#THE HALE FAMILY BEING PROPS FOR THE NARRATIVE

[sototallynormaliswear]

this one goes out to every side character in teen wolf that could have been so interesting provided that anyone in the writers room cared: I love you and you mean the world to me

[alexisginesphoto]

A Response-- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / Hale County, This Morning, This Evening

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941 by photographer Walker Evans and journalist James Agee, has become an American classic, noted for how the book, at time of publication went against norms of documentation and traditional reporting. Up until this point, photos were generally regarded as accompanying text, which was given the highest importance in books. This publication broke norms by essentially publishing two books in one, where the photos (taken by Walker Evans) stood on their own, without the company of text to overtake it. The photos were also published first in the book, thereby establishing their importance over the text (written by James Agee) that mark the second half of the book.

The documentation of the reality of the sharecroppers is striking. They are white, impoverished families with gaunt faces, hardened with struggle, living in bare shacks. Black and white photography captures the essence of its subjects, and in this case serves to stress the brutal reality of these sharecroppers. Where the project lacks is in its depiction-- only white families are shown, and at the time of these photos, 75% of the Hale County population was black. I would like to think of this subversive racism behind the project as not completely intentional-- black people even then understood the power of the camera, and arguably, the implication of white people behind it, and ran from them. Agee was quoted as saying, "I notice how much slower white people are to catch on than negroes, who understand the meaning of a camera, a weapon, a stealer of images and souls...". That being said, the project shows a truth of American History, albeit a staunchly curated, and therefor, relative truth. This phenomenon best explained by Richard Avedon, "There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person... portraits are much more about me than they are about the people I photograph... The photographer has complete control, the issue is a moral one and it is complicated." 

The overall tone of the project invites feelings of despair, sadness, the hopelessness of oppressive, crushing poverty. The book itself is a beautiful work of art that I personally feel, for its time, was way ahead of itself as a photo book with reference to the professional, clean layout of the photos. The book can stand to compete and excel beyond photo books published even today.

Hale County, This Morning, This Evening by Ramell Ross captures the same geographic area of America and Alabama state, but in a completely different manner, with a completely different demographic-- black people. Watching the documentary, I felt Ross was very successful in removing his presence, and therefor the personal narrative, of the photographer/filmmaker almost entirely. Some of this, I believe, can be attributed to the amount of time Ross spent living in Hale County-- 3 years, versus 8 weeks by Evans and Agee. In this way he eludes a shortcoming of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, because the subjects are not "othered" by the outsider photographer (and narrator); they are not props. Ross is successful in capturing the "historically elusive" black population because of his access as a black man himself, his natural integration into the community through his years spent there. Scott L. Matthews, professor of history at Florida State University, says Ross's work "brings the humanity of Hale County's people into the light... they appear at a distance... absorbed in quotidian experience and not captured by the camera for the viewer's pleasure or project. Ross presents them with sacrificial care, allowing them, and not the artist, to author their identities." Both projects have in common that they use untraditional ways to document Hale County, and have various successes in doing so. Ross's untraditional documentary uses almost a stream of conscious type of observation, comprised primarily of "b-roll" footage, and yet the film is not lacking in contex or journalistic quality-- the viewer is able to take away very much about the reality of the people of Hale County. The b-roll, stream of conscious approach captures the essence of real life-- it mostly happens in small moments, mundanity, a buildup of the cumulation of everyday life. It doesn't happen in these grand moments-- a powerful snapshot that captures an all encompassing truth in a fraction of a second.

I had a greater appreciation for Hale County, This Morning, This Evening. As a work of journalistic documentary, I felt it was more successful of a truer depiction of life for the people in Hale County. While it also lacks in depicting of a population (in this case, the minority white population), and admittedly has the advantage of motion picture to provide a more realistic account, I overall found it more interesting and exciting to see a typically ignored population be depicted. I also found it very moving that it didn't portray these people as victims, or through a lens of despair, as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men did. It was just real-- it made no statements, and it took its time.

[princeescaluswords]

Killer Obsession

So I was directed to a great article (https://www.teenvogue.com/story/white-male-serial-killer-obsession-problem) about how Hollywood romanticizes and profits off of our rather creepy obsession with darkness.   I came across this gem in that story.

QUOTE:  We are continually fed this idea that white male serial killers are charming, debonair characters — that they're just misunderstood, incomprehensibly complex people who also happen to have a strange proclivity for the dark and macabre. And while there's nothing wrong with being curious about what drove them to commit acts of this nature, that curiosity becomes an issue when movie or TV producers opt to completely gloss over the lives of the victims in favor of an easily digestible "outsider" narrative. When we focus so much on the murderer — their neuroses, their troubled pasts — we ignore the fact that the victims of these crimes were also people. By romanticizing the men who committed these crimes, we end up forgetting the victims were actual people who were so much more than some of many body parts found in Dahmer's closet.

After I read the article, I poured myself a celebratory drink.  “It’s not just me!”  Because there is no greater example of this obsession than Teen Wolf show’s and Teen Wolf fandom’s fascination with turning Peter Hale into the ‘hero’ of the story or at least a ‘hero’ on the same levels of other characters.   With one or two sentence changes, I could make the above paragraph completely about him.

For those of you who scream “fiction =/= reality” from the rooftops, answer me this – why are there more biographical films about Jeffrey Dahmer than there are about Hugh Thompson Jr. or Katherine Johnson put together?   The choices you make in pursuing fiction have consequences.

Because the only way you can place Peter Hale on the level of any of the other characters in Teen Wolf is if you ignore his victims.  Let’s just table the discussion on whether revenge is morally acceptable – let’s eliminate Kate, Garrison Myers, Unger, Reddick, and the video-store clerk from the discussion, because Peter had plenty of other victims we can talk about.

We can talk about Nurse Jennifer, whose body he shoved into a car trunk like so much useless baggage (which he joked about) after she was instrumental in helping him get his revenge.   We can talk about the school janitor who he killed for being in the way and then used his body as a prop.    We can talk about Adrian Harris, who was moments from being killed because he had the nerve to get drunk into a bar and talk to a pretty woman.    The show never talks about the nurse or the janitor again; the fandom pretends that they don’t exist and that Harris ‘deserved it’ for not being a nice person.

Or we can talk about how the fandom talks about Scott McCall, criticizing him for holding a grudge (even though he doesn’t actually hold a grudge in the show) because it shows that he is ungrateful for the ‘gifts’ of the asthma cure and the werewolf powers, which should more than make up for the multiple murder attempts, the mind control, the manipulation, and the extortion.   It reminds me of nothing more of people trying to justify imperialism by saying ‘look at all the things that colonization brought!’  

Or we can talk about how the show treats Lydia Martin, who was savaged, used, and gaslighted.  Of course, Peter though she was strong enough to survive with only a “few years of profoundly disturbing nightmares.”  The show resolves this situation with the briefest of confrontations (undermined by a poor music selection) and pointless witty banter in the penultimate episode.    Fandom has a better track record than the show, at least acknowledging that what Peter did to Lydia deserves more than a laugh track.

Of course, he was ‘ill’ in Season 1, which doesn’t stop anyone from celebrating him, because the only answer is ‘when did he get better?’   It wasn’t in Season 3a where he manipulated everyone to regain power.  It wasn’t in Season 4 where he worked with the person who killed his family in Season 1 in order to kill a child for his own greed.   It wasn’t in Season 6, when he spent the time drawing a perfect spiral of revenge on the floor of his cell (super healthy!). Teen Vogue’s article is spot on.  

It’s good that at least someone with a voice and reach is addressing Hollywood’s enabling of fan’s unhealthy fascination with deranged killers.  

[caveartfair]

The Overlooked Black Women Who Altered the Course of Feminist Art

Lorna Simpson, candid. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, gathered in New Jersey for their second retreat, where they worked together to formulate a collaborative letter.  

The Heresies Collective, whose membership consisted predominately of white women, had just published its third feminist art journal, titled “Lesbian Art and Artists,” but had neglected to feature a single woman of color. The Combahee River Collective, which was formed to raise consciousness about race and gender issues, had assembled to craft a response.

“We find it appalling,” they wrote, “that a hundred years from now it will be possible for women to conclude that in 1977 there were no practicing Black and other Third World lesbian artists.”

The critical debate that it provoked was an expression of the complex and often tumultuous relationship between mainstream feminism and the black women who were so often excluded from it—a tension that continues today. The activities undertaken by black women to push back against their erasure, in the late ’60s through the early ’80s, effectively amounted to a desire for a revolution.

It is from this fervor that a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum gets its title: “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.”

The show, which is one part of the museum’s year-long initiative to reimagine feminist art, “A Year of Yes,” highlights the work of black women artists during the height of second-wave feminism and serves as a record of their stories—to be remembered for the next hundred years and beyond.

Emma Amos, Sandy and her Husband, 1973. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

At the exhibition’s core are the many artist-run organizations that were developed during this time.

Among those represented is Emma Amos, the only woman and youngest member of the Spiral collective, one of the earlier groups included in the show. Spiral was conceived in 1963 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. Its founding members, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff, met weekly to discuss the evolving role of black artists in the midst of social and political change.

The group would eventually invite Amos to join them after requesting to see examples of her work, a procedure that, she observed, other (male) members were not subjected to.

Amos’s work reflects the isolation she experienced in Spiral, as well as in the art world at large. In Sandy and Her Husband (1973), for instance, Amos painted her self-portrait, Flower Sniffer (1966), so that it appeared to hang on a living-room wall—her body is hunched over and her eyes pivoted in a fixed gaze at a couple embracing in the middle of the room. Amos is inside the painting, within the scene, and yet she is still found on the periphery.

Another figure featured prominently in the exhibition, Dindga McCannon, had invited a group of black women artists to her home in Brooklyn in 1971. Kay Brown and Faith Ringgold were among those who attended. The meeting, and the many that followed, would eventually lead to the formation of the Where We At (WWA) collective and one of the first professional exhibitions of black women artists. That June, the self-titled group show opened at Acts of Art Gallery in New York’s West Village.

Where we at, Cookin & Smokin Poster, 1972. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, 1973. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

“We Wanted A Revolution” features a rich collection of works and texts by the artists of WWA. McCannon’s three-dimensional collaged painting of a female warrior, Revolutionary Sister (1971), and Elizabeth Catlett’s jarring bronze bust of a black man staring blankly through the crosshairs of a target are both on view.

Elsewhere in the show, Betye Saar offers an emblem of the Black Power Movement with Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail (1973)—a rendition of a molotov cocktail that highlights the violent clashes between activists and law enforcement, as well as the aggressive, commercialized stereotyping of black femininity.

Crucially, many of the artists and activists featured in this exhibition had their hands in both the black feminist and black power movements of the ’60s through the ’80s. But their contributions were often overlooked.

One such figure is Ringgold, whose voice in this show displays just how intertwined the issues of gender and race were and still are. Ringgold, who was a key early member of WWA, appears in many forms throughout this history.

Moved by her concerns about the activist and former Black Panther party member Angela Davis’s imprisonment in late 1970, for instance, Ringgold set out to create a mural for the inmates at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island. She conducted a series of interviews with the female inmates, in which many explained that they wanted to see narratives of women outside of typical domestic roles.

Faith Ringgold, For the Women’s House, 1971. Courtesy of Rose M. Singer Center, Rikers Island Correctional Center. © 2017 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Ringgold would ultimately create the large-scale painting For the Women’s House (1971) to be hung in the lobby of the facility. The mural, which is featured in the exhibition—only the second time it’s been shown since its removal from the island in 1999—is sliced into eight triangular scenes, with each one imagining different futures for these women, from shooting hoops on a basketball court to addressing the nation as the president of the United States.

The work represents a hopeful, revisionist view of the world—one in which women share the same mobility as their male counterparts.

The show spotlights not only groups and collectives, but also the protests and activities of community-run spaces that became the nexus for black art at the time.

Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown (JAM), founded in 1974 and dedicated to showcasing artists of color, is one such example. Bryant and many other artists connected to JAM wrote critical letters in response to the outrage of an exhibition titled “The Nigger Drawings,” at Artists Space in 1979, which appear in this show.

In the later ’70s and ’80s, political expressions about the intersection of race and gender were seen more and more through the lens of personal narrative and performance. Senga Nengudi created anthropomorphous renderings of flesh-toned panty hose that were evocative of the female form, such as Inside/Outside (1977). Her works were often used as props in public performances.

Later works by Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson display a careful examination of the narratives around black identity. Weems’s Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), for instance, aimed to challenge common perceptions of the black family as being broken and destructive, while Lorna Simpson’s iconic captioned images—the first of which, Gestures/Reenactments (1985), is displayed here—offer a complex reading of a black man’s experience as both victimizing and empowering.

Installation view of Elizabeth Catlett, Target, 1970, in “We Wanted A Revolution.” © Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

By capturing this history, the exhibition hopes not only to revise the feminist canon, but also to fill in the backstory behind feminist and civil rights movements today. And it does not shy away from institutional critique—an article on display recounts an open hearing of women artists held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1971 and titled, “Are Museums Relevant to Women?” Nor does it try to overshadow the individual stories and perspectives of the artists it includes.

“One of the most important things that feminist art history has brought to the world is significant contributions to this idea of revisionism, of revising history, rewriting history, and writing people back into history,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Catherine Morris, senior curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Including a show about black women within “A Year of Yes” emphasizes the dangers of a single narrative and the importance of engaging in more nuanced discussions about racial and gender inequality. “In order to effectively envision our future, we need to be able to talk honestly about our past,” Anne Pasternak, the museum’s first woman director, notes in the catalogue.  

This transparent and self-critical approach shaped the way that the institution brought the exhibition together. A year and a half ago, in the early stages of its preparation, the museum invited a group of artists—who would eventually be featured in the show—to have a discussion with curators about the exhibition.

Jan van Raay, Faith Ringgold (right) and Michele Wallace (middle) at Art Workers Coalition Protest, Whitney Museum, 1971. Courtesy of Jan van Raay. © Jan van Raay.

Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

“It became clear that these artists wanted to tell this story themselves,” says Morris, who curated the exhibition alongside Rujeko Hockley, now an assistant curator at the Whitney. The two “became concerned about not wanting [the exhibition] to be written like it was a history that [they] were discovering,” and so made it a priority to privilege the voices and opinions of the artists over their own.

It’s accompanied by a robust catalogue featuring a carefully curated selection of historical texts that provide an additional opportunity to engage with these women’s voices. Together, the exhibition and catalogue form a kind of pseudo-curriculum, a comprehensive (and long-overdue) excavation of these women’s histories over 20 years.

Indeed this show is a grand achievement for the artists, curators, and historians involved, and is a welcome resource for the many young women who have long been taught that feminist art, political art, and art in general didn’t include faces like theirs.    

While the show raises timely questions about intersectional feminism, female representation, and gender inequalities—all urgent themes in Trump’s America—perhaps most pertinent is the show’s insistence on reminding us that black women have long faced the perils of a world in which their voices are silenced.

In this sense, “We Wanted A Revolution”  is the realization of a dream—for us all to finally sit back and listen.

—Yelena Keller

from Artsy News

[caveartfair]

The Overlooked Black Women Who Altered the Course of Feminist Art

Lorna Simpson, candid. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, gathered in New Jersey for their second retreat, where they worked together to formulate a collaborative letter.  

The Heresies Collective, whose membership consisted predominately of white women, had just published its third feminist art journal, titled “Lesbian Art and Artists,” but had neglected to feature a single woman of color. The Combahee River Collective, which was formed to raise consciousness about race and gender issues, had assembled to craft a response.

“We find it appalling,” they wrote, “that a hundred years from now it will be possible for women to conclude that in 1977 there were no practicing Black and other Third World lesbian artists.”

The critical debate that it provoked was an expression of the complex and often tumultuous relationship between mainstream feminism and the black women who were so often excluded from it—a tension that continues today. The activities undertaken by black women to push back against their erasure, in the late ’60s through the early ’80s, effectively amounted to a desire for a revolution.

It is from this fervor that a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum gets its title: “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.”

The show, which is one part of the museum’s year-long initiative to reimagine feminist art, “A Year of Yes,” highlights the work of black women artists during the height of second-wave feminism and serves as a record of their stories—to be remembered for the next hundred years and beyond.

Emma Amos, Sandy and her Husband, 1973. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

At the exhibition’s core are the many artist-run organizations that were developed during this time.

Among those represented is Emma Amos, the only woman and youngest member of the Spiral collective, one of the earlier groups included in the show. Spiral was conceived in 1963 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. Its founding members, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff, met weekly to discuss the evolving role of black artists in the midst of social and political change.

The group would eventually invite Amos to join them after requesting to see examples of her work, a procedure that, she observed, other (male) members were not subjected to.

Amos’s work reflects the isolation she experienced in Spiral, as well as in the art world at large. In Sandy and Her Husband (1973), for instance, Amos painted her self-portrait, Flower Sniffer (1966), so that it appeared to hang on a living-room wall—her body is hunched over and her eyes pivoted in a fixed gaze at a couple embracing in the middle of the room. Amos is inside the painting, within the scene, and yet she is still found on the periphery.

Another figure featured prominently in the exhibition, Dindga McCannon, had invited a group of black women artists to her home in Brooklyn in 1971. Kay Brown and Faith Ringgold were among those who attended. The meeting, and the many that followed, would eventually lead to the formation of the Where We At (WWA) collective and one of the first professional exhibitions of black women artists. That June, the self-titled group show opened at Acts of Art Gallery in New York’s West Village.

Where we at, Cookin & Smokin Poster, 1972. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, 1973. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

“We Wanted A Revolution” features a rich collection of works and texts by the artists of WWA. McCannon’s three-dimensional collaged painting of a female warrior, Revolutionary Sister (1971), and Elizabeth Catlett’s jarring bronze bust of a black man staring blankly through the crosshairs of a target are both on view.

Elsewhere in the show, Betye Saar offers an emblem of the Black Power Movement with Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail (1973)—a rendition of a molotov cocktail that highlights the violent clashes between activists and law enforcement, as well as the aggressive, commercialized stereotyping of black femininity.

Crucially, many of the artists and activists featured in this exhibition had their hands in both the black feminist and black power movements of the ’60s through the ’80s. But their contributions were often overlooked.

One such figure is Ringgold, whose voice in this show displays just how intertwined the issues of gender and race were and still are. Ringgold, who was a key early member of WWA, appears in many forms throughout this history.

Moved by her concerns about the activist and former Black Panther party member Angela Davis’s imprisonment in late 1970, for instance, Ringgold set out to create a mural for the inmates at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island. She conducted a series of interviews with the female inmates, in which many explained that they wanted to see narratives of women outside of typical domestic roles.

Faith Ringgold, For the Women’s House, 1971. Courtesy of Rose M. Singer Center, Rikers Island Correctional Center. © 2017 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Ringgold would ultimately create the large-scale painting For the Women’s House (1971) to be hung in the lobby of the facility. The mural, which is featured in the exhibition—only the second time it’s been shown since its removal from the island in 1999—is sliced into eight triangular scenes, with each one imagining different futures for these women, from shooting hoops on a basketball court to addressing the nation as the president of the United States.

The work represents a hopeful, revisionist view of the world—one in which women share the same mobility as their male counterparts.

The show spotlights not only groups and collectives, but also the protests and activities of community-run spaces that became the nexus for black art at the time.

Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown (JAM), founded in 1974 and dedicated to showcasing artists of color, is one such example. Bryant and many other artists connected to JAM wrote critical letters in response to the outrage of an exhibition titled “The Nigger Drawings,” at Artists Space in 1979, which appear in this show.

In the later ’70s and ’80s, political expressions about the intersection of race and gender were seen more and more through the lens of personal narrative and performance. Senga Nengudi created anthropomorphous renderings of flesh-toned panty hose that were evocative of the female form, such as Inside/Outside (1977). Her works were often used as props in public performances.

Later works by Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson display a careful examination of the narratives around black identity. Weems’s Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), for instance, aimed to challenge common perceptions of the black family as being broken and destructive, while Lorna Simpson’s iconic captioned images—the first of which, Gestures/Reenactments (1985), is displayed here—offer a complex reading of a black man’s experience as both victimizing and empowering.

Installation view of Elizabeth Catlett, Target, 1970, in “We Wanted A Revolution.” © Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

By capturing this history, the exhibition hopes not only to revise the feminist canon, but also to fill in the backstory behind feminist and civil rights movements today. And it does not shy away from institutional critique—an article on display recounts an open hearing of women artists held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1971 and titled, “Are Museums Relevant to Women?” Nor does it try to overshadow the individual stories and perspectives of the artists it includes.

“One of the most important things that feminist art history has brought to the world is significant contributions to this idea of revisionism, of revising history, rewriting history, and writing people back into history,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Catherine Morris, senior curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Including a show about black women within “A Year of Yes” emphasizes the dangers of a single narrative and the importance of engaging in more nuanced discussions about racial and gender inequality. “In order to effectively envision our future, we need to be able to talk honestly about our past,” Anne Pasternak, the museum’s first woman director, notes in the catalogue.  

This transparent and self-critical approach shaped the way that the institution brought the exhibition together. A year and a half ago, in the early stages of its preparation, the museum invited a group of artists—who would eventually be featured in the show—to have a discussion with curators about the exhibition.

Jan van Raay, Faith Ringgold (right) and Michele Wallace (middle) at Art Workers Coalition Protest, Whitney Museum, 1971. Courtesy of Jan van Raay. © Jan van Raay.

Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

“It became clear that these artists wanted to tell this story themselves,” says Morris, who curated the exhibition alongside Rujeko Hockley, now an assistant curator at the Whitney. The two “became concerned about not wanting [the exhibition] to be written like it was a history that [they] were discovering,” and so made it a priority to privilege the voices and opinions of the artists over their own.

It’s accompanied by a robust catalogue featuring a carefully curated selection of historical texts that provide an additional opportunity to engage with these women’s voices. Together, the exhibition and catalogue form a kind of pseudo-curriculum, a comprehensive (and long-overdue) excavation of these women’s histories over 20 years.

Indeed this show is a grand achievement for the artists, curators, and historians involved, and is a welcome resource for the many young women who have long been taught that feminist art, political art, and art in general didn’t include faces like theirs.    

While the show raises timely questions about intersectional feminism, female representation, and gender inequalities—all urgent themes in Trump’s America—perhaps most pertinent is the show’s insistence on reminding us that black women have long faced the perils of a world in which their voices are silenced.

In this sense, “We Wanted A Revolution”  is the realization of a dream—for us all to finally sit back and listen.

—Yelena Keller

from Artsy News