I love the Schomburg, it always has something going on. Currently, it celebrates one of our most famous photographers and film makers with Gordon Parks: 100 Moments
This event “…celebrates a photographer who transformed the visual story of America with his ever-questioning lens, highlighting—in particular—the significance of Parks’s photographs from the early 1940s. 100 Moments focuses on Parks’s photographic practice of documenting African Americans in Harlem and Washington, D.C., during a pivotal time in U.S. history. These photographs were taken when both cities were going through significant changes—arising from post-WW II urban migration, the expansion of the black press, concern for children’s education, and entrenched segregation and economic discrimination. “
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY
FYI: The Schomburg Library was the vision of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Of African/ Puerto Rican descent, he recognized the need to consolidate the culture, history and art of people of color. His collection was absorbed into the New York Public Library system after his death in 1938. It became a part of the “Division of Negro History” at the 135th Street Branch.
It just doesn’t happen, especially something created by David Simon, that the drama plays backup to the music. The music is the backbone to this wonderful epic, cause New Orleans is a living document about the United States and as much some people would like to see it gone and forgotten it keeps rolling, like that river.
New Orleans is the seed to the culture of the United States and the source of modern music across the world, and it takes “Musician from Other Lands” who come to pay their respect for us to wake up to the treasure we are trying to kill.
There is a thought that recreating New Orleans and turning it into a Disney Land park, with re-enactments of funeral marches, and almost spontaneous breakout of jam sessions every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at 8PM at a designated club will preserve the history and magic of this place. I don’t think so.
“A major career retrospective of the work of José Bedia at Miami Art Museum (MAM) explores the influence of indigenous cultures and religions from Cuba, North and South America, and Africa on the artist’s work over the last three decades…featuring 35 artworks including large-scale figurative paintings, installations and drawings, highlights the layering of spiritual, social and historical constructs in Bedia’s body of work—all of which are retold through a highly personal lens.”
I always get excited when Ms Morrison graces us with a new book. Just released last week, her latest is “Home”, which centers on a man’s two most life assaultive experiences – while a soldier during the Korean War and growing up in the South in the 50’s.
Ms Morrison, now 81, has such a fantastical, spiritual approach to her characters and plot, but she’s also got “edge”. She can set a tone, paint a picture, capture identifiable feeling/emotion and describe events so clearly and with such poetry that it makes you laugh or, it makes you cry. There are some passages in her much acclaimed book “Beloved” that are so painful that your throat clutches and closes.
Her “truth”, in her books like “Sula”, “The Bluest Eye”, “Song of Solomon” just to name a few, are cloaked in make believe and are sometimes difficult to handle – sort of a ground glass in the oatmeal type of thing. You feel it. (“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and Ms Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.)
I think she is amazing and a true gift.
“Writing was … the most extraordinary way of thinking and feeling. It became the one thing I was doing that I had absolutely no intention of living without.”Toni Morrison
The Met Presents “P.S. Art 2012”, the 10th annual display of selected art by local children.
This is a “juried exhibition of talented young artists from New York City’s public schools. This selection showcases the creativity of seventy-six K through 12 students from all five boroughs and includes paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed-media works, collages, and drawings. Each piece represents a unique expression of imagination and ability.”
Ms Primus, 1919 – 1994, often referred to as “the grandmother of African-American dance”, will have an evening devoted to her contributions on 5/24/12 at the Schomburg Center in New York City.
“Youth dancers from the Harlem School of the Arts will open the evening with a performance of Primus’s signature work, “Bushasche, War Dance, A Dance for Peace.” Afterwards, there will be a discussion conducted by Peggy and Murray Schwartz about their book, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus.
