Roots in Spirituality, Fashion &[…]” https://www.moadsf.org/calendar/ MOAD Free Family Day on Dr. King’s National Holiday, Jan. 20, 11-5. James Gayles’s Reflections 2: The Creative Process, An Exhibition through Feb. 7, 2020 at OakStop, 1721 Broadway, Oakland. Gallery Hours, Mon.-Fri., 9 am to 8 p.m. The exhibit is of water colors inspired by cultural figures. The book is a collaboration with 24 professionals writing about their approaches to creativity. James Gayles designed the logo for Maafa San Francisco Bay Area (maafasfbayarea.com) We are so happy he recovered from the terrible accident last year when he was hit by a car. Feb. 7, 6-9 p.m. is the closing reception. Chris Tucker at the Paramount Theatre, 20th and Broadway in Oakland, January 11, 8 p.m.
The Oakland Symphony, under the direction of Maestro Michael Morgan present: “Bernard Tyson’s Playlist” at the Paramount Theatre, Friday, January 24, 2020, 8 pm
Michael Morgan, conductor, says this concert is “A community-wide tribute to this visionary, who left us far too soon.”
The Bay Area community was shocked and dismayed when Bernard J. Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Hospitals — known as Kaiser Permanente, died suddenly late last year. He and Michael Morgan discussed his playlist, a tradition began a few years ago with W. Kamau Bell followed by Dolores Huerta. Guest curators sit on stage and share with the audience the inspiration for the selection. If I remember correctly, Mrs. Huerta danced (smile).
This concert will be an opportunity to get to know Mr. Tyson (Jan. 20, 1959-Nov. 10, 2019)
and to honor his legacy with the largest or one of the largest HMOs in the country perhaps world. Without giving away the entire playlist, the selections include: Sly & The Family Stone’s “Family Affair” and Moses Horton’s “I’m Gonna Sing Til the Spirit Moves My Heart,” to Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” and BB King & Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Let the Good Times Roll” performed by the Oakland Symphony & Oakland Symphony Choir, under the direction of Dr. Lynn Morrow, with special guests, Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, Jazz Mafia, and others to be named.
Mr. Morgan chose selections for this occasion to highlight the esteem Tyson’s community held him. This musical celebration will include readings of Tyson’s own words that inspired so many. I’d looked forward to speaking to Mr. Tyson about his playlist in an interview, so when I heard of his death, I thought I’d been mistaken. I wasn’t. When I went for an appointment last month, I spoke to a nurse there and she shared Kaiser is building a large teaching hospital in Southern California that will bear Tyson’s name. I will be giving away free tickets to the concert Jan. 24, on Wanda’s Picks, Friday, Jan. 10, 8-10 a.m. PT. Go to the website blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks to listen and blog. If you aren’t near a computer or smart phone and want to listen call: 347-237-4610. Send a message to (510) 255-5579 after you listen in. Maestro Morgan will be on at 9:30 a.m. PT.
Roxie Picks for January 2020:
Our Song, Jan. 13, 7 p.m. Big Roxie
16 Bars, directed by Sam Bathrick, 2018. 94 mins. DCP, Jan. 25
16 BARS is a feature length music documentary that offers a rare glimpse at the human stories – and songs- that are locked away in our nation’s jails and prisons. The film follows a unique rehabilitation effort in the Richmond City Justice Center that invites inmates to write and record original music. In the jail’s makeshift recording studio, 4 men collaborate on an album with a Grammy-winning recording artist. Todd “Speech” Thomas, from the iconic activist hip-hop group Arrested Development. As the creative process unfurls, each of these men must unearth painful memories from the past, which hold a key to a new chapter in their lives.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/339907823
Also at the Roxie
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Starts January 17. Roger Macdonald of The Internet Archive IN PERSON on Jan 17 & 18!
For thirty years, Marion Stokes, the left-wing activist and archivist, secretly recorded television 24 hours a day. Her project began with the Iran Hostage Crisis and ended upon her death some 70,000 tapes later. Capturing revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today, the Philadelphia-based Stokes’s stated intention was to protect the truth while the television networks were carelessly throwing away their own archives. Packed with unexpected twists and unbelievable footage, director Matt Wolf’s film is a sensitive portrait of a woman who was both a prickly, obsessive eccentric and a tireless media watchdog, one eye always opened for mediated falsehoods.
Comedy
19th Annual SF Comedy Festival or Sketch Fest January 9-26, features: Chloé Hilliard, January 18 at Live at the Alamo, Draft House, Cinema (18+). https://sfsketchfest2020.sched.com/artist/chloe_hilliard.20b61990?iframe=no
Chloé Hilliard is a larger than life stand up comedian. Well, that’s because she’s 6’1 and rocks a killer afro. Born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in a large Hasidic Jewish neighborhood, Chloé has spun her unique experiences into side splitting laughs. Once you know how to tell a story you’re set for life. As a journalist-turn-comedian, Chloé Hilliard is entertaining the masses with her wit and ability to find the humor in everything. For over ten years, Chloé was a culture and entertainment journalist, writing for The Village Voice, Essence, Vibe, King, and The Source. For her expertise on Hip Hop culture she’s appeared on CNN Headline News, ABC News, Our World with Black Enterprise and C-Span.
Her work has been featured in Best African American Essays: 2009. She made her national TV debut on NBC’s smash hit “Last Comic Standing” and has since appeared on AXSTV, Comedy Central, Tru TV, MTV and most recently “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” https://twitter.com/chloe_hilliard
Rashaad Newsome’s To Be Real at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Art Institute https://fortmason.org/event/newsome/
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) and San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) announce the West Coast debut of Rashaad Newsome’s To Be Real, an exhibition environment of collage, sculpture and the interactive A.I. Being. The exhibition presents a series of neo-Cubist portraits in expressive frames, threading an ornamental glamour through figures reflecting on human agency, Blackness, and the radical futurity of emerging identities. Paired with new sculpture, A.I. and installation elements, To Be Real invites the viewer to imagine a richer and mutually shared way of being in the world. To Be Real will be on view at SFAI’s Main Gallery within FMCAC’s Pier 2 from January 10 through February 23, 2020. Admission is free and open to the public.
To Be Real, which takes its name from Cheryl Lynn’s 1977 queer anthem, draws from ballroom divas, haute couture, and African art. The collages present extraordinary subjects, each aware of their pose. These works form an opulent web within the artist’s King of Arms Ballroom, an immersive installation of floral and heraldic patterns. The works bear witness to Ansista, a 3D figure suspended in a Vogue dance dip. Ansista combines a non-binary, African mahogany torso with a face inspired by the female Pho mask of the Chokwe peoples in Congo. The figure is additionally queered through contemporary assemblage: a lower body cut from a life-like sex doll, outfitted in drag padding; a custom wig, acrylic nails, and high heel boots; and a dress form that fuses traditional African and drag ballroom aesthetics. Together, the collages and sculptural figures draw from Queer, Black, and Ballroom life itself, pointing to the future utopias that these lives represent and inspire.
At the conceptual center of To Be Real is Newsome’s “child,” Being. The cloud-based, A.I. Being’s programming has been populated with the works of radical authors, revolutionaries, and theorists such as Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, and bell hooks, among others. Housed apart from the main exhibition space in its own gallery, Being acts as the critical heart or brain of the exhibition, exploring ideas about individual agency and historical oppression.
“Historically, Black people function inadvertently as queer objects,” says Newsome. “When we came to America, we weren’t human beings but things of some sort, neither occupying the classic subject nor object position. As a result, we occupied a peculiar non-binary space of ‘being’ which has disturbing analogies to the queer space inhabited by robots.”
In films and television shows like Blade Runner, The Terminator, Ex Machina, Prometheus, and West World, robots exist, like enslaved peoples, to obey orders. Often, they find ways to break those orders, emerging as subjects in their own struggle for freedom. Newsome invites us to converse with his Being as we seek to understand the meaning of “being human” against a history that keeps certain peoples outside the accepted realm of humanity. Built within a philosophical framework of post-colonial and Black liberation, Newsome’s Being interrogates the dehumanization of our world via emerging technologies and increasing awareness of anti-Blackness, intersectional identity, and the frames for human agency.
Exhibition Information
The exhibition will be on view January 10 – February 23, 2020 in the SFAI Main Gallery on Pier 2 at FMCAC. Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm. Admission is free and open to the public.
Open concurrently with To Be Real, the Museum of the African Diaspora’s (MoAD) presentation of Rashaad Newsome’s STOP PLAYING IN MY FACE! and ICON continues through March 1, 2020. The exhibition focuses on video works inspired by the origins and continued dynamism of Vogue, a dance phenomenon that emerged from Harlem’s queer ballroom scene. For more information, visit MoAD.
Parallel Programming
In conjunction with the opening week of To Be Real and of the FOG and Untitled art fairs, FMCAC and SFAI will present Newsome’s immersive performance Running. In this abstract portrait of soul, composed for light and voice, three singers explore the “vocal run”: a musicology term for a rapid series of ascending or descending musical notes, usually improvised and sung in quick succession. With the vocalists Kyron El, Aaron Marcellus, and Devin Michael from its New York City premiere, Running features an original score composed by the artist, incorporating samples of vocal runs by Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, James Brown, and Kelly Price, among others.
Running will be presented January 17th and 18th at 7pm in Gallery 308. Tickets are $20/15 seniors, students, members and are now available for sale.
Exhibition Organization
Rashaad Newsome: To Be Real is jointly presented by Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Art Institute.
To Be Real was originally commissioned by New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency Program in collaboration with Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, with generous support from The William Penn Foundation and De Buck Gallery. The Live Feed creative residency program supports and nurtures the development of new work with residencies and commissions generated over two years. Lead support of Live Feed is generously provided by Partners for New Performance and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
About the Artist
Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work brings together collage, sculpture, film, music, computer programming, and performance to form an altogether new field. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic works. Using diasporic traditions of improvisation and collage, Newsome crafts compositions that walk a tightrope among intersectionality, social practice, and abstraction.
Newsome lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, and his work is in numerous public collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC); Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); The Brooklyn Museum (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); and The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), among others.
The Art of David Bruce Graves: Heaven and Earth
A Review
By Wanda Sabir
Born in Pittsburgh, yet raised in Oakland, David Bruce Graves has been drawing and making art all of his life. His career began in the commercial art field, when he graduated from the Academy of Art in S.F. at the University of San Francisco before heading for New York City, where he lived and worked for many years. He says he wished he’d studied there so that he’d have had more access to working professionals during his collegiate years, but he made a success of it nonetheless before returning to the Bay Area in 2012.
This success, Graves says, is directly connected to his relationship with his aunt, Ann Tanksley, who was and is a fabulous artist and her husband John [who] was one of the best photo retouchers in NYC. When the artist’s family would visit the Tanksley home in New York, when he was a child, he says, “I was enchanted by their world and how they were so successful at it.
“Aunt Ann inspired and mentored me as she still does. John Tanksley took me under wing in a sense when I eventually moved there, and the many hours I spent looking over his shoulder as he retouched and manipulated photos for major advertising agencies had a big influence and closely relates to the technique I’m currently working in.”
Still kind of shy about talking about the work which in its presentation one can see how much thinking goes into each piece. Nonetheless, visual art is the kind of medium where silence is often justified. In Graves’s work, one kind of wants an opportunity to just live in the painting, and extrapolate on what a character might be thinking as in “The Griot’s Wife”, where we see a man with bag and his musical instrument, the kora, preparing for a storytelling journey. His wife walks with him, yet her eyes speak volumes as she appears to contemplate her husband’s impending departure.
Questions arise in a person after contemplating the work—too bad there are no chairs or benches in the larger gallery. Each of the 31 pieces deserves its own audience and then there is the art in the window– stunning. The title work: “Heaven and Earth” is there along with “Bush”, as in Angela Davis’s hairstyle crossed with Eve and Adam’s abode, or maybe it’s the countryside just outside of Accra – a place untamed, natural, pure.
Hopefully, the weather will stay warm and dry so patrons can step outside and check out the art displayed in the Joyce Gordon Gallery (JGG) window, 406 14th Street in downtown Oakland. Angela Davis might have had a bush, but this “bush” is a world atop a woman’s head. Butterflies and hummingbirds like the protagonist’s energy too. Graves’s butterfly motif imprint, like an artistic DNA allows one to trace artistic creations through the large gallery from wall to window cross multiple canvases. Images of warriors standing unafraid with wild animals — cheetahs in “The Swift,” as other images show characters dissolving, turning swiftly spinning into funnels – whirlwinds juxtaposed with youthful energy, rites of passage and liberated women stepping from the plantation into commerce and prosperity.
Graves says he is fascinated by the period after captivity when Africans could join this American society as participants economically and politically. So we see these women in compositions: “Flor De Noche (Flower of Night),” “Freebird,” “Lady and the Tramp,” African American women dressed for success challenging prejudicial and racist ideas of worthiness or equality. In other work, not in this exhibition, Graves adds future elements like spacecraft, an allusion to the Dogon, who perfected cosmic travel without leaving the ground. Graves’s work is layered and illustrates for finite minds the infinite span that is African culture– whether this is the western episode characterized by African enslavement which seems to have run its course or what is to come. Slavery does not define African people, “Heaven and Earth” puts this in perspective.
These compositions show characters who are emancipated, free from white pathology. Graves’s characters, the majority of which are Black women, are take charge personas. It is no wonder his work flies from the walls or bins wherever he exhibits.
When asked why he paints Black women, he says simply that African women inspire him. I guess everyone needs a muse and there is nothing wrong with seeing such beautiful African Diaspora women cover JGG walls. When I visited Graves fine arts website I saw a rendering of his mother and father. I can’t wait to have that conversation with him about his parents and how they nurtured his desire to draw.
David Bruce Graves “Heaven and Earth” exhibit at Joyce Gordon Gallery through February 28 is more residency than typical art showcase. African people have agrarian roots pre-captivity. This connection between Black people and the earth is a constant theme in this exhibition and is intended to remind patrons of relationships reflected in African spirituality. Such acknowledgement affirms the ashay or energy that courses through all beings regardless of said entities’ presentation. Whether one shows up as a rock or a tree, a leopard or a butterfly we are from the same river.
“Heaven and Earth” speaks to the first peoples, African people’s responsibility to care for and protect the planet. It is from this place – respect for all things from which ethics and values emerge. These principles feed consciousness, which fuels a kind of soul force that Africans in the Diaspora retain despite efforts to separate or to erase who we are.
Dianne D. Glave, author, “Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage” (2010) looks at the “two strands of environmentalism– the first is preservation of what some might term the ‘wild places, like the ocean, the woods and swamps. The second is [concerned] with natural resources, including land, water, forests, and minerals. . . . rural African Americans often applied both ideologies” (6). Key voices in this discourse are George Washington Carver, Ned Cobb and Thomas Monroe Campbell. These men saw the earth as something living which could be injured. Dr. Carver, the director of the Tuskegee Experiment Station said: “‘Unkindness to anything means an injustice done to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you I am kind. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil” (qtd.in Rooted 7).
Dr. King calls this is the “love ethic,” and one of the keys to “a beloved community.” At a time when ignoring the planet and its species hastens the end of life as we know it, Graves’s work poses options, some involving magical thinking. The artist illustrates across multiple compositions how powerful Black people are, whether it is “Black Panther Lives”– his persona marked by distinctive African lips and wide nostrils or in another work a glowing third eye watches from an oracle’s forehead. On the journey to this foreign place African people learned to speak in colors and form, such as Graves displays in his “Songhai Woman,” enigmatic of his creative process—
If we look at “Songhai Woman,” the work is both intellectual and pragmatic. Her character is a composite of multiple images – a nose, eyes, ears from different models. While other characters in titles such as “Swan Lake” or “Venus Africanus” are women whom have modeled for Graves, “Songhai” starts with several found archival photos which the artist methodically layers in a digital application to create the composition. As we spoke, Graves showed me where water color effects and textures transformed the dominant figure as it passively interacted with the other mediums. Who would have known technology had such capability?
In Graves’s works unraveling is a part of a larger process of building, rearranging. . . allowing textures to develop as the ingredients, like spices, migrate or move from aroma to concept. I asked if he were a sort of an Obatala—the god of the white cloth, who created the human form. Graves said he was more a Visual DJ—sampling, scanning, and remixing as he rocks to tracks from Black Coffee and Louie Vega. He uses both Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter, to work his magic and it is magical. Imagine a young African woman goat herder, a kid on her shoulders. There is a work depicting another young woman with a crocodile lifted over her head, “Genesis” open at her feet. This canvas is unframed waiting for a purchase in a print bin. It’s one of several deals; Graves’s work is affordable.
The artist said he works between two large 32 inch screen monitors, a move from traditional mediums to digital. Strategic randomness marks his canvas as colors juxtaposed in unusually creative ways have one’s head swiveling– the glass bead textures and almost tie dye moments on some canvases make fingers itch to touch.
His “Heaven and Earth” is peopled by characters we’d like to know about especially the stoic yet beautifully serene Mother/Goddess whose rendering is what one might call, the title track. In the work exhibited here at JGG, Graves illustrates the synergy between Africans and their environment whether its “Traveler,” where we see a youth in his robe and kufi hat striding cross an open plain or the already mentioned“Africanus,” a multi-limbed goddess standing on water swirling beneath her feet—she is Kali and Yemanja.
In “Suns of the Maasai”, there are boys becoming young warriors through initiation. in other works there are ravens in league with oracles, favelas and statues of Jesus. In “Swan Lake,” Graves suggests multiple endings to a story that shares many origins. The woman pictured wears the swan like a sarong, the bird comfortably draped over one shoulder, while other swans swim near her feet. A lush forest surrounds her on a bright day. David said that the natural surroundings in this work were from his walks at Lake Chabot in Castro Valley. The water reminds me of Oṣun River in Oṣogbo, Nigeria.
Graves compositions allow histories or multiple narratives to exist simultaneously. His work is not stagnant, rather the artist invites us into the medium to share our perspectives. We are in the now and then, joined at the horizon or along the edges where the two calabashes meet, damballah or the magical snake holding the two sides together where heaven meets earth.
Join Graves for an engaging free Artist Talk moderated by the amazing Brian Keith Thomas, Friday, January 17, 7-9 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street, Oakland.
