Harlem Renaissance + Reclaiming our Histories

The Harlem Renaissance began in 1918 and lasted until mid-1930’s. The roaring 20’s/Harlem Renaissance were in part a response to the immense loss of life that resulted from the Spanish Flu, also in 1918 - a pandemic that mirrors our experience of Covid in many ways. The black community, reeling from the horrors of slavery, but far enough away from themselves being slaves (and possibly the massive loss of life from the flu) were at a place to construct a new identity about what it meant to be a Black American. This is the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance - a search for a sense of their Identity within a space they never had the ability to shape on their own before. In the process of breaking down and rebuilding this national/cultural identity, Aaron Douglas - labeled the ‘father of Black American Art’ - was asked to do the important work of constructing a visual record of the shared history that united the black experience in America.

Part of the way Douglas’ work helped to establish a strong new sense of identity was by openly refuting aesthetic standards of the time (western european/traditional painting) and hearkening back to abstracted and deeply symbolic forms found in african and egyptian art - heritage that long preceded him and his contemporaries, but considered to be ‘savage’ and not afforded the regard that classical art forms had for the white western world. Blended with modernism and cubism, emerging art forms also disrupting the old school of art, Aaron Douglas refracted these different visual lenses to establish a language all his own - and in turn, a new branch formed in the history of art - an Identity for black americans to see themselves reflected in.

In Douglas’s famous mural series depicting the history of the Black American, each piece has some specific components that help tell the narrative - a sense of moving along a pathway, away from darkness/subjugation towards a beacon of hope/light, a clear sense of the past, the current state of making headway towards a distant symbolic future, and a figure we are following, as they lead others along that same path.

Together we are going to practice something similar, with cut paper as simpler forms, some with patterns and texture to inspire something that drawing cannot give us - and 4 things that must be included in your piece:

1. there must be a path
2. there must be something representing the past
3. there must be some kind of symbolic future
4. there must be someone (a version of yourself) guiding us away from the past, towards the future

Process:

Time and space don’t exist for any express reason, but just are.

 May 2022

An art activity for visiting student groups, a pile of young people and I on our bellies in a gallery. A girl tells me about Home, except she has two of them - the Bronx, where we are - and Mexico, a place she told me she has never been. As soon as I was alone I wrote down the exchange, knowing it would be important later. I wonder about the idea of home being something you yearn for, but not necessarily a place you have experienced - does that feeling of not quite belonging get embedded in your sense of self? At what point does it get passed down, becoming inextricable from a cultural identity? When will belonging supplant the narrative of not belonging? Can it do that in such a way that doesn't erase an entire sense of self?

Once, when I was about 11 (around the same time I decided I was too grown up for stuffed animals and put them all in a black trash bag) watching some movie with a sweet moment where a father walks a daughter down the aisle to be married - I cried for possibly the only time I can remember about my lack of a father, the realization of a particular series of coming-of-age narratives I was not going to experience. It stands out in my memory because I'd never witnessed anything about being married that made it seem desirable, and watching fathers with their young daughters made me deeply uncomfortable for a long time, a deep sickened space opening up in my core. Visceral, tangible, that hole in my being.

Identity Map Making, Curriculum notes/questions January 2023

*my first group of students to do this will also be reading The House on Mango Street, we will make covers for their own books they are writing in response to this intense piece of literature. 

What parts of me are connected to the landscapes I've inhabited? What landscapes do I have to work with in the first place?

Swampland, definately. - but what part of me? The guts? Our organs are associated with instinctual, guttural/gut feelings and responses, something all of us could practice listening more closely to. The Everglades have such a unique ecology, the marshland reminds me of learning about our earliest cellular development, before the embryo has any structures other then inside/outside and proto veins. Lake Alice features prominently in my youth, with its wooden pathways through lush greenery and spiderwebs and tropical birds nesting everywhere, alligators napping next to picnics in the wet heat.

Coffee Shop - always drinking coffee with my mother, from a pretty young age, pot after pot. Reading in various coffee shops and bookstores while she flipped through magazines, sourcing images for her moodboard. The smell, flavor of espresso, like tasting comfort food from my youth. Coffee grounds, rich as soil, grounding me in a way my mother never could. I think she used it to ground herself too, or like a pacifier, so the voids we were born with were distracted by the pungent, arresting qualities inherent in coffee beans. I wonder if we were hiding in those coffee shops together, from our life. Since it seems to be such a sensorial experience, is it connected to my nose, mouth? My hyper acidic stomach, that nearly gave up a bunch of years ago because I was only consuming coffee and adrenaline to survive? A quadrant of my brain/nervous system?

Kitchen - the place I feel most joyfully connected to myself, where all of the thing people describe feeling while doing Art ACTUALLY manifest for me. Deep trust, intuitive, responsive, meditative. I know when to add more flour to change a consistency of batter or dough, I think of the worn Betty Crocker cookbook in red gingham that my mother used. The large bubbling pots of thick soups and stews I leave for anyone in the household to consume, where I've magicked all the vegetables I normally avoid, robust umami smell spilling into the hallway. Sometimes I sing along to music from my childhood, or go hours not speaking as I move around here. Is this my heartbeat, my center? My spine, foundation? A quiet part of my brain?

Work - Art to me is the same as any other work I do in the world - it is how I interface with society at large, a place full of boundaries and mirrors to explore connection and see myself more clearly BECAUSE of those boundaries. Is work my voice? My skin? my hands? My clothing? Maybe New York City has become my armor. Shaped like me and deeply protective. Layered over earlier parts of myself. Maybe the buttressed ceiling of the Park Avenue Armory is my lungs - I learned how to fill that space with my voice, where I found a strength I never knew was possible.

Where does my childhood live? I was reminded earlier of my siblings and cousins playing in grandma's pool, often with no supervision, during the summers for 2 weeks ever year. Playing with my early best friend Alisha who lived down the street, and being in her world could allow me to forget mine, and the man I came home to, snarling in my face with blood colored eyes, breathing cigarettes and alcohol into my nostrils and mouth. Being on the playground also sticks out clearly, metal structures I adored scaling - are those my bones? Is play on those structures actually foundational to my being in some way, like the tensegrity of our actual bodies?

There is also this damp, crumbling, overgrown section of Gainesville - these cute simple victorian structures we called the student ghetto, that I always imagined living in, very like where I ended up the year I lived in Richmond's fan district. And my neighborhood growing up, swamped in wisteria vines, emanating the most incredible yummy sweet smell. The duck pond area. The hippodrome, where my creative vision was fed by what remains some of the most inspired theatre I've ever witnessed. Garage sales with my grandmother. The specific weather/air quality of Easter, Halloween and the Gator's Homecoming Parade. The baking heat of being caught in traffic in the afternoon, in a car with no ac, the car tan deepening since I loved the force of the sun pressing itself into my freckled, scots-irish skin. That car. A copper 78' chevy Nova, no speedometer, 8 cylinders - we cruised up and down the length of florida in that thing, visiting various penitentiaries, the year mom was a travel agent: disney world, cape Canaveral where we stayed at a hotel on Cocoa Beach and did all the astronaut simulations, I was the only one brave enough to try the G force one. 4 G's and I had to lay down for an hour because I was so sick afterwards. Tubing on the itchetucknee river, Uncle Dave's boat on the St. Johns. Pulling in crab traps and fishing off his dock, looking for alligator eyes after dark with a flash light. The first time he had me spice the water for a crab boil. The sound of cicadas, nighttime in Florida is LOUD. Watching the bat house next to lake alice in twilight. The bats swishing past us when we turned the pool lights on and swam at night, after grandma went to bed - the lights called the bugs to dive blindly in the water as we shrieked and giggled in the neon green glow.

This is a gentler way in, compared to the huge questions I was trying to ask last year. I can be here. I can hold others here. 

Song that always made me think of my father:

The Way by Fastball

They made up their minds
And they started packing
They left before the sun came up that day
An exit to eternal summer slacking
But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

They drank up the wine
And they got to talking
They now had more important things to say
And when the car broke down
They started walking
Where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold
And it's always summer
They'll never get cold
They'll never get hungry
They'll never get old and gray

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won't make it home
But they really don't care
They wanted the highway
They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up
And they couldn't find 'em
They left before the sun came up that day
They just drove off and left it all behind 'em
But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold
And it's always summer
They'll never get cold
They'll never get hungry
They'll never get old and gray

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won't make it home
But they really don't care
They wanted the highway
They're happier there today, today

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold
And it's always summer
They'll never get cold
They'll never get hungry
They'll never get old and gray

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won't make it home
But they really don't care
They wanted the highway
They're happier there today, today

Color process for Graphic Novels @MS95

 

If I’m lost I just ask myself what story I’m trying to tell

Queens again, the painting part of the mural has begun. I start each mural with high schoolers in a similar way - pour out primaries and gather everyone around to talk about what colors/parts they are most interested in beginning with. This is how I build a practice around allowing our desires and things that excite us to be what organizes our decision making process. It is clearer in context to a mural then some of my other classes, but in all of them, I'm looking to instill that quality of engagement with self/internal diagnostic towards pleasure or curiosity and how that can guide us productively, thoughtfully - how that can be underneath every effort we make in this life. I know how hard it was for me to reorient myself in that way much later in my life, and how difficult it must have been for my embodiment teacher to witness me struggle to negotiate with myself as she helped build new containers within to hear/feel/respond from that place - and I am grateful to have a space with students already skillful enough to resonate with the groundwork I'm exploring as I try to translate it into an art practice. Its nice to have positive results - evidence that the direction I'm going is a solid one. 

All of the returning students in this mural program have grown so much since the first time we began a project together last year, clear in their willingness to fill the space with their ideas and voices and drawings. One of them approached me during our session last week, while thoughtfully mixing a color they couldn't define yet and asked me questions adjacent to color theory - but more specifically how to know when colors fit or not. I explained how different artists create color palettes that feel connected - in particular - how mixing a drop of the same color in all of the colors unites them subtly, or when I use oil paint I choose not to clean my brush while I paint so there a natural connecting undertone. Similarly I have us continue to transform our paint mixtures, so they all are literally born from each other which has a similar uniting effect. The student asked me why I didn't explain that to the larger group, as a teaching moment. I asked him if last year it would have seemed important or made sense, when he shakily began painting for essentially the first time on something this large scale. I could see him understanding something about how I teach, which is very non traditional - emergent, support based, and always staying with them where they are at and letting them tell me when they are ready for the next layer of awareness and skill. This approach requires creating relationships with students where they feel safe and supported enough to come up against questions and reach out for my support, because they know without question that I am available and listening in a specific way. Depending on the environment and previous experiences with adults various students have (as well as their age/development level), this is a more or less effortful process. But it is the most important part.

An Art Therapist recently framed SEL (Social Emotional Learning) in a way that really helped me more concretely understand the nature of what I'm trying to to do. Just a phrase, in passing during a workshop - about how all of these steps are about decision making, the delicate space between thinking and doing where so many of us become hamstrung, choked up, stuck. The first place I came to understand the value of practicing how to be in relationship with the world was through conflict - an important piece of forming strong bonds, and the practice we all need in safe relationships to engage in conflict without fear of disconnection and loss. The years I spent studying Practices in Embodied Teaching repeatedly brought up the question about what it means to be a teacher, why any of us believe we should be teachers, the goals or needs we inadvertently bring into the room from that vantage point etc - and the pervasive idea that students are empty vessels waiting to be filled by our knowledge, which undermines and disempowers young people with rich full bodies and minds who are looking for containers with which to process/practice and understand how to engage with themselves and their already richly complex experiences in the world. Its not about me, or the inherent value of some arbitrary technique I might feel needs to be learned. More and more I am coming to understand that everything boils down to safe containers to practice making decisions so we can learn how to listen and extrapolate from the outcome of those decisions to guide the next series of decisions. As I build curriculum I am getting more and more focused on art media and practices that have a spaciousness around pausing and being able to make a different choice so the stakes are low, and reframing media/drawing outcomes we don't like as opportunities to reorient ourselves with increasing clarity about what we DO think/feel/believe/like/want - to build capacity for increasingly braver choices and more expansive potential outcomes with increasing self awareness as its own byproduct of the exploration. So they can practice being human and not feeling shame or fear about that humanness. So we can have an experience of being ok to be where we are at, rather then constantly being assessed for our future potential/value to some corporate entity, always being seen as who they will be or how they might potentially validate the adults around them. If you never learned that where you are at and what you are is exactly right, it may take excruciating effort to find and have that experience later in life - you might not even know it is an experience that is available. You may learn that to be alive means always striving for things you are not and don't have because you never got to have an experience of being good, or enough, or good enough to enjoy yourself at any moment. 

I'm starting to notice the different qualities that imbue the student body in different spaces I regularly encounter. I think last year I was having a hard time organizing all of my observations, but something feels clearer now as I move from school to school. At one school I subbed at last week, the sense of fraternal focus - a sibling like responsiveness to each other is clear, as well as an accompanying sense that familiarity/sameness is of utmost importance. Instead of being distracted by what I had witnessed here the year prior, I'm starting to understand that these are clues I can work with - not just things to be undone, but resources related to their mechanisms for bonding and communicating that I can work with to create bridges that feel familiar and eventually can move into unfamiliar and groundbreaking territory.

Being at that school again briefly threw the high school I am at on Wednesdays into sharp contrast, which I'd been struggling to have a feel for - while the students I've had so far mostly claim they are at this arts high school against their will and are not interested in art, there is a moody soulfulness - a preoccupation with feeling states and sense of selfness, and an undercurrent of resistance to authority even in the smallest of ways, tiny moments of reclaiming a sense of agency - that seem to me the most resounding definition of being an artist at any period in time. What rich ground to consider building curriculum in response to - ways they are already inclined to explore or crave guidance in navigating. There are so many clues, finding how the threads connect to form a larger picture is starting to help me see the spaces where my skills can actually build on top of the richness of the ground already laid, even if it is imperfect or lacking in support. 

As my ability to notice and name what I am experiencing of these environments gets more sophisticated, so too does my response to those cues. As sloppy and unkempt as this particular series of notes is, I am naming this so that I can refine it - so I can come back later to add depth to these glimpses of things I'm still trying to comprehend.
 

Authenticity is an orientation, not a destination

A conversation in 3 parts

I.

Tuesday, December 20 2022

A gathering of students, a school out in Queens, our last session before the holiday break. The conversation shifted from the usual angst of school drama to musing about family, as we all focused on the puppets we were making, the table a kaleidoscope of colored paper and googly eyes.

The student next to me, often outspoken in a thoughtful way - mentioned being mad at her mother. In the same breathe also acknowledged that was a natural part of loving people, that she wasn't worried about it lasting forever. Went on to describe how her immigrant mother became valedictorian, graduated with honors, was her inspiration - this 10th grade student growing up in a quiet part of New York City. Another student offered up in response the awe she felt that her immigrant father had been accepted into Columbia University back in his youth, and earlier on the street she had announced to me her best friend had been offered $120,000 scholarship to her second choice college in NYC.

I usually am a witness here, available to share my experience or opinion when asked of me - but today the outspoken student, without looking up as she calmly struggled to make a chicken puppet with golden skin - asked me about my parents. Here is a tender spot of discomfort, in a group of students in varying shades of brown, with parents who fought incredible systemic and cultural odds to provide their children a middle class lifestyle and opportunities - to reveal how pitifully ill equipped my white mother was to do anything, how sad and inept all of my white caregivers were. I answered her questions, all of the students continued to focus their gaze on their individual puppet processes, so I couldn't gauge how knowing those things about my childhood might be landing on them. The outspoken student after a small pause wished for me to meet someone I trusted enough to love one day, so I could have children - because she thought I would be a really good mother. Hard to name what I felt, shame maybe, but also awe that these young people already had skills that I'm desperately trying to learn as I approach the age of 40.

The only thing in my fridge when I got home was leftovers from a cultural food festival another one of my schools had the day prior - they begged everyone to take some home because there was so much. Tamales, jerk chicken falling off the bone, rice and beans, homemade flan, nourishing my body in more ways then one, invisible hands transmuting love into flesh, effort into meaning. Bright bursts of shame and gratefulness moving through me, tears and satisfaction like waves lapping at sand.

II.

Wednesday, December 21 2022

1st period, a school in the Bronx. I'm lucky if I have more then a handful of students before the rest show up half an hour into class. Here I have to keep moving, keep trying to sneak moments of connection, student engagement falling like a handful of sand slipping between my fingers. 

I showed a few of them the mural design my Queens crew had created together. I think they should be seeing and responding to each others work in general, but maybe I was hoping to inspire something by sharing this particular piece. Evidence that everyone's work is getting seen, experienced outside of that room maybe. Proof their efforts matter. One of them, a student that was particularly intense for me to figure out how to meet the needs of during the summer program but has decided I'm safe enough to be connected to now - appraised it quickly and frankly asked if the students who designed the mural were white. She looked me in the eyes waiting for my answer. No, I responded, only one or two of them were white. I didn't acknowledge out loud what she was picking up on - there is a clear difference in resources and sense of life possibilities, something I perceive as a class difference. I know there are many more layers to this exchange I just had, a clue worth holding on to.

We've been working on what I'm calling Fractured Self Portraits, an exploration where students show multiple aspects of themselves in one piece, those different parts winking at us through cracks like looking into a broken mirror. The week before, one of her friends actually made a lot of effort in developing her version of the assignment - and quietly told me about the locket she wears, that will go in the portrait - it holds her mother's ashes. Another student who has only shown up 3 times and looks at me with wary suprise because I am always so glad to see him - showed me a sketch of this assignment, and in one of the fractures was a tornado with words like 'Family' caught in the storm. These things are shared with the acceptance that they are normal, because they are. In a different environment, where these kinds of realities are less so, or when expectations of student expression or involvement aren't taking these realities into account - what can any of us feel but shame? I could keep going, there are so many moments and real things that get shared with me that hit like an arrow in this room, and each smile, each moment of eye contact is a bridge we are building, that may one day take them anywhere they want to go - but they need us to believe in them no matter what side they show of their many layered selves.

This is not just me as witness, since there is more effort needed for trust to build, and patience required for walls to soften. This is a more active exchange, but also the components in the room are more familiar to me, so I feel myself differently here. 

III.

Thursday, December 22 2022 

I came across an article written back in October. The headline reads: NYC Schools Chief Criticized for Saying Some Kids Deserve Top Schools More Than Others. 

In it David Banks is quoted as saying: Students who work "really hard" should have priority access compared with "the child you have to throw water on their face to get them to go to school every day".

Something that is shown to me really quickly doing the murals, and as I develop more sophisticated artmaking projects - is how students are learning to learn. How adults have set students up to be and engage with material in relationship to themselves. Student disengagement is the fault of the adults involved in developing children's relationships with learning. Penalizing children for adult failure is perpetuating existing class structures and intergenerational trauma, by instilling shame as a baseline experience of themselves in the world. I don't understand how there is any confusion about this - it isn't about opinions or pedagogy, it's as real and documentable as the laws of physics.