Sunday, October 21, 2012

Mel Edwards: Rediscovering Someone Recognized


Rediscovering Someone Recognized

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Melvin Edwards in his studio, a former foundry, in Plainfield, N.J. More Photos »
Plainfield, N. J.
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“WALK around, but don’t hurt yourself,” the sculptor Melvin Edwards advised on a recent rainy afternoon as he led visitors through his studio. He was only half-joking. Mr. Edwards has worked in this former foundry since 1976, nine years after moving to New York from Los Angeles, and its 3,600 square feet is so crazily cluttered with towering piles of metal, tools, half-finished sculptures, duffel bags, yellowing newspapers, plastic Halloween skeletons and the like that people who have already visited tend to warn others away. (His dealer, the New York gallerist Alexander Gray, calls it, “a cross between ‘Hoarders’ and ‘Sanford and Son.’ ”)
Hanging near the entry were a group of sculptures from his Lynch Fragments series, the small welded-steel wall reliefs he has been making on and off since 1963, several of which can be seen in the survey “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,” which opens at MoMA PS1 on Sunday. From afar they suggest the sort of gestural abstraction associated with John Chamberlain or David Smith, but up close they reveal themselves to be of assemblage, made with half-submerged objects like chains, hammer heads and spikes that seem to struggle against one another.
It was hard to imagine how any art could have emerged from the chaos of the studio. “This was theoretically the wood room at one time,” Mr. Edwards said, walking past a table saw piled with lumber and cardboard boxes. In the cavernous metalworking room, he stopped to point out a group of rusty artillery shells, a row of dust-encrusted football and welding helmets, and a junked lawn mower, one of several he has on hand.
Any object — or any question — can prompt Mr. Edwards, 75, into a dizzying string of anecdotes, like the time he visited the original World Trade Center site, or how he keeps finding little chunks of aluminum from the army coffee pots that were made in the building long ago. A warm, burly man with a ready laugh, there is nonetheless an undercurrent of intensity to everything he says.
For instance, when he showed off a spade and shovel from Dakar, Senegal, where he and his wife, the poet Jayne Cortez, have lived part-time for 12 years, Mr. Edwards suddenly turned serious. Like many of the other objects here, he explained, these tools might be used to make a piece, or they might be transformed into sculpture themselves.
“In my world, anything might become something,” he said. “And if you stand there too long,” he added, laughing heartily, “you might, too.”
Today, the somethings the artist has produced during his half-century career are being rediscovered. Although he achieved early fame, with four solo museum exhibitions by age 33, including a project show in 1970 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he didn’t have his first commercial gallery show until he was 52. By then his career had already gone under the radar, much to the dismay of critics.
“Melvin Edwards is one of the best American sculptors,” wrote Michael Brenson in The New York Times in 1988. “He is also one of the least known.”
But now Mr. Edwards’s profile is quickly rising, partly because of his prominent role in “Now Dig This!” When the show opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last fall, one of the Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions, it re-established him as a pioneer whose early success helped open the door for a somewhat younger generation of African-American artists like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi.
“Mel Edwards was really an art star in Los Angeles,” said Kellie Jones, the Columbia University art historian who is the show’s curator. “The kind of career markers he had created visibility for African-American artists.” But until she began research, Ms. Jones added, “I had no idea.” (The discovery was especially jolting because she had known Mr. Edwards since childhood, when he ran in the same bohemian and political circles as her parents, the poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones.)
Interest in Mr. Edwards’s more recent work is also bubbling. Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea, which has represented him since 2010, will open a show of old and new work on Oct. 31. And the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is planning a retrospective in 2015. Catherine Craft, a curator at the Nasher, said she decided to organize the show after seeing the welded steel sculptures in “Now Dig This!” at the Hammer. “Having seen Mel’s work in reproduction I was so struck by how powerful they were” in person, Ms. Craft said, “and how incredibly fresh they seemed.”
She met Mr. Edwards last June at Art Basel where, to much acclaim, he recreated one of the four pieces from his 1970 Whitney exhibition as part of Mr. Gray’s presentation. Called “Pyramid Up and Down Pyramid,” it uses strands of barbed wire and the delicate shadows they cast against a wall to create two airy polyhedrons that allure even as they repel. As well as showing sculpture from the ’60s to the present, Ms. Craft now hopes to devote one gallery to replicating the entire Whitney show.

“I think that a lot of people in the art world are looking back at recent art history,” said Mr. Gray, whose coming gallery exhibition will also reproduce another Whitney piece employing barbed wire and chains. While collectors and younger curators love to discover unknowns, he added, these days they also seem to glean a thrill from “rediscovering the recognized.”
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Introduced to abstraction by his high school art teacher in segregated Houston, Mr. Edwards went to Los Angeles to study art in college, as “it was the only way to get out of Texas at the time.”
For some years he bounced between schools and took time off to work after starting a family with his first wife; he ended up at the University of Southern California on a football scholarship.
He became involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement. He was also fascinated by California’s midcentury European intellectual refugees, like the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely, his mentor at U.S.C. Although Clement Greenberg’s belief in art for art’s sake held sway at the time, Mr. Edwards was unconvinced. “That was what people were pushing, that your art had to be what they call ‘pure,’ ” he said. “But all my art history said art had been made all over the world for all kinds of reasons.”
His own coalesced in the racially charged environment of the times, which in Los Angeles culminated in the 1965 Watts riots. One event leading to that moment came in 1962, when the police raided a local Nation of Islam mosque and killed a worshiper. Mr. Edwards produced his first Lynch Fragment the following year. Called “Some Bright Morning,” the wheel-shaped piece sprouts a triangular blade and a biomorphic lump dangling from a chain, subtly suggesting both oppression and revolution.
While he had been showing sculpture for three years it was “an epiphany moment,” Mr. Edwards said. “I realized I had come onto something rooted in what I was interested in, politically and aesthetically.”
His first solo show, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, came in 1965, just before he graduated from college. Three years and several shows later, he left for New York, where he was promptly included in the second exhibition of the newly minted Studio Museum in Harlem and chosen to create the solo project at the Whitney — part of a new push on the museum’s part to embrace black artists.
About two dozen shows at regional and university museums followed, culminating in a 1978 survey at the Studio Museum. Yet his career in New York stayed somewhat on the margins. Although Mr. Edwards was in demand for public sculpture commissions, the resulting works usually ended up far from the art world, on university campuses or in housing projects. And his 30-year career retrospective in 1993 was at the Neuberger Museum of Art, a modest institution in Purchase, N.Y.
His longtime friend and supporter Lowery Stokes Sims, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, pointed out that when Mr. Edwards arrived in New York, Minimalism was the prevailing trend, and “the situation for black artists became inherently politicized,” she said. “There was a debate about whether black art should be abstract or figurative. The assumption was that if you made abstract art then you were copping out, that you were choosing to be with the mainstream.”
Yet at the same time, the Lynch Fragments were content-laden enough to be “tough stuff for the art world to take in.”
For years Mr. Edwards has felt deeply connected to Africa, where he has taught metalworking in several different countries. “They named me Grandpa Blacksmith,” he said, chuckling, of his time in Zimbabwe.
Then there is his longstanding commitment to public sculpture. At his studio, Mr. Edwards mentioned a piece he made in 1985 for Lafayette Gardens, a housing project in Jersey City. Called “Holder of the Light,” it involves huge discs of brushed stainless steel balanced against a zigzagging shape that suggests a lightning bolt.
Some years ago, hearing that the project had been torn down, Mr. Edwards assumed the piece had been sold for scrap. But to his surprise, it was soon reinstalled in the neighborhood. As he arrived to inspect it, a group of children emerged from a school bus screaming, “Yea, yea, the sculpture’s back!”
Recalling the moment, Mr. Edwards shook his head. “There’s no experience like that for making modern art,” he said.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Woman Beheaded for refusing to be a Ho!


Afghan woman beheads daughter-in-law for refusing prostitution, police say

A young woman had her head chopped off for refusing to prostitute herself - and one of the killers was her mother-in-law, police say.
The other was the mother-in-law's cousin.  And both admit it, according to Afghan police.
To most people, the slaying of 20-year-old Mah Gul is unimaginable.
But it's just "one more incident that highlights the violent atmosphere that women and girls face in Afghanistan and the region," Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said Thursday.
The killing happened Sunday in Herat province, in southwest Afghanistan along the Iranian border.
Gul's husband is a baker.  When he left home for work, his mother and her cousin tried to force the young wife into prostitution, said Noorthan Mikvad, spokesman for Herat police.
When she wouldn't do it, they beheaded her, he said.
In a statement, Nossel said women and girls in the region "are raped, killed, forced into marriage in childhood, prevented from obtaining an education and denied their sexual and reproductive rights. Until basic human rights are guaranteed ... these horrible abuses will continue to be committed."
The U.S. State Department says some "Afghan women and girls are subjected to forced prostitution, forced marriages – including through forced marriages in which husbands force their wives into prostitution, and where they are given by their families to settle debts or disputes."
Some families even knowingly sell their children into forced prostitution, the State Department said, "including for bacha baazi – where wealthy men use groups of young boys for social and sexual entertainment."
Herat police say their investigation found that Gul's husband and father-in-law were not involved in her killing.
CNN has extensively reported on the abuse of girls and women in Afghanistan, a nation where under Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, women were banned from classrooms, politics or employment. Women who wanted to leave home had to be escorted by a male relative and were forced to wear burqas. Those who disobeyed were publicly beaten. In some parts of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, locals were encouraged to blacken the windows on their homes so women inside could not be seen.
The Afghan government, including a woman running for the presidency of the country, has tried to make it relatively easier for young women to go school. In 2004, girls were formally guaranteed a right to an education under the Afghan constitution.
Yet major problems persist and girls are in extraordinary danger in part of the country. They are terrorized walking to school. In 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan, near Afghanistan, the Taliban issued an official edict mandating that no more girls should be able to go to school. That was after the Taliban had regained their stake in the control in the region after the 2001 invasion.
Girls and women's families sometimes abuse and kill them. In July, the Taliban executed a woman in public, justifying the killing by saying she had committed adultery.
In 2011, people around the world were appalled to learn about a then-13-year-old named Sahar Gul who had been married off to a member of the Afghan Army. Sahar said her husband raped her, and enraged that she didn't immediately conceive, her in-laws locked her in a basement for months. They tortured Sahar with hot pokers and ripped out her nails. Ultimately, she said, they wanted to force her into prostitution as punishment for failing her obligation as a woman.
Her face made famous on Time's cover, young Aesha had her nose and ears hacked off for running away from her husband's house. Aesha was brought to the United States. Her life continues to be hugely challenging as she's forever emotionally scared by the abuse she suffered.

Hey, Mr. DA, Drop Charges Against Stop and Frisk Protesters!


FW: Urgent Tuesday-No Jail Time for Carl Dix and the Stop & Frisk Protesters

Saturday, October 20, 2012 8:31 PM
From:
To:
jmarvinx@yahoo.com
Marvin X,

Here's the material we're putting out on the trial opening on Tuesday.  It would be good if you could make it out to the courthouse, and also if you could spread the word on this outrageous injustice.  The DA's office that is trying to put us in jail for protesting Stop & Frisk is the same one that couldn't, or wouldn't, put on an effective prosecution of the cops who murdered Sean Bell in 2006.

Carl



Please share this Alert:  

Monday, October 22, before we gather at Union Square for the 4:00 pm protest, CALL the Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown, starting at 9:00 am.
  718 286 6000.  Tell the DA to drop charges from November 19, 2011 on Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Robert Parsons, and Morgan Rhodewalt.
Put Stop-and-Frisk On Trial – Not the Freedom Fighters! 
No Jail Time for Carl Dix & the Stop-and-Frisk Protesters 


All Out to Defeat the Charges 
BE AT THE COURTHOUSE TO make clear to the authorities and all those watching these trials that many are with these defendants and see this prosecution as totally illegitimate.  Cornel West puts the call out on youtube.    We'll be delivering copies of this resolution to DROP the charges on Tuesday.  Please sign it now.
  • Tuesday October 23: Rally 8:45 am Trial 9:30 am Queens Criminal Court, 125-01 Queens Blvd, Kew Gardens Queens.
  • Tuesday October 30: Rally 8:45 am Trial 9:30 am 100 Center Street, Manhattan
  • Tuesday October 30: 6:30 pm Raise the Roof on the Legal Defense Fund Party, St. Augustine’s Church 290 Henry Street, Lower East Side.
Trials on outrageous charges against five courageous freedom fighters who put their bodies on the line to end the racist police policy of stop-and-frisk begin on October 23 and October 30. Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Morgan Rhodewalt, Bob Parsons and Noche Diaz could be jailed for 2 to 4+ years. 
Make no mistake: what is being put on trial here is nothing less than the ability and right to stand up and say NO MORE to the racist policy of Stop-and-frisk, which terrorizes Black and Brown people throughout the city.  
Without mass resistance and the actions of these people and hundreds more who put their bodies on the line in protest, stop-and-frisk would not now be so hotly contested in the city and the courts.  The even more urgent truth is that standing up to defend these freedom fighters has everything to do with putting an end to the crime of stop-and-frisk and the way a whole generation is being condemned to lives of criminalization, marginalization, brutality and the spirit-crushing, human-wasting confinement of the largest prison system in the world.   
The authorities want to punish these people for having stood up for justice, and through doing that deliver a message that anyone who resists their criminal injustice will pay a heavy price.  
This must not go down!  If we allow them to be convicted and jailed without a massive fight, the battle against stop-and-frisk and the whole spirit of resistance will be seriously weakened. But if many, many people stand with them in this legal battle, if we beat this back, then the movement will gain further initiative pulling more people into the struggle.  BACKGROUND: Carl Dix is a revolutionary leader who initiated, together with Cornel West, the movement to Stop stop-and-frisk and End Mass Incarceration, including by leading a series of courageous non-violent protests of civil disobedience at police precincts throughout the city.  Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Morgan Rhodewalt and Bob Parsons will be on trial in Queens on October 23 facing more than 2 years in jail for the protest in Queens on November 19, 2011.  The Queens District Attorney has piled charges on them, twice adding to the charges they faced months after their arrest.  This DA, who couldn’t or wouldn’t put on an effective case against the cops who murdered Sean Bell in 2006, is vigorously trying to put these freedom fighters in prison.  This makes it even more clear their intent to punish any who dare to stand up.  This only underscores the importance of people coming to court to demand the charges be dropped!  
On October 30 Noche Diaz, a leader in the movement to end mass incarceration who is known throughout Harlem as a member of the People’s Neighborhood Patrols and across the city’s campuses for speaking in classes against stop-and-frisk, goes on trial in Manhattan,facing more than 4 years in prison for politically calling out police who were brutalizing people.   
14 more defendants will be tried in 2 more trials in Queens, and on November 5 and 27 
in Brooklyn, for a November 1, 2011 protest at the 73rd Precinct, which has the highest rate of stop-and-frisk in the city.
What You Can Do: 
  •      Attend the trial Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.  Check for updates at stopmassincarceration.org
  •      Monday, CALL the Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown, starting at 9:00 am.  718 286 6000. Tell the DA to drop charges from November 19, 2011 on Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Robert Parsons, and Morgan Rhodewalt.
  •      Monday, October 29, call the Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance staring at 9:00 am.  212 335 9000.  Tell the DA to drop charges from October 21, 2011 and March 27, 2012 on Noche Diaz.
  • ·         Spread the word on these outrageous prosecutions. Stopmassincarceration.org.
  • ·         Contribute money to help meet the costs legal defense ($7000 so far).






"There is nothing more unrealistic than the idea of reforming this system into something that would come anywhere near being in the interests of the great majority of people and ultimately of humanity as a whole."  Bob Avakian--from BAsics.

You can't change the world if you don't know the BAsics.

Elliot Bey and Ancestor Goldsky Join Marvin X's Book Tour


Elliot Savoy Bey accompanies Marvin X coast to coast. Dr. M will also be joined by Ancestor Goldsky on djembe and trap drums. Goldsky has also accompanied Dr. M coast to coast. 



Friday, October 19, 2012

Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain (full album) (1080p)



The Moors were in Spain from 711 til 1492, thus Spain has a thousand years of African/Arab history and culture. What has Spain done since the fall of Granada, Seville, Toledo? Much of what we know as Spanish, including the language, is African/Arab,e.g., lettuce, lemon, jacket, shirt, etc. When Miles Davis' wife took him to a Flamenco concert, he got turned out/on to this music, but he was only getting turned on to himself. Clearly, he made himself at home. Love live Miles Dewey Davis! As historian DeGraft Johnson tells us, when General Tarik crossed into Spain in 711, it was an African victory, so let's be clear! It was the Moors who guided Columbus to the Americas. And when he arrived, what did he see but mosques, clear evidence the Moors had been here long before Europeans. Perhaps we should celebrate Moorish Day in the Americas rather than Columbus Day! Long live Prophet Noble Drew Ali!
--Dr. M

John H. Bracey: Obama- The Perfect President for White People