Category: news

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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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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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half note #002

do-you-want-more-image the-roots-and-then-you-shoot-your-cousin-cover-art

Every since I first saw The Roots “Do You Want More?” album cover, something about it has always seemed like “a visual sample” of Romare Bearden’s “Pittsburgh Memory”. Although  I am not quite sure that the structure over the head of the character on the right in Bearden’s collage is a bridge, but it is definitely some type of city infrastructure that suggests the same type of feeling from a visual standpoint.

As I think about Bearden’s eye, I think it is safe to say that he and The Roots have/had their eyes/ears/bodies steeped in the concerns of “the folk” , the everyday people that poem beauty and ugliness into song that sings on canvas, stage, page, tongue, arm, leg, leg, arm, head, whatever…

What I enjoy most about The Roots, whether or not i totally dig the album from a musical angle, is that their albums always give me something to think about as an entire package, cover, liner notes (those Major Jackson joints were the bomb), song titles, ideas in the songs, etc, etc…and that is what I am most looking forward to in this new album…Ear up!

 

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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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A Thought on Humility…

I just got finished reading another great piece from Joe Ross’ blog. The is called A Politics of Humility and it reminded me of something I wrote a long time ago about how elusive humility can be, but also how rewarding it can be or it can even disappear, but Joe goes further from a personal meditation to a thought how to build a much more peaceful planet.

Check out this passage:

“We might find a far richer peace if we sought more humility. But humility is pretty out of fashion these days. Have you ever heard a parent dream that their child grows up to be humble? Yet isn’t it possible that with more humility — seeing that our true place is with others, among others, not over them, running them– we would unleash a mighty calm upon the world.”

Read the whole post here

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Just thinking

Because I don’t watch much TV here in Bamako (it is full of people speaking French way to quickly for my ears), I spend a lot of time (may too much) on the internet. Yesterday I came across 2 articles that made me think a bit, but even more than that it was hard for me not to see them as connected in some way:

This article about Camden and this article about the wealth concentration in the Northeast Corridor of the mainland US (based on Census Data)

I think the contrast between Camden’s poverty and the wealth of some of it’s surrounding counties makes this contrast  even greater and heightens our awareness of it, not to mention that poverty and dysfunction of People of Color always seems to be a narrative .

But I was also thinking even harder about was this… If all of that wealth is concentrated in the Northeast of the US, what kind influence does that buy the people that live in those areas and who have amassed that kind of wealth? What effect does that have on the narratives and stories that we hear or have access to? As much as we are told this corridor is the bastion of intellectual, liberal, progressive living and thinking some stories still don’t get told like the one, Richard Rothstein published in the Huffington Post today check out this passage:

“Throughout our nation, this fear of confronting the past makes it more difficult to address and remedy the ongoing existence of urban ghettos, the persistence of the black-white achievement gap, and the continued under-representation of African Americans in higher education and better-paying jobs.

One of the worst examples of our historical blindness is the widespread belief that our continued residential racial segregation, North and South, is “de facto,” not the result of explicit government policy but instead the consequence of private prejudice, economic inequality, and personal choice to self-segregate.

But in truth, our major metropolitan areas were segregated by government action. The federal government purposefully placed public housing in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods (PDF) to concentrate the black population, and with explicit racial intent, created a whites-only mortgage guarantee program to shift the white population from urban neighborhoods to exclusively white suburbs (PDF). The Internal Revenue Service granted tax-exemptions for charitable activity to organizations established for the purpose of enforcing neighborhood racial homogeneity. State-licensed realtors in virtually every state, and with the open support of state regulators, supported this federal policy by refusing to permit African Americans to buy or rent homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. Federal and state regulators sanctioned the refusal of the banking, thrift, and insurance industries to make loans to homeowners in other-race communities. Prosecutors and police sanctioned, often encouraged, thousands of acts of violence against African Americans who attempted to move to neighborhoods that had not been designated for their race.

By the time the federal government reversed its policy of subsidizing segregation in 1962, and by the time the Fair Housing Act banned private discrimination in 1968, the residential patterns of major metropolitan areas were set. White suburbs that had been affordable to the black working class in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were now no longer so, both because of the increase in housing prices (and whites’ home equity) during that period, and because other federal policies had depressed black incomes while supporting those of whites. It was not until 1964, for example, that the National Labor Relations Board for the first time refused to certify a union’s exclusive bargaining status because it openly refused to represent black workers as it did whites.”

Somewhere there is a nexus that provides an answer for Camden, for Detroit, and for the many other places that we are lead to believe are the way they are solely on corruption, crime, and dysfunction and moral failings of colored people.

I know there is much more complexity to this topic than this short articles, but I don’t think that it is as complex as we would like to make it either. I think that these articles are more closely related  than I think most Americans would like to admit. It brings to mind a line from Sekou Sundiata’s poem Magic Bullet he says, “Somewhere in America tonight, Americans are loving the Past as long as it ain’t History.”

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Respect the Architect – Kanye ‘s Anthimeria

Kanye West © Noam Dvir, Instagram User dvirnm
Kanye West © Noam Dvir, Instagram User dvirnm

Copyrighted image by dvirnm

So I guess I should start by saying I am not a Kanye fan and after reading about some of the blacklash…ahem backlash from members of the architecture establishment in Lian Chikako Chang’s article about Kanye’s recent visit to Harvard Graduate School of Design (I walk past here all the time while on Residency at Lesley doing my MFA)… I am still not a fan, but as poet/curator/hiphophead I really dug Kanye’s mini-lecture at Harvard School of Design.

The -lash  is mostly centered around Kanye’s use of the “architected”. I understand this on many levels as poet and as someone trying to deal with language I understand that he used a rhetorical device called Conversion or Verbification or Anthimeria  or sometimes known as “verbing the noun”. This is common practice in the African American creative realm and is found all over in African American literature, drama and so on and so forth, so it comes as no surprise that an artist whose currency is language would say something like this. I always love to hear Sonia Sanchez say “poeting” when she talks about what she does; graphic designer Alan Flecther also used the term in the title of book Picturing and Poeting.

What I really love about this specific term is that it another way to describe a process that takes something from an idea caught in the flesh and blood, that is in our brains and makes a “thing” out in the world. It speaks to a very deliberate and intentional process by which to bring something abstract into the physical world…I cannot argue with Kanye on that.
I think the more ways we can find to articulate that sentiment and work ethic the better, be it architecting, poeting, whatevering, etc.

The other thing that I think the -lash makes clear is that in a profession that is 91.3% “white”, the fear of having someone who does not look the part, but who has such a huge platform, co-opting their language appears to be a threatening proposition…

Anyway, go read Lian Chikako Chang’s article For Architects Only? How Kanye Exposed Architecture’s Bias, also check out Phaidon’s blog from over a year ago (July 2012) about Hip Hop Architecture, and other articles about Hip Hop Architecture here , here  , here  and the work of Earl S Bell for good measure. Also check out other examples of verbing the noun – “architecting” in the Caribbean with the “V is for Veranda” Project.

When you are done with all that go check out Guru and Bahamadia on Respect the Architect, (that phrase comes from a Biz Markie sample from Nobody Beats the Biz)…architecting for real!

UPDATE: Also shout out to Doug Patt author of How to Architect

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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…