Category: visual art

Posted on

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…

Posted on

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

Posted on

Scenes from Ile De Goree #001: Sand Painting

769I

I wish I could remember this man’s name, i think his family name was Diop…The sand painting he is holding was done in probably 5 minutes. I probably should have taken a video, but I am quite self conscious about being exploitative or making the art and the artist feel like an object in my lens.

I have seen sand paintings before as finished products, but have never seen the process or materials that make the final product.

Below are a few photos of a quick “sketch” that Diop did to showcase the wide variety of sand that is used to give color and texture to these sand paintings. Every color that you see on the wood is a sand that occurs naturally in terrain of Senegal, from grey-blue to the volcanic black…

It took Diop longer to explain where all the colors and textures came from than it took him to actually lay down this sketch, which he actually considers a throwaway…beautiful stuff.

Posted on

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…

 

Posted on

Scenes from Togo #002

The following images are me playing around with the Pano feature on my iPhone. I was trying to see what would happen if i did “vertical panoramas” instead of horizontal ones.

I am not totally happy with the result, but is was phone to play…I will keep trying in different contexts to see how it alters my experience.

vertical pano #000vertical pano #003veritcal pano #001vertical pano #004

From left to right, the 1st and 3rd are pictures in the courtyard of the hotel we stayed in in downtown Lome. In the 1st image if you look carefully you can see my feet. The 2nd pic is of this awesome tree  I saw that had grown like an arc over the basin of the Kpalime waterfall. The 4th pic are of the waterfall in Kpalime, if you llook closely you can see Melanie down there at the bottom. During rainy season the waterfall would be much more impressive.

Posted on

Scenes from Togo #001

While in Togo we took a ride up to Kpalime, which is in the next prefecture up from the prefecture that Lome is in.

Kpalime on map

This was a cool totem at one of the artisinal markets in Kpalime. Although the had some really nice items we found that things were a bit pricey when compared to similar items in Lome.

Totem Front
Totem Side
Totem Back
Totem Side

This area is very close to the border with Ghana, thus the people in this area are part of the same ethnic group, Ewe. The Ewe, span both Togo and Ghana.  In the month of November, the inhabitants of this area has a festival called Kpalikpakpaza , the first festival was held in 1997.  “The festival is meant to remind the Kpalime people of the valour of their ancestors during wars in the ancient days.” 

I am going to do some more research about this festival, because I have long been searching for a festival (or celebration) to replace Kwanzaa, which I have never quite been a fan of or quite understood why African Americans with genetic and cultural lineage to West Africa would accept a festival whose lingua franca is Swahili (East African) and whose founder has such a problematic past. Anyway, that is a discussion for another time…

Stay tuned…

Posted on

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!

 

Posted on

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 .

 

 

Posted on

What’s been on my mind

So many thoughts come to me as I move through my day, exploring my little corner of this vast Continent, trying to keep 3 languages (English, French and Bamanakan) straight in my head, trying to stay creative and nimble, etc

But there are some thoughts, observations, ideas that keep coming back, things that won’t leave you alone. Over the past few months I have been thinking about money, currency, cash, moolah y’all…how it functions in the world, its behavior, the behavior of those who handle it, define it, worship it, and  those that are under its foot, caught in its crease. A recent article from SiliconAfrica  has made me think even harder as I attempt to come to grips with my own complicity which has made ask and attempt to answer some tough questions for myself and the way I move in the world.

I have always been interest in Africa (I will post more about that soon my my other blog BOOM FOR REAL BAMAKO), even from a very young thanks to late Uncle Clemson “Russell” Joiner and my parents efforts to make sure I understood that there is more to African American history than enslavement (rebellion and victory) and the Civil Rights Movement.

I have been fortunate enough to have people around me from an early age to explain to that Africa and its influence on all American life is not some remote dead thing of the past, but that it is still with in a lot of ways… not as retentions but as things we have always done. I was reminded of this just a few weeks back when the The Daily Beast posted pictures from Martin A Berger’s newly published Freedom Now!: Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle where this photo taken by Don Cravens in 1955 caught my attention:

royalty1

which in turn immediately made think of the picture I took during my first week here in Bamako in 2013, which I call  Royalty.

royalty2

 

Although I was not surprised to see women carrying things like this in Bamako; I must admit, despite my Low Country/Gullah roots, I was still surprised to see this.  I see women like this everyday walking around Bamako, I marvel at them, how they are always in motion, always at work, always serving.

Because these things have been repeatedly going through my mind since I have been here I have been trying to make sense of them the best way I know how…by attempting to make poems. I am not quite ready to share them yet, but you will see them, if I am blessed you may see 1 or 2 of them in print.

See you soon.