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mrlenords · 4 years ago

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Day 19: Richard Bruce Nugent was a Harlem Renaissance Painter and Writer who gained notoriety in the Harlem Renaissance period (approx. 1918 - late 1930s), which coincided with the Jim Crow Era (approx. late 1880s. - early 1970s). Although there were many gay artists and writers at the time, he was one of the few who were relatively open about their sexuality. This was particularly brave considering black and LGBTQ people were regularly jailed, beaten, lynched, and/or murdered at the time. Nugent’s written and visual work depicted elegant images of interracial homoeroticism. As such, it was not well received by some of his closeted contemporaries. Fellow gay writer and philosopher, Alain Locke spoke out against Nugent’s works specifically saying that it radically promoted the effeminacy and decadence of the homosexual lifestyle.

However poet, Langston Hughes and other gay Harlem Renaissance contributors celebrated Nugent. They met at speak easies like Niggerati Manor where they socialized freely hidden away from the damning and often dangerous grip of Jim Crow. These moments of unguarded intimacy inspired one of Nugent’s most notable written works titled, “Smoke, Lillies, & Jade,” for The Fire!!! Press and has the distinction of being the first published work written from a black homosexual point of view.

Gay codes were one way Nugent was able to use homoerotic themes and motifs in his work. LGBTQ people adopted gay codes as a second language and a necessity essential to their survival at the time. They were used in much the same ways that Negro Spirituals, Call & Response, quilt patterns were used by slaves in Antebellum. Both slaves and LGBTQ people needed a way to communicate effectively with each other without being jailed, beaten, or killed by their oppressors. Nugent was very prolific at this and thanks to him we have a rich source of LGBTQ historical information on what life was like for black homosexuals during Jim Crow and the Harlem Renaissance.

#BlackHistoryRebootPRIDEEdition

#LGBTQPride

#LGBTQHistoryMaters

#BlackQueerIcons

#BlackHistoryMatters

#IntersectionalityMatters

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theessential · 4 years ago

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Where Is The Niggerati?

Dreams of black writers

black, queer like me

conversations never grow tired

a unified future we all see.

No more microaggressions

or awkward, harrowing looks

or acts of repression

or reminders of what they took.

Beautiful black faces

inhabiting all my favorite places

no more speaking in code

switching for whites is only for the old.

Our time is coming to the tide

all of our trials taken in stride

for now we become wise

consistently exposing the oppressor’s lies.

#poetry #writing

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miseducatedybg · 2 years ago

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Niggerati

And on the first day,

The creator took his pen and began to write the anthology of our existence.

Ours ,the first people

The ones in his image

A creator who created multiple copies of himself,

We just happened to be black skinned

And later that black skin is labeled negro

As Spanish as it is

And white as our oppressors are

We took the title.

The Illuminati is a group of individuals who collectively have the power to conquer and control anonymously.

Nigger was the title that was given in a form of hateful speech.

Give black people time and an idea and we can flip and create anything like our father intended.

We are the creatives that move in silence

Placing our wants on the collective creative society. We are the standard

We just happen to be black.

#poetry #my own style #my own work #blacklivesmatter #black poetry #Spotify

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blackkudos · 6 years ago

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Richard Bruce Nugent

Richard Bruce Nugent (July 2, 1906 – May 27, 1987), aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was a writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. One of many gay artists of the Harlem Renaissance, he was one of few who was out publicly. Recognized initially for the few short stories and paintings that were published, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.

Biography

Richard Bruce Nugent was born in Washington, DC on July 2, 1906 to Richard H. Nugent, Jr., and his wife Pauline Minerva Bruce. After attending Dunbar High School, he moved to New York after his father's death in 1920. The majority of his life and career took place in Harlem in New York City, and he died on May 27, 1987 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

During his career in Harlem, Nugent lived with writer Wallace Thurman from 1926 – 1928 which led to the publishing of “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” in Thurman's publication “Fire!!!”. The short story was written in a modernist stream-of-consciousness style, its subject matter was bisexuality and more specifically interracial male desire.

Many of his illustrations were featured in publications, such as “Fire!!!” along with his short story. Four of his paintings were included in the Harmon Foundation's exhibition of Negro artists, which was one of the few venues available for black artists in 1931. His only stand-alone publication, “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still," was issued in a limited edition by Warren Marr II in 1945. He later married Marr's sister, Grace on December 5, 1952.

His marriage to Grace Marr lasted from 1952 until her suicide in 1969. Nugent's intentions with the marriage were unclear as they were not romantic due to his clearly stated interest in other men. Thomas Wirth, contemporary and personal friend of Richard Nugent claimed that Grace loved Richard and was determined to change his sexuality in “Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent” 2002

He attended the Community Planning Conference at Columbia University in 1964 as an invited speaker. The conference was held under the auspices of the Borough President of Manhattan/Community Planning Board 10 and Columbia University. The idea of forming an organization to promote the arts in Harlem emerged from the conference’s Cultural Planning workshop and led to the formation of the Harlem Cultural Council. Nugent took an active role in this effort and attended numerous subsequent meetings. Nugent was elected co-chair (a position equivalent to vice president) of this council. He also served as chair of the Program Committee until March 1967.

Legacy

Nugent's aggressive and honest approach to homoerotic and interracial desire was not necessarily in the favor of his more discreet homosexual contemporaries. Alain Locke chastised the publication “Fire!!!” for its radicalism and specifically Nugent's “Smoke Lilies, and Jade” for promoting the effeminacy and decadence associated with homosexual writers.

Nugent's group of friends, made up of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, and John P. Davis, all frequented "Niggerati Manor," which was where they socialized with each other as well as where the origination of "Fire!!!" was based. As well as his friends, Nugent was also influenced by the likes of Aaron Douglas and Georgia Douglas Johnson. These people's aesthetics were seen in his work. They also helped get his work into various magazines for exposure.

Nugent's work resurfaced in anthologies such as Michael J. Smith's “Black Men/White Men: A Gay Anthology" (1983), and Joseph Beam's interview with Nugent in “In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology” (1986). His work after its resurfacing brought to light the lifestyle of black gay artists during the Harlem Renaissance. His use of codes made much of his work pass unseen by straight contemporaries under the disguise of biblical imagery for example. Nugent bridged the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the black gay movement of the 1980s and was a great inspiration to many of his contemporaries.

Bibliography

Shadow

My Love

Narcissus

Incest

Who Asks This Thing?

Bastard Song

Sahdji

Smoke, Lilies and Jade

The Now Discordant Song of Bells

Slender Length of Beauty

Tunic with a Thousand Pleats

Pope Pius the Only

On Harlem

On Georgette Harvey

On Gloria Swanson

Lunatique

Pattern for Future Dirges

Popular Culture

Film

As one of the last survivors of the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent was a sought-after interview subject in his old age, consulted by numerous biographers and writers on both black and gay history. He was interviewed in the 1984 gay documentary, “Before Stonewall,” and his work was featured in Isaac Julien’s 1989 film, Looking for Langston.

Brother to Brother is a film written and directed by Rodney Evans and released in 2004. The film debuted at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival before playing the gay and lesbian film festival circuit, with a limited theatrical release in late 2004.The film is concerns an art student named Perry (Anthony Mackie) who befriends an elderly homeless man named Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), who turns out to have been an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Through recalling his friendships with other important Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce chronicles some of the challenges he faced as a young, black, gay writer in the 1920s. Perry discovers that the challenges of homophobia and racism he faces in the early 21st century closely parallel Bruce's.

Theater

Smoke Lilies & Jade is a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) play by writer Carl Hancock Rux. Loosely based on Nugent's 1926 short story, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" (as well as elements of Richard Bruce Nugent's own life) the play concerns the psychological and moral growth of its protagonist Alex as he reflects on his love for a man named "Beauty" and a woman named "Melva", as well as the relationships, injustices and tragedies that eventually befell him and many of the Jazz Age's African American artists and intellectuals. The play was initially commissioned by The Joseph Papp Public Theater and later produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance.

Wikipedia

#Richard Bruce Nugent #07-02 #05-27

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96thdayofrage · 3 years ago

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365daysoflesbians · 8 years ago

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JANUARY 7: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

(photo credit)

“No I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” (How It Feels To Be Colored Me, 1927)

On this day in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston, was born in Notasulga, Alabama though if you asked her she’d tell you she was born in the only place she called home: Eatonville, Florida. The daughter of two ex-slaves, Hurston lived in the first all-black town in the United States from age three to thirteen. She was sent to a boarding school after her mother died when she was a teenager and was eventually kicked out because her parents didn’t pay tuition. While living with family in Jacksonville, FL, she found work as a maid before leaving for Washington D.C. There she took classes to get her high school diploma, worked as manicurist and waitress, and continued to write. In 1918, she began studying at Howard University and co-founded their student newspaper, The Hilltop. She earned her Bachelor’s from Barnard College, Columbia University in 1928, and spent the next two years in a graduate program as an anthropology student.

Living in Harlem during the 1930s and 40s, Hurston as the self-titled group Niggerati, Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman created a literary magazine called Fire!! which featured many artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Though they only published one issue, it created a bit of controversy as it contained art concerning homosexuality and prostitution.

Best known for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston wrote several essays, plays (including one with Langston Hughes), short stories, and novels as well as an autobiography. June Jordan explains in Notes Towards a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred that Hurston’s work wasn’t given proper recognition/acknowledgement because at the time, writers were focused on fighting white power and Hurston’s life and work weren’t concerned with such. She wrote to document the lives of black people without worrying about the way white audiences would receive it. At a time when many black writers were focused on presenting their people in a manageable arguably more sophisticated manner, Hurston told stories of her people specifically for her people (herself?).

Hurston traveled through the American South, the Caribbean, Jamaica, Haiti, and Honduras for anthropological research during the 1930s and 1940s.

Hurston married twice. In 1927 to jazz musician, Herbert Sheen, who later became a physician. In 1939, she married Albert Price but that lasted less than a year. Though Hurston was very private about her personal life “[s]he was close to a number of women” and as it wasn’t safe to be queer at the time, much less black and not-straight, “how intimate and romantic [her] relationships were remains open to speculation.” (OutHistory)

Though she continued to write in her later years, Hurston did not receive adequate compensation and had to support herself through odd jobs such as working in the library, substitute teacher, and maid. Hurston died alone and broke in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home on January 28, 1960.

Her work was ordered to be destroyed and pieces were salvaged by friend and law officer, Patrick DuVal, who passed by the house she lived in, as it burned. Though Hurston had written to W.E.B. DuBois asking for resources to be used to keep records of blacks so their lives wouldn’t fall into oblivion, nothing came of it and Hurston’s work fell by the wayside.

Although recognition of her life and work were lost for many years, in 1973 Alice Walker and Charlotte D. Hunt found an unmarked grave in the site where Hurston was thought to be buried, and labeled it with a gravestone of her own. Walker published an essay in Ms. Magazine titled “Looking For Zora” stating, “I realized that unless I came out with everything I had supporting her, there was every chance that she would slip back into obscurity.” (Alice Walker Shines Light On Zora Neale Hurston, PBS, 2014). Which is interesting when you read her stance on faith in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road:

“I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost” (Wikipedia, 2016)

Though Hurston's life was “ever changing, ever moving” she never remained lost.

Quotes From Hurston to add to your Fight the Power: Black Queer Women Manifesto

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

“All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.”

“I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.”

“you got tuh go there tuh know there.”

“Make the attempt if you want to, but you will find that trying to go through life without friendship, is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and not worth much after you get it.”

“truth is a letter from courage!”

“If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Sources: (x, x, x, x, x, x)

~Lex Lee.

#queer #queer history #women's history #zora neale hurston #black women #20th century #usa #literature #alice walker #365daysoflesbians #queer woc #black queer women #people

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vcubeyonce-blog · 6 years ago

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Black capitalism

“Beyoncé performs Black southern realism and her audience accepts this performance as genuine. Zandria Robinson’s analysis of the “Formation” video hails Beyoncé’s southern realism as decidedly transgressive in its “rec- ognition of the werk [sic] of ‘punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens’” and that, “Movements for black liberation are led by black folks at the margins who know we must all get free to sink that car.” It is plausible to suggest that, as an artist steeped in corporate music, Beyoncé’s racial performativity presents competing manifest (intentional) and latent (unintentional) functions. The last line of “Formation,” which is the nal track on the album Lemonade, gives us a glimpse into how individualism and capitalism inter- sect for her. She proclaims, “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.” is closing declaration borrows the Southern female gentility trope to mask an ethic of individual economic advancement synonymous with a broader capitalist agenda. There are deeper social consequences to her use of Southern realism here, most troublingly, a false mode of Black communal liberation.” -Mako Fitts Ward, "Queen Bey and the New Niggerati" page 153

This excerpt from the reading really stuck out to me because I did not know how to form an opinion or analyze it. I agree that celebrities do say things about money and wealth without realizing that the majority of their fans are nowhere near being in the same tax bracket as them. I do think that white famous and white non-famous people talk about their generational wealth without receiving any backlash because that's just a norm in society and its what is expected. Meanwhile famous people like the Carters are scolded for praising the generational wealth they have built for their families. I do think the Carters give back to their communities and do not forget where they came from. Beyonce says it herself as its noted in the text that she is proud of her Texan, Creole and southern Black heritage. She is unapologetically herself and although her fans are not wealthy like her they can appreciate her realness and her never switching up on her roots. Beyonce has worked her butt off. She is talented and is well deserving of her success and the coins that have come with it. In formation when she says “the best revenge is your paper” to me that can me your education. Having your “paper” or “degree” is a symbol of power and represents the wealth of the mind. Being Black and educated is something to boast about in the same way that people boast about having money. Beyonce is telling us hey get that education or go out their and find your passion and use it as a tool to create success to get that paper. Beyonce is saying be gracious be humble do not forget where you came from just because you made it out and got some money. Also a lot of people doubted Beyonce a lot of critics said she would not be this successful and she is shutting them up with her paper!

Maddie Jones

#vcubeyonce #submission

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nude110008000016 · 6 years ago

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Niggerati hands on my shoulder beyond the dirt.

I wonder if Wallace Thurman would of liked Frank. I feel like Dean Blunt would be more up his alley.

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fabulizemag · 7 years ago

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Now on http://fabulizemag.com/2018/01/when-zora-neale-hurston-died-alice-walker-bought-her-a-headstone/

When Zora Neale Hurston Died, Alice Walker Bought Her A Headstone

US writer Alice Walker pauses during an interview with the Associated Press in Gaza City, Tuesday, March 10, 2009. Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. author Alice Walker said a catastrophe has befallen Gaza and that she hopes she and others can help President Barack Obama “see what we see.” Walker, 65, and members of the U.S. anti-war group “Code Pink” toured Gaza this week, including an area destroyed in Israel’s recent war on the territory’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)

Black sisterhood is a remarkable bond that has helped drive our communities for centuries. There is nothing better than sisters looking out for each other. Personally, part of my growing and evolving into a better black woman was to embrace other black women. I am grateful that I grew out of the not wanting to befriend women stage and I recognize my life has become so much better with the number of black women I surround myself with. I am grateful for every black woman/femme/non-gender conforming person that has embraced me, both good and bad to help me unpack my problematic ways and to shine like the star I am meant to be. I read this story about Alice Walker buying Zora’s headstone and the gesture is nothing but love. I hope you enjoy it too.

From the Paris Review:

“Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under.

Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest.

“In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times,” Walker swore. Hurston was somewhere in the crummy segregated burial ground; trouble was, her grave was unmarked. “Zo-ra!” Walker roared. And, as if Hurston had shoved her, Walker stumbled into a sunken rectangle in the heart of the yard: presumably Zora.

At the local monument maker, Walker clocked a queenly headstone called Ebony Mist. It reminded her of Hurston when she was learning witchcraft at temples in Louisiana, and though Walker dearly wanted it, the issue of lucre obliged her to settle for a modest one—“pale and ordinary, not at all like Zora”—which she had cut with A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH.

I studied cultural anthropology at Orlando’s liberal-arts college, where Hurston was a bona fide heroine. She herself had done her anthropology studies at Columbia University, where she along with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were protégées of Franz Boas, the giant who institutionalized the vital participant-observation method. Papa Boas sent Hurston to Harlem with phrenology calipers to measure the skulls of pedestrians and give lie to the notion of Negro inferiority. She never finished her Ph.D., and turned instead to literature. When she came back down to Florida to do fieldwork, she essentially went AWOL on Boas, though she still shipped him oranges.

One summer, in what was mainly a ruse to dwell with a boyfriend in his parents’ beach house, I fulfilled my chemistry requirement at the local community college. We drove by Hurston countless times—we stopped to coo over manatees in waters minutes from her resting place. But until I, too, tried to look her up in Eatonville, I’d had no clue Hurston was so close by.

When I visited last October, the cemetery’s grass was buzzed down, but the Garden of Heavenly Rest remained dumpy. I offered Hurston a pair of ripe grapefruits. People often leave her balls of citrus, which figured into her fiction. People often leave purple things, too, in recognition, I think, of the Walker connection. The plot was flush with cash, dominos, a rhinestone statement necklace, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of sparkly red nail polish, and two bottles of Guinness.

Whether this corpse in this sandy earth belonged to Hurston is still uncertain. What’s more, the gravestone is wrong: it reads “1901–1960.” Zora had fibbed on her age and was born a full decade earlier, in 1891. She returned to Fort Pierce at the end of her life, in 1957. Her options had evaporated and she had scraped by, twice divorced, as a chambermaid, office clerk, substitute teacher, a journalist on a murder trial, and, if one of Walker’s sources had it right, a horoscope columnist. She was at work on an uncontracted biography of Herod the Great—a project fourteen years in the pipe—when she had a stroke and passed away in a county welfare home on January 28.

After my visit, I itched to read Hurston again. Her first published story was a ghost story, and when I spotted it collected among Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926—branded “feminist, turn-of-the-century American supernatural literature”—#MeToo was stirring and the timing seemed right. But I accidentally shipped the book to my parents’ address in Florida, then had the parcel rerouted to New York City. Once I had it in hand, I put off cracking it open.

Earlier this month, I packed Restless Spirits when I left for Paris during the cyclone bomb. Lo: the plane flew without luggage; my bag did not surface for weeks. As a result, I began leafing the 1996 anthology of twenty-two ghost stories by Hurston, Kate Chopin, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and others on the first anniversary of the Women’s March, which, in Paris, was pissed on by bitter weather and not well-advertised. Near the Eiffel Tower, a crowd of approximately a hundred people carried banners such as ENCORE FÉMINISTES and exhorted American expats to vote absentee in the midterms.

Reading this literature has been no comfort—your spine won’t shiver but your hands will wring. It ran in popular magazines such as Harper’s, Vogue, and The Atlantic over a fifty-year period during which, as the book’s editor remarks, the industrial revolution bent ideologies about the nature and role of being female to more brutal degrees. The short stories are organized into themes: matrimony, motherhood, sexuality, madness, widowhood, and spinsterhood. In them, fearful, enraged, desirous, pained, and restless American women have been made so by a culture we can still recognize today. The editor notes in her introduction that the supernatural was a safe way for the authors to confront their dissatisfaction via allegory. When they wrote about their world, she asks, is it any wonder that the ghosts they conjured, and those who saw, heard, and were able to listen to them were chiefly women?

In fact, “Spunk” (1925), Hurston’s Eatonville-set story about possession, supplies the anthology’s rare male ghost. In it, a gutless hubby manages to comes back to kill his wife Lena’s lover, who had killed him first. Only Lena survives the love triangle. It is pure woman-on-top Hurston, as she lived and breathed: the force who tripped Alice Walker in the cemetery when she dared to shout, “Are you out there?”

#Alice Walker #black women #black writers #feminism #womanism #Zora Neale Hurston #Art #CULTURE #FEATURES #Read &amp; Chill

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impossiblesomething · 7 years ago

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I’m having an “I’ve got better at home moment” with my multi signed copy of #karawalker dust jackets for niggerati #book (at Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn)

#book #karawalker

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are-scared-of-revolution · 8 years ago

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The Controversies of Kara Walker

Lucy McKeon | March 19, 2013

Guests at the Newark Public Library looking at Kara Walker’s “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos” (all photos by Heidi Cramer, courtesy the Newark Public Library, unless otherwise noted)

A photograph of Obama behind a podium hangs below the image of a glaring white cross, aflame. Black-and-white figures taper down the wall unceremoniously, but beautifully balanced amid scuffs and marks. This is a photograph of the artist Kara Walker’s studio wall, and she’s showing us the process by which her latest controversy was created.

Ever since she became the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1997 at 27, Walker has been considered “controversial.” Established artists — primarily (and it’s noteworthy that this fact is always emphasized) a handful of prominent black female ones — rejected her work as racist, offensive, even a willing “weapon against the Black community,” saidartist Howardena Pindell. Today a professor at Columbia, Walker has also been called “influential” — one of TIME’s 100 most in 2007, in fact. “Walker’s vigilance has produced a compelling reckoning with the twisted trajectories of race in America,” wrote the artist Barbara Kruger. “She is brave.”

In this conversation, emphasis is frequently put on Walker herself, who’s continually seen as a representative stand-in for her work. That work includes silhouette images, shadow puppetry, video animation, and distinctive large-scale black paper-cut Victorian silhouettes have covered the walls of numerous museums and public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. But Walker has always contended with her audience’s perhaps overactive perception of her; producing oil paintings in graduate school, she became tired of professors asking why her art didn’t look like her, presumably because it didn’t seem to deal directly or exclusively with “black experience.” With fame, she has become a kind of symbolic arena in which we wrestle with and work through questions of artistic representation, of race and history, of offense and censorship. Kara Walker, a black female artist investigating and playing with race, gender, and violence through her work, is herself the ground of contention.

Kara Walker, “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos” (2010), graphite and pastel on paper, 72 x 114 inches (© Kara Walker; image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.)

Her latest controversy concerns a drawing titled “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos” (this type of long, sentence-like naming is common for Walker), currently on display in the reference room of the Newark Public Library in Newark, New Jersey. The large 6-by-9½-foot drawing presents a “Guernica”-like chaos of anguished forms in graphite and pastel. But instead of the Spanish Civil War, the subject is race in America. The burning cross and Obama at the podium are there, as are images of struggle and abuse from slavery through Reconstruction and Jim Crow — most notably, a black woman whose face is being forced into the groin of a white man. As with the work’s title, these images complicate Martin Luther King’s faith in evolving justice.

While for many it clearly seemed an honor that art collector Scott London loaned the work, not everyone was pleased when the drawing was first displayed in December 2012. Multiple staff members complained, and the work was covered. Library Director Wilma Gray called a staff meeting and later explained that the two-week-long covering of Walker’s piece was meant only to give the library enough time to discuss and figure out how to move forward. “Censorship or Common Decency?” blazed the Star Ledger’s headline.

Gray invited Walker to the library to discuss her art before an audience on the evening of March 7. The well-known scholar and artist Nell Painter prompted Walker both with her own questions and those compiled from others, followed by an audience Q&A. Walker brought a slideshow of images, many from the 2011 exhibition Dust Jackets for the Niggerati, in which “The moral arc …” first appeared. She begins by showing us photographs of her studio during the creation of the work.

Nell Painter and Kara Walker at the Newark Public Library

“There’s a too-muchness about it,” Walker says, responding to a question about why art that addresses race and gender is so often considered inflammatory and rejected out of hand. “Dealing with race you’re already entering the terrain of too much,” she explains, “and when you add gender to that, because violence is implicit in each, the viewer might feel overwhelmed.” Add to this the “too-muchness” that Walker has earlier described as pervading all visual art: the mute quality of drawing that potentially makes the viewer feel more complicit in what’s going on, and the fact that images come at the audience in their all-at-once entirety, whereas for the artist, they’ve been unfolding over time. Looking at the finished product might feel less like an autonomous action than a confrontation, even an attack.

Hence Walker is letting us, the audience, into her studio, her process. One question that has continually preoccupied her, she says, is how to be adequately black, or how to be black at all. This quandary — as much about external recognition as self-perception — has been reinvigorated in the Obama Age, when discussions about race, or the lack thereof, have the potential to expand the conversation as much as they threaten to collapse history. Concepts like “colorblindness” and “postracial” are proposed, rejected, and proposed again, while black writers and their works — among them Toure’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? and Baratunde Thurston’s How to Be Black — offer experience and anecdotes as a way of attempting to navigate the question of contemporary blackness. To Walker, black has long seemed “a solid thing” whose meaning evaded her. Her project as an artist, then, has been to try to unpack this difficulty in understanding.

Her first silhouette work, “Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,” plays with the melodrama and racial dynamics of Gone with the Wind. “The silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject — of not being able to look at it directly — yet there it is, all the time, staring you in the face,” Walker told Art21, describing the technique’s handling of the uniquely “bizarre construct of racism” in America.

The audience at the event

The folkloric aesthetic of silhouettes and shadow puppets bridges the temporal gap between the antebellum South and Walker’s biting and sometimes humorous handling of its legacies. “Humor has always been a kind of problem with my work, hasn’t it?” Walker replies to one question in Newark. “All of my work catches me off guard,” she says, and in this sense, it’s a success: “When I surprise myself, I often end up laughing.”

Silhouettes also allow Walker to reject prescribed identities while accepting limitations, she explains. Always interested in Beaux–Arts style, on the one hand, and grand historical paintings and cycloramas — “overwrought pontificating in visual form” — on the other, Walker recognized that both forms were considered “second class citizens of the art world.” So she made “riffs on types,” as she refers to them — self-reflective images once or more removed from immediate reality as well as the period they refer to, in which self-perception and historical myth can be simultaneously present and at odds.

“Is it even okay to make drawings of figures — of black figures — ” in the contemporary social moment in which we find ourselves? She wonders this aloud toward the beginning of the night in a soft voice and returns to the question again later on. Her tone is gentle and assured, even while admitting uncertainty. (When one audience member says they can’t hear her in the back, Walker acknowledges her soft-spokenness and explains that she is “a little anxious.” Her voice gets louder as the night goes on but never abandons its innate quiet authority.)

Walker’s question is not merely rhetorical, and to realize that points to the absence of defensiveness in her uncertainty. She may be a little anxious, but her openness is calming. Considering these images, this history, we may all be a little anxious. After the 1997 MacArthur controversy, Walker found herself pondering the audience’s responsibility in responding to art and wondered if it might not be beneficial for audiences — not just black ones but all audiences — to respond strongly to artistic representations every now and then.

Walker speaking with guests after the program

Slavery and its legacy are our common national history, not a niche issue, and images that engage with it would be inadequate if they weren’t sometimes viscerally provocative. Discomfort is often central to the complaint that something is “offensive,” but it can be provoked by a range of sources — clever satire or subversive art, hate speech or objectionable politics. The particular breed of discomfort isn’t always immediately distinguishable. “The promise of any artwork,” Walker said when her drawing was covered in December, “is that it can hold us, viewer and maker, in a conflicted or contestable space, without real world injury or loss.”

Requesting that an artist discuss her work can feel incongruous or reductive, in part because overemphasizing the intent can only ever amount to partial explanation. But considering an artist’s process, as well as an audience’s discomfort, may illuminate the differences in our vantage points from behind or before the canvas — may help us process the “too-muchness” of it all.

Kendell Willis, a library employee initially upset by the drawing, said he had a better understanding of the library’s position after meeting with officials. “They said there are a lot of things in artwork we don’t want to talk about,” he explained, “and that made absolute sense.”

Kara Walker in conversation with Nell Painter took place Thursday, March 7, from 6 to 8 pm at the Newark Public Library (5 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey).

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