Three artists at MPA

McLean Project for the Arts presents three new exhibitions featuring contemporary artworks by prominent local DMV artists. Curated by Nancy Sausser, the exhibitions display three intriguing artistic approaches that will captivate gallery visitors.

* Robin Rose Presents Scriptronics: An Art for the Future – This innovative exhibition in the Emerson Gallery features both abstract, encaustic paintings and a series of interactive “sound drawings.” The drawings are created through a method which amplifies the sound of the pen on paper and adds a performance element. Demonstrations are scheduled for Sept. 30 at 7 pm and Oct. 15 at 12 noon.  

* Equilibrium: Works by John M. Adams – The artist’s site-specific drawings in the Atrium Gallery incorporate the angles and planes of the space, while his paintings merge with the gallery walls, blending and interacting with their location.  

* Color Riffs: Paintings By Barbara Januszkiewicz – Inspired by American Blues music, the artist’s vibrantly colored, abstract paintings reflect melodies, harmonies, harmonic progressions, and chord structure. A musical soundtrack and music app accompanies this exhibition in the Ramp Gallery.

McLean Project for the Arts (MPA) is a nonprofit contemporary visual arts center located within the McLean Community Center at 1234 Ingleside Avenue, McLean, VA. For more information, visit http://www.mpaart.org or call (703) 790-1953.  

ArtBriefly.com: A Curated Art News Site has Launched.

From the folks at Arts Law Journal:

Orangenius is pleased to announce the launch of Art Briefly (artbriefly.com), a new website featuring curated news focusing on the business of art. Readers of the Art Law Journal have often remarked on the lack of timely, accurate news and information on the business and legal side of the art industry, so we set out to fill that demand, creating a site that identifies important art business and law news from around the web and aggregates the content into one site. At Art Briefly, you won’t find tutorials, software or hardware reviews, critiques or other creative-centric content. Instead, the site will feature content that can help members of the art community to better understand and grow their business. 

Using special software, Art Briefly scours the web, identifying articles and news items that may be of interest to our readers. Content that meets our criteria is forwarded to our editors who read each article, and select the best for posting. Art Briefly is not intended to be a substitute for the underlying source, and we offer only the first paragraph or two of an article along with a link back to the original source.  Ever supportive of creators of all types, our goal is to serve the market with aggregated content of interest to our readers, while also ensuring the original creators are fairly credited and compensated, as appropriate, from their efforts. 

This is only the beginning for Art Briefly. Orangenius plans to make Art Briefly the “go to” place for news about the legal and business environment of the art community.  Our goal is to make this site not only a place to quickly find stories of interest, but also a forum for discussing innovative art business ideas, a place to find answers to legal questions, a destination where writers and bloggers can be the first to find trending stories, and eventually, a site where our members can control the content. 

Until then, click to enjoy Art Briefly 1.0

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Emmett Till Project commemorates the 60th anniversary of the 1955 murder and trial of Emmett Louis Till that helped spark the Civil Rights Movement - check it out here.

The Batman Brooding

The Batman Brooding, shown below both in process and as a finished drawing, will be part of the Supernatural: In the Face of Danger show at Goucher College’s Silber Art Gallery in the Sandy J. Unger Athenaeum from September 8, 2015 through October 11, 2015.

The Batman Brooding
c. 2015
Charcoal and Conte on Paper
Framed to 26x21 inches

The show features works from artists Rick Garcia, Carla Goldberg, Jeannette L. Herrera, Simon Monk, Dulce Pinzón, Richard Schellenberg, Andrew Wodzianski, Nick Zimbro and myself.

This exhibit, which is free and open to the public, can be viewed Tuesday through Sunday from 11a.m. to 4 p.m. An artist’s reception will be held Friday, September 18th, 2015 from 6 to 9 p.m., with an artist talk at 7:30pm in the Silber Art Gallery. 

Please visit www.goucher.edu/silber or call 410-337-6477 for more information.

Dulce Pinzon at Goucher College

Dulce Pinzón is a Mexican artist currently living in Puebla, Mexico. Her work is influenced by feelings of nostalgia, questions of identity, and political and cultural frustrations. Her Superheroes project consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment, and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown in Mexico, and the amount of money they send to Mexico each week. 

BERNABE MENDEZ from the State of Guerrero works as a professional window cleaner in New York. He sends 500 dollars a month.

  Superheroes: The Real Story, a solo exhibition featuring Dulce Pinzón’s photographs, will be presented at Goucher College’s Rosenberg Gallery in the Kraushaar Auditorium from September 2nd through October 11th, 2015.

This exhibit, which is free and open to the public, can be viewed Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. An artist’s reception will be held on Friday, September 18th, 2015 6-9pm. 

Please visit www.goucher.edu/rosenberg for more information.

Another Dolezalian alleged fibber outed

Here we go again with this Shaun King dude! I wonder if this guy is also an "artist..." Check it out here.

The curious case of Cuba's racism

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s excellent PBS series Black in Latin America addressed Cuba in an unique segment, and when you read the comments to this episode, it is apparent the immense cultural ignorance that most people have about the toxic racist nature of the Cuban dictatorship.

Much has been written about racism in Cuba, and it was one of the earliest subjects addressed by the WaPo's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV. In his article Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's recent monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in re-establishing diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) appear to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University notes that “The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Will the expected flow of American tourists help? Zurbano writes in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings on Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that our President's dealings with a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least receive a little attention on the status of blacks in their nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how a bunch of historically and socially clueless American negotiators orchestrate deals with the leaders and the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism.

Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically that although 65% of Cubans self-identified as white in the last census, many experts estimate that today the island is about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper.

The harsh Cuban reality today, they claim, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt in silence?, especially in view of our nation's own racial history? Would we be silent in dealing today with the criminal government leaders of the apartheid South Africa of the 20th century?

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

Human rights and racism should be at the top of the agenda (if there's one) in our diplomatic discussions with the Havana tyrants.

What will this "change" bring to the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." - Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?