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Dirt, Seeds, and Blooms: Of Bajor by Jean Sebastien Boncy

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:06:57 GMT

Dirt, Seeds, and Blooms: Of Bajor
by Jean Sabestien Boncy
March 13, 2015

2013

I’m in a parking lot; class won’t start for another twenty minutes. 97.9 is on, soto voce, while I’m trying to catch up on some sleep. Murmurs regarding Miley Cyrus and the VMAs drift into a semiconscious mind. In case you’re the type to pride themselves for standing outside of Pop, allow me to catch you up: this kid’s TV icon performed a rape jingle with a creeper in a Beetlejuice outfit during an award show. The performance was an act of aesthetic terrorism with a hip racist edge, trolls crawled out of their virtual caves to denounce one young woman’s sexuality with exceptional misogynistic vim, the sanctioned Feminist Action Squad responded with righteous fire, and a total lack of consideration for intersectionality. The asses that break the Internets still need to be televised first. But hey, listen, what’s coming out of the speakers is important too, and maybe a little more urgent. “What’d you think of Miley’s outfit,” somebody asks. One of the djs, possibly Kiotti, chuckles a bit then answers “Straight Fallas Paredes.” I jackknife in my seat, chocking on laughter.
It’s a brilliant joke, laconic wit straight off the dome, with just the right amount of surprise and a laid back delivery that understands that this particular structure needs not the strain of emphasis. It’s the kind of laugher that has you missing the next sixty seconds of broadcast because you’re still unpacking it’s implications. It’s also a joke for people who know life in the Southwest. Much of his potency is tied to the body’s ability to remember Fallas Paredes. Have you stood in its center? Felt the fabrics? Gazed at the wares, letting the pop of colors and patterns dance for your eyes? Can you recognize a one-night outfit? The type that will only hold together long enough for a single sustained stretch of hardcore partying? Do you know this place? Because Google can only give you so much. And just like that, I have an answer to the question that’s lingered since the Parazette show.

2012

Julie and I have picked a horrible time to visit In Plain Sight, Aaron Parazette’s survey of Houston painting at McClain gallery. They are setting up for a panel discussion and our view of several paintings is compromised; sorry Robert Ruello, maybe next time. We have been away for so long, and we’ve been craving a lot of Houston work, but the dessert array is mostly buttermilk pie. Now, I like a good buttermilk pie, but we’d been hoping for a bit more diversity. No Floyd Newsum? Who knows what happened? The limits of one man’s Rolodex. Gallery politics. Simple availability issues. Any possible answer would be both pedestrian and incomplete.
We gorge on buttermilk. Some of it is quite good. Much of it barely has any flavor. Some of it tastes like ass. We wonder why call it a Houston survey at all. For the most part, these paintings, good and less than, have the familiar monoculture sensibilities so in vogue at the art fairs. There is a Kent Dorn behind the makeshift bar, in dim light. We’re upset at the insult, especially because this painting is getting at something. You know, specifics. It’s a real Houston painting, and it kinda rubs us the wrong way how it’s tucked away. We start counting, and there’s a handful more, maybe six or seven. Julie and I don’t agree on the quality of every single piece, but somehow we agree on that Htown vibe. We have no language for it. We have no criteria. But we’ve lived here a long time, Julie was born here, and we’ve been paying attention, and we recognize it. There is real delight in touching a knowledge that was hidden in plain sight, and fresh delight can cloud the true value of a thing. We agree that there is such a thing as Houston painting, a distinct a recognizable thing, but does this have any importance? Does it matter?

2011

The boomerang action of grad school has dropped us here, in a Northwest Houston backyard, surrounded by dog bombs, and standing on the rust colored grass. Julie and I will be living in her parents’ home for the foreseeable future. We have no money, we have no jobs, but there is still room for hope.
The last three years’ worth of calamities is a long and varied catalogue. It has left us exhausted and broken. We are not the same people who left in 2008. We had to find new ways of being sane, and new reasons to be artists. Embracing near the fence we can feel the last three years drooping and detaching like old skin. The fence is too high to see how the neighbors live, but we can hear them. Our first night back, our first hour back, and what we hear is

Welcome to the land, where it just don't stop
Trunks pop tops drop, and the front end hop
Paint flop screens on, acting bad in the song
Yeah it's on riding chrome, balling at my home
Texas plates don't hate, showing up in the state

Fat Pat and the sultry air, envelop us

tops drop

We know we are back home, as our home knows we have returned

tops drop

We are welcome before the first salutations, and we are at peace before any reason for peace

tops drop

Before tonight, I had always made pictures in Houston. Starting tomorrow, I will make pictures of Houston.

1999

Back of the Greyhound, middle of the night, I am on my way back to my single room in the medical center. I was in Miami visiting my peoples. Every time I got a chance, I left town. We can see the city lights in the distance. This Cuban lady tells her somnolent kids, “Here it is. Fucking Houston.” This trip is not a choice, it’s a last option. I came to town the same way. I used to feel the same way, “Fuck Houston.” But right now, I’m thinking, “Fuck you, lady. I live here” And I want to stay. My many returns to the city, more than the movements away from it, have taught me how to long for its blessings. If I had to move away, quickly, begrudgingly, like the Cuban family, I would miss the food, and the people and the flatness, I would miss the late afternoon light coming through the windows of the 53 on the way back from the Cinemark.
I want to be here. This is where I live.

2014

I’m working an installation and most of the crew is new to me. Half of them are recent transplants. I like them, they’re clever people, politically aware, wide areas of interests, quick with the jokes. I test them anyway, “You find yourselves listening to more Beyoncé since you moved?” They both fail. One of them seems satisfied that he has o idea what Beyoncé sounds like, the other one is an old fan lapsed for political reasons. They both missed the point. In her seat of power you owe the queen allegiance. It is not about love or taste. It means even more if it’s not about love or taste. To belong to an alien place one must veer into alieness. I could explain, but I can’t force them to understand, so I let it go.
In five months or in five years, maybe they’ll be part of the metropolis, and maybe they’ll make art for its denizens, and I’ll be thankful for objects that resonate in sync with my body.

Review: BOUND: Africans vs. African Americans Written by Jasmine Jones

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:58:16 GMT

Review: BOUND: Africans vs. African Americans
by Jasmine Jones
March 15, 2015

Not only did I spend time screening films and observing the operations of the Silicon Valley African Film Festival in preparation for the Houston African Film Festival, I also had the invaluable experience of connecting with several of the filmmakers. One particular instance served as a catalyst for screening the controversial documentary BOUND: Africans versus African Americans (AVAA). In between screenings, I was casually talking with a Guinean filmmaker about superstitions and beliefs carried from generation to generation and I noticed that we had quite a few in common. I wondered out loud if perhaps my ancestors were from Guinea. Innocently, he responded, there is one way to find out…”what’s your family name?” My family name is Jones. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a sense of embarrassment came over me as I thought about how to verbalize to this man that that my family name more than likely belonged to the person who owned my ancestors as slaves thus isn’t really my family name. I can only attribute this feeling to it being the first time I was having this type of conversation with a continental African. It was as if his “African-ness” inadvertently reminded me of the tragic moments of my family’s past and our lost identity.

The subtitle “Africans versus African Americans” is very misleading. As a viewer, you begin watching the film expecting for these two groups of people to be pitted against each other as they hash out their issues with one other. Those moments do not escape AVAA, particularly during the dialogue in which a handful of Africans and African Americans passionately discuss their perceived notions of one another…one person asking “Why don’t African Americans get over slavery?” and another person asking “Why don’t Africans own their land?”

Despite these very heated conversations, the Kenyan filmmaker, Peres Owi,no does not show bias towards Africans nor African Americans. As the film continues, she tells the history of the Black experience as well as the African experien,ce in which we see parallels of lost identities due to slavery and colonialism. The visual motif of faceless individuals appears throughout AV,AA further illustrating these parallels. By the end of the film, the conflict shifts from external to internal with both groups fighting to assert their identities. The external conflict is based on a misunderstanding due to the constant onslaught of imagery/ definition of our characters created by an oppressive, dominant culture and the lack of communication about our history and experiences. Editor’s note: the corrections are just a suggestion. The section in blue previously read like a r-n on sentence.

The documentary ends with one of the African American participants taking a DNA test, in which she is able to trace her ancestry to Ghana and in that moment you sense that a bridge has been built finally connecting two different worlds.

I Want to Love You Episode 2

Fri, 05 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Burn!

We’re talking Dana Schitz and the Whitey Biennial, and my friend, photographer and activist Jay Trinidad, says, “This is why I will not shed a tear when the NEA dies. It has sustained an art world like this.”

Read that again.

Ok.

Her, her, her, her everybody

One of the administrators at my kid’s school wants ideas on why the students aren’t behaving. A lot of them are not following protocols. A lot. If most of the students are not following the system, then what kind of hubris would lead someone to believe that there is something wrong with the kids? There’s something wrong with the protocols. There’s something wrong with the system.

Where is the excitement for the arts? I’m sorry the “fine arts”? Where are the crowds? Where is the chatter? And before anyone damns the masses for their lack of education, their lack of effort, before anyone mumbles “hoi polloi” like they was born with a monocle on, let’s take a second to remember that we are living in the Age of Networks. The masses are out there enjoying music in languages they cannot understand, swooning over fashions from half a world away, relearning traditional crafts thought lost to the bloodline. There’s a Filipino bus driver out there grooving to Magnum Band. There’s a kid in Connecticut that always picks Nollywood over Hollywood. Shit is available and findable and sharable. Your tribe don’t have to live on the block now, not when most of us are more connected than Lamont Cranston. But most people don’t seem curious about what the artworld is up to these days, and really the artworld is not curious about most people, except maybe as abstractions and as feed. No questions are asked, desires remain unexplored. Like, I meet way too many people in the art bubble that seem proud that they don’t know a single Future song. No one has a duty to love Trap, but the pride is telling. It’s connected to why so many art spaces move into cheap neighborhoods and never stress that the neighbors never visit, or that all of their marketing money is directed past the hood, or that they don’t know any of the history of their new home. It’s connected to how little effort there is from the big institutions to be inviting and attentive to the parts of town that have to make due without a Whole Foods.
Be that way, art bubble. Be that way, and whither while burning the little oxygen that remains within your walls. Outside there is plenty of misery, but there is also a constant and constantly evolving polyphonic celebration. This could be us, but you dyin’.

Wait till I get my money right

Splendiferous and I went to see some art in Austin. OK Mountain had this delicious show of Japanese artists. Of course we couldn’t afford anything in the show, the trip

itself was a luxury. One of the painters had made shirts. They were like twenty bucks. I bought one and wore it for years, nice fit, unusual peach color, and a striking image on the chest. I know it was empirically dope since I never wore it without at least a couple of randos commenting on its dopeness. The shirt was hot, I felt good wearing it, folks were happy to see it. Occasionally someone would ask about the artist, and I would pull up the bottom and read the name out to them. Years ago the shirt died in a laundry accident. I don’t remember the name of the artist. I keep an eye out for dope shirts because I can never afford my friends’ paintings.

Most shows don’t sell shirts. That’s too bad, I would love more options to support artists directly. I wouldn’t be mad at a tip jar. As it is most of the money flowing through the arts come from two sources: rich folk and the State. Being rich is an amoral state that will be eradicated in the better, more egalitarian world that we are fighting for. And the State’s main function is maintaining the kyriarchy that feeds the rich. That’s not me telling you this, that’s countless exhibits in poorly funded art exhibitions and panels at non-profit spaces. Just kidding, I’m saying that too. It’s past time that we accept that our sources of funding come with an agenda. I mean we know this but it’s high time we started living like its real. I ain’t mad at no artists drawing a paycheck from collectors or some city grant. Stack that money till it gets sky high, get the fucking appetizer, take the trip. Spend that money with my blessing. Because I love my brother and sister artists, I want your joy to fly high. But sister, but brother, I want you to consider exit strategies. Alternative sources of cheddar. Making shit your high school buddies can afford. You don’t wanna end up Gee Money to the powers-that-be’s Nino Brown.

Here’s an easy first step: galleries are stores. Say it often and to varied groups, loud enough to be heard across a modest room. When you bump into a gallerist of your acquaintance, say something like, “How’s your store doing?” Wonder out loud why every gallery wants to be a Fendi store when most people only got Ross money. Who’s gonna be the brave gallerist to open up a Ross gallery?

Dave Chappelle walked away from 50 million because somebody laughed the wrong way. Closed up shop, went to see friends in Africa, retreated back to the Mid West to clear his mind. All because someone laughed like George Washington at a slave whipping during one of the tapings. We cannot always afford that type of rebellion (food and shelter, food and shelter) but we should consider it daily and enact it where we can.

Run the numbers and remain humble

Ways of Seeing got a sequel this year. It is a disheartening enterprise in toto, but we must at least acknowledge the mercy and economy of the show for managing to place its nadir in the opening seconds: Jerry Saltz walks up to the camera and opens his mouth. Shit. In forty-five years we’ve regressed from John “motherfucking” Berger to Jerry “poor baby” Saltz. The support of Whiteness will always lead to mediocrity because that support is a euphemism for suppression. Suppression of beauty, and genius, and innovation, of orgasms and epiphanies that exist outside the

hegemony and prove it to be a cancer. Saltz does talk to a couple of Black artists, but that only confirms the problem because mediocre-white-boy is controlling the access and presentation of those artists. Power is power, you know?
Episode three has Internet Becky talking about the “digital as medium.” She speaks to 3 white folks all in video that appears staged by Wes Anderson’s whiter brother. You are real people so right now you’re thinking: Where the fuck are the Vine stars? The crowd sourced fictions of Black Twitter? The YouTube satirists? The Tumblr curators and archivists? Where the fuck is the model challenge? Where are the kids? Where are the outsiders? Where are the PO motherfucking Cs? This Internet they are talking about looks like a version from middling 60s sci-fi. Miss me with it. Please.

The numbers are the numbers. The artworld is still frightfully white, and the higher you climb the whiter it gets. Most of the diversity is found among the artists themselves, in other words the art proletariat is diverse. But the higher you climb, the snowier it gets. Curators, directors, publishers, collectors, it’s Tintin au Tibet. And the entrance requirement for people that don’t look like the cast of Mad Men is forbidding: great luck, great talent, great effort. In comparison to what is asked of mad ones: the luck of your skin, something resembling talent, and the occasional effort.

Most of the efforts to diversify the artworld still depend on the machination of too many mediocre and unreconstructed white folk. They still depend on preserving structures and traditions that have proven to be full of poison. There is no redemption that passes through the established protocols of our current concepts of museums and art history. Too slow, too rife with obstacles. New types of experiences are what is necessary. Things that were brewed and constructed outside of the system need to be imported wholesale. Our next queer directors should not come from a place that the hetero normative recognize. Our next Black curators should come from a place that the white establishment cannot pronounce. Our next Latinx editors should come from radical education not suffocating ivy. We fill our positions with people that live outside the bubble. We sweat the ratios. And we vow to stop repeating these same mistakes. We do this or watch, in thirty years, Ways of Seeing 3 starring Hannah Montana.

I’ve been loving you too long to stop now

I kept asking my art appreciation students about pleasure, and they kept looking at me like I was talking nonsense.
“You’ve had English classes? Literature classes, right?
“Yeah.”

“And you’ve talked about the pleasures of text, right?”
Crickets and squints.
“You know, the way words are chosen and sequenced to become music? To bore into memory with their specificity and joy?
“Nah, we just talk about what it all means.”

We need any more information? I mean, obviously we do, but do we need it from artists? Do we need any more installations that look like high school dioramas about water conservation? Do we need entire walls that look like visual aid for an econ 1 class? And bruh, even there that would not be worth no A. Somebody gets outraged over a Mother Jones article and instead of channeling the vibrational charge of that outrage into something transformative, something that is built to pierce another human, we end up with another show that prioritizes information over aesthetic. Get it? Get it? Get it? Art schools are churning out more students than artists. And students are desperate for clarity; they don’t want to be misunderstood. That neurotic scramble for acknowledgement, plaudits for big brains, fills our galleries with “research” void of generosity and surprise. Aesthetic traditions built over millennia are viewed with suspicion because they are so difficult to demystify, and also because they’ve been used rather effectively (to be fair) by more than a few assholes. We create fewer and fewer fine objects and more and more reports. The technocrats are winning.

I came back to class with some printouts. I had several of them read the words. They were pedestrian, the sentences repetitive, the whole thing tedious and flat. “Listen” I said, and put on Otis singing the exact same words. A dead man’s voice coming through cheap speakers to grab us. In that aural mist we were cradled, loved, and more than a little turned on. Don’t come at us unless you’re ready to be on your Otis shit.

The Lightning bolt made enough heat

I am on a ship on fire in the middle of the ocean with you. We are on a burning ship. No help is coming. We are warmed by the same heat, our back-lit faces turnt black blurs with red edges, our tall shadows dancing across the sheet of the sea. What will become of us? Shall we sink, grow gills, and learn to swim the cool dark depths? Shall we atomize what’s left of the structure into a fleet of rafts and set off once more across the ocean with no maps or sextant? Shall we swim to the nearest island, adapt to a new diet, and twist our mouths around new tongues? Shall we dance faster and harder, sing louder and louder, turn into fuel for the fire, and become smoke? No help is coming. We need to make a decision.

Crashing, Burning, and Crashing Again: Hard Work and Success for Artists of Color

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Ned? Oh, Ned he’s so damn smart, he's a genius”. This is my cousin referring to my white half-brother who is in his early 30’s still had not landed a steady job, lived at home and I should add, suffered from suicidal thoughts and depression. And yet, this pronouncement didn't take me by surprise, my entire life I had heard about how many wonderful things were possible in his future, “you know he plays so many video games, maybe he’ll be a surgeon or a pilot!!”. His destiny was to follow the trajectory of a Bill Gates. I, on the other hand, was the older half-sister who never heard about the wonderful things in store for me.

Unlike my brother I was given a completely different message, albeit unwittingly, by my dark skinned Latin American Immigrant father who I spent most weekends with. If I was with him I was most surely at his restaurant watching him cook and hustle his ass off. Like many immigrants he arrived fully pledged to the American Dream. He was an entrepreneur who over the decades was sometimes doing well but most times struggling. To this day I have never seen anyone work harder than my dad but at the end of his life while suffering from cancer, the American dream bitch slapped him hard. He died poor and the country that he had toiled for let him fall through the nightmarish cracks between Medicare, and disability. All his hard work and nothing to show for it. My brother and I, like most Americans, from the moment we were born have had the myth that we are living in a meritocracy thrust upon our shoulders, the idea that if you work hard enough you will be a success and conversely if you don’t work hard enough you will fail. As a child of color I had learned a lesson that my white half-brother unfortunately never did. Which is for every Bill Gates There’s a million Carlos Lopez’s. In essence, it’s all bullshit.

For all of the disadvantages people of color might have in our country built on institutionalized racism, one small advantage we might have is the perspective my dad gave me. We know that being good and working hard doesn't guarantee success because we have witnessed it. We know that to work hard gives us only a hope of a chance of success and no promises. Being mixed race I had the benefit of having intimate knowledge with the white and nonwhite experience of the “meritocracy”. The difference is while I was expected to work hard to have a chance at success my brother was simply expected to just have success. It's no surprise that the pressure of this had him considering ending it all, he failed in a place where everything is set up for a white male to succeed. After all we are a country that made Trump, white mediocrity equals success, this is especially true in the art world.

Contrary to what art schools would have you believe, good work doesn't equal good career. Many mediocre artists locally and nationally have consistent exhibition and sales records. They don't seem to have earned it. I lament, as most artists do, as to why I work so hard making art and striving towards greatness but the rejections keep coming. In a way all artists can relate to the frustration of working hard and having nothing to show for it because artists are a not valued in our culture. But if you are an artist of color reading this know that, like my brother and I, we are not playing the same game as white artists, the rules and results are different. Adrian Piper herself has seen the art world shun her then embrace her over the decades.

She has had to support herself as a philosopher because the money she has made is so inconsistent. A philosopher! Mega Star Chris Rock spoke about having a white dentist as a neighbor. For every talented minority art star like Kerry James Marshall there are thousands of mediocre white artists making a living with careers that if I had, I’d feel like I had won the lottery. Maddeningly, many white artists still think we minority artists have some sort of advantage showing and selling work, they couldn't be more wrong.

I have been producing the best work of my life and it's piling up in my studio slowly taking over my home. In my desperation to show, I like many others before me have turned toward those god awful self-help-career books and websites for artists. With titles such as “Making it in the Art World” and “How to be a Successful Artist”, the only problem is these books are written for white artists because their solutions are white. For example, they often recommend regularly visiting galleries you are interested in showing with and cultivating a relationship with the owner. This is a little hard to do from behind a glass front door that has been locked by said gallery owner during business hours because they are scared to let a black man in (this literally happened to my husband). These books show zero awareness of the necessities for people of color to modify their approaches to the White Cubes, for the most part white women don’t even get tailored advice for navigating a market rife with sexism. Intersectionality ain’t in the glossary. They purport that if you say and do the correct things you should succeed. For white artists it may hold some grain of truth but let them begin to lose a step and there is nothing to explain or forgive their failures, they may find themselves where my brother was, feeling worthless and depressed.

We artists of color must not get bamboozled into believing we live in a meritocracy. We must always remember the struggles of our friends and loved ones and know that we are working hard to make great art as an end in and of itself and not as a guaranteed means to an end. Let’s not forget that though we may have idols who are successful white artists we may never have their careers and (here is the most important part) It’s not our fault!!! The system would have us believe artists of color have some kind of advantage, if only we kissed ass a little more, appealed to their exotic ideas of us, applied for that extra grant or show, gotten that extra line on my CV then you might have had a chance. Resist this because it’s not us that needs to change it’s the system itself. How many art institutions in town are run by people of color? (according to a 2016 study by the American Alliance of Museums curators, conservators, and those working in publication and registrar are over 80% non-Hispanic white). How many shows by artists of color or women artists are being seen, written about? (Just look around you) Most importantly how many of your artist of color friends are able to even halfway support themselves with their work?

The gap between rich and poor, and failure and success is getting wider in this country. Now multiply that by a hundred and you have the situation that us minority artists find ourselves in. So do yourself a favor and be kinder to you, reject the dangerous career advice, make great art as an antidote to mediocre white art and put the blame for your struggling career where it belongs, the rotten art world establishment. If we don’t we will call ourselves failures in a game that was never designed for us to win, we might even understandably want to quit, or we might end up like my dad or my brother blaming ourselves and wondering where we went wrong. We must reject the brainwashing that would make us say to ourselves, “You are the only thing holding you back”, in spite of an entire system built to keep success just beyond our grasp. Instead let’s put our combined efforts into, not just making stunning art for its own sake, but supporting fellow minority artists, and also holding non-profits, museums, galleries, and people in power accountable for their biases. Demolish this squalid and unfair system, that’s all the advice I need.

Infinity Affinity Loops: Edgar Arceneaux in Conversation with Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This past summer Edgar Arceneaux and I got together for an interview at his home studio in Pasadena, CA. I have been wanting to do a studio visit with him for years. As CalArts alums, students of the renowned conceptual artist Charles Gaines and Los Angeles based artists I have been following his work for quite some time. After attending a screening of his work Until, Until, Until... at USC Roski I was interested in unpacking many of the threads I have observed within his multidisciplinary practice over the years and to get a behind the scenes look at what he was currently working on and what he was thinking about in terms of future work. I caught him in the midst of preparing for the inaugural Current LA Biennial that has since passed. We were joined by Imani Ford a current graduate student at Yale, studying contemporary African- American artists in Los Angeles. She was gathering research for an upcoming project. Since our conversation Arceneaux has a newly released Art21, a new teaching appointment at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and a current solo show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Our conversation organically revolved around The Calarts Mafia (1) and what it means to build a network of conscious thinkers and artists, music, vulnerability, making mistakes, issues of race and class, and navigating the art world and our interdisciplinary practices.

EA: The one thing that I am working on right now is the Current LA Biennial. I have one of the smaller projects. What I am doing is kind of merging together two different interests. One has to has to do with belief and religion and the other one has to do with water. Current LA is focused on water. It is the first Public Art Biennial in Los Angeles. It is taking place at public parks all over the city. Parts are centered around the LA River. Bloomberg Philanthropy is supporting it so it will be around for a while and it is international. Rirkrit Tiravanija is in it, Mel Chin and other artists. My project is called “The CENTER of the EARTH”. The idea is that beneath a drinking fountain is a complex system of beliefs that we don’t normally think about. In a modern developed nation like ours you are going to have clean drinking water no matter where you go, and when you go to a public park and access public facilities, to some degree it is sort of about the social contract, you know the public places where you will be safe, where you can use the bathrooms. Your tax dollars are paying for these facilities, but one of the things I have learned in the process of working on this show is that a lot of the drinking fountains that are broken or falling apart sometimes they are not fixing them and they will just sit there and you will try to turn on the water and there is nothing. Then they will be replaced with Pepsi, Coca Cola and bottled water giving way for private industries to take place. So I was thinking how do I talk about this idea of belief and conflict that is connected to water that is happening right now as a public property and the challenges that are happening right now in relationship to privatization.

Edgar Arceneaux. The CENTER of the EARTH, 2016; mixed media; variable dimensions. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

EA: So I thought back to this experience I had when I was in Jerusalem. I went and visited the old city of Jerusalem about 10 years ago and I went and visited this church called the church of the Holy Sepulcher I don’t know if you have ever been. I have seen some beautiful churches but this one hands down was the most magical one. So it has no nave, it only has chapels and all of these different brands of Catholicism exist in this one building and it s a very conflicted space because the different branches of the religion don’t get along and sometimes they actually fight each other... The different priests sometimes knife each other but this is a holy site. This is where Jesus’ body was interred in the cave or supposedly where he rose, where his body was cleaned after being taken down from the cross. So it’s like really intense. So I was walking through one of the chapels, the artist who was showing me around and I were looking at this little altar and I said, “What is that?” and he goes, “That’s the center of the earth according to this religion.” This kind of blew my mind. But of course the earth is round so any one point of the globe will be the center of the earth. So I looked over and saw another one maybe about twenty feet away and I said, “What’s that?” and he goes, “Well according to that religion that is the center of the earth.” Then it just kind of struck me as both you know beautiful and it sort of said something about belief and about conflict at least within the Judeo-Christian tradition that is about othering other belief systems. So I knew I had these two fountains that I was working with in the park. I am basically remaking the two fountains in something of a design that is reminiscent of an arabesque pattern that will look something similar to this (showing KACH the design) it will look in this range and height. What is the name of the large stone that people circle around for prayer? Have you seen it? You know the one I am talking about.

KACH: I have never been to Jerusalem.
EA: Okay this is not in Jerusalem. So this is apart of the holy building.

KACH: Are there any links to the erosion of trust? I know you said that the water fountains are in parks and beaches and things like that throughout the years there has been distrust of free readily available drinking water in which we put more trust into these as you said private corporatized companies such as you want the Dasani bottled water instead of something that is a free flowing source that is coming from the earth.

EA: Yes you devalue one so you can sell someone the other. Getting someone to buy something that is free is how marketing operates.

KACH: And I am thinking about the erosion of trust too and when you talk about this idea of faith and belief. That you have to believe that you are being cleansed with holy water from this source that is taking these sort of ailments away. So I wonder if that is factoring into this project as well.

EA: (Begins playing National Geographic video featuring the holy fountains on his tablet.) So I am going to place these two things in the center. So bringing this arabesque pattern it won’t be a traditional religious motif it will be something that points to something from the Middle East and they will be colored and painted and dipped in chrome so they will be two opposite colors. Right now the goal is to cast them in aluminum and there are a couple of boulders in the park and I am going to try to locate those and if I can I am going to run water through them.

KACH: I think the functioning water would definitely be very important because in a way you would restore some type of function outside of the conceptual premise to bring viewers from all different perspectives. Because there is something that you are doing in which you are making something that is very ambiguous and specific at the same time... It will kind of have some of arabic as you said but not something specifically tied to a religious context so I think it would be interesting if it did have another element of water or the absence of water can be important to the piece to make a statement that the center of the earth is subjective. So it's like a piece that is functioning with multiple layers. I was reading a lot of

interviews and writings about you and your work and you create situations that cannot be naturally resolved by the viewer so if there are two fountains opposite of each other and they are both spewing the same water what does that mean? I am also thinking about it in this geography of Los Angeles and you are taking something that is from miles and miles away. I don’t know it’s kind of interesting how you are taking these elements that are pushing and pulling I imagine that when you see it you won’t really know how to connect them.

EA: Yeah and I think that what I am constantly trying to do is put people in a third position in which you have to draw a form of synthesis you know duality can be the enemy too. I don’t even want to call it progressive thought...It can be the enemy of critical thinking because it posits one side within a binary to the other so they are linked in a way that in some situations one can only be described by the absence of the other. So you know when Charles Gaines would talk about this in his Post Colonial class he would say that blackness is described as the absence of whiteness it is not its own thing. You know duality does that in lots of different things it is constantly ascribing difference to what it is not as opposed to what it is. So I am always trying to figure out ways in which the viewer always becomes the way in which the work is realized. You are being forced to think outside of this plus this equals this. So a lot of times I use the number three to organize my shows thinking about triangulation as a form of thinking.

KACH: I really love that concept and this idea of making the viewer do the work. Just thinking about this idea of triangulation of making the viewer work out the concepts on their own and to struggle with them. You do this really interesting staging. I wanted to talk about theater in your work and I am glad that you brought up how you think about a number to kind of setup how you want the viewers to engage with the work and the concepts that you are working on. So I was wondering if you could talk about that some more in depth because the materials that you use sometimes glisten, I have seen you use wind elements and different things that bring the viewer in and they seem like they are disparate elements but they are not. They have these threads but then they don’t so you are constantly going in and out of dislocation. Which makes sense with what you are talking about but in a sense you also have to work with the binary in order to get out of it. Does that make sense? I am interested in how you are grappling with and staging these concepts in your exhibitions.

EA: Well if you are trying to tell a story in a 3 dimensional space like a gallery then you have to figure out how to make the conventions of the gallery tell that story in a way that, I don’t know if I want to say true to it but recognizes how people typically engage with that space. So the way in which I try to do that at least in the gallery is to think about the full range of a person’s vision and how peripheral information lets people

see things in relationship to each other even though they may not be looking at it directly. So I may have something on one wall to the left and then all the way across the room there is a conversation that is happening there but you don’t see it until you turn the corner and walk and then you are like, “Oh yeah there is something else here” There are certain kinds of geometries that I try to set up that allows people to recognize certain affinities that exist between different things. Because the difference may actually be an illusion they may be exactly the same but they may just look different. So, I am trying to remember what the question was again.

KACH: It’s okay it had a lot of layer and you are answering it. This idea of how you are setting up your exhibition space with this type of triangulation in the space and the different mediums that you are using to kind of create this kind of staging of these ideas to get people out of their binary thinking about these ideas.

EA: Oh yeah now I know why I brought that up. Because if you're trying to to tell a story that does not rely on the conventions of storytelling then you need to figure out another of way for people to understand the progression of that story. I am using story in the sense of not that there is one way of being there is some experience that I want people to feel with the gathering there is a picture that I want people to get so I try to rely on archetypes for that. Because you know archetypes are ingrained within us through culture. Through our environment, through our relationship with our parents and how we understand power, through our relationship with our siblings and the way in which they are in some degree symbolic to the authority of the State and how that has certain echoes within the body politic. So I try to rely on archetypal relationships to give people a sense of how things relate to each other on a basic level. So something is big in relationship to something that is small. Something is hot in relationship to cold. Or you can see yourself in the piece. Or you can see yourself and the piece across the room at the same time. So like these are things that communicate to you without words. Then I have to figure out what the nature of the interaction is amongst those elements. Is one about creating harmony and balance? Is it one about creating a fracture or a fragmentation. Is there a thing about scale where it varies from big to small. How do I arrange it so that they are looking at themselves in relationship to the work so those are the types of archetypes that I think about when I am ultimately trying to organize a room. It is hard to think about these things in the beginning then you get a sense of it once you know where it is going to go. So the staging part for me is somehow reminiscent of you know how Socrates within the Republic would situate dialogues within environments because it was a necessary frame to understand what was at stake. Something that would take place of the stairs of the court, a dialogue would happen. It wasn’t until I realized that the republic was a metaphor for the soul. Even though it is a fictitious city there is some kind of allegory for the conflicting forces within us as individuals that I started to piece together with recognition. The forces that are raging within us as individuals to some degree manifests itself within the family body and how it manifests itself within the social body. Now these aren’t the same things but when you start to recognize these affinities you can see through these windows that stretch across time, space, people and materials. I just try to constantly show people that. With each show I try to think about what are the elements in this particular constellation that are going to tell the story differently than the one that I did before.

KACH: I definitely pick up on this idea of elements that cross across time and media because I am interdisciplinary but you say that you are multidisciplinary. Is that correct? Sometimes they are interchangeable.

EA: I don’t know they are interchangeable for me and I don’t know exactly how to describe it for everyone. I could describe it to you in this way because I know that you will understand it. Essentially I try to use the materials that make the most sense with the subject.

KACH: That’s it! I understand. You do what you have to do when you have to do it.

EA: Yes and I am always looking to put myself into a situation––when I can––that I don’t have as much control over the materials as much as I would like so I have to struggle with it.

KACH: Which you should be, because if you were too comfortable doing this triangulation it would just be “bada boom bada bing” you know it would be kind of like the same ole thing on a loop and as an artist if you don’t make yourself uncomfortable and put yourself up against the wall sometimes it won’t show in the work. That relationship that you are trying to have with the viewer, you can see that the audience will not be as willing to go through the same questions.

EA: Some of my favorite songs are the ones where you feel that the artists is so in the moment that they don’t care that they are fucking it up a little bit. There is one Lenny Kravitz song on his second album I believe and he really fucks up one of the verses and he left it in there. You know what I mean?

IF: He does that a lot though I feel like a lot of his music does that..

EA: Maybe he just doesn’t care. I don’t listen to his music much but Stevie Wonder does it. But you know there is a point where they listen to it and say you know what let’s leave that in there. It gives you a little window into their humanity. They make this great stuff but they are vulnerable too.

IMANI: I had a question going back to how do you strike the balance between. Like I keep thinking about Audre Lorde and using the same tools like the archetypes to kind of unravel the way we think about things. Are you pointing to the fact that we think in these binaries or are you pointing to the possibility for us to think outside of these binaries? If you understand what I mean. That is something really interesting to me. Whoever walks into the gallery space how are they cognizant that these binaries exist, like it’s a lot of different ones and I am thinking about it. Are you trying to do both or one or the other?

EA: Well I will answer that in a couple of ways. One is that I use pop culture a lot mainly because it communicates across cultures and different demographics. Because people kind of know the rules because if I use Spock in a drawing people kind of know who Spock is. The other part of it is is that I know—and science backs this up—is that the mind does not think in binaries. Thought is very fluid, it’s elastic and constantly shifting and moving away. Culture and society is constantly putting us into these categories and there are a lot of things that people take for granted without question. So I am always asking myself what are those things that people take without question? Then I try to subvert that. So the Book And A
Medal show that I did at Susanne Vielmetter was my last exhibition. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the subject. When it comes to things that are iconic it becomes very difficult to show a different aspect of that. So you know history has turned Dr. King into a superhero. It prevents other people from being able to imagine themselves being able to follow on that path. Which I think is somewhat both consciously and unconsciously within society and ourselves kind of the way for us to mitigate our fear of that sacrifice.

KACH: Definitely.

EA: So I thought... can I tell a story that takes something iconic and turn that in a way that makes it totally fresh and tells you something that you didn’t know? So I just took that as a challenge to see what I could do. So I sort of developed that whole body of work around an assumption that everyone took for granted. So I mean duality is just a way of getting people through the door. Giving them something they know and then you try to take them some place else to get them to see and try to connect to them in a way that recognizes their intelligence. In some instances people say, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand what you are trying to say.” And they say, “ Is this what you are saying?” and I say yeah and they say, “Well, I thought it was something more complicated than that.”

KACH: I ask that question a lot as an artist about remaking with the master’s house with the master’s tools. Then I think well you show work in a white cube that is the gallery and there are all types of plays of power, whether there are objects trying to undo this system or whether there are not. The architecture of the gallery itself is wielding a type of power. Who will come in to see your exhibition, who doesn't see it, where it is advertised, where it isn’t advertised. Sometimes when work enters these spaces to talk about colonialism and various structures of power, I wonder if the architecture of the space is doing the undoing as well which is why I am so interested in Edgar’s staging because all of the objects within this space are negotiating power. Even how much time you spend in the space with what allures you. You make a lot of beautiful objects you have these books that are glistening, even as you stated the viewer is expecting something more complicated or harder to get but really you are like no this is Spock and this is Tupac, but it is also trying to pull you in to do some dismantling for yourself. But then once you are sucked out of it you are still in the gallery...you are still in that space. I don’t really know how to navigate that as an artist, as a viewer, as a consumer...it's like we are still bound to these constructs, but as an artist/creator it is important to create these experiments to see how you can do that even if it is impossible at times.

EA: Part of the reason why I decided to make a play as opposed to a performance art piece

was because I wanted to work in a different milieu but also with a different set of rules then the gallery because of the very thing that you are talking about, because when you come to the thing with a different sensibility as a visual artist doing theater it was a way for me to kind of leave behind a little bit of that kind of feedback loop that you are talking about. We’re in the white cube so you have to do things that perform to the white cube.

KACH: Exactly.

EA: But the mind and creativity by its very nature will fill any vessel no matter the shape it is kind of like water. I wanted to not deal with the art community in this piece at least not alone. I am still trying develop that now and take the play on the road and connect it with other people that I think would be enriched by the storytelling in the way in which we told it. and I think it will make me a better artist when I do my next exhibition. I can say it already has. I don’t know if the work will be better but I can say it has made me a better thinker having worked within the profession of theater. I tell you if you ever get the opportunity to work with The CalArts Center for New Performance do it.

KACH: Definitely. It is something that I am interested in. When I went to the screening of “Until, Until...Until” and I heard about the work that you are doing, for me it felt like such a natural progression in regards to going to the gallery and the works that you are doing outside of the whitebox. I saw so many threads that excited me and I was like, “Of course Edgar is doing a play now!” And I attended the screening and it was so meta. It was mind blowing. You have Ben Vereen performing as Bert Williams and then you have this other performer [Frank Lawson] that comes in and is––

EA: Performing Ben Vereen playing Burt Williams.

KACH: Exactly. It just kind of loops into infinity and then I am looking at this theatrical performance that was filmed so it is all of these layers in how you work with time. Even when you work with drawing there is this kind of progression but it constantly even with these little heads they look back. There is this constant infinity element and then what you are talking about with this idea of vulnerability and you like to let a lot of the seams show so it was really exciting being in the audience and being like “oh there is Edgar right there telling someone to... Or the stagehands are slower as they go across the stage and at the same time that something is being built up it is also dissolving at the same time and it like how can you do something seamless when the subject matter is about this rupture.

EA: You know it’s funny because on the making side of it I am always trying to figure out this fudge factor and by that I mean if something goes terribly wrong you can still get something out of it essentially. So on the final night I don’t know if you saw this but um two of the curtains actually fell of the rod and landed on stage. Fortunately it was the last night of the show. But that last night I was so angry because there were so many things that went wrong and I kept telling myself that the audience doesn’t know, the audience doesn’t know.

KACH & IF: (Laughing)
KACH: Yes they don’t have a clue!

EA: They don’t have the sense of the show. It’s enough going on in the foreground and middleground and if something is not quite right on one of those layers it won’t sink the ship. Now if the actor had a heart attack and died on stage then that would probably not play out well... But that is sort of my critique of popular culture. That even that would be acceptable as far as turning it into a story that could be sold.

KACH: I mean you have Beyoncé falling down the stage and people filming it and putting it on Youtube and making memes out of it and it wasn’t planned or her hair getting caught in a fan and she is still singing. But then that is spun like “Wow she is dedicated! or She is a robot! Even though that was not intentional.

EA: Yeah but you know she also knew she had a team of people that would run over and you know. If she in the bathroom and runs out of toilet paper she will be able to get some in a second.

KACH: Yes, but she is not planning to fall down the steps in stilettos.

EA: Yes, but what I am getting at is that it is not just her. When we did the play it wasn’t just me. You know so that is just on the level of strategy but on the content side I am always thinking about how stuff

comes back again and I am thinking about it personally and in terms of history. I remember when I did my first residency as an Artist In Residency it was actually at Project Row Houses and the Banff Center so I shot my work and then I edited it in Banff. It was kind of cool to go back and forth between two residencies at the same time. So I was going from like the snow to the sticky hot weather of Houston and back and forth, but I remember when I got there it really changed my life. I was in my mid twenties and I had just graduated from Art Center and I was really awkward and I never had any girlfriends and nothing was ever meaningful so when I got to Banff I was able to recreate myself. I didn’t know too many people there. Well I knew a few but not very well. You know I had lots of flings. I was making work but I had this situation with this woman that was the exact same problems that I had with a woman I just left in LA and it was deja vu and it was some dynamic that I brought with me.

KACH: Yep it’s always there. Wherever you go that is where you are. IF: Yes, you can’t runaway from yourself.

EA: You can’t. There was something that I did. I don’t know why I picked her but it was something there and you start to realize that dynamics are produced and that there are some things that are affinities that happen between dynamism that shapes our perspectives and look a certain ways over time. You have a child and that is the most immediate and direct confrontation of the past into the present.

KACH: Yes, and I have this mantra that I use for my practice called the “Historical Present” and I see that within your work all the time with how you are reconciling the residue of these past moments and it’s like this push and pull or this infinity symbol you know.

EA: Yeah, and there is a way in which you can do it and I have tried it a few times to do it in the play. You can do a series of relays that can amplify so you can see all of the past and present and you recognize your position within it. There are these layers of mediation that echo within one body occupying all of these different presences because that is how we actually live in the world. Again we are constantly being convinced not to recognize those affinities. Like when Zora said, “Daddy, why does that person have to live on the street? Why does that person have to beg for money?” And how do you explain that? We become apathetic to it you drive past the homeless people. I mean living in New York I saw a homeless woman lying on the ground with her arms stretched out it was 20 degrees. This sister was wearing pretty much what looked like a potato sack, probably damn near death. Well she wasn’t dead. I remember walking past her and a I turned back to stop and look at her I was thinking what has conditioned me not to recognize her? What has conditioned me to recognize her and then not do anything?

KACH: To keep it moving. To go on about your day and do what you feel is urgent or a priority to you.

EA: Yeah, and what’s a part of it is that it’s something that has taught me that this person is totally separate from me.

KACH: Or you are conditioned to think that they are not a part of you because that helps you to keep it moving o do what you think you have to do.

EA: Yeah. I got mine you get yours and maybe if I become rich I can come back and help you. That’s the American way and it wasn’t always like that.

KACH: Not even that. Pick yourself up by you boot straps. Like Dave Chappelle says about Sesame Street and Oscar the Grouch. “ Get it together Grouch!” (Laughing)

EA: Thank God for Dave Chappelle.
KACH: It’s that same sentiment. We are taught that.

EA: That’s the reason why The Chappelle Show was so amazing because it actually did that. It recognized these feedback loops and affinities. His show was fucking amazing.

KACH: He is a brilliant man and I got a chance to meet him in Yellow Springs, Ohio and I talked to him for a little bit and he was talking about comedy and Paul Mooney and this idea that you have to have the audience laugh every minute or couple of secs. He just keeps the punches coming and what do we do when we shouldn’t be laughing at it but we have to but we shouldn’t be, but we are really laughing at ourselves and this condition. It’s this idea of nervous laughter because you know you could help that lady. Even coming back from Nigeria and seeing so many people in so many conditions and knowing that I am somewhat of a millionaire with the dollar exchange but it's a situation that is bigger than you and me or outside you of me and I have to take care of my family or I am not rich. This idea of wealth is subjective to who you really are. You are very privileged beyond a doubt.

EA: Yeah and depending on where you are at. There has to be some sort of base that a just society has to have in order to live. When I was in Sao Tome you know this small island I saw one or two homeless people––a handful–– but everybody else because they did not own any property built their own homes so that they could live off the land and fish in the sea and they had a community. It has it’s own problems and some places do not have plumbing at all but if someone needs a home people around you are going to help build it. So it wasn’t this type of criminalization of poverty that exists here so to me that was something reaffirming about humanity and also recognizing how violent our society is on so many small levels especially around this maldistribution of wealth. Of course as artists we show in galleries, we make our work but there is also another layer of our practice which is how we talk about it and how we talk about it too and you know I try to be involved in conversation with my peers, you and having Imani come and stay or try to write about work that in a way, tries to humanize and have people understand what it is that we do and the value of it and to also recognize the stuff that we make that intersects with how we make it. The creative force produces the objects but then the force goes away and the object stays with us.

KACH: Yes. That is the art.

EA: That is the art.

KACH: Yes when collectors or museums own the work and you can only see it when you go to someone’s home or all of these things I am more interested in the conversations that were produced. Because you are influenced by the research that you are doing and the travel that you are doing, that is the art that produces the object. Because essentially it's an object and a conduit to get the conversation sparking. Once the conversation is out in the world and after we leave the theater... what we just witnessed that is the work. The work getting inside of you.

EA: That’s right.

KACH: Because the experience is ephemeral. It’s never again. And so that is the thing that excites me about being an artist and maybe that is a way of dismantling the kind of tools, not putting so much stake in the actual objects but what the objects bring to the forefront.

EA. 1 Yeah and if Charles and myself and Andrea and Rodney and Olga and Sam are all considered to be a part of the CalArts Mafia the glue that holds us together is what you are describing.

KACH: Yes I definitely agree! Across all of ya’lls practices. I agree.

EA: The other critical part of it too is recognizing what these institutions do to you as a person.

KACH & IF: Um hum

EA: Imani and I were talking about this in the car and over dinner. As soon as Imani told people that she was accepted to Princeton she lost a lot of friends.

KACH: Even I was like OOOO because it is the name. IF: Yeah it changes us.

EA: Yeah. We recognize how it changes us. Within the arts it is so problematic at least at the level that we are engaged. There is an expectation that part of success is a transformation of class and that you need to look a certain way and to talk a certain way. These things go back to early models that came out of France, you know the creative class is some aspect of this problem. There is a certain expectation that you should look like the wealth that your work is acquiring and you should travel in the circles with the people who are able to then champion and support your work. I never was able to fully embrace that.

KACH: Because when you look around you're like okay so the things that got these people to like me now. When people say, “Oh you are doing so well!” and I say, “No it’s just new people who like me now.” It doesn’t mean yeah now I am doing well! It doesn't mean that those things that you carried around with you your entire life and influenced you and then all of a sudden you wake up at this seven course dinner and all of a sudden that is supposed to change things. It’s really kind of uncanny and then you have to form alliances and loyalties because you don’t want to bite the hands that feed you but then that is

problematic because some of these hands are problematic because you don’t know where they have been or what they want with you or if you are just going to be their pawn for the system and if you are making political work, work that is about these power structures and ideas then you become what you hate you are replicating it and you get lost in it. I have had a few friends that have succumbed to that and you're like “What the hell?” But I always think about how can we go back to the reason why you make the work. Once you start losing that or forgetting that the kind of criticality/ what you are trying say and what you are trying to impart becomes lost.

IF: Well all of that is about where you came from. You become alienated from that. Because the things that are instilled in us the upward mobility others us. So it’s this weird kind of...

EA: It’s a dilemma. I think this is the dilemma of any creative person unless you are super rich and you don’t have to think about your class position in the same way.

KACH: Or you should be.

EA: You can decide not to. You know I was thinking about Stevie Wonder. I used to be a huge Stevie Wonder fan and one of my rituals I did in undergrad was get my paycheck from work-study and I would go buy Stevie Wonder album and sit and listen to it for like a week. I would buy them chronologically. I went from his early music to the stuff he was doing in the 70’s to Living For The City to that funk opera he did The Secret Life of Plants.

KACH: I love that album!!!

EA: Which is amazing but then something happened in the 80’s. I don’t know what happened in the 80’s but I attribute it to the kind of malaise that happens when you get older but also I think it does have something to do with his class position because he didn’t have to prove himself. He became an icon and didn’t have to prove anything anymore. Even when Michael Jackson was being attacked in the 90’s his music became increasingly self conscious. Why don’t you just leave me alone? A lot of it was him reflecting upon his own position and I think that the work suffered for that not to say that they are not both incredibly talented people but the challenges that they took on formally with the work became more autoreferential.

KACH: But then I wonder. I am a true believer that art imitates life and life imitates art once they did acquire this certain recognition they are trying to talk about their life and the life that they are living and want to live and sometimes I think about that too if you are in another class bracket you are talking about the life you want to live too. I recently read Citizen by Claudia Rankine I love her work I think it’s an interesting follow up to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely have you heard about that book? It’s an American lyric talking about pharmaceutical corporations and antidepressants, police brutality and all of these instances in American society in which we are just like in this constant malize or depression. When I read Citizen I was like, “Oh this is Claudia’s I am rich now hip-hop record.” Because it was like, “Now I have made it, I am now this well respected academic, I have this amazing house, everybody around the world knows me but when I step outside of my house or my office or this campus where everyone knows me and where I am revered at I am just another Black woman and the cashier is asking me if my card works before I swipe it at the grocery store.” So it’s about all of these microaggressions but it’s not really class conscious like okay I am a top dog in the academic world although I know that is not the only positionality that I am speaking from because it is layered which is why I am writing this book in the first place so I kind of felt like that. It

was like “Oh I have made it but I still won’t accept all of those politics of race and things that are put onto my body.”

IF: Kanye says, “Even if I am in a Benz I am still a nigga in a coupe.”

KACH: Exactly! That’s like this album once rappers make it big it’s about how much money they have and how many friends they don’t have. It’s like this paradise of being accepted and being known for your work is not the paradise that you imagined. Toni Morrison says that we can only have paradise with the exclusion of others. Even in your paradise someone still has to scrub the toilet or take out the chamber pot. That’s what I am thinking about in all of this. I was also talking to my writing mentor about Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me he has that same “I made it out of Baltimore and the hood and now I am in France/I made it out the hood I don’t have to think like that anymore it’s a past memory and now my circle is different.” I love his work though.

IF: That is so funny because my aunt told me yesterday to accept who I am now and to stop controlling the way I am viewed but it is hard.

KACH: But the other side is an illusion that's the thing and the other thing that you are aspiring to be is outside of yourself but It should be constantly evolving too.

IF: And it is.

EA: But I think the part of it is that there is always a frontier in which you can make a mistake and people don’t know if you can succeed there or not and I think that when you get to a level of financial security it can scare you even if you don’t recognize it. America is one of those weird places no matter how affluent you become particularly if you grew up poor or middle class that your wealth is going to be taken from you. That is just something that indicative to this culture. There is no real respect for people that are poor and there are no real resources for you to even get help. The shit is real. There are places where you can

still find challenges. If I had the opportunity to work with Stevie Wonder I would do a straight a cappella album I would be like leave all of the electronic shit behind it’s gonna be just you and a piano. Oh did you hear Bobby Womack’s album that he did before he died?

KACH: No, and I am so upset about him passing away and Prince

EA: It is amazing. The Bravest Man In The Universe.

KACH: The Bravest Man In The Universe?!

EA: Yeah, and he alienated a huge section of his following. It is an electronic album he just got a bunch of young people to write for him and he sang over the dubbing.

KACH: Wow.

EA: It’s amazing.

KACH: Yeah, I was going to ask you what are you listening to right now?

IF: That is so important.

EA: Cody Chestnutt I want to work with him on something.

KACH: You know I just learned about The Secret Life of Plants three years ago.

IF: Good because I am writing down these names.

KACH: That is how you start.

EA: Yes, that is how you start.

KACH: I mean we both studied with Charles (Gaines) and it’s like slow down Charles I am trying to understand!!

EA: Oh I still do it. You need to have someone in your life like that. (Starts playing Bobby Womack)
I been trying to say I am I sorry
Do you know the pain I am feeling and it just won’ t let up

KACH: Which speaks to what you were talking about with bringing this body with you and being on this loop. What I tell my friends who are going through things I tell them you have to forgive yourself first of all and then you can see what your role is that you played in it and then you can see all these layers of healing and manifestations. That is what I saw in “Until, Until, Until...” That last scene in which he is taking off the make up. Forgiving himself and being like,” I am not going to allow people to treat me like this anymore, I am gonna do me.” I think that is like allowing yourself the joy that you need to feel whether you are in that make up or taking it off. I thought about that really deeply in that scene and asked myself what does it mean to claim your joy through so much trauma?

EA: Also recognizing that it takes a long time to get there. Sometimes it take years to get there. Sometimes it is two steps forward and two steps back. You know when I went through therapy and then I did this really great program called The Rockwood Leadership Program it is one of the best things I have ever done. If you ever get a chance to do it you should do it. It is basically for people who are in a field where they are trying to be a leader for social change and they help you to understand and sort of ground you in your own purpose to basically state it all at once. You go in there for five days and you say that’s not possible to do that shit and then by the end you can. They have you go down the elevator of your own trauma.

KACH: That is intense.

EA: Yeah it is super intense. People were crying and shit, and going out of the room. You do it with a group of people and it is really amazing. I came out of it and within a year I realized that I had taken those two steps back or even four and I recognized that even though I knew what my issues were it didn't mean that I was going to do anything about them. They say knowledge is power.

IF: They say knowing is half the battle.

EA: Yes because you can build go arounds. You know people who get their stomachs stapled and now they are like I can’t eat solid foods. People will start eating soft foods and start gobbling soft foods as a go around. There is a chemical in our brains that will kick in when you try to change to stop us from changing.

EA: Oh let me play this other song this is something else that I am really into right now Do you know Roman GianArthur?

KACH: No

EA: He did an album that is a mashup of Ok Computer by Radiohead and You're My Lady from D’Angelo. This album is free on Soundcloud. He made music with Janelle Monae. (Plays album in the background.)

KACH: Wow. I have always wanted to ask you if you feel like your work is related in any type of way to Afrofuturism?

EA: It is content in some projects. I have done work about Sun Ra. I would say that I don’t know within the orthodoxy of Afro-Futurism if I fit within it but I would say that some of the projects that I have doing have explored the subject. I wouldn’t say that I am though. I have a friend named Julie Myers who said that Afro Futurism to some degree has a utopian aspect to it that I am not necessarily invested in. But you know like with Sun Ra he is a fascinating figure because of how he thought about the world. Which documentary is it that he did on him? Not space is the place... Basically at the end he said he thinks that his project did not go as far as it should have. He was recognizing the limitations of his vision and getting people to come along with it.

KACH: Yes and that is hard. Afro-Futurism wasn’t even a term when he was around it kind of came in the 90’s and I think that now any African American that is working with spaceships or Star Trek or any type of space cosmology I think it is easy to group people into that and it is something that I question a lot as an artist because you want to define your work and what you do but you also don’t want someone to just slap a tenet or what your work is about and what it encompasses. I have the same issue with utopia. I am shooting for this peace and I don’t think that I should have to go to space to find that but peace is subjective some people can have peace like ISIS in eliminating people who don’t believe in the same way as they do. You know what I mean? So it can take on violent instances. I wouldn’t describe your whole practice as Afro- Futurist, but I am learning as I am trying to disassociate with the term that I am actually learning a whole lot more about. Just in relationship to how you talk about time, that is a major component of Afro-Futurism. That the future is now and now is the future and all of those concepts and this kind of infinity loop. Like in your work people are not really sure what time they are actually in. Even in Until, Until, Until... and a lot of the drawings. I don’t know, so maybe some of the components but not all of the components and what does that mean too?

EA: Yeah there are some parallels and affinities I think. Essentially what creative people are trying to figure out is how to maximize the space for them to explore and play around and create without any determinacy that some other force might sort of impose upon them. You know in Black music that is where you can find at least the most pervasive data set of how people have played around with certain troupes. At least in Jazz where it is about improvisation and interplay between these immersive elements do that kind of synergy building over time so it is not so much what but when it comes together. That is where I can see the ethos. It is not of like an escape as far as the extent of being true to how we actually think and breathe and how we are wired as humans. At least that is how I try to understand it. But I haven’t done any research lately into what Afrofuturism is or how people are coding it today I just know it is popular.

KACH: It’s really popular. That is my kind of issue with it too. I don’t want it to be placed onto me so soon. I don’t know I feel like it is kind of trendy right now and anybody that does something with space is grouped into that.

EA: Yeah it’s easy to do. I mean I was in that show... KACH: At the Studio Museum? (The Shadows Took Shape) EA: Yeah the catalogue is around here somewhere.

KACH: Which I think that was an awesome show and the thing that I like about the shows that they put on is that some artists are like yes this directly responds to the them and other artists are brought into question the specificity of the theme. I like how a lot of their shows like Black Romantic, which challenged ideas within Black figurative painting, which is what I think these shows, should do. They are posed as questions instead of answers and that is what I find the most fruitful as a viewer. That is what I enjoy so much about your work. I left the screening of “Until, Until, Until...” with so many questions and I don’t know if you can answer those questions. Those questions are for the creator or for me and my role in society. Like I said that is where the art is.

EA: Yeah, it is not for me to answer them but to continue the dialogue about them. KACH: Exactly.

EA: That is the goal. That is why I was talking with Imani and we were talking about going to BAR (2) and screening the film. I just texted the organizer to see if that is something that we can do because I really want to have a conversation, some conversations with Black people around this film to see what people will say. Just the stuff that I would never think about. I have had some people come up to me and say, “I wish Ben (Vereen) would have never did that performance. I just wish he never did it.”

KACH: Yeah. But I think that is the easy route to go with something like that. It is really intense but he challenged the limits of himself and the audience and I was on your vimeo and seeing the clapping videos. Knowing that that would occur but that you have to do it anyway because you have something to impart and it could have went so many ways but the way that it did happen the fact that the public didn’t get to see those last instances but the people in the room saw it. They saw it.

EA: They saw it.

KACH: They saw those last five minutes that we ––well you have seen it–– but we as the general public will never know and like I said when you reach a certain level you don’t want to be Stevie Wonder in the 90’s as you say and when you work with certain tropes those troupes have the power to bring the baggage of that history, but for him to get up and say I don’t care i have to do this even though it's like “What the fuck are you doing?!” It is still at that age and stage in your career you put yourself in a situation where

people can say “What the Fuck are you doing?!” And to think that you would come in your generation to pick that back up to make this really compelling work that keeps these conversations alive. I mean we are still capable of wearing the blackface without the black face.

EA: Do you want to see it? KACH: Yes!
EA: Okay let me set it up.

After the conclusion of the interview Edgar showed me the second half of Ben Vereen’s performance in which he honored the legacy of Bert Williams at Ronald Reagan's inauguration dinner. I saw the performance reenacted by actor Frank Lawson but it was truly haunting to see Vereen perform it within the original context. I did not record the footage of course because Edgar does not want it to be released due to Ben Vereen’s wishes. After the viewing Edgar allowed me to snap some pics of his home studio and writing space and our conversation concluded.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Prior to the interview recording I proposed that Edgar was a part of the CalArts Mafia which is a network of CalArts alum that support and nourish each other via resources and moral support that have a huge presence in the LA art scene. However at first our opinions differed about what it actually is. Usually the CalArts Mafia is seen as an elitist underground informal network of graduates with a pay to play mentality in terms of the art scene.
The Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.] is an annual convening of black visual artists held in Chicago, IL. As an artist led initiative the Retreat is guided by the tenets of fellowship, rejuvenation, and intellectual rigor and strives to create time and space for an intergenerational community of black visual artists to engage outside of the institutional environment. Initiated by Theaster Gates and Eliza Myrie in 2013 [B.A.R.] is advised by Carrie Mae Weems and Sarah Workneh and supported each year by a variety of artists fulfilling the Retreat’s programmatic ambitions. Info taken from http://blackartistsretreat.com/info/

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is a Kentifrican-American artist who focuses on questions of race, sexuality, and history through a variety of visual,

performative and textual mediums. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in

Harlem, NY, Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

Music is the Muse: Jennie C. Jones and the Physical Residue of Jazz Music

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

There is an ongoing discussion regarding Blackness in contemporary art and politics: Should an African-American artist make work that reflects Blackness and is representative of the entire race, or should they embrace a personal modernism and liberate their aesthetic from the bounds of a singular identity. Jennie C. Jones’ mid-career survey at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston does not explicitly conform to one view or the other, yet, it does provides a soft and reflective insight into the culture that defines her identity and informed eleven years of her artistry. The exhibited works do not bear the burden of being representative of Black culture, nor do they need to. There is ample space in the contemporary art world for Jones’ voice within any multicultural discourse, with no explanation, on any topic, including the history of jazz.

Jones’ featured works explore the physicality behind music, from production and consumption, to distribution. She focuses on the products of the African-American jazz musicians from her youth, and the tools used to experience that music. It is a much more specific area of focus than most abstract artists will dedicate an entire career to, but the result is not too monotonous. Examining a broad aesthetic grouping we will discover that champions of geometric and lyrical abstraction like Ellsworth Kelly, Norman Bluhm, and Kazimir Malevich tended to explore pure non-objective, non-representational compositions of human life, landscape, architecture, and simplification of natural forms. Seldom do we find an obsession with such a particular inanimate subject group, and even more rare is for that subject group to be the focus of an entire body of work. This specificity guarantees that Jones’ art will not be confused or generalized with the work of other contemporary artists, for better or worse she is dedicated to asserting her unique interest, and she truly believes in the direction of her work. The exhibition showcases Jones’ range, maintains its clarity of subject matter, all while highlighting her aesthetic across multiple forms and mediums including minimalist sculptures, abstract drawings, color field painting and digital micro sampling of vinyl recordings.
Walk into the CAHM and the first thing you see is a long wall immediately separating you from whatever is beyond in the museum space. It’s essentially bare, but to the left there is the artist name listed above the exhibition abstract, and to the right is a massive black square with a dark red strip trailing down the left border, in the bottom right corner of the blackness is the iconic Blue Note Records logo. These solid blocks of color form the crop section from a Blue Note LP album cover. This is the one and only wall painting in the entire exhibition, and will prove to be very important as a historical document for understanding the origin of Jones’ color field paintings. Her use of solid rectangular bands, and a restricted color palette closely mirror the iconic design of 1950’s Blue Note cover art. A soft crackle rattles throughout the building, raining from speakers hidden high in the rafters, not music, but the rough scratch of a vinyl record on repeat. This audio piece is both an ode to the nostalgia and novelty of using vinyl, and an explicit introduction to the era of music that Jones’ work stands in conversation with.

In a speech at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Jones talks about a time where she was struggling for content, working to justify her aesthetic and trying to figure out the meaning behind the work that she was making. Once she realized that she was spending more time curating her playlist than she was defining her content, it was clear that the music she played in her studio was the source of her content.

After this, she began to investigate the relationship of form in art to the music that is played in the studio during the creation of art. Regarding Jazz, she determined that non geometric abstract art is the equivalent of the improvised and organic jazz sound, while geometric art is representative of the composed and formal song structure found in a modern jazz quartet. When people talk about classic jazz albums, they often say the music has “space”. Jones tries to reproduce a sense of space in the overall dynamic of her painted compositions. Her acrylic paintings, which she calls “Acoustic Paintings”, are composed using monochromatic canvases with sound-absorbing panels. Her “Soft Gray Tone with Reverberation #2”, is a hard gray and yellow acrylic on canvas with a gray absorber panel mounted on-top and towards the left of the frame. There’s a strict distinction between the forms, and to continue the metaphor this piece may reflect the formal song structure of the jazz quintet. Each of the paintings on display has a similar unassuming form, sound panels mounted atop a restricted acrylic color palette. The only differences being in the irregular shapes of the canvases, some are perfectly square, while some a thin and rectangular, and a few are triangular. The paintings have depth, each provides its own sustained suspense based on the spatial location of the shapes, and the appropriation of the absorber panels is clever, so improvisational, but its use as an element of the geometric composition seems highly derivative.

Along the outer walls of the gallery are the collages, each grouped in sets made between 2004 and 2014, and varying in size. The most interesting set amongst the collage drawings is “Sony Walkman Auto Reverse Green” an arrangement of elemental shapes, abstracted from the formal design of a Sony Walkman. It’s a consist of 12 parts, which show the same item at different points of abstraction, the forms range from highly recognizable shapes to increasingly unorganized arrangements. The relation of these drawings to the work of other artist is very interesting. The style of abstraction is reminiscent of both Kasimir Malevich’s the Russian Suprematist, and Ellsworth Kelly the American Minimalist. Malevich, the pioneer of Suprematism, a Russian avant-garde movement, had a style characterized by a non representational and abstracted heightening of society through art. Kelly emphasized a simplicity in form across both painting and sculpture, he is noted for his use of shaped canvases and minimalist aesthetic. Using extensive white space, and simple representative colors based on real-life observations from the Walkman design, Jones places her work in conversation with both the history of avant-garde abstraction and consumer technology. The collages grouped together are impressive, but alone they are sure to be less powerful and less interesting. None of the visual representations are necessarily original, virtually every abstract design or composition can clearly traced to the product that they reference. Jones does nothing to hide the relationship though, many of the works have titles clearly naming the original (“Sony Walkman”, “Solid State”). She is a force for her derivatives of original products because she has devised a very specific subject matter within the contemporary abstract canon.

Jones’ work communicates her literal obsession with the byproducts of jazz music, from music production to distribution and even album cover design, her conceptual sculptures continue to build on a practice of minimalism and reappropriation. Each of the sculptures on display represent specific objects within the vocabulary of music consumption, common

materials, such as CD cases, LP sleeves, and headphone wires. This “physical residue” is Jones’ muse, and it’s reflected clearly in both “Spider Trio (for Louis)” and “The Gentle Influence of the Bourgeoisie (Trombone Improvisation)”, the first is basically a group of wire cd holders held together with felt while the other is a plastic CD rack flipped upside-down. Found objects created using common materials. Although it’s not nearly interesting enough to remember this is the most literal representation of music byproduct as art object. “Song Containers”, another sculpture set, is the most interesting piece in the show. Jones has taken the recognizable forms of 8-track cases, compact disc, cassette tapes, and gatefold LP covers, and recast them in brushed aluminum. It’s the same simple, minimal form which has become trademark throughout this exhibition, but each of these explores a playful concept which lends directly to Jones’ intent. Tucked on an awkward shelf near the front of the gallery, they look like toys. The aluminum designs are sleek, alluring, and easy to recognize at quick glance without losing any of the original intent or integrity. There’s ten editions of each totaling forty small sculptures, the sheer quantity suggest that this is these are most important work on display, albeit the smallest. Scaled appropriately these would make admirable outdoor sculptures, in class with the public commissions of the recently deceased Ellsworth Kelly.

As a comprehensive contemporary art exhibition the “Jennie C. Jones: Compilation” is exceptional, it’s an immersive visual and audible experience, with many points of entry for someone who many not be learned in the history of art, jazz music, or contemporary blackness. At its core this is a jazz inspired show, which exemplifies the differences in popular music taste over the past three generations. The fascination is with record engineering and the technical aspects of the recordings, which means the equipment and how the finished product is going to sound. There is an obvious nostalgia in subject matter, which makes one mull over what would be the result if Jones’ focus was redirected to modern technology, and the popular music of today. Consider the differences in visual representation when examining analog tech in the form of records and cd’s, versus abstraction in the modern download economy where albums and records may never leave the screen of a smartphone? Regardless, this work is good, Houston has endorsed it, and Jones will never again need to justify her aesthetic. In previous talks Jones has discussed Modernism which is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation, she is noted for saying about the Jazz era that “the contribution of African American artist to modernism was absent in visual art and was more-so audible, through the music of the time”, it seems that as a retroactive response to this she has attempted to fill part of that visual gap, by discarding the the demands of modern music and highlighting specific aspects of a genre past its pop-culture heyday.

Film Review; Losing Ground

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground has layers upon layers upon layers of story. As I sit down to write, I don’t think my review will even scratch the surface of everything this film is about. Collins effortlessly juggles a film with in a film, several storylines, existential crisis and discourse on the plight of the black artist. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Any other filmmaker would allow themselves to become weighed down by such heavy subject matter and overwhelm their audience. Not Collins though, she manages to weave together a subtle, yet powerful portrayal of a woman in search of herself without dropping the ball at any point during this film.

Released in 1982, Losing Ground , was broadcast on PBS’ American Playhouse and played at various film festivals and colleges. Although deemed a classic upon its release, the film never received distribution and sort of fell into obscurity. The negatives were eventually rescued and restored by Collins’ daughter and the film was released by classic film distributor, Milestone Films, in early 2015.

At the heart of this film is Sara Rogers, a professor of philosophy who suddenly becomes focused on ecstatic experiences, particularly her inability to have one. She buries herself in research on ecstasy, but eventually finds herself as the lead in her student’s thesis film. The film is an interpretation of the song, “Frankie and Johnny.” Ironically, the story of Frankie and Johnny is a reflection of her relationship with her husband Victor, an abstract painter who has no issue with losing himself in ecstatic experiences. The two spend the summer in upstate New York as Victor looks for inspiration for his work while questioning his journey as an artist.

Losing Ground closes similarly to its opening statement as spoken by Sara to her college class, “Human existence must be without rhyme, without reason. That in the face of sustained horror, the argument for an absurd universe becomes the only rational argument.” There is no ending, no explanation or any sense made out of the events staged throughout the film.

One of the first African American women to direct a feature film, Collins was undeniably ahead of her time. Decades later, films rarely explore the internal conflicts of women…so it goes without saying that we often do not get to see films where the internal struggles of African American women are central to the storyline. Unfortunately, the world never got to see the full span of Collins’ creative genius due to her passing in 1988 at the age of 46. A deluxe 2-disc DVD of Losing Ground will be available for purchase on January 26, 2016 on the Milestone Films website .

Jasmine Jones currently works in the entertainment marketing industry specializing in regional film publicity and promotion. She was previously the Film Series and Social Media Manager at the Houston Museum of African American Culture and co-directed the 2015 Houston African Film Festival.

Critical Sankofa Planning - Mobilizing Texas Freedom Colony Memories

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I study the origins and preservation of Texas Freedom Colonies, places founded by ex-slaves, through memory and observed rituals. My assumption is that we have long been doulas to the truth: We possess the ability to manage our relationships to structures, nature, and space. Some see my partialities as a badge of courage and fidelity, while others see my subjectivities as mere bias. However, interrogating memory and its purpose in Black life cannot be done without rigor. This is a research methodology of care, repair, and discomforting objectivity. Getting Black Texans to remember and recognize the value of their memories value is the work of Critical Sankofa Planning. Looking back to look forward. Recollection as resistance.

Consider the present challenge of deciding how Black Diasporic people will live now. How will we live in a way that affirms rather than criminalizes our bodies? How will we build wealth? How will we simply be? Critical Sankofa planning urges us to ask first, how early Black Texans, somewhere between slavery and Juneteenth, made home place. Where did these places go? Why do some remain? Are the answers in elders’ memories?

Take two settlements, Riceville and Fifth Street, in Southwest Houston. To tell you about these settlements, I need only tell you about my grand aunt, Ruby Brown.

Her cotton long sleeved bloused was unbuttoned/ Open almost to the waist/Her backbreaking bosom, the edges drenched in perspiration from Houston’s 1929 heat/Each finger dug into the wealth of her hip/The other leg perched unlike a lady on the chrome bumper of a Ford /“She was so womanish!”/ The story, words shot out grandma’s diastema/”Ruby made a match of those two/Two grown out the same citified and country earth” /They met under Ruby’s pecan trees, down from Old Man Fondren’s hunting grounds/Here, where men’s hourly wages drowned in white lightening, their bodies stirred by Etta James/Down from Great Grandma Hester in her urban bottom of chicken wire fences off the grid/Ruby is the way things came to be/The way I came to be/Ruby/ is a mystery under photo album cellophane/A 1950 poll tax card signature.

To understand Ruby is to understand life in Black settlements and entrepreneurial, visually transgressive, Black women living in Jim Crow Texas. It is recognizing their networks of care and commerce. Our Rubies are our treasures; our master plans, teaching us how to take up and own space, to be truly seen.

Freedom Colonies are difficult to integrate into the modern planning project, because they go unseen. Freedom Colonies’ current challenges, triumphs, and collective wealth are unknown. We need Black family memories to make them visible, relevant. This approach doesn’t dismiss structural racism, but it does require a shift toward recognition before mobilization. Engaging in Critical Sankofa Planning requires that we honor, learn, and then move. Remember and honor ancestors, not just structures. All of them! Not just the rich, learned ones. Learn from the past (including limitations, class, gender, or sexuality -based marginalizations), and then move.

I am a plannervationist. I use the tools of the present to plan; but first I look to what we already own (ours bodies, stories, songs, homesteads, and our bloody and blessed memories) to detect a problem or an opportunity. If a community faces a problem, it is likely they are facing one they’ve solved before, and need only be aided in remembering the solution. We all have maps to our origins, our assignments, and to our ways of being here for one another. I collect the stories, and help communities draw the maps.

About Andrea Roberts

Originally from the greater Houston area, Andrea Roberts is a development and planning professional, founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, and doctoral candidate in the Community & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation Programs at the University of Texas-Austin. This is part of a longer forthcoming article. For more about Critical Sankofa Planning, early African American placemakers, like the Texas Freedom Colonies Project on Facebook. Email Andrea Roberts at roberta318@gmail.com .

Charles Gaines: Undoing Perception

Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989, curated by Naima J. Keith for the Studio Museum in Harlem traveled to The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA and was on view Feb 7th-May 24th. Charles Gaines is finally getting his due with a traveling major museum show capturing the early beginnings of his conceptual system based works. While at CalArts I had the honor of studying with Charles and learned so much about the politics of colonialism in relationship to language, imagery and beauty. Before he began teaching at CalArts Charles taught at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in the 1970s. At the time it was a hotbed of political and social activism. It was there that Charles created his meticulous graphs with tiny numbers that determined the aesthetic of his grid based work. As a young African-American artist Gaines created a space for himself and artists who came after him in which he challenged given ideas of beauty, objectivity, and self-expression. He worked within ideas of the Conceptual Art of the 60's in which Sol Lewitt was his mentor. As his work evolved he added photography as a documentary element. I am captivated by his work with images of walnut trees. His walnut trees are shot in a straight forward manner and are in conversation with identification photographs and mug shots. We witness trees filled with leaves, we witness those leaves fall away manipulated through the artist’s systematic code.

Gaines interventions were often triptychs in which right next to the source material for the decoding you will see two different renditions that have a sense of movement and time. If a photograph is supposed to represent the “truth” or final rendition of a subject, Gaines interrupts the initial narrative that he anticipates to be fueled by our learned associations. Gaines dissects the image through organized lines, muddles it and creates a time warp of numbers. Throughout the series studies of the trees become layered by the innovative usage of plexiglass boxes in which his systems began obliterating, confining, releasing and neatly codifying the image of the tree through a digitized code. He still uses the boxes as a device to layer and complicate text and imagery.

His tree works towards the 1980s changed dramatically in which the beginning of the exhibition featured more subdued colors but when you approached the final room of the exhibition you were knocked to your knees by chroma! The solitary images of trees now had numbers layering on top of the branches. Barren trees were interrupted by fecund trees that are layers of bright acrylic hues sandwiched on top of and in-between plexiglass. The trees became barren and full, dead and alive, constructed and deconstructed, simple and complex. Your eyes do a dance trying to negotiate the illusion. The viewer is left to question the presence of the source image. We are left with wondering what the disparate elements have to do with one another. This pondering is an undoing of our perception.

April 24, 1970, midnight concert at the Apollo Theater Harlem

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Visual artist William Cordova, an old school vinyl head, had three works featured in an exhibition entitled “ The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl .” This essay is in homage to an underappreciated masterwork.

“Let me make this…very clear to all the police in the audience, and for those who will still see their roles as passive ones: the shit is on!”

–Felipe Luciano (East Coast Chairman, The Young Lords)

April 24, 1970, midnight concert at the Apollo Theater, Harlem

This live album came into my own archive by chance but not accident. It was through direct awareness and relation to the social content of the material rather than curiosity that led me to its existence.

The concert, organized by the Young Lords, captured the imagination of many young people all over the US, and influenced other music oriented fundraising events by bringing together activists and musicians who were radically revolutionizing activism around the world; The New Haven 8 Concert, Concert for Bangladesh and Concert for The People of Kampuchea, Farm Aid, the list goes on.

The Young Lords, a Latino community organization based in New York City, modeled themselves after the Black Panther Party’s platform. Free survival programs, children’s breakfast, food/clothes giveaway, legal defense, and free clinics for the poor. The concert appealed to a diverse audience through an eclectic line up of music that included, R&B, Latin avant-garde, Rock, Salsa and poetry. The proceeds went into these programs.

The album’s jacket design is minimal with a single Black and White photo printed across the front. The back of the jacket is equally simple without liner notes, year of manufacturer or Record Label, except to note tracks and performers. It is important to note that the actual vinyl record does not contain any printed information other than the numbers 0086813209.

One is almost prompted to visualize the movements and breathing of each performer as they interact through their set.

One can figure out the A side by listening to the audio intro of Denise Oliver, The Young Lords Minister of Economic Development, hosting “our first guest” the music of Joe Bataan. It’s obvious that Bataan’s set is incomplete from the quick audio cuts, still, this may be the earliest known live recordings of Joe Bataan, An Afro-Filipino, from Spanish Harlem and one of the first musicians to sign with Fania Records. Track 1 is a scorching version of What Good is a Castle; a poignant composition about the state of low income housing the decrepit high rises of El Barrio. Track 2. Ordinary Guy is an interesting sped up live version from Joe Bataan’s Riot album (Fania 1968). Ordinary Guy was originally released on Bataan’s Gypsy Woman LP (Fania 1967). Tracks 3. Obatala closes the set but then Joe Bataan returns to the stage and proceeds to perform his first hit single, Gypsy Woman and finally a theater rousing Freedom from 1969’s Poor Boy (Fania).

“But I was what I am, a man for the times…am talking about freedom?” – Joe Bataan (Freedom)

The Rascals (formerly, Young Rascals) start up track 4. Good Lovin,’ from their self-titled Young Rascals album (1966, Atlantic) partially excludes is the bands introduction by Denise Oliver. Track 5. People Got To Be Free, evolves into an extended sing along with the audience that runs a total of 6 minutes a huge feat for a song that originally runs 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Track 6. Groovin’ (1967, Atlantic) really reveals the extent of influence that Afro & Latino music had in contemporary Rock music of the late 1960s and early 70s. Groovin’ first starts out with a conga solo from an unknown player and a bilingual version of the song by lead singer Felix Cavaliere. A version that is seldom heard live. (Groovin’/ Sueño, Atlantic 1967).

Elaine Yarborough and The Truth & Soul Ensemble performed only one song or at least it was the only one included, Track 7. Leavin’ This Morning, a traditional folk song originally recorded by Odetta on Odetta and the Blues (1962, Riverside). The Truth & Soul Ensemble’s version though is far from traditional or acoustic. Elaine Yarboroughs (not to be confused with Yarbrough & Peoples) soulful voice often climaxes the blaring high brass, drums & bass background of The Ensemble. It is unfortunate that no other recordings of this group were able to be located.

The following performers, track 8. The Harley Four, is interesting in that this is a Martial Arts family troupe performing without any music as background and yet included in the album.

Side B opens with a long duration of static whose source, after much scrutinizing, turns out to be the microphone to the reel-to-reel recorder that the entire event was recorded with. Track 1. Speech, starts out with “a solidarity telegram from Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, it’s unclear if Denise Oliver of the Young Lords is reading the telegram. Track 2. Starts out much clearer, the album track listing states, Richard Moore (Dharuba) of the Black Panther 21 speaks.

“I came to curse you out and you should take that as constructive criticism … come and see about Bobby”

-Dharuba (Black Panther)

Richard Moore (Dharuba Bin Wahad), and 20 other Black Panthers accused of planning to terrorize New York City landmarks were all eventually acquitted in what was to be the longest and most expensive criminal court trial in NY city history. This rare recording of a speech by Dharuba also makes the entire event more monumental in regards to the historic location, historic event and historic participants.

Track 3. Felipe Speaks, “let us not support political prisoners because they are images. Let us support them because we are supporting ourselves,” a brief monologue by Felipe Luciano (The Young Lords NY Chairman).

Track 4. Pedro Pietri, is an early recording of late activist and poet Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary poem, a powerfully insightful masterpiece of literature. One can hear a pin drop in the Apollo’s cavernous stage as Pietri’s poetry flows with rhymes.

Juan,  Miguel,  Milagros, Olga, Manuel, All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow passing their bill collectors on to the next of kin All died waiting for the garden of Eden to open up again under a new management All died dreaming about America

-Pedro Pietri (excerpt, Puerto Rican Obituary, Monthly review Press 1973)

Track 5. The Last Poets, offers a reunion of sorts as David Nelson, Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano the original Last Poets took center stage probably for the last time (1968-1970). Only one track is mentioned though the trio performs 3 pieces including Tell Me Brother (Kain), Black Woman (David Nelson), and Rifle/Oracion-Rifle player (Luciano). All three tracks were also recorded in The Last Poets, Right On film soundtrack (Juggernaut Records 1970). Felipe Luciano offers the audience a parting comment, “Revolution is difficult…but we will win…you mustn’t just sit there, leave and think it’s not happening…. Let me make this…very clear to all the police in the audience, and for those who will still see their roles as passive ones: the shit is on!”

— William Cordova

Sound Travel

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT

“[The] first, best use of a time machine, Alice-- Going to see all those classic gigs in the universe that you ’ ve only ever read about.” -The Eleventh Doctor

“Let us begin. What Where Why or When.....” -The Teacher

Time Travel. There are plenty of options to be sure. Bringing Nat Turner some much needed info just ahead of his insurrection (Snitches get stitches!). Maybe showing up to the Audubon Ballroom and whisking Malcolm away just before that sawed off snatched him away. Or actually talking to that Theatre Dept. girl in my art history class.....but I digress.

These are all good choices yes, but in advance of those more serious time trips, a leading authority [The good Doctor quoted above] has suggested that one should first string together series of musical jaunts. Fantastic voyages to those missed concerts and club shows that still haunt the unconscious alcoves in your mind. I lay here for you a list of 10 concerts I would visit were I to procure a candy painted DeLorean with an after market Flux Capacitor

First Stop

Outkast , Austin 2001

Stankonia Tour

As I understand it, this was their magnum opus of live performances. It has been Outkast’s music that has most continuously travelled with me from dorky teen to dorky adult. In 2001 I was Living in Austin, earning my graduate art degree from UT. Though I could have easily attended the Austin performance, I forfeited this opportunity so that I could catch them with my Girlfriend during their stop in Houston 3 days later. After the Austin show they promptly cancelled the Houston show. One half of the duo, Andre’ 3000, wouldn’t tour again for ten years. DOH!

Fresh Fest 1985 (1984?)

This has always been a real FOMO moment for me. A classic and pivotal point on rap music’s grand arc, Fresh Fest was the first large scale national hip hop tour. Headlining the show was Run DMC, Whodini and LL. Hip Hop royalty to be sure. This tour travelled all around the US, and here in Houston, it took place at Astroworld’s Southern Star Amphitheater. With Astroworld being demolished a few years back, I imagine seeing this performance there would have made this memory even more sentimental.

Somewhere in 1982

lets get a little unconventional for our requisite Michael Jackson stop and see if we can sneak onto the set of MJ’s Beat It video. Dystopian rollerblading gangland dance battles? Perfection. Is it blasphemous for me to say that Beat It is a much better video than Thriller?

Zaire 1974

Shifting time gears a bit further back to 1974 and across the waters to Kinshasha Zaire to the ZAIRE 74 Music Festival. 3 days of music from the U.S. and the motherland headlined most notebly by Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and James Brown along with a plethora of other Soul and R&B groups. The entire event was capped with off with the Ali VS Foreman Rumble in the Jungle.

Kalakuta Republic 1975

Since we are already on the continent, lets move a bit north and west and maybe a year ahead to 1975 and see if we can get into Fela Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic and hang out for a few days, weeks or months. Fela declared his compound home an independent nation and held nightly trance inducing concerts. Let’s just make sure we take our leave before the state army rushed in and brought it all to a close.

Egypt 1971

Where to next? To kick it with Sun Ra and his Arkestra as they played a series of shows around the Egypt. I think Specifically I wanna roll with them as they visit the pyramids and perform an impromptu and mobile concert in the desert. Sun Ra, as a cult figure, has always inspired me. The video of them twirling in the desert feels like the completion of an idea. His music is in part rooted in a cosmic interpretation of Egyptian mythologies, and to perform at those sites, I’m sure felt like a culmination. I would love to have joined in.

Congo Square

New Orleans sometime in the 18teens

Congo Square, the gathering place for slaves in New Orleans where most of the music you listen was probably birthed. But, actually, scratch that. Not fucking with slavery like that.

Somewhere on Dowling Street in the 1940’s maybe?

Rumor has it that Lighting Hopkins would sometimes play on the local bus route on Dowling in 3rd ward. Present day Houston doesn't have much a street performance culture. It’s noteworthy that Lighting used this form as a way to find an audience. A pretty raw venue to be sure.

JY 1989

Houston Texas

In 1989 my family moved from 3rd ward to South Park and I missed out on the cultural experience of attending Jack Yates High School. My brother, however, being 4 years older than me did not. He in fact was a prominent member of JY’s Marching band, often playing lead Trumpet. Unfortunately I had few opportunities to see him perform. (Unless you count him practicing in our front yard.) After High-school he quickly acclimated to adulthood (Much quicker than I did) and stopped playing music. I think I would arrive during his senior year and see him play the halftime show of one of Yates’ home games. Maybe even against my own alma mater, Ross Sterling.

Tombass Park

My final stop could probably be any summer in the last 40 years or so. I think I would find some random black family reunion, fix me a plate and wait for the inevitable moment when somebody’s uncle starts bumpin Frankie Beverly and Maze. Hopefully ending with Golden Time of Day. *

*technically, this trip is actually possible.