10/3/2023 0 Comments Mass moca hours july fourth![]() ![]() “The Writing Man’s Chair” (2017) is a tribute to William Arnett, a friend of artist and creator Lonnie Holley. The display is described as an artistic response to the state of the earth, both environmental and political. The following works of art are part of the found art sculptures exhibit, “Thumbs Up For The Mothership” by Lonnie Holley and Dawn DeDeaux. Pictured on the wooden beam of the sculpture are photos of butterflies, John Lennon playing the piano and kids playing in a pool as well as some other photos. ![]() 1875 (Kabal American Zephyr)” is made up of saws, wheels and other discarded items. His work, “The Lurid Attack of the Monsters from the Postal News Aug. Learn more about this photograph here.Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is one of the featured artists at the museum. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 21. ![]() James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) in Sascha Feinstein and David Rife, The Jazz Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 47. Text by Alexandra Foradas, Curator, and Manolis Sueuga, Williams College Art History Graduate Program Curatorial Fellow Although America’s virulent racism ultimately led some of these artists, thinkers, and activists to emigrate across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, jazz and blues remained foundational for the era’s activist music.Ī coda at the end of the exhibition includes photographs of the next generation of musicians, artists, and activists-including Labelle, Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, and Huey Newton-whose practices were shaped by 1950s and ‘60s jazz and blues as they ventured out for deep waters. Luminaries including Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka frequented performance venues like the Apollo Theater, Savoy Ballroom, Minton’s Playhouse, Studio Rivbea, and Lenox Lounge, and drew inspiration from the improvisation and freedom of live performances by artists including those depicted in the photographs in Deep Water. The Harlem riots of 19, triggered by police violence against Black people, inspired protests across the nation. Throughout this period, New York-including Harlem, where Baldwin’s story takes place-was central to both the jazz scene and to the growing civil rights movement. In great jazz and blues, songs shift and grow as performers draw on their experience of and connection to lived and musical histories: each performance is a risk, as the musicians immerse themselves in those depths anew.īeginning in the early 20th century, thousands of Black folks migrated to New York, seeking economic opportunity and escaping the violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing-he had been there, and he knew.” In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, cultural historian Christina Sharpe posits connections between the wake left behind by a ship’s passage (“from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee”) a wake held in mourning of the dead (“Wakes are processes through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory.”) and wake as in “being awake and, also, consciousness.” Baldwin’s short story draws a related set of connections between deep water, remembrance, and the performance of blues music. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. The narrator ponders the bandleader’s interaction with Sonny during the performance: “He was having a dialogue with Sonny. In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), the narrator (brother to the titular piano player) describes a bandleader’s performance as a way of retelling (hi)stories, of making them feel immediate and alive. The photographs here bear witness to a wellspring period in modern jazz and blues, and celebrate Black musicians from the 1950s-‘60s including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, and Nina Simone. James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” 1957 Deep Water is the third of a series of rotating exhibitions drawn from a single private collection of music photography. And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation.” For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen.
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