Robert-Goldwater-Library

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.59

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 April-May 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_59_AprMay2007.txt

New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show

Photo: Cary Conover for The New York Times
The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show opened at the Seventh Regiment Armory.

via NYTimes Art Review:
New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show
Global Art: Talismans, a Phantom and a King
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: May 21, 2007

You think art fairs aren’t sexy? The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show is out to prove you wrong. Just inside the entrance to the Seventh Regiment Armory’s drill hall you’ll find a peppery display of Burmese pornographic drawings. And smack in the middle of the show, bristling like a cactus garden, is a cluster of carved-wood Thai phalluses.

No need to call the vice squad. All this stuff is religious or folk-religious. The sculptures and drawings were created a century or so ago as talismans to ensure prosperity, fertility and supernatural protection. It is said that they can even perform miracles, like warding off bullets and turning ho-hum you and me into Ms. and Mr. Irresistible.

These forceful items are part of a special display organized by Chinalai Tribal Antiquities, a gallery in Shoreham, N.Y., for a fair that has more than a few irresistible features of its own. The wide-open space at the armory, suitable for tanks and tennis, imposes the same regimental format on every fair that appears there: booth beside booth, aisle after aisle. But this show has a look of its own, in part because it is the only tribal fair in town, which seems odd, given that New York is, among other things, an African-American city with a significant African population, a Latino city that grows more Latino by the day and an Asia outside Asia.

As for textiles, where else, even taking the Metropolitan Museum into account, can you lay eyes on the range you see here? [read on...]

30 Years of DanceAfrica

text and image via Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM):

BAM celebrates 30 Years of DanceAfrica with a kaleidoscope of dance, music, film, and art. New this year: a showcase of spoken word, dance and music inspired by the spirit of Africa and an archival retrospective. Join us Memorial Day weekend to honor America’s largest festival of African and African-American culture and another joyous milestone: the 70th birthday of Artistic Director Baba Chuck Davis.

Dance
Featuring Ndere Troupe of Uganda, Forces of Nature Dance Theatre Company, Kulu Mele African American Dance Ensemble, Bambara Drum and Dance Ensemble, Sabar Ak Ru Afriq Dance Theatre, and BAM/Restoration DanceAfrica Ensemble.

Bazaar
The one-and-only open-air bazaar features African crafts, food, and fashion—and an exciting premiere: a live showcase of poets, dancers, and music inspired by the spirit of Africa.

Art
Exhibitions include The Colors of 30 Years of DanceAfrica by artist D. Lammie-Hanson, the African Ancestral Altar, the African Sculpture Garden, and an archival retrospective by BAMart and MoCADA in the 80 Hanson Place lobby.

Music
Gokh-Bi (Go-Bee) System merges political rhymes with the sounds of Senegal for hip-hop you haven’t heard before.

Education
Dance workshops for all and a community partnership with Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.

Film
The best of the African Film Festival includes the acclaimed drama Bamako and the sequel to the animated classic Kirikou! [see earlier post]

DanceAfrica Film

image and text via Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) [IMDB links added]:

May 23—30

To help celebrate the 30th DanceAfrica presentation, we’ve got a full line-up of the best films from the African Film Festival, along with special screenings of the acclaimed Mali town meeting drama Bamako.


Bamako (2006) 115min
Wed, May 23 & Thu, May 24 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako
Sissako, whose last film Waiting for Happiness played at DanceAfrica in 2003, returns with Bamako. The film audaciously stages a trial against the IMF and World Bank in a small African village, contrasting the political arguments against economic imperialism with the goings-on around the small town, including a film crew making a Western starring Danny Glover, who was an executive producer on the film. “A strong candidate for African film of the year.”—Variety.

Watch the trailer for Bamako here.

Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2006) 75min
Fri, May 25 & Mon, May 28 at 2, 4:30pm
Sat, May 26 & Sun, May 27 at 2pm
Wed, May 30 at 4:30, 6:50pm
Directed by Michel Ocelot, Benedicte Galup
The sequel to the animated family favorite finds the old narrator exclaiming that there is still more of Kirikou’s story to tell! This new film looks at four separate magical encounters between the quick-witted child and an evil witch who threatens his small village. Bursting with color and life, the film also paints a positive portrait of communal life in Africa, and extols the values of working together.

Don’t F*** With Me I Have 51 Brothers And Sisters (2004) 86min
Fri, May 25 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Dumisani Phakathi
This film is the story of Dumisani’s epic journey to find his 51 siblings and come to terms with the loss of his father as a child. Critics have compared this film to jazz music—with bursts of joy and pain that allow the viewer to feel the family’s triumph over loss and longing. This film is as much the story of South Africa in search of its origins as it is Dumisani’s.

The 11th Hour (2006) 90min
Sat, May 26 at 4:30pm
Directed by Zelalem W/Mariam
A determined father is on a quest to save his eight-year-old daughter who’s suffering from a serious heart condition. This moving and dramatic film is a mirror image of the extreme sacrifices that are paid to save a helpless young child. Through a long and perilous journey for the girl’s father, is willpower alone enough to secure her life?

The Night of Truth (2004) 100min
Sat, May 26 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Fanta Régina Nacro
Mirroring the political strife and genocide in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa, this film opens as preparations are being made to end a decade of civil war in a fictitious country. Both rebels and government forces gather, bringing with them years of rage, grief, hope, suspicion, and bitterness.

A Child’s Love Story (96) 2004min
Sun, May 27 at 4:30pm
Directed by Ben Diogaye Beye
This is a touching investigation of innocent love between children in Senegal set against the background of a traditional class system. Despite the difference in their background and family lives, five young children become friends but find that economic upheaval in the country threatens to tear them apart.

Daughter Of Keltoum (2001) 106min
Sun, May 27 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Mehdi Charef
A young woman travels to an isolated Berber settlement in the mountains of Algeria. Rallia’s journey to locate her biological mother immerses the viewer in a world virtually untouched by contemporary society, one that still clings to tribal mores and strict religious codes of conduct. Charef skillfully captures the windswept vistas and the daily search for water, the responsibility of the resilient women of the Berber tribe.

African Shorts Program 78min
Sun, May 27 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Features the films:

Ousmane (2005), 15min Senegal/France
Directed by Dyana Gaye
Dakar, Senegal. A seven year old, who begs in the streets, decides to write a letter to Santa Claus….

Toi, Waguih (2005), 28min Egypt/France
Directed by Namir Abdel Messeeh
This is the story of a relationship between a Egyptian screenwriter and his father, who was jailed for being a Communist in 1959.

My Lost Home (2005), 19min Morocco/France
Directed by Kamal El-Mahouti
A look at the life of Kamal El-Mahouti, who arrived in France in 1970, when he was six years old, and lived in a housing project for the next twenty years.

Whole: A Trinity Of Being (2004), 16min South Africa
Directed by Shelley Barry
Three experimental shorts which deal with sexuality, visibility, and voice from the perspective of a wheelchair user.

Museums That Use Flickr

Reblogged from e-artcasting:

Your Photos on Museums: Ile Ife National Museum, Nigeria

You are e-artcasting's most precious value. Thanks to your emails, comments and contributions e-artcasting's mission is increasing its diverse outreach.

One of our most active activities is located at our Flickr group. "E-artcasters" are about to contribute 1,000 wonderful and rare photos on art museums from all over the world, so it is hight time for celebration. Today we start a new section named, "Your Photos on Museums" in which we will rescue on weekly basis a selection of your best contributions at our Flickr pool.

For our Grand Opening, this exquisite image of the Ile Ife National Museum (Nigeria) taken in April 1958 and posted by Rabinal, who also shared with us a fragment of The White traveller in Black Africa, by Colin Wills,

The Creation of the World (Yoruba version). The creation of the world took place at Ife. Orafame. The Supreme Being, the Creator, sent Orishala out from heaven to create the world. The way was long and hot, and Orishala rested in a grove of palms. He was thirsty, and he drank palm wine, and fell asleep, a serious dereliction in one with such a high task. Orafame was disappointed. He called another demigod named Oduwa, and sent him forth to carry out the mission. Oduwa did not pause by the way. He took earth, a hen, and a chameleon. The hen spread out the earth and scraped it into a mound, just as you will see her do today. The chameleon moved over the mound, testing it with his light weight, feeling gently with his little feet. His delicate,tremulous movements which you can see today, are a memory of that great task. From the mound grew the Earth. It was there that Orfame set down the first man and woman, and from there stemmed the Yoruba people. The mound still exists; I will show it to you presently, said my guide. Oduwa, naturally, is worshipped by millions of Yoruba. The chameleon is also sacred, and the hen, though eaten, is regarded with great respect and affection. But the strange thing is that Orishala also has his devotees. One might expect them to be the wine-bibbers of the community. On the contrary, they are the teetotallers. When Orishala awoke and found that somebody else had created the world while he slept, he bitterly lamented his failure, and swore never to touch palm wine again. He never did, and neither do any of his followers. His failing remains an example forever, a warning to men of their own frailties.

Image: Rabinal: Museum at Ife, posted on September 2006.

Malick Sidibé: Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

via Artnet News, 05/15/07 :

GOLDEN LION TO SIDIBÉ
Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, 72, is to be awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale. In recognizing the artist, known for his portraits of life in Mali’s capital, Bamako, Biennale curator Robert Storr writes that "no African artist has done more to enhance photography’s stature in the region, contribute to its history, enrich its image archive or increase our awareness of the textures and transformations of African culture in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first than Malick Sidibé." Visitors to the venerable artfest have a chance to appreciate his work, in the form of a special series of photos Sidibé took of Malian contestants in an AIDS-awareness pageant.

Film and History in the Pacific Workshop

Film and History in the Pacific

 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
A Workshop at The Australian National University, Canberra
6-8 February 2008

This workshop explores two questions: how has film shaped Pacific history and understandings of Pacific pasts? and how do – or might – Pacific historians engage with the medium of film? Although film in the Pacific dates back to the late 19th century and is now increasingly the medium through which Pacific pasts are encountered by both Pacific and local audiences, Pacific historians (with a few notable exceptions) have rarely engaged with film and even fewer have been directly involved with film production.

Four themes will guide the workshop:

    * Film, frontiers and imperialism – how film has been used to document Pacific frontiers and advance or oppose imperial interests;
    * War and identity – cinematic portrayals of war and their formative effects on local and metropolitan identities;
    * Islanders and others – representations in film of, by and for Islanders and the depiction of minority groups in the Pacific;
    * Pacific pasts and history through film – on the use of film as a source material; as an approach to researching and representing history; and as a means of communicating to audiences.

Presentations on this last theme will especially serve postgraduate students, filmmakers and historians who have pioneered the use of film or wish to make greater use of it; and teachers and academics guiding and assessing students who want to use film in their research or theses.

A program of screenings is planned in association with the workshop and participants will have the opportunity to visit film repositories in Canberra.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts (no more than 200 words) is 31st May 2007. Please forward abstracts and any inquiries to the convenors chris.ballard(at)anu.edu.au or Vicki Luker vicki.luker(at)anu.edu.au.

Attendance is open to all and registration is free, thanks to the support of the Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU.

A Schomburg Renaissance

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

A 1925 sign from the New York Public Library’s Negro division.

via the NY Times:

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: May 11, 2007

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

By the time it officially became the Schomburg in 1972, taking its name from Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Puerto Rican-born black bibliophile who donated his collection, it was a one-stop connection with the global black experience. Its wonders include a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech, documents signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a signed first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, daguerreotypes of African-Americans from the 1830s, Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs. Its exhibitions have tracked black migration and displayed the contents of Malcolm X’s pocket when he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom.

“The center has increasingly become one of the cultural anchors of the greater Harlem community, one of the top three tourist destinations, along with the Apollo and the Studio Museum in Harlem,” said Howard Dodson, the Schomburg director. “The kind of change that’s taking place in Harlem is of political, social and historical interest to the center, and we’ll be here to document it. We are not going anywhere.”

As the Schomburg unveils its facelift, Harlem itself is also undergoing one of its periodic renaissances. There’s new real estate development, new stores and restaurants, new places to imbibe culture. The association with Harlem has been the constant for the Schomburg trove of more than five million items: art, manuscripts, films, photographs. The center has been a place for community meetings and for local politicians, for schoolchildren and eminent researchers like the historian John Hope Franklin.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, is among those who see the renovated Schomburg as an emblem of a Harlem at the top of its game. Hundreds of thousands of tourists pour into Harlem annually to shop in the stores on 125th Street, sit in the pews of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church or revel in the serendipity of finding new cafes or dowager buildings.

“The Schomburg stands as a bearer of the idea that our history and culture are important,” said Ms. Golden, who is African-American. “The renovation will reinvent the sense of the institution as living, breathing space. All the cultural institutions in Harlem are going through a period of incredible growth, and it’s not just about physical renovation.”

A walk through Harlem makes vivid its embrace of many worlds. There are the tiny African braiding shops, mom-and-pop restaurants with an African or Caribbean flavor, as well as Citarella and Starbucks amid the cacophony of 125th Street, the area’s commercial spine. It is dotted with stores like Old Navy, as well as the Apollo and the Studio Museum. The streets are cleaner and safer than they have been in years. (read on ...)

And take note of the following:

Two exhibitions will be on view through Oct. 28: “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes: Images of Blacks in the 19th and 20th Centuries” and “Black Art: Treasures From the Schomburg.”

The “Stereotypes” exhibition is meant to show the prevalence of caricatured images of blacks for most of the early 19th and early 20 centuries. It uses items like sheet music, posters, advertisements and postcards to show how words like “darktown” and “coon” were casual companions to depictions of blacks with distorted features.

Some of the items are on loan from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich.

“A small amount of this is from the South,” Mr. Dodson noted. “A significant amount of the stereotypical ads come from New York.”

The propaganda is contrasted with real-life black images from that period: couples in their wedding finery, 1920s bathing beauties, formal banquets.

“Black Treasures” is an eclectic display that includes the 1868 marble and bronze “Portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello,” by Pietro Calvi, as well as the 1969 collage “Black Manhattan,” by Romare Bearden, and dozens of other work by Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Faith Ringgold and others.

   

The Inca: Bridging Gaps

An Inca suspension bridge in 1877 and the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. Engraving, from “Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas” by E. George Squier (Harper and Brothers); Angel Franco/The New York Times

via NYTimes:

How the Inca Leapt Canyons
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 8, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Although scholars have studied the Inca road system’s importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, “Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges.”

Dr. Ochsendorf’s research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university’s approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.

Photos: Carl T. Gossett Jr./The New York Times, left; Adriana von Hagen, center; and Robert Spencer for The New York Times

The first steel section, top, being installed on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1963. The last remaining Inca bridge in Peru, center, was the model for the M.I.T. bridge project. John A. Ochsendorf of M.I.T., above, showing cable made in Peru.

Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called “materials in human experience,” students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.

In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning “how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture.”

From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver.

“If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people,” Professor Lechtman said.

In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was.

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons. [read on...]

Amy Chen's Farewell Party

Amy's Party