Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Askia Toure': The Unlimited Power of Art in Man

The Unlimited Power of Art in Man

04/11/2017 08:45 pm ET

Co-Founder of the Black Arts Movement Askia M. Touré Speaks and Art Lives - BLACK

3 Unpublished Poems in Editorial for National Poetry Month
www.oaklandnorth.net
This period is potentially entering into the second Civil War and the condition of African Americans and other peoples of colors and mirrors that of African Americans and Native Americans in the 1900s. We are still colonized. Askia Touré for this interview

“The Honorable Baba Askia Toure is the the sage and grio of culture and thought.  A man who was visited by Auset. Form the pyramid to the projects to the stars one of the major influences behind who I am today.”

“Free people don’t have to say “Black Lives Matter”. Free people don’t have to say that. That’s a known reality. Some of the more perceptive scholars have called this Post Reconstruction two.” Askia M. Toure, Poet and Black Arts Movement Legend
Art Man. Hear history. Art Askia Touré. Hear now? You listen to Askia Muhammad Touré and you will hear history. You will hear the tears, brimming. You will hear the joy swimming. Hoarse laughter circling. You will hear the pride, unmasked. Yes, a distinct color timbre of glee that is in that voice that is history as it keeps time with staccatoed alliteration and a vibrato that hums. A sweet soul. Magnificent soul of the Kora humming is his S’s. See history is made of men and women who did the work, made the time. Their time is history whose hearts sing as they walked the streets. To Harlem in the 1960s from Songhai in the 1400s, history is paved with blood sweat and tears. Hear? Bone crushing rhythms? Yes - it is loud, undeniable. And definite percussion. Authority. Animal skin on Djembe drum rapping. It is our voices come from the dark into the light of day. It is the sound of elections. It is the sounds of revolutions. Resistance. Soulutions. The earth’s heart beating is earthquakes and them- they voices. It is the beat of a man’s heart covered over in voice. And these hearts in unison, a great spirit force immortal. Risen. Now, history sits at a room in Boston and composes lines to not only record the record but carry the spirit forward. The voice carries on from the mouth of a svelte sage into the ears of youngs. Hear it now? Yes. It’s the voice of Askia Muhammad Touré. Black. Arts. Movement. It’s poetic dialect. Didactic. Red heart, earth center. Talk slowly beat. We are born again again and again. This fire rages. Calmed only by breezes
http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com
A Younger Askia Toure’ grabs the mike and speaks truth
Askia Muhammad Touré is a poet and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement. His works include African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004 (Africa World Press, 2007). Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Touré (Third World Press. 1999) From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide & Resistance! (Africa World Press. 1990) Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation. (1972 Songhai. Songhai Press, 1972). In 1989, he won the American Book Award for his work with poetry; In 2000, Stephen E. Henderson Poetry Award for Dawnsong and in 1996 Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute like in Chicago, Illinois.
WIND-CHANT: A DIVA “PROFILES” She was wild and fresh, a breeze from forever/ blown across frontiers of my life. Her whispers/ were soft, spring breaths stroking leaves,/ guiding them towards fecund maturity. I was/ rock, unbending, hopelessly rigid; but she/ found secret depths, emerald valleys glowing/ in her mind. Wind and rock, yin and yang,/ her golden voice sang in dark infinities,/ was sunlight where green reigned supreme/ in mythic landscapes extolling Summer./ My beautiful one, a hurricane sweeping/ the tropics, filling us all with emotion,/ insurgent devotion to all that surges and/ surrenders, sings and embraces totalities;/ emerges clean and whole to perpetual/ rhythms alive in melanin realms where/ lost voices haunt recurring dreamscapes,/ and spirits resurrect full moons, forever Eden. Toure Askia, April 2017
In 1961, Touré protested the assassination of Patrice Lumumba with Amiri Baraka, Calvin Hicks, Aishah Rahman, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Alex Prempe, Mae Mallory, and Maya Angelou at the United Nations. He is a former editor of the Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue and Black Star. He also participated in the rise of the Black Panther Party and helped write SNCC’s 1966 “Black Power Position Paper.” He is a former editor of the Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue and Black Star. The current Resistance finds roots gripped tightly in Askia Toure’s clenched black power fists.
These days, he resides and teaches in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a writer-in-residence in Boston at the now defunct Ogunaaike Gallery in Boston’s South End. He is currently working on a film about the Black Arts Movement and completing further projects and poems of his writing.
“Poets like Larry Neal and Askia Touré were, in my mind, new masters of the new black poetry... Askia had the song-like cast to his words, as if the poetry was actually meant to be sung.” — Amiri Baraka, poet and dramatist
But let’s ground these words to earth and bring the high talk to the earth’s granular vibrations. I’ve said it before - What a blessing it is to converse with the elders; to glean their wisdom with simple truths, simple talk. Their words are like a benediction. They are sonar bridges throughout the ages. Are we listening to our elders? What Askia Muhammad Touré embodies is the beauty of our elders. And we are a wealthy people. Billions is a meager number when compared to the riches of our soul, of our legacy. Our elders are rich with time, cosmic beings who know no limits. These are the shoulders upon which we stand upon. And this is the measure by which our children will look to us, their forebearers, a new power generation.
Askia expresses a pride in the next generation of millennials warriors and draws a line straight from the Harlem Renaissance to our current cultural milieu:
Elder Askia Toure’, as one of our preeminent poets, National Poetry Month might hold a particular significance to you. What kind of poetry have you been working on lately?
While having a background of modern lyrical and narrative poetry, rooted in the Blues/Jazz tradition of Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks, I found myself drawn to the epic, as a form for conveying specific cultural and spiritual experience. While a young poet, in the Umbra group, and later in John Killens’ writers workshop at Columbia University, I was advised by poet-critic Lorenzo Thomas to explore the works of the Negritude poets, Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas. While “abroad,” I discovered W.B. Yeats, and the Irish tradition, the Romantic Percy Shelley, and the Chilean bard, Pablo Neruda. I was deeply moved by Neruda’s Spanish Civil War poems, and the great epic, “Song of the Red Army at the Gates of Prussia” However, my major Neruda influence was his “Canto General,” or the General Song of South America. These influences inspired my volumes “From the Pyramids to the Projects”, and “Dawn Song!”. Currently, I’m working on my Nile Valley epic, “Isis Unbound, the Goddess Songs” which include my first Nile Valley short stories.
Rich, lyrical poetry that explores themes such as apocalypse, the Black Arts Movement and activism. Toure’s language reflects that of the biblical Pslams, which were not meant for dramatic reading but rather to be sung. Google Books
“The kids have went for the okie dokie with this thug rap” Askia Toure
As one of the founding voices of the Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement, you have witnessed Jazz at its height and the emergence of Hip Hop as a global sound. Where has black expression been and how has it informed the black American experience?
My view is that Black expression is, or dominates culturally, the “American” experience. African-American classical music “Jazz” is functionally “American” classical music! Jazz is the “voice” of Modern-Post-Modern era. Unfortunately, the U.S. is dominated by giant corporations, created and controlled by the Anglo elite, which has never accepted “Jazz” as American classical music. The liberal acceptance of Wynton Marsalis and his mentor, Stanley Crouch is a half-hearted motion to reflect the World’s recognition of “Jazz” as U.S. classical music.
“Jazz,” of course, is the music of the descendants of slaves, and therefore, could never be accepted by the descendants of the Anglo masters. The study, “This Is Our Music, Free Jazz, the ‘Sixties and American Culture,” by Professor Lain Anderson, University of Penn. Press, 2007, reflects this particularly “American” cultural dilemma.
As for Hip Hop, I view it as basically a youth musical expression of the Millennials, Black Arts’ grandchildren. Because of African-American national oppression, Hip Hop was interfered with by white musical corporations and transformed from youthful cultural pride with groups such as Sista Soulja, Queen Latifa, X-Clan, Common, KRS1 and Public Enemy into the degenerate “Gangsta Rap” thuggery, led by Lil Wayne & company. Within the original cultural imagery, young women were celebrated as beauties and “queens”, but with the Corporate “intervention,” the Lumpen “thug” negative was emphasized, and young Black females were denigrated as “chicken-heads, skeezers, bitches and “ho’s.” As a prominent Black journalist and novelist pointed out, his teen-age daughters complained that nobody sang them any love-songs! A negative “first” for Black urban Blues & Soul music.
“The poems in this collection address the cultural and spiritual needs of Black people. In Dawnsong! In these poems Toure takes the reader back to ancient Egypt and, at the same time, demonstrates the relevance of Egyptian history and, at the same time, demonstrates the relevance of Egyptian history and mythology to the lives of contemporary Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. “
MILES, BEYOND 2000: A FINAL ELEGY (for Miles Davis)
“Jazz is finished. We better get it together!” — Miles, 1975
Driving through America’s neon graffiti,/ one remembers Miles’ furious quest:/ a master disciplined, fiery, determined;/ a man—-zealous, powerful, elegant—-forging/ Driving through America’s neon graffiti,/ one remembers Miles’ furious q uest:/ a master disciplined, fiery, determined;/ a man—-zealous, powerful, elegant—-forging/ in the fluidity of grace: a dark, griot mind/
exploring depths of Inner Space—-and Time/ so marginal in his magical paradigm blazing/like a nuclear sun. Miles who created new/Essence and rhythms via Great Black Voices—/ orality, beyond puritan morality, unleashing/ Apocalypse. A prophet seeking visions, past/ Bluesy “style” collapsed beneath the ferocious/
Genocide of “Dollarism”: Anglo imperialists/ scheming to blast our Harlems into myriad/ Free Fire Zones among Dantesque Infernos./ So, how would life flourish within this/ Nation of Poets, Shouters, Screamers when/ the Blue Song fades in Urban Gulags,/ and only primitives remain among its echoes?/ Who would we be then: what ancient agony/ withered, though essential, awaits in bleak/ Silence spewed with crack pipes, condoms,/ glocks, and the shock of recognition among/ nameless, faceless spirits writhing in the dusk?
Askia Toure, April 2017
http://streamafrica.com
Askia Muhammad I (ca. 1443 – 1538), born Muhammad Ture or Mohamed Toure in Futa Tooro, later called Askia, also known as Askia the Great, was an emperor, military commander, and political reformer of the Songhai Empire in the late 15th century, the successor of Sunni Ali Ber. http://streamafrica.com
Your name is that of a kingdom governor, military strategist and statesman. He was renowned for encouraging literacy amongst his followers in in the Empire of Songhai. How has that name impacted your life?
My name change developed out of the Black Arts Cultural Revolution. While reaching back to Africa, and the Ancestors, we embraced what we discovered about African Civilization and history. I chose the Songhai emperor, Askia the Great, who was a legendary and inspiring leader and ruler of the Songhai empire of West Africa. We rebelled against the culture of our Anglo former enslavers, and sought to get rid of our “slave -read Anglo-Saxon- names.” We hoped to create radical, new traditions among us which we could leave to the younger generations. It was in that spirit, that Maulana Karenga and colleagues created the African holiday known as Kwanza, which has become a new tradition among our people.
Black Lives Matter - I ask you this question listening to a video in which you stated, “Free people don’t have to say “Black Lives Matter”. Free people don’t have to say that. That’s a known reality. Some of the more perceptive scholars have called this Post Reconstruction two.” - How do you believe that American Lives Matter at this juncture in World History?
This period is potentially entering into the second Civil War and the condition of African Americans and other peoples of colors and mirrors that of African Americans and Native Americans in the 1900s. We are still colonized. They have just shifted the slavery to the inner cities and prison industrial complex. The urban police in the cities across the country take the same position as the slave patrols. Matter of fact, the way black people are treated now, they are worse than the slave patrols. Because the slaves were considered valuable for their economic value in picking cotton. Now, an active minority appears to be capable of shooting down
I think it is critical as a senior activist, it is a number one on priority to engage the Millennials to make them aware of their legacy and to talk the history with them. I think that is very important. As we did in the 90s and 2000s, we will develop institutions whereby we can transform and transfer a lot of experience to the younger generation. They are very receptive they ask a lot of questions. A lot of our colleagues have sat down with them and we are so proud of them. A lot of them are the children of the buppies but in a lot of cases they went looking for the old folks that were the Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement. I am so proud of them. We got along instantly. They are sort of see us as living legends because they generally know the story of our struggle. We are to them what John Henry Clarke was to us.
I have known Toure when he was Roland Snellings and he was published in Soulbook, Journal of Black Poetry,Black Scholar and Black Dialogue Magazine. However, more importantly, when I arrived in Harlem in 1968, he was the one who gave me a tour. When I came back to the US as a draft dodger, I departed Chicago for Harlem after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. Askia was the one who gave me my tour of Harlem. I was working at the Lafayette Theater with Ed Bullins. We were associated with the Last Poets, LarryNeal, Barbar Anne Teer, Nikki Giovanni, Sonja Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra. We were all there together. Marvin X Jackmon a.k.a. El Muhajir, co-founder of the Black Aesthetics Movement, Black Arts Movement, publisher www.themovementnewsletter.blogspot.com 
Askia Toure and Marvin X, co-founders of the Black Arts Movement
blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com
I am going to tell you just to cut to the chase, the most significant event I attended with Askia. We were at Spelman College in Atlanta and we were doing poetry readings. Askia was reading a poem about Venus and Serena Williams. He read that poem and of course it glorifies the ebony woman and everything that they represent. After he read this poem and applause broke out in the audience, we were afraid. I had never experienced applause like that as the response was like an earthquake. The whole room shook. I think Askia was afraid as well because it was so powerful. But that is the power of his work.” Marvin X a.k.a. El Muhajir, poet, playwright and essayist
We created the largest black cultural movement in the history of the United States. We created the black arts journals. We created over 20 journals of various regions of the United States from the east coast to the uni And yet there is no mention of that throughout the literature.
What really disturbs me is that the establishment would not deal with our work because you are dealing with a society that tries to ignore those contributions but the fact is that the black literary world would not exist without our movement and has romanticized the Harlem Renaissance. Because I came from the Umbra black magazine which came under the authority and guidance of Langston Hughes. So we always revered papa Langston but what you have now is assimilationist Negros who would not deal with their own heritage because. The movement was basically created by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and myself.
Later, there was Nikki Giovanni in Chicago due to Negro Digest Hoyt W. Fullard and Hakeem Donnell Reed and the writers and artists out of Chicago. It went out to the West Coast with Marvin X. Jackmon and Eldridge Cleaver. All across the country we were linked up. Out of New Orleans, it was John Dent. Umbra magazine was the message for all of that. We were all in it, in Chicago and Detroit and so forth. We put forth major movement. These assimilist Negros were ducking and dodging in the 1960’s until now.
____________________________
See now? Askia Muhammad Toure’ is the spirit unrivalled in living and the spirit fleshed from ancient ruler to ruling griot, the times were not lost on him but made by him, enhanced by him, made whole by metaphysical knowings. How are we born? How will we die? Askia Toure is not concerned with that. The charlatans flee his presence. He knows the secrets and it is within how we live, enhanced by an eternal fire with no end, lighting days and ending nights. Black Pride! Fire that crushes the narcissism, barbarism and nihilism of capitalism. From the Niles to the Kilimanjaro, he carries within a barrel chest broad, the beat for generations- from Black Power Movement to Millennials carrying forth the fight for black liberation, from the pride of ancients, his is the voice carrying instruction. Black Panthers strut tall and long. From the tall grass of the Sahara to the Oakland, Chicago, Detroit and NYC urbans. From the Pyramids to the Streets of Harlem, his is instruction that will born Hip Hop, make the world spin like on boogie. Instruction that will born the new era hereto un-named. Instruction that will cleanse itself and renew the contract for our beautiful women, through whom travel the unborn, the unknown, the new heroes. King griot Askia Muhammad Toure’ - He is ours, a smile as broad as the heavens, dimples deep as waterfalls cascading. Our living, breathing liberation. No cheap commercial, this the real thang, a cosmic heart beating. His is the divine masculine, percolating territories from ancient kingdoms to afro- futuristic landscapes. In his palms, the palm lines are oceans and mountains, hereto un-named. Futures unfurling with great African names. A mystic preacher, metaphysical in form, his is the wisdom of the ages, the metaphysics of the sages, raging fierce for the divine feminine, every syllable uttered, a sly tryst increasing the entwinement betwix his masculine and her feminine. Oh, how Askia Muhammad Toure’ loves his woman. He loves his women as only black man with a black soul could. He would kill for his women but so much more powerful is his towering vulnerability and gentle soul, he will live for his black woman, and passage of time will not still this beautiful will. His is the terrible fire sweeping through towering myriad conscience, keeping us straight woke! His is the spirits and souls and tribal edicts of technologies that are coals waiting to be be lit by new soul, new knows, new millennials. Askia Muhammad Toure’s is the immortal soul of our beloved ancestor resurrected. A mythic figure beyond time.
CANDACE/1
She was blue(s), a deep indigo;/ her vital spirit vibrated/ an enchantment of cool silver,/ like a nightclub scenario:/the bloods blowing strong/ in every mellow key, reaching/ harmony on Duke’s “Satin Doll.”/ And the tonal/emotional nuances/ vibrated through one’s intimate/ universe. All of this embodied/ in her Solo: her Life Song, among/ dreams & vistas of subtle karma./ She was cool vibes by Milt,/Ramsey’s immaculate arpeggios/ echoing a vital sensuality/ of melanin realms “when dawns/ were young.” She was woman/ and myth—primal, elegant, splendid—reborn in puritan/ climes, among pioneers and/ corporate satraps, millennia/ from Napata; subtle regal cool.
Note: The Candaces were the female rulers of Kush, the only “Queendom” of recorded history. They challenged Rome, and attempted to liberate Kmt (Egypt) from Roman rule. Napata was their 1st capitol.
________________________________

Askia Muhammad Touré Awards

  • 1989 American Book Award
  • 2000 Stephen E. Henderson Poetry Award for Dawnsong
  • 1996 Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute like in Chicago, Illinois.

Works

THE MORNING EMAIL
Start your workday the right way with the news that matters most.
  • African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004. Africa World Press. 2007. ISBN 978-1-59221-554-6
  • Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Touré. Third World Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-88378-209-5
  • From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide & Resistance!. Africa World Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-86543-135-
  • Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation. Third World Press. 1972
  • Songhai. Songhai Press. 1972
  • Isis Unbound, the Goddess Songs (TO COME)

Monday, April 10, 2017

Syria: poems by Marvin X and Mohja Kahf


Two Poems for the People of Syria



Oh, Mohja
how much water can run from rivers to sea
how much blood can soak the earth
the guns of tyrants know no end
a people awakened are bigger than bullets
there is no sleep in their eyes
no more stunted backs
fear of broken limbs
men, women children humble with sacrifice
old/young play their roles
with smiles endure torture chambers
with laughs submit to rape mutilations
no victory oppressors
days numbered
as the sun rises
let the people continue til victory
they smell it on their hands
taste on lips
believe in hearts
know it in minds
no backwardness no fear
resistance til victory.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir




Syrian poet/professor Dr. Mohja Kahf


Oh Marvin, how much blood can soak the earth?

The angels asked, “will you create a species who will shed blood

and overrun the earth with evil?” 

And it turns out “rivers of blood” is no metaphor: 



see the stones of narrow alleys in Duma

shiny with blood hissing from humans? Dark

and dazzling, it keeps pouring and pumping

from the inexhaustible soft flesh of Syrians,

and neither regime cluster bombs from the air,

nor rebel car bombs on the ground,

ask them their names before they die. 

They are mowed down like wheat harvested by machine,

and every stalk has seven ears, and every ear a hundred grains.

They bleed like irrigation canals into the earth.

Even one little girl in Idlib with a carotid artery cut

becomes a river of blood. Who knew she could be a river 

running all the way over the ocean, to you,

draining me of my heart? And God said to the angels, 

“I know what you know not.” But right now,
the angels seem right. Cut the coyness, God;

learn the names of all the Syrians.

See what your species has done.

--Mohja Kahf

Friday, April 7, 2017

40th Anniversary of Roots, Saturday, April 8, 2017, Oakland


Reverse Psychology: From Toby to Kunta

In my essay The Psycho-linguistic Crisis of the North American African, we discussed language usage as a primary component in the destruction of the African mind brainwashed with European language and mythology. But this psycho-linguistic transformation was carried out with the black bullwhip on the Black African's ass. It was "shock therapy" that forced Kunta Kinti to renounce his name or African identity and become the so-called Negro Toby! So how do we reverse the process to resurrect the African personality buried in the deep structure of the socalled Negro mentality, yes. that mind steeped in passivity, sloth and ignorance? Must not the whip be employed as it was in the original experiment? Well, what did Elijah Muhammad mean when he said, "We must force Black unity!"? What type of force must be employed? If it is physical force, then he meant the whip! If we sense a sado-masochism here, what was life in the American slave system?
--Marvin X

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Norman Richmond, Our Man in Toronto, Canada, Back on FM Dial with Diasporic Music

Diasporic Music back on the FM Dial


Diasporic Music which started on CFNY-FM in Toronto a few days after
Bob Marley joined the ancestors in May 1981 is back on the radio dial.
Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali and Malinda Francis aka Mali
Docuvixen can now be heard on http://blackpower96.org/
www.uhururadio.com which is based in St. Petersburg, Fla. The show is
heard every Sunday from 2pm to 4pm

The show was featured on CKLN-FM 88.1 in Toronto and was one of the
most popular shows on the station and the city. Richmond also produced
and hosted Saturday Morning Live and From a Different Perspective,
Many who Richmond mentored have gone on to host TV and radio show on
the CBC, Flow 93.5 and G98.7.

Richmond quotes Junie Morrison (Ohio {Players, Parliament/Funkadelic},
“We've been around for such a while/ Be kinda hard not to have a
style”.


The show features one hour of interviews and one hour of music. The
show has interviewed Gerald Horne, Efia Nwangaza, Abdul
Alkalimat,Lawrence Hamm, Ezili Danto, Rupert Lewis, Abayomi Azikiwe,
El Jones, Marvin X, John Woodford, and others.

Richmond was the first and one of the only people to broadcast the
commentaries of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the Great White North.

Richmond says he has a “Marcus Garvey Mix” and plays music from Cape
Town to Nova Scotia. Abdullah Ibrahim aka Dollar Brand, Shauntay
Grant, Maestro Fresh Wes, Michie Mee, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Calypso
Rose,  Motion and others are featured on the show weekly.

Richmond is can be reach at norman.o.richmond@gmail.com

Sunday, March 5, 2017

BAMBD calls  for community support of the Berkeley Flea Market

Remember the time when the Berkeley Flea Market was the chief market place of North American Africans and Africans from the Diaspora? Remember when it was the crossroads of  Pan African culture in the Bay?
Well, if vendors and shoppers don't rush to keep it alive, it is in serious danger of closing down. The non-profit corporation which operates the Flea Market at the ASHBY BART Station are threatening to close the market on Sundays because they cannot afford the expense of Sundays due to the low turnout of vendors and customers. A petition was circulated demanded it remain open on Sundays but it is a business and no business can remain operating in the red! This is an economic reality.

Of course we know gentrification or ethnic cleansing has decimated the North American population in Berkeley, the Bay Area and throughout the US. Thus it is not surprising the ASHBY Flea Market is in dire straights. But we think it can be resuscitated with Pan African Unity, otherwise it will join the dustbin of history of other cultural/economic districts such as West Oakland and the Fillmore in San Francisco.

ASHBY Flea Market organizers have called upon Oakland poet/playwright/organizer/planner  Marvin X and the  Black Arts Movement Cultural and Business District (BAMBD)  planners to assist in a revival of the Berkeley Flea Market. The BAMBD planners have agreed to help in the resuscitation of the market so vital to Berkeley's Pan African identity, even though BAMBD planners realize the ASHBY Flea Market may suffer a fate similar to the BAMBD unless there are investment partnership agreements with Berkeley developers who eye the flea market space as ideal for expanding the long planned Berkeley corridor from downtown Berkeley through the Lorin District to downtown Oakland which will erase the traditional North American African presence in South Berkeley. Alas, this is why the cause is lost unless North American Africans and those of the Diaspora unite in Pan African unity to push back those reactionary pseudo liberal whites who have no qualms about further displacement of North American Africans in Berkeley. For a clearer perspective on how North American Africans view their situation, we suggest they check in with Berkeley NAACP president Al Mansour who has described the fight for space and place as ethnic cleansing, to the utter dismay of Berkeley's pseudo liberal whites. Alas, shall we quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "I'd rather deal with the KKK than pseudo white liberals.!"

The BAMB will do all we can to keep the ASHBY Flea Market alive as a symbol and reality of North American African cultural and economic identity and independence. But your help is needed as vendors, cultural workers, artists and customers. We are begging you to vend at the ASHBY Flea Market; we are begging you to shop at the market in the name of self-determination and cooperative economics. Let's bring this cultural and economic entity back to it's former glory as the cross-roads of Bay Area cultural livelihood!

At present, other ethnic groups benefit from our consumerism as per spending with other than our own kind, even at the ASHBY Flea Market. There are a plethora of ethnic groups who sell to us but will never buy from us. This has got to stop. I talk about this in my Parable of the Donkey. North American Africans are the donkey of the world: any ethnic group can set up shop in our community and prosper, send money back to their home countries while we go down down down.

I was elated this morning at the ASHBY Flea Market when I purchased coffee and peace cobbler from a sister and she gave me change with bills marked with red, black and green, the colors of  the Pan African nation. She said her mother had told her to mark bills in this manner. I informed her I shall mark all my bills the same way.


  • Marvin X and Vendor Nur Jehan       
UPDATE ON BERKELEY FLEA MARKET

The Berkeley Flea Market and the Juneteenth Committee have tentatively agreed to unite for the success of both entities. We should expect the 2017 Juneteenth to include the Berkeley Flea Market. Stay tuned as we seek to give new life to the Berkeley Flea Market, crossroads of North American African culture and African Diaspora culture, as well as culture and economic activity of global ethnic groups.

As per North American Africans, this Saturday, there were North American African visitors from Brooklyn, New York, Alabama and elsewhere. One brother from Brooklyn who works at Medgar Evers College, recognized Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner booth and asked when he was coming back to Brooklyn. Marvin responded, "When you invite me!"
 
--Marvin X
2/25/17

Monday, February 27, 2017

Author Prosperity Carter: How to Get Off the Shelf Collecting Dust


Poet/author Prosperity Carter with customer holding her poetry collection Beyond Fame


At the Tampa, Florida Black Expo, poet/author Prosperity Carter dusts off  a customer checking out her forthcoming book How to Get Off the Shelf Collecting Dust. She will be featured in the March issue of The Movement Newspaper, Voice of the Black Arts Movement International, of which she is Associate
Editor. In May, Prosperity will study at the University of Ghana, West Africa. While in Ghana, she will be hosted by The Movement's Pan Africa Editor, Hip Hop diva Muhammida El Muhajir, now residing in Accra. While in Africa she will be on assignment for the Oakland Post News Group. Prosperity is now available for speaking and reading engagements coast to coast and globally. Contact the Black Arts Movement Speakers and Artists Bureau: 510-200-4164; mxjackmon@gmail.com

www.themovementnewsletter.blogspot.comr

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Black Women Artists History has Overlooked

Museums Celebrate The Black Women Artists History Has Overlooked

See their work. Know their names. Learn their stories.

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the artist; c. Lois Jones Mailou
Lois Mailou Jones, “Ode to Kinshasa,” 1972, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 36 in.
On the first day of Black History Month, the good people at Google blessed the internet with a doodle honoring Edmonia Lewis, the first woman of African-American and Native American descent to earn global recognition as a fine arts sculptor.
Lewis, who grew up while slavery was still legal in the United States, became known for her hand-carved, marble sculptures of influential abolitionists and mythological figures. In part because Lewis made all of her sculptures by hand, few originals or duplicates remain intact today. She died in relative obscurity in 1907, and, to this day, remains lesser known than many of her white, male contemporaries.
This well-deserved tribute to Lewis got us thinking about the other black women artists whose contributions to the history of art have been similarly overlooked or undervalued. So we reached out to museums across the country, asking which artists past and present deserve our attention, too. Below are nine of those artists: 

1. Pat Ward Williams (b. 1948)

Whitney Museum of American Art / Purchased with funds from The Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation
Pat Ward Williams, “Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock,” 1986, wood, tar paper, gelatin silver prints, film positive, paper, pastel, and metal, overall: 61 13/16 × 108 1/4 × 3 in. (157 × 275 × 7.6 cm)
Pat Ward Williams is a Los Angeles-based contemporary photographer whose work explores the personal and political lives of African-Americans. Initially, the artist set out to disrupt the homogenous way black life was captured on camera. “We always looked so pitiful, like victims,” she told the LA Times. “I knew I was a happy person. There were aspects of the black community that weren’t being shown.”
Attempting to break past photography’s tendency to linger on surfaces, Williams incorporates other media and methodology into her process, yielding mixed media collages that collapse past and present, history and imagination.
Her most famed work, featured above, features a photo of a bound black man chained to a tree, pulled from a 1937 issue of Life magazine. “Who took this picture?” Williams writes in the margins of the photo. “How can this photograph exist?”
Jamillah James, a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, wrote to The Huffington Post: “Pat Ward Williams’ prescient, complex meditations on race, history, and representation, such as her landmark “Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock” (1986), resonate with a particular urgency and relevance in today’s cultural climate. Her combination of photography, found materials, and text engages viewers in a perceptual tug of war between what they see, their own associations, the artist’s voice, and the weight of history.” 
Shared courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

2. Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998)

Smithsonian American Art Museum
Loïs Mailou Jones, “Initiation, Liberia,” 1983, acrylic on canvas, 35 1/4 x 23 1/4 in. (89.6 x 59.1 cm
Loïs Mailou Jones was a Boston-born painter whose plentiful, 70-year art career spanned North America, Europe and Africa. Her eclectic style shifted over time, taking inspiration from African masks, French impressionist landscapes and bright Haitian patterns. An active member of the Harlem Renaissance, she used vibrant visuals to heighten the urgency of her politically charged works, which addressed the joys and challenges of black life.
Mine is a quiet exploration,” the artist famously said, “a quest for new meanings in color, texture and design. Even though I sometimes portray scenes of poor and struggling people, it is a great joy to paint.”
Throughout her career, Jones experienced discrimination as a black artist. For example, when she first began showing her artwork, she reportedly asked white friends to deliver her works to exhibitions in an effort to hide her black identity. She did so with reason ― according to The New York Times, she’d had an award rescinded when the granter learned she was black.
After teaching at an African-American art school in segregated North Carolina, Jones eventually took a position at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she taught for 47 years. Upon retiring, she continued to paint and exhibit her work until she died at 93 years old. Despite not being a household name to some, her art lives on in esteemed institutions like the National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
Shared courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

3. Alma Thomas (1891–1978)

Smithsonian American Art Museum / Bequest of the artist
Alma Thomas, “Antares,” 1972, acrylic on canvas, 65 3/4 x 56 1/2 in. (167.0 x 143.5 cm)
Alma Thomas, born in Columbus, Georgia, moved to Washington, D.C., with her family as a child to avoid the racial violence in the American South. Interested in art from a young age, Thomas was the first student to graduate from Howard University with a degree in fine art. There, she studied under Loïs Mailou Jones while adopting an aesthetic of her own. 
Thomas’ style pulls elements from Abstract Expressionism and the Washington Color School, drawing from the splendor of nature to create nonrepresentational canvases that sing with soft vitality. Famously, Thomas was most inspired by her garden and would watch with fascination as the scenery changed around her. 
I got some watercolors and some crayons, and I began dabbling,” she said. “Little dabs of color that spread out very free ... that’s how it all began. And every morning since then, the wind has given me new colors through the windowpanes.”
Jones taught at a junior high school for most of her life, making work on the side. She had her first exhibition at 75 years old, later becoming the first woman to have a solo exhibition at The Whitney. 
Shared courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

4. Laura Wheeler Waring (1877–1948)

Smithsonian American Art Museum/ Gift of the Harmon Foundation
Laura Wheeler Waring, “Anna Washington Derry,” 1927, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.5 cm)
Laura Wheeler Waring, raised by a pastor and teacher in Hartford, Connecticut, was interested in art as a child. In 1914, she travelled to Europe, where she studied the old masters at the Louvre and specifically the works of Claude Monet. When she returned to the United States, due to the encroachment of World War I, Waring went on to teach and lead the departments of art and music at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers. 
Although Waring worked in landscapes and still lifes, she is most celebrated for her paintings, which depicted accomplished black Americans with dignity and strength. Her most well-known series is the 1944 “Portraits of Outstanding American Citizens of Negro Origin,” which featured depictions of individuals including W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson and James Weldon Johnson.
During the Harlem Renaissance, Waring also contributed pen and ink to the NAACP magazine The Crisis, working alongside activists to address probing political issues. An exhibition of Waring’s work showed a year after her death at the Howard University Gallery of Art.
Shared courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

5. Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939)

The Studio Museum in Harlem / Gift of the Lannan Foundation
Barbara Chase-Riboud, “Le Manteau (The Cape),” 1973, cronze, hemp rope, copper.
Born in Philadelphia, Barbara Chase-Riboud began taking art classes at a young age. As a student at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, she sold a woodcut to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By the time she graduated from Yale with an MFA, she had a sculpture on view at the Carnegie Mellon Institute.
The artist is known for her larger-than-life sculptures made from cast metal and shrouded in skeins of silk and wool, the strange lovechildren of a suit of armor and a ballgown skirt. At once strong and fluid and feminine and mechanical and natural, the stunning works became a symbols for feminine strength, as well as a visual manifestation of transformation and integration. 
I love silk, and it’s one of the strongest materials in the world and lasts as long as the bronze,” the artist said. “It’s not a weak material vs. a strong material [...] the transformation that happens in the steles is not between two unequal things but two equal things that interact and transform each other.”
Chase-Riboud, who currently lives between Paris and Rome, is also an award-winning poet and novelist, known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings, about the non-consensual relationship between former President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.
Shared courtesy of theThe Studio Museum in Harlem.

6. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960)

Brooklyn Museum Fund for African American Art in honor of Saundra Williams-Cornwell
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, “Untitled (Head),” ca. 1930, wood, head without base: 12 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 7 in. (31.8 x 16.5 x 17.8 cm).
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was raised in Rhode Island by an African-American mother and a Narragansett-Pequod father. She attended the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design where she studied painting and drawing, notably portraiture, and worked as a housekeeper to pay tuition. She graduated amidst the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance. 
In 1922, Prophet moved to Paris, in part frustrated by the racism rampant in the American art scene. Despite being broke and exhausted, she was creatively invigorated by the change of scenery and began creating sculptural portraits from materials including wood, marble, bronze, plaster and clay. Of the works, art historian James Porter wrote (quoted in Notable Black American Women): ”The pride of race that this sculptor feels resolves itself into an intimation of noble conflict marking the features of each carved head.”
Despite the fact that her sculptures were exhibited at high-society salons, Prophet herself remained impoverished abroad, eventually forcing her to move back to the States. There she continued to submit her sculptures to galleries and competitions, while also teaching art at both Atlanta University and Spelman College. (She was rumored to bring a live rooster to class for her students to sketch.)
Eventually, Prophet moved back to Rhode Island ― in part, again, to escape segregation ― at which point her career slowed down dramatically. Although few of her sculptures are accounted for today, one is housed in the permanent collection of The Whitney in New York City.
Shared courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

7. Maren Hassinger (b. 1947)

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles / Gift of the artist
Maren Hassinger, “A Place for Nature,” 2011, wire rope, dimensions variable
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Maren Hassinger began dancing at the age of 5. She intended to continue studying dance as a student at Bennington College, but ended up switching to sculpture. In 1973, she graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in fiber art. 
In her work, Hassinger combines elements of sculpture, performance, video and dance to investigate the relationship between the natural and industrial worlds. Her commonly used materials include wire, rope, garbage, leaves, cardboard boxes and old newspapers, often arranged to encourage movement, as if the sculptures themselves are engaged in a dance. 
Hassinger’s work explores personal, political and environmental questions in an abstract language that allows viewers to come to their own conclusions. “All the pieces with boxes are about our gross need to consume, and where it leads us,” she once told BOMB. “Where is the bleeding heart in all of this? I don’t think my work has so much to do with ecology, but focuses on elements, or even problems we all share, and in which we all have a stake.”
Since 1997, Hassinger has served as the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. 
Shared courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

8. Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982)

Gift of Judith Alexander / Photo by Gavin Ashworth
Nellie Mae Rowe, “Untitled (Two Figures and Animal,” Vinings, Georgia, 1979–1980, crayon, felt-tip marker, and oil pastel on paper, 15 × 11”
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in rural Georgia, one of nine daughters. Her father, a former slave, worked as a blacksmith and basket weaver; her mother made quilts and clothes. She married at 16 and, when her husband passed away, married another widower at 36. When he died, Rowe was 48 years old and began a new life as an independent woman and an artist. 
Rowe referred to her blossoming interest in art as a chance to re-experience childhood. She began to adorn the exterior of her house, which called the “playhouse,” with stuffed animals, life-sized dolls, animal-shaped hedges and sculptures made of chewing gum. 
Along with her installations, Rowe created vibrant and flat drawings from humble materials like crayon, cardboard and felt-tip markers. Her images normally consisted of humans and animals swallowed by colorful, abstract designs and often referenced personal struggles in her own life. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981, Rowe channeled her emotions into her work, grappling with her changing body and attitudes towards death through bold, symbolic imagery. 
I feel great being an artist,” Rowe famously said. “I didn’t even know that I would ever become one. It is just surprising to me.”
Shared courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.

9. Senga Nengudi (b. 1943)

Hammer Museum / Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
Senga Nengudi “Revery - R,” 2011, nylon mesh, metal springs, sand, 22 1/2 x 15 x 6 in. (57.2 x 38.1 x 15.2 cm) 
Senga Nengudi was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Los Angeles, California, soon after. She studied art and dance at California State University, where she received her BA and MFA. In between degrees, she spent a year studying in Tokyo, where she was inspired by Japanese minimalist tradition as well as the Guttai performance art groups. 
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Nengudi was an elemental force in New York’s and Los Angeles’ radical, avant-garde black art scenes, though her acclaim never quite spread to the mainstream. Along with artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, she formed Studio Z, an artist collective that shared a love for abandoned materials and overlooked spaces. The collective often wore costumes and carried instruments to improvise performances at unlikely locales like freeway underpasses or abandoned schools. 
Nengudi’s most iconic sculptural performance project, called “R.S.V.P.,” featured pantyhose as a central material. Exploring the everyday object’s relationship to skin, constriction, elasticity and femininity, Nengudi stretched and warped the sheer undergarments so they resembled sagging body parts and abstract diagrams. She’d often recruit collaborator Hassinger to activate the sculptures by dancing through them, privileging improvisation as the mode of ritual. 
When we were kicked off the boat, improvisation was the survival tool: to act in the moment, to figure something out that hadn’t been done before; to live,” Nengudi told Hyperallergic. “And the tradition goes through Jazz. Jazz is the perfect manifestation of constant improvisation. It has to be in place at all times. Constant adjustment in a hostile environment, you have to figure something out right away.”
Shared courtesy of the Hammer Museum.
CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reiterate that the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was non-consensual.