There is probably no question in portraiture that is more confusing to beginning photographers than how to photograph people with black skin. What exposure to use? Should you open up the lens? Should you stop down? What about lighting? Years back, for many photographers it was hard to pose these question, much less know where to go to get an accurate answer.
Uncertainty was the norm, and confusion ruled. Fortunately, in this day and age, it is a question that can be dealt with directly. It is simply a question of photographic technique for photographing subjects with dark skin, rather than a racially charged issue.
No one has a clearer explanation than our good friend and master portrait photographer Monte Zucker. As NYI students learn in Monte’s portraiture videotape that is included in Unit Six of the Complete Course in Professional Photography, it’s simple:
“If I am lighting a black person, I’m not going to change the light, I’m not going to bring it in any closer. I’m not going to open up an extra f-stop.
“The only thing I’m going to do is use the light coming from the side and around the subject. What we need to do when we’re photographing a black person is to bring an extra light in from a 90-degree angle.”
In essence, what Monte does with people of color is to wrap the light around the planes of their face, to make sure that heavy shadows do not obscure detail in the portrait subject. He recently wrote an article for Shutterbug Magazine and for the Web site he created along with master photographer Gary Bernstein, www.zuga.net.
Because Monte is a great teacher, a gentleman, and a good friend, he gave us permission to reproduce this article that appeared recently on his site. We thank Shutterbug Magazine for letting us reprint it as well. Thanks Monte, for all the confusion that your insights clears up!
My recent trip to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean gave me opportunities that I hadn’t expected. In particular, I photographed many black people – some wearing stark white – many against light, bright backgrounds. I thought that the contrast would be too much, especially using digital. It actually wasn’t at all difficult. One just has to understand how to use the light.
My reason for being on the island was to consult with and teach the photographers at Beaches, an affiliate of Club Med. I was invited there by Andy and Krys Mann, co-owners of the photography franchise at the hotel. One of the portrait sittings that I did while I was there was for a mother and her two children. Of course, it’s never quite as easy as one would want it to be, but that’s part of the fun of being (1) a portrait photographer and (2) a teacher who welcomes all challenges.
I went on the trip with my Canon D30 digital camera, my Quantum flashes and several Westcott light modifiers. I was told that all of their work was done outside, so they didn’t want me to bring lights. When I arrived I understood completely. The area offers backgrounds everywhere you turn. Most of them were completely unexplored by the photographers there before I arrived.
My favorite portrait location turned out to be a small area between two wings of motel rooms. No one would have ever thought to take pictures there, until I saw it and began working there. The walls were a pale pink. They actually took on different shades of color depending on the light. The area was open from above (a natural built-in hair light. One side was open to the parking lot (one of my all-time favorite choices for location photography). Depending on the time of day, you get either soft, reflected light thru the buildings or direct sunlight late in the afternoon.
When the direct sunlight was coming into my studio had two people hold up a Westcott translucent panel. At the time of this sitting, however, the direct sunlight had not yet come in strong. My host, Andy, held up one of my Westcott Monte Illuminators (black side to me) protecting my lens from extraneous light.
Another reflector was used on the shadowed side of my subjects to bounce light across the faces of my subjects, creating the highlights on their dark skin. That’s Preston Dickenson on my left, holding the reflector. Preston is Andy’s partner in charge of all video production. He, too, was excited about what I was teaching. He stayed close-by the entire week.
The light was very subdued. A lot of light wasn’t required. But it needed to come from both sides, not just from camera position. That’s the way you photograph dark skin…. by bringing in specular highlights from both sides. Nor is it necessary to open up the lens any more than usual. Light crossing over the skin brings out great highlights.
That’s what I needed for these portraits. Lots and lots of highlights! Had I been using an exposure meter, I would have taken an incident meter reading with the reflector in place, pointing the meter towards the camera. As it was, all I had to to was to do a test shot on my D30 and go from there. I knew that the light background might make the image of the people too dark, so I overroad the camera by one f/stop and it worked perfectly.
I posed everyone in an L-shaped cove of two of the walls. Light was bouncing from all directions, but I added another silver reflector camera left to create more side lighting and sort of a main light. I pushed the ISO up to 400 on the camera, selected a wide open aperture (plus one extra f/stop) and let the camera do it’s thing with the shutter speed. That’s all there was to it.
The mother and little girl were dressed appropriately for the portrait. Her son, however, had a sweatshirt on with large lettering. I was afraid that it would be a terrible distraction in the picture, so I asked him to remove his shirt. Reluctantly, he obliged.
I began the sitting by placing the little girl on a stool, the mother and brother on both sides.
Before she knew what was happening I got a picture. Within seconds, however, she began to cry. This wasn’t going to work. I looked on the back of my D30. I had a good picture, so I moved on.
I tried placing the daughter on the stool, her mother holding her. I could see that it wasn’t going to work, so I told her to hold her daughter. Preston lit the child’s face with his reflector, spot lighting her beautifully. It’s amazing how that little reflector can direct light to a single spot when it’s necessary.
Again I tried to get her apart from her mother.
It just wasn’t going to work. I moved on.
Since I had photographed the little girl with her mother, I did the same with the boy.
I directed the mother carefully to photograph her in provirtual against the simple background. I could see that this was going to be pretty easy, so I moved them in more closely for the next portrait.
My Westcott reflector is silver/black. The reason I like it is that it reflects back whatever the color the light is at that time. So, even though it appears to have been a gold reflector, make no mistake. The silver/black one is the only thing that I need and use.
Creating a portrait of the son was a lesson in lighting dark skin. As I moved the reflector from place to place I could see the highlights creating a fantastic sheen across his face. The reflector, then, became my main light, placing all the emphasis on his face and playing down his hands and body.
Photographing the mother was simple. I didn’t feel that smiles were appropriate for any of them, since all the smiles I was getting from both of the children were terribly fake. Even the mother seemed to be more relaxed with this simple study of her.
The late sun cast such a warm glow on her I was surprised, myself, that my silver reflector was doing such a great job.
I tipped my camera extremely to my right to make her lower shoulder the higher shoulder. Don’t ask me why. It just struck me that the composition looked great through the finder that way. Yes, I did a little retouching on these portraits in Photoshop.
Soon afterwards, we were on the beach. It seems as if everyone on Turks and Caicos wants their portraits made on the beach. I found many other gorgeous surroundings, but the water there does have an incredible color, so I obliged. I did find, however, that the best beach portraits are always made very late in the day. Just before and after the sun sets. Otherwise, no one can keep their eyes open. These portraits were made just as the sun was setting.
This time, the speed of the camera’s ISO was set to 800. It was that dark and I needed a somewhat fast shutter speed, since I was hand holding the camera for ease of movement. I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time or a lot of chances.
My first picture of the mom and daughter appeared to be fairly successful. The little girl actually smiled! I moved on to the family group picture again, my fingers crossed, of course!
Here you can see where Andy was again holding the reflector, opening up the shadowed side slightly. The light was waaaay down by now. I positioned the family to form a pyramid composition and tried to stick with that. My low camera height positioned them low enough in the picture, so that the horizon line wouldn’t cut them in half.
I didn’t even try to get them to look at the camera at first. I was just thrilled that the little girl wasn’t crying. I told everyone to look at her.
It was working. They looked out to sea. Counted the boats. Did everything, except stand on their heads to keep her happy. I even told her to pinch her brother’s nose. She liked that.
And then, finally, she looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back…AFTER I snapped the shutter. I was happy. She was happy. Her mother was happy …. and so was Andy! What could be better?
You just wouldn’t believe the low level of light under which we were working. I explained to all the photographers that it isn’t the amount of light that counts. It’s simply the angle at which the light come towards the faces of dark-skinned people. When you cross their faces with light you pick up incredible detail. These pictures should prove that to everyone.
By the way, I just wanted this little PS to give credit to all of Andy’s crew who were so great for this week of classroom instruction. They were: Mike Slack, Shaun Tucker, Joan Burton, Betty Parker, Kendra Parker, Madicyn Villaobos and Anita Marcus. Sandra Been and Alexis Devonish were manning the Tour Desk. Nikki Hanna was the wonderful wedding coordinator who kept everything flowing smoothly. Thank you one and all!
By the way, you can always see a lot more of my photographic instruction on the web site that Gary Bernstein and I share, www.zuga.net.
Please consider supporting Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, a PBS documentary that explores how African Americans have used photography as a tool for social change. Since the birth of photography in 1840s, African Americans rejected what they saw about themselves in the dominant culture and took ownership of their own cultural image. Empowered through photography, Black people began to record and embrace their own truths and forge their own identities.
Through A Lens Darkly illuminates the hidden, little known and underappreciated stories of African Americans transforming themselves and the nation through the power of the camera lens. The film also explores how contemporary photographers and artists like Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Anthony Barboza, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Coco Fusco and Clarissa Sligh, have built upon the legacy of early Black photographers while trying to reconcile a past that our forebears would rather forget.
Please help us complete this important project by making a tax-deductible donation that will be used for the final editing, sound mix, and archival licensing of the Through A Lens Darkly project.
We have been working on this film and multimedia project for the past 8-years and we could not have made it this far without the support of our friends, colleagues, partners and funders. We welcome you to join our completion campaign.
In many ways, I was destined to make this film because of grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson, Jr.. For him, photography was a means of unifying our extended family, knitting together the disparate branches and providing a means to connect one generation with the next. Grandpa’s stories describing his great grandparents making their way out of slavery and building their lives into something despite the crippling racial barriers they faced, were brought to life by the photographic images that boldly showed us who we really were. My family archive compelled me to create a collective archive of who we are as African Americans, as Americans, as humans.
JOIN US!!! Through A Lens Darkly is a collaborative project. We appreciate your support of our journey to create and share images of ourselves with honor, respect and dignity.
On a recent afternoon at Julius Lowy Frame and Restoration Co., a three-by-four frame sat on a work table, shining with freshly-applied gold leaf. The craftsmen at Lowy, as it’s known, still apply gold leaf by hand, a painstaking process that starts with coating a wood frame with successive layers of gesso, yellow clay, red clay and water. A gilder will rub a gilding brush on his or her forehead to coat it with oil and make it slightly adhesive, and pick up a sheet of gold with the tip of the brush. The gold leaf is so thin it wags erratically in the air, like a catfish yanked out of a river by an expert noodler. The gilder gently lowers the gold onto the wet surface of the clay. The molecular attraction of the wet clay bonds gold to the frame instantly, so the tiniest stray gesture could ruin it.
“Two and a half hours,” the glider said, sighing, when asked how long it had taken her to finish the frame.
Lowy CEO Larry Shar, a sharply-dressed man with the bald head and Brooklyn accent of Lloyd Blankfein, wasn’t impressed. He can afford to be patient with his 4,500 antique frame inventory. They get older and more valuable by the day. But he has to make sure that with the workers he pays by the hour—to restore old frames, craft new designs and reproduce antiques—are doing their jobs efficiently.
“The only correct answer to that question,” he told Huffington, “is not fast enough.”
For the last 105 years, Lowy has been one of the premier framers in New York, if not the world. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires a new Velazquez, or the estate of Max Weber is putting on a big retrospective, or a Slovakian collector buys a $10 million Caillebotte, they go to the grand six-floor Lowy townhouse on East 80th Street to pick out a frame. They’ve most notably made the frames that showcase Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Cezanne’s “The Bather” at the Museum of Modern Art.
Most of Lowy’s frames were made in Europe, especially Spain, France and Italy, and sell for between $15,000-$50,000. One of the most valuable frames on hand right now, though, is American. Larry’s son Brad, who represents the third generation of Shars to work at Lowy, estimates it will sell for $150,000, probably to a “frame collector” who will display it as art object in itself—without a painting inside. Designed by 19th century architect Stanford White, the ornate, gilded number hangs hidden behind a thick grey velvet curtain in the Lowy’s showroom. Gold never tarnishes, and it remains a mark of prestige for many. (“Especially Russians,” Shar laughed.)
Lowy specializes in antique frames, which are found everywhere from antique stores in Europe to auction houses. Some date back as far as the 14th century. Shar particularly admires the Spanish and Italian frames from the 16th and 17th century in his collection, which are often painted black and red rather than gilded, and feature figurative rather than decorative accents. “They’re not so pompous, not so regal, so they appeal to a Brooklyn boy like me,” he explained.
When Larry first started working at Lowy, learning the ropes from his father Hilly, many of the company’s clients came from elite, old-money families like the Whitneys and the Rockefellers, whose collections dominate the walls of New York museums to this day. They were confident, idiosyncratic art collectors who chose frames from the gut, often with an eye to fitting in well with the rest of their decor.
But many of Lowy’s clients now think of paintings as investments more than beautiful objects. So they tend to choose frames that they think will make an artwork marketable. A frame’s historical accuracy is a selling point that translates easily from buyer to buyer, unlike its subjective aesthetic appeal.
“In today’s world, it’s more a thinking man’s game,” Shar said. “50 years ago, we’d put French frames on American 19th-century paintings. They were expensive paintings, so we’d put a fancy frame on it.”
But just because a frame fits a painting’s historical period doesn’t mean it’s the right one. For that reason, Shar sees historical accuracy as just one of many factors that should be considered when choosing a frame. The underlying principle, he says, is to strike a balance between “contrast and harmony.”
Shar notes that some bids for historical accuracy result in awful pairings. French impressionists, for example, would often fit gilded 18th century French frames from a century previous to their paintings—so it makes no sense to insist on a 19th century frame for a Monet today. Meanwhile, many mid-20th century American painters used low-quality frames for their artwork merely because they couldn’t afford better ones.
“If you want to put that kind of trash in your living room, around your multi-million-dollar painting, by all means, do it. But it seems like a pretty narrow-minded approach,” he said.
We’ve been patiently waiting for Angela Simmons to launch her clothing line and now we have the first sneak peek at the signature collection.
The 25-year-old star, who studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, announced the debut of her signature collection, Angela by Angela Simmons, on her website with a short note and video showing off a few of her threads:
“I’m so excited to share the first video for my Angela by Angela Simmons collection. I’ve always wanted to create a fashion line and it’s finally happening. Check out a sneak peek of my collection.”
The black-and-white video is a cool way to introduce the line to folks, and we’re digging the funky remix to Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love.”
“It is stuff you can wear for a long time. I think it is important to create fashion that is really fashionable, yet still affordable,” Angela told Global Grind.
We’re not sure what the price point is or how timeless knee patch sweatpants and matching Peter Pan-collared tops are, but we’re happy Angela is finally seeing her dream come to fruition.
ORLANDO, Fla. — A former lead singer of the soul music group “The Spinners” has died in Orlando.
A statement released Monday by the manager of the rhythm and blues group said Bobbie Smith passed away Saturday morning due to complications from pneumonia and influenza. He was 76.
The statement says Smith had been diagnosed with lung cancer in November.
Smith was the group’s original lead singer and was the voice on their first hit “That’s What Girls Are Made For.” Also called the “Detroit Spinners,” the group earned nearly a dozen gold records and half a dozen Grammy award nominations.
The group’s biggest hits in the 1970s included: “I’ll Be Around,” “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love” and “Games People Play.”
Nearly twenty five years after one of the world’s most expensive art heists the FBI has announced that they have identified the individuals who stole $500 million worth of masterpieces.
In the announcement, which took place on the 23rd anniversary of the crime, officials stated that they had tracked the painting’s whereabouts after they were sold, following the art as it circulated through Connecticut and Philadelphia.
“With that confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England,” he added.
The location of the paintings, however, remains a mystery, which is why authorities have taken to the public for any information that could help close the case. The museum is continuing to offer a reward of $5 million for help with the return of the art and has released the new information in hopes of reinvigorating public concern.
“You don’t have to hand us the paintings to be eligible for the reward,” Anthony Amore, the Gardner Museum’s chief of security, said in the FBI’s statement. “We hope that through this media campaign people will see how earnest we are in our attempts to pay this reward and make our institution whole. We simply want to recover our paintings and move forward. Today marks 23 years since the robbery. It’s time for these paintings to come home.”
A kid who would give up recess to make time for another lesson? Never happen.
At Woods Lake Elementary at 3215 Oakland Drive, in the Kids in Tune program, however, that is precisely what did happen. And not just one child made such a choice, but 79 children voted to extend their music lessons rather than go outside to play.
For them, Kids in Tune is play. These children play musical instruments for two-and-a-half hours, four days of the week, as part of the Kids in Tune program, a collaboration of Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS), Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra and Communities in Schools (CIS) of Kalamazoo. An after-school program launched in the fall of 2011, Kids in Tune is built on the Venezuelan philosophy known as El Sistema, founded by Dr. José Abreu.
“I saw a YouTube video of an orchestra of young people from all walks of life playing instruments, and I started to think about how to reach people in our community,” says Elizabeth, or Liz, Youker, education director at Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra and founder of Kids in Tune. “Music changes lives.”
Youker found the partners she needed in Woods Lake Elementary, a Magnet Center for the Arts, where she worked with Rachel Boomsma, senior site director for Communities in Schools, to put the music program together.
“It’s an extraordinary meld with CIS,” says Youker. “The wonderful thing about working with CIS is that we can surround the kids with a web of support, helping them develop social and academic skills along with musical skills. There’s a lot of interest now in the concept of resilience, how that’s needed in life, and it’s fairly inherent in music.”
“Resilience is built into music study,” echoes Boomsma, who is a thesis shy of her master’s degree in music therapy. “Music is fun, but it’s also hard work. You have to keep doing it, practice and push through, even when you are good at it.”
Children pop in and out of the classroom at Woods Lake Elementary, and they ask Youker and Boomsma about their instruments, about practice sessions, about the recital coming up the next day, when they will perform for their families and other community members. The flow of activity is bustling and constant.
Five hundred children attend Woods Lake Elementary, and the capacity for the Kids in Tune program is 100 with plans to expand. “In terms of demographics,” says Boomsma, “about 84 percent are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches. We identify the kids with a strategic need for this program, those who are least likely to have access to music but need it the most.”
“The instruments are for the most part made available through grant funding,” says Youker. “Some instruments come from KPS, and we will always accept donations.”
The walls of the room are lined with instruments. Junior-sized cellos, violins, flutes and clarinets, percussion instruments lined up neatly, waiting to be taken up in the next child’s hands. The children, kindergarten through fifth graders, take their chosen instrument and head down the hall to another room for rehearsal. Kids in Tune has started with strings, but the plan is eventually to include all the instruments that comprise an orchestra–even harps, Youker says a little dreamily.
Kids in Tune is music and far more than music. The program includes hot meals and transportation, academic tutoring, group lessons and one-on-one sessions, choir, dance, and the occasional field trip to hear the professionals perform.
“Money can be an obstacle to the arts, of course,” says Youker, “but kids can be dealing with all kinds of obstacles, like getting a ride, or just finding the space at home to practice.”
“Parents love this opportunity, much more than any other program we’ve offered,” adds Boomsma. “We’ve actually met some of the parents in the music events for the first time. We were seeing about 20 percent attendance at events from parents. Now, we see as much as 94 percent, and extended family, too, come to the events.”
Parents are called in for meet-and-greet meetings, instructed on instrument care, and how to help their children practice at home, says Boomsma. For the most part, however, practice happens at school, after hours. She and Youker are looking into allowing the children to take their instruments home for the weekend.
Helping Youker and Boomsma with the program is a growing cadre of volunteers. Eric Barth, a mathematics professor at Kalamazoo College by day, shows up at the end of his work day to become the young orchestra’s conductor. He is the music curriculum director here, writing arrangements suitable for young beginners.
“I caught the magic,” says Barth. “I love sharing this experience with the kids. All the challenges we all face–music builds those skills that we need to face life’s challenges.”
A moment later, Barth is in front of the kid’s orchestra, coaxing, praising, cheering, and successfully inspiring enthusiasm in the young musicians. Seated among them are several Kalamazoo College music students, part of a college service learning program, playing with the kids. That, too, is part of the program, with those who are just beginning to learn practicing side-by-side with those who have already achieved expertise.
Deb Faling, director of social-emotional health initiatives at CIS, wanders through the gathering crowd, talking to parents, talking to kids. “Oh, I’m very charged up about this program,” she says. “It’s amazing, to see the changes in these children as they take up their instruments. Every kid here feels like they have an advocate in this program. Our staff is always trying to find a way to personalize the experience and to connect with the child.”
Faling tells a story of a boy who loved wrestling, and so a staff member wrote a music arrangement based on the WWF theme song for the young cellist’s favorite wrestler. A new and dedicated musician was born.
“Every kid thinks it’s normal to play music,” Faling says. “They identify with it.”
“We focus on the whole student,” Youker adds. “Music isn’t just about learning to play the scales. This is wholly affirmative, passion over precision. Once they have the passion, they will be motivated to pursue precision. We want them to fall in love with music.”
This is the El Sistema philosophy: through passion and support, nurturing and joy, given a chance to know music intimately and personally, a child will learn life skills through the learning of music skills. As the orchestra of tiny musicians soars into another go at Beethoven, however squeaky it might be at moments, it appears that change is well under way at Woods Lake Elementary.
Standing at the back of the room, lips pressed into a smile, cheeks flushed, Youker listens. “It’s working even better than I expected,” she whispers.
Read more growth and innovation news, plus inspiring stories of life in Southwest Michigan, at Southwest Michigan Second Wave.
This photo taken Feb. 25, 2013, shows Nubia de Lima, 29, in her Rio de Janeiro apartment in Brazil. De Lima, a black producer for Globo television network, says she experiences racism on a daily basis in the reactions and comments of strangers, who continuously assume she's a maid, nanny or cook, despite her flair for fashion and pricey wardrobe. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
By JENNY BARCHFIELD
RIO DE JANEIRO — Many Brazilians cast their country as racial democracy where people of different groups long have intermarried, resulting in a large mixed-race population. But you need only turn on the TV, open the newspaper or stroll down the street to see clear evidence of segregation.
In Brazil, whites are at the top of the social pyramid, dominating professions of wealth, prestige and power. Dark-skinned people are at the bottom of the heap, left to clean up after others and take care of their children and the elderly.
The 2010 census marked the first time in which black and mixed-race people officially outnumbered whites, weighing in at just over 50 percent, compared with 47 percent for whites. Researchers suggest that Brazil actually may have been a majority-nonwhite country for some time, with the latest statistics reflecting a decreased social stigma that makes it easier for nonwhites to report their actual race.
It is a mix of anomalies in Brazil that offers lessons to a United States now in transition to a “majority-minority” nation: how racial integration in social life does not always translate to economic equality, and how centuries of racial mixing are no guaranteed route to a colorblind society.
Nearly all TV news anchors in Brazil are white, as are the vast majority of doctors, dentists, fashion models and lawyers. Most maids and doormen, street cleaners and garbage collectors are black. There is only one black senator and there never has been a black president, though a woman, Dilma Rousseff, leads the country now.
A decade of booming economic growth and wealth-redistribution schemes has narrowed the income gap between blacks and whites, but it remains pronounced. In 2011, the average black or mixed-race worker earned just 60 percent what the average white worker made. That was up from 2001, when black workers earned 50.5 percent what white workers made, according to Brazil’s national statistics agency.
Brazil recently instituted affirmative action programs to help boost the numbers of black and mixed-race college students, though both groups continue to be proportionally underrepresented at the nation’s universities. They made up just 10 percent of college students in 2001, and now account for 35 percent. Those numbers probably will continue to rise because of a new law that reserves half the spots in federal universities for high school graduates of public schools and distributes them according to states’ racial makeup.
Still, black faces remain the exception at elite colleges.
Nubia de Lima, a 29-year-old black producer for Globo television network, said she experiences racism on a daily basis, in the reactions and comments of strangers who are constantly taking her for a maid, a nanny or a cook, despite her flair for fashion and pricey wardrobe.
“People aren’t used to seeing black people in positions of power,” she said. “It doesn’t exist. They see you are black and naturally assume that you live in a favela (hillside slum) and you work as a housekeeper.”
She said upper middle-class black people like her are in a kind of limbo, too affluent and educated to live in favelas but still largely excluded from high-rent white neighborhoods.
The Chicago History Museum's "Inspiring Beauty" exhibition -- a tribute to the Ebony Fashion Fair -- opens Saturday. Joy Bivins curated the vibrant exhibition.
The traveling show began in 1958 and, thanks to the leadership of its long-time producer and director Eunice Walker Johnson of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, brought stunning European fashion to the African American community.
“My mother often spoke about the importance of African American women feeling beautiful,” Linda Johnson Rice, Johnson Publishing Company chairman said in a statement about the show. “The Ebony Fashion Fair legacy represents an important part of the rich African American cultural experience in America, and I am extremely excited that the Chicago History Museum is bringing my mother’s vision to life.”
The exhibition — titled “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years Of Ebony Fashion Fair” and featuring nearly 70 looks from designers including Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Dior, Emanuel Ungaro and more — was curated by Joy Bivins. (Preview the exhibition below.)
In addition to being aspirational, the vibrant show — called “The World’s Largest Traveling Fashion Show” — has long been known for celebrating the human body in ways that were often unexpected at the time.
The 7,000-square-foot exhibition, one of the largest in the museum’s history, opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 5, 2014.
The CEO of Channing Capital Management has great taste—and a sense of humor about his “impractical” Gold Coast gear.
By Heiji Choy Black
Eric McKissack, 59, is known for his financial savvy: He runs an investment management firm. But he also gets kudos for being one of the best-dressed men in Chicago. Whether it’s a bespoke three-piece suit for a board meeting or a cashmere Brunello Cucinelli tux for a gala at the Art Institute (he’s a trustee), McKissack appreciates exquisite fabrics and tailoring. “You wear well-made clothes; they don’t wear you,” he says.
He learned that lesson early in life. Growing up an only child in Nashville, he was influenced by a family of natty dressers, including an architect grandfather (who cofounded the country’s first registered African American architecture firm) and an art-collector uncle. Today, the Gold Coast 19th-century rowhouse that he shares with his wife, Cheryl, a marketing consultant, reveals his love of the finer things. For examples of art, objects, and apparel he loves, see below.
10 Things He Loves
BRUNELLO CUCINELLI TUXEDO ($6,895 for similar style, Brunello Cucinelli, 939 N. Rush St.)
“Navy makes you look a little—but not too—different.”
VALEXTRA BRIEFCASE ($3,419, Barneys New York, 15 E. Oak St.)
“It’s old Italian craftsmanship with contemporary design.”
CANDELABRA
“We go to Seattle often—my wife is from there. We bought this piece by an artist in residence at the Pilchuck Glass School.”
CIRE TRUDON CANDLE ($85, Jayson Home, 1885 N. Clybourn Ave.)
“I love this French candle maker’s scents and history.”
VINTAGE SAARINEN CHAIR ($3,447 for similar style, Design Within Reach, 1574 N. Kingsbury St.)
“It has the comfort of a wing chair, with a modern profile.”
BROADWOOD & SONS PIANO ($18,000 for similar style, antiquepianoshop.com)
“I was lucky to find it at an antique piano store in New York.”
JAEGER-LECOULTRE REVERSO WATCH ($15,400 for similar style, Marshall Pierce, 29 E. Madison St.)
“I’m a modest watch collector, and the Reverso is an icon. I like that it has an international time feature.”
GOLD & WOOD FRAMES ($825 for similar style, Glasses Ltd., 50 E. Oak St.)
“One side is horn; one side is wood. They are very comfortable.”
CHAKAIA BOOKER SCULPTURE (Prices for similar pieces by request, marlboroughgallery.com)
“Booker created an amazing sculpture out of rubber tires. It’s at the MCA now.”
MASERATI QUATTROPORTE SEDAN ($98,000 for 2013 model, Maserati Chicago, 834 N. Rush St.)
“This car is totally impractical for Chicago, but I love it.”
Photography: (Maserati) Courtesy of Maserati; (tuxedo, booker sculpture) Ratko Radojcic; (all others) Anna Knott
This article appears in the March 2013 issue of Chicago magazine.
In 1976, New York philanthropist, art patron, and collector Agnes Gund read in The New York Times that art programs were being slashed from New York City public schools due to drastic budget cuts. Her response to the article was to found Studio in a School, a program that since its inception in 1977 has brought over 620 professional artists—including MacArthur-Award winner Pepón Osorio—into classrooms as teachers and creative role models for more than 800,000 New York City school children, 90 percent of whom are from low-income families.
“I thought that every child had the right to an arts program in their school,” Gund says, “not as a frill or an extra, but as a consistent thing taught really well as both an academic subject and a joyful pleasure.” To date, Studio has contributed over $90 million in services to students ages 3 to 23 at more than 700 locations, and is currently operating in over 150 public schools, daycare centers, community-based organizations, and museums.
“In art, there’s no right and wrong,” Gund continues. “If one child makes a rabbit that doesn’t look like the next child’s rabbit, that’s not a failure. I think art should be taught for its own sake, but it also can be brought into other subjects so easily. It helps with science, it helps with math, it helps with verbalization.” As she conceived her program, Gund felt that practicing artists would intuitively understand this integrated approach—and could benefit from a steady job with a flexible schedule that still allowed for their own studio time.
In partnership with the New York City Department of Education, Studio began training artists as teachers and then offering several candidates to each school, giving principals final hiring power. And while the program funds approximately 80 percent of the budget for administrative support, supplies, and ongoing mentoring for the students—with generous support from sources including the Robertson Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, and Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky—it asks participating schools to come up with the remaining amount. Requiring schools to make some financial commitment is something Gund was advised to do early on.
“If you give something away for free, you don’t get the community involved,” she explains. “Schools wouldn’t try to raise the money and interest the parents in it, or try to get teachers to understand how important the program is. This way, they have a real stake in it.”
Studio was piloted in three schools during its first year and was immediately embraced within the school system. Two years later, Gund hired Tom Cahill—a practicing artist who had been teaching art classes through the Brooklyn Museum—as the organization’s president and CEO, and he quickly expanded the number of schools the organization reached and the range of services it offered. In addition to its core program in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms, Studio now offers discovery-based initiatives for pre-kindergarten, Saturday workshops and apprenticeships for teens, courses in portfolio-development for students interested in applying to art school, and a summer internship program at museums for college students that is helping to bring more diversity to the field.
“We’ve developed expertise and a comprehensive art curriculum that really is broad across many schools and is relevant to many age groups,” Cahill says. In 2004, he was asked by the Department of Education to cochair a committee whose aim was to create a set of standards for arts education. The program, called the “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts,” is now implemented throughout New York City public schools.
“Studio has been a motivator for the schools to hire,” continues Cahill, who sees it as a great achievement when Studio can cycle out of a school that then builds its own art program. To enable and support this, Studio now provides extensive professional development for artist-instructors who are being hired directly by schools.
Gund and Cahill strongly believe that visual intelligence permeates other academic subjects and aspects of life, and they have been keen to prove it. Since 2009, Studio has worked with the national consulting firm Metis Associates to study the actual impact of integrating rigorous visual arts education into the core curricula of high-poverty urban elementary schools. Preliminary results, which compare schools using the “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts” to those that aren’t, show that the program is correlated with improvement among students in state literacy and math tests, greater job satisfaction from teachers, and more awareness from principals about art’s capacity to engage parents in their children’s academic development.
“Innovation and the arts go together,” says Cahill. “It’s part of the curriculum where there are multiple perspectives and multiple answers. We know that once kids are thinking and responding and asked to examine a work of art and describe it, they are using higher-order thinking skills. Those critical faculties are the things we’re saying are 21st-century workforce skills.”
Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.
Copyright 2013, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th St 9th FL NY NY 10018. All rights reserved.
Celestine Wilson Hughes began to feel like a real artist about the time she got a
band saw and started cutting wood in the backyard for painting projects. Before that she considered herself a vendor of jewelry and hand-painted t-shirts. Customers told her she was an artist and she began to adopt that mantle. Wilson Hughes, who is self-taught, makes large totemic sculptures out of colored glass shards. Her works are celebrations of community, the garden and especially of women’s undervalued inner strength and women’s bodies. Hughes just got a studio outside her house when she started a residency at the 40th St. A.I.R. (Artist in Residence) studios in West Philadelphia. We talked with Celestine on Dec. 9, 2012 at her 40th St. A.I.R. studio.
Coming soon, a YouTube audio slide show of this podcast!
This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. The slide show is edited by artblog Intern Alison McMenamin. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes.
Kara Walker. "And Encourages the Youth," 2011. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Kara Walker (born November 26, 1969) is a contemporary African American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.
Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969.[1] Her retired father is a formally educated artist, a professor, and an administrator.[1] Her mother worked as an administrative assistant.[2]
“One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.” —Kara Walker[3]
Kara Walker moved to the south at the age of 13 when her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.[4] Walker first came to art world attention in 1994 with her mural “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” This unusual cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an old-timey south filled with sex and slavery was an instant hit.[5] At the age of 27 she became the youngest recipient of the coveted John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant. In 2007 Walker Art Center exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the artist’s first full-scale U.S. museum survey. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University.[4] Influences include Andy Warhol, with his omnivorous eye and moral distance; and Robert Colescott, who inserted cartoonish Dixie sharecroppers into his version of Vincent van Gogh’s Dutch peasant cottages.[5]
Kara Walker, Untitled, 1996, cut paper, watercolor, and graphite on canvas, 69½ x 66”. All images courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
I’ve been thinking about Kara Walker’s work for a long time. Two years ago, a bleeding barn from one of her watercolors appeared in one of my poems. About a month ago I finished writing a book of poems, Modern Life, which is populated by catgoats and centaurs, civilians and soldiers, and I found myself wanting to talk to her. Who better to ask about the division/fusion of past and present, how to live in the middle of “yes” and “no,” where the real and imagined intersect?
People have been paying attention—both positive and negative—to Walker’s work since she became one of the youngest artists to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, in 1997. Perhaps that is only fitting, because Walker is certainly paying attention as she cuts along the dotted lines of race and gender, manipulates paper marionettes on film, and conjures the gray area as she types in black ink on white paper. The world, as seen through Walker’s eyes, is tragicomic, pornographic. She asks her audience to perch on hyphens, slide down slashes—and when we emerge, we have a bristling intuition of boundaries and stereotypes that is entirely new.
This year a traveling retrospective takes the measure of her drawings, paintings, installations, and the cutout silhouettes for which she is best known, as well as the films that she has added to her repertoire in the last few years. Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, opens at the Whitney Museum of Anerican Art, New York, in October and travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in February 2008.
Matthea Harvey Let’s talk about hybrids. In your work, you have white swans with human heads—
Kara Walker The swans with the black heads came very organically. I was thinking about objects of beauty and destruction. I first used them in a piece meant to be a comment on my ownership of stereotypical black forms. This conversation was happening as to who has the right to use stereotypical images of blacks. Do they reinforce cultural values that set African Americans back generations, or are they fair-game images that preexist you and me?
MH What about your more mythical cutouts of children with tails or a figure who is half ship, half woman?
KW They are all over the place, aren’t they? They are like little walking fables. I’m externalizing what can’t be expressed verbally. I’m thinking of the little girl holding her tail, but each figure is unreal or hybrid to begin with, so to call this one a shadow or pickaninny or Topsy . . . is she a real character? Is she an externalization of a part of me? There are so many fallacies, so many myths about the absence of humanity in women, in blacks, that I don’t even think it’s abnormal that she has a tail.
MH You work in many different mediums, including paper cutouts, gouache mixed with coffee, brass rubbings, overhead projectors . . . . Lately you have been making films in which you manipulate cutout figures behind a scrim, with shadow and cut-paper sets. These are like narrative animations of your silhouettes. Have you found that each medium leads you in different directions? What are the frustrations and/or delights of each one?
KW I’ve done two films and a video, and the frustrations there are the lack of touch and immediacy. On the other hand, because I’ve made mainly puppet films, there’s a great deal of another sort of touch. We’re making puppets and manipulating them, and they develop personalities. It’s a little goofy, but I’m completely surprised by the performance aspect. I can leave the studio at the end of the day and feel like something happened, something that’s counter to what’s happening out in the world, and it has developed a language and a universe. With the film I made last year, at the end of every day I felt as if I had just made a painting. (laughter) Like, “This is what I want a painting to do!” It’s activated all the way through, not just on the surface. The story happens over time; it unfolds. Very often I picture things in my head all at once. In the film it’s happening on both sides of the canvas.
MH In the film, you emphasize the artificiality of the puppet play. The sticks you use to manipulate the puppets are visible, and you also allow the viewers to see your hands and face, and those of the other puppeteers, semi-visible behind the scrim. What was that decision about?
KW I didn’t want to pretend that it was an illusion. When you’re working with a screen, you’re wearing a mask and putting on a performance. There’s an acknowledgement of the presence of the subject, and then there’s the story, and the subject and the story are always moving back and forth between reality and fiction. I did two live puppet-show performances—something I will never do again—but I discovered that me with a screen or a mask is a whole different personality. I noticed it, I felt it, and I didn’t really like myself afterward. Leading up to getting behind the scrim, I was scared silly, an increasingly erratic nervous wreck. Afterward, I was like Joe Cool. I was in LA, too, which didn’t help. It was a little creepy. I felt that somehow I had to live in the world that the mask created.
MH I know I’ve had moments where I’ve written a poem that horrifies me. I think, “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to have someone having sex with a pig in my poem.” But then I feel like I have to live with it. (laughter)
KW Yeah, narratives are forever.
MH You have talked about the different reactions viewers have when they come to your work. I’ve experienced all sorts of emotions myself looking at it. What emotions do you have when you’re creating the pieces? Do you blush or laugh or cry?
KW Yeah, that’s the hard part: I can’t make this work if I don’t feel something along those lines. I’ve definitely laughed or cackled out of absolute surprise at myself, and I have probably cried enough tears to flood the city. Shame is, I think, the most interesting state because it’s so transgressive, so pervasive. It can occupy all your other, more familiar states: happiness, anger, rage, fear . . . . It’s interesting to put that out on the table, to elicit feelings of shame from others—“Come and join me in my shame!” It is a little peculiar.
I got an email last year from a student at a community college in Arkansas. He told me that in his Art Appreciation class, they watched a video about me and my work, and the reactions from the white students in the class were so violent and cruel. Like, she can only get away with making this kind of work because she’s black! If a white man made this work, he’d be lynched. Language like that. And I’m thinking, “Is this wishful thinking?” The lynching thing frightened me. That was the kind of reaction that I might imagine is out there, but to hear it up close made me a little more afraid about how people respond.
MH You had a show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art last year called “After the Deluge,” which was a response to Hurricane Katrina. What did it feel like to be dealing with such a recent political phenomenon?
KW The problem that I was encountering, like a lot of artists after 9/11, after this disaster in the Gulf, is that it seems impossible to respond adequately through your own work without seeming self-serving or overdetermined or earnest to the point that nobody is going to listen. I was having trouble figuring out how to insinuate myself into the museum in a way that seemed interesting. My feeling was that there was something really vital that I wanted us all—whoever us all is—to hold onto in terms of being confronted with images of disaster over which we may or may not have control. I felt that art could address those underlying currents before they disappeared or were washed away by political positioning or jockeying for the best story.
Still from 8 Possible Beginnings Or: The Creation of African-America, A Moving Picture By Kara E. Walker, 2005, black-and-white film in 16 MM transferred to video, 15 minutes 57 seconds.
MH What are you working on right now? I see some interesting pieces on the wall over there—
KW This is so new that I don’t know if I can name it. There was the Walker Art Center show in Minneapolis, and then the requisite hole of non-production, and I’ve been trying to work my way out of that gradually. The writing on the wall and the images from the Internet are just the beginnings of my convoluted method: writing somewhat spontaneously, and then researching through the depths of what I’m thinking.
Last week I was very annoyed about the state of painting, annoyed with a lot of questions about my uncertainty or my lack of participation in conversations about painting. I’m not really actively painting, so it feels like I’ve missed the boat on what people are talking about in that world. I was looking up contemporary artists who use terms like “image-making strategies.” My sense was that in the sensibility of these artists there’s something corrupt about the picture plane—that any image or mark is just a recitation of other terms. There’s no longer any search for originality. The effort of painting seems to have to do with strategizing: putting the viewer in a position where they’re looking at an intentionally shallow painting—shallow in a way that feels different from, say, Warhol’s shallow. Maybe I’ve over-interpreted it, but I think that Warhol’s sense of shallow is incredibly soulful. It’s open and generous in a dumb kind of way, like, “Here it is!” Yet it’s accepting of its own fallibility and humanity.
MH So you feel that contemporary painting is too veiled, too ironic?
KW Yeah. My feelings grew out of my teaching experiences at Columbia. I was getting the sense that a really good painting only succeeds if it’s abject to the point of suicide. It’s a site of no hope. As if a good painting can no longer stand to see itself alive, thriving. An artist in the program, who is not American, created some work that didn’t have that sensibility. It was very much image- and memory-oriented. The critique veered around to, “You have this very conservative view of painting.” And I thought, “What does that mean?” Was it, “Oh, well, he’s an ethnic artist, so he can tell us a story.” I wondered if that was condescending. It was really complicated.
MH What is teaching like for you?
KW It’s like that. (laughter) I come away with a lot of problems and doubts and insecurities. It’s a little like being in school. It’s a learning process.
MH You’ve mentioned that your work is often taken as a rewriting of history, what was actually happening in the antebellum South. But you’ve asserted that your work is fantasy clothed in historical outfits. I am curious about whether those fantasies are in the historical outfits from the get-go, or whether you transpose them afterward.
KW I think it’s a combination. On my new typewriter last night I wrote a couple of sentences about memory, whether or not there is such a thing as a past and a present, or if the present is just like the past with new clothes on. It was a very frustrating thought, and it started to sound very conservative, which I didn’t want. I wrote something like, “Women always wind up being women.” I read somewhere about how Frederick Douglass’s narrative, or variations on his narrative, have this very American rags-to-riches or boy-to-man construction, whereas—and maybe I just intuited this—women’s narratives are confronted with silences: rape, child death, illegitimate childbirth. Even today, these are the threads that seem to continually bind women together: some determined by the culture, some determined by biology. That’s where women always end up being women: you can do x, y, and z to become a human being, but you’re suddenly confronted with being a woman again in a very limited sense: being a sexual object, and a sexual object who might also become a mother, willingly or unwillingly.
I’m sorry. I just digress. That’s all I do. (laughter)
MH No, it’s great. Digressing is how we get somewhere. Plus this seems to relate to your use or appropriation or revision of offensive language and images. I want to ask you about the resolution that was approved in New York on February 28 to ban the use of the N-word. The person who sponsored it, Councilman Leroy Comrey, argued that the word was derived solely from hate and anger, and that its meaning cannot be changed.
KW I don’t know. I do think that there is a proper use of profanity that is incredibly useful and shouldn’t be washed out or sullied by overuse. Its meaning cannot be changed—but then again, we are constantly changing the meanings of words. It is up to each successive generation. You know, I was sitting in the park yesterday testing out my typewriter, and this little boy looked at this alien object, like, “Cool!” I am typing away, yeah, this is neat, and then his mother took him along. It reminded me of a situation where I was playing a Stevie Wonder song, “Pastime Paradise,” and somebody came in and said, “I don’t know that Puff Daddy song.” I had always assumed that when things are sampled or reused, some of their original content comes with them, but now I don’t think that is the case at all. I have been making my work under this assumption to some extent. I think it comes in waves. A certain moment opens a fissure and all the past comes flooding in.
MH Do you work on the typewriter a lot?
KW I do. Sometimes I write on the computer, but it doesn’t feel the same. I like the clackety-clack of the typewriter. It’s as if it answers. There’s a thought, and you put it down, letter by letter, and it answers back.
MH Does working on a typewriter feel connected to your use of the silhouettes? They are both antiquated mediums.
KW Maybe. Yeah—a little something that’s forgotten and shelved but still incredibly useful, or vital, that leads you to all sorts of other innovations. The typewriter leaves every flaw intact. When I write longhand, if all else fails, I can draw a picture. I can cover up the errors, the mistakes of switches in tense or grammar. With the typewriter, it’s, “I am flawed, but I’m going to keep trying!”
MH I’m glad you’re talking about the text in your work. I’m interested in the constant interplay between text and image in your pieces. Text makes its way onto the surface of your drawings, and your titles have subtitles. How do you think of their relation?
KW Well, sometimes I get mad at myself when I write on top of the drawing, because it seems like a giveaway. They might come off as too instructive, even if it’s written in the same spirit as a typed piece or a title. In my thinking, the word is a completely separate thing. It really sits off to the side, unless I write it underneath. The exceptions are the watercolors that were a response to accusations of irresponsibility to the black community. A suite of about eighty watercolors called Do You Like Crème in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? which I worked on, diary-like, to deal with the letter-writing campaign started by Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. I put a fair amount of trust in my visual “speaking” voice. I allowed myself to write and draw pretty freely over the pages of a notebook so that page by page I could ask and answer the question, “What is a ‘positive black image’?” Is a positive image one that is honest? And if so, to whom or what? I think that images, these hand-drawn characters I make, have the ambiguous duty of being both part of the real world (which is cruel and nasty) and the world of other images (which sometimes pretend to be noble, but are often concealing disgusting intentions).
Kara Walker, Negress Notes, 1995, collage, ink, gouache, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 9×6”.
MH I love your variety of titling strategies: You play with puns, as in African’t, Dawn of Ann, The Emancipation Approximation; you appropriate antebellum language, as in Missus K. Walker returns her thanks to the Ladies and Gentlemen of New York for the great Encouragement she has received from them, in the profession in which she has practiced in New England; and sometimes you give a series of pieces the same title, as in Negress Notes (Brown Follies). At what point do the titles arrive for you, and what function do they perform?
KW They’re the sideshow act. Just thought of that. (laughter) The image is that of a three-ring circus. I’ve never known how to concentrate on a three-ring circus. The title has its own agenda, which sometime runs counter to the rage in the piece. It can be a queasy invitation to this uncomfortable space. One of the pieces or situations that I was happiest with was when, over a couple of months, I sat and typed on note cards in the hopes of something arriving or making sense. Another month went by and I realized that I really needed some images. I thought I would try to use the note cards as a springboard for the images, although there was no one-to-one relation. The pictures I made are called American Primitives. Varying in size from six inches square to about nine by 12, they are pretty small, intimate ruminations on black figures plopped into a scene, like actors on a stage.
I feel like I’m constantly at step one of learning how to be an artist, or how to make art. I have an idealized folk artist in my mind. . . . I don’t know if it’s my calling, I don’t know if there’s a divine voice behind this, but I know that I have to do it. That was where the writing came from, and I kept the same method alive for making the images. The images were all gouache landscapes on gessoed panels with tissue-paper cutouts on top. I sat at my kitchen table and just cranked out one painting after another. It was very energetic and satisfying. And then there was this third moment when text came back in. Each one of the pieces had a title that had nothing to do with the initial writings, but I felt that I held a strange thread that connected them, from writing to image to writing again.
MH Could you give an example of one card, one image, and one title that came afterward?
KW The cards are dense. Lots of trying to figure out what the voice is, a voice that seems to shift character midsentence, from master to . . . There was one group of cards where I was thinking of myself as a New World black, like I have my own land that I can do anything with, but I have no tools and no skills. How do I create this project of a new society, given the scarcity of resources? I was trying to write from this debauched kind of leader position, which is what I was feeling like a little bit at home. (laughter) One of the images I painted was a tangle of branches, and two little faces in circles that became two suns. One has a whitish face, and the other has sort of black Negro features. They’re scowling at each other. I was doing these things like an assembly line. I had these two faces and the tangle of branches, and then I said, “What kind of cutout am I going to make?” I made another circle, and by accident there was a little cut in the paper already, so it looked like it was a smile, in profile. It just made me laugh. It went from this landscape that was not ever going to be completely developed properly, to Two Competing Suns and The Impostor, which became the title. I loved the title so much.
MH That’s one of my favorite pieces, and I love that title in particular. Wallace Stevens is a ridiculously good titler— Le Monocle de Mon Oncle or The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade. Last weekend I was in Baltimore, at the American Visionary Art Museum and saw a painting by William Tyler, an outsider artist, with a great title: The Imposter Chicken Went Swimming in the Birdbath.
KW Wow. You didn’t get to the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, speaking of great titles?
MH I did, and that’s a title I don’t know what to do with.
KW It’s a weird one. Blacks in Wax? It’s sort of jaunty and rolls off the tongue. I think it makes me smile too much. It runs counter to the missionary—I was going to say missionary position. (laughter) Missionary quality of the institution. The whole place runs counter to itself. It’s interestingly charged and problematic.
MH I noticed while I was there that they had one of the images you use in your visual essay in the catalogue for the Walker Art Center show—an image of little black children sitting in a tree, titled Blackbirds. Is that where you found that image?
KW No, it was a gift. Coco Fusco sent it to me. An eBay purchase. I need to thank her for that. Thank you, Coco.
MH What do you think its purpose is?
KW I’m not sure if it has a purpose. That’s what’s so peculiar about the whole black collectible phenomenon. So many objects and images serve absolutely no purpose. What’s the need to continually look at bodies in a particular way? It seems perverse.
MH You’ve said before that some of your favorite artists are anonymous. Do you have favorite pieces that you can describe?
KW Well, there’s one anonymous piece that I did a riff on a couple of years ago in this book called American Primitives—a very queer little painting called Darkytown. No knowledge of who could have made it, why it’s titled that, what the characters could have meant, but it epitomized something . . . . It was ludicrous in its formal construction, because there’s an attempt at single-point perspective that goes off in one direction, and there are black caricatures way too big in the foreground, and there’s a dog and some other little people, and a telephone or a telegraph wire. It looks like one of those Komar and Melamid Most Wanted paintings. It’s got everything: landscape, portrait, animal, perspective, illusion—
MH You liked that you didn’t know who had drawn it?
KW Well, I like that it’s shrouded in mystery.
MH At the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore they have this amazing dress made in the ’30s by an anonymous woman who was institutionalized for schizophrenia. The hospital had a dress code and she crocheted this “horse dress” in response to the hospital’s policies. It’s the most incredibly beautiful, eerie, and defiant dress I’ve ever seen—the horse’s eyes are where the breasts would be, and there are abstracted hooves on the side.
KW It’s so interesting to have the need to externalize what can’t be processed internally.
MH Do you regret, resent, or relate to how much of your own biography is used in interpretations of your work?
KW It’s one of those things that makes me smile because it’s just a story. It has no relation to the truth of who I am or how I came to be. A few years ago a young historian, Gina Dent, gave a lecture about how often African American women, creative women, artists or writers, find that it’s not so much that their work is received critically as their body is received critically. Their whole body and biography become the source of query. The other part of her argument had to do with how often these same women have to resort to writing their own biographies or constructing their own critiques in order to counteract that.
MH In her book Seeing the Unspeakable, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw talks about how often writers scrutinize your appearance—
KW It just happened recently in an article about my willowy limbs. (laughter) It’s worthy of some commentary.
Kara Walker, Br’er, 1996, watercolor and gouache on paper, 62×42”.
MH You’ve invented a persona in your work, “Kara Elizabeth Walker, an emancipated Negress and leader in her cause.” Could you talk about that?
KW Kara Walker the invented construct—I’ve never been asked about it. I don’t have an answer for it ready at hand. My graduate-school show was the first time there was an external narrative to what I was proposing to do, the work that I could have created if I had lived 150 or 200 years ago. If I had access to any tools at all, it might have been something to cut with or some paper—so the silhouettes seemed very accessible. Over the years, the persona has shifted here and there to reflect and hold onto this imaginary self of the past and reflect changes in my present circumstances. Like, at one point I added a “B” for my married, hyphenated last name. Then I got rid of the “B.” I am less interested in reinventing that character, because she has to position herself against or sidle up next to white or institutional power in this seductive and cagey way, and I can only do that so often without feeling a little queasy.
MH Can you tell me more about the idealized folk artist you mentioned having in your head?
KW Well, I didn’t have a certain kind of artist in mind. I’ve often responded to early American art that has the quality of “We’re not trained in Europe, we’re not going on the Grand Tour, we’re just trying to make pictures of what we see,” because it runs counter to my experience. I grew up around artists and art institutions, galleries, and students who were studying art. There’s nothing about me that doesn’t know how to paint, but I don’t trust my ability to paint, so I feel like I have to continually relearn it. My first real encounter with early American art and folk art was in college. I felt that I recognized a real humanity that I had been missing in modern painting. I don’t have any kind of animosity toward the modernists; it just felt incredibly subversive to me to like genre painting and pictures of things that are rendered with very little professional skill. It’s a little like the writing I like to do. It comes out with a kind of force, and it’s the force or the intent that legitimizes it, makes it human and real. My proverbial folk-art self might also be similar to the one that started cutting out paper, although I had a lot of rules and ideas in place for why I wasn’t going to paint. I didn’t have rules in place for why I was going to cut paper.
MH Your work has been compared to satirical work by people like Hogarth and Goya along with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Colescott, and Adrian Piper. Are there people in other genres that you feel a certain kinship with?
KW Mark Twain is high on the list. I sometimes conjure up imaginary conversations with him about his characters, their frankness. I query him about Huck and Jim and their urgency to survive. I ask if he ever felt disappointed that his political stories were misunderstood as children’s tales, or if he was perfectly jaded by human foibles and certain that “children’s tales” are all we produce anyway.
MH How would you describe your relationship to narrative?
KW Laylah Ali and I were talking not too long ago about how sometimes the word narrative is used in a way that feels very distant. Storytelling has this quality of being folksy and homey and not critically viable. I like storytelling. I like the way people invent things and lie, and construct identities for themselves as a form of storytelling.
MH How did you start using Br’er Rabbit in your work?
KW I worked backwards. The rabbit popped up before I had really sat down and read Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, and then I got very interested. It wasn’t too long after I had drawn the rabbit that I said, “Hey, that must be Br’er Rabbit.” It’s a rabbit with clothes on, you know.
MH Which is not so common. I didn’t know the whole background of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox before I looked it up—that the two are based on African trickster figures; that “Br’er” was an abbreviation of “Brother,” which is how the slaves addressed one another; and that the stories were collected from slaves at the Laura Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana.
KW I have a collection of the stories, and some of the drawings and engravings I prefer over others. I like the crispness of A. B. Frost’s drawings of wrinkled pants and the expressiveness of these animals running around acting like black men. That’s the strangest part about the stories. That and the idea of ventriloquism. Here is Joel Chandler Harris effectively playing the part of anthropologist: he’s transcribing, but also calling things from his memory. There is something that feels direct, but it is completely indirect in that he creates this cobbled-together mythological creature called Uncle Remus who was a construction of the many servants and slaves that Harris had known in his childhood. Then there is the little boy, who is Harris himself, or maybe he is the entryway for a certain type of reader to inhabit this world. In one of the stories, there are a number of voices: Uncle Remus starts the story, but a mysterious man, maybe West Indian—the accent changes—starts some verbal sparring with Uncle Remus. He corrects Uncle Remus about how the story should go, and it is almost illegible because of how the dialect is transcribed. Then Aunt Somebody Else is off to the side making commentary. You can almost hear it happening, but just when you think you are getting closer to a very familiar, familial scenario, you are pulled back into this white male point of view—a reminder that you are not part of this. It’s an interesting process to move through all of these levels of story to get back to a trickster character. It feels very African. These are not like Aesop’s fables, with a moral at the end.
MH Speaking of fables, you made a limited-edition pop-up book called Freedom: A Fable? A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times. I know that you designed it for Peter and Ilene Norton and that it was not intended for children, but the form itself does suggest children as a possible audience. I am wondering if you have had any experience with children seeing your work.
KW Just my daughter, who is my biggest critic.
MH How old is she?
KW She’s nine now, and at the risk of repeating myself formulaically, she did at age four say something along the lines of “Mommy makes mean art.” She still remembers saying that. She comes to my shows. At the Walker, for the first time I felt like censoring my work from her. I didn’t, but it did creep into my consciousness.
MH There are a lot of attempts to mediate people’s reactions to your work: wall text and warning signs. I am curious what an unmediated experience with your work might be like.
KW I don’t know. Children are drawn to the overall clarity of the black figures on white. Then things get pretty murky, because parents come in and explain things and it becomes too much. Too much for the parent, like where do you begin, or do you just let things flow? That’s what I chose to do with my daughter. I had all kinds of anxieties. What negative impact will this have? I just thought, I can’t predict anything, so she will just have to guide me through my work.
MH You create these worlds that are so full of brutality and desire and rape and maiming—umbilical cords and piles of shit and power struggles everywhere. Is there any love in that world?
KW There is all this giving over of self and stealing and taking of others. I think it is born of a kind of passion, but you know how passion can be confused with love and can inspire all kinds of criminal acts. Where is the love? I’m still learning. (laughter) The writing pieces are about that. There is still a part of the activity that is private, and the voice within the writing is still complicated.
MH T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called “The Hollow Men” that reminds me of your work: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow” and “Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow” and “Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow.” Do any of those “betweens” feel like places that your work resides?
KW All of them. Where the shadows that I’ve been making fall short is that they become solid and I feel like I am still—with the film or projections—trying to find a way to make the between-ness more transparent without being absent.
MH That between place is a state that I am always thinking about. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald saying, “The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time,” or Rilke, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
