Amanda Browder’s “Spectral Locus” covers the exterior of Richmond Ferry Church in Buffalo, NY. It’s part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Public Art Initiative. See more photos here. (photo courtesy Richmond Ferry Church)
This week, the new African American museum, the troubles of nonprofit workers, Norton Museum’s Cranach diptych, the Qatari art scene, colonial nostalgia, and more.
The vision and the challenges behind a new African American museum in DC:
Bunch may be a fighter, but he seems eager to avoid such a clash—the cost, perhaps, of doing business with Congress, on whom so much concerning the museum depends. (More than half of the funds for the building have come from the federal government; the balance has been provided by a star-studded group of private donors, including Michael Jordan, the television producer Shonda Rhimes, and Oprah Winfrey, whose contribution of more than twenty million dollars is commemorated by the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theatre.) Bunch told me about a meeting he had with Jim Moran, a former U.S. congressman from Virginia, who initially opposed the museum: “He says, ‘O.K., Lonnie, I don’t wanna be rude, but I don’t think there should be a black museum just for black people.’ And I said, ‘Neither do I.’ Blew him out of the water.”
With benefactors like these, there may have been little incentive to engage more directly with the most heated debates about black identity and culture, or to empower the scholars best known for leading, and reflecting upon, those exchanges. Seven years ago, one such scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested by a white police officer while trying to gain entrance to his own home, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This led to the now infamous “Beer Summit” with Gates, President Obama, and the arresting officer. Gates later offered the museum the handcuffs used to detain him. Bunch initially declined the gift, before reversing himself.
There is a lot of concern over an Israeli court’s ruling about the transfer of a rare archaeological library from East to West Jerusalem:
Activists and archaeologists are worried that this could create a dangerous precedent and allow for more artefacts to be removed from the occupied territories and brought to Israel, in contravention of international law.
The museum features an important archaeological library, including thousands of volumes. Some of the oldest books date back to the 16th and 17th centuries, including accounts from pilgrims and scholars who travelled to the region, while others from the 19th and early 20th centuries cover antiquities sites in the region.
… Hani Nur el-Din, a professor of archaeology at Al Quds University and director of its Jerusalem archaeological research unit, said that the move has a symbolic significance.
“This is the base for the IAA and the base for archaeological excavations within East and West Jerusalem, the West Bank and every part of Palestine and Israel,” Nur el-Din told Al Jazeera. “It’s one of the main symbols that Israel has political power in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
… “Because we are not excavating, we depend on Israeli publications from Jerusalem. And while we may be able to rely on the data, we can’t rely on the interpretation, which is always political, focused on biblical archaeology,” he added.
Nonprofit workers are being overworked under the pretense of doing “good,” but what is really happening?
Why would nonprofit workers be willing to stay in jobs where they are underpaid, or, in some cases, accept working conditions that violate the spirit of the labor laws that protect them? One plausible reason is that they are just as committed to the cause as their superiors, whose decision-making can prioritize an organization’s values above all else. Another possible explanation is that because the job market is so difficult, they have no better options.
But it also might be that some nonprofits exploit gray areas in the law to cut costs. For instance, only workers who are labelled as managers are supposed to be exempt from overtime, but many employers stretch the definition of “manager” far beyond its original intent. Low-paid workers who do not have executive decision-making power and do not manage a staff, according to the Department of Labor’s criteria, shouldn’t be classified as exempt, but some employers put them in positions that are nominally managerial to escape overtime regulations.
The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, can keep the Adam and Eve panels by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Carolina Miranda writes:
But this case, which encompasses the history of European tumult in the first half of the 20th century, contains an array of difficult narratives about who is allowed to lay claim to the art — raising moral and legal questions about the murkiness of ownership in the chaos of revolution and war. One of those questions: Should it matter if the person trying to reclaim Nazi-looted art is the daughter of a Nazi?
Last week’s decision rests on the more narrow legal notion that representatives of the art dealership of dealer Jacques Goudstikker, Von Saher’s father-in-law, intentionally decided not to seek restitution of the works after the war for financial reasons, thereby abandoning the family’s claim to the art.
This article about the Qatari art scene reads like it was written by someone burned by the system there (and skews towards the bitter), but there are lots of insights into the scene on this wealthy autocratic island:
All of this was supported by a multibillion-dollar annual budget that allowed all sorts of seemingly impossible missions to be accomplished. Qatar dragged renowned Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei out of retirement for the construction of the $1.6 billion Museum of Islamic Art, bankrolled exhibitions by Takashi Murakami, Louise Bourgeois, and Richard Serra, and also went on a very, very pricey international art shopping spree. For example, although never officially confirmed, it’s widely believed that Shiekha Mayassa was behind the record-breaking $250 million paid for Cezanne’s The Card Players in 2012—the most ever paid for a work of art. It’s a record that she is rumored to have eclipsed yet again in 2015 with the $300 million acquisition of Paul Gauguin’s When Will You Marry? Neither have ever been seen with public eyes since they were purchased: Last anyone heard, they were sold at auction (presumably to Qatar), and there’s been no mention of them since.
Kimberly Drew talks to Carrie Mae Weems about her work, including what was going on her life when she created her well-known Kitchen Table series:
CMW: Back then I was teaching — working with a number of young people at Hampshire College. It was one of those volatile moments — seminal texts on feminism were being produced, discussed, talked about. Laura Mulvey’s very important essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” on the gaze had been produced, and everybody was referencing that and talking about that. The assignments that I often gave my students, I always asked them to make a portrait of somebody else and then a portrait of themselves, because I wanted them to see the differences in terms of how they represented themselves as opposed to how they represented others. The way in which men photographed themselves was deeply frontal. Women always photographed themselves turned to the side and slightly obscured. Their faces were never quite open and flat to the camera. They were always hidden behind hair, hidden behind objects, hidden behind things. It’s sort of a vulnerability of revealing the self.
I was thinking about the ways in which my students were working and I was also thinking about the way in which the dialogue had taken place and how it had very much excluded the black female body. It was just not a part of the discussion. Those things came together to really form the initial impetus for Kitchen Table. I knew that I wanted to be involved and bring together a group of people to examine monogamy, polygamy, the structure of family, the structure of the relationship between men and women, the structure of the relationship between women and their children. There’s also a structural relationship between women and other women.
Post-Brexit, it’s probably worth noting that many people have seen what they describe as the return of a type of “colonial nostalgia.” Kehinde Andrews writes:
Colonial nostalgia is not just confined to the Brexiters though. It has become a common feature in TV, films and even restaurant chains. Gourmet Burger Kitchen sparked outrage with the launch of a burger called the Old Colonial, sanitising empire by superimposing palm trees in the advertisement. And while hosting a debate on reparations for slavery, the Oxford Union advertised a cocktail called the Colonial Comeback, alongside a less-than-subtle image of African hands in chains. A London bar recently had to change its name after protests that calling a place The Plantation was offensive. It speaks to the appalling collective ignorance of the horrors committed in British history that the owner, The Breakfast Group, was unaware that a bar specialising in Caribbean rum should try as hard as possible to avoid any connotations of slavery. But I suppose if you remember Britain as the nation that “abolished slavery”, as David Cameron does, perhaps they thought the name would be a testament to abolition.
Is handwriting going extinct? Maybe:
A tension between style and substance pitted ornamentation against speed at the start. As Trubek tells it, the Sumerians’ first notations were solely bureaucratic, recording financial transactions in symbolic shorthand. By the medieval era, scribes went through 60 quills a day copying a single book for some three months, reaching perhaps the “apogee of handwriting in the West,” she writes. Though their work was “neither creative nor original,” occasionally a little ego spilled into the margins. “Now I’ve written the whole thing,” one monk scribbled. “For Christ’s sake, give me a drink.”
How we write is delicately connected to what we write and why. Trubek suggests relegating cursive to art class, but removing it to the realm of the exceptional limits our expectations of experiencing beauty in the day-to-day. Today’s second graders, including my own, will learn to type — one day, my daughter might even out-key Stella Willins, who banged out 264 words per minute in 1926. But we can’t quantify the value in an ability to forge a rare harmony between utility and beauty, the handsomely scripted grocery list, the love letter, the diary I write just for myself.
This article on BuzzFeed tells the sordid story of ISIS recruits who slip in and out of Syria and Europe (and why European law-enforcement agencies can’t find them). They are often doing things that many people probably don’t expect:
“We have one guy who comes home from Syria to visit people on breaks,” he said. “We know he’s in Syria and he’ll sneak back into the town, see his friends, and go clubbing. We have CCTV of him sniffing lines of coke and drinking in a club on one break before he goes back to Syria.”
Some interesting statistics about Gawker, which closed this past week, including the most frequent post topics (they published 202,370 posts since 2002):
The world’s 11 worst anti-women laws, and the surprising reality that they still exist:
4. Women can be murdered for cheating with minimal repercussions
In Egypt, a man can kill his wife and get off with a far more lenient punishment than is typically given for murder, if he catches her in an act of adultery. The situation is similar in Syria, where a man must only serve up to seven years in prison if he murders his wife, sister, mother or daughter after finding her engaged in an ‘illigitimate’ sexual act.
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
