‘Not so black and white’

Art exhibit of postapartheid South African Art at the Kyle Kauffman Gallery. Opening on September 18th. Information here.

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Viva Africa! the theme for July’s First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum

Target First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum happens again on July 5. Next month’s theme is an African affair, including screenings of Ousmane Sembene’s Moolade and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness as well as Brooklyn/Botswana DJ Stone (pictured at the Chimurenga Party at Le Grande Dakar in Fort Greene in May this year) headlining an African dance party. More here.

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Books: Jumel Terrace Books in Harlem

Jumel Terrance Books in Harlem is worth a visit. Been trying to go for a while. It’s owned and run by Kurt Thometz, a private librarian who, among others, edited a book of Nigerian pamphlet writings, Life Turns Man Up and Down (published by Pantheon in 2001) from of a brownstone in Harlem. Here’s a description from the store’s website:

At the pinnacle of Sugar Hill, Uptown’s only antiquarian bookshop specializes in local history, African and American: Colonialist and Revolutionary books, art, and ephemera relating to the Morris/Jumel Mansion and its community: Harlem, Washington Heights, African America, Africa, and the Black Atlantic are our specialties. Housed on the garden floor of an 1891 brownstone, the stock draws on private librarian Kurt Thometz’s collections on these subjects. Open Friday through Sunday from 11 to 6 – by appointment, serendipity, and invitation – the shop hosts book signings, exhibitions, and special events.

Some testimonials from the mainstream press can be found here and here. The bookstore’s site is here.

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Exhibition: Katrina, ‘Those who fell through the cracks’

Full information here.

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Basquiat in Cote d’Ivoire

Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the first American artist of African descent to achieve international stardom, often referenced Africa or the African diaspora in his work; take, for example, 1983’s “The Nile” (a painting that featured nods to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Nile and the Nuba in Sudan) and “Gold Griot” (1984). So recently when I found a copy of Phoebe Hoban’s biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art — first published in 1998 by Viking — around the house, I was curious to read about Basquait’s relationship with the continent. But I also wondered if Basquait (born in Brooklyn, NY, and son of a Haitian immigrant father and Puerto Rican mother) ever visited there. The book, despite its “national bestseller” status and reviews in high-brow, mainstream US media outlets (reviewed here, here and here) focuses on the tawdry details of Basquiat’s life (sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs). Nevertheless, the book does gives an adequate account of what the the art world in 80s New York City was like (according to reviewers who should know), especially about “the condescension and subtle racism” of Basquiat’s patrons.
But back to my focus. Basquiat, it seems, only traveled to the African continent once: an August 1986 trip for a show the art dealer Bruno Bischofberger had organized at the French Cultural Institute in Abidjan, capital of Cote d’Ivoire. “It was Basquiat’s first and last trip to Africa,” writes Hoban. Bischofberger apparently had warned Basquiat (who was accompanied by his girlfriend Jennifer Goode) “… not to be disappointed that there were paved streets and skyscrapers in Abidjan, not just people living in primitive huts.” Writes Hoban:

‘He [Basquait] was hoping that very unsophisticated African people would see his show,’ said Bischofberger. ‘But everyone was invited there by the government, and there were three or four of the most famous artists in the country, and people who had been trained in Paris. It was not the man in the street who got to see Jean-Michel’s work.’

Despite this, Basquiat “enjoyed” meeting local (Hoban, for affect, uses the term “indigenous”) artists, “although they turned out to be more influenced by Western art than he had anticipated.” Then:

After the show, the group took a car trip through the countryside, to a tribe (sic) in Korhogo. ‘Jean-Michel was smoking so much pot, I wasn’t sure the chauffeur would be able to stay on the road,’ says Bischofberger. His wife, YiYo, took a lot of pictures. ‘The only thing you saw of black people was their eyes in the evening,’ she recalls.

Later in the book Hoban briefly describes Basquiat’s friendship with an Ivorian artist Outtara [Hoban does not provide a first name] who he had met met on a trip to Paris. They had planned to visit Abidjan, the Ivorian capital, in August 1988. Traveling with Kevin Bray, “a young videodirector who had befriended Jean-Michel,” they would “… go to Outtara’s village for a ritual cleansing. Outtara had arranged with the local shamans (sic) to perform a ceremony that would cure him of his addiction.”
But a few days later Basquiat was found dead in his apartment. Hoban, prone to drama (and what one reviewer described as her “Hollywood rendition of black culture”), writes about how Outtara (already in Abidjan) received the news of Basquiat’s death:

Outtara … at first though the news of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s death was a hoax, that Basquiat had staged a cynical ‘publicity stunt.’ When the news registered, he informed the shamans (sic) who who were waiting to cure Basquiat, ‘They did the ceremony for the dead,’ says Outtara. ‘It takes place at night, and involves an animal sacrifice. It’s related to voodoo. They wore masks, and prayed and did mystic dances around the fire all night long.’ As Gerard Basquiat [his father] was claiming his son’s body in the city morque, the African magic men were releasing his spirit in an ancient rite.

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Orchestra Baobab play downtown Brooklyn

On Thursday, June 26, at 12pm, in a popular summer lunch time music series that in the past has featured, among others, Toumane Diabate and his Orchestra (last summer in fact). For more details, see here. To get a feel of Orchestra Boabob’s music, listen here.

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Western media and war children’

The Village Voice, following the lead of two Australian journalists, subjecting the memories of Ismael Beah, the former teenage child soldier, who was forcefully conscripted into a violent civil war in Sierra Leone and then wrote about (excerpted here), to the kind of scrutiny reserved for James Frey, war mongers and war criminals. I am still trying to figure out what the point of all that “investigation” was. Now the Village Voice, probably trying to make up for its rudeness, treats another former child soldier — this time the Sudanese rapper Emmanuel Jal — with some courtesy. See an interview by a reporter for the weekly with Jal, who has a new record, here.

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Chimurenga came to Brooklyn

To launch the latest issue of Chimurenga Magazine, we put on a party in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It was monster. I played papparazzi. More pictures here.

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Obama can always have Brooklyn Flea

Original picture here. (Official Flea Market website here.)

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Chimurenga comes to Brooklyn

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