Category: lit stuff

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Banned in DC? Part 2 or “All Your Art Belongs to Us”

Early this morning (Nov. 4th), the Ceremonies of Dark Men, posted an brief explanation as; to why the piece the Camp/Joiner collaboration was removed, it said the following

“A member of JBG Companies, a real estate development firm, had enough clout to render the agreement between them and the DC Commission null and void and had the piece by Camp and Joiner removed. Evidently, they took issue with Joiner’s poem.”

In addition to the the above explanation, CoDM posted a beautifully done video montage of the a gentleman named Frank X reciting my poem in its entirety, mixed with images by Don Camp. Although it would have nice to have read the poem myself, I am pleased with the outcome. Thanks to A.M. Weaver , Kelli Anderson, Frank X anyone else involved in making that happen!

The reality of this piece being removed  and why it was removed may speak to larger issues around public art, who owns it and who gets to say whether it stays public or not.

That said, I would like to give a super shout out to developers who do not censor artists and who seek to understand art without projecting their own rigid and perhaps even racist views onto a piece of art.
Shout out Arch Development Corporation in Anacostia, in the many years that I have worked with them, I have never felt censored or creatively stifled in anyway. They have always allowed me or the artists that I have worked with the liberty to say what they want or need to say; so I am thankful for Arch Development for all that they have done and continue to do for art, artists, Anacostia and for DC overall.
Shout to Bozzuto, although I am new tenant in the Monroe Street Market and I have not been “working” with Bozzuto a long time, it appears that they open to trusting their partners (Cultural DC) to select quality artists to occupy their spaces and then letting the artists doing what they do best, create. That said I hope that I am not speaking prematurely, because if “a member of JBG Companies” had enough clout to lean on the DC Commission, perhaps he/she will have the same kind of influence on their fellow developer. Who knows, I guess we will find out…

I do hope that the billboard will be remounted somewhere else in the city, I am putting my bid in for Brookland or in Anacostia, since those are communities that I am connected to through The Center for Poetic Thought and through my long standing work with Arch Development

 

Stay Tuned

Update 8:32AM (UTC) Nov.5th 2014

The quoted paragraph above

 

“A member of JBG Companies, a real estate development firm, had enough clout to render the agreement between them and the DC Commission null and void and had the piece by Camp and Joiner removed. Evidently, they took issue with Joiner’s poem.”

has been removed from the statement made by CoDM on early in the morning on Nov 4th. I am curious as to why…

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Banned in DC?

CoDM 5x5 Featured Location: Location: NoMA – 51 N. Street, NE Collaborators: Artist Don Camp & Poet Fred Joiner http://www.the5x5project.com/a-m-weaver/don-camp/
CoDM 5×5 Featured Location: Location: NoMA – 51 N. Street, NE
Collaborators: Artist Don Camp & Poet Fred Joiner
http://www.the5x5project.com/a-m-weaver/don-camp/

Well, not quite, but maybe censored is more like it.

I am/was honored to be chosen by curator A.M. Weaver to be a part her 5 X 5 Project , Ceremonies of Dark Men (CoDM), for the DC Comission of Art and Humanities especially with such an amazing group of visual artists (Donald E. Camp, Larry Cook, Isaac Diggs, Stan Squirewell and Michael Platt) and poets (Major Jackson, Kenneth Carroll, E. Ethelbert Miller and Afaa Michael Weaver).

I still have not gotten all the details, but A.M. told me shortly after my our piece (Don Camp and myself) went up the company that owns and/or manages the building were very displeased by the excerpt of my poem, so much so that they wanted them remove immediately. Here is the excerpt:

excerpt of Seven Ways of Looking at Black Flowers By Fred Joiner

excerpt of Seven Ways of Looking at Black Flowers By Fred Joiner

 

A.M. warned me that they were threatening to take it down that weekend before the official opening of 5 X 5, but fortunately that did not happen. However they were not sure how long it would be allowed to remain up.

So a few days ago, while cruising Art Whino’s Instagram feed I noticed the our piece was taken down, because Artwhino’s new mural project was in progress. I asked the moderator of the Instagram handle what the deal was and he said that they were planning this for over a year, which makes me beg the question, Why would they put our piece in the first place if it was supposed to be up until Dec, if they had already promised the space to someone else…Sounds kind of fishy to me, but at least they will have some other nice art up and a ready made “scheduling mistake” rather than censoring a piece of art they did not care for.

Anyway, since they (JBG)  did not bother to read, understand or reach out to me to to get clarity on the ENTIRE poem, I have posted it below.

I was told that A.M. and the CDoM project may post an official an update about what happened with the piece this week, so I am anxiously awaiting more details. For now all I have to go on is their decision to remove our piece because they thought it was divisive and would incite (or perhaps offend) viewers. The irony of that is on the day Melanie, Naomi and I went to go check out the  billboard we came across at least 3 or 4 people who loved the billboard and did not think it was racist, divisive or inciting at all…go figure.

Anyway, I will post more details when they are available, in the meantime go check out Art Whino’s project and the ghost of mine at 51 N St NE (right near the NY Ave Metro and the ATF).

 

GENE DAVIS (1920–1985) Black Flowers, 1952
GENE DAVIS (1920–1985)
Black Flowers, 1952

Seven Ways of Looking at Black Flowers By Fred Joiner

XIII

What is more beautiful than black flowers,
Or the Blackmen in fields
Gathering them?

– Raymond Patterson, Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Blackman

I

In what mellow tone
Do black flowers
Sing their blues?

II

Black flowers like black
Hands – colored: reaching toward
A mystery. Up South.

III

Black flowers, the gift
Of open palms
Facing North, but
Rooted South

IV

A man and a woman
Are one
A man and a woman and black flowers
Are dust

V

Against a sky white
Like a fists full of Sea
Island cotton the sky raining
Blood on black flowers

VI

In our world/ The tongue speaks
Only a binary song, always a black
Flowering problem, against a white
Canvas —blood  in between

VII

The sound possibilities of black flowers
Were choices made by the hands, breath
And brass of a gifted man
Looking inward, blood on his lips

 

after
Gene Davis’s painting
Black Flowers, Raymond Patterson’s poem,
Twenty-Six Ways of Looking
at a Blackman, and Wallace Stevens’s poem ,
Thirteen Ways of looking
at a Blackbird

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random art musings #001

About a year ago I bought a book from Phaidon called The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage by Peter Vergo. Although I was a bit skeptical from the title, I thought I still would go ahead and take a chance. I also looked at the table of contents and the section titles left me with some hope.  Over the past year or so I have paged through the book, but other than one small reference to Romare Bearden;Vergo anecdotaly claims that Stuart Davis advised Bearden “to listen to the freedom that characterized Earl Hines’ piano playing.” In reading an interview with Bearden on Archives of American Art website, it appears that David and Bearden were two friends sitting around talking about music:

Avis Berman: It seems to me that your coloring has really gotten very much purer over the years – almost like the climate, you know, like the West Indies where you get that kind of color, and I was wondering how you had evolved your color schemes.

Romare Bearden: Well, I think the big thing about. I was a great friend of Stuart Davis, and he used to listen to Earl Hines’s music, all the time. And the main. And he used to say, “You know, listen to what he isn’t playing, what they call the interval, and, it’s what you don’t need.” You know it, but you throw it out, you don’t need too much. You know, you just have to find the things now that you need, because. The artist’s problem isn’t, say, the problem of the Renaissance, because if you look at a painting of scenes of. of photographs of Matisse of this day, the other day, about twenty days, until the whole thing is achieved. And each painting is different, until he finally gets to the one and changes this and the other. And so in the modern, in the modern art, seems bent on destruction and new beginnings, destruction and new beginning. And in the past, say the Renaissance, say Tintoretto, or someone, Titian, do a sketch, and they carried it out pretty much. Because so much of the art was built on skill. And we don’t need a lot of the things that ehy had to put in. And this is a round-about way of telling you ____ ____ ____.

Being a composer himself, I hardly think Bearden needing advising on how to hear freedom in a jazz musicians playing. To be completely honestly, I find a quite a bit of irony in a a non-African American advising an African American to hear the freedom in a musical expression that his African American ancestors created.

Anyway, other than that minor reference to Bearden, I found no other references to African or African American painters or musicians. This seemed rather odd for  book titled The Music of Painting to not include any African or African American painters, musicians or references..AT ALL. I mean how can you talk about music, painting and modernism and not reference ANY Africans or African Americans? How can you have a section called Art, Jazz and Silence  and not include Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman?  It seems to me that these kinds of omissions are deliberate and I am not sure how or why a publisher would…well..nevermind.

The one bright moment while going through this book was an image in this book that made me think of another book I bought around the same time, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.

On page 305 of The Music of Painting,  there is a sequence of 8 images from Walt Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia. The first time I glanced at these images though I immediately thought of Aaron Douglas’ paintings. This clearly set off a series of questions in my head that are still bouncing around in my mind. Is is possible that Walt Disney was inspired or influenced by Douglas’ work? If so, what kind of options do we have with today’s technology to remix Douglas and add motion and sound to his already majestic and cinematic work?

I will be revisiting this as I dig more into the book, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. Stay tuned…

 

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A Brown Sterling BeARThday

after winter, Sterling A. brown

Today is the birthday of Sterling A. Brown, a folklorist, poet and literary critic who spent over 40 years teaching and mentoring at Howard University. I will always remember Amiri Baraka telling the story of being in a group of students going to a room in Brown’s house with wall-to-wall recording of jazz and blues, then Brown proclaiming to the group “This is your history!”

Despite growing up in a musical and arts exposed houshold, I still  feel like i came late to Sterling A. Brown. I was in my early 20’s and had just started frequenting the open mics poetry sets in DC from the MUG to Mangoes , Bar Nun to Black Cat and Kaffa.

I am honored to have the opportunity to open The Center for Poetic Thought in the Brookland neighborhood that Brown called home so many years while teaching and mentoring at Howard University. The Center is in large part a dedication to Sterling A. Brown and our interests in trying to expand on the tradition of innovation in poetic thinking that poets like Sterling A. Brown helped to build.

Please stop by and see us. The Center for Poetic Thought is located at 716 Monroe Street NE, Studio #25, part of the new Monroe Street Market  in the Brookland neighborhood of NE DC.

The Center for Poetic Thought

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Hurston/Wright Poetry Workshop with Thomas Sayers Ellis 8/2 – 8/3 2014 in DC

Hurston/Wright Poetry Workshop with Thomas Sayers Ellis

Crank-Shaped Poems

This workshop will explore the possibilities and the uses of cultural attitude and the percussive behavior known as
poetic swag. Goals of the workshop new sense and new music; lyric poetry with an eye toward and against tradition.

Workshop Leader: Thomas Sayers
Ellis is a photographer and poet, and the author of Skin, Inc: Identity Repair Poems. His first full collection, The
Maverick Room was awarded the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Ellis cofounded the Dark Room Collective in
Cambridge Massachusetts in 1988, and his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The
Best American Poetry. He teaches in the low-residency Creative Writing Program at Lesley University and he is on the faculty of Cave Canem.
Weekend Writing Workshops

The Hurston Wright Weekend Writing Workshops are open to Black writers working in the genres of fiction, poetry,
nonfiction and memoir.
Join an intimate group of writers for a weekend of intensive writing and discovery that will stretch the bounds of your imagination and your writing. Working with award winning authors who lead each workshop, you will be mentored and find and create a nurturing community of support.

Saturday and Sunday, August 2-3, 2014
9am to 3pm (lunch included)
at the The Hill Center in Washington
D.C.’s Historic Capitol Hill Neighborhood
Tuition: $369.00
Deadline for applications
is April 18th.

Submit here

Click here  & here —> Hurston-Wright TSE workshop

 

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half note #001

On the Way to Salif Keita's Island
On the way to Salif Keita’s Island

Sometimes it’s a good feeling to know that you are not alone or at least to know that someone else is thinking what you are thinking.

About 2 years ago i wrote this piece called “Mel Bochner: In the Tower…or in the mix?” . It was a brief meditation on Mel Bochner’s exhibition in The Tower of the National Gallery of Art in DC and what was going on my my head at the time. In the piece, one of the things i talked about was visual poetry, in particular what I suggested was Bochner’s render of a “visual sonnet” based on the structure of the the Thesaurus paintings. I further suggest that these poems are connected to Stein, Boultenhouse , Apollinaire lineage starting with Stein’s “word portraits” to Boultenhouse’s “Poems in the Shape of Things” to Apollinaire’s collection of visual poetry Calliagrammes.

Just a few weeks ago I came across this article entitle “Apollinaire ‘s Visual Poetry” on MoMA‘s Blog INSIDE/OUT. AIf felt good to know that the same type of  language and thinking that I had used to frame the poetic qualities of Bochner’s work was being used to by a curator at MoMa to talk about Apollinaire’s Calliagrammes.  I know it seems like such a small perhaps even insignificant thing, but as a part of my creative process, it is important to create and find community where I can for encouragement, particularly with the experience of living in a new place where you don’t yet  have community to plug into and to be a support.

Anyway, that is my half note for now…more soon…

INSIDE/OUT Blog Archive on Poetry related stuff click here .

 

 

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random art musings #000

AmericangothicAmerican Gothic, ( 1930) painting by Grant Wood Gordon_Parks_-_American_GothicAmerican Gothic, (1942) photograph by Gordon Parks CapricornCapricorn, model 1948, cast 1975 (sculpture) by Max Ernst

So M and I were at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) a few years ago and although I had been to the NGA many times before, we decided to take their “Introduction” tour. While on that tour one of the pieces that they highlighted on the tour and that really caught my attention was Max Ernst’s Capricorn.

It hit me on a few levels, mostly because I am always looking for  the presence of “African design intelligence” or an African aesthetic in art, literature, etc and this piece in particular felt like it had an organic feel to it, in the same way that some many of the African works that I have been exposed to, especially in the sculpture world….I am not sure if it was the fashioning of animals in human “positions” (i.e sitting and standing) or just a kind of symmetry and balance that  I feel in looking at all of these works.

In looking at the Wood and Parks pieces and considering the titles it is clear that the two works are in “conversation” with one another, even if that conversation is oppositional or confrontational, it is there.

The Ernst piece, Capricorn immediately caught my attention because it appeared that it, too, was a part of this visual conversation; its balance the composition, what was depicted all suggest  at the very least a thread of a connection.  The other thing that made me think that they was the timing. Both Parks’ piece and Ernst’s piece were completed very close in time, Parks piece in in 1942 the year of Grant Wood’s death and Ernst a few years after in 1948. I cannot help but think particularly around the time of Wood’s death that engaged artist like Parks and Ernst would not have something say about it in their work.

When I come to a piece of art I am always thinking about its DNA, not just process, materials and aesthetics , but the real lineage of the piece…who, what, where, why or when spawn it…what other ideas or works of art is it connected to, not just movements and manifestos

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Happy Birthday JB, August 2nd

Not this JB…

james-brown

This JB…

 

I don’t remember when I became interested in Baldwin, but I do remember seeing The Amen Corner
as a kid with my parents, and pulling Blues for Mister Charlie and The Fire Next Time
off my parents bookshelf and trying to make sense of the world that Baldwin was talking about. It would not be until I was a teenager that I would start to grasp how deep Baldwin is/was/be.

Much later than that I would come across Baldwin’s essay On Being White and Other Lies. This essay in a lot of ways made me rethink what it means for a group of people to decide and believe  that they are “White” and for that group of people to decide who else was or could become “White” . Conversely, that same group of people convinced of their “Whiteness” (pure, fair, just and deserving of honor) could also determine who would be their binary opposite, the “Blacks”. This essay for me also caused me to question “Blackness” as a function of being this binary opposite and the moral assignments that come along with it.

As student of Mathematics and Information Systems, I also started to think about the inability of a simple binary system in language to capture the complexity of humanity. For me, I find it hard to talk fully about  such complex in such simple terms. In intellectual, creative and progressive circle many of us push the envelope for more inclusive, complexity and nuanced, you see this so much in gender and sexuality discussions, you see it socioeconomic class discussions, yet when it comes to race  and culture we seem to be stuck with the binary.

Both “Whiteness” and “Blackness” are fiction despite the cultural, social, political and economic capital they wield and how real they feel. That is not to say that I am not connected to the substance of the experience in America we call “Blackness”, I am just not convinced that that label effectively or accurately captures that experience. Baldwin help to make that clear for me.

I am going to end with this anecdote, because I think it articulates what Baldwin was saying more clearly than I ever could. A few years ago, I was sitting on one of Dr.Greg Carr‘s lectures at Howard University and he said to a roomful of “Black” people, “In American society someone has to be Black, that don’t mean it has to be you.”  Hearing that made me re-visit Baldwin’s essay and gave me another way to look at the language we use and that is used against us…

 

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Still Blue?

I am almost ashamed to say that I did not remember that Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America was published 50 years ago in 1963.

Here and Here. Baraka lays down the hard fact of the heavy learning mojo that the late Sterling A. Brown put on him (and Toni Morrison, A.B. Spellman, Lucille Clifton, Thomas Sowell and many others).  These are writers and thinkers that inform who I am today so I through them (and his work as well)  I have come to a greater appreciation for Sterling A. Brown.

This appreciation becomes even more significant  as I think about the my recent family reunion down in the heart of  Gullah/Geechee land (Coastal South Carolina), I am remind that I am part of the Blues People Continuum or as Dr. Tony Bolden put it the “blues network.”( his book is called Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture 

bluesnet

I like the fact that Dr. Bolden’s  makes space in the “blues network” for all forms of  “African American vernacular culture” beyond just music, because this is the foundation for some of the new projects that I have coming up. This kind of grounding will be the perfect marriage of my current obsessions.

Thank you Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) for the work…to be continued