30 Days of Birthday: Day 7 - The Civil War exhibits at The Met

 An ambrotype image of the Pattillo Brothers of Henry County, each holding D-guard Bowie or side knives: (from l to r) Benjamin, George, James and John -- Company K, 22nd Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry. They enlisted together on the same day -- August 31, 1861 -- and served with the Army of Northern Virginia.  If you'd like to know what happened to them in battle, click here.

When I spend the day at The Met in the Balcony Lounge -- listening to jazz, rewriting and rereading, and yes, thinking way too much -- sometimes I wander into an installation to distract myself and clear my head.  There are several on hand that coincide with the anniversary of the Civil War and they are wondrous.

The exhibit Photography and the American Civil War is the one that has consistently pulled me in from the inside out, in part because I love to tromp through history books and sift through it all to find out What Actually Happened.  This is the war that was photographed exhaustively, the first major conflict to come alive inside that lens. The hoi polloi was understandably transfixed.

What's especially alluring (and yes, disturbing) is that the people in the photos look real. Really, really real. There's just no other way to put it. Most of them look as though they are reaching through that expanse of space and time and whatever else stands between us, and really seeing me. The kicker is that a few of them look like people I actually know.  The brothers in the photo above are no exception.

I can't see a piece of art once and get everything out of it and walk away. The more I look at it, the more I see, the more inspired I feel.

These photos are ethereal.  I can't get them out of my head.

writing and rewriting and then some

surprise! i'm writing erotica -- under an assumed name, of course. i don't know what that name is yet but i've found a pseudonym generator, so i'm well on my way to something interesting. perferrably a guy's name.

someone dared me to do it and i figured, why not.  it's a pretty popular genre -- and when i say popular, i mean pert near everyone is doing it. i've heard from way too many writers who reignited their careers by taking up a pseudonym and writing erotica.  i haven't seen very much that explores any of it from a black female perspective, though. maybe i can change that.

strangely, it's the kind of thing that feels easy to churn out of me, now that there's relative calm in my life.

i'm working on rewrites on this libretto and i'm working on lyrics for a new song cycle and i'm working on submissions for the bmi musical theater workshop and i'm working on a dance performance idea. somewhere in there when my brain starts to glaze over, i'll pull out this erotica and reread it and think, hey this is interesting and then i write a page or two and put it aside. and then i'll go back to what i was doing. if i keep this up, i should have something interesting by the end of the summer. not a short story. probably a novella. a novel seems too cumbersome, too heavy, too much.
 
aside from all this writing, there's that soulful country/rock album i'd like to finish as a birthday present to myself.

apparently, this is a real incubatory moment for me.  this fall should be explosive.

when it's time to get out of the house and spend the day someplace else, the balcony lounge at the metropolitan museum of art is idyllic.  they have wifi, they serve high tea (amongst other things) and they have books and periodicals to get lost in. here's the kicker: not anyone can get into this lounge and it's usually empty on weekends, so i'm left alone.

as if all of that weren't enough, it's adjacent to the asian wing, so when my mind goes completely blank, i can walk to the next room and sit in front of a bodhisattva and be completely and utterly overwhelmed. what more could a nerdy blackgrrl ask for, really.


(i instagrammed this one a few weeks ago. it's ginormous.)

 i can't really think about budhisattva and not have this steely dan song swing through my head. (great album...)

At The Met: African Art, New York and the Avant-Garde

I'm almost done with the brilliant, epic, well-researched work Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern by Jayna Brown. It has sent me careening into the turn of the century -- the sights, the sounds, all of the ephemera that surrounds it -- and has me rethinking my world as a black female performer and my place in the entertainment industry.  Our collective history as black performers has been underrreported and grossly underrepresented so consistently and for so long, it was somewhat cathartic to finally learn the truth: we were a powerful influence all over the world -- as performers, as dancers, as vocalists, as bandleaders, as musicians.  We were a revolutionary force to be reckoned with. We still are.

Now that so much of the book has dovetailed so thoroughly with what I already know about the zeitgeist of those times and the performers who were relentless in pursuit of greatness, I'm picking up more pieces to the puzzle as I go along. Not surprisingly, I found quite a few of them at The Met in an exhibit called African Art, New York and the Avant-Garde. 

It's a small exhibit, tucked away somewhere in the depths of the Pre-Columbian section on The Met's first floor, and it's filled with paintings, photographs, programs and such, collected by wealthy patrons of the arts in the 1920s. It's well worth seeing.  There are quite a lot of beautiful African sculptures. How they got those artifacts from Africa remains a mystery.  It gives one reason to pause and wonder what other priceless items they took.  What's especially important to note is that this art was essential in defining and informing what we now know of as a modern aesthetic.

Here's one of my favorites -- probably because the face is so specific.  It was among the first African works exhibited in an art gallery.  (Who is it -- someone's wife or aunt, perhaps?) I love the well-groomed hair and bun, too. The style looks so. Well. Modern. Exactly like something I'd see on the street in Bed-Stuy or Harlem now.

The Met's website states: By 1914, it had been exhibited at Robert Coady’s Washington Square Gallery in New York. The head therefore became the first African artifact displayed in New York alongside art by modern masters such as Juan Gris and Henri Rousseau.

Displayed alongside modern masters, huh.  To the artists, writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, this was a very important acknowledgement that was happening at a moment in our history when we were beginning to understand our history and our connection to Africa. Clearly, this meant that African art was just as good as European art -- and by extension, so were we.

(Freestanding wood sculpture head from the Fang peoples in Gabon.)

They did much more than simply display the African sculptures they "found". They used them as a kind of creative springboard to explore new abstract ideas and shape them into a modern framework. For example, Picasso's African Period and the subsequent creation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon -- the first Cubist painting and an important step toward modern art -- was inspired by sculptures from the Fang people.

In one especially disturbing photograph, we see a patron's living room. It is filled to the hilt with priceless works of art. There were so many pieces that I recognized, I couldn't stop gasping.  Where did they get that art?

the day after that

nyc can be so beautiful, sometimes. the filth they're always showing in the movies and on television doesn't ever measure up to the real thing when it's this breathtaking and simple. this is me in fort tryon park -- a place that looks and feels a lot like my parents' backyard in atlanta.

actually, in my first few years of living in nyc, i would take the train to this park and wander through it until i got to the cloisters, because it was a "pay what you wish" situation and i was all kinds of broke. it was the same deal at the met. i always thought of that place as especially spectacular because it was basically five museums in one. and believe me, i treated it like it was my very own palace. when i didn't have enough money to get on the subway and head to that glorified castle near the end of the A line, i would walk across the park and spend all day getting lost in the post-Impressionist wing, staring at my favorite one, but mostly scheming and making lists and daydreaming about my future in nyc and what it might be like.

i always thought that the cloisters are a bright shining example of what people should do with their money when they're really loaded.

later, when i had two nickels to rub together, the met was the first museum i joined. but then i joined MoMA too -- because it was so unbelievably expensive but mostly because i'd been stuck in bauhaus for years and i really needed to learn about modern and contemporary art.

i think of any work of art as a kind of snapshot: a moment in time that captures something of the artist's life, the artist's essence. when i walk through any museum, i feel as though any one of them have been split open and emotionally disemboweled right in front of me. kandinsky makes me feel that way. so does de kooning. and rauschenberg. a live performance, a song, a recording should do the same thing. seeing emmylou harris at joe's pub and listening to her sing red dirt girl made me blink back tears. i don't know if it's me or what but i don't hear a lot that moves me. i can still get lost in what i see, when i wander through a museum. and then certain pictures become touchstones in the same way that i can get so emotionally tangled up in a song or a particular lyric. so when i go, i want to see certain ones and get that particular feeling all over again.

i think i made the beginnings of pre-production plans on my next cd while sitting next to picasso's goat in the rock garden at MoMA. i like that goat. it looks unhinged. besides, i have an uncle with a farm in walterboro that has a lot of goats. if i could have a pet, it would be a goat. so until i get back down south, this one will have to do.



at first, i went to museums because i wanted to see the art that i'd been looking at in textbooks all of my academic life. and then i went because it helped me to think through ideas in this really expansive way. now i get it: it's occupying one part of my brain while another part is ticking away like a metronome. and some other part of me is exploding...