WTNN
Issue No. 2/March 2018
What’s The New News
FREE
ART
and
politics
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
The last issue of WTNN delved into the subject of community– community-as-location, community-as-relationship building, and community-as-fellowship. I wondered, How can you have community without politics to sustain it, defend it, or push for solutions to adequately address its needs? I don’t think you can. How can art not be political when it’s birthed in a place in which politics, overtly or covertly determines the way societies operate? I believe it must be. I think as many do that art is political because of its dialectical nature between itself and those who experience it. Art is also political because of its content and the space it occupies, in other words just its very being. Perhaps we are the principles and elements of art; perhaps we are, in other words, art personified. We may not agree on art’s definitions or its content but the ideas we exchange give rise to internal and external discussions that reverberate: ideas become opinions, and opinions become positions-some reflective, some reactive. What we do with our opinion is important. What we amplify or dismiss is consequential to our condition in life. Art acts as a catalyst, a reminder of everything in our society that needs to be changed or dismantled. However, we must analyze ourselves in addition to challenging the status quo. We recognize as a result, the multiple ways our structural systems empower few and marginalize many. Maybe we are catalysts, the amplifiers, and the art. Project Row Houses is a great example of what I’m saying. In any case, we must consider the principles and elements that underlie the art–that which we make and that which we embody–and apply them to our lives. We can’t hesitate to reframe, reimagine, rethink, and restructure that, which is not working for us, so that it can be beneficial to us all. We are art. The art is us. Without us there is no politics, and without politics there is no us.
WTNN
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BOX
LOCATIONS
1. Crumbville TX, 2316 Elgin St. | Artist: Brian Ellison aka Plutolenz 1.
2. Doshi House, 3419 Emancipation Av. | Artist: Monica Villerreal 9.
What’s the New News
3. Project Row Houses, 2521 Holman St. | Artist: Phillip Pyle,II
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4. S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, 3815 Live Oak St. | Artist: Jeanette Degollado
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5. Third Ward Multi-Services Center, 3611 Ennis St. | Artist: Ashura Bayyan 10.
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6. Houston Museum of African American Culture, 4807 Caroline St. | Artist: Marlon Foster 7. Wolf's Clothing, 2701 Emancipation Ave. | Artist: Anthony Suber
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8. Forward Times, 4411 Almeda Rd. | Artist: Sofia Mekonnen 9. Navy Seafood, 3201 Emancipation Ave. | Artist: Matt Manalo 10. The French Fry House, 3221 Ennis St. | Artist: Nathaniel Donnett
What’s The New News Creator Nathaniel Donnett Editor Julia Brown Curator & Programs Director Ryan N. Dennis Public Art Coordinator Jeanette Degollado Marketing & Communications Manager Michael McFadden
Graphic Designers Julia Brown Phillip Pyle, II
Newspaper Box Artists Nathaniel Donnett Matt Manalo Marlon Foster Sofia Mekonnen Anthony Suber
Writers Michon Benson-Marsh Julia Brown Photo Credits Nathaniel Donnett Cover, Page 2, 12 - Nathaniel Donnett Theresa Escobedo Page 3 - Pixabay Jeremy Johnson Page 4, 5 - Josie Pickens Page 6, 7 - Laura Wellen Josie Pickens Pages 8, 9 - Michon Benson-Marsh Andrea Roberts Page 10, 11 - Theresa Escobedo Laura Wellen Page 13 - Andrea Roberts Page 15 - Jeremy Johnson
Established 2010
Issue No. 2/March 2018
Special thanks to these businesses for their support: Project Row Houses Houston Museum-African American Culture Forward Times Wolf’s Clothing Navy Seafood The French Fry House What’s The New News is published with a grant from Surdna Foundation and through the support of Project Row Houses.
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
independent dramas. Any movie trying to embrace the world must grab wider than yet another all-white cast. In the wake of Black Panther, the hollow myopia and lack of effort in Hollywood moviemaking is simply Normally I avoid these kinds of movies. Most days I no longer good enough. consider superhero flicks little more than Hollywood’s excuse to spend a bunch of money. In these movies, Because yes, representation is political, the same beautiful people hit each other or blow things up, way art is political. Maybe it’s naïve to ever expect acting out yet another tired fantasy rooted in the idea otherwise. Amiri Baraka said: “The attempt to divide of American exceptionalism. And yet, I went to see art and politics is a bourgeois which says good Black Panther (twice) and, both times, was thrilled to poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything my toetips by the lushness of Ryan Coogler’s vision. is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not Challenge Day at the waterfall. The tribal fashion. The to have any politics is making a political statement charismatic villainy. The Dora Milaje (Danai Gurira by that act.” I saw a recent production of Baraka’s chucking a wig in the face of a baddie will give me “Dutchman” staged at Texas Southern University. The life, forever and ever amen). All. That. Brown. Skin. In actors inhabiting Clay and Lula were spirited leads, every corner of the (beautifully lit!) screen, there was and the message, as Michon Benson-Marsh explains, is still timely: Art is Political. someone brown to root for.
DISPATCH:
If we’re going to talk Art and Politics, let us start where we must, in the month of March in the year 2018: with Black Panther.
In this issue of Nathaniel Donnett’s What’s The New News, Josie Pickens takes us deeper into Black Panther, which has earned a billion dollars in less than a month on screens (and cash—the direction in which it flows, who earns it, who doles it out—is always political). It’s been gratifying to watch the whole country get swept up—people are cosplaying, imagineering sequels and prequels, and thinkpiecing still on whether or not Killmonger was right. I’m only slightly embarrassed by my internal surge every time I hear someone talk about the movie in agitated excitement, or see Black Panther co-stars Xing their arms on a red carpet amid a sea of Hollywood elite. Everywhere I look there are indications of a palpable shift—something has leapt out from the screen and is electrifying the whole world.
However. Art can also be the opposite of Politics. Or, rather, the making of Art is the opposite of Politics.
To be a maker, to make anything whatsoever, is an opportunity to go into your metaphorical (or actual) woodshed, shut the door, and dwell for a while in the apolitical. That necessary vulnerability, the required intimacy, is the opposite of political (see Laura Wellen’s “Letter from Me to You”). Your choices and preferences might be shaped by politics, but giving yourself to art, giving everything, the truest part of yourself, without demand or expectation, is always beyond the political. To conceive of a piece of art and make it live requires humility, hope, openness, self-exposure, close attention, and even gratitude— all things that can transport you away from that which As Theresa Escobedo mentions, Art inspires. It evaluates and assesses and assigns value (that is, the creates space for previously nonexistent possibilities political), toward that which receives and appreciates (a STEM center for youth in Oakland, for example). and sympathizes with and reflects on. Art is political in part because it makes people feel, it makes people do. Art whips up energy, and that The injection of Politics into Art becomes a crime when heating of molecules changes the air, dangerously, it prevents the art-maker from actualizing that which threatening the status quo (just ask the long line of would free us. Jordan Peele, after winning the Oscar fascists and dictators and authoritarians throughout for Best Screenplay, openly admitted he never thought history who knew to dispose of the journalists and the Get Out would get made. He stopped writing the script about 20 times before he succeeded. If this happened artists—the cultural truthtellers—first). to a privileged, already-star, then overconcern with But in addition to my enthusiasm about the movie, the political is definitely stopping many of us here on there’s been a lingering aftereffect that I didn’t the ground from doing our work. Andrea Roberts anticipate. I look differently at movie trailers now. describes how the prejudices hardwired into the most Those all-white casts bore me. Those samey plot-lines liberal-seeming corners of academia can affect the that only have room for a practically-invisible ethnic way we view ourselves, and hinder our art-making. sidekick bore me. More than that, they disappoint me. Only art projects us into a different world than the They make me impatient. The expansiveness of Black one that actually exists. And we need it all—yes, even Panther makes me impatient for that better world we Marvel movies, more than we know. all know exists somewhere. I was starving for this kind of representation and didn’t even know how badly. What were we discussing again? Ah, yes. The ubiquity of politics. by Julia Brown And I’m not talking about what Jeremy Johnson describes in “Toward a Taxonomy of Art,” tropes and Art is political, sure. But let’s all, for a time, forget that stereotypes trussed and dissected by the mainstream, fact. Just as no one can predict the future, you never lifeless. What I want on movie screens (and know how what you make will be received. You can everywhere else) is nothing less than Black freedom: only clear your corner and do the work you know you Black folk in rom-coms, in sci-fi, in horror, and in quiet, need to do.
In The Time of the Panther
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
FOR THE CULTURE: I am still processing all the beauty and boldness presented in Marvel’s Black Panther—a film directed and co-written by Oakland, California native Ryan Coogler—that was imagined and shaped, quite remarkably, from the Afro Future. The film has become an immediate artistic and cultural phenomenon, whether one is discussing designer Ruth Carter’s immaculately made (and thoroughly researched) costume designs, marveling at the all-Black bad ass woman-led army The Dora Milaje (and the woman warriors of Dahomey that they were inspired by), or admiring the shift in the traditional princess narrative offered through the character Shuri (King T’Challa’s tech savvy, whiz-kid, adorable younger sister). Deep, philosophical conversations critiquing Black Panther are happening as well. Many viewers are attempting to ascertain who the true hero is in the film: is it King T’Challa or Erik Killmonger? Does the film present a positive portrayal of African Americans through its characterization of Killmonger? Does Wakanda—this fictional African nation untouched by colonial influence or rule—care only for its own countrymen, heartlessly forsaking other less fortunate African people on the continent and throughout diaspora? How do African people battle colonial mentalities that might lead them to behave like their oppressors? Black Panther is doing precisely what Black art should, pushing its viewers to wrestle with their ideas about Blackness, about community, about legacy, about politics and especially about resistance. One conversation that we should be having more involves a short scene in the film where Erik Killmonger visits the African artifacts collection of a British museum. Here Ryan Coogler and his co-writers take the entire art world to task regarding accessibility, knowledge, cultural appropriation, repatriation and the lack of diversity in traditional and celebrated art spaces. In the scene, Erik Killmonger (the orphaned son of a Wakandan prince and heir to the throne), is seen admiring African artifacts. Of course, White museum personnel racially profile and follow him, a Black man wearing his hair in locs and dressed in streetwear. We learn that Killmonger is more knowledgeable about the artifacts than the White woman museum staff person pretending to engage him. We also learn that the artifacts Killmonger inspects were likely stolen from Wakanda (by way of Benin), and that the museum staff is so focused on profiling Killmonger that they fail to detect the setup and heist that follow. The scene reminds Black Panther viewers that Black patrons are often not welcome in mainstream, traditional art institutions, that these same art institutions are guilty of cultural and physical theft, and that they believe African art and culture to be important enough to include in their collections but not important enough to actually study, value or respect.
by Josie Pickens
What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
Casey Haughin, an art and history student at John Hopkins University, reminds us that the museum scene in Black Panther could not be a more honest representation of what is happening today in far too many high-ranking art spaces. She writes in an essay entitled “Why Museum Professionals Need to Talk about Black Panther”: “African artifacts such as those shown in the film’s museum are likely taken from a home country under suspicious circumstances, such as notable artifacts in real-life Britain like the Benin bronzes which now reside at the British Museum. It is often the case that individuals will know their own culture as well as or better than a curator, but are not considered valuable contributors because they lack a degree. People of color are less represented in museum spaces, and often experience undue discrimination while entering gallery spaces. Finally, museums are experiencing an influx of white women filling staff roles, leading to homogenized viewpoints, and lack senior staff with diverse backgrounds.”
Lessons Learned from the film Black Panther about (Mis) RepresentAtions of Blackness in the Art World
Describing the lack of diversity in museum spaces, Haughin references a recent study conducted by The Mellon Foundation and the American Association of Art Museums that revealed only 28% percent of museum staff are people of color— with most of that staff working as security guards or custodians, and that Black people, while representing 11% of the U.S. population, only represent 6% of museum visitors and patrons. The Mellon Foundation study also divulges that almost all curational roles in museums are held by Whites. Kimberly Drew, who works as a social media strategist for The Met, contemplated these statistics and what it means to be a queer Black woman working in such overwhelmingly White spaces. In an opinion editorial for I-D, Drew shares the following: “According to a 2013 study funded by the Mellon Foundation, 84% of curatorial roles in museums are held by non-Hispanic white people. This means that nearly 84% of the people who are making critical decisions about who is added to the canon, who becomes the subject of monographs and which art is important enough to be remembered, are from the same racial group (and in most cases, the same socioeconomic background). What might happen if the 20- and 30-something-year-old reporters asked more people (of all backgrounds) about this crisis? What if the art world was constantly held to account for exclusion, with every opportunity?” On too many days, for me, the answer to Drew’s question is that we may never know what the art world being held accountable for its obviously discriminatory practices would look like. But on other days, when I am more hopeful and radically imaginative, I know that Black folk and Black art will survive and thrive—as it always has, as we always have. Here’s to Black futures where we are working towards Wakanda. Here’s to Black art that beautifully and authentically represents Black lived experiences. And here’s to Black folk creating our own art spaces, so that conversations about old, stale, offensively White high museums rejecting us as patrons, artists and art professionals, will be outdated and uninteresting. Wakanda. Forever.
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
THIS IS A LETTER FROM ME TO YOU. by Laura Wellen
THE TIME IS RIGHT NOW, AND THE PLACE IS HERE.
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
Dear you:
together, now, and it will be enough.
imagine, because it is hard to touch dirt there.
I am writing to you right now, just as you are reading my words right now, too.
In fact, we are doing it here. See how easy that was?
Luckily for you, we can be grounded together, right here where we’re standing.
What’s the new news? we stutter. New news is old news now. And now. And now.
You and I own this moment, or maybe we should say We can be part of the grounding trend. we belong to it. In either case, here we are, and this is our minute You don’t have to, but maybe you could take off your together, just you and me, here, in this place, shoes, if you don’t mind.
Wise Reem says: we always rush toward the future, connected by that paper in your hands, and taking Let’s stand in the mud you found. Or, if you are thinking or we look at the past like it was some special magic some breaths. Now, here, breathe. I have lost my kite right now, we can just stand near thing that we wish we could find again. That leaves out the present, she says. We forget the I would like to ask you to do it and lean over and smell it and take three deep breaths. If you aren’t standing in the mud, you can right now, and sometimes we don’t remember about something for me. the right here, because we’re looking at a shiny thing Look at the sky. Really. Longer than sink your fingers into it. We will wash our hands later. Remember building mud castles and mud cakes and over there, sometime soon. you want to, until people passing by having mud on your clothes and having it cake on might think you’ve lost your kite. your skin after a day of playing? Three more deep Now, look at the earth. Keep looking, and look deep. breaths. When you were playing in the mud were you I am writing to you. Right. Now. chasing the future? Can you find a muddy place? Looking at time in the present is a Can you see the sky reflected there? political act in itself, Wise Reem says. If you can somehow own your time, Michelle says Mona has started putting electrical cables in her bed and wiring a line that goes out her she says, you have everything. bedroom, down the length of her building (it is a big building in a big city), until it connects to a rod that she (Maybe no one says this out loud because they would pushes into the nearest earth she can find. This is the rather sell you something or make some money from only way she can sleep at night. your time so they can buy something shiny, too. They are definitely not paying you what your time is worth, This is called grounding, and, apparently, it is a thing though, and you know it, so that’s not news.) people do. What Wise Reem means is that we can be present They mostly do this in big, tight cities, as you might
Grounding is touching dirt. To be grounded is to know a place. Being present in a place is political. Don’t believe them when they try to sell the future to you. And the past was pretty messy, so we probably shouldn’t get too starry-eyed about that. Be here, with me, now. Ground yourself, dear one. I’ll be right here, beside you. We’ve got this.
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
The Paradox of P by Theresa Escobedo
Art has long been engaged with the political. Particularly since the Enlightenment, art has been employed in the service of politics to proliferate pointed agendas, especially via easily-replicated mediums—prints, etchings, lithographs, and written texts, for example. It could be argued that every work of art is informed by the political climate in which it is made and therefore is political in some way. What is certain about art is that it functions as a barometer of society. It’s no secret that funding for the arts, humanities, and public media have been cut, if not eliminated entirely, across the board nationwide. These cuts, acutely damaging to educational and public enrichment programs, are the most obvious manner in which art is subverted or confined by politics.
We are in Houston, Texas—Clutch City—a sprawling metropolis built on marshland and swamp — a surprisingly resilient city that has overcome some seemingly insurmountable situations (think about the events of the past year). The unexpected is anticipated here. We are in Third Ward, a historic ward whose designated boundaries and character have drastically changed since its establishment in the 1800s. Who knew a so-called “elite neighborhood of late 19thcentury Houston” would devolve and later reinvent itself as a place where community-based non-profits and churches hold a significant percentage of real estate? Who knew that self-initiated, grassroots creative and social programs could become the nucleus of a cooperative and engaged community?
Art works in mysterious and subtle ways, and its effects are often unexplainable. The fact that the value of art is difficult to qualify and quantify (perhaps especially to those in governing positions) makes establishing and defending funding for the arts difficult. The significance and merit of art cannot be determined by numbers, or even by popular consensus.
The short of it is that art and art-making have been largely compromised and abused by those with political agendas, who use art to establish and propagate stereotypes and stereotypical images to maintain the current power structure. Our politics tend to infringe upon individual freedom of speech and emotional autonomy, thus curbing individual expression and communication—critical for artSomeone knew. And in this story, art has played a making. Thankfully, artists, by their very nature, often large part. operate beyond the bounds of normative thinking and independently of social or class realities. Artists provide an alternative and counterpoint to political restraint.
What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
Politics and Art
The long of it is that in response to confinement away from and outside of the political and social mainstream, artists develop new methods through which to express themselves. This is why in the present era we see the emergence of new media and mediums as effective modes of communication— photography, film, performance, documentary, and installation—the new propagators—have become invaluable social tools. It is precisely because of the contemporary political climate that social-political has art emerged with the strength that is has.
Houses (whose programming initiatives cater to the environment. The unique microcosm that is modernimmediate needs of its proximate community) have day Third Ward, borne of segregation and isolation, has, in unique ways, laid a strong foundation for the greatest opportunity to thrive at this time. actualizing this potential. Art is perhaps the last frontier of unregulated free expression. Art is born of and advocates freedom. Art allows for a bridge between politics and society and changes the world one perception at a time. It looks at the world critically and can alter the way we think; it helps us to evaluate whether we accept that which is established and defined by politics.
Art, in its truest sense, speaks to our humanity, and forever responds to the context in which it is made. At its best, it has the capacity to change the status quo. In its current manifestation, art is no longer treated as a commodity. The social-political statements and experiences made by new art and creative placemaking are truly valuable. This is why artistfounded and artist-led organizations like Project Row
The most radical future an invested and engaged civic body could build would be one in which artists have significant political influence and perhaps are, themselves, running for offices that address the most significant and dynamic issues of our time—issues of placemaking, infrastructure, land ownership, democracy, civil and human rights, capitalism, the economy, migration and mobility, and the
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Do or Die!
played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-Seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw…If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music. Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.”5
When people question whether Black art has the power to effect political change, their tone at once bespeaks skepticism, anticipation, and fear. The skepticism is certainly rooted in an historical narrative that insists Africana people cannot create anything of value. In 1781, Thomas Jefferson publicly insisted: “[I]n imagination, [blacks] are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. Among the blacks is…no poetry.”1 Once that debate settled, many art enthusiasts began interrogating the efficacy of Black art. At an African art exhibit, for example, contemporary museumgoers might pore over drum and mask and tool, hoping to learn what the artifacts do – what magic they conjure, which gods they stir. The popular perception is that, beyond merely existing, the “arts of Africa were meant to make things happen.”2
The most prolific Black artists of the twentieth century have, instead, recognized the power in Black art, describing its potential to destroy the extant political structure and to change the lives of oppressed people everywhere. While working to attract a diverse audience of consumers, a generation of new artists explicitly charges their contemporaries with the task of activating an arsenal of visual, aural, and written texts in order to “wage war against every institution which influences the actions of black people.”3 Yet these same artists allow themselves to be wooed by the alms of their respective community’s oppressors, and, subsequently, stop making their art.
by Michon Benson-Marsh
As painful as the physical blow he deals Lula (and as fatal as the knife Lula thrusts into Clay’s stomach at the end of the play), Clay describes the effect of Black art as intensely palpable. For him, art powerfully, albeit guilefully, communicates the artist’s social, cultural, and racial politics. Clay sermonizes about the power Black art has to entertain the masses. He also recognizes how artists can use it to suppress their desires to furiously unleash their political agendas in the real world. Spewing idle threats about what powerful art can do, Clay the artist dies because he never allows his “art” to annihilate his peculiar oppressor. explores the dangerous paradox of Black art—“Die if you do; die if you don’t.”4
Baraka’s drama echoes all the anxieties around Black art suffered by society at large. Baraka’s staged response illustrates what happens to Black artists In “Dutchman,” Clay and Lula are strangers riding the who are too apprehensive about executing their evening subway. When the attractive white woman individual and collective strengths in the face of their sees the middle-class Black man, she begins to seduce oppressors. They die at the hands of very systems they him, first by offering him a bite of her apple, then by are obligated to “kill.” dancing suggestively and talking frankly about sex. Visibly uncomfortable with her advances, Clay might Many young artists begin their careers ready to affect have consented to be intimate with her, but he soon In his one-act play “Dutchman” (1964), the all manner of positive change. But, quieted by the becomes too incensed by her cruel comments. Rapid“godfather” of the Black Arts Movement Amiri Baraka lullaby (or perhaps, in the context of “Dutchman,” we fire attacks on his ineffectual heritage and his impotent might call it a “Lula-by”) of commercialism, among manhood, coupled with her misplaced confidence in other things, they fail to activate their power. Now is the her superficial understanding about Black music and time to effect change. Show work in the spaces where culture, prove too much for him to stomach. When the people need it most – in community galleries, like Lula attributes his shortcomings to his fear of white the Community Artists’ Collective and Project Row people and to his being “Uncle Tom Big Lip”, Clay Houses. Showcase in the myriad coffee shops and slaps her as hard as he can, signaling his wrath and lounges and restaurants around Third Ward. Hell! squelching any insecurities he once had about his Go rogue, and push art onto the Metrorail train in own identity. In that moment, Clay deems himself an memory of artists like Clay, who could not quite make artist, “a poet”, and he elucidates for Lula (and for the art do what it does. The time has come to initiate the bystanders on the train) the function of Black art: next, triumphant political surge. If the artists don’t, we all die! “You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don’t even know how…Belly rub hates you. Old bald-headed 1 Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. four-eyed ofays popping their fingers…and don’t (Historical Printing Club, 1784) 150. know yet what they’re doing. They say, “I love Bessie ² Davidson, Basil. The African Genius. (James Currey, Smith.” And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith 2004) 160. is saying, “Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass.”… ³ Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. Doubleday, 1972. Charlie Parker?…All the hip white boys scream for 4 Baraka, Amiri. Dutchman. Faber & Faber, 1964. Bird. And Bird saying, “Up your ass, feeble-minded 5 Baraka, Amiri. Dutchman. Faber & Faber, 1964. ofay! Up your ass.” And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would’ve
What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
Imaginaries are weak/they are strong/ they are Porgy and Bess/they are tenpoint plans/they are pipe dreams/ dystopias and utopias/they are psyches seeking perception/they are unreal/ they are structures and systems/they are misunderstandings/they are silent revelations/they are ignorance/they are ritual/they are collectives and contracts/they are complexes (military & nonprofit)/pláticas and cyphers/ they are boundaries/they are memories/ they are los sueños and visions/they are processes and prose/they are relationships/they are dusty roads/ they are Black Wall Streets/they are women’s clubs /they are earthly order/ they are over and under/they are a safe middle/they are classes/they are destinations/they are moral codes/they are loving. Untitled Poem by Andrea Roberts © 2013
What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
I revisited this poem, written five springs ago. I composed it after having presented a paper to a noted African Diaspora scholar, who initially seemed to be impressed by the way I put words together. The paper was on black women organizing, even in places unwelcoming to them, and the possibilities of reclaiming space. I extracted womanist wisdom from social memory, archives, relatives, and HBCU journal articles about the Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary. The paper describes the unheralded past and the future possibilities embedded in the defiant art of Black women creating selfsufficient communities in the early 1900s through collective, often expressive, action—quilting circles, rationing bacon, budgeting, and raising chickens—in order to liberate themselves from sharecropping. After the paper presentation, the professor affirmed my paper, then summarily dismissed it. “This is an imagined Black collective. This is an ideal, right?” I heard it like a five-year-old being reminded the stove is hot. This Black feminist imaginary of collective action was linguistically lovely and worthy of memorialization, but I was overreaching when I claimed this was a past from which we could learn. The paper was later published in the Journal of Planning History. As a then community and regional planning doctoral student (now professor), I would experience many of these moments—instances in which my poetic license was met with paternalistic derision from within and without my field, never finding a real disciplinary home. I experienced the myriad ways practitioners of my discipline could divide and alienate me from my creative self. I knew I would have to be artful about living at the intersection of womanism, poetics, and planning scholarship. Even now, it feels a confession—I root my research in the poetics of Black life and imaginings of a world in which we actualize free Black space. I believe the pursuit of liberation through Black imagination is one of the most elusive, yet concretely political acts on the planet, happening in and outside of academia. Resistance through cultural agency informs my current scholarship, in which I record surviving free Black imaginaries (in song, recollection, poem, or lament) of a free Black past and a future where we win. I extract their coded messages about where and when to gather. On hot summer nights in Jasper County, I observe the assemblage of bodies in holy dance within spaces thought to no longer exist. Over 558 Freedom Colonies, (urban, rural, and suburban) historic Black settlements in Texas persist through cultural reproduction that attracts and sustains descendants’ commitment to place preservation. This persistence is protest. It is the same resistance African Americans used to elude plantation masters through coded messages embedded in work songs. Unfortunately, so many of us have forgotten the words. In these settlements, I met people who are a little bit Third Ward and a little bit East Texas, a little bit Pineywoods and a little bit Fifth Ward. They remember their songs, they own and use their ancestors’ tools—a planning and preservation repertoire all their own. They remind us that African Americans embody (along with the collective mourning of the home we lost and the Wakandas we imagine) the capacity to settle, to move, to recover, to conjure, and sing freedom into existence. When these freedom colony descendants gather, they discuss politics and elections, and at other times they just glorify God and love on each other. They perform the poetics of free black places, fomented by their ancestor’s hopeful imaginaries.
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The Poetics
of Black
Imagination by Andrea Roberts
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What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
TOWARD A TAXONOMY of Art by Jeremy Johnson
Black Art Artem africanus Habitat: homes, yards, streets, radios, hearts and minds, The Ether, sometimes galleries, sometimes museums Lifestyle: unknown Lifespan: 100-1000 years, 50 year cycles, cycles of millennia, ad infinitum Diet: clay, wood, paper, steel, wool, pigment, oral and written histories, antimatter, concepts and feelings of (post/neo-) colonizers Black Art is the common name for a Black specimen (melanistic variant) of the many species of art. While Black Art can take the form of a material object, its classification does not depend upon its psychosocial content, or formal conventions, or even the color black. The term typically designates a non-utilitarian fragment of the universe conceptualized in a Black1 brain, and fabricated by Black hands, or performed by Black mouths and bodies.2 Some observers have posited that Black Art must concern itself with The Middle Passage, Chattel Slavery, Reconstruction (limited focus please), Jim Crow and Civil Rights, or Barack and Michelle Obama in order to be a genuine specimen of Artem africanus. There is much debate over this feature of Black Art, its content and scope being constantly expanded or curtailed depending on the whims of social dicta or in the interest of governmental productivity. An unforeseen, and completely unintended, consequence of classification is a nearly complete dismissal and devaluation of the species. Absolutely nothing can be done about this unfortunate outcome. It has been studied and dissected. We have created infallible computer models to determine the most efficient and accurate methods for this specific taxonomic project. We have run simulation after simulation, and have found it best if Artem africanus be allotted only this corner of the art world, and speak only to issues directly related to The Ghetto™ or The Struggle™ or The Man©. Because what else could Populus africanus3 want to make the focus of art? Love? Joy? Birds, trees, insects, astronomy, universal humanity? Aesthetics? Surely not. If an object is found that raises questions about the sanctity of capitalism, the primacy of Western philosophy, the binaries of gender or any other subject not detailed in the Black Codes of Conduct, the specific epithet africanus must be withdrawn immediately until further review by committee. The entire canon might be upturned, and the other categories (e.g. Asian, Chicano, Feminist) rendered useless if we allow any restructuring or rethinking of the current paradigm. How would we then recognize Artem normalem4 in the field? How would we ascertain their corresponding market and cultural worth? In order to understand Artem normalem we must differentiate between the various species and subspecies, keeping detailed records of every type. Keep the talk in the barbershop. Keep the poets on the corner. Keep the frogs in the bayou. Keep the trill in the Tre. Negroid is now archaic. Archaic is not necessarily racist, but... ² Blackface is racist and should be archaic, but... ³ Black people 4 Regular Art 1
What’s The New News – Issue No. 2/March 2018
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