May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture The Birds at Rikers Island By Violaine Huisman In order to get to Rikers Island, you must cross a bridge that rises steeply, hiding the other side from view. A sign in brightly colored cursive reads: HAVE A NICE TOUR! At the top of a wooden staircase, you present your ID in exchange for a numbered badge. The exchange evokes travel: ferry ticket counters, border-patrol booths. I expect to smell the ocean. Instead, there is a pungent odor of sewage, for which Tommy Demenkoff, who runs arts education programs for the department of corrections, apologizes. It’s not usually like that. Tommy drives our group—Nikos Karathanos, ten company members performing in The Birds at St Ann’s Warehouse, and me—to the island in a white and blue corrections van. On the way over, to our right, a peninsula shoots into the East River: LaGuardia’s runway. The bridge affords the city’s best view of planes taking flight. Read More
May 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soviet Anthology of “Negro Poetry” By Jennifer Wilson Years before he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the attorney Loren Miller spent the summer of 1932 in Moscow helping edit a Soviet anthology of “Negro poetry.” Miller had arrived that June with a group of twenty-two African Americans (including his good friend Langston Hughes) to shoot a Soviet agitprop film about racial tensions and labor disputes in the American South. When the project fell through, Miller and many of his compatriots stayed in Moscow to pursue creative opportunities that would have been largely foreclosed to black artists in the United States: the aspiring actor Wayland Rudd found work with the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the painter Mildred Jones apprenticed with the Soviet artist and graphic designer Aleksandr Deineka. For others, the backdrop of Moscow provided fresh creative inspiration: Dorothy West, a voracious reader of Dostoyevsky, rushed at the chance to visit Russia and write about life there, eventually penning short stories like “A Room in Red Square”; Langston Hughes, fascinated with the nearby socialist republics Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which he referred to as the “Soviet South” for their burgeoning cotton industries, published travel essays and reportage out of Samarkand and Tashkent. But for Miller, life among Moscow’s creative class offered first and foremost an opportunity to engage in the day-to-day work of building communism by doing what he knew best: writing, editing, and getting his radical poet friends paid. In August 1932, a dispatch from a Moscow correspondent of the Associated Negro Press appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier (at that time one of the country’s most widely circulated black newspapers) announcing the publication of an anthology of “Negro poetry.” “The Russians,” it read, “take the widest interest in anything pertaining to Negroes” and were “anxious to read and hear anything concerning Negro life.” According to the article, the Soviets hoped the anthology would teach their own authors “to write social poetry.” Read More
May 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Mad or Bad? Magritte’s Artistic Rebellion By Abigail Solomon-Godeau René Magritte, La moisson (The Harvest), 1943. Long considered aberrations in his artistic career, René Magritte’s sunlit surrealist and vache pictures have recently been reassessed by art historians and critics not only on their own terms but also in relation to the notion of “bad painting.” The two bodies of work have often been discussed separately, since they are stylistically dissimilar and the latter was produced specifically for Magritte’s first solo exhibition in Paris, in 1948. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think of them as related. Both series are almost unrecognizable as “Magrittes,” and one followed directly after the other, together spanning World War II and the immediate postwar period. Far more than a neutral background, historical events may have helped shape, if not determine, the nature and terms of these works more than has until now been presumed. Read More
May 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Gertrude Stein’s Mutual Portraiture Society By Anne Diebel Portraits of Gertrude Stein by Picabia, Picasso, and Valleton. Between 1908 and her death, in 1946, Gertrude Stein created over a hundred prose portraits, which she called “word paintings.” Most of her portraits were of her friends: Alice B. Toklas, Matisse, Picasso, Sherwood Anderson, Erik Satie, Hemingway, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Jane Heap, Carl Van Vechten, Virgil Thomson, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others. In some cases, she was returning the favor of a friend having made a portrait of her in another medium. Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein was followed by Stein’s “Pablo Picasso,” which appeared in a special issue of Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. (The issue also featured Stein’s Henri Matisse and reproductions of works by Picasso and Matisse.) Stein would then write a prose portrait of Stieglitz, too. There’s something precious and annoying about these artists’ mutual admiration, but also something admirably transactional—you do me, I’ll do you, and we’ll both benefit. This mutual portrait project reached a new level of absurdity in 1923, when Stein’s “A Portrait of Jo Davidson” was published in Vanity Fair. Stein’s piece was accompanied by three photos: a photo by Man Ray of Davidson working on his recently completed sculpture of Stein (a bronze casting based on Davidson’s model now sits in Bryant Park); a photo of Jacques Lipchitz’s 1920 bronze bust of Stein; and a photo of Picasso’s 1907 painting. Read More
May 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Nietzsche Wishes You an Ambivalent Mother’s Day By John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary Mary Cassatt, Sleepy Baby, 1910. The cultural institution of Mother’s Day began with a single massive flower delivery. In 1908, Anna Jarvis, widely regarded as the founder of the holiday, delivered five hundred white carnations to Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had taught Sunday school for decades. It was the start of a century-long Mother’s Day tradition: give solid-white carnations in honor of the memory of the deceased; give solid-red and solid-pink ones to the moms who still live among us. For a single day, the life of a mother is supposed to be easy. She can take a break and bask in the admiration of her absolute purity, unmitigated faithfulness, unbridled charity, and total love. But perhaps this form of celebration is too easy; perhaps it masks the true difficulties and precariousness of a woman bearing and raising children. In truth, very few things about motherhood seem absolute, unmitigated, unbridled, or total. And maybe we should accept, even celebrate, precisely this ambivalence. Read More
May 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon By Autumn Womack Zora Neale Hurston’s previously unpublished anthropological text Barracoon will be released on May 8, 2018. Zora Neale Hurston, Kossula: Last of the Takoi Slaves, stills from a black-and-white film in 16mm, 5 minutes. © The Margaret Mead Collection. Arrangement by Josh Begley. On May 10, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter to Alain Locke, the self-professed dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston’s longtime collaborator, frequent pen pal, and sometimes mentor. She reports the arrival of her diploma from Barnard College, where she studied anthropology; commiserates with Locke about the drudgery of teaching; and begs for a visit—Hurston includes a detailed description of the “sea animal graveyards” that she’s discovered in the phosphate mines at Mulberry, Florida. Hurston enclosed within the envelope a few objects: “two vertebrae of pre-historic sea animals” excavated from the “deep depressions” of the seafloor and a small piece of wood. “The bit of wood,” she writes, “is from the ship in Mobile Bay. (Cudjoe Lewis).” In May 1859, Cudjoe Lewis, along with 116 other Africans, was captured from Dahomey, in what is today Benin, and sold to Captain Foster. Foster was traveling at the behest of the Mehear brothers, three American slave traders who were originally from Maine but had relocated to Alabama where they operated a shipyard. Three months later, the slave ship Clotilde docked in Mobile Bay, where the newly enslaved were sold. Because the transatlantic slave trade was abolished some fifty years earlier, once the Mehears landed on U.S. soil, the ship was “scuttled and fired.” Its remains were left to sink to the bottom of Mobile Bay, where, like Hurston’s fish vertebrae, it would await discovery. Read More