Tag Archives for race

Life After: Kehinde Wiley

Acclaimed painter Kehinde Wiley was first introduced to his craft when his mother enrolled him in art school as a child while living in South Central Los Angeles.  He used to visit museums and read art history books with paintings from the Renaissance age of chivalrous white men looking poignantly at their viewers.  Wiley realized early on that these larger than life portraits were more about representing the levels of access, power and racial identity in society.  Wiley has been on a journey to explore these issues ever since.  He recently came to town to deliver a 10-year retrospective on his work and discuss the evolution of identity politics in art.

Wiley started his career taking pictures of black men in the streets of Harlem.  He mainly focused on the power politics of hair and black masculinity.  He would invite the models up to his studio, where they would also view the portraits in his art books, asking “who are all these old white dudes?”  Like Wiley, most of the models were from areas that didn’t have access to this kind of art, which again explains the power dynamics in society.

Wiley took his craft to another level with the “World Stage” series, his best known work of fusing traditional art with the contemporary street life of men of color around the world.  The series began in China, where he was invited to work in a studio in Beijing.  Wiley had his African-American models assume poses from Chinese communist propaganda posters.  He says the models and the original people in the posters seemed to share the same characteristics of false hope through their smiles.

“The idea is more than a painting on a wall; this painting is a social wall,” Wiley said.  “I wanted to capture that social history.”

Wiley then took his World Stage, well, around the world.  From Tunisia to Senegal to India to Brazil, Wiley has captured the contemporary black male experience like never done before.  He recalled his time in Israel setting up shoots in the back of Tel Aviv night clubs and asking for drunken models.  Many of the Israeli portraits are of Ethiopians and native-born Jews and Arab Israelis.  Wiley says the experience opened his eyes up in many ways about the Arab-Israeli conflict.  One frame of a painting of an Ethiopian poser says “Can We All Just Get Along” in Hebrew, referring to the Rodney King beating incident.

In Rio de Janeiro, the model interaction was much more challenging, as he had to travel through the favelas with a camera crew and security guards with AK-47s.  He did one shoot at a woman’s home when word got out that an American was paying a lot of money for models, and a queue of people suddenly showed up at the house.   In other countries he has visited, Wiley found many people to be reluctant or even hostile towards a camera crew coming into their area.

“Often times it’s hard to get models, but sometimes there are people who want to be discovered,” Wiley said.  “There are people who are like ‘of course you found me.’”

Nowadays, Wiley doesn’t have a hard time getting models.  He has been commissioned in recent years to produce paintings for the World Cup and Michael Jackson.  Usually when he hosts opening receptions for his work, Wiley invites his models back to view the final products.  Many of them love the work; in fact, some of the models use their portraits on social media profiles.

Wiley’s work has finally come full circle.

“I am always wondering if there is a social good in this work,” he said.  “I meet young artists around the world who now feel it’s possible to be a part of this world.”

Focus on Race & Politics

I talked with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick about the importance of racial diversity in politics today.  This coming a day after Patrick announced that Mo Cowan would become the interim senator replacing John Kerry.  Patrick is the first black governor of the Commonwealth, and currently the only sitting black governor in the country.

 

Zadie Smith: Life After

British author Zadie Smith became an instant literary success upon the publication of her first book White Teeth in 2000.  The novel is a semi-autobiographical tale about living in London’s new multicultural landscape.  Many of her subsequent books including her latest work NW examine the intersection of race, class and identity.  In the 13 years since White Teeth’s publication, racial politics and the publishing world have evolved tremendously.  Recently, she came to Boston to discuss life in Obama’s America and why writing online is the new normal.

Smith has been a tenured creative writing professor at New York University for the last three years.  It was announced last year that her third book On Beauty will be adapted into a film and the BBC film adaptation of White Teeth has finally been put out on DVD and online streaming formats.  The Internet and media have made seismic shifts in the way the written word is shared with readers.

Like many of her contemporaries, Smith contemplates why she should continue to write in the digital age.  Writers not only have to contend with book reviewers at major newspapers and magazines, but also with social media critics, as well as have to fight copyright infringement to protect their work online.  She says today there is no difference between fake and real writers, as anyone now can be considered a published writer with the click of a mouse.

“Some might say it is harder to write now than it was years ago,” Smith said.  “How will writers be paid online? I have no idea.”

Maybe a culture tax she suggested.

However, she also says that the Web can be a great place for writers too.  She spends a lot of time reading blogs, and not just literary blogs, but a lot of the “trashy blogs” the rest of us read.  Writing online has also created a new intimacy with her readers that has helped inform her writing.  But she is still a fan of the printed, written word.  Smith says she owns over 10,000 books by authors ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Zora Neale Hurston to Jean-Paul Sartre.  While many of the books are used as teaching aides, she also enjoys casual reading.

Smith never expected to become a writer, but has been an avid reader since she was a child.  She seriously considered becoming an actress at one point, but writing eventually became her true calling while attending Cambridge.  The only real writing training she had came from reading other books and having her work critiqued by her classmates.  Smith only wrote three and a half essays while in university, but those essays became the impetus for White Teeth.

While a great deal of that book came out of many hours of research at libraries, White Teeth is based on many aspects of her own life.  Born in North London to a black Jamaican mother and white British father, identity politics is part of her everyday life.

Smith said before a crowd Wednesday night at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that she has many identities including being a liberal, feminist, black woman and British.

She also identifies with President Barack Obama’s multicultural background and his gift of mimicry.  Smith wrote this about Obama in 2008:

“Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: ‘I believe that’s the Milky Way.’ This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them.”

Smith says that she didn’t watch Obama’s second inauguration, as she doesn’t own a television and she is not into the “pomp and circumstance” of such occasions.  But she was pleased Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural speech, since she lives at the tip of Manhattan – ground zero for Hurricane Sandy.

As for her other identity as a writer, she will continue to do that, even as the Internet reinvents content distribution.

“Why I write? Because I am a writer,” she said.

That’s a Fact: Young, Gifted & Black

Bunker Hill Community College held the opening reception Feb. 9 for its latest exhibit “That’s a Fact: Young, Gifted and Black.” Many of the area’s best and brightest artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and photographers were invited to display and celebrate their art. It was exciting to attend because it almost looked like a modern day Harlem Renaissance gathering.

During the 1920s and 1930s many African-Americans moved to the North as part of the Great Migration. Many of those migrants had creative aspirations and made their way to Harlem. These artists used their work to express the new black identity; many of them influenced by self-determination, the Jazz Age and the racial bigotry of the time. Like their Harlem forefathers, the young artists in this exhibit are expressing their own black identity, only this time their influences are hip-hop culture and their pride in having a black man in the White House.

Watch the video here

UK Race Relations: Yesterday & Today

Two white men were found guilty and received life sentences for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager stabbed to death by five white youths at a London bus stop in 1993. Nearly two decades on, the verdict may have brought some closure to a case that put a spotlight on racism and criminal justice in the United Kingdom. I was a teenager myself at the time and remember hearing a little about this case, but it wasn’t until I viewed the BBC film The Murder of Stephen Lawrence when I got the whole story of the case and how England is so not “postracial.”

Read the full article here