Read moreArt can be such a history lesson sometimes. So often it represents what is most important to a people during specific periods of their time.
Zora Neale Hurston – Story Teller
Zora Neale Hurston, 1891 – 1960, started to publish right after the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The ability to support oneself with art that explored the African-American experience waned with the onset of the depression and she fell into obscurity until re discovered by Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”).
Her work gained attention with the introduction of college Black literature classes during the 70”s. She was found and embraced by a whole new generation (including me). Her novels, short stories and poetry are now also taught in women’s studies and general literature courses.
She studied cultural anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. As a “folklorist”, she wrote and sang in the rural style and dialect of the people she remembered from the all black town of Eaton, FL where she was born and of the folks she met while traveling across the south.
Perhaps her most famous book, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, 1937, is about “Janie”, who managed to make her way thru life and find love during a time and in a place very difficult for a woman’s survival. (The was made into a TV movie a few years ago with Halle Berry)
Zora Neale Hurston – Great story teller!
Bibliography (from Wikipedia)
- Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine
- Sweat (1926)
- How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
- The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
- Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
- Mules and Men (1935)
- Tell My Horse (1937)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
- Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
- Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
- I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
- Sanctified Church (1981)
- Spunk: Selected Stories (1985)
- Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play, with Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
- The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (1995)
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Resist!
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits”, April 4 – June 14 *The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco presents an exhibit of 70 prints which “explores photography’s role in shaping public identity and individual concepts of race and socioeconomic status over the past 150 years.”
Represented are those men and women who have “resisted” in assorted ways, from activist Angela Davis to singer Jessye Norman, from labor leader A. Philip Randolph to boxer Joe Louis.
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits”
MoAD – The Museum of the African Diaspora, 4/4 – 6/14/09
685 Mission Street San Francisco, CA
“Let your Motto be resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No opposed people have ever secured Liberty without resistance” – abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, 1843
Images: Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963
Cultural Arts Coalition-First Friday
The CAC featured Stella Pope-Duarte, reading from her books and poems. Stella Pope-Duarte is the Arizona award-winning Chicana writer and author of Fragile Night, Let Their Spirits Dance, and The Women of Juarez. Musical entertainment was provided by Carmen DeNovais, who with her husband, Zarco Guerrero, are local influential fixtures in the Arizona and the Southwest arts scene.
Stella Pope Duarte
Carmen DeNovais
A mission of The Cultural Arts Coalition’s is that these artistic expressions will call upon our humane need to dialog, to create conversations and therein to promote shared understanding- causing us to pause for meaningful discussions in a public space around critical issues and public policies.
Precious Ramotswe – Lady Detective
“Precious Ramotswe “ is Botswana‘s only female private investigator – the main character of the “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith.
I noticed a few years back that Ms Ramotswe and the author’s name were listed week after week on the SF & Bay area California paper back bestseller list. “Precious” just sort of kept catching my eye and I got curious. I discovered that the Botswana detective has a worldwide cult following.
The author was born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, practiced law in Scotland and when McCall returned to Zimbabwe, he began to write about a red bush tea drinking female private eye – “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”. In this, and the books that followed in the series, our lady sleuth tracks down wayward husbands, missing children and solves village mysteries all the while keeping to the traditions of her culture and maintaining the standards of both Queen Elizabeth and Nelson Mandela (she admires both).
BTW: Directed by the late Anthony Minghella, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency “will soon come to an HBO screen near you. Produced for the BBC in 2008, “Precious” is played by singer Jill Scott. Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose and Idris Elba from “The Wire” are also in the cast. Should be fun!
Books in the series:
* 1998 .The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
* 2000 .Tears Of The Giraffe
* 2001 .Morality for Beautiful Girls
* 2002 .The Kalahari Typing School for Men
* 2004 .The Full Cupboard of Life
* 2004 .In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
* 2006 .Blue Shoes and Happiness
* 2007 .The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
Driskell at the High in April
Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell
The High Museum of Atlanta’s exhibit of nearly 100 objects and works on paper presents the work of David C. Driskell, artist, scholar, and educator for the first time. His work themes, of the last 40 years, have been on the African Diaspora.
April 21, 2009 August 2, 2009
High Museum of Art Atlanta, 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E. Atlanta, GA
(Image: “Lady In Waiting”, D.C.Driskell)