Fogelson Library Research Award Winners

Last semester the Fogelson Library Research Award Committee asked the instructors of the Writing Roundtable I courses to submit essays from their classes that they felt exemplified the research and composition process. We received selections from nearly all of the relevant faculty and, after an arduous process of evaluating the merits of each submission, selected three finalists.

The inaugural recipient of the $200 prize for first place is Leland Mark, whose essay about sustainable communities is an outstanding exemplar of an academic research paper.

Brian Owen was awarded the $100 second place prize for his insightful and original analysis of the psychology of corporations.

The erudite exposition of Sango Imai-Hall's essay on the tropes and archetypes of comic books was awarded the third place prize of $50.

The Award Committee would like to thank all of the faculty members who entered their students in this year's competition. You will be pleased to know that next year we will be adding an award for instructors of composition as well!

Further thanks on behalf of the Committee are extended to the Friends of the Fogelson Library, for their fiscal contributions that made this award possible and their input in the selection of our finalists.

And, finally, a big thank you to SFUAD alumna Thea Light for documenting the award winners and their receiving of their awards earlier this semester.

Photos by Thea Rose Light, 2012.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

 

The Santa Fe University Performing Arts Department presents LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS opening Friday evening April 20.  You'll love it whether you are unfamiliar with the story and music, or if you have seen it a hundred times!

Little Shop of Horrors, the musical by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, ran in an off-Broadway production beginning in 1982.  The film version, directed by Frank Oz, with Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia and Steve Martin, was released in 1986, the same year that it came to GGT for the first time.  Come in to Fogelson Library and see the display near the entrance:  you will find photos and reviews from CSF's 1986 production, as well as other information about the evolution of the story behind the musical.

Cover for a DVD re-release of the original 1960 Little Shop Of Horros, produced and directed by Roger Corman.  (Do you recognize the very young Jack Nicholson in the cover photo? He has a small part in the movie.)

The musical was based on a 1960 movie by Roger Corman, king of the cult film.  In our display, you will see three books about Roger Corman and his movies, each of which includes information about Little Shop of Horrors.  For more information about Roger Corman, see call number “PN1998.3 .C68” on the lower level, and check the library’s catalog for some of his movies that we have in our DVD and VHS collections.  (Sadly, we do not have Ski Troop Attack, Bucket of Blood,or my personal favorite The Wasp Woman.)

Roger Corman in 2006. Photo by JaSunni .  (Used through Creative Commons licensing, commons.wikimedia.org.)

In researching the background of Little Shop of Horrors, some anonymous references cropped up indicating that Corman and his co-writer, Charles B. Griffith, got the idea for their screenplay from a short story by John Collier entitled "Green Thoughts." "Green Thoughts" was first published in the May 1931 issue of Harper's Magazine.  In Collier's story, the plant--an ugly orchid bought at auction from an explorer to some unnamed exotic place--eats and digests a couple of proper British cousins and a cat, whose faces are reproduced in the flowers that bloom on the plant!

The evolution of the plant through these stories is interesting.  In 1931 it is an orchid from some savage unexplored, but earthly, place.  In 1960, Griffith and Corman have Seymour getting the seeds "from a Japanese gardener over on Central Avenue.  He found them in with an order he got from a plantation next to a cranberry farm."  Whether this is supposed to be a reference to post-WW2 Japan is an intriguing question.   Then in 1982, Ashman changes the plant's origin to outer space:  "While [Seymour] was browsing the wholesale flower district, a sudden eclipse of the sun occurred, and when the light returned, the weird plant had appeared." This plant is supposed to look like a large Venus Fly-Trap. Seymour realizes later on in the story that his plant, Audrey II, came from an unknown planet with the goal of conquering the Earth.

The creativity that goes into designing the Audrey II puppet is one of the elements that preserves Little Shop of Horrors' standing as a popular musical for school, college, and community theatre groups.  Here are some renditions of Audrey II from photostreams of Flickr.com members.  Thanks to all the photographers for sharing the rights to these photos.

 

Audrey II, by "Spyderella" (Sharon). (personal creation, 2008)

Audrey II, by "Drurydranma" (Len Radin)  (Drury Drama Team, Drury High School
North Adams, Massachusetts, 2005) 

         
   Audrey II, by "Pinprick" (Amanda). (Coupeville High School Drama Department, Coupeville, WA. 2011.)

 

Audrey II, by "gamelaner" (Tony). (Henry Sibley High School Theatre Dpt., Mendota Heights, MN.2010)

Audrey II, by "KwaziiCat" (LornaNiese). (Dennyloanhead, Scotland, UK. 2010.)

 

Final featured artist-educator for Women's History Month 2012: JUDY CHICAGO

"Although she is primarily a practitioner of art, Chicago is also a renowned educator.
In developing [her] educational programs, Chicago sought to undermine the assumption at the time that it was impossible to be a woman and an artist.  More recently, her mentoring [to women and men as well] has been with the priority to create artwork that reworks personal experience."

Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World by Stange, Oyster and Sloane (2011).

In addition to being a prolific artist and the author of eleven published books, Judy Chicago pioneered a unique, content-based pedagogy that helps art students find their individual voices while aspiring to aesthetic excellence. Her methodology dates back to the early 1970’s when she set up the first program aimed at women students at California State University, Fresno. At that time, although the preponderance of undergraduates in art school were female, few became practicing professionals. Chicago set out to change this; out of the fifteen Fresno students, nine became successful professional artists.

After a year, Chicago was invited to bring her program to the California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts), a new school north of Los Angeles, where she team taught with artist Miriam Schapiro. The Feminist Art Program produced Womanhouse, the first female-centered art installation. Womanhouse – whose reverberations are still felt today – jump-started the Feminist Art movement which went on to become a global phenomenon, introducing new subject matter, media and approaches to art making.

from http://www.judychicago.com/educator

Judy Chicago's Educator Timeline

Woman’s Building: In 1973, Chicago partnered with the late art historian Arlene Raven and renowned designer Sheila De Bretteville to found the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), the first independent feminist art program. 

SINsation Title wall, IU Bloomington, 1999: In 1974, Chicago stopped teaching in order to focus entirely upon studio work. She returned to academia in 1999 when she began a series of semester-long residencies at universities around the country. Her first appointment was at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she facilitated a project class that culminated in an exhibition at the I.M. Pei designed art museum on campus. 

Duke University: In 2000, Chicago held appointments at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). The UNC class was a graduate seminar while at Duke, she facilitated a class called “From Theory to Practice” in which she guided students in projects based upon three subjects: women’s history; birth and creation; and the Holocaust, An exhibition was held at the end of the semester which so impressed the administration that they held it over so that it could be seen by students and faculty across the campus.

Western Kentucky University: In 2001, in celebration of the thirty-year anniversary of the famed Womanhouse, Chicago and Woodman were invited to re-visit the subject of the home in a project class for both women and men at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.   

Envisioning the Future: 2003 brought another team-taught project when Chicago and Woodman facilitated “Envisioning the Future”, a public/private partnership in the Pomona Arts Colony, east of Los Angeles. In 2003, Chicago and Donald Woodman facilitated eight artmaking groups, training and supervising the eight artists who headed up each of the groups.  At the end of the project, there were twelve exhibitions around the Inland Valley are of Los Angeles.

Vanderbilt University:  In 2005, Chicago and Woodman became the first Chancellor’s Artists in Residence at Vanderbilt University, where they again facilitated students and local artists in a project called “Invoke/Evoke/Provoke”.

The Dinner Party Curriculum Project: When Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party, it was with the intention of educating a broad and diverse audience about women’s achievements.  In 2007, Judy Chicago created some guidelines for teachers wishing to use the piece as a basis for classroom projects. In 2009, Through the Flower launched the K-12 Dinner Party Curriculum Project, a comprehensive curriculum that can educate, empower and inspire students at all grade levels.

Kutztown University:  An annual Dinner Party Institute led by Dr. Marilyn Stewart and colleagues where teachers explore the curriculum and visit The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum with Judy Chicago. 

Penn State: In 2010, Penn State University acquired Judy Chicago Art Education Archive, described by the university as one of the most important private collections of archival materials on feminist art education.                                                                                  This information adapted from http://www.judychicago.com/educator/timeline.php

You can read all about Judy Chicago's educational theory by clicking this link:  http://throughtheflower.org/pedagogy/

 

Judy Chicago lives in New Mexico and is represented by the David Richard gallery.  You can see her work right here in Santa Fe at David Richard Contemporary, 130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite D.

 Photos courtesy of judychicago.com press kit       

Fogelson Library and Chase Library have several of Judy Chicago's books.  Visit the online catalog or ask a staff member for more information.

MAYA ANGELOU

Most of us know Maya Angelou as a poet and autobiographical writer.  But before she wrote her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou  studied drama and dance in school, worked as a waitress, cook, and San Francisco cable car conductor;  toured Europe with a production of Porgy & Bess (1954-55); studied with Martha Graham and danced with Alvin Ailey; worked as a nightclub singer and recorded an album Miss Calypso (1957);

moved to New York to perform for wider audiences; joined the Harlem Writers Guild (1958); wrote a musical revue Cabaret for Freedom in which she also performed (1960);  was the editor for the Cairo, Egypt Arab Observer, taught drama and dance in Ghana where she edited and wrote for the Ghana Times; moved back to the US from Ghana in order to work with Malcolm X, worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964-1968); and,in the late 1960's, with the help and encouragement of James Baldwin, began writing her memoirs.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1970, when she was 42 years old.

This is how Angelou sums up her path to becoming a writer:

"Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a 'natural' heart surgeon."

Since 1982, Dr.Angelou has been the Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.  She teaches a master class in World Poetry and Dramatic Performance. "Teaching literature [is] an affair of the soul...To educate is to liberate,” and great teachers “remind people of what they already know instinctively,” though they have wonderful allies in great literature. Of her poetry class at WFU, "it has been a transformative experience for [her students]."  From an article in Wake Forest University's The Daily Deac, 16 February 2011.

At the age of seventy, Angelou was the first African American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.

photo by Adria Richards. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Click to hear Angelou perform her poem: On the Pulse of Morning or  And Still I Rise

For more information about Maya Angleou, check out the following links, and be sure to visit  Fogelson Library to see some of the items in our collection authored by her. 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maya-angelou

http://mayaangelou.com/bio/

DAWN UPSHAW

March is Women's History Month and 2012's theme is "Women's Education -- Women's Empowerment."  In recognition, this month fogelsonblog is featuring brief bios of five women who are outstanding artists as well as respected educators.  Our musician this year is Dawn Upshaw.

"...One of the most consequential performers of our time," the Los Angeles Times.

"It's her nature to sing, just like it's a bird's nature. That's why she's here on earth," Robert Shaw, conductor.

"As a teacher, Upshaw exposes young singers to the expanded array of possibilities for vocal music and affords them the opportunity to cultivate creative partnerships with the composers of today."  MacArthur Fellows description, 2007

Dawn Upshaw (2004), photo by Dario Acosta

Soprano Dawn Upshaw blends rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music.

At a point in life when other vocalists might be settling into comfortable routines or limiting their artistic risks, Upshaw has abandoned safer career tracks in favor of a quest for meaningful collaborations. (excerpts from Nonesuch Records)

In 2005, she was named the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts at Bard College.  She is the Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, a program that she conceived and designed.

 

"The Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music is a unique Master of Music program in vocal performance designed and conceived by Dawn Upshaw. Each year a select group of up to 8 singers is invited to join the program through an intensive audition process. The small number of students in each class insures that each singer receives the individual attention that can uncover and nurture his or her unique qualities in order to create a complete singing artist.  Ms. Upshaw takes a personal interest in the growth of each student and acts as both teacher and mentor to help them realize their full artistic and professional potential. She is in residence at least three times each semester for intensive work with students in individual coachings and master classes. Her inspirational presence sets the tone for the exploration and discovery of a wide-range of musical styles and for the development of communicative and emotionally compelling music making." 

  [from "Graduate Vocal Arts Program Overview,"  bard.edu/conservatory/vocal arts]

Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Artistic Director, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2008)
Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius” prize (2007)
Honorary doctorate degrees from:
Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, Allegheny College, and Illinois Wesleyan University 

Vocal studies faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center
Music Director, Ojai Music Festival, Ojai, California
Four-time Grammy Award winner
More than 50 recordings
1984 winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions
1985 winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Competition
Member of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Development Program.

Click below to watch a segment from a Master Class at Bard College Conservatory, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/Upshaw.Bard

Another Master Class excerpt, 2006:

http://www.youtube.com/Upshaw.MasterClass

Fogelson Library has Dawn Upshaw's CD I Wish It So, music by  Bernstein, Sondheim, and others (call number MUSCD M1505.U67I84 1994).


More biographical information about Dawn Upshaw can be found here:
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Upshaw-Dawn.htm
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/05/03/raising_her_voice/
http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/dawn-upshaw
http://www.macfound.org/

DEBORAH WILLIS

Deborah Willis is a portrait and art photographer, one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography, and curator of African American culture. Deeply committed to education, she is also the Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and has an affiliated appointment as a University Professor with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. 

(Photo of photo from book jacket of Posing Beauty,2009.)

Willis is an educator, a university department chair, a curator and historian, and continues her artistic work (see her website at debwillisphoto.com).  Read her complete six-page curriculum vitae here. Some highlights:

  B.A., Temple University

  B.F.A. Photography,Philadelphia College of Art

  M.F.A. Photography, Pratt Institute

  M.A. Art History and Museum Studies,City University of New York

  Ph.D. Cultural Studies, George Mason University

1996 Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award

2000 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship  

2005 Guggenheim and Fletcher Fellow

2010 Society for Photographic Education's "Honored Educator" 

Author or co-author of more than 15 books, five curated exhibitions, as well as several visiting artist appointments and numerous other photographic projects.

Fogelson Library has four of her books available for checkout.  See the display near the circulation desk this week.

 

For more information, see these websites, better yet come in and see her books!

http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=1566

http://admin.tisch.nyu.edu/object/WillisD.html

http://www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com/artists/willis/resume_willis.html

UTA HAGEN

Uta Hagen was one of the foremost acting teachers of the 20th century. A celebrated actress in her own right, she trained many of the outstanding actors of the American Stage and Screen.  (from the Overview page of the Hagen Institute, HB Studio, hbstudio.org.)

Uta Hagen in The Seagull. Vandamm theatrical photographs, 1900-1957. / Productions / The Seagull. (Shubert Theatre, 1938). The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts / Billy Rose Theatre Division

UTA HAGEN received the Tony and Drama Critics Award for her performances in Odets’ The Country Girl and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In later years she earned an Obie for “setting a theatrical bonfire” (New York Times) in Mrs. Klein, and subsequently appeared Off-Broadway in Collected Stories and at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles opposite David Hyde Pierce in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks. In 1999 she was awarded a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 2002 was awarded the National Medal of the Arts. Miss Hagen taught master classes at HB Studio from 1947 until her passing in 2004. She was the author of two premier acting books, Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor.

She was interviewed by Charlie Rose on November 28, 1995.  Watch the interview (copyright Charlie Rose LLC):

 Among her students are these names you'll recognize:  Matthew Broderick, Robert DeNiro, Judy Garland, Whoopi Goldberg, Christine Lahti, Jack Lemmon, Liza Minelli, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Amanda Peet, Charles Nelson Reilly, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver.

To learn more about Hagen, visit the library's display table featuring outstanding artist-educators for the 2012 Women's History Month.

Fogelson Library has Hagen's two books on acting, her memoir Sources, a vinyl LP recording of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Uta Hagen as Martha, and the two-volume video Uta Hagen's Acting Class.  These will be on display for about a week, but you can always find them in our collection.

More information about Uta Hagen:

  hbstudio.org 

  Women's International Center 

  Colorado Thespians Techniques, Uta Hagen  

Thanks to hbstudio.com and charlierose.com .

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

2012 National Women’s History Month Theme:

Women’s Education – Women’s Empowerment

The equal opportunity to learn, taken for grated by most young women today, owes

much to Title IX of the Education Codes of the Higher Education Act Amendments.

This legislation, passed in 1972 and enacted in 1977, prohibited gender discrimination

by federally funded institutions.  It has become the primary tool for women’s fuller

participation in all aspects of education from scholarships, to facilities, to classes

formerly closed to women.  Indeed, it transformed the education landscape of the

United States within the span of a generation.
(Quote from the National Women's History Project. Read more at nwhp.org/2012theme.)

It is the 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX.  For more information on Title IX, read about its history here.

The National Women's History Project 2012 honorees are six women who are educational pioneers.  They are:

Emma Hart Willard (1787-1870), Women Higher Education Pioneer;

Charlotte Forten Grimke (1837-1914), Freedman Bureau Educator;

Annie Sullivan (1866-1936, Disability Education Architect;

Gracia Molina de Pick (b. 1929), Feminist Educational Reformer;

Okolo Rashid (b.1949), Community Development Activist & Historical Preservation Advocate;

Brenda Flyswithhawks (b. 1950), American Indian Advocate and Educator.

Willard

Grimke

Sullivan

Molina-Enriquez

 

Rashid

Flyswithhawks

 
You can read a short biography of each of these outstanding women by picking up a brochure from the Women's History Month display on the table near the entrance to Fogelson Library. (You can also read about them at http://www.nwhp.org/whm/honorees2012.php). Browse our selection of library materials on the subject of women and education included in the display.  Don't forget: all display items from the library's collection are available for checkout!




This March for Women's History Month, fogelsonblog will profile a series of women artists and teachers.  Keep checking back this month to learn about a writer, a visual artist,  a musician, an actor, and a photographer who have a strong commitment to education.

Black History Month, Week 4: PHOTOGRAPHERS

                   Featured book in this week's display: Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis (2000)

From the Introduction:

   "While there is a growing awareness of works by contemporary black photographers, there has been very little historical research or critical analysis of the images produced by nineteenth and early twentieth-century African-Americans.  Few art historians and scholars in the field of nineteenth-century photography have focused on the fine works and activities of African-American photographers.
   "African-Americans have produced photographs  since 1840. [...] The first photographs made by black photographers are, like all photographs of this period, significant in terms of their contributions to American history and culture.  What makes them particularly significant is that the inhumane institution of slavery existed in the 1840s and would survive another twenty-five years. ... Although pervasive racial discrimination existed throughout the United States, hundreds of free men and women of color established themselves as professional artists and daguerrotypists during the first twenty-five years of photography's existence.
   "It is astonishing for us to look back with a late twentieth-century perspective at the lives and works of these early nineteenth-century black photographers.  Concerned about how black people were portrayed in a world of rank racist imagery, black photographers were especially sensitive to negative depictions of black Americans during the mid-1800s. [...] Many black photographers contradicted these depictions by making representative portraits of their subjects.  Most of their African-American clients wanted to celebrate their achievements and establish a counterimage that conveyed a sense of self and self-worth.  Obligingly, many black photographers recorded the significant event in African-American life--celebratory as well as unsettling."  (Willis, Deborah, Reflections in Black, W. W. Norton, 2000, p xv-xvii)

Jules Lion (1810-1866) made Daguerreotype of an Unnamed Young Woman, probably in his New Orleans studio in 1842.  Born and educated in France, Lion exhibited and won prizes for his paintings and lithographs in Paris by the mid-1830s.  He emigrated to New Orleans in 1837, and was employed in the portrait lithography studio at the New Orleans Bee. Back in France in 1839, Lion learned to make daguerreotypes.  He brought his new skill back to New Orleans where he lived the rest of his life, making (daguerreotype and lithographic) landscapes of New Orleans and many portraits, and instructed art and lithography at Louisiana College.

[Urias A. McGill, half-length portrait, facing front] sixth plate daguerreotype, by Augustus Washington, about 1855. Urias McGill was one of four McGill brothers who ran a very successful business in Liberia. The brothers owned several trans-Atlantic vessels for exporting Liberian products such as palm oil and camwood. The firm also operated a store in Monrovia. The photographer, Augustus Washington (c.1820-1875), was born in Trenton NJ and studied at the Oneida Institute, Kimball Union Academy, and Dartmouth College before becoming a teacher in Hartford CT.  He learned to make daguerreotypes to finance his education, and eventually opened a daguerrean studio in Hartford.  In 1852, he emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia, where he opened another studio.  Eventually he gave up photography to serve in the Liberian House of Representatives and Senate.

This is a portrait (c.1875) of J. P. Ball, African American Daguerreotypist, Entrepreneur, and Activist. Ball traveled extensively and used his photographic skill to build a successful business as well as to document the lives of slaves.  He used his candid images in lectures, pamphlets, and other antislavery activities. He also made important images from the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Ball was born ("a free person of color") in Virginia in 1825.  He settled in Cincinnati in 1849, Ohio being at the time a leading abolitionist state, and Cincinnati a sophisticated, cultured gateway to the West.  His success was such that he was named the official photographer of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation (1887).  During the 1870's he left Ohio and, over the next 30 years, resided and opened studios in several locations including  St. Louis, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and eventually Honolulu.  He died in Honolulu in 1904. (above, Photographer unknown)

Thomas E. Askew (1847-1914) photographed Summit Avenue Ensemble in the living room studio of his home in Atlanta in 1899.  The photograph's subjects are Askew's five sons and a neighbor, all musicians.  "...[I]n the portraits prepared by Askew, the Georgia Negro Exhibit provided a resounding declaration of the self-worth, self-esteem and self determination of a people in spite of the obstacles thrown in their path." *

This portrait of Frederick Douglass was taken about 1895 by Cornelius Marion Battey (1873–1927).  Battey, an educator, is known for his portraits of musicians, statesmen and Masons.  He was the director of the Photography Department at the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama. His photographs were exhibited in US and European galleries, and published in several magazines.

P. H. Polk (1898-1984) was a student of Battey at Tuskegee Institute, where Polk, too, became a faculty member after 1927.  Pearl Cleage Lomax, author of a book about Polk entitled P. H. Polk: Photographs, says of Polk:  He would take our pictures and let us see that those who said we were invisible were lying. That those who said we were ugly were lying. That those who claimed we were less than human were lying. That those who said we did not love each other, and marry, and produce children, and suffer, and grow old were lying…[He] would let us bloom in the safe zone before his camera, and we saw ourselves differently through his lenses. We saw ourselves shining in all our specificity. In all our generalities. In all our terrible humanness. We saw ourselves just shine.**  Polk is well known for portraits of influential personalities like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Washington Carver; and for his candid portraits such as the one above: The Pipe Smoker, 1932, (from the Paul R. Jones Collection, Atlanta, GA), many featuring Alabama farm workers of the 1930s.

* Quote from Profile: Thomas E. Askew , (c) ddfr.tv, 2012  (Digital Diaspora Family Reunion).
** Lomax, Pearl Cleage, P. H. Polk: Photographer.  Nexus Press, 1980. 

Photographs above (except The Pipe Smoker) are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired: published in the US before 1923.   

The Pipe Smoker is from the Paul R. Jones Collection, published digitally by the Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) online magazine, Resource Library, as part of an exhibit catalog for "Through These Eyes: The Photographs of P. H. Polk" at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, August-October, 2000.

Thank you Ana Livier!

How Fogelson Library is an asset to a basic human characteristic:  curiosity!



Thanks to our film student Ana Livier Cortes Aguirre for sharing this!

BLACK HISTORY MONTH -- WEEK 3: Literature

Richard Wright, photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1939.

Richard Wright from "Blueprint for Negro Writing"

The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility.  He is being called upon to do not less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die. . .create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life.  It means that in the lives of Negro writers must be found those materials and experiences which will create in them a meaningful and significant picture of the world today. . . And the time has come to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder our of what materials can a human world be built.

Wright's Black Boy,  Native Son, and American Hunger are available for checkout from the library at call number PS3545 .R815 .

 Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, photo by Angela Radulscu, 2008.

My parallel is always the music, because all the strategies of the art are there. . . Music makes you hungry for more of it. . . It slaps and it embraces; music is the mirror that gives me necessary clarity. . . The literature ought to do the same thing.

[quoted in Paul Gilroy's Small Acts, published by Serpent's Tail, 1993.]

Toni Morrison is a novelist, professor and Nobel Laureate.  Hear her Nobel Lecture here.  (33 minutes)

Langston Hughes from Selected Poems

[T]he police beating Negroes' heads, that ole club says, Bop, Bop, Be Bop!  That's where Bebop came from, beaten right out of some Negroes' heads into their horns.
 

You can find Langston Hughes' plays and poetry on the lower level at call number PS 3515 .U274.

Langston Hughes, photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
 

John Edgar Wideman, photo by Geoffrey A. Landis, 2011

 John  Edgar Wideman, from the Preface of Breaking Ice edited by Terry McMillan:

Good stories transport us to these extraordinarily diverse regions where individual lives are enacted.  For a few minutes we can climb inside another's skin.  Mysteriously, the dissolution of ego also sharpens the sense of self, reinforces independence and relativity of point of view.  People's lives resist a simple telling, cannot be understood safely, reductively from some static still point, some universally acknowledged center around which all other lives orbit.  Narrative is a reciprocal process, regressive and progressive, dynamic.  . . . Minority writers hold certain peculiar advantages in circumstances of cultural breakdown, reorientation, transition.  We've accumulated centuries of experience dealing with problems of marginality, problems that are suddenly on center stage for the whole society:  inadequacy of language, failure of institutions, a disintegrating metropolitan vision that denies us or swallows us, that attracts and repels, that promises salvation and extinction.. . . Our stories can place us back at the center, at the controls; they can offer alternative realities, access to the sanctuary we carry around inside our skulls.

Fogelson Library has a copy of Wideman's collection of early African-American writing with the exquisite title:
My Soul Has Grown Deep (Call number E185.96 .W52 2001)  as well as five other works by him.

Walter Mosley, 2007. Photo by David Shankbone.

Walter Mosley  Life Out of Context

If I don't write, I feel that I'm not participating in my own, internal, life.  Somewhere along the way I did learn that there is a personal context for me, and that background is writing.  I wake up in the morning, in this skin filled with desires that have no immediate language.  Finding that language is my job if not my destiny, and failing to write is as serious a crime as a sentry going to sleep at his post during wartime.

Mosley is the author of the Easy Rawlins mystery novels.  A versatile author, artist and really interesting human being, you can find out more about him here: waltermosley.com

Works quoted above, and many other books dealing with literature of the African Diaspora, are on display near the circulation counter this week.   Check them out!

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/vanvechten/index.html, and are in the public domain.  Other photographers' work is used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and/or the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.  See commons.wikimedia.org for more information.  

Black History Month -- Week 2

This week we feature items from the collection that deal with the performing arts: music, film, and theatre.

From Cultural Codes: Makings of a Black Music Philosophy: An Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop by William C. Banfield.  

     The blues is the first great Black American music form with its own unique musical language, structure, practice, style, ethos, and philosophy, complete with cultural mythologies and cosmology and a form that provides a vehicle for inventive, individual creative musical expression.  It is as well an openly social form that represents the freedom and desire to speak what you want about your experience, which is universally adopted and understood as a form that evokes and contains this as "existential musical meaning."  It was the first popular music form that the world could point to and say, "Black people, they created that."  This is why it is so fundamentally important in the historical quest for definition and identity in Black American culture.  (p.101-102.)

You will find this Cultural Codes among the displayed books on the desk between the stairs and the circulation counter on the main level.  If you look for it after this week, you will find it at call number ML3479 .B364 2010.

Scott Joplin (1867-1917), known for his many ragtime compositions, was trained and composed in the classical tradition as well. His largest works are the operas A Guest of Honor and Treemonisha.  This photo by an unknown photographer is from about 1907.

Learn more about Scott Joplin by clicking here.

You can hear his own pianola recording of The Maple Leaf Rag here , and Solace (my favorite rag) here .

Ma Rainey (1886-1939) was an important blues singer and the first woman blues singer to be recorded professionally.  From a musical family, she started touring at a young age with minstrel and vaudeville shows.  (Photo, by an unknown photographer, is in the public domain.)

Read a short biography of Ma Rainey at biography.com .

Hear her sing Prove It On Me Blues  by clicking here .  (If you click nothing else, click that.  It's terrific.)

Bill Robinson (1878-1949). Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1933.

Want to see some unbelievable dancing?  BillBojanglesRobinson.youtube.com

From Ossie Davis' Preface to  
The Impact of Race:  Theatre and Culture by Woodie King, Jr.
 

     ...Black Theatre is itself little more than a figment of a dreamer's imagination.  Still, the more it doesn't exist, the more we love it and defend it, and argue about it, and fight over it, and promote it, and tell ourselves great big lies about it existing--mostly in the eye and in the heart of the beholder--what it means and what it's all about and why its presence is absolutely essential to our status as a people.. . .

     Someday we will prevail, and we Black folks will understand why we must ultimately come into control of the images we want the world to know us by; we will come to respect and depend on our own Black Theatre, which will have something more to offer than genius and raw gumption, good intentions and fly-by-night productions.  We'll have stable, respectable, black middle-class institutions owning and operating their own theatres from one end of the country to the other.  Our playwrights and our performers will join our musicians and our athletes as carriers of the message of black artistic excellence.

Ossie Davis, 2003

This portrait of Ira Aldridge is from about 1830.  Aldridge is dressed as the character Mungo from The Padlock by Isaac Bickerstaff.  Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to England about 1827.  He performed many roles, including Shakespeare's Othello and Aaron (from Titus and Andronicus), for audiences in London and throughout Europe until his death in 1867.

 For more information about Ira Aldridge, see Ira Aldridge .


There is interesting information about African-American silent films in the blogs: www.amoeba.com, and normanstudios.org .

Actor Rex Ingram (1895-1969). In costume from The Green Pastures. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.

You'll find a biography of Rex Ingram at aaregistry.org

Ossie Davis (1917-2005).  Photo 1951, by Carl Van Vechten.  

 

See an impressive list of the film and TV apprearance of  Mr. Davis at imdb.com .  This, of course, is only a fraction of his life's work as an activist, actor and writer.  You can read more about him at georgiaencyclopedia.com .

All photographs by Carl Van Vechten are from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/vanvechten/index.html, and are in the public domain.