One of the truisms of this world is that someone somewhere is always leaving us. Years ago I realized that if I were to note the death of everyone I considered significant or admired, I could fill this blog up with nothing but such accounts--and I love reading obituaries, especially the fuller and more fulsome British versions--but that struck me as macabre and time-consuming, so, as regular J's Theater readers know, when I have time to blog I will post thoughtful but brief personal commemorations, and when time is as scarce as mountaintop air, I will simply post links and a short note. I have little time today, so I'll be posting links to several obituaries of one of my personal hero(in)es, Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa e.t.c., who died yesterday at age 91.
La MaMa e.t.c. (for Experimental Theater Club), which I am glad to be able to say I set foot in a few times, during the late 1990s (though I only smiled at Ms. Stewart, too afraid to utter a single world), is simply one of the most important theater and performance institutions in New York and the United States. Countless major actors, playwrights and performance artists got their start in its E. 9th St. basement and later first-floor spaces on E. 4th Street from 1962 onwards. Stewart, an African-American woman who had no theater experience when she started La MaMa and was working as a dress designer, directed and maintained this jewel with an almost unerring aesthetic compass and a determination that would make many a soldier jealous. It has played an almost incalculable role in the development of Off and Off-Off Broadway theater, as well as in nurturing the possibilities of formal experimentation in a city and a larger culture that over the last 50 years has become increasingly hostile to anything non-commercial that isn't located within the walls of academe.
As I pointed out on a friend's Facebook link about Stewart's passing, one of the things that ought be noted is how crucial to the aesthetic, social and economic ecology of New York theater and performance, and national and global theater and performance this little downtown theater has been. Writers such as Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Sam Shepherd, Harvey Fierstein, Lanford Wilson, David and Amy Sedaris, and Tom Eyen, to name just a few, had some of their earliest productions in its theater, and, to quote the New York Times, acclaimed actors including "Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Diane Lane and Nick Nolte" appeared in its productions during its early years. The Times's Ben Brantley, in his appraisal of Stewart, notes how artists from around the world, sometimes significant figures from troubled regions, such as the Belarus Free Theatre and its current joint La MaMa-Under the Radar Festival production of Being Harold Pinter, circulated through Stewart's institution, making it a key node in an vital and thriving thick, material network of international artistic and intellectual exchange and relations.
The Public Theater has announced that it will dedicate the remainder of its 55th season to Ms. Stewart, and the Under the Radar Festival, which ends on January 16, has followed suit.
One of the things I did while I was back in New Jersey was drop by Kenkeleba Wilmer Jennings Gallery in the East Village to catch the "Abstraction Plus Abstraction" show that's running until early April. This exhibit is showing concurrently with "African American Master Abstractionists" at Anita Shapolsky Gallery, one of the sponsors of the two shows, and together they constitute of the largest shows of important 20th century abstract art by African Americans. Shapolsky, whose gallery roster includes Louise Nevelson, Antoni Tapiès, Karel Appel, Buffie Johnson, and William Saroyan, writes:
This is the first time I am exhibiting an African-American group of artists. My gallery has exhibited black artists over the years in group shows. Many galleries have never shown them. The public should be made aware of good art whoever does it.
The artists in this exhibition are truly masters of Abstraction. The black art movement was helped by the W.P.A., the G. I. Bill (after WWII) and the Civil Rights movement. With all that, most artists had to go to Europe to paint and sell – similar to the jazz musicians of that era. Many of these artists did show in the fifties and early sixties but like all abstract artists, they were eclipsed by the Pop and Minimal movements. Today, many galleries are showing younger artists of all races. This group of first and second generation black artists has fallen through the cracks and should not be forgotten.
I hadn't been over Kenkeleba Wilmer Jennings in a few years (perhaps it was as long ago as 2001-2002, when Chris Stackhouse was part of a group show there), and before that, around 2000, I participated in organizing a show and preparing a catalogue-style pamphlet there, curated by Adrienne Klein and sponsored by my former employer, New York University's Faculty Resource Network, of faculty artists from historically Black colleges and universities (Louis Delsarte, Arturo Lindsay, and others). In any case, I'd never met artist Joe Overstreet, one of the gallery's founders (with his wife, Corinne Jennings) and a major abstract painter himself, but he was there and I got to speak with him briefly about the show, which includes pieces by Betty Blayton, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam (mentioned in Seismosis, no less), Richard Hunt, Herbert Gentry, Overstreet, as well as landmark artists from an earlier era, like Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Alma Thomas. When I saw that these artists were part of the mix, I realized how important this show was.
I'll let the images speak for themselves, but if you want to catch the concurrent New York shows, you still have a bit of time; there'll also be a show this upcoming fall at the Opalka Gallery at the Sage Colleges in upstate New York.
Anita Shapolsky Gallery 152 East 65th St, NY, NY 10005 (212) 452-1094
Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba 219 East 2nd St, NY, NY 10009 PH: 212-674-3939 Until April 24, 2010
Opalka Gallery will also feature these artists: Opalka Gallery - The Sage Colleges www.sage.edu/opalka November 5 - December 12, 2010
Betty Blayton Forced Center Right, 1975 mixed Media / canvas, 36" Round Joe Overstreet (b. 1933) Untitled Dragon, 1997 Watercolor Alma Thomas (1891-1966) Untitled, 1966 Watercolor on paper Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Untitled, 1979 Watercolor on shaped paper Charles Alston (1909-1977) Abstraction (ca. 1950) Charcoal on paper Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) Caprice, 1968 Oil on canvas
In today's The Root, Henry Louis Gates Jr.meditates on an unknown Irish forebear, asking "Who's Your (Irish) Daddy?". He, like me and quite a few African Americans, has Hibernian roots and branches in his family tree, and many of us know little about those Gaelic ancestors except apocryphally, though for many years historians, family archivists and genealogists, and in recent decades geneticists, have filled in the gaps. In the piece the wise professor traces out his own family's Irish bloodline, paralleling the portrait he painted a few years back on his genealogical shows, African American Lives, which I've written abouton here before. As the programs devoted to his own family's stories demonstrated, there's probably more Ireland in him than West Africa, a bit of knowledge that he didn't originally appear ready for, though who living in this society could blame him? Gates's story, as I noted above, isn't uncommon, though his depth of knowledge about his family unfortunately remains so. While genetic ancestral testing raises many problematic issues, what I've taken away from Gates's work is the idea that in concert with genealogical research, it can really open long-hidden doors about our families' past, which is to say, our own.
My own familial links to the Emerald Isle are evident in part in my last name, which is often mistaken for two other common Irish (and English and Scottish) names, King and Keane. All my life it's been misspelled, despite being only five letters long, and increasingly is mispronounced (have people forgotten that English has silent Es?) Years ago I wrote a poem on this very subject, noting how I'd heard differing stories about where a certain Keene, a white settler in western Illinois who went west to the Gold Rush, returned, and married an enslaved or free black Maryland-born woman, came from. It was titled "Origins." Thinking of it now, I'm also reminded of the story my late father used to tell of how his father would wear a green boutonnière in his lapel on St. Patrick's Day, and Irish Americans in St. Louis would sometimes hail him, and others curse him, but many were baffled by the display. He nevertheless knew why he wore the green carnation and where his name flowed from, and was quite proud of it. As to whether he attended the St. Patrick's Day parades, I do not know. We never attended any growing up, nor did I got any when I was old enough to drive to them. I do recall the excitement that arose among my classmates, though, when the holiday was approaching, and the possibilities for parties and drinking began to abound. Among the many parties I attended in high school I can't ever remember a St. Patrick's Day one--Halloween, birthdays, toga parties, parents-out-of-town yes, but a drinking fest to commemorate the Irish saint: no.
My grandfather's stories, which became my father's, became mine. And so, in sophomore year, back in the pre-Internet genealogy days, when I had to prepare a family tree for my Irish-born, Benedictine instructor, I placed those Irish (Scots-Irish) Keen(e)s where I was told they belonged, along with assorted African Americans, and some Native people from in and around Missouri. All of them had a story or two, including one ancestor named Plunket Spotser, who was not an Irishman but a full-blooded Indian from Audrain County. (He even appears online these days, on Missouri's death certificate registry.) My teacher, who, though still a part of the monastery that ran my high school, now serves as a parish priest for a rural district outside St. Louis, was somewhat bemused when he studied the links. Where did you get this information? he politely asked. From my parents, I said. He nodded and appeared to take it all in stride, though I wondered then whether he also did not wish that he could dial someone up, some record bureau, for a bit more verification. I was nevertheless proud that I had the most colorful and interesting family tree, and there were many branches that had not been touched.
I recalled this story some years back, when, in the early 1990s, C and I lived in Dorchester and I happened to be leaving the Boston T's Andrew Station, the subway station just at the edge of South Boston, or "Southie," which was racially aboi in the long aftermath of the city's busing crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, and periodic attempts at housing and educational integration. I cannot for my life remember why I, knowing the potential for danger, decided to get off the train at Andrew and make the reasonable trek up Columbia Road to our apartment, but I can vividly hear the two or three drunken, screaming male revelers, far less civilized than St. Patrick himself--or any of the Irish saints, I imagine--ever might have been, yelling out choice epithets, of a racist sort, and running towards me, which led me to draw upon my prior experiences as a junior and high school sprinter, and get as far from South Boston and deep in Dorchester as my legs could bear. After the shock, I think I laughed it off, but I made sure I never went near Andrew Station on or around St. Patrick's Day after that, and viewed the subsequent St. Patrick's Day parades and celebrations, which in Boston date back to the 1700s, more than a little ironically, having succeeded not in surviving too much Guinness or boiled corned beef, but my brains nearly getting bashed in.
A certain psychologist I knew told me the story, however, of a very different sort of encounter in Ireland itself. A light-skinned man of noticeable black ancestry--he wouldn't be mistaken for anything else, except latino, in this country--he traveled to Ireland with an Irish-American friend, in the 1970s. As they traveled through the country and countryside, then more bucolic than before the recent "Irish Tiger" era, he and his friend would encounter friendly locals who invited them for drinks, to chat, to have a home-cooked meal. At one point, one of the locals asked, utterly seriously, if the two were brothers. My friend said that he told the man they were just friends, and wondered to himself how on earth anyone could suppose a direct familial relationship, but then when he encountered the same question again, wondering if he, the black man, didn't have more "Black Irish" ancestry, he began to realize how strongly perceptions, truths in fact, are shaped by context. What these people were seeing was quite different from what Americans back home might; the difference in skin and hair was less visible than what united the then young duo, easy familiarity, mannerisms, speech, affect, their very being in the world.
Actually I've never been to a St. Patrick's Day parade in New York, or Chicago, or anywhere else, though I have sometimes worn green. (No carnations.) As an adult, the struggles of out gay Irish-American groups to gain admittance to the New York parade, which is ongoing, has been enough to keep me away. Once upon a time this merited a great deal of public commentary, but now it doesn't seem to garner more than rote reportage. It should given that the New York City Council Speaker since 2006, Irish-American lesbian Christine Quinn, has felt unwelcome enough that she's spent St. Patrick's Days celebrating with inclusive parades, in Washington, DC, and Dublin. The Ancient Order of Hibernians in NYC have yet to budge, but eventually they will get their act together, or younger, more gay-friendly folk will be running them down the road, and LGBTQ groups and officials will be welcomed and welcome, so it is predicted here. And then, perhaps, I'll attend one of their parades. Or at least raise a pint in recognition.
As the old Irish saying goes:
May you live as long as you want, And never want as long as you live.
"People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African-American," Hunter said. "They're not us. They're impostors. Even people I know come up and say, 'Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?' I say, 'Come on, he's Dominican. He's not black.' "
He continued:
"As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us. It's like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It's like, 'Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?' ... I'm telling you, it's sad," he said.
Vladimir Guerrero
Now I think Hunter was trying to say that whereas since Jackie Robinson's pioneering season black players in the Major Leagues had predominantly been African American, things have changed considerably over the last 15 years, to the extent that a few years ago, the number of African Americans baseball players at the elite level and even in the pipeline was dwindling, in part because of the leagues' financial cutbacks in scouting, developing and promoting black American athletes. Instead, many teams had chosen to focus their efforts and funds on the much less expensive talent available overseas, especially in the Dominican Republic, such that the only black faces on some teams were Afrolatino. He clarified his remarks by saying that:
"What I meant was they're not black players; they're Latin American players. There is a difference culturally. But on the field, we're all brothers, no matter where we come from, and that's something I've always taken pride in: treating everybody the same, whether he's a superstar or a young kid breaking into the game. Where he was born and raised makes no difference."
Luis Tiant
Yet this is still very problematic. Hunter did not make clear who the "people" were who asked him if Guerrero was black (he is), but interestingly enough, after several years in which African Americans had begun to disappear from the MLB, the numbers, at least on major league rosters, have risen, and some bona fide stars, like the Yankees' pitcher C. C. Sabathia and the Philadelphia Phillies' recent NL MVP Ryan Howard. Nevertheless, many teams now have Afrolatinos from DR, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, and a few even have Afrolatinos from Panama and Cuba.
While I understand where Hunter is coming from, I also have to say that he's making a basic, common and problematic categorical error here, that points to ignorance that unfortunately is widespread. Not a single media report I've read has cleared it up, so let me do so now, for him and everyone else, with a simple formula to recall.
All self-defined African Americans are black, BUT not all blacks in the Americas are African American. MOST ARE NOT.
Zoe Saldana
That is, Barack Obama, Mo'Nique, Torii Hunter, Beyoncé, and anyone else who defines herself or himself as African American is black, but black people like Idris Elba, Sophie Okenedo, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Pelé are not African American. The latter encompasses and isn't reducible to the latter. To put it another way: The majority of black people in the Americas are not African American. Those players aren't African American, but they are black.
Now, it's also the case that there are more black Latinos combined in the Americas (though not in the United States) than there are African Americans. Some of those black latinos, like actress Zoë Saldana, or actor Laz Alonso, stars of the blockbuster Avatar, may and do consider themselves many things: black, latino, Dominican-American and Cuban-American respectively, even African-American.
Manny Ramírez
Blackness is a racial definition, while "African American" functions as an ethnic designation. "Dominican," which Hunter cited in opposition to "black," is a national definition but also an ethnic one in the United States. According to the last US Census and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the majority of black people in the United States are African American, but the percentage of non-African American blacks grows daily, primarily as a result of the immigration from Africa, Europe, and yes, Latin America. And some of these black immigrants decide, as they see fit, to call themselves African American. One category does not elide the other.
Roberto Clemente and his family
In terms of baseball history, Hunter's ignorance is also glaring. Among the major black players in Major League Baseball's history are several black latinos, including Roberto Clemente, who was Puerto Rican and black. Both. In his lifetime he acknowledged this fact, and spoke elequently about the racism he encountered as a result of being both latino and black. Also, among the great pitchers of all time are several Afrolatinos, including Cuban Luis Tiant; another, still pitching, is Pedro Martínez. Yet even if we simply look at the earliest years of integration of Major League baseball, among the first blacks to play after Jackie Robinson's important debut was black Cuban Saturnino Arestes Armas "Minnie" Minoso, who broke in as a 23-year-old rookie with Cleveland (which also fielded the first African-American to play in the American League, Larry Doby) in 1949, two years after Robinson, though he was out of the league for several years until he returned in 1951. Interestingly enough, during the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut, in 1997, the discussion of the role of Afrolatinos in integrating Major League baseball remained muted, despite the raft of scholarship on the subject, including studies of the transnational interplay between African Americans and Afrolatinos in the early years of organized baseball and the Negro Leagues. As Hunter's comments suggest, it unfortunately remains so today.
Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos
Former President George W. Bush learned, after his now apocryphal query to Brazil's then-president, F. H. Cardoso, that Brazil has one of the largest self-defined black population in the Americas according to its Census, and if we were to use the various US definitions of "black," the number of black people in Brazil would dwarf that of the US by at least a factor of two (100+ million vs. 47-48 million). The Dominican Republic, the country that Hunter cited, has a far larger percentage of people of African descent (well over 85%) than the US; this is the highest of any Spanish-speaking country in the Americas. In fact, it exceeds that of all other Spanish-speaking countries with identifiable black populations, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, and Panama.
US actor Andre Royo
This brings me to a question I've asked again and again is, mentioning it sometimes on this blog and sometimes in other forums: why don't black Americans know this basic fact? We just concluded Black History Month, which unfortunately functions as a kind of African American Trivia and Recognition Month, with some emphasis--though too little, I think--on Africa itself or its peoples, or blacks more broadly across the Americas. It's bad enough that we barely hear anything about black people living on the continent where they are the overwhelming majority--can you think of a single dedicated public discussion, for example, on the situation in the Congo, which was part of the region that supplied the most black people to the transatlantic slave trade and which is still suffering as a result of European and regional meddling?--but there is almost zero discussion of the black people in this hemisphere. I even joked on Twitter as to whether there'd be any mention of Zumbi de Palmares, Célia Cruz, and so forth, and certainly there were programs all over that talked about Afrolatinos and Afrohispanic cultures, but no concerted effort during this vital month to open up the dialogue and spread the knowledge, including to people like Torii Hunter. A while ago I reviewed the film Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player, and one of the more interesting moments in that film concerned its treatment of the relationship between the Dominican player and an African-American teammate. What the film portrayed was an attempt to communicate across a linguistic and cultural divide, and considerable nuance in the ways that each player read the other. It also suggested the possibility of a kind of amity and brotherhood, and not the wall that Hunter's comments suggest. I don't know how true the relationships the film portrays are, though what also is clear is that in their home countries, despite the complicated and often racist discourses around blackness in which their identities and consciousness are formed, there are all kinds of pockets of resistance, sometimes inspired by African-American culture (especially black American musical forms and styles), and when Afrolatino ballpayers from outside the US spend any length of time here, their perspectives often change, even if their self-characterization and identifications, and their own struggles around race (cf. Sammy Sosa, and his skin-bleaching spectacle of last year) do not.
Reggie Jackson
Interestingly enough, Hall of Famer and former Yankees star Reggie Jackson (Reginald Martínez Jackson), who is African American and Latino, defended Hunter, saying:
"Torii Hunter has no malice in his heart. He's a wonderful person of great character and he's done a great deal in communities to prove that and back that up. I think when you make a comment to the media - and I'm at fault at times - you need to be able to read what you're saying at the same time."
"Torii Hunter has no malice in his heart. He's a wonderful person of great character and he's done a great deal in communities to prove that and back that up. I think when you make a comment to the media - and I'm at fault at times - you need to be able to read what you're saying at the same time."
That's all well and good, but now Jackson and others--George Bell? Joaquin Andújar? José Rijo? Bernie Williams?--need to educate Hunter and a lot more people, especially black folks, about the reality of black people in Major League baseball, across the hemisphere, and all over the globe.
***
A new documentary about late art great Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of those African Americans who was also an Afro-Latino (the son of a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian-American father, no less), which was nominated for the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize this year, is set to hit screens soon. Directed by his friend, Tamra Davis, the documentary, titled Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, includes interview footage from the period near the end of Basquiat's life when he was living in Los Angeles and already established as one of the hottest young artists to grace the American and international art worlds. The Variety review I link to above praises the intimate portrait it presents of Basquiat while simultaneously criticizing it as perhaps too much a work of hagiography. As a Basquiat devotee, I can't wait to see it!
