Robert-Goldwater-Library

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.57/58

A list of newly arrived books at the Goldwater Library will be posted bi-monthly as an easily downloadable text file. Here is the list for February-March 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_57-58_FebMar2007.txt

A Museum Grows in Brooklyn

“Black Madonna” is now at Mocada. (Angela Jimenez for The New York Times)

via nytimes.com:

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE
Published: March 28, 2007

Six years ago, when Laurie Cumbo founded Mocada, a museum that showcases the works of black artists across the diaspora, it was housed on the fourth floor of a church-owned brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Space was scarce — 800 square feet — and resources more so. “It was literally mom and pop,” Ms. Cumbo, 31, recalled. “My family stuffing envelopes, picking up art, hanging things up.” And the building was a walk-up, which meant “lots of huffing and puffing,” she added.

Mocada (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts) has gained ground since those early days. The museum moved downtown to Brooklyn’s trendy Fort Greene area last year and is currently housed in a 1,700-square-foot, ground-floor space at the James E. Davis Arts Building, where its neighbors include Bomb, the art and culture quarterly, and the New York Writers Coalition.

New digs and a higher-profile space have in no way altered the museum’s mission: to give artists of color a place to shine. “If we are to assume that talent is equally distributed among the races, then why are there so many black artists that are not written about?” Ms. Cumbo asked. “Why has their talent been overlooked or marginalized? I wanted to start something so these artists’ work could be documented, catalogued, preserved and ultimately celebrated.”

Over the years, Mocada has featured works from renowned artists like Wangechi Mutu and Kehinde Wiley and their more obscure peers like Dwayne Rodgers. And it has mounted exhibitions on hot-button issues like AIDS, abortion and police brutality, each with a different curator in an effort to keep the perspective fresh. Its current show, “Postmillennial Black Madonna,” which runs through May 13, explores various interpretations of the Virgin Mary in modern society. “French Evolution,” which begins in June, will examine the 2005 riots in France.

“They have created quite a buzz,” said Isolde Brielmaier, a Vassar art history professor. “People come knowing that they’re going to see art that is relevant to them and relevant to the community. There’s nothing like it in Brooklyn.”

African Films in NYC

via FilmForum.org:

U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (2005)
Directed by Mark Dornford-May
At Film Forum through April 10

Carmen, perhaps the world’s best-loved opera, with its story of love, jealousy, revenge and madness, is set in a sprawling South African shantytown, and sung in Xhosa! George Bizet’s 19th century spectacle is re-imagined in a naturalistic world of pool halls, bars, courtyards and barracks. The seductive, boisterous Carmen (who works in a cigarette factory), is sung with tremendous charisma by Pauline Malefane. When she sets her sights on a Bible-reading policeman, he doesn’t stand a chance. Rarely has an opera been made more modern, relevant or vibrant than in this stunning interpretation, featuring Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK), the internationally acclaimed South African theater company.

Showtimes
U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha on imdb.com

[image source]

via filmlinc.com (Film Society of Lincoln Center):

The 14th New York African Film Festival
April 4 - 12, 2007

In 2007, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the independence of Ghana––the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence from colonial rule––with an especially strong lineup for the 14th New York African Film Festival. With 47 features, documentaries and shorts from 20 countries ranging from Algeria to South Africa, the festival will once again serve to dismantle long held notions and prejudices about African society, expanding and challenging Americans' perceptions of tradition, modernity and the role of women. As a special feature this year, we offer a unique selection of rarely seen archival footage, ranging from colonial propaganda films to newsreels made at the very moment of independence; remarkable if at times unsettling images of Africa and Africans that remind us of the immeasurable importance of self-representation.

Filmmakers and other guest speakers will be on hand to present their work during the festival (those shows are indicated by an asterisk in the Program Overview). On Monday, Apr. 9, the African Film Festival will present its annual roundtable discussion at the Furman Gallery, a chance for audiences and filmmakers to explore and discuss in further detail the guiding themes of the 2007 festival, as well as the complex and multifaceted role of cinema in postcolonial, national and pan-African liberation. The festival continues at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Apr. 20 and 21 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinematek, May 25 through 28.

Films for the 14th New York African Film Festival are in English except where noted. All non-English films are subtitled in English.

Program Overview and  Calendar

Pictured above: The Narrow Path, Tunde Kelani, Nigeria, 2005;The Night of Truth/La Nuit de la vérité, Fanta Régina Nacro, Burkina Faso, 2004; Rostov-Luanda, Abderrahmane Sissako, Mali/France, 1997 [image sources]

Museums + folksonomies: bridging the semantic gap

via NYTimes:
One Picture, 1,000 Tags {excerpts}
By PAMELA LiCALZI O’CONNELL
Published: March 28, 2007

[...]

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site; some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands of works, there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one, "art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the picture." [read on...]

The National Museum of the American Indian

via Material World 3/22/07:

Fanny Wonu Veys, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After a research visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I decided to visit another Smithsonian museum: the National Museum of the American Indian. Ever since I saw the building works in progress in 2003, I tried to keep updated on what was happening in the museum. It was a unique opportunity for me to see the museum now that it had been open for a little over two years.

Architecturally, the museum building built in hand-cut Minnesota goldstone, with its curvilinear forms and its surrounding garden which includes one hundred and fifty native species contrasts with the other stark white, rectangular buildings on the National Mall and other parts of the city. The visitor enters from the east – the other Smithsonian Museums have their entrances situated on the Mall side or one of its parallel running avenues – , goes through the now ubiquitous bag search routine, and is welcomed into the circular Potomac area, the meeting point for guided tours, arts and craft markets and demonstrations. This area spans the four levels of the museum and is closed off by a step-dome on which daylight, caught by prisms in one of the windows, is reflected.

The ground (first) floor is dedicated to the Museum’s Mitsitam café, the small Chesapeake museum store and the Rasmuson theatre, while the second floor holds the large Roanoke museum shop and an exhibition entitled ‘Return to a native place’ which focuses on the native peoples of Washington D.C.’s local Chesapeake region. The third and fourth floors have the exhibition spaces which are organised thematically into our lives, temporary exhibition space (third floor), our universes, our peoples and the Lelawi theatre (fourth floor). In each section, respectively looking at contemporary native life, native beliefs and native history the voices of indigenous curators representing groups from North, Central and South America are heard. The third and fourth floors are also home to object-rich cases where part of the museum’s vast collection is presented and where visitors can have a self-guided experience through the use of interactive screens. The museum argues that its aim is to give visitors the opportunity to listen to the stories of people that are geographically and culturally related, not taking into account political boundaries. However, it seems to me that existing political boundaries were the major drive force to include the Hawaiian Islands and to exclude Greenland from representation in the museum.

read the full post here

Native Imagination: 'Off the Map' in New York

via NYTimes, Art Review:
'Off the Map' Lands You Can't See in a Guidebook
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: March 23, 2007

Can a South American Indian landscape painter find inspiration in Brooklyn? In a word, yes. Carlos Jacanamijoy (of the Inga people of Colombia) has no trouble making a connection between the urban jungle where he lives now and the Putumayo rain forest on whose edge he grew up. "Here, the roar of the subway or the incessant traffic of cars and pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge, projected by the sun, is right in front of me, through my window," he writes. "In the same way I remember listening, among lights and shadows, to the cacophony of animals during an overwhelming night in the middle of the jungle."

Mr. Jacanamijoy, whose luminous, explosive landscapes mix the rich colors and events of the rain forest with hints of Brooklyn’s bustling environment, is one of five artists in "Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination," a refreshing show of landscapes, or better, mindscapes, at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan. Not exactly in the American tradition of the sublime, their work doesn't speak of spacious skies and amber waves of grain, but of complex personal relations with their culture, ancestry, past and present surroundings.

Most of it doesn't relate to places you can locate in a guidebook or on a map, writes Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), an assistant curator at the museum, who conceived and organized the show. Instead it "reveals the unexpected in a genre of painting dominated by European convention." But the show isn't all painting. One artist, Erica Lord, of Finnish-American and Native Alaskan parentage, uses video in "Binary Selves" to fashion a more site-specific environment that evokes a split and shifting self.

Erica Lord: video stills from Binary Selves, 2007. Digital video and mixed media

Gravitating as a child between her father's Alaskan village and her mother's in rural Michigan, Ms. Lord sees home as an indeterminate space without a fixed geographical location and herself as a person of multiple cultural identities that can't be teased apart. Looped film of the villages and her voyages between them alternate with depictions of the Inuit tradition of "throat singing," in which two women face each other, vocalizing wordlessly in an almost competitive duet. In this mirror-lined installation she plays the part of both singers, appearing in one role with the face tattoos, native shells and beads that suggest her Alaskan descent; in the other, assuming the more conventional appearance of her European ancestry. It's a touching performance.

Another arresting presentation is made by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), who also lives and works in Brooklyn. His wonderfully ornate, colorific abstractions, incorporating beads, thick impasto, pigmented silicone and other relief elements, are inflected by a blobby spill of silvery urethane that breaks through a wall in the gallery to cascade onto the floor, a sardonic attempt to mess up the pristine, white box of the gallery's space.

His influences range from 19th-century Iroquois beadwork to contemporary techno rave and club culture, he has written, adding that his desire to "act out the role of an explorer depicting an inviting landscape was a reaction to Native tribes being consistently described as part of a nostalgic and romantic vision of pre-colonized Indian life."

The two other painters in the show, Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) and James Lavadour (Walla Walla) work in more traditional but still lively modes. Ms. Whitehorse's Navajo heritage is reflected in the Southwestern elements that inform her paintings: nuanced grounds in the deep-to-pale colors of sky, land and water, against which float delicate seeds, floral and vegetable forms, insects, squiggles and calligraphic notations along with echoes of Indian ornament.

In his group of intensely colored oils, Mr. Lavadour explores geological formations, fierce firestorms, ruined or ghostly buildings and layered mountains, built up in authoritative brush strokes. Inspired by jazz, he orchestrates his work with discordances and offbeat juxtapositions, making sudden shifts in hue and composition. A powerful effort is "Blanket," a grid arrangement of 15 same-size but different landscapes in three rows, each unit neither fully abstract nor explicitly realist, each contributing to the overall impact by its teasingly ambiguous structure and the heat of its color.

What gives this show its flavor and vitality is the sophisticated integration of indigenous American motifs with a vibrant contemporary approach.

Quilled box by Vicky Sanipass (around 1996). Photo: Mashantucket Pequot Museum

It's a different story at the uptown UBS Gallery, where "Gifts of the Forest: Native Traditions in Wood and Bark" holds forth. Drawn from the collections of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a vital part of the tribal reservation in southeastern Connecticut famous for its Foxwoods casino, the show celebrates the trees of the rich forests that once covered the Northeast, yielding essential materials to the Pequot and other Eastern Woodland cultures. The materials go back hundreds of years to ancient woodworking tools used in New England before the introduction of European iron implements.

Contemporary objects in the show for the most part carry on the tribal traditions, like the simple and beautiful wooden flute made in 1999 by Hawk Henries (Nipmuc) and adorned with an elegantly carved bird motif; the exquisite containers covered with showy dyed quills done around 1996 by Vicky Sanipass (Micmac) and displayed with Micmac boxes of the mid-19th century; and a carved and painted root club made in 2000 by Stan Neptune (Penobscot), topped by a stylized eagle and ending in a delicate deer's hoof. It is based on traditional Penobscot root clubs that originally served as weapons, like the 19th-century model also shown here, with a formidable spiky head.

Many of the objects were made in the 19th or early-20th century: handsome woven baskets, carved bowls and spoons; decorated cradle boards to which babies were strapped; birch bark canoe models; an elegant birch bark hamper whose sides bear a stylized tree motif. One of the show's most arresting displays is an array of 19th- and early-20th-century tools, most embellished with decoration, including an apple corer, a knife with a handle in the shape of a curved hand, and splint gauges that allowed basket makers to cut several splints of the same width at the same time.

But this is just a taste of the treasures at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. For a truly in-depth experience, go there.

 

Canoe, early 20th century, Northern New England

"Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination" continues through Sept. 3 at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan, (212) 514-3700.

"Gifts of the Forest: Native Traditions in Wood and Bark" continues through April 27 at the UBS Art Gallery, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd Streets, (212) 713-2885.

Issa Nyaphaga Installation @ the Carlton Arms

Announcing a new room installation at the Carlton Arms by the Cameroon artist Issa Nyaphaga with a photograph by Julie Dermansky. Nyaphaga, a founding member of the Paris-based African Journalists in Exile, will premiere his month-long project and finish the remaining portion during the March 29 opening with live musical accompaniment.

Thursday, March 29, 6-10PM
Free

@ The Carlton Arms Hotel
160 East 25th Street
between Lexington and Third Aves (212) 679-0680

6 train to 23rd Street / www.freedimensional.org

freeDimensional organizes short-term studio and residential space for artists, activists and citizen journalists experiencing censorship, xenophobia and/or economic marginalization.

Issa Nyaphaga uses diverse forms of artistic expression such as photography, painting, documentary and filmmaking to make portraits of artists who have faced persecution in their home country and have sought asylum in a new country. Before leaving Cameroon, Issa was imprisoned and tortured for his political cartoons in a local newspaper; he is a founding member of African Journalists in Exile.

Julie Dermansky: 'Prison in Rwanda' (Detail). 2005.

Juli Dermansky is working on a series of photographs documenting genocide sites and places signifying political injustice around the world called Mankind's Monuments to Barbaric Acts and other Macabre Vacation Destinations. For Issa's installation, Julie contributed the image 'Prison in Rwanda' shot from Kigali's airspace, where many people accused of genocide are held.

AnthroSource now available

The Goldwater Library is pleased to announce that the AnthroSource online resource is now available to researchers * through the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The database, developed by the American Anthropological Association in partnership with the University of California Press, brings together 100 years of scholarly publication by the AAA, including full text access to 15 current titles and an archive of all AAA journals:

An online portal to full text anthropological resources, AnthroSource offers access to over 45,000 articles in AAA journals, newsletters, bulletins, and monographs; a linked, searchable database containing past, present, and future AAA periodicals;  centralized access to a wealth of other key anthropological resources, including text, sound, and video; and interactive services to foster communities of interest and practice throughout the discipline.

AnthroSource is a fully integrated information resource. Its powerful search engine makes precision research quick and easy. Citations in article PDF files are dynamically linked through CrossRef to other publications, both within and beyond AnthroSource.

* Researchers within the museum as well as museum staff with remote access may connect to  AnthroSource directly through WATSONLINE, The Catalog of the Libraries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; or from a link in any of the applicable online serial records, for example American ethnologist [electronic resource].

   

Maya Meetings @ UT Austin

via petiteMort.org:

  Friday March 9th - Wed May 14th:

Maya Meet 2007
The River Cities: Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Pomona

University of Texas at Austin
Department of Art and Art History
Austin, TX 78712

Maya Meet at UT in Austin

Times: Check website for details. Friday, Sat, Sun, presentations and forums; Mon, Tues, Wed reserved for specialized Workshops.

Admission: Per event, check website for details. The Mayan Glyphs Workshops run from Monday through Wednesday, are offered per course registration fee.

Every year scholars and students of Meso-American culture meet in Austin to discuss new findings in the field. In addition to the presentations and forums specialized workshops are offered as a crash course to the deciphering Mayan writing. Beginners to advanced classes are available.

The focus of the 2007 Maya Meetings at Texas is the Usumacinta River region (Southern Mexico, Western Guatemala), looking at both ancient sites and contemporary issues.

Ceramic arts in Africa

The most recent issue of African Arts (spring 2007) is devoted to the theme of "Ceramic Arts in Africa."

Researchers within the museum as well as staff with proxy access can click here or here for access to the entire online version of this issue.

• Ceramic Arts in Africa: A Curator's Perspective / Kathleen Bickford Berzock
• Ceramic Arts in Africa: Field Research and Making Objects Speak / Barbara E. Frank
• Early Ceramics from Calabar, Nigeria: Towards a History of Nsibidi / Christopher Slogar
• Marks of Identity: Potters of the Folona (Mali) and Their "Mothers" / Barbara E. Frank
• Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations in the Grassfields (Cameroon) / Silvia Forni
• Namsifueli Nyeki: A Tanzanian Potter Extraordinaire / Barbara Thompson
• Metaphors, Myths and Making Pots: Chewa Clay Arts / Laurel Birch Aguilar
• Interview with Clive Sithole / Gary van Wyk
• The Women of Kalabougou (Mali) / Janet Goldner
• Ewe Ceramics as the Visualization of Vodun / Lisa Aronson
• Pottery-Making in Bonakire, Ghana / Marla C. Berns