DC Black Theatre Fest Presents unFRAMED June 12-14 Read more: http://dc.broadwayworld.com/article/DC-Black-Theatre-Fest-Presents-unFRAMED

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DOUBLE PLAY CONNECTIONS, DOING LIFE PRODUCTIONS, and Jane Dubin, Executive Producer are pleased to present Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s unFRAMED directed by Brent Buell as a Spotlight Show at the D.C. Black Theatre Festival. unFRAMED will play a limited engagement at the August Wilson Stage at the Studio Theatre (1501 14th Street, NW, Washington D.C.) Performances are Sunday, June 12 at 7 pm, Monday, June 13 at 7:30 pm, and Tuesday, June 14 at 7:30 pm.

The nation misread him,

The prison enraged him,
His art expressed him,
His woman believed him,
His poetry saved him.
“In unFRAMED writer and performer Iyaba Ibo Mandingo tells the story of his journey from Antigua to America. It wasn’t without tribulations; navigating treacherous times without a father, Mandingo turned to art. unFRAMED puts the art front and center: Mandingo uses painting, poetry, prose and song to tell a story that echoes the lives of many.” – Times Herald Record
Using canvas, paint, poetry, prose and song, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, formerly Kenny Athel George DeCruise – painter, poet, husband, father, son, and undocumented immigrant from Antigua – evolves the story of his life transformation.
At the age of eleven, Iyaba is plucked from the tropical comfort of his boyhood and taken to life in America where he must navigate his way to manhood without the guidance of a father; from “Mommy Me No Wanna Go Merrica”, a prophetic piece that hints at the many trials he will face in a new land, to his powerful political poetry that that would lead to his arrest and attempted deportation in post 9/11 America.
Iyaba shares his rage, his determination, and his hope while he paints a self-portrait and successfully struggles to redefine his humanity, rediscover his smile, and truly accept himself for the first time.
unFRAMED plays the following schedule
Sunday, June 12, at 7:00 pm
Monday, June 13, at 7:30 pm
Tuesday, June 14, at 7:30 pm
Tickets are $15 and are now available online at http://bit.ly/unFRAMEDtixatDCBTF.
Running Time: 85 minutes
BIOGRAPHIES
IYABA IBO MANDINGO (Playwright, Performer) – painter, poet, writer, and playwright – is a native of Antigua, West Indies, who came to the United States in 1980 as a young boy. His earliest exposures to the arts were through his mother, a professional singer, and his grandparents, a tailor and a seamstress who first introduced him to colors and patterns, paving a path to his many ways of expression: drawing, painting, sculpting, writing and performing. Iyaba studied fine arts at Southern Connecticut State University and today teaches in and around the tri-state area as a Master Teaching Artist. He is a member of the Harlem Arts Alliance.
Iyaba was awarded a national Percent for the Arts Program artist grant, and is a two-time Connecticut Grand Slam champion. In January 2011 he won Yale University’s Martin Luther King Birthday Invitational Slam, his third such win. He appears regularly as a performance poet in venues across the United States and abroad, including Nuyorican Poetry Café, Brooklyn Moon, and Next Door Café among others in the NY area. He is the recipient of artists’ grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and multiple commendations from the Nassau County African American Museum. He was recently seen at 59E59 Theaters (NYC) as Henry in Deb Margolin’s The Expenses of Rain (Laura Barnett, director). He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, 41 Times and Amerikkan Exile. His new novel, Sins of My Fathers, will be released in 2011. His artwork has been included in over a dozen group and individual shows in the tri-state area.
unFRAMED is Iyaba’s first full-length play in poetry and prose, during which he uses a canvas to paint his physical portrait while using words to tell his personal story-a story of an undocumented immigrant boy’s journey to manhood through the perils of adolescence, the pitfalls of racism and the struggles of finding identity in his new country. Iyaba has performed his play at Gallery 1212 (CT), Casa Frela Gallery (Harlem), York College-CUNY (NY), Rider College (NJ), Niagara University (NY), Nichols College (MA), Breakthrough Theatre (FL), the University of Baltimore (MD), the Hudson Valley Writers Center (NY), the Railroad Playhouse (NY), and other venues around the country.
BRENT BUELL (Director) has taken the directorial helm on works including From Sing Sing to Broadway, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in NYC; his comedy The Gem Exchange; Rosemary Hester’s You Can’t Leave That There; Wood Bars, which he wrote with Miguel Valentin for the opening of John Buffalo Mailer and Tom Kail’s Back House Productions; and his Las Vegas spectacular, Undone Divas. He wrote and directed The Terrors of Teri, a film for Ohio University’s University College; directed the dance film Figures in Flight 5; and Goddess Films tapped him to direct its new comedy Moses starring Rosie DeSanctis. For ten years, Buell volunteered with the non-profit organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts, directing theater in New York’s maximum-security prisons. There his productions of plays ranging from John Steinbeck‘s Of Mice and Men to three original works by prisoners, have earned praise from critics, including from The New York Times. His Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code premiered at Sing Sing and was the subject of a feature article in Esquire by bestselling author, John Richardson. His experiences provided the basis for his chapter “Drama in the Big House” in the book Performing New Lives: Prison Theater by Jonathan Shailor. An accomplished actor, Buell has appeared in classic roles from Shakespeare and Ibsen to Moliere and Strindberg, and on the big screen in both the hit comedy Grand Opening and the soon to be released controversial thriller Al Qarem. He has written two novels, Rapturous (Early 2012) and Daniel and My Revelation (Fall 2012). Mr. Buell received his M.A. from Ohio University where he studied with novelist Herbert Gold.
Jane Dubin (Creative Consultant and Executive Producer) is a TONY Award winning producer and the President of Double Play Connections, a theatrical production and management company committed to supporting emerging artists and playwrights in the creation and development of new works. Jane is a graduate of the Commercial Theatre Institute’s 14-week (NYC) and O’Neill Center Intensive (CT) Producing Workshops and Director of Theater Resources Unlimited’s Producer Development Program. Productions: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (London), The 39 Steps, Norman Conquests (7 TONY nominations, winner – TONY, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, Best Play Revival), Groundswell (The New Group), Beebo Brinker Chronicles (2008 GLAAD Media Award for Theatre). National tour: The 39 Steps. Other: OPA! at TBG Theatre (Best Commercial Production, MITF 2008), Take Me America by Nabel and Christianson (Best Musical, MITF 2007), Count Down, by Dominique Cieri, and the one-woman show, MentalPause by Margaret Liston.
Ms. Dubin is on the Board of Directors of the non-profit theater company, Houses on the Moon and a member of the League of Professional Theatre Women. She is consulting producer to the Moving Mantras Performance Group, a company integrating the movement of yoga and modern dance and co-curator of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center New Play Reading Series. She holds an MBA in Finance from NYU’s School of Business.


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The Root: Segregated Museums Mirror History

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Natalie Hopkinson is a contributing editor toThe Root.

The Anacostia Community Museum is one of the Smithsonian Institution’s grand, federally chartered Washington, D.C., museums, but it is located miles from the Mall’s gleaming white marble monuments where millions of eighth-grade history students pilgrimage each year.

It is a world-class museum charged with interpreting and preserving the black experience. But it is tucked away in a remote corner of Washington’s poorest, blackest ward. Since it was established in 1967, the museum’s surrounding Ward 8 community has served as a glaring metaphor for the black experience: segregated, under-resourced and disrespected. A few weeks ago my husband got lost while driving to meet me there. He rolled down his car window, and flagged pedestrian after pedestrian. “Where’s the Anacostia Museum?”

Person after person he stopped replied with blank stares.

In a rant on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) railed against these kinds of federally supported ethnic museums — calling them un-American. According to U.S. News and World Report, Moran went off about the burdens of funding them during a Capitol Hill Appropriations hearing:

Every indigenous immigrant community, particularly those brought here enslaved, have a story to tell and it should be told and part of our history. The problem is that much as we would like to think that all Americans are going to go to the African American Museum, I’m afraid it’s not going to happen. The Museum of American History is where all the white folks are going to go, and the American Indian Museum is where Indians are going to feel at home. And African Americans are going to go to their own museum. And Latinos are going to go their own museum. And that’s not what America is all about … It’s a matter of how we depict the American story and where do we stop? The next one will probably be Asian Americans. The next, God help us, will probably be Irish Americans.

Never mind that the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as the Museum of American History and the National Museum of African Art, for that matter, regularly draw crowds of all races. Still, as the new National Museum of African American History and Culture prepares to open on the Mall in 2015, the challenges and successes of the Anacostia Museum may be instructive. The new museum, led by Lonnie Bunch, will fight for scarce public and private resources and respect. It will fight for collections that could arguably belong in the Museum of American History and other “mainstream” institutions. It will battle the stubborn questions, from black people and white people alike, about why history must be segregated.

But unlike the beautiful Anacostia Community Museum, which is safely out of sight for the most part, the symbolism of the new museum will be impossible to ignore. In addition to usual questions about black worth and legitimacy, it will carry the additional burden of integrating our nation’s most elite historic neighborhood.

The eminent cultural historian Fath Davis Ruffins chronicled the decades of fits and starts of establishing a black museum on the Mall in a 1998 article in the Radical History Review. Ruffins pointed out that historians have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to fully documenting the black experience. For centuries, black historic documents and artifacts have been largely discarded or passed down to descendents and often lost to history.

To wit: Years ago, I wrote a Washington Post article that mentioned the existence of a diary of a Maryland slave named Adam Plummer that historians believed was lost to history. One of his descendants, living in Maryland, read my article and came forward with the diary of perhaps the only real-time accounts of a slave life, written by a slave beginning in 1841. She promptly pulled it out of her attic, and eventually donated the diary to the Anacostia Community Museum, which has marshaled the considerable resources of the Smithsonian Institution to preserve and guard it like the Constitution. (Plumgood Productions has done a short documentary about the discovery of the diary.)

How it will address slavery in general is a major challenge for curators at the black museum on the Mall. “Instead of being removed from the ‘scene of the crime,’ the proposed museum would be erected within sight of locations where slave pens stood during the 1850s and the early years of the Civil War,” Ruffins wrote. Permanent exhibits on slavery would be snug between two sacred white memorials to founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — both slaveholders. Awkward!

Moran may be right that white people may not go to a black museum. The whole enterprise may, as he argues, represent the balkanization of American history. One could justifiably pile on, as other prominent black historians have, that a black museum represents the ghettoization of black history. The late, great historian John Hope Franklin, for instance, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, spent a career arguing that his work chronicling the black experience belonged not in “black studies” but at the very center of American history.

Moving on to the Mall will sometimes be awkward and sometimes hostile — as those of us who have integrated an all-white neighborhood or school know firsthand. The Mall may become “overcrowded” with a cacophony of colors and stories, as Rep. Moran predicted. But a true, comprehensive, warts-and-all account of how America came to be demands it. If it cares about telling the truth about itself, Congress should fully support this enterprise, at any cost.

Writing in 1998, nearly two decades before the dream of a black museum was scheduled to come to life in 2015, Ruffins put it best:

We know the name of King, but we do not know the names of all the others who were murdered trying to vote in the South, or the millions of Native Americans who were killed for their lands, or the millions who were caught up in the bloody maw of the Third Reich. To remember them, all nations build memorials and sometimes even museums.

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Dallas Museum of Art Announces Awards for Artists

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The Dallas Museum of Art has announced its annual awards to artists, which offer grants for travel and special projects to nine individuals. Some familiar names as of late: Edward Sentina, whose work was featured in the Neiman Marcus windows installation, will use the grant to work on a 24-hour performance piece for the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. Travel grants will go to Kevin Todora, who will travel to the 2011 Venice Biennale, and sometimes FrontRow contributor Joshua Goode, who will travel to Africa and Europe to explore a variety of cultural and religious sites.

Here’s the full release:

Dallas Museum of Art Presents Its 2011 Awards to Artists

—With 9 New Recipients, the Combined Awards Programs Have Given

More Than 235 Artists over $520,000 Since 1980—

Dallas, TX, May 24, 2011 — The Dallas Museum of Art is pleased to announce its 2011 Awards to Artists. This year, nine artists received one of three awards. The Museum’s annual awards were established in 1980 by the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund to recognize exceptional talent and potential in young visual artists who show a commitment to continuing their artistic endeavors. The Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund is awarded to artists between 15 and 25 years of age who reside in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado, while the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund is open to residents of Texas under the age of 30. The two funds have awarded over $465,000 to artists since their founding.

The DMA also announces the 2011 travel grants. In 1990 the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant was created to honor the memory of Dallas artists Otis and Velma Dozier, who strongly believed in the enriching influence of travel on an artist’s work. The grant seeks to recognize exceptional talent in professional artists who wish to expand their artistic horizons through domestic or foreign travel and is awarded to professional artists at least 30 years of age who reside in Texas. Since the fund’s development, the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant has given over $135,000.

The four 2011 Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award recipients:
Lindsey Allgood is a candidate for an M.F.A. in Studio Art at the University of Oklahoma, and she received a B.A. in Journalism from the University in 2009. As a native Oklahoman, Lindsey aims to bring performance art, her chosen medium, to that region. She will use the award funds to travel to the Summerwork Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin and to Boston, where she will study with performance artist Faith Johnson and perform at a gallery.

Diedrick Brackens views himself as a hybrid of an artist and anthropologist, and as such he dedicates a bulk of his practice to research and documentation. His current body of work explores African American culture, particularly handmade objects about the home. After receiving his B.F.A. at the University of North Texas this year, Diedrick will use the award funds to travel to New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to conduct research on black life in the Americas.
Kasumi Chow uses photography to capture women’s perceptions of their surroundings. Her photographs show women frozen in suspended animation in otherwise ordinary, everyday scenes. A graduate of the University of North Texas with a B.F.A. in Photography, Kasumi will use the DeGolyer Award to purchase a large-format camera and additional equipment so that she can continue creating her photographs.

Sarah Zapata aims to preserve the traditional art of weaving and to explore how conventional techniques can be used to create contemporary works of art. Recently, Sarah used a loom to weave threads consisting of strips of old telephone book pages, investigating the creative potential of two seemingly obsolete and antiquated objects. With the funds, Sarah will purchase a loom, which will allow her to continue her practice and share the skills that she has learned. She graduated in May 2011 with a B.F.A. in Fibers from the University of North Texas.

The three 2011 Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award recipients:
Xxavier Edward Carter uses language to explore human attraction and repulsion, which he describes as the “magnetism of humanity.” He will use the Kimbrough Award to produce a new series of mixed media works based around language and abstraction. More specifically, the fund will go toward the purchase of materials to document his creative process while the series is in production.

Kerry Pacillio received her B.F.A. in Sculpture from Texas Christian University in 2010. With the help of the Kimbrough award funds, Kerry will create a music video for the Kinks’ 1987 song “Property” (for which the band itself never made a video) and will portray each band member. With the video, Pacillio intends to encourage viewers to explore issues of property, longing, and memory triggered by material objects left behind after the end of a relationship.

Edward Setina is a Dallas-based installation artist. With the assistance of the funds awarded to him, Ted will continue with a body of work he began two years ago as a performance piece that was presented as part of a group show at Dallas’s McKinney Avenue Contemporary. He will create a twenty-four-hour performance that will consist of an eight-foot illuminated Plexiglas cube in which he will reside for the duration of the performance. This body of work is an extension of his academic training in painting, which was Ted’s concentration at the University of North Texas.

The two 2011 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant recipients:
Joshua Goode combines painting and installation to explore the origins of spirituality. With the Dozier Travel Grant, Joshua will travel across Africa and Europe to visit centers of mythology, ritual, and religion, such as temples, cathedrals, and tombs, and will follow the migration path of early man from Africa to Europe. His planned stops include Ethiopia, Romania, southwestern France, and northeastern Spain. Joshua has exhibited at galleries throughout Texas, including Guerilla Arts, Dallas; Co Lab, Austin; and Art Storm, Houston. Joshua earned his M.F.A. from Boston University and his B.F.A. from Southern Methodist University.

Kevin Todora is a Dallas-based artist who questions the photographic object. In 2008 he traveled to New York City and visited many museums and galleries, and was influenced by the exhibition Unmonumental at the New Museum, where he saw photographs pinned to surfaces, draped over objects, and used as bases for sculptures. Drawing from this experience, Kevin began to cut and paint onto photographs. With the Dozier Travel Grant, he will attend the 2011 Venice Biennale, one of the largest international gatherings of contemporary art, to explore other innovative exhibitions and installations. He received his M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University in 2009 and his B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2005.

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Oprah as Muse: Five Unexpected Ways That the Talk Show Legend Impacted Art

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On the penultimate episode of Oprah Winfrey‘s beloved television show, aired today, actor Tom Hanks tells the TV icon in a video tribute: “Your show has turned surprise into an art form.” Over the course of her 25-year-old show, Oprah — who will depart on May 25 to run her new cable network OWN full-time — has gifted cars to her entire studio audience, introduced stars to their biggest fans, and reunited Rwandan refugees. She likes surprising her celebrity guests, too: her no-holds-barred interview with James Frey contributed, in its own way, to establishing the author’s rebel-artist persona.

But even Oprah’s most avid followers may not know that while she herself is an artist of surprise, she is also the occasional muse for visual artists and a frequent patron of art institutions. In 2010, she served alongside Vogue’s Anna Wintour as co-chair of theMetropolitan Museum‘s Costume Institute gala, while the stage door she donated to the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago is currently on view through July 15. From her own, deeply personal donation to a Wisconsin museum to a West Village gallery show memorializing her late dogs, Oprah’s adventures with art are best described as eclectic. To honor Oprah’s final show, ARTINFO has compiled a list of the top five moments in Oprah-inspired art, from the positively uplifting to the downright creepy.

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A century-old Upper East Side façade conceals the aggressively modern design of David Adjaye.

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With the flamboyant orneriness that limitless wealth allows, the art collector Adam Lindemann and his wife, Amalia Dayan, have staged an act of architectural dissidence on the Upper East Side. Lurking behind the limestone scrolls and wrought-iron gate of the carriage house at 77 East 77th Street is an eccentric concrete château, a gray five-story tower scarified with angled window slits like some demonic jack-o’-lantern. It’s the first Manhattan opus of David Adjaye, the architect of the Smithsonian’s future National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. A new book, David Adjaye: A House for an Art Collector, published by Rizzoli, documents every room, wall, and basement nook of the ­Lindemann-Dayan house, revealing both garish taste and a formal inventiveness that hasn’t been seen in a private New York residence since the days of Paul Rudolph. But Rudolph inhabited his own experiments; Adjaye has created a dim, almost gothic lair for a family with idiosyncratic predilections.

The house is a private museum, at once exhibitionistic and secret. (The owners declined my request for a tour.) A gallery for Lindemann’s and Dayan’s outsize, aggressive, and theatrical collection occupies nearly the whole ground floor, and the house wraps itself around the art. A glass bridge offers a disturbing view of Maurizio Cattelan’s dead Pinocchio lying in a pit below. The living-­dining room accommodates Damien Hirst’s vast painting of hugely magnified cancer cells, sprinkled with shards of glass and razor blades. The most intimate part of the house is the vertiginous stack of bedrooms; at the top of the tower, one of Andy Warhol’s “Electric Chair” silk-screens hangs across from the conjugal bed, right where its occupants can gaze on that aestheticized instrument of death just before they slip out of consciousness.

At a time when the rich typically measure their status in views, Adjaye has sequestered his clients in a thick-walled redoubt. He has beaten back the historic district’s rules by grudgingly following their letter. New construction must be invisible from the street, so the house pulls back from the sidewalk, leaving a sliver of court between the gate and the front doors—an airlock dividing the preserved past from the defiant present. The regulations forbid blind windows in a false façade, so Adjaye has shoved a minuscule, free-floating library up against the street-facing windows and joined it to the house by a little glass bridge. This tiny space, which gets direct light while the public rooms retreat into the house’s darkened heart, expresses all the perverseness of this project. Part flashy art space, part medieval keep, the building toggles between showiness and seclusion, radicalism and respectability, roughness and luxe. Adjaye has disposed the interior spaces inequitably, in grand halls and cubbies; in this home, the residents can choose between being dwarfed or caged.

A Ghanaian-descended Londoner, Adjaye has taken (and exhibited) hundreds of photographs of African cities, and here he riffs on an improvised urbanism where edges refuse to line up and the sun is a violent opponent. He brings in light by piercing the shell with vertical cavities (in a tenement, they’d be called air shafts). The exposed concrete is dark, pitted stuff, full of air holes and gravel, corrugated in places to resemble tin siding. That calculated coarseness gives the house a raw power and also infuses it with menace. But in the end, there’s something distasteful about invoking a hand-built shack in a high-gloss neighborhood: It smacks of architectural slumming.

A pile of art-filled concrete boxes, receding from the city and scattered with eccentrically geometric windows; the echoes of Marcel Breuer’s lyrical and severe Whitney Museum around the corner could hardly be clearer. Just as Breuer made climbing or descending on foot part of the Whitney experience, Adjaye has lavished obsessive attention on staircases, promoting the fire stairs from obligatory safety feature to a climbable sculpture made of steel plate and exotic zebrawood. Another staircase leading to the roof garden recalls Paul Rudolph’s floating risers, practically begging the children to leap off the balustrade-free side.

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New Orleans and the culture of resistance

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Over five years since the catastrophe of hurricane Katrina, communities in New Orleans are still struggling to rebuild and return. Shocking images of Katrina broadcast globally continue to communicate the growing economic, social and racial fault lines in America. Beyond the headlines, community organizing and resistance to post-Katrina economic shock treatment of key public institutions, including the school systems and public housing, have drawn battle-lines illustrating broader contemporary struggles against hyper-capitalism.

On culture, artists in New Orleans are playing a critically important role in building a culture of community resistance for key political struggles, while creative, dynamic sounds and boundary challenging artistic practices — which have made New Orleans famous for the arts — continue to shape the front lines of contemporary culture in North America.

Author and community activist Jordan Flaherty explores culture, community and resistance in Floodlines, an inspiring read on Katrina and all the under-reported stories of social justice struggles in the years after the storm. Flaherty writes in a lyrical style, illustrating a deep connection to the arts, while also communicating the urgent realities facing the poor majority in New Orleans, a predominantly African-American city — realities that today have fallen far from the headline glare.

Floodlines is a key read for anyone interested in reading a critical contemporary history on Katrina and also for all involved in community organizing. It is an eye-opening examination on the hope, struggles and conflicts that revolve around community-led movements for social justice.

Community activist and Art Threat contributor Stefan Christoff had the opportunity to speak with Floodlines author Jordan Flaherty during a recent visit to Montreal.

Art Threat: In Floodlines you highlight community struggles and resistance in New Orleans surrounding hurricane Katrina, can you point to some key struggles you focus on in Floodlines and their importance for communities across the U.S. and in Canada.

Jordan Flaherty: U.S. policies on healthcare, education and criminal justice in someways presents a dystopian future for Canada, as many policies are first tried in the U.S. and then exported globally through structural adjustment programs via the IMF and World Bank. Today privatization policies are being applied and enforced in the U.S., striking communities like New Orleans.

A back and forward between different countries and contexts is taking place, different strategies to push privatization, militarization and the criminalization of the poor. All these issues were projected in hyper speed in New Orleans. Struggles around the privatization of education really came forward after Katrina.

In New Orleans overnight around 7500 teachers and employees, basically the entire staff of the public school system was fired. An entire school system radically disrupted in New Orleans, from a system under the control of local school boards, to a system of charter schools or state controlled schools, a major move toward a free market school system.

On criminal justice, the first state institution to restart after the storm in New Orleans was the city jail, a bus station was transformed into a city jail. Prisoners were also left behind as the waters were rising during the storm orshipped upstate to prisons like Angola, a former slave plantation where it is estimated that over 90% of the prison population will die behind bars.

Our public hospital in New Orleans was immediately shut down after Katrina.

After the storm you had 80% housing damaged in New Orleans but the public housing was mainly undamaged, but public housing was quickly boarded-up post storm by people in power who tried to take that opportunity to close public housing. Congressman Richard Baker, a prominent Republican said after the storm, “we finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it, but God did.”

People in power took advantage of the situation to push forward rapid reforms on all of these issues.

In listening to you outline the board changes across the social structure of New Orleans after the storm Naomi Klein’s thesis outlined via The Shock Doctrine comes to mind, can you expand on reality of hyper capitalism enforced on New Orleans post Katrina?

Certainly Naomi Klein’s framing in The Shock Doctrine has been an important lens through which to look at the situation and what we faced in New Orleans after the storm.

On the teachers, the union that they were all members in was the largest union in the city, it was 80% African American, so it was a foundation of African American middle class life in the city. After Katrina the union cease to exist, all the teachers were fired and so that move hit the social-economic well being of so many in the community.

In New Orleans public schools were already in trouble prior to Katrina but you had two different views about what was wrong with the school system, many community members thought that the problem was the lack of public funding for the schools, the bad pay for teachers, the crumbling infrastructure, while people in power thought the problem was that the teachers union had too much power that there was too much local control.

So opportunists took advantage of the storm to completely wrest the school system out of local control, to effectively shutdown a public school system for New Orleans. So the firing of teachers, attacking the teachers union, taking the schools out of school board control, were all steps in their plan to try out free market experiments on the education system.

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African American Opera Colors Galapagos

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Two Brooklyn opera companies, AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) and OPERA ON TAP (OOT), will present Opera Grows in Brooklyn: Opera of Color, featuring a collection of contemporary opera and song from African Americans, in the next installment of Opera Grows in Brooklyn. The evening will feature Give and Take, a chamber work by jazz icon David N. Baker; songs from soprano Adrienne Danrich’s new live-documentary An Evening in the Harlem Renaissance, including the New York premiere of five songs by Drew Hemenger with poems by Langston Hughes; and excerpts from Nkeiru Okoye’s folk opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom. The show will be held on Sunday, June 12th at 7 pm at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. Tickets are $15 in advance atwww.galapagosartspace.com and $20 at the door.

Opera Grows in Brooklyn is an ongoing collaboration between American Opera Projects, “known for bringing cutting-edge vocal production to the masses,” (New York), Opera on Tap, “…raucous and sublime…un-elitist, imperfect, and fun…” (NY Sun) and Galapagos Art Space, that presents 90 minutes of music from contemporary opera composers in a hip, cabaret-style atmosphere. Audiences have a chance to meet the creator and artists after the performance.

Composer Nkeiru Okoye presents excerpts from her two-act folk opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom. Harriet Tubman tells the story of the legendary Underground Railroad conductor as she grows from a girl born in slavery into the woman who would lead more than 70 people to freedom. Based on recent Tubman biographies, the story encompasses the universal themes of sisterhood, courage, sacrifice and family bonds. Harriet Tubman showcases Okoye’s penchant for infusing popular and non-Western influences in a ‘classical’ framework. Starring soprano Jasmine Muhammad (NAACP Gold Medal Winner in Classical Voice), with music direction by Mila Henry.

Soprano Adrienne Danrich (San Francisco Opera) performs songs from her new live-documentary An Evening in the Harlem Renaissance, a musical celebration of one of the most exciting times for African American writers, composers, artists and performers. Danrich highlights settings of poet Langston Hughes in works by Margaret Bonds, John Musto, and Ricky Ian Gordon, as well as the New York premiere of five new settings of Hughes’s poems composed by Drew Hemenger, and commissioned by Danrich and The Lively Arts Concert Series at Indiana University Pennsylvania. Also featuring Bass-Baritone Isaac Grier. Piano by Mila Henry.


Give and Take is a 1975 chamber work for soprano and ensemble by jazz icon and Renaissance man, Dr. David N. Baker . His compositions total more than 2,000 in number, including jazz and symphonic works, chamber music, and ballet and film scores. A virtuoso performer on multiple instruments, Mr. Baker has taught and performed throughout the world. He has been nominated for both a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize and was recently honored by the Kennedy Center with their Living Jazz Legend Award. Give and Take will be performed by soprano Malesha Jessie (Los Angeles Opera, Boston Pops), and uses poetry by Terence Diggory.


ABOUT OPERA GROWS IN BROOKLYN
“You never really know if you’ll be there for the premiere of the next great masterwork by the next great composer” the opera blog Parterrebox declared in 2010. In 2011, audiences can look forward to evenings focusing on opera and songs based on living Brooklyn authors (Sep. 18), and Rock and Roll vs. Opera (Dec. 11). Each performance begins at 7pm on a Sunday at Galapagos Art Space in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.

For over 20 years, American Opera Projects (AOP) has been creating, developing and presenting exclusively new American opera and music Theatre Projects that have appeared at the Lincoln Center Festival, Skirball Center at NYU, the Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and many other national and international venues. AOP, based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has presented over 15 world premiere operas including Lee Hoiby‘s This is the Rill Speaking (2008), Stefan Weisman’s Darkling (2006), and Paula Kimper’s Patience & Sarah (1998). Recent productions of AOP-developed projects include Séance on a Wet Afternoon at New York City Opera (2011) and the world premiere of Before Night Falls at Fort Worth Opera (2010). Upcoming: World Premiere of Tarik O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness at The Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio in 2011. www.operaprojects.org

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THIS FRIDAY, MAY 20…. at 6353 Greene Street, Philadelphia, PA 19144.

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Panoramic Poetry
Friday, May 20 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

6353 Greene Street, Philadelphia, PA 19144

The Downtown Panoramic Poetry Shows every 2nd & 3rd Friday have now moved from Downtown 701 Market Street, to The October Gallery at 6353 Greene Street …

The October Lounge A seamless blend of art, rhythm, prose and music. Showcasing the area’s artists, poets, vocalist and musicians.

Spots are going quickly !!!

To get on the list to read at upcoming Panoramic Poetry :http://www.panoramicpoetry.com/

More Info: 215 629-3939


Maybe It’s Jon Stewart Who Can’t See Beyond Race

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I’m going to make some points about the lesser controversies (namely the lyrics issue) surrounding the invitation of rapper/poet “Common” to the Whitehouse, because John Nolte has the larger controversies that were completely ignored by Jon Stewart pretty well covered.

One thing that stuck out to me in Stewart’s attempted takedown of Fox News (or “epic takedown” if you’re a Mediaite straight news guy: notice how the first linked article is entirely opinionated but not distinguished as such as Mediaite claims to do, and the second glosses over convicted cop-killer and FBI-classified domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimar — also a hero to Common as an “alleged” cop killer). It was the equivalence Stewart attempted to draw between Johnny Cash and Common. Stewart showed George Bush presenting the National Medal of Arts to Johnny Cash (who had written some rough lyrics in his day as well) and then asked emphatically, “What’s the difference?! What’s the difference?!” The answer Stewart was getting at was as subtle as the CB4 rap he played the next day (yeah, this actually exists. I couldn’t stop singing it either):

Stewart is unsurprisingly asserting that anyone who objects to Common’s Whitehouse invite is either racist or trying to influence people who are, and are holding different standards to Bush’s and Obama’s choice of honorees. But Stewart’s first deception is that while the National Medal of Arts is presented by the President, honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the Arts, not the Whitehouse, so it was not Bush’s decision at all.

More importantly, see if you can find another difference in the two artists and two situations:

If the only difference Jon Stewart can see between the two is skin color, then Stewart is the one who can’t see beyond race. Johnny Cash was 70 years old and a year short of his death when he was presented the National Medal of Arts. He wasn’t exactly influencing or seeking to influence America’s youth with his art at the time, and it had been decades since he had written any songs about killing anyone. Even when Cash was younger and exploring some rougher themes in his music, while he did have appeal to adolescents, I’m not aware of him trying to bring Elmo-watching kindergarteners into his fan base (same goes for Ted Nugent). I’m also unaware of the songs he wrote or examples in which Cash celebrated actual cop killers (as opposed to merely adopting the voice of one artistically). Regardless, Cash was heavily frowned upon by most of polite society in his youth (regardless of his skin color), and would never have been honored by a President at the height of the rough and rowdy part of his career.

On the other hand, Common seeks to have a very large influence on even very young children (particularly African American Children), yet openly celebrates actual cop killers and “Black Power” icons like former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal and opposes interracial marriages.

Most conservative objections to bad public behavior, particularly in artwork, stem from the concern of their influence on children. Unlike some other early to mid twenty year olds with elite educations and no children, I know better than to lecture and insult actual parents on issues of parenting (especially on Mother’s Day … what an ugly week for Mediaite), but even I can understand that children are very easily influenced and thrive on role models. Both Common and President Obama celebrate themselves as great role models especially to African American children, and yet both of them have a disturbing pattern of sending some of the worst and most racially divisive possible messages to them, one of which is stigmatizing police as racist.

Now Obama just gave a great big presidential seal of approval to rapper who has no business whatsoever being marketed to small children.

I’m not old enough or responsible enough to care much about such parental matters, but Jon Stewart’s dismissal of the concerns of citizens, parents, and especially policemen as a manifestation of racism is insulting, and that does bother me. I have no doubt any Republican, white president would have been hammered mercilously by both the left and the right for promoting and celebrating a white artist at the Whitehouse half as offensive as Common. The only double standard here is that Obama gets a complete pass for being a liberal. I’m looking forward to Stewart getting straightened out on The Factor on Monday.

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Detroit Institute of Art renames contemporary African American art gallery

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The Detroit Institute of Arts will name its new gallery of contemporary African American art after a pioneering General Motors executive and his wife.

The newly named Maureen and Roy S. Roberts Gallery honors the generosity of the couple.

They are longtime philanthropists in the areas of the arts, culture and education.

The new gallery features works by such artists as Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett and Alvin Loving.

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2 Live Stews Host Education Fundraiser at Bill Lowe Art Gallery

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Throughout their 10-year career in broadcasting, radio personalities and brothers Doug and Ryan Stewart of the nationally syndicated sports talk show, The 2 Live Stews, have stood tall as community activists, serving as mentors for hundreds of youths along with being advocates for higher education.

The cornerstone of their benevolent work is The Stewart Education Foundation, and this past weekend, the brothers hosted a fundraiser at the Bill Lowe Art Gallery on Peachtree Street to raise awareness of their program.

Created in 2010, The Stewart Education Foundation is an independent public charity and sustained by contributions from educators, corporate sponsors and other supporters of public education.

The Stewart Education Foundation offers grants and programs that support educators’ efforts to close the achievement gaps, increase classroom innovations, provide professional development, and salute excellence in education for young African American men.

“The Bill Lowe Art Gallery is incredible. A lot of people came out and it’s for a purpose. We’re trying to increase efforts when it comes to helping with mentoring and sending kids to school,” said Ryan. “The foundation has been blessed and this is a wonderful event.”

Ryan’s older brother and co-host, Doug, followed up these sentiments about event and their charitable organization.

“It’s always good to give back helping young black males get into college and assist with their tuition,” he said. “My brother and I have been mentoring for about eight years with Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta,” he said. “Our show is based on brothers. We’re brothers in our fraternity (Omega Psi Phi) and brothers in real life. So we always figured it would be good to have a brotherly role model in your life and it spun off to our foundation.”

During the festivities, The Stewart Education Foundation presented a $2,000 check to the Commitment to Excellence Foundation’s Black Rhinos mentoring program.

“This money is going to help with our college tours. We’re looking to expand our program to expose young men to college opportunities. This is going to helping that dream come true,” said Kenny Howard, staff member with the Black Rhinos. “This means a lot to us to partner up with the Stewart Foundation and be a recipient of this award so we can expand a do a lot more for the kids.”

Doug and Ryan Stewart’s daily sports talk show, The 2 Live Stews, is syndicated in 37 markets and airs locally on sports radio 790 The Zone from 1-4 p.m. This fall, they will celebrate their 10th anniversary working as on-air personalities.

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Harlem River Park Artwork Designed by Local Artists and Kids

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Tylik Mejia wasn’t that excited about an opportunity to work with the Creative Arts Workshops for Kids to design a mural to attract people to Harlem River Park.

“I declined at first because I said I’m not really an art person,” said Mejia, 15.

That’s when his mother, Kim Walton, 46, stepped in.

“I said you should try it because you just might like it. A few weeks later, he was coming home every day saying: ‘Ma you won’t believe this,” Walton said.

Mejia helped to design six banners that will hang on Fifth Avenue and beckon people to the park, and became so adept that he helped supervise his peers.

The banners, along with 15 etched steel plaques that will be installed near the water at Artist’s Cove at East 139th Street and Harlem River Drive, are part of an effort to beautify the park while creating a connection with the surrounding communities.

“The purpose of the banners is to act as an anchor to get people into the park,” said Richard Toussaint, a member of Community Board 11 who wrote the proposal for the park back in 1990.

The 20 acre park is being built in phases between the Harlem River and the Harlem River Drive from 125th to 145th streets.

Thomas Lunke, director of planning and development for the Harlem Community Development Corporation, which oversaw the project, said it’s part of an effort to make the park into a “relevant neighborhood asset.”

“We wanted to empower the community to express itself in the arts,” Lunke said.

The etched plaques, designed by artists such as Manuel Vega Jr., depict images representative of Harlem’s history and culture. Vega’s etching “Harlem River Ran-Kan-Kan” depicts Tito Puente. Another by Nora Mae Carmicheal called “Harlem’s Hellfighters,” depicts members of the 15th New York National Guard Regiment, the first African-American regiment to fight in World War I.

Harlem artist Misha McGlown designed a mixed media collage that shows a view from the park. It shows the state flower and rocks that represent the Harlem River.

“They have given so much thought to the ecosystem in the park,” McGlown said of her collage.

“The art brings an element of interest and exhibition quality to the park. It’s also a powerful learning tool,” she said.

The banners represent different elements of the park. One shows a fisherman and is based on a man who used to fish in the area before it officially became a park. Another represents some of the flowers found in the park. The young people involved in the project surveyed the area before deciding what elements to depict in the banners.

“It’s a very empowering experience for young people,” said Molaundo Jones, program director of Creative Arts Workshops for Kids. “They will see their work outside the park and think about the importance of what they did and how it helps the community. It reverberates in the rest of their lives.”

Mejia said he and his fellow banner creators had to learn not only about art and blending colors but about patience, working collaboratively with others and respect and self-respect.

“Once I got into the program, I thought to myself: ‘This art stuff is nice,'” said Mejia.

Now, he still wants to be an education lawyer but also sees possibilities as a graphic designer.

“It makes me feel that no matter what age, big or small, everyone can make a difference,” Mejia said.

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‘At the Fights’: a heavyweight collection of American writers on boxing

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‘At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing’

edited by George Kimball and John Schulian

Library of America, 517 pp., $35

Blame it on Hemingway.

George Kimball, in the introduction to this collection of essays and excerpts, argues “the birth” of American boxing writing was the fight between Jack Johnson, the first African American to hold the heavyweight title, and Jim Jeffries, a former champion who came out of retirement in 1910 to reclaim the title “for the white race.” Jeffries lost. Jack London covered the event.

London’s piece, written for the New York Herald, opens this book. He writes well about the fight and the bigger implications, but Jack London is not the reason so many writers embrace boxing. Ernest Hemingway moved boxing from the sports pages to the literary pages. Robert Cohn, from “The Sun Also Rises,” was a Princeton middleweight champion, and Hemingway liked to challenge fellow writers to boxing matches, especially when he was drinking. Unfortunately, Hemingway apparently didn’t pen anything sufficiently focused on boxing to make it into this collection.

Literary heavyweight Norman Mailer is among many authors who see the boxing ring not only as a stage for visceral drama, but as an arena rich with symbolism and metaphor. Mailer, in his 1975 book “The Fight,” likens George Foreman’s beating at the hands of Muhammad Ali to a bad marriage.

“There is a threshold to the knockout. When it comes close but is not crossed, then a man can stagger around the ring forever. He has received his terrible message and is still standing. No more of the same woe can destroy him. He is like the victim in a dreadful marriage which no one knows how to end.”

George Plimpton, professional author and amateur athlete, writes about Ali — Cassius Clay at the time of Plimpton’s 1964 piece for Harper’s — as an entertainer more than a fighter, and Plimpton works Malcolm X into this analysis as well.

“Neither of them ever stumbles over words, or ideas, or appears balked by a question, so that one rarely has a sense of the brain actually working but rather that it is engaged in rote.”

Richard Wright, two years before “Native Son” established him as a heavyweight novelist in 1940, wrote about the Joe Louis rematch with German Max Schmeling, a friend of Hitler. The fight itself received one paragraph of attention from Wright, while the remainder of his article for a Marxist publication puts the contest and resulting celebration of Louis’ victory into a context of race, politics and class.

“Carry the dream on for yourself; lift it out of the trifling guise of a prizefight celebration and supply the social and economic details and you have the secret dynamics of proletarian aspiration … They wanted to feel that their expanding feelings were not limited; that the earth was as much theirs as much as anybody else’s.”

Joyce Carol Oates, one of only two women included in the book, focuses on Mike Tyson and his rape conviction in a 1992 essay. Oates believes boxing “raises to an art the passions underlying direct human aggression,” while Tyson puts it thusly, “Outside of boxing, everything is so boring.”

Personally, I think boxing can be boring, but good writing interests me, and this book is 51 rounds of punchy, disciplined, agile writing. Hemingway is not included, probably because he made statements such as, “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything,” but didn’t write about boxing all that much. I believe he would appreciate the writers here who elevate the sport.

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Bookstore maintains link to African-American history

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For 25 years Yusef Harris has promoted black awareness at Alkebu-Lan Images Bookstore, an independent bookstore that focuses on black history, education, self-help and spirituality.

“I wanted products that reflect African-American heritage and culture and improve one’s self-esteem,” said Harris, who opened the Jefferson Street shop in 1986. “At the time, there were no resources for black art and black books.

“People would come in and say, ‘I want that Cosby art,’ because there was an awakening and awareness in the black community.”

Alkebu-Lan was the original name for the continent of Africa whose people were known as Alkebulans, Harris said. The store was the former psychologist’s solution to promote positive images of blacks in the community, he said.

Now, celebrating its 25th anniversay, the store offers books on black history, self-help, urban novels, spirituality and children’s books with brown-shaded cartoon characters.

Harris added greeting cards from a black-owned company before Hallmark’s Mahogany line was created.

His business grew with the popularity of The Cosby Show and Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel, Waiting to Exhale.

“Alkebu-Lan works because I am selling niche products that could not be found in other stores. It is my business to know what book Tom Joyner is talking about on his radio show or what books are props in black films for when people come in and say, ‘Do you know that book? I can’t remember the title but I heard (about) it on the radio.’”

Harris travels to conferences for professional black organizations to promote his Nashville-based bookstore. His ventures have helped Alkebu-Lan Images become a destination for African-American tourists in Nashville and for people on college tours.

“That national base has become a big part of my success,” he said. About 10 percent of the business comes from colleges and education centers. Another 30 percent comes from conventions and festivals.

Harris opened the bookstore using a $15,000 loan from the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency as the down payment on a former gas station. His first inventory was full of trinkets and straw bags that he brought back from Kenya. There were also a few books donated by other black-owned bookstores and entrepreneurs.

The company grew to have a $100,000 payroll in the mid-1990s with a satellite location at Tennessee State University’s incubation center for shipping books and paintings.

In recent years, the book business has dwindled, but Alkebu-Lan Images says it holds on by reminding North Nashville residents of the importance of raising literate youth.

The bookstore began celebrating its 25th anniversary with a weekend book fair at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School with 25 local authors. Harris awarded $500 in scholarships to three students at the event.

As other national booksellers and regional bookstores close their doors, Alkebu-Lan also has seen a decline in customers, but Harris says he is committed to promoting African heritage and culture.

He has launched the “Power Now, Reading is How” initiative to put Saturday morning reading programs in North Nashville churches. Harris is donating books and recruiting retired teachers to help elementary and middle school students cultivate their reading skills and adopt the habit of opening a book. He also plans to create a formal organization for Nashville’s black authors.

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Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden gets Underway with Dig

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Change, long discussed and planned, is taking shape and form these days in Lexington’s East End neighborhood. The latest evidence is materializing on a half-acre parcel of state-owned property near the intersection of Third Street and Winchester Road.

An archeological dig got underway on Tuesday on what is believed to have been the site of the home of the great 19th century African American jockey Isaac Murphy. Confirmation, perhaps by unearthing the foundation, would signal a key first step toward the construction of the Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden, envisioned as an homage to the three-time Kentucky Derby winning jockey -a first- and recognition that before there was a Keeneland, Lexington’s Northside was the heart of Thoroughbred horse racing in the Bluegrass.

“It’s a bookend to the park dedicated to the horse (Thoroughbred Park at the corner of Midland and Main),” said Steve Austin of the Blue Grass Community Foundation. “Now we’re talking about a park dedicated to some of the people who rode the horses. We don’t do enough of that in Lexington. The horse is king, but it takes a human to ride it.”

Many of those humans resided in Lexington’s predominately African-American East End neighborhood. They included the winning jockey of the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, Oliver Lewis, as well as Ansel Williamson, who trained Lewis’ steed, Aristides. Thomas Street was once home to jockey James “Soup” Perkins, who rode Halma to victory in the 1895 Derby.

But considered to this day one of the greatest riders who ever lived, Isaac Murphy was a cut above them all, not only the first jockey to win three Derbys, but adding to his first victory in the 1884 “Run for the Roses” the winner’s trophies in the Kentucky Oaks and the Clark Handicap.

The park design, said Austin, is expected to become a point of real pride not only for residents of the East End, but for the entire city.

“This will be one of the finest additions to the city park system in a long time,” Austin said. “We’ll have plazas. We’ll have dry-laid stone walls. We’ll have art elements. We’ll have an outdoor amphitheater for classes and performances. We’ll have storyboards that will talk about Isaac’s life and other African Americans in the (horse) industry and the history of the East End. So, it’s a place of beauty, a place of learning. It will also be the trailhead of the Legacy Trail. You can start right there and go all the way to the Horse Park.”

Austin’s organization is spearheading efforts to raise funds in support of the project and has received a generous lift from local businessman Warren Rogers.

“W. Rogers Company (the Lexington-based water treatment facilities management firm) has made a $25,000 donation toward construction of the park that matched a $25,000 contribution by the BGCF. We’d like to use that as a challenge to the rest of the business community. We’re 80 percent of the way there. We need another $100,000,” he noted.

Austin said construction of the park will get underway as soon as the required archeology is completed and plans are approved by the state.

“We’re going to go ahead and start construction on the belief that the community will support us,” he said.

What inspires Austin’s faith? Positioning and collaboration.

“Isaac Murphy is an inspirational figure because of the integrity with which he lived his life,” noted Rogers when asked what motivated him to contribute so generously to the project. “He can be a role model for East End kids and children throughout Lexington. His memory also helps connect East End residents to their historic past as the center of Lexington’s Thoroughbred racing industry. This is why I am excited about being invested and an active participant in the rebirth of the Third Street corridor.”

A celebration of Isaac’s 150th year is scheduled for Saturday, May 14, 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., on the location at the corner of Third Street and Midland Avenue. The event features an official proclamation by Mayor Jim Gray, a public archeological dig, live music, kid crafts, stick horse races and cupcakes.

Schoolchildren will participate in the dig on May 18 and 19.

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