Dälek
Feat MC dälek & Mike Mare
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A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello
Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis
My Monticello
By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49
NYT
In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” [Read more…]
The Liquidity of Ourselves: Amoako Boafo’s Singular Duality: Me Can Make We
at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through November 6, 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Amoako Boafo’s second exhibition at Roberts Projects, Singular Duality: Me Can Make We, represents an exploration into personal identity and the dualities that comprise and shape our human existence. On the surface, this exhibition both examines and celebrates the theme of Blackness, as each image is suggestive of empowerment and individuality. Yet upon deeper reflection, we see the artist pushing the limits of materiality and content in new and exciting ways. The result is a powerful and persuasive body of work, one which serves as a compelling visual testament to the beauty of the Black experience. [Read more…]
Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020
by Mark Goodman
For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read more…]
Envisioning a Gilded Vengence in Mark Steven Greenfield’s Black Madonna
at William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (through 28 November)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Mark Steven Greenfield’s powerful exhibition of Black Madonna paintings, currently on view at William Turner Gallery, is perfectly timed to coincide with the election of the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, to be our next Vice President; while the exhibition notably follows on the years-long Black Lives Matter protests that in all likelihood lifted Ms. Harris to the second highest office of the land.
As an African American artist who emerged out of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, Greenfield has had a long arc of making art of consequence, art with something to say, art with teeth. In his latest exhibition, Black Madonna, Greenfield takes dead aim at centuries of racial supremacy by inverting the very narrative of white dominion: exalting Blackness while simultaneously setting aflame, quite literally, the relentless tide of teeming inhumanity that seeks in all-too-horrific ways to subjugate and enslave. [Read more…]
Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”
Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner
Palo Alto
on Impulse!
Pitchfork
Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. Less than half a decade later, he’d slipped to No. 6 on DownBeat’s International Critics Poll ranking jazz’s best pianists, and writers routinely dismissed his playing as stale and uninspired. Still, he was Thelonious Sphere Monk: If he was no longer weird, and no longer a superstar, he was still a legend. A legend who couldn’t afford to miss a $500 payday at a high school. [Read more…]
Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest
By Food & Wine
We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —
Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and identity of Black communities and has played a role as a source of both comfort and strength for a people constantly subject to abuse, discrimination, and misunderstanding. [Read more…]
Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory
at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and remarkable thing. She has created an entire origin-myth that not only revisits ancient African history but invents it. Through 40 new works specially commissioned for the Curve Gallery at London’s Barbican Centre, Ojih Odutola has hand-drawn a fictional prehistoric civilisation dominated by female rulers and served by males labourers. [Read more…]
Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad
by Sarah A. Seo
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
by Gretchen Sorin
Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
by Candacy Taylor
Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00
The New York Review of Books
In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America. [Read more…]
Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People
Reviewed by Patrick Lohier
Heads of the Colored People
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99
Harvard Review
In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question—a booming “Yes!”—especially as experienced by Black Americans. [Read more…]
It’s Been Going On and On and… The Devonns “Blood Red Blues (Protest Song)”
from their recent self-titled release, The Devonns
on Record Kicks
The Lynching
They should have slept, would have
but had to fight the darkness, had
to build a fire and bathe a man in
flames. No
other soap’s as good when
the dirt is the skin. Black since
birth, burnt by birth. His father
is not in heaven. No parent
A Bullet of Exigent Thought in Sault’s “Don’t Shoot Guns Down”
From the just-released Untitled (Black Is)
on Forever Living Originals
Juneteenth in an Amerika Undone, and a Nation’s Action Against a Coded Tongue
“Coded Language”
by Saul Williams
from the Amethyst Rock Star release
on American Recordings
On What It Means To Be A Revolutionary
Tales Of The Unconfined: Alison Saar’s Defiant Women Warriors
Syncopation, at L.A Louver, Los Angeles (through 29 February)
Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Alison Saar’s work combines the raw power of tribal art with the postmodern sophistication of complex cultural subtexts. Her work is made in a near devotional way, which infuses a rare emotional intensity into her new narratives on upturning gender and racial hierarchies. Few artists can use visual materials as skillfully to create such powerful political statements. Fewer still can combine aesthetic technique and conceptual acuity in artwork that is so heartfelt it resonates with the viewer viscerally, a sensation akin to listening to a Nina Simone song. This is a rare feat only an exceptional artist can accomplish, which makes her concurrent exhibitions, Syncopation, at L.A Louver, and Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles, stand out even amidst the art fair frenzy. [Read more…]
The Breathless Charm Of Tina Brooks’s Minor Move
on Blue Note Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Soulster James Brown was known as the godfather of soul for a reason. His syncopated music had the sound of a crisp, rehearsed band that could stop on a dime. In live shows, the singer demanded that same precision found on his studio recordings. Brown regularly fined bandmembers onstage for miscues and dropped notes, dancing his way over toward the offending bandmember in mid-song and flashing with his hand the amount of the fine. It’s been lauded as part of his perfectionism, a backbone of his “hardest working man in show business.” But to be clear, that is business, not music. [Read more…]
Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970
Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970
by Vivien Green Fryd
Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95
NYR
In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects. [Read more…]
Don’t Call Me A Person of Color: I’m Black
A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read more…]
The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On
by Adam GopnikUneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
by Patrick Sharkey
W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pp. $26.95
Excerpt courtesy of Adam Gopnik and The New Yorker
[…]
In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it. [Read more…]