As part of THE HIKERS—Rashid Johnson’s new show and film at Hauser & Wirth New York—MarthaGraham Dance Company members Leslie Andrea Williams and Lloyd Knight will perform a dance/movement iteration of the work.
Navigating a white male world wasn’t threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I knew more than them. — Toni Morrison
TONI MORRISON—THE PIECES I AM—the new documentary by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, now in theaters—is a joyous, exhilarating look at the life and work of a great American author, teacher, and editor who has always been happy to be labeled a “black writer,” a “woman writer.”
“I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to, and among…”
And it is shocking, in Greenfield-Sanders documentary, to come across such benighted critical voices as, say, Sara Blackburn’s in 1973, in America’s supposedly liberal newspaper of record:
“Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life.”*
Removing the white male gaze as the dominant voice is a key element of Morrison’s practice, and she doesn’t hesitate calling out black writers who seemed to write to white audiences. Citing RalphEllison, she asks, “The Invisible Man? Invisible to whom?”
As a senior editor at Random House throughout the 1970s, Morrison discovered and championed books by Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Bettie Wysor (author of TheLesbian Myth). She also persuaded Angela Davis—then in her late twenties—to write her autobiography.
“Eventually I learned that the book she wanted to publish was the book I wanted to write… She helped me access my imagination in ways I continue to be grateful for today.” — Angela Davis
Song of Solomon (1977) was Morrison’s first best seller, and five years later she left her editor’s post to devote her time to writing and teaching. She’s professor emeritus at PrincetonUniversity, and often told her students, “I know you’ve been told, ‘write what you know.’ I don’t want you to do that. You don’t know anything.”
TONI MORRISON—THE PIECES I AM features interviews with Morrison’s friends and colleagues—Walter Mosley, Farah Griffin, Fran Lebowitz, Paula Giddings, Hilton Als, Sonia Sanchez, editor Robert Gottlieb, and Davis—as well as a rich selection of contemporary artwork by, among others, Mickalene Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, David Hammons, and Rashid Johnson.
For his directorial debut, RashidJohnson has shot an update of Richard Wright’s controversial 1940 novel about Bigger Thomas’ seemingly irrevocable slide into the void. The screenplay by Suzan Lori-Parks changes some of the novel’s key plot points—”It’s not the book,” Elvis Mitchell told a recent FilmIndependent audience at the Arclight screening in Hollywood—but the expendability of black lives in this new NATIVE SON is, tragically, still contemporary.
“One of the criticisms of the book—and one I share—is the character’s lack of agency. Wright wrote them as archetypes.” — Rashid Johnson, at the FilmIndependent screening of NATIVE SON
As Bigger, Ashton Sanders (Moonlight) gives a performance of cool hesitation that recalls the voice and armature of James Dean and a young Keanu Reeves. For a scene at the home of Bigger’s rich, art-collecting employer, Johnson—in an audacious move—places his own 2015 painting Untitled (Anxious Man) directly behind Sanders as an angel/devil-over-my-shoulder figure.
NATIVE SON—which premieres tonight on HBO—co-stars KiKi Layne (If Beale Street Could Talk), Bill Camp, Sanaa Lathan, Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson, Elizabeth Marvel, and David Alan Grier.
Film stills, from top: Ashton Sanders in Native Son (2019); Sanders and KiKi Layne; Sanders; Sanders and Nick Robinson (right); Sanders. Photographs by Matthew Libatique, images courtesy Sundance Institute and HBO.
Film Independent photos, from top: KiKi Layne and Rashid Johnson; Elvis Mitchell, Johnson, and Layne. Film Independent Presents HBO Screening Series—Native Son, March 20, 2019, Arclight Hollywood, photographs by Araya Diaz/Getty Images.
The public presentation of MUMBO JUMBO—Grace Wales Bonner’s Autumn/Winter 2019 collection that shares a title with Ismael Reed’s revolutionary 1972 novel—will conclude ATIME FOR NEW DREAMS, Wales Bonner’s exhibition at the Serpentine.
Throughout this final week of the show, the dancer and performance artist Michael-John Harper will take residence within the gallery and perform a daily ritual of movements.
Exploring “magical resonances within black cultural and aesthetic practices” through improvised installations and shrines, A TIME FOR NEW DREAMS also incorporates the work of Chino Amobi, Black Audio Film Collective, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, David Hammons, Michael-John Harper, Liz Johnson Artur, Rashid Johnson, Kapwani Kiwanga, Klein, Laraaji, Eric N. Mack, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Ben Okri, Ishmael Reed, Sahel Sounds, and Wales Bonner.
From top: Eric N. Mack, Capital Heights, 2019, in Grace Wales Bonner—A Time for NewDreams, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, 2019; Rashid Johnson, Untitled (daybed 1), 2012; Wales Bonner; Grace Wales Bonner, Everything’s for Real; Liz Johnson Artur, There is onlyone…one, 2019. Images courtesy the artists and the Serpentine Galleries.
GROUNDINGS, organized by Grace Deveney and Tara Aisha Willis, explores movement—seen and unseen—through a series of residencies with artists who work in dance, music, and performance art. The exhibition considers the reciprocal influence between bodies in motion and the invisible forces that govern movement, such as gravity, time, and electricity.
Over the run of GROUNDINGS, performers will hold open rehearsals in which they create performances and physical objects that speak to the themes of the exhibition.
Annette Kelm, Untitled, 2012. Chromogenic development print. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Jimmy De Sana, Cowboy Boots, 1984. Vintage cibachrome. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Courtesy of the JimmyDe Sana Trust and Salon 94, New York.
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