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Tag: Black people

  • Andy Bey, Jazz Singer Renowned for His Vocal Range, Dies at 85


    Andy Bey, a jazz singer, pianist and composer whose silky, rich bass-baritone and four-octave vocal range placed him among the greatest interpreters of the American Songbook since Nat King Cole, his role model, died on Saturday in Englewood, N.J. He was 85.

    His nephew, Darius de Haas, confirmed the death, at a retirement home.

    Mr. Bey’s life in jazz spanned over 60 years, from his early days as a child prodigy singing in Newark and at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan, to a late-career run of albums and lengthy tours that kept him active well into his eighth decade.

    The sheer reach of his voice, and his expert control over it, could astound audiences. Not only could he climb from a deep baritone to a crisp tenor, but he could also do it while jumping ahead of the beat, or slowing to a crawl behind it, giving even well-worn songs his personal stamp.

    At a typical show, he might start out singing and playing piano, alongside a bass and drums, then switch between them, sometimes singing without piano, sometimes playing the piano alone.

    Even long into his 70s, Mr. Bey had a commanding, compelling voice, projecting from his baby face beneath his signature porkpie hat, a look that made him seem younger than his years.

    He was a rarity, a Black man singing jazz, a field in which women had long dominated alongside white singers like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.

    “A lot of men don’t want to sing ballads because it exposes your vulnerability,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2001. “It seems like male singers are not supposed to show that side a female singer can show. But as a singer you have to be willing to take it. For me it’s like a cleanser.”

    Mr. Bey went far beyond jazz, looping in blues, R&B and soul, whether performing standards or his own compositions. Later in his career, he became known for his rendition of “River Man” (1969) by the British folk-rock musician Nick Drake.

    He liked to say that he had four careers, one after the other. First, as a solo child performer, then as one-third of Andy and the Bey Sisters, with his sisters Geraldine and Salome.

    After that, he played with a string of jazz artists before breaking out on his own with “Experience and Judgment” (1973), which melded soul and jazz, and seemed to herald the arrival of a major new talent.

    Then he all but disappeared. He worked with jazz artists like Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, and spent long stints in Europe.

    It was not until 1996 that he released his next solo album in the United States, “Ballads, Blues & Bey.” By then, the industry had largely forgotten him — 25 record companies turned him down before Evidence, a small jazz label, said yes. (In 1991, he recorded an album called “As Time Goes By,” on Jazzette, a Yugoslavian label.)

    “Ballads” was a success, and led to a career renaissance. Mr. Bey had lost none of his vocal range; if anything, his voice had taken on a smooth patina. He released seven more albums over the next 18 years, received two Grammy nominations and became a fixture on the global jazz-club circuit.

    “The attention doesn’t surprise me, because I believe I deserve it,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999. “But I didn’t realize I’d get this much attention. I’ve been an underground figure, or a cult figure, all these years. An acquired taste, as some writers have called me.”

    Andrew Wideman Bey Jr. was born on Oct. 28, 1939, in Newark. His father, a window washer born Andrew Wideman, was an adherent of the Moorish Science Temple of America, an offshoot of Islam, and followed its practice of adopting Bey as a surname. His son kept the surname but did not share his father’s faith.

    His mother, Victoria (Johnson) Wideman, raised Andy and his eight older siblings.

    He is survived by his sister Geraldine (Bey) de Haas.

    At 3, Andy was already teaching himself to play boogie-woogie piano, and at 8 he was singing shows alongside the saxophonist Hank Mobley. His singing in venues around Newark caught the attention of record labels, and he released his first solo album, “Mama’s Little Boy’s Got the Blues,” when he was 13, in 1952.

    He was no doubt gifted with preternatural talent, but he was also surrounded by a musical family and a close-knit community in Newark that produced jazz stars like the singer Sarah Vaughan and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

    Mr. Bey credited his high vocal range to his decade-long run alongside his sisters, though he also closely modeled his style on Vaughan and Nat King Cole.

    “I would never be tired of the comparisons,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2001. “Nat King Cole was one of my idols and a major, major influence. He’s still the one for me.”

    Just before releasing “Ballads, Blues & Bey,” Mr. Bey revealed that he was gay. He had never hidden his sexuality, but he decided to publicize it after he found out he was H.I.V. positive.

    In a way, his sexuality only added to his uniqueness as a Black male singer, and an older one at that. His age, he said, made his performances more persuasive.

    “You have to kind of put yourself out there if you’re going to make somebody believe something,” he told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2005. “It’s trying to focus on what the song is saying and hopefully that it communicates something through sound, melody, rhythm — through all those components that help to make great music.”



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  • Head of African American Museum Departs as Trump Targets Smithsonian

    Head of African American Museum Departs as Trump Targets Smithsonian


    His order claimed that the Smithsonian, in particular, had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that it promotes “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

    The executive order presents a test for Mr. Bunch, who was not told of it in advance. Though he has not commented publicly, he last week sent an email to Smithsonian employees indicating an intention to persevere, saying that “we remain committed to telling the multifaceted stories of this country’s extraordinary heritage.”

    Mr. Bunch won praise for creating and leading the African American museum. But in an indication of the pressure he is expected to feel from the Trump administration going forward, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, described Mr. Bunch in a statement earlier this week as a “failure.”

    The museum opened with strong bipartisan support, but has come under attack from some Republicans as race and diversity have become a growing political flashpoint. In a 2023 congressional hearing with Mr. Bunch, some Republicans accused the Smithsonian of “left indoctrination.”

    Mr. Trump’s order criticized the African American Museum for a graphic posted online in May 2020 that referred to “hard work,” “individualism” and “the nuclear family” as part of “white culture.” (The graphic has drawn condemnation before; in the past Mr. Bunch has said he agreed that the graphic was inappropriate, and noted it had been taken down shortly after it was posted, when it was criticized by Donald Trump Jr. and other conservatives.)

    The graphic was posted before Mr. Young’s arrival at the museum. During his tenure, the museum has organized a number of temporary exhibits with a strong arts and cultural bent, including “Reckoning,” a show about art and Black protest that opened in 2021, and “Afrofuturism,” which opened in 2023.

    David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said: “Kevin’s contributions to the culture as a poet, essayist, editor, and leader of a great American museum are dazzling. I know he will go on making his mark in myriad ways and in the bravest voice.”



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  • Fred Eversley, Sculptor of Otherworldly Discs, Is Dead at 83

    Fred Eversley, Sculptor of Otherworldly Discs, Is Dead at 83


    Fred Eversley, a sculptor who used a technique dating back to Isaac Newton to make otherworldly discs of tinted resin, died on March 14 in Manhattan. He was 83.

    His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Maria Larsson, who said that he died after a brief illness.

    Mr. Eversley was a Brooklyn schoolboy of 12 or 13 when he first learned, from an issue of Popular Mechanics, that the centrifugal force created by spinning a vessel of liquid will push its surface into a parabola. Newton did this with a bucket and a rope; Mr. Eversley, working in his parents’ basement, used a pie plate of Jell-O on a turntable.

    When he returned to the idea nearly three decades later, after giving up a career as an engineer, he was a fledgling sculptor in the busy artists’ community of Venice Beach, Calif., experimenting with plastics and dye. Using liquid polyester, which he called “the cheapest, the least toxic and the most transparent” resin available, he worked out a process for casting separate layers of resin colored violet, amber and blue in a spinning cylindrical mold.

    The result was a form he stuck to for the next 55 years: a translucent disc, somewhat bigger than a vinyl record and much thicker, displayed vertically on a pedestal. Each disc has a highly polished parabolic concavity on one side that creates optical effects like a lens, sharpening and minimizing the view behind it. At the same time, the colors sparkle and change dramatically, according to the light in a given room and a viewer’s movements; as Mr. Eversley liked to say, it becomes a kind of kinetic sculpture without kinetic elements.

    Over the years, Mr. Eversley produced opaque as well as translucent discs, worked at different scales, and made other parabolas by slicing through resin rings and tubes at sharp angles. Steadily successful at winning public commissions, he installed soaring curves of futuristic steel or glowing polyurethane at Miami International Airport, in West Palm Beach, Fla., and at the southern end of Central Park.

    A charming and self-possessed man, he also acquired friends, mentors and patrons wherever he went. He used the sculptor Charles Mattox’s lathe to spin his first mold, was introduced to the gallerist Leo Castelli by Robert Rauschenberg and, according to his wife, became close friends with the influential collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza after encountering him in an elevator.

    Early on, he showed his work with other members of what became known as the Light and Space movement, an ethereal California spin on Minimalism. He was also associated with Finish Fetish, a movement that emphasizes new materials and the labor-intensive perfection of surfaces, and he was occasionally grouped with the Black Arts Movement, though some other Black artists found his work insufficiently political. (He made his first opaque disc after the sculptor John McCracken jokingly handed him a can of black pigment with which to make some “black art.”)

    Still, with his engineering background, Mr. Eversley thought about what he was doing differently from how his peers did. His abiding interest was energy, in the scientific sense. And his abiding love was the only shape that, whatever hits it, whether light or sound, throws everything back into a single focal point: the parabola.

    Frederick John Eversley was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 28, 1941. His father, Frederick William Eversley Jr., was an aerospace engineer and a contractor; his mother, Beatrice (Syphax) Eversley, taught at an elementary school. His paternal grandmother was Jewish, and his maternal grandmother was a member of the Shinnecock Nation.

    In addition to his wife, he is survived by three younger siblings, Rani, Donald and Thomas Eversley.

    As a child, Mr. Eversley liked to listen in on his father’s conversations with other engineers and to experiment with his grandfather’s camera equipment. He attended the progressive Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts; worked at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village as a teenager as well as for his father’s aviation company; graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School; and met jazz greats like John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald at the Putnam Central Club, which his grandfather had founded, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

    He was the first Black man to live on campus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his senior year, the father of a fraternity brother offered him a job at Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, Calif. He had already been accepted to medical school. But then he began dating a painting student with plans to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

    “It’s a long story,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with the art historian Danielle O’Steen for the monograph “Fred Eversley: Parabolic Lenses,” “but my liberal parents suddenly turned on me and thought my idea was too wild. They refused to help out with money, so I figured the only way to spend the summer of ’63 in Mexico with Suzanne was to accept the job at Wyle and ask for advance payment.”

    That fall he moved to Venice Beach and began running tests for NASA, private companies and the Department of Defense, like designing a special test chamber that bombarded the Apollo space capsule with high-intensity noise.

    His plans were derailed again by a serious automobile accident in January 1967 that left him temporarily unable to work. By then he was surrounded by artists like James Turrell, whose studio was down the block; Richard Diebenkorn, whose studio was visible from his apartment; and Mr. McCracken, who moved in next door. Many of them came to him for help with engineering problems.

    “Since I was on disability payment,” Mr. Eversley explained in the monograph, “I could play freely, without any pressure around staying out of the Army or making my living. I guess I felt like, if others can make art, I can, too. I really had nothing to lose.”

    He started with photographic transparencies attached to the sides of plastic cubes illuminated by fluorescent bulbs. But soon, with the encouragement of friends like Mr. Mattox, John Altoon and Robert Rauschenberg, he dropped the photographs and focused on the plastic, casting and polishing luminous rectangles and cones. In 1969, when Mr. Altoon died, Mr. Eversley took over his studio, which had been designed by Frank Gehry.

    Soon Mr. Eversley was enjoying a debut few artists could dream of. On a single day in 1970 he sold two pieces directly to the painter and influential gallerist Betty Parsons and was offered a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcia Tucker, with whom he had worked at the Folklore Center. That year he also had several solo shows at commercial galleries in New York, Chicago and Newport Beach, Calif., and appeared in more than a dozen group shows, including one at Pace Gallery in New York and one in Tokyo as well as several in California.

    Despite this explosive beginning, for much of his career Mr. Eversley was, and had to be, his own best salesman. Fortunately, though he might have downplayed it, he had a talent for it.

    “I really don’t believe, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, that my business techniques are that aggressive,” he said in a 1980 interview with Ocular magazine.

    In 2018 he signed with David Kordansky Gallery, which has locations in Los Angeles and New York. The next year, after a yearslong dispute with his Venice Beach landlord, he returned to New York, where he owned a five-story loft building in SoHo. In 2023 Kordansky staged his first New York solo show since 1976, “Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses.” For that show, he made a series of brilliantly colored seven- to nine-foot-tall monoliths, realizing an idea he first had decades earlier. Amanda Gluibizzi described them in The Brooklyn Rail as “megalithic and space-age at the same time.”

    Shortly before his death, said Ms. Larsson, an architect who also managed her husband’s studio, Mr. Eversley was talking about what a charmed life he had had. If he did, it must have been at least partly because he came forward so eagerly to meet every opportunity.

    “Fred showed up,” Ms. Larsson said. “He showed up everywhere. He used to say, ‘Maria, we need to show up.’”



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  • Getting in Touch With the Black Imagination at the Oculus

    Getting in Touch With the Black Imagination at the Oculus


    The Institute of Black Imagination, in the Oculus at the World Trade Center PATH station, is an experiment in cultural alchemy. It turns a retail store called Space 001, typically a space for transaction, into a place of transformation, providing public access to an archive of thousands of books, periodicals and record albums pertaining to Black culture. The store serves as a platform for innovative Black designers of all kinds, who sometimes make personal appearances.

    The institute, a nonprofit, was opened in October 2024 by Dario Calmese, a creative director for the Pyer Moss fashion brand, an intermittent dance choreographer and a visual artist. In 2020 he became the first Black photographer to shoot a Vanity Fair cover (of the actress Viola Davis).

    There is also a podcast from the institute, of the same name, that explores unconventional thinking from a range of industries and disciplines. One of its purposes, Calmese says, is “to give people access to the conversations I wish I had access to when I was a young Black kid in St Louis.”

    Last week, I.B.I. celebrated the 100th episode with a live recording at Space 001, featuring Paul Tazewell, who recently won the Academy Award for best costume design for “Wicked.”

    I recently spoke with Calmese about the origins of I.B.I. and what he hopes to accomplish in this location. The interview has been edited for clarity.

    How did the institute come about?

    I choreographed a dance for Carmen de Lavallade, an incredible dancer with Alvin Ailey, and then also met her husband, Geoffrey Holder, who was a singer, dancer, painter, choreographer and costume designer, and the first Black man to win a Tony Award for best director of a musical, and for costume design, for “The Wiz” in 1975.

    He passed away in 2014, and I was invited to his storage lofts in East Harlem. When I saw this room — costumes and paintings and sculpture and a sea of books — my first thought was, this is the blueprint to creativity Geoffrey left behind.

    Prior to this, most of my life and my career, I’ve been looking for a type of mentor, someone who was existing in this multivalent way. I kind of posthumously found that mentor. My next step was to get and keep these books together. There were books on fashion design, drawing, painting instruction, art monographs, mythology, occult books about divination, Black studies, erotica. It was just phenomenal. I had the idea of creating a reference library to share with other Black and Brown creatives.

    This whole thing is about access. For three years I petitioned Carmen and her son, Leo, who were managing the disposition of Geoffrey’s collection, to let me have a portion of it to create this library. In 2018 they agreed, but I had no money.

    How did you find the money?

    For years the books existed in my studio while I wrote grant applications and then started the podcast so that I could build a community around this idea. Deborah Cullen-Morales, an officer at the Mellon Foundation, became aware of my project and invited me to apply for a grant. In 2021, I received the first disbursement of $500,000, and they renewed the grant two years later.

    I think of an institute as an organization with an educational or social role tied to a particular objective. Is that the case with I.B.I.?

    Think of the I.B.I. as the central node. The podcast, our digital interactive archive — which is blackimagination.com — the physical archive of books, vinyl records, and periodicals, and then the store, Space 001, all become outputs of this more central idea.

    As much as we are dedicated to research, and history, it’s not behind some pay wall. I want to meet people in the mall, on the street. Our lives, our beauty should be ubiquitous. You should be in the mall and stumble into Audre Lorde [the feminist activist, writer and poet], or a book by Nikki Giovanni [an American poet, writer and educator].

    Is this why the store is in the Oculus? It seems odd to have a space that’s supposed to be experimental in the context of such naked commerce.

    We chose the Oculus not because of the retail element, but because it was the most centralized location for all the historic Black neighborhoods in New York City — 30 minutes from Uptown, 30 minutes from Newark or 30 minutes or less from Brooklyn.

    Then [we] decided to subvert this space. How do you walk out richer than when you came in? You come in for the coat, and then you stumble into ancient Egyptian magic, or you see a Tom Ford book, and then you discover this incredible designer out of Norway. We meet people at their curiosity. We want to ensure that the next generation of dreamers and thinkers have the tools and resources they need to imagine the world we will all live in.

    How did you decide who to feature in the store? Are these designers chosen by certain criteria?

    It’s more who I am excited by, and who many people don’t know about. We invite incredible designers from all around the world, either taking their work on consignment — selling it for them for a percentage of the sale — or buying from them wholesale.

    For example, we feature Nifemi Marcus-Bello [recently shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize], an industrial designer from Lagos, Nigeria, mostly working in high-end furniture. We have a floor lamp and a couple of his LM stools.

    We have T-Michael, a Ghanaian by way of London and living in Bergen, Norway, and via the brand Norwegian Rain he and his partners make essentially the best raincoats in the world. He has stores in Paris, Tokyo, Oslo and Bergen but no distribution in North America. We are getting Ashya bags by Ashley Cimone, a designer who makes gorgeous leather bags that are produced in Los Angeles.

    It seems that the podcast offers other voices besides designers. Is this true? What key cultural figures have you had on the podcast?

    [Gospel musician] Kirk Franklin; Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale; Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist working on artificial intelligence, who is a co-founder of Black in AI.

    I interviewed Dr. Danielle Wood, the first Black woman faculty member at M.I.T. and founding director of the Space Enabled Research Group, which seeks to increase opportunities to apply space technology in support of sustainable development goals.

    Who do you think will be nourished by the Institute?

    We reach a pretty broad audience, but first and foremost, we are about the diaspora. But this is not a Black American story or organization. This is about what we call a decentralized blackness. We’re speaking to the dreamers, the thinkers and the curious.

    Historically, many contributions of Black artists, thinkers and inventors have been overlooked or inaccessible in the wider public. We’re capturing history and propelling it forward in an age where everything is digital and moves so fast. Having a dedicated space to slow down and engage deeply with these stories is vital.

    The Institute of Black Imagination

    World Trade Center Oculus, 50 Church Street, Manhattan.





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  • Why Did It Take a Fire for the World to Learn of Altadena’s Black Arts Legacy?

    Why Did It Take a Fire for the World to Learn of Altadena’s Black Arts Legacy?


    Saar, whom White would eventually recruit to teach at Otis, grew up on the edge of Altadena in the 1930s and ’40s. Her neighborhood’s paperboy, she told me, was Jackie Robinson, who lived down the street. Her local landmarks included the five-and-dime store, where she bought trinkets and art supplies. Though she would eventually settle in Laurel Canyon after studying art at Pasadena Junior College and U.C.LA., she has maintained tight family and professional relationships to both Altadena and northwest Pasadena throughout her life.

    In the 1950s Saar (whose maiden name was Brown) started a jewelry business, cleverly named Brown and Tann, with Curtis Tann. Saar’s sister, the teacher and civic leader Jeffalyn Johnson, settled in a home on Lincoln Avenue, where she and her husband, Alvin, hosted art shows in their backyard. Visitors would dress in their Sunday best. Other venues for art display, Saar said, were churches, afternoon tea parties and artist-run studios. Often there would be musical performances or book readings.

    “It was very Altadena — laid-back, informal and filled with makers supporting each other,” said Moore, adding that artists here often stayed under the radar, without recognition by distant galleries, museums and critics. When Saar and others broke through , they were often identified as part of the larger Los Angeles scene.

    And then came the fires. Hundreds of artists have lost their homes and studios, and it’s unclear how many will be able, or willing, to return.

    “I just don’t want to go through this again,” said La Monte Westmoreland, 83, a longtime Altadena collage artist who lost one home in the 1993 Kinneloa fire. He rebuilt, only to lose his patio, koi pond and metal and ceramic sculptures in this one. “I don’t want to think about the next fire.”



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  • Visionary Artworks Plumb the Mysteries of Creativity

    Visionary Artworks Plumb the Mysteries of Creativity


    Scott Kerr, a fifth-generation art dealer in St. Louis, didn’t know what to expect last year as he was crossing the Mississippi River into East St. Louis, a once vibrant city in Illinois with a large Black population that never recovered economically after the civil unrest of the 1960s.

    Kerr was responding to an unsolicited email from a man named Lincoln Walker, who was hoping to get an appraisal of paintings by his father, Abraham Lincoln Walker, a house painter by trade who died in 1993. He had spent his spare hours during his last three decades in his basement, consumed with making art.

    The younger Walker, 62, an auto mechanic who goes by Link, guided Kerr to a tractor-trailer on his property. There, he opened up the back doors to reveal a trove of more than 800 artworks filling racks and stacked deep on the floor.

    “I was just mesmerized by what I saw,” Kerr said of the dark, phantasmagoric paintings, many with abstracted faces and forms materializing out of flowing evanescent brushstrokes and textured surfaces. “As soon as I looked at it, I was very confident that this was a major body of work.”

    So far, many in the art world seem to concur.

    Last November, at the Art Dealers Association of America’s Art Show in New York, Andrew Edlin, a specialist in self-taught artists, organized a presentation of Walker’s work. (Kerr, whose gallery McCaughen & Burr, now represents Walker’s estate, has teamed up with Edlin.)

    Edlin’s booth sold out, he said, with paintings bought by prominent collectors including Beth Rudin DeWoody, founder of the Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Fla.; the New Museum board president, James Keith Brown; and the artist Brian Donnelly (a.k.a. KAWS).

    Walker’s first solo New York gallery show opens Feb. 22 at the Andrew Edlin Gallery, with about two dozen paintings priced from $10,000 to $85,000. Several more works by the artist will be at the Outsider Art Fair, which Edlin owns, from Feb. 27 to March 2 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan.

    During a preview of Walker’s paintings at his gallery, Edlin described one untitled 1980 canvas as a cross between the work of the Surrealist Max Ernst and the Romantic painter and poet William Blake. “I don’t know if that’s hell or purgatory,” Edlin said.

    He believes that Walker must have looked at other artists as he was teaching himself to paint, comparing some of his neighborhood scenes of Black life to expressive figurative painters such as Benny Andrews and Ernie Barnes, and Walker’s more desolate landscapes to Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí. Yet Walker’s influences remain largely unknown.

    “There’s this inherent mystery about the work of a lot of ‘outsider’ artists that get discovered posthumously because they didn’t necessarily write or talk about it and aren’t around to tell people about it,” Edlin said. He noted that it’s typical for someone other than the artist to get such work into the public eye, citing the stories of two acclaimed self-taught artists. Henry Darger’s landlord rescued his work and Martín Ramírez’s psychiatrist shared his.

    Edlin acknowledged that the term “outsider art” is controversial, with many in the art world rejecting the differentiation between trained and untrained artists. “The nomenclature is very loaded politically,” said Maxwell Anderson, president of the Souls Grown Deep foundation, which promotes Black artists from the American South. “When you look at our website, you won’t find the following phrases: ‘self-taught,’ ‘outsider,’ ‘vernacular.’ We just want it to be seen as art.”

    But Edlin believes that the outsider art category does have a distinct culture.

    Such artists working hermetically “don’t have career aspiration, it’s just not part of the equation,” Edlin said. “I’ve always felt like there’s something to being un-self-conscious that is liberating in the creative process. They’re creating their own worlds.”

    Walker certainly never sought attention for his paintings.

    “He never cared if anybody ever saw one of them; that was just not his thing,” said Link, who was adopted by Walker and his wife, Dorothy, as an infant and inherited his father’s work when his mother died in 2013. Link said he carefully stored the paintings for years, but after he almost died during the coronavirus pandemic, he decided it was time to do something with them. He said he sent inquiries out to the art world, and Kerr was the only one to respond.

    “My mom wanted to get his paintings out there,” Link said. “We all knew how good he was. I want to make his name great.”

    Dorothy Walker, who was a social worker, had some of her husband’s paintings exhibited at a street fair and at a local gallery in the mid-1970s — and, according to Link, would yell at her husband when he didn’t show up for these events. In 1995, with the help of Lou Brock, a baseball Hall-of-Famer whose wife was close to Dorothy through their church, she got Walker a posthumous retrospective at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

    A 1995 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the exhibition noted that Dorothy showed some of her husband’s paintings in 1974 in Seattle, where they were critiqued by Jacob Lawrence, arguably the most famous Black artist at that time. (Link said an uncle on his mother’s side was a professor at the University of Washington, where Lawrence taught, but doesn’t know if his father ever met Lawrence.) There was also a 2013 show of Walker’s work at 10th Street Gallery, in St. Louis, Mo.

    Born in 1921 in Henderson, Ky., Abraham Lincoln Walker moved in his youth to live with his aunt and uncle in East St. Louis, which was once home to creative luminaries including Josephine Baker, Ike and Tina Turner, and Katherine Dunham. In the 1995 article, Dorothy said that as a child, her husband had been an evangelical inspirational speaker at the Church of God in Christ in Mounds, Ill. Link said he could remember his father going to church only once.

    “But he was real religious,” Link said. “I’d come downstairs, he’d be on his knees praying. Some of his paintings might be what he pictured as the afterworld, as hell or heaven.”

    Walker had a thriving house-painting and wallpapering business, and first tried making art in the early 1960s, when Dorothy asked him to bring home a catalog of murals. When she selected a tree with apple blossoms to hang over the living room couch, Walker balked at the $25 price, instead painting the image himself.

    “He had the ability to look at something and duplicate it, if he wanted to,” Link said. He would play in the basement while his father painted before and after work and all weekend long, listening to Bill Cosby on 8-track or jazz albums by Count Basie or Miles Davis, a contemporary of Walker’s who was also raised in East St. Louis, just blocks from the Walkers’ home. On lunch breaks from work, Walker would drive around the neighborhood with his sketch pad, often drawing one of the abandoned burned-out houses there.

    Link said that his father never went to an art museum, though he did keep the family’s set of encyclopedias in his work space — a possible source for early works from the 1960s, where Walker was learning the fundamentals of anatomy and composition and experimenting with styles such as Cubism.

    By the 1970s, Walker had developed his own moody palette and dystopian style of painting narratives unfolding around him. These scenes became increasingly psychedelic and abstract in the 1980s, in works where he moved paint across his canvases in huge swaths. Link said he used putty knives, all kinds of brushes, newspaper, plastic wrappers — whatever was at hand.

    Walker quit smoking and drinking after the sudden death of a close friend, Link said, and subsisted mainly on juiced vegetables for the last 15 years of his life. According to his wife’s account, Walker would fast periodically, and then would have visions.

    “As he progresses more to abstraction, I think he’s referencing a response to a spirit world,” Kerr said. “From three feet away you would think a painting is a complete abstraction, until you get up on it and there are just a thousand different faces in the work.”

    Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director at the New Museum, said he was struck by how Walker used “frottage,” a technique of rubbing a textured surface and teasing out imagery within the pattern. It has a long history in art, most famously with the Surrealists, including Ernst, who said he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.

    “Did Walker just develop it on his own? Maybe. Did he learn it? Probably,” Gioni said. “With the great self-taught artists, you are always confronted with this strange phenomenon that they had a knowledge of art and techniques. It suggests they were certainly less isolated than we think.”

    Beth Marcus, who lives in Boston and collects contemporary and self-taught artists, bought two Walker works in November. What really interested her were the large brushstrokes in his later works that looked like they had been applied with house painting tools. “It reminded me of Gerhard Richter and Ed Clark,” she said, “who used squeegees in their work.”

    Walker’s relationship with reality and fantasy fascinates Katherine Jentleson, senior curator of American art and curator of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. “My favorite of his paintings have abstracted human forms emerging from almost geologic matter, like continents breaking apart and something very cosmic,” she said. Jentleson has committed to acquiring at least one painting for the High Museum from Walker’s exhibition at Edlin.

    While a lot self-taught artists she exhibits had exposure to canonical art, whether through museums or magazines or television, she said that in terms of scholarship, “I think we have to be more broad in what we think of as being relevant influence on their art.”

    Many experiences in Walker’s life could have had “an interesting bearing on the lyrical quality of his brushstrokes or otherworldly realms he appears to be dipping into,” Jentleson said. “Very rarely is an artist, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, truly going to be outside of culture, in the way that Jean Dubuffet imagined.” Dubuffet was the midcentury French artist who promoted the idea of “art brut” as pure, naïve talent.

    For Donnelly, the artist who bought five of Walker’s paintings, the works can stand on their own visual power without connecting all the art historical and biographical dots. “I love learning about artists,” he said, “but there’s so much there in the painting, it’s nice not to have it all laid out for you.”



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  • Ken Wydro, Who Helped Create an Off Broadway Phenomenon, Dies at 81

    Ken Wydro, Who Helped Create an Off Broadway Phenomenon, Dies at 81


    Ken Wydro, a playwright, director and producer who with his wife, Vy Higginsen, poured their life savings into the Off Broadway gospel musical “Mama, I Want to Sing,” an enduring work of Black theater that ran for more than 2,800 performances, died on Jan. 21 at his home in Harlem. He was 81.

    The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Ahmaya Knoelle Higginson, said.

    “Mama, I Want to Sing” tells the tale of a minister’s daughter who rises to international fame as a soul singer. The show is loosely based on the life of Ms. Higginsen’s older sister, Doris Troy, who honed her singing chops at her father’s Pentecostal church in Harlem and later tasted the big time by co-writing and recording “Just One Look,” which was a Top 10 single for her in 1963 and later became a hit for both the Hollies and Linda Ronstadt.

    Ms. Troy also made her mark as a backup singer on rock anthems like the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and in 1970 she released a solo album on the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, with a supporting cast that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston.

    “Mama, I Want to Sing” is “a Black Cinderella story,” Mr. Wydro said in a 2013 interview with Call Me Adam, an entertainment website. “Coming from behind, finding oneself through loss, pain and family love.”

    Although “Mama” ultimately had a marathon run, success was anything but guaranteed. Nearly every major theatrical producer in New York rejected the show, fearing that a gospel-heavy musical would attract a limited audience.

    The show was a family affair. Mr. Wydro was the director; he and Ms. Higginsen produced it as well as writing the book and the lyrics for its many original numbers (Wesley Naylor and Grenoldo Frazier wrote the music). Ms. Troy herself was cast in the role of her mother, while Ms. Higginsen — a prominent disc jockey and television host in New York — provided onstage narration from inside a booth, in the manner of a radio announcer. (Their daughter eventually took over the lead role).

    With a budget of only $20,000, Mr. Wydro and Ms. Higginsen opened far from the lights of Manhattan’s theater district, instead raising the curtain in 1983 in the long-dormant August Heckscher Theater in East Harlem. Without the money to advertise in major newspapers, they largely depended on word of mouth.

    “We did grass-root marketing, went around to Black churches and then touched base with the schools, sororities and professional business groups in the Black community,” Mr. Wydro said in a 1990 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer.

    Word did indeed get out. In a 1984 review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that “a recent performance culminated in an audience singalong of the gospel standard ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ and the mood in the theater was jubilation.”

    An article in The Times the next year noted that “Mama” was drawing audiences “literally by the busload, from as far away as Boston and Decatur, Ga.” Another article, in 1987, described the theater’s “whooping, cheering, whistling” crowds while noting that the musical had already logged 1,500 performances, making it the longest-running Black show in Off Broadway history.

    Kenneth Wayne Wydro was born on Feb. 11, 1943, in Queens, the elder of two sons of Kashmir Wydro, an insurance salesman, and Olga (Savitch) Wydro, a real estate broker. His father was the son of Polish immigrants; his mother’s parents were from Ukraine.

    After graduating from the Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Wallingford Conn., in 1960, he attended the University of Rochester in Rochester N.Y. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physiology there in 1964 before heading to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master’s in theater in 1966.

    Mr. Wydro spent the early part of his career running seminars in public speaking and communications for companies like IBM and General Foods. He wrote four books, including “Think on Your Feet: The Art of Thinking and Speaking Under Pressure” (1981).

    He and Ms. Higginsen, who changed the “o” in her last name to an “e” when she entered show business, married in 1978 and began outlining “Mama” while strolling on a beach in Jamaica a few months later. They spun off a sequel, “Mama, I Want to Sing: Part II,” in 1990, and a third installment, “Born to Sing,” in 1996.

    In February 1994, thousands turned out to see the original show performed at the Paramount Theater in Madison Square Garden. In its various forms, “Mama” toured extensively in the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan. A film adaptation with Ciara, Lynn Whitfield, Patti LaBelle and others was released in 2011. In 2023, their daughter directed a 40th-anniversary revival of “Mama,” which ran for three weeks in its former home, now El Teatro in El Museo del Barrio.

    In 1998, the couple and their daughter started the Mama Foundation for the Arts to support musical artists working in traditionally Black genres.

    The couple continued to work as producers over the years. Mr. Wydro also wrote plays, including the 2006 drama “Secrets: The Untold Story of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.”

    In addition to his wife and their daughter, Mr. Wydro is survived by a brother, Laurence.

    In later years, Mr. Wydro often expressed pride in the impact “Mama” had on Black theater. “What we were able to do,” he told The Inquirer, “was to appeal to an audience that had not traditionally been invited to theater before.”



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  • What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in February

    What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in February


    This week in Newly Reviewed, Holland Cotter covers two group shows: one devoted to an important gallery from the past, the other focused on language and silence.

    Upper East Side

    Through March 29. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, huntercollegeartgalleries.org.

    D.E.I. didn’t exist in the mainstream New York art world a half-dozen decades ago. Black artists eager for shows had to find them mostly in Black neighborhoods, and live with the fact that a fiction called race would determine their audience.

    A rare exception was a storefront gallery called Acts of Art, which opened in the West Village of Manhattan in 1969. It not only exhibited new art by Black artists but also became, de facto, a place where diversity, equity and inclusion were demonstrated and promoted.

    Although the gallery is long gone — it lasted for just six years — its spirit is revivified in a small, tightly researched and impeccably mounted exhibition at Hunter College.

    Acts of Art was founded by two artists — Nigel Jackson (1940-2005) and Patricia Grey — at a hot cultural moment. The year it debuted, a big show called “Harlem on My Mind” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Planned as an integrationist gesture but composed of documentary photos rather than art, “Harlem on My Mind” was an infuriating flop and inspired the formation of a protest group called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition.

    When, two years later in 1971, the Whitney Museum opened a show called “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” organized by a white curator, the coalition staged a rebutting group show, and Acts of Art was where it appeared. In a stroke, the gallery caught the public eye and a spot in the history books.

    It hosted other activist happenings too, including the first exhibition of the all-women Black collective Where We At. What the gallery did mostly, though, was what it was designed to do: provide a showcase for a wide variety of contemporary Black artists who would otherwise not have been seen in downtown Manhattan. Fourteen of those artists make up the current show at Hunter, organized by Howard Singerman, a professor of art history at the college, and Katie Hood Morgan, the gallery’s chief curator, working with 15 students in the school’s Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar.

    A few of these artists — Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-98), Hale Woodruff (1900-80) — are now canonical stars. Others are less familiar, but no less treasurable. All of their work is, just by existing when and where it did, politically loaded, though almost none is overtly polemical. Nor is there uniformity of subject matter, style or medium. Figurative art dominates, from Dindga McCannon’s jazzy painted portraits, to a haunting biblical narrative by Ann Tanksley, to Lloyd Toone’s African-inspired sculptures made from scrap wood, shoe leather and nails. But Ademola Olugebefola’s etchings take us close to abstraction, and the torn-paper collages of Frank Wimberley take us all the way there. (A survey of Wimberley’s work goes on view at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea starting on Thursday.)

    One of the most intriguing things here is a self-portrait painting by Jackson, the gallery’s co-founder. He depicts himself as a grimacing, empty-eyed, barely there ghost. And, in fact, when the gallery closed, in 1975, he more or less disappeared, first moving to Africa, and, after returning to New York, disassociating himself from the art world to which he had made such a vital contribution. We don’t know why, but thanks to this sterling show, that contribution is acknowledged and preserved.

    Chelsea

    Through March 29. Hill Art Foundation, 239 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-337-4455, hillartfoundation.org.

    The success of a personal-choice group exhibition like “The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts” at Hill Art Foundation naturally depends on the tastes and curatorial skills of the chooser. And with the writer Hilton Als in charge we’re in good hands. In a wall text, Als writes of his interest in art that suggests equivalencies with language, spoken or written, in terms of its expressive dynamics (loud, soft; dark, light), and its ability to suggest silence — that most radical of sonic conditions.

    Some entries here refer to the literal production of language: A sculpture by Rachel Harrison incorporates a typewriter; one by Vija Celmins takes the form of a king-size rubber eraser. Others — a one-line printed text by Christopher Knowles, a vivaciously annotated drawing by Umar Rashid — make language itself a primary visual medium, with abstract drawings by Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, as light and fleet as signatures, giving visual art the presence of a voice. Finally, spoken word does find a place, in Ina Archer’s three-channel video “Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show,” which surveys a history of minstrelsy as seen in vintage films.

    And the show is punctuated with references to writers whose authorial voices the curator admires, James Baldwin chief among them. Als has organized memorable exhibitions around Baldwin before, considering him both a producer of words and as an often-portrayed visual subject, with the two aspects united here in a 1955 first edition of “Notes of a Native Son,” with a grave-looking Baldwin gazing out from the dust jacket.

    Baldwin’s presence is also enlisted in an image-word pairing that presses home the ominous implications of the first half of the exhibition title. Next to a 1962 Andy Warhol painting of a matchbox printed with the words “Close Cover Before Striking Match,” Als posts a quote from a Baldwin essay from the same year calling for antiracist revolution. “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” Judging by what we’re reading, and seeing, and hearing in the news, “next time” could be now.

    See the January gallery shows here.



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  • A New Hammer Museum Show Traces Alice Coltrane’s Influence

    A New Hammer Museum Show Traces Alice Coltrane’s Influence


    After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names.

    To musicians she was first and foremost Alice Coltrane, the Detroit-raised pianist who met John Coltrane in New York City in 1963, married him and joined his band in its late, avant-garde phase before his death in 1967. She went on to release important albums herself, playing piano and harp, accompanied by some of his main musical acolytes.

    To spiritual seekers, however, she was Turiyasangitananda — Turiya for short, or simply Swamini, the Hindu term for a female religious teacher. After John’s death, she traversed an intense period of meditation, physical trials and revelations. In 1972, she moved from their house on Long Island to California; a few years later, obeying what she experienced as a divine command, she founded an ashram near Los Angeles. There, the music was devotional, laced with Sanskrit mantras, part of a community life focused on study and worship.

    Her impact in her lifetime was significant but segmented. At a memorial gathering at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in May 2007, the program was so rich with jazz greats that it merited a music review in The New York Times. It also featured members of yogic groups whose chants, the critic Nate Chinen wrote, “nodded promisingly toward polyphony but ultimately faltered into vagueness.”

    Over time, however, the memory of Alice Coltrane — by any name — has overflowed these niches and seeped into broader culture. A musical biography by the scholar Franya J. Berkman, published in 2010, was the first to treat her oeuvre in full, from Detroit gospel roots through Hindu bhajans. Recent reissues of obscure or rediscovered albums have widened the critical attention.

    Last year, the harpist Brandee Younger led tribute concerts in several cities, while the Indian American vocalist Ganavya released a critically praised album rich with Alice Coltrane covers and references. At the pop-culture extreme is a bumper sticker that popped up a few years ago: “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness.’”

    It almost feels, said the producer and composer Flying Lotus, who is Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew, as if she now has the greater cachet. “I hear more people talk about my Aunt Alice than about John Coltrane, which is fascinating,” he said.

    Now, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is breaking new ground by examining Alice Coltrane’s influence in a field that she did not practice herself but where her life story has resonated and her ideas have found purchase: contemporary visual art.

    The show, “Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal” — the title comes from a short text by Coltrane about her spiritual journey that is being reissued this month after years circulating as a cult item — mixes previous and newly commissioned work by 19 fine artists, some prominent, like Martine Syms, Rashid Johnson and Cauleen Smith, and others less known or just emerging. Roughly half work or have roots in Southern California, anchoring the project in the region.

    Organized by the Hammer curator Erin Christovale, with the curatorial assistant Nyah Ginwright, the exhibition proposes several ways to explore Coltrane’s influence. Some works offer direct references, like Smith’s film “Pilgrim,” which she partly filmed at the ashram shortly before the property was sold in 2017, or Ephraim Asili’s film “Isis & Osiris,” which features Younger playing Coltrane’s restored harp. In others — like an installation of industrial light fixtures by Devin T. Mays — the connections are more abstract.

    Undergirding the show are materials from Coltrane’s archive that, in many cases, have never before circulated outside her family and ashram circles. Christovale consulted closely with the family and devotees; for some of the show’s new commissions, artists found inspiration in the documents they shared.

    For Christovale, who nurtured this project for years, the chance to focus a contemporary art exhibition on Alice Coltrane went beyond stoking her own avowed fandom.

    Coltrane, she said, constantly recurred in conversations with artists — mentioned as an inspiration, her music playing in their studios, with the sense, notably but not solely among Black female artists, that her example radiates richly. “She is someone who is part of their artistic experience,” Christovale said. “I would say that it goes beyond music. It’s like a sonic healing that inspires creatives writ large.”

    The ashram, in its day, was a simple building set on 48 acres in Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica Mountains. The edifice no longer stands: It burned in 2018, after the property’s sale, in the massive Woolsey wildfire. The spiritual community has dispersed to a degree, but many devotees stay in touch and gather at different homes or online for worship. There is also a small diaspora of young people who grew up at the ashram, including the rapper and singer Doja Cat.

    Michelle Coltrane, Alice’s oldest daughter and a singer herself, still lives where the family settled in the late 1970s, on a quiet block in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. One afternoon in December, over tea and snacks in her living room, several of the ashram’s elder devotees shared how their path led to Alice Coltrane — or Swamini, as they preferred to call her — decades ago.

    Shankari Adams had traveled to California from the East Coast in the early 1970s on an undirected quest. “I was searching for churches, paths, anything,” she said. In San Francisco, she found the One Mind Temple, which was devoted to John Coltrane. But it was a concert by Alice Coltrane, in Berkeley, that blew her mind. In line to meet Alice after the show, she felt a force, she said: “As I got closer the air got thinner and purer, like when you go up in an airplane.”

    As for Purusha Hickson, he had come up in Black radical politics, as a teenager in Westchester County, N.Y., and as a student at SUNY Albany. “But I had a lot of questions,” he said. “It looked like sometimes some of the activities that we were doing in the movement were creating more chaos than harmony and liberation.” He hitchhiked and rode Greyhound to San Francisco, then stayed in California. He received Vedantic initiation in 1975, then joined Alice Coltrane’s community. He continues to teach hatha yoga today.

    In the ashram’s heyday, services mixed regulars and drop-ins, with an open-door policy. Swamini played organ and sermonized on life, devotion and divinity. She followed Swami Satchidananda, then Sathya Sai Baba, and traveled to India, but studied all religions and developed a message of universal human understanding. In audio excerpts she varies cadence and tone, in the manner of Black church preaching. “She was raised in Detroit,” Christovale said. “Don’t get it twisted.”

    Coltrane was only 69 when she died, though she believed she had experienced many past incarnations. She was familiar with untimely death — John Coltrane died at 40; one of their three sons, John Jr., died in a car crash at 17. Either way, she was prepared. “She was always very frank with us,” Michelle Coltrane said. “‘I’m not always going to be here.’”

    In her capacity as a primary steward of the legacy of both John and Alice Coltrane, Michelle (who also uses the Hindu name Sita) regularly fields requests of many kinds, but “nothing like this one,” she said of Christovale’s exhibition concept. Gathering the archive and oral histories for the show, she said, only deepened her awe at how much her mother — a widow with four young children in 1967 — achieved.

    Over the years, Michelle has observed her mother’s cultural prominence grow, she said, noting the circulation of bootlegged records and her own encounters with music students versed in the obscure works. “It’s shorthand for cool” to know about Alice Coltrane, she said. In her view, the coronavirus pandemic may also have drawn people to Alice’s work. “Maybe people were searching for something else, something to feel,” she added.

    In conversations with several artists in the exhibition, the shared pattern was a prior awareness of Alice Coltrane that has focused and sharpened, sometimes prompting specific artworks, but even more so serving as a kind of compass for their life and practice.

    Adee Roberson, who has made a platform sculpture that visitors can step onto and hear a sound work composed with the musician Nailah Hunter play from directional speakers, first heard Alice Coltrane’s music some 20 years ago. A punk-rock kid with Jamaican roots, she respected Coltrane’s place in jazz. As an adult, personal setbacks helped her appreciate Coltrane’s trials, while Roberson’s spiritual and healing work — she is trained in several massage and body work practices — unlocked the music’s force.

    “When I think of her, I think of how sound really does heal you physically and emotionally and psychically,” Roberson said in her bungalow home-studio in South Los Angeles. Her sculpture is made of selenite — the most cleansing stone, she said. It is shaped like a disc and marked in quadrants after the Kongo cosmogram, which represents the cyclical relationship of material and ancestral worlds.

    For the artist Suné Woods, who works in video and collage, the show provided an opportunity to interview a range of people — ashram members, her own family and others — about their spiritual lives. She wove some of these reflections into the soundtrack for her two-channel installation, “On this day in meditation,” which includes original and found footage of Los Angeles-area landscapes made with a thermal camera. While completing the work, Woods meditated every morning at 4 a.m.

    The piece is a sensory experience that aims to reflect “what comes through when I meditate,” she said, sitting on the narrow deck of her very small house — a kind of aerie — perched on a steep hillside in the Echo Park neighborhood. “It’s a work where I want you to feel.”

    Nicole Miller, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who has lately been working with an early form of laser animation, drew on Alice Coltrane’s Vedic star chart, which was preserved in the archive, to write short phrases that light up in her installation “For Turiya” when sounds run through a synthesizer. The references to the chart are kept oblique, Miller said, out of respect. “I wanted to figure out a way to honor her instead of mining from her,” she said.

    An architectural piece by the sculptor GeoVanna Gonzalez, who lives in Miami, involves an aluminum platform structure along with stained glass and a woven rug. Its inspiration is the home that Alice and John Coltrane shared all too briefly in the Dix Hills section of Long Island, which the couple had carefully decorated with furnishings chosen for their spiritual associations. (The home is now a registered historic site and is being restored.) Gonzalez’s work will function as a stage for performances during the show’s run.

    For some artists, Alice Coltrane’s life yields prompts of a kind. Bethany Collins, for instance, who lives in Chicago, learned that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a favorite of Coltrane from her Detroit church music days. Collins is known for works on paper that blur or alter scores of musical pieces that recur in different times and social contexts. Her series in the show is based on that hymn and on the Largo from Antonin Dvorák’s “New World Symphony” — itself drawn from Negro spirituals, and which Coltrane adapted on one of her albums.

    As for Mays, a sculptor and performance-based artist who grew up in Detroit and lives in Galveston, Texas, his installation of light fixtures collected by a particular rule — they must be used, and not discarded or scavenged, but given to him — may seem abstract, yet draws on his understanding of Coltrane’s example.

    Alice Coltrane modeled a discipline and dedication that he seeks to emulate as an artist, Mays said. From her, he added, “I could make sense of how one finds a way to stay in practice and to continue to practice all the time.”

    “Monument Eternal” isn’t so much an exhibition on Coltrane than it is a show that thinks with Coltrane through a gamut of methods that, in a sense, she makes possible. It arrives in a hard time, not least for artists in Los Angeles grappling with last month’s fires. (The family of Syms, who grew up in Altadena, lost their multigeneration home.) That the ashram building itself was destroyed by fire is an echo that resonates with Christovale, though everything is too raw just now to digest further.

    Perhaps, Christovale said by phone recently, the exhibition can be a salutary gathering space. “Her whole expression is rooted in a sense of healing and connecting to a divine power,” she said of Coltrane. “You feel it at a cellular level when you listen to her music. I hope that if anything, a show like this, in a moment like this in this city, can be a space for people to let their shoulders drop.”

    Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal

    On view Feb. 9 through May 4. The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 310-443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.



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  • Discovering Family Roots in Brooklyn Slavery

    Discovering Family Roots in Brooklyn Slavery


    Come to the Center for Brooklyn History’s grand Romanesque Revival building in Brooklyn Heights looking for staid portraits of 19th-century burghers, and you’ll find them.

    But on a recent evening, Mildred Jones, an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was pondering a less expected large-scale oil portrait — of herself.

    It was hanging alongside the image of John A. Lott, a prominent judge whose family had enslaved her great-great-grandfather Samuel Anderson. Her thoughts on the likeness? Jones paused, looking a bit sheepish, then smiled.

    “I just love the whole idea,” she said. “It has opened up a whole new set of information and possibilities for telling the story of Black folks in Brooklyn. We’ve been here a long time. And it’s a story that needs to be told.”

    The twinned portraits of Lott and Jones are the anchors of “Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn,” a new exhibition looking at the borough’s long-neglected history of slavery — and the work ordinary people have done to help recover it.

    The show, on view until August, draws on fresh research in the collections amassed at the center (formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society) since its founding in 1863 by men like Lott. But it also builds on the dogged efforts of amateur genealogists and family historians to track down people whose lives may have been only fleetingly recorded.

    Dominique Jean-Louis, the center’s chief historian, said the exhibition helps illuminate — and begin to repair — one of the cruelest realities of slavery: that enslaved people had no right to keep their families intact.

    “There’s something really powerful about how the descendants of those families now have the tools to stay together, but also to find each other and make those connections,” she said. “That’s really beautiful.”

    It’s been nearly two decades since the New York Historical’s landmark 2005 exhibition “Slavery in New York,” which shocked many visitors who (wrongly) saw this city as a progressive bastion of abolitionism, and slavery as a mainly Southern phenomenon. In Brooklyn, many historical sites have added material on slavery, while activists have highlighted how many of the borough’s major streets — Bergen, Nostrand, Lefferts — are named for slaveholding families.

    But the topic can still carry an explosive charge — particularly when the national political moment has suddenly made talking about Black history feel to many like an act of defiance.

    “Some of us started doing genealogy to find out something about ourselves individually, but in doing that, we’re finding out about the history of us as a group of people,” Jones said. “In this time and age, it’s more important than ever to continue.”

    The exhibition, which is funded in part through the Netherlands Consulate’s commemoration of the 400 years of Dutch presence in New York, sketches out the big picture of slavery in Brooklyn. That includes dispensing with some common myths, starting with the idea that Dutch slavery was somehow more “humane” than that practiced by British settlers in, say, Virginia.

    In 1811, in a rare published firsthand account, John Jea, who was born in Africa and enslaved in Brooklyn, put it bluntly. “The horses usually rested about five hours a day, while we were at work,” he wrote. “Thus did the beasts enjoy greater privileges than we did.”

    Nor was it just a matter of a handful of household servants here and there. A 1786 census document for Brooklyn’s seven townships counts 2,669 white inhabitants and 1,317 slaves.

    Slavery in New York also lasted far longer than many people realize. Under the state’s 1799 gradual abolition law, some people remained in bondage until 1827. And after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, not just runaways but free Black New Yorkers were in danger of being captured and sold into slavery elsewhere.

    In preparing the show, researchers dug through the collections in the center’s grand upstairs library, looking not just for references to enslaved people in property records, but for documents that provided clues about their actions, personalities, dreams.

    Among the documents in the show is an 1814 bill of sale for a young girl named Mercy, owned by a member of the Lefferts family. The contract mandated she be taught to read and write. And above one sentence, the seller added a promise: that she would “behave.”

    “You can really look at this document and recreate the moment,” Jean-Louis said.

    The Samuel Anderson story came not from the center’s research, but through the New York chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, which contributed to the show.

    The group was founded in 1977, in the wake of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which inspired a boom in family history research among Americans of all ethnicities. Several members were at the exhibition’s opening, where they talked about the enterprise with equal parts passion and wonky command of both 19th-century archives and 21st-century databases.

    “People used to say Black people didn’t have a history, but we knew that wasn’t true,” said Stacey Bell, the group’s president, who has traced her ancestry to before the American Revolution. “Then people said it was impossible to document. And it is hard, because you don’t find our ancestors hitting the records the same way as people who were not enslaved.”

    Today, the Lott family name is commemorated in an elaborate oversize family tree in the center’s collection; a historic house in Marine Park; and a three-block street in Downtown Brooklyn. Samuel Anderson’s name, by contrast, was all but forgotten.

    Growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jones only knew that, unlike friends who spent summers with relatives down South, all her ancestors were “from Brooklyn.” She first learned about Samuel Anderson decades later, when her brother, an avid genealogist, was researching people in a family burial plot and found a remarkable nugget: an 1897 interview with him in The Brooklyn Eagle, billed as “Uncle Sammy’s Reminiscences of Slavery Days.”

    The article included a drawing of his tidy two-story cottage, and of Anderson himself. It described him, at age 88, as “resembling Mrs. Stowe’s image of Uncle Tom,” with a “sunny disposition” and eyes that suggested “more than the usual intelligence possessed by those of his race.”

    The interviewer, Jean-Louis noted, emphasized his experiences in slavery. “But he kept talking about his life after he was free,” she said.

    The show also documents the way slavery was remembered — and misremembered — by white society. A newspaper clipping from 1895 describes “Black America,” an open-air exhibition that recreated a Southern plantation in a park in Brooklyn, complete with hundreds of performers picking cotton, singing songs, rocking on the porch and otherwise demonstrating “the versatility of the Southern negro.”

    At the same time, the memory of slavery in New York was being erased. In 1946, when The Eagle published a photographic feature about the surviving houses of Brooklyn’s old Dutch families, including the Lotts, not a word was said about the Black people who had also lived and worked in them.

    Filling the gaps of the past is a continuing labor, and not just for Black New Yorkers. As part of the exhibition, the center is holding workshops to help people of all backgrounds research their family history.

    And whatever the political winds, several members of the Black genealogical society said, that desire to know where and who you come from cannot be suppressed.

    “No one people’s story in this country is more important than others,” Bell said. “We can’t erase what was here. It’s our history, and we have to face it.”



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