Mickalene Thomas II. Black Woman as “Origin of the Universe”

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I thought I knew what to expect from Mickalene Thomas’s exhibit.  Of course, I thought it would be wonderful, but Thomas took it to another level in a way that made my pre-exhibit-viewing post unworthy of her actual impact.  Just as she creates worlds for her sitting models, she created a world in this exhibit, “Origin of the Universe,” her first museum exhibition that showed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art before coming to the Brooklyn Museum.

I walked into a typical gallery display, but this time, with larger-than-life-size images of black women, with lips (of various kinds) super-sized in all of the right places.  Rhinestone enamel, that’s the best way I can describe it, takes the place of black women’s flesh and bone as well as the textiles that wrap their bodies and settings.  Up close and personal, these black women seem to just shine in a way that museum reproductions will simply never be able to really reproduce. The blue veil on that Sunday-Go-Meeting hat makes the whole wall glow right up alongside the glow of blue lipstick sitting alongside.  These are not portraits of the same woman and yet they are connected and connecting.

This is my first post about an art exhibit and I am doing my best here to describe Thomas’s installation with words and language that will fall outside of the usual distant, abstract white museum-talk that we usually hear.  I want to have a deeply personal conversation with Thomas’s exhibit and so I need different language, a task that Thomas herself excels at!

“Origins of the Universe” is the re-mix of Gustave Courbet’s still controversial 1866 painting, L’Origine du monde (Origin of the World).  This “language” that Thomas invents in her work is all the more apparent to me after reading the essays in the exhibit catalog, a critique Roberta Smith addresses in the New York Times.  In fact, the first essay of the catalog opens by polemicizing black beauty: not by discussing Thomas, but by providing an ode to Winslow Homer and his oil painting, The Cotton Pickers, cited as a sensitive rendering of black life and the history that the writer thinks Thomas encapsulates.  Unlike what Homer and this curator want to focus on, Thomas’s black women ain’t about no damn cotton! Along with her remix of Courbet in her exhibit’s very title and, thereby, placement of black woman AS the universe, Thomas’s paintings also explicitly un-do and re-do 19th century European art by Ingres, Titian, Renoir, and the likes.  Thomas shows that she can undertake a critique of western art, past and present, and also OVERtake it with black women as muse, subject, and world.

After witnessing these larger-than-life images and places, I walked into a room of Thomas’s vast array of collages where black women are once again pieced back together again.  To the left of these collages is a video display of a striking woman in red and a portrait Thomas has done of her: all I know at this point is that she is called Sandra AKA Mama Bush. The woman in the video poses and shines and it seems like Thomas’s rhinestones are again there to literally capture that shine.  From here I walk into yet another room, Brooklyn’s unique edition to the exhibit from its Santa Monica beginnings: an installation of four, furnished, domestic interiors made specially for this Brooklyn exhibit. These intricately patterned interiors are, of course, amazing with their level of detail— wall paper, flooring designs, pillows, hand-made furniture, 1970s album covers, shoes lying around— and all so meticulously planned.  As you walk around these four rooms, along one wall is a series of more than a dozen photographs in layered, gold framing.  It feels like you are at your grandmother’s house, walking past photos of the family, and, for black female viewers, this kind of aesthetic intimacy is, I think, exactly the point!  Photos of Sandra AKA Mama Bush line the walls.  Like I already said, Thomas creates a world, not pieces on a gallery wall, a world that gives you back to yourself.

And just when I am sure I have reached the end of the exhibit, there is a small room tucked in the back: it is a small resting place with brightly upholstered chairs, ottomans, and a bench, all made/upholstered by Thomas herself. I sit and watch a movie/documentary about Thomas’s muse: her mother— Sandra AKA Mama Bush.  We learn that her mother was/is a survivor of domestic abuse, drug addiction, and now failing health/mortality.  Mama Bush wanted to be a model but met the barriers associated with the white beauty industry; that is, until she became her daughter’s model, now immortalized in a universe for and about black women as a point of origin.  As I watch each moment of this film, a film that Thomas herself made, I can’t help but notice and literally feel the textile work of the chair I am sitting in (I spent the most time in a chair but I made sure to visit each furniture item in the room since each tapestry was different.)  I am reminded of black women’s quilting traditions and am deeply struck by the fact that Thomas chose this as the medium in which she wanted me/us to hear her Mother and Muse.  I was so overwhelmed that I decided to forego looking at anything else in the museum and just went back to where I first entered the exhibit and started all over again.

If I can be a bit territorial, I must say that I was proud to be part of Brooklyn and a member of the Brooklyn Museum (I do not always join museums in this way because they seldom represent me).  I did, originally, have mixed feelings about the lack of art replicas at the Museum Shop: on the one hand, I want to see Thomas everywhere but, at the same time, I am VERY appreciative that Thomas and the black women who she centers are not commodified as museum products for purchase.  I love that the Museum made the exhibition even bigger than its Santa Monica showing (and wish, in fact, it controlled more of the direction of the catalog).  I will have to miss Thomas’s talks at the Museum, unfortunately, since I have my last classes those days, especially the November 29 talk with/about her mother.  I love that the Museum offers: a slideshow of the installation; a playlist of 28 songs designed by Thomas to hear while you see, sit, and watch; and even an online teacher’s guide.  Like I said, Mickalene Thomas, the black women who she centers, and Brooklyn are definitely shining!

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Mickalene Thomas I: Black Women’s Environments

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After having the kind of week that presents no seeming ending, I decided I would inaugurate the new week with Mickalene Thomas who is showing her Origin of the Universe at the Brooklyn Museum, just a 20 minute walk from my home.

I have been increasingly drawn to Thomas’s work and the way that she uses black female models.  She creates an entire setting for them, one that she intentionally creates to empower them.  And though Thomas seems to, forever and a day, be compared to Andy Warhol, she is not showing/resuscitating victimized white celebrities in the way that he did.  Instead, she  is always visually empowering everyday black women in a whole new world that she creates specifically for them.  For me, that difference, her difference, makes all the difference in the world.

In my most, immediate, everyday connection to Thomas’s wisdom and vision, I think about my own home and hope to see it as a space to think through/make black, female, visual spaces as a cocoon of and for black female power (see the collage of images of where I sit/read/meditate below— the collage also links to an interview with Thomas).  Thomas seems to make that kind of process/thinking central to her work.

But what Thomas especially makes me realize is that the creation of the kind of environments where black women can realize themselves must take the very notion of environment as space-language-rhetoric so much deeper.  There is a kind of everyday, material practice that her work evokes for me.

Thomas is not just using the right words of what it might mean to empower, see, and hear black women, she is actively doing it with her hands and every movement.  And for that reason, yes, I think she is creating a world, not just a formulaic code/string of words and good intentions.  It is exactly what black women need and deserve.

So, today, Thomas’s work seems the perfect way to let the old week go and the new one begin!

(This post is followed up in the next post with an attempt to reflect on the weight of experiencing Thomas’s full exhibit.)

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“I Know You Got Soul”

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My students and I have not seen one another in quite some time now: all classes were canceled for a while in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy; I was in Oakland for a few days presenting at a conference; in between that, we had something of a blizzard (Snow Storm, Athena); students on the Manhattan campus had to pack up all their belongings in 2 hours, in the dark, to be squirreled and packed off to dorms across Queens; some of my students are undoubtedly still cleaning homes and Sandy debris.  In the midst of all of that, school goes on: topics for final project topics have been set; we have mandates to make up missed time that will cut into the Winter break; we have been trying to still do our research all along.   Some are also teaching so this means they are attending departmental meetings or even doing the assessment/research projects that I have facilitated in my own program.  We have a few more weeks left in the semester to grind out like this.  It seems safe to say, if my levels of energy are any indication, that we are ALL drained and depleted.  But we are here.  Same place, same time.  And we WILL focus back in on what we really came here to do, despite all that other institutional stuff that gets in the way.

I take full responsibility for not designing a better sequence of discussions and events that could have linked us better in the time that we were away from one another.  How do we crank the energy all the way back up?  How do we capture what we already did, looked at, wrote, and discussed?  How do we step boldly into the rest of the semester and the work we still need to do?

I have hit a pedagogical challenge beyond the limits of my own imagination because I don’t have any clear, quick answers to these questions other than to apologize for the time away …and then catapult us right back into the semester. I’ll say/do that apology like this though:

It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you
Without a strong rhyme to step to
Think of how many weak shows you slept through…

and then, brought to you live (forward to 2 minutes and 30 seconds) …

In short, let’s get back to the work at hand and get it poppin!

 

 

This week we are explicitly reading about black masculinities and literacies and/or black girlhood, womanism, and literate lives.  As a way to represent all of that, I want to look closely at Nikkey Finny’s “Foreword” for Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy by Ruth Nicole Brown.  Here are the (some) of the lines that moved me:

I have been asked at least one hundred times to travel and talk to young girls about the path of my own life. I have been honored to do so.  But I have never been asked to travel and listen to any young girls talk about how they see the world or how they think the world sees them.  Always while there, in the middle of whatever I have come to say, even if I look up and reach out in the hopes of lifting up a two-way conversation into the air, most of the girls still look lost.  What could I possibly want to hear from them? Everything!

All understanding is not always available to the tongue.  I am a woman deeply connected to my body… This understanding of the body came to me through my poetic sensibilities.  I have and keep a fierce responsibility to my body as well as to my mind.  I hold on to this responsibility by way of words, language, and silence…

Black girls know the answers to a wide universe of things but nobody is asking them any questions…

What does it mean to have a sun-drenched intimate cathedral of space created for the questions Black girls want to ask?… This is the Black girl praise house… [This is] the tradition of the old Camp Meeting revival, where the longed for spirit makes the journey to be fed and IS fed… [This is] the voice of Ida B. Wells saying, ‘I wish I could put my arms around my people and fly away,’ but instead firing up her anti-lyncing campaign…

Nikky Finney offers us these lenses here into black women’s literate lives as a way to see and hear the weight of what we are dealing with this week.  I’ll close here with her 2011 Acceptance Speech of the National Book Award in poetry where she gives us a bridge all the way back to how we started the class: in the slave quarter culture.

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Occupying Wall Street: Literacies and Education for the 99%

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Today I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion with two, wonderful colleagues, Christine Utz and Jon L. Peacock, both creative writers who worked as two of the 60 writers to create the text, Occupying Wall Street:  The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America.  Unsurprisingly, it was probably one of the most direct and unflinching conversations that I have been involved with about social action and critique against capitalism in my current space (Here is the plan/outline of today’s discussion.)

I have read/heard many people talk about Occupy Wall Street (OWS)  as a literacy/educational movement, but usually only in the context of the uses of social media.  I think we miss so many ideological issues when we only focus on these seeming processes of participants’ and onlookers’ conversations and discourse arenas.  The OWS book really helped sharpen these thoughts for me.

In particular, I am struck by the educational, participatory model that OWS models for us.  To get at what is radically literate and educational in OWS, we have to look particularly at the nestings of horizontal participation and the value of labor.  What I am also interested in is the galvanization of a new kind of (college) student.

On the heels of Hurricane Sandy’s still disastrous impact in New York City, with so many of my students and colleagues still without electricity and/or homes, I keep thinking back to this past summer.  My Brooklyn neighborhood, in its pre-gentrification phase, was primarily people of color who worked for the city— municipal workers (I, myself, was a public high school teacher when I moved in). One neighbor, one of the few oldheads left on my block, works for Con Edison so I have witnessed, vicariously through him, the complete disintegration of workers’ dignity and actual jobs in these past 14 years living here, all alongside the CEOs of this utility company bursting at the seams in profit.   Yet I have heard very few activists, including those of color, embrace and/or link the strike that these Con Ed workers waged for a good part of last summer, many of whom were people of color, to the very conditions that so many poor communities of color are facing in NYC post-Sandy: the slow work and/or overwhelmed-ness of Con Ed workers (many of whom were downsized or ousted long ago) and the general degradation of poor and working class peoples (that results in the downsizing of their jobs and the supersizing of CEOs’ pockets).  Given how difficult it often is for even activists to see just how linked our fates are as workers, I am struck by the ways OWS made these connections real, especially for college students, who organized alongside and with labor unions as part of the work they did at OWS.   Here we have an educational climate that, by and large, tells you that you are simply supposed to get your degree, whatever the financial debt may be (which, after all, helps you value the degree as it adds to schools’ financial portfolios), compete and beat out everybody else for that job at the end of the line, and not think about any one but one’s self (with little critical awareness of that self).  And yet, despite all of that and maybe even because of it, here we have college students walking out of classrooms to work with union organizers and other workers at OWS.  This requires a complete mutation in how you define and do the work of being a “student” and that, to me, is what we need to be theorizing and defining as the new literacies and educational praxis of OWS.

I am also inspired by the way the book was written which, as Jon showed us, is further indication of  the way work was organized and valued at OWS where every role is seen and valued vs. commodified according to individualistic monetary gain.  I see the book as a history of OWS but also as an unfolding of its praxis/theory of social change. Christine also pointed out, rather brilliantly, that the book is also a protest manual and in that sense, it seems like something invaluable to those of us interested in literacy and education for change which must, at its heart, always be doing some protest. 

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