Art for Sale Page 2

Fifty years ago the idea of a white art gallery owner flying down from Atlanta to meet a group of black artists in Fort Pierce would have seemed preposterous.

First of all, black artists were virtually unknown in the segregated South; second, where would any aspiring black artist have exhibited his work? White-owned galleries might as well have been on another planet.

That fact, of course, prompted a group of painters from Fort Pierce, subsequently dubbed the Highwaymen by a collector, to take a new tack. They crammed the trunks of their cars with stacks of colorful paintings (many still with wet paint) and hit the highway to sell them at medical offices and motels all over South Florida.

Last Thursday, what was once impossible became fact.

Atlanta gallery owner Catherine Kelleghan flew here to meet six of the Highwaymen, looking to represent them to a growing African-American clientele in her city.

Kelleghan said that several of her clients had urged her to exhibit more black or ethnic art. During her research, she came across the story of the Highwaymen.

Spurred on by dynamic individuals like Fort Pierce artist Alfred Hair (killed in a barroom brawl in 1970), and to a lesser extent by Gifford painter Harold Newton, the group grew until more than 20 painters and salesmen were plying the highways.

Back in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the economic choice was clear to these young men: Either sweat your brains out in the tomato fields or citrus groves for maybe $5 a day or try selling paintings at anywhere between $15 and $25 each — a fortune by comparison.

Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to sit down to lunch at Avenue D’s Granny’s Kitchen restaurant with Kelleghan, five Highwaymen and the only Highway-woman. The stories began to flow like a bottomless glass of sweet ice tea.

The legend of the Highwaymen has grown over the years, and since it wasn’t written down until recently, the stories have always been a little, shall we say, elastic in nature.

Gary Monroe, a college art lecturer from Daytona wrote the definitive book on the Highwaymen in 2002. It was Monroe who first told the story about “assembly-line” art. Alfred Hair, the originator of the Fort Pierce group realized that to make some really big money, they needed volume. Monroe wrote that one artist would paint the clouds, another specialized in water, while others might add in the foreground details in the highly stylized Florida landscapes.

Perhaps early on that did happen, yet no one on Thursday even mentioned it.

What became clear is that there were two distinct groups of painters, and those from Fort Pierce were aware of but didn’t socialize with those from Gifford. The idea of a tight-knit group seems to have come later.

Most in the group said they learned how to paint by observing their peers. They played on their strengths: along with being a born entrepreneur, Hair was especially good at painting the ocean; Gibson was the fastest painter, and everyone agreed Al Black was the slickest salesman.

For Mary Anne Carroll, the lone woman in the group, it was the fact she had a car. Once she was allowed to hit the road, she sold $70 worth of paintings the first day and she was hooked.

I knew about Hair’s role; I was less familiar with the influence of Newton, who many critics say was the best pure painter in the group. It was Newton who encouraged several others to take up art for a living, recalled Curtiss Arnett, Roy McLendon and Willie Reagan, all from Gifford.

Some like Reagan and Fort Pierce-based Issac Knight held full-time jobs. Reagan taught school, Knight worked at Grumman Aerospace. Both began painting in their spare time.

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Review by Kremena Nikolova-Fontaine.

More than enough articles have been written about the famous French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (b.1911– d. 2010, aged 98), who boasts a prolific career of more than 75 years.

Since I reviewed two of the previous exhibitions of the National Gallery of Iceland in my last review, I consciously intended to focus on some other gallery’s exhibition this month, instead of writing about Bourgeois’s “Kona/Femme”, currently on display there as part of The Reykjavík Arts Festival 2011.

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to miss the chance to witness the originals of Bourgeois’s complex, metaphoric and confessional inner world last Wednesday (the free admittance day) which has fascinated me for years even though I’ve only contemplated on reproductions.

My fear was that her work could turn out to be an over-stated utter nonsense in reality, as is sometimes the case with what you see in books and inspires your imagination but loses its magic once you see the originals.

That was not the case with this exhibition and I felt compelled to share my experience of it.

“Kona/Femme” occupies three of the four halls at the National Gallery of Iceland, but it is not a retrospective—these are relatively recent works but demonstrate the mastership of an established professional. There is one piece, “Cell (Black Days)” (2006), which has never been exhibited before.

I started my visit in Room 2 (to the left of the entrance behind the reception desk) where you will see totemic sculptures reminiscent of African art which are suggestive of female and male sexuality, plus some quite expressive color drawings in naïve style of female genitalia.

The works were a light starter which failed to warm me up for the surprise main course in Room 1 (opposite of Room 2): two samples of Bourgeois’s famous cell installations, plus other drawings and smaller works.

“Cell (Black Days)” (2006) stole the spotlight with its refined symbolism. Some of the artist’s personal clothing—a favorite element in Bourgeois’s installations—is protected behind a wall of iron net which both stimulates voyeurism and irks the inability to touch.

It provokes the raw impulses I recall from the movie Fight Club, even though the composition inside is tranquil in quite a disquieting way. A powerful work— my appetite for more increased.

On the upper floor in Room 4 (to the right of the staircase), I was stunned by the divine breathtaking dessert of Bourgeois’s giant spider sculpture.

My eyes couldn’t get enough of caressing the elegantly-crafted disjointed legs of the creature and admiring the slightest effortless details from all angles.

The eggs in the belly of the mother-spider provoked an orgasmic spasm of delight. The sight of it is so mesmerizing that you don’t want to ever go away or at least carry it with you in your pocket if you could.

The paradox is that spiders are not known to be pretty creatures, but Bourgeois once created a magnetic portrait of her mother as a spider—the original design from 1999 is tellingly entitled “Maman” (“Mommy” in French). A quote by Bourgeois inher Wikipedia profile explains the concept:

“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

It is not surprising that the spider sculptures brought Bourgeois the greatest public attention of her career. The spider in “Kona/Femme” made it clear as a day to me that this would have to be the review of the month.

Personally, I’d name Bourgeois as one of the artists who had the biggest impact on my impressionable aesthetic taste while I was still an art student.

I remember that at first, her disturbing work appeared to be an over-loaded gloomy surrealistic kitsch—but only at a superficial glance.

At a closer inspection, the overwhelming sincerity of regressed trauma in her work was something I could hardly ever forget with its vivid multi-layers of unpretty sexuality: it keeps haunting you like a recurrent nightmare.

It’s a well-known fact that the inspiration behind Bourgeois’s art is family dysfunction fuelled by the arrogance of her cheating father who took her English governess who lived under the same roof as his family for ten years as a mistress.

Apparently, the arrangement was not secretive enough, as one evening as a little girl Bourgeois made a voodoo bread figure of her Dad and ate it.

Perhaps it is a lesser known fact that Bourgeois’s mother Joséphine fancied feminism and named her daughter afterLouise Michel, a renowned feminist leader from the infancy period of the French women liberation movement.

That makes me sympathize even more with Joséphine Bourgeois. This woman must have endured conflicting feelings for a decade—I doubt this submissive arrangement was of her taste.

The straightforward theme and the title of the exhibition “Kona/Femme” (“Woman”) made me ruminate on the fate of women as partners in relationships versus independent individuals. From today’s point of view, it would be unfair to make a judgment on why “Maman” stayed in a dysfunctional union.

Many people consider the institution of matrimony outdated. No matter how advanced and open-minded our society has become today, the problems of balancing family life and cheating spouses have not evolved much throughout the centuries.

Betrayal doesn’t cease to hurt emotionally, regardless of whether it occurs in marriage, cohabitation or a friendship—the principle of trust and loyalty is the same. We all need to feel loved and respected.

Many unhappy couples choose to swallow their misery for years by making excuses for fear of the unknown. The most common justifications are: for the sake of the kids or because of financial reasons.

Bourgeois’s spooky art is a clear evidence of how damaging staying in a bad relationship can prove for the psyche of a young child.

I was curious to find out whether Bourgeois continued the family tradition of dysfunction in her private life, but it turned out that she was married for 35 years to American scholar Robert Goldwater, before she became a widow, and raised three sons, parallel to her career.

Despite Bourgeois’s unhappy childhood, she believed in the old-fashioned institution of matrimony and had been an activist on behalf of LGBT equality and supported the nonprofit organizationFreedom to Marry:

“Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing.”

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Anthony Heilbut can lay claim to knowing Mahalia Jackson better than almost anyone else living. He produced some of her seminal recording sessions, and walked away from the experience with his sole Grammy Award. In the new documentary Rejoice & Shout—playing in limited theaters—Heilbut speaks of Jackson in reverent terms. One comment is particularly striking. Explaining why Jackson’s music resonated with mainstream audiences, he simply notes that she was presented to the public as “a great artist.” He says it matter-of-factly, but his implication is clear: before Mahalia, he suggests, gospel musicians simply weren’t regarded as great musicians by the average record buyer.

I’m inclined to say that this hasn’t changed all that much. Gospel music is oft recognized more for its fervor than for its musicality; some folks think gospel is more about making a “joyful noise” than anything else. But this movie might change that thinking. Rejoice & Shout is not a movie about the gospel—if anything, the religious elements are played down—but it is, rather, the story of gospel as a music (specifically a black music). It’s steeped in the stuff. It bears witness to its power and its majesty.

And while gospel music is presented here—at least initially—as something of a folk art, it’s never written off as primitive, or as the province of amateurs. Actually, Heilbut—an author and record producer whose commentary is some of the most fascinating in the entire film—makes another illuminating comment about some of the early black gospel quartets. He notes that you could always tell a black gospel group apart from a white barbershop quartet because, though the style was similar, the black groups actually brought a greater sense of musicality, emphasizing the different vocal characteristics of the singers in a more sophisticated way than what the barbershop groups were doing.

But you won’t need anyone to tell you that black gospel is powerful music. You’ll hear it for yourself. Director Don McGlynn has made a number of documentaries with musical subjects—Howlin’ Wolf, Dexter Gordon, and Charles Mingus, to name a few—and he’s learned that, in many cases, it’s important to let the music attest to its own power, on its own authority. For this film he’s come up with some simply breathtaking, vintage footage of gospel performances. For this footage alone, the movie is a gem—and when he hits us with a full, uncut performance of a song from Mahalia, it essentially renders all the commentary unnecessary.

Ironically, that’s the only real problem with the film: Though McGlynn clearly understands the music’s impact, he doesn’t always trust his viewers to pick up on it. It’s really only a problem for the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, which McGlynn structures as a sort of “spiritual foundation” for what is to come. Listening to Mavis Staples talk about the communal aspects of gospel—how it offered a sense of unity and perseverance during periods of slavery, segregation, and eventually the civil rights movement—is interesting, and points to where the film is headed. Hearing Smokey Robinson wax theological about how the Creator’s hand is evident in creation is nice to hear, but ultimately irrelevant to the story told in this film—particularly given that Robinson isn’t really a gospel musician.

But once the film starts to truly dig into the history of black gospel, it’s pretty remarkable. It starts during the era of slavery, and traces the origins of gospel music to a time when plantation owners began forcing their slaves to attend church services with them. The slaves were moved by the message but not by the European music, which they just couldn’t relate to. So they married Christian themes to African rhythms, and gospel was born.

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Matt Gray, project director of the non-profitAmerican Opera Projects and Opera on Tap, is out to prove to the world just how vibrant and colorful opera actually can be.

On June 12, at DUMBO’s Galapagos Art Space, Gray will present, “Opera Grows in Brooklyn: Opera of Color,” a three-act, 90-minute performance of African-American composers and opera singers.

To many who are unfamiliar with opera, often it is viewed as an old, stuffy and elitist art form. Gray would like to change people’s opinions of opera while also show the world what kind of operatic pipes Brooklyn has to offer.

Gray, who has been with AOP since 2003, never considered himself a music scholar by any means before he took the job– especially since his real passion is monologues and off-Broadway theater. In fact, he admits, he really wasn’t that into opera.

“[Opera] may have a lot of wonderful references, but if it’s between this and seeing ‘Spider Man 4,’ I’m going to go see ‘Spider Man 4,” said Gray of his former opinion of opera. “I had the same musical background most people our age have, that being far removed from opera.”

Naturally however, after years of working with opera through AOP, Gray’s appreciation for the art form grew in a much more intimate way.

“It’s an incredibly hard, creative process because it involves so much hard collaboration from so many different types of artists,” Gray said. “And yet, if all of those pieces come together well, it really is the apotheosis of all performing arts.”

Galapagos Art Space isn’t Lincoln Center or The Guggenheim, even though Gray has produced shows there before. But that’s the beauty of this kind of opera event: Instead of waiting for awkwardly choreographed claps, you can sip cocktails at a bar while the classical show goes on.

“It’s a much more fun atmosphere. It’s more cabaret style,” said Gray.

One of the performances will be a series of excerpts from a larger project by 40-year-old Adrienne Danrich, a soprano from San Francisco. The project entitled, An Evening in the Harlem Renaissanceelucidates icons like Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith. A 15-year veteran singer and Aretha Franklin romantic, Danrich said she wonders all the time about the role of opera in the African-American community.

“It has to do with what you’re exposed to. When I was growing up I wasn’t exposed to opera or classical music at all,” said Danrich. “People think that they know what opera is, and what I’m attempting to do with my shows is breakdown that stereotype and to show them what the actual range of sound you can get.”

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Leopardo and I am African American, Swedish, Italian, French, Native American and Chinese. I identify as multiracial.On April 18, I picked up the Daily Nexus endorsement issue. You can imagine my surprise when I picked up the Nexus and saw the [left] image that was intended to depict me. The skin tone of the image is much darker than my own, and there is absolutely no resemblance to my own facial features. I felt very offended by this image.

But as a multiracial person, these thoughts are silenced by various critics. Some will say that I do not want to identify as black at all or that I have a problem with being depicted darker because I do not like dark skin. Some will suggest that I should just take the endorsement and shut up.

But what exactly is the problem with darkening the skin substantially on my endorsement image? First, the image did not look like me. Second, this image is not representative of my multiracial identity, and actually distorts my image in such a way that delegitimizes it. By depicting me as this darker image, it denies my multiraciality, and instead, emphasizes a monoracial identity that simply seeks to construct me as black. These notions reflect racist notions, such as the “one-drop rule,” in which a person is designated as black if they have any amount of African ancestry. Third, this image shows complete disrespect for how I identify as an individual.

I am tired of society at large telling me and other multiracial individuals how to identify. Thus, I feel it is imperative that I be able to declare my multiracial identity as it is, and have this identity respected. If you are mixed, or an ally of our community, join us in the struggle to claim our own identity in any way we please. Join Mixed Student Union at UCSB.

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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.

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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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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.

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.

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.

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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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