Mendi+Keith Obadike @ Studio Museum / Tisa Bryant @ Schomburg

Mendi + Keith Obadike: American Cypher (installation view)
Photo: Adam Reich

I always intend to write up arts-related events that I attend, but before I know it a certain summer languor--which during the school year transforms into teaching and grading responsibilities--overwhelms me, and before I know it, not just days, but weeks have passed. Here retrospectively then are some paragraphs, brief, and photographs from two recent events.

Two Sundays ago I dropped by the Studio Museum in Harlem to catch intermedia artists Mendi + Keith Obadike conversing with Abbe Schriber about their current exhibit there, American Cypher, which is up until June 30, 2013 (next week if you're in town), as well as about their collaborative projects and practice, and a host of other topics related to both. I arrived not long after the event began, so I missed the pop quiz they distributed, but I did get to hear curatorial assistant Schriber, the show's organizer, pose a number of questions about their fascinating exhibit, which explores DNA coding, race, digital aesthetics, and the complexities surrounding our popular understandings of genetics and history. 

Mendi + Keith in conversation with Abbe Schriber

The duo walked the audience through American Cypher's structure and format, which respond to American stories about race, history, DNA, and the law, and comprises a eight-channel sound installation with video, a series of prints, and a book, and which is one version of a multiformat suite of works that include scores produced at the invitation of Rhizome, prints, a letterpress book, and a public sound art installation at Bucknell University. The Griot Institute for Africana Studies and  Bucknell's Samek Art Gallery originally commissioned the works, in which Mendi + Keith explore five stories about Black Americans (or, in the case of one person, a racist self-identified "White" person with African ancestry) that, as their Vimeo writeup says, "hinges on deciphering the genetic code."

The five stories include explorations of the genetic codes of James Watson, the Nobel Laureate (and racist) noted above; US President Barack Obama; Oprah Winfrey, whose "dream ancestry" of being a Zulu DNA evidence undermined (she has West African "Mende" origins, I believe); two men caught in the net of the US penal system; and at the center of the project Sally Hemings, the enslaved young woman who bore several children by US President Thomas Jefferson, a well-known story that DNA evidence in 1998 helped to verify (tying Hemings's descendants to the Jefferson family).

Mendi + Keith in conversation with Abbe Schriber

Mendi + Keith made original recordings of Hemings' last surviving possession, a small bell, on display at Monticello, Jefferson's historic estate in Charlottesville, that Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's late wife and Hemings's half-sister) gave to her. A clip of Keith handling the bell and the recording it played during the conversation, and they later digitally altered the tracks, while also using the genetic code of the Hemings and Jefferson family lines to create the soundscape playing at the Studio Museum. They, like the exhibit, are highly informative and entertaining, wearing their brilliance quite lightly, but the profound implications of their work in this and other projects, and of the ideas they're exploring, are serious and continue to play in my mind.

Mendi + Keith Obadike : American Cypher at The Studio Museum in Harlem from Keith Obadike on Vimeo.

***

Last week, I headed back up to Harlem to see my dear friend (and sister!) Tisa Bryant give a presentation, which included a conversation with archivist, publisher and author Steven Fullwood, to the Ordinary People Book Series on her first book, Unexplained Presence, a highly innovative and thought-changing collection of essays and imaginative texts that attempt to understand and think through the unexplained presence of various Black figures in works of European literature and film. Whether exploring the severed black head in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) or the frequently undiscussed irruptions of colonial critique in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962) or the uncredited but absolutely central and vital performance of Zakes Mokae in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), Tisa provides a way of seeing what is right before our eyes but nevertheless, under the perspective of one set of gazes, passed over often in silence.

Steven and Tisa

Although I have read and discussed this book many times, including with students, I never fully knew the process by which Tisa drafted it, so the conversation illuminated this and a number of other points, such as what happened to the novel that this project had originally been. (She is, she mentioned, still thinking about and working on it, among her other projects.) I also had never seen Tisa talk about the book in conjunction with film clips, which she did to great effect, showing clips of Darling and François Ozon's Eight Women (2002), which is both an homage to George Cukor's iconic 1939 film The Women, but also a strange and enthralling cinematic experience in itself. Tisa walked the audience through the film's disturbing but utterly important treatment, from the film's opening frames, of the black maid, Madame Chanel, played by Firmine Richard, who is literally pushed to the floor by one of the film's villains, her now no-longer secret lover, played by Fanny Ardant. I won't give away the film or Tisa's essay, but I will say that Tisa's discussion enriched my understanding both of her project and the film.

Tisa discussing Darling

I'll conclude by noting how enjoyable the event was, particularly in its informality, and in Steven's questions and his encouragement of the audience to ask questions. A number of writers and filmmakers were in the audience, so they came informed, and Tisa handled the queries with aplomb. If you haven't read the book, do order a copy and check out what she's up to.

Photographer Donald Agarrat, who
took photos during the event

Shelagh Patterson, Erica Doyle, and Tisa

Sports + Barkley L. Hendricks at Studio Museum in Harlem

Okay, at first I was thinking, nothing literary today. The "apparatus with which I think" (Bierce) is tired. So: sports. And specifically: baseball.

Yesterday, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols was named the MLB's 2008 National League Most Valuable Player. Pujols hit .357 with 37 home runs and 116 RBI, and had an on-base percentage of. He beat out the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies' (and native St. Louisan) strapping slugger, Ryan Howard, who hit 48 homes (first in the league) and drove in 146 runs (first), while hitting only .251.


Albert Pujols, aka El Hombre (or Prince Albert, Phat Albert, The Machine, and my personal tag for him, Big Papa, Photo: Emily Rasinski/P-D)

Pujols was easily a more consistently dangerous threat at the plate, with an on-base percentage of .462, and a .653 slugging average, both well ahead of Howard. He was second only to Atlanta's Chipper Jones (.364) in the batting title race.

This is Pujols's second MVP award, making him the first Latino and Dominican player to achieve this status; his first came in 2005. He has been in the top five every single year he's been in the league, save last year, and is the only player in MLB history to have 30 home runs and 100 RBIs in this first 8 seasons. It's not unlikely that if he had better protection in the lineup he could have hit even better. As it was, despite being out 12 games because of injuries, he still helped kept the Cardinals in contention for most of the season, until their late fade, when they finished in 4th place.

Other MLB awards: AL MVP, Dustin Pedroia (Boston); AL Cy Young, Cliff Lee (Cleveland); NL Cy Young, Tim Lincecum (San Francisco); AL Rookie of the Year, Evan Longoria (Tampa Bay); NL Rookie of the Year, Geovany Soto (Chicago); AL Manager of the Year, Joe Maddon (Tampa Bay); NL Manager of the Year, Lou Piniella (Chicago).

***

Bernie T. pointed out this amazing story to me, and Reggie H. posted about it yesterday, so I'll send you to his blog to read more. Take it away, Reggie:

Since my partner and I got hooked on Rugby thanks to watching the Wallabies, the All-Blacks, and the Tri-Nations tournament on Fox Sports, I can't resist pointing to this video and article about The Hyde Leadership Public Charter School in Washington DC, from the New York Times.

When the team starts the post-game singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," I get all choked up....

Aim High, boys!

***
I seldom read Newsweek magazine, but I did flip through it today while waiting at the pharmacy, and saw Sarah Bell's article, "Urban Outfitters," which among other things asks why Kehinde Wiley, whose gorgeous new paintings are lighting up New York (in the exhibit "Down" at Deitch Projects and elsewhere) hadn't acknowledged his debt to Barkley L. Hendricks.

Who is Barkley L. Hendricks? Well, interesting that you ask, because today the New York Times offered a brief focus on Hendricks that's worth checking out. Hendricks is an important but little heralded painter whose work from the 1970s on has mapped out a new area in African-American and American vernacular, photorealist portraiture. To give one example of his work, I've posted of my all-time favorite of his works, "North Philly Nigga (William Corbett)," [1975. Oil and acrylic on cotton canvas, 72 ½ x 48 ½ inches. Collection of E. Blake Byrne, Los Angeles], which resoundingly evokes a world I and many others know and recall so well. Many of his most famous paintings, full-size in scope, depict urban black male subjects, sometimes in dandyish fashions, sometimes in street wear, but he also has painted numerous portraits of black women and group images, some inspired by prior works in the Euro-American art tradition, others drawn from his own photos and mass media imagery, as well as from his personal life. He also has exhibited some of his photography, which mines a similar vein.

Hendricks, it turns out, is having his first major retrospective exhibit this year; titled Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, it's now at the Studio Museum in Harlem (it runs from November 12, 2008-March 15, 2009). (You can hear the great art historian Richard Powell on Hendricks' work, from the exhibit's previous stop at the Nasher Museum of Arts at Duke University website.) A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Yale's art school (BFA, MFA), and a longtime professor at Connecticut College, he has been making his art almost concurrently with the rise of late 20th century vernacular forms such as hip hop, funk and r&b, and his work is the epitome of soul, wit, grit, rawness, queerness, and realness. Although work of this kind hardly seems revolutionary now, especially with the "return" of painting, especially representational and realist painting over the last few years, Hendricks is and should be acknowledged as an important pioneer. His DNA is all up in Wiley's and others' work. So give some props, bruh. And let's all get up to the Studio Museum (and Deitch) if we can!

Hendricks on YouTube (doesn't he sound a little like Chris S.?)

He received a United States Artist award as well this year (congrats to all the other winners, including folks I know, like Harryette Mullen, A. Van Jordan, Tayari Jones, and Forrest Gander, and many I've long admired, like Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Joy Harjo, William Greaves, Jawole Wille Jo Zollar, Ela Troyano, and lê thi diem thúy!)

(Also running simultaneously with this exhibit is AACM philosopher-musician George E. Lewis's Travelogue, a SMH StudioSound exhibit that he writes was "twenty years in the making.)