The Festival mondial des arts nègres represents the first official showcase of works by African international artists. This, by some fateful coincidence, was the first art exhibition I saw, when I was eight years old.
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On my second birthday. Wearing the Nigerian “national clothes.” Soon after this (sic) photo was taken, my family and I would be internally displaced refugees thanks to Nigeria. Still in the same territory, but under a new flag, our world would never be the same again.
It was my birthday, and with my father we were by the swimming pool. A tall guy was working alone on a chess problem. Dad offered to play with him and won twice. Much later, I found out that the tall guy’s name was Bobby Fischer.
Holiness is what is dear to the gods. Who said that? I dunno but it’s not helpful. Never mind, ignore it. Let’s check-in instead. So, how are you coping? Healthy and sane? My starting position (forced on each of us, black reader and white writer, by this writing and our society) were the sites of […]
The illustration on our first opening poster is from a color lithograph titled Ilpost (Urgent Mail) by one of our members Keviselie/Hans Ragnar Mathisen. It symbolizes the pressure from competing with dominant societies that Sámit and other Indigenous people have to cope with.
On this day commemorating incomplete emancipation, I offer you this unfinished blogpost in the form of three unanswerable questions: How many Republican sheep does it take to maintain Trump’s regime? How many armed militia statue-protectors does it take to maintain settler colonialism? How many commercial prisons does it take to maintain racist injustice? This blogpost […]
On May 20, 1982, I was invited to stay in the dome of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy at New Gourna. Consequently I began to dream of building a dome house for myself. Five years later, we developed a technique at the University of Kassel to build domes from adobes (earth blocks) without formwork. Since […]
Sikh massacres, Baba Kharak Singh Road, Connaught Place, New Delhi, November 1, 1984
I can’t get this image (of a 17 year-old Linda Goode Bryant finding a newly published copy of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” during a school trip to New York in April 1967 & ending a letter to her parents back in Columbus, Ohio by writing that if she were to just eat one […]
Dear Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Department, I am writing this post for the gallery B side as an open letter to you in request that you show Wu Tsang’ 2012 short film For how we perceived a life (Take 3) as part of your online programming. Back in Fall 2013, during the visiting […]