some shameless self-promotion: Fred L. Joiner X Studio Museum in Harlem X Phillips Collection

Over a year ago, I attended an online session of the Studi Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum. It was an amazing opportunity to say the least. Ieft that practicum so full I have yet to finish a reflection I started writing about for this site…soon come.

The practicum was fruitful in many ways, one of which was meeting so many cool and smart people in the museum world and expanding my circle of creative folks worldwide. Another awesome personal outcome of the practicum and the community I found there were the opportunities it created for me to talk about my ideas about the intersection of other art forms and poetry…Big Thanks to Erica Harper for asking me to be on the Phillips Collection panel for Teaching with Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle Then and Now

Another opportunity that was so meaningful to me was when Ilk Yaska invited me to write a reflection for Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum and Systems symposium. It is hard to describe my respect and reverence for the Studio Museum. I know the idea of the museum itself comes with its flaws, including the Studio, yet I love the work the Museum has been doing and its efforts to define an “us”, “our”, & “we”

Needless to say, it was an honor to write this reflection, and I hope to get more opportunities like this. The version that is on the website is a bit different from the one I turned in, so if you want to read that one hit me up, I will send it to you, but go here if you want to read the version they published.
One correction I noticed is that they misprinted my equation for Wellness represented it should read:

Not Wellness = Care + Time

Anyway, enough running my mouth, here is the link to my recap /reflection….click here

April 14, 2014April 15, 2014

half note #002

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!

November 26, 2013May 12, 2015

Respect the Architect – Kanye ‘s Anthimeria

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