Tag: bossip news for African Americans

We begin the new year with an art bang, as big new exhibitions open at some of our favorite venues.

Fans can look forward to centuries of African American art in a very special traveling exhibition at the Holocaust Museum, along with provocative contemporary art at the Blaffer, Moody, and Center for Contemporary Craft, as well as an art festival at the MATCH on our must-see list.

Since it’s always our resolution to celebrate local artists, we’re also highlighting some intriguing gallery shows to checkout this month.

“Things Fall Apart” at Redbud Arts Center (now through February 24)

See current works by Houston-based artist Randall Mosman and Copenhagen artist Anders Moseholm in this show that highlights their reflective approaches to figurative painting, as well as their similar philosophies on change and interconnection.

Mosman and Moseholm draw inspiration from a primal connection to expressing the incomprehensible—akin to how individuals in the Stone Age depicted life on cave walls. For them, when things fall apart, it opens the door to new possibilities.

“Primary Colors: Dan Gorski Paintings, 1962-65” at Jung Center (now through February 14)

Though an acclaimed and active artist and teacher until his death in 2017, the former director of the MFAH’s Glassell School first drew attention from the art world for his abstract and minimalist paintings in the ’60s.

This colorful exhibition focuses on this period of Gorski’s work and specifically on a group of paintings that showcase his fascination with color combinations and biomorphic compositions. In a description of the exhibition, the Jung Center notes that Gorski’s early engagements with minimalism, color field, and hard-edge movements, as they developed in the United States, mark a critical period in 20th century art.

He pushed that artistic experimentation and investigation throughout his entire career, including his many years as a Houston artist.

“Blood Quantum” at 14 Pews (January 12-March 9)

14 Pews, that beloved small treasure of an art and film venue, presents an ambitious new photography project from its executive director, Cressandra Thibodeaux.

A collaborative multidisciplinary series,“Blood Quantum” features large-scale portraits along with revealing interviews of 10 Native Americans. The title of the exhibition refers to the U.S. federal and some state laws that historically defined the status and identity of Native Americans according to their “blood” ancestry.

In describing the genesis of the series, Thibodeaux explained, “My aspiration with this project is to create an immersive experience for audiences, inviting them to engage and reflect on their own experiences. I aim to raise awareness about the ongoing challenges faced by Native tribes and individuals, inviting viewers to delve deeper into the complexities portrayed within each photograph.”

“Reynier Leyva Novo: Former Present Today” at Blaffer Museum (January 12-March 10)

For this first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. of Cuban conceptual artist Reynier Leyva Novo, the Blaffer will showcase a new painting series from Novo that explores themes of revolution and tyranny, and how facts and myth can combine to create propaganda.

Renowned for his artistic political responses to Cuban politics, the Blaffer notes that Novo’s work “challenges ideology and symbols of power, questioning notions of an individual’s ability to affect change. His works form an interventionist response to the seemingly recognizable in the spaces of public memory, known histories, and axis’ of power around us.”

“The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection” at Holocaust Museum Houston (January 12-June 23)

Having acquired one of the most deep and expansive private collections of African American art and artifacts in the world, the Kinsey family sent those artworks and objects on the road to share them with the nation and beyond.

The exhibition traveling to the HMH will feature over 100 pieces amassed by Bernard and Shirley Kinsey during their five decades of marriage, including major artworks of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Modern and Contemporary paintings and sculptures. The artwork is given further context set alongside cultural and historical objects chronicling the history of Black people in the Americans, from 16th century baptismal records to Civil Rights era writings and photography.

“The Kinsey Collection highlights the resilience of African Americans despite a long history of discrimination and trauma,” describes Alex Hampton, HMH’s changing exhibitions manager in a statement on the exhibition. “It also shows the vital contributions Black people have made to American society despite this history. As a Holocaust and Human Rights museum, we want our exhibitions to bring communities together by illuminating the similarities in our histories while also keeping in mind the differences.”

Look for several special public programming events in conjunction with the exhibition, including an appearance by the Kinseys.

“Dialogues: A Convergence of Color and Form” at Anya Tish Gallery (January 12-February 24)

Two Houston-based Latinx artists will be featured in this exhibition: Colombian-born Tatiana Escallón and Mexico-born artist Marisol Valencia. Though working in different mediums with very different visions, both artists share a commonality of creating thought-provoking, meticulous and highly textural artworks.

Escallón’s large format abstract paintings confront the viewer with raw vivid markings and self-authored texts. Offered in juxtaposition, Valencia’s minimal, yet highly complex monochromatic porcelain sculptures offer an intriguing complement to the space.

Although employing different techniques and mediums, both artists embrace the emotive value of color and form, highlighting themes such as memory, displacement, and feminism.

“Hayv Kahraman: The Foreign in Us” at Rice Moody Center (January 12-May 11)

This first Texas solo exhibition of the acclaimed Iraqi-Kurdish artist’s work will highlight Kahraman’s most recent research-driven art projects influenced by her heritage and experience as a refugee.

With a selection of over forty paintings and drawings, including large-scale canvases, the exhibition will feature intimate figure drawings that demonstrate the artist’s meticulous draftsmanship of line and color.

The Moody Center makes it a practice to showcase artists who often look to other fields, like the sciences, when creating their work, and “Foreign in Us” seems no exception as the exhibition organizers highlight Kahraman’s interest in bioscience and using painting to explore the semantic implications of “invasive others” within the fields of immunology and microbiology.

“We’re honored to present Hayv Kahraman’s recent work at the Moody,” states Moody executive director, Alison Weaver. “Her powerful imagery, deeply informed by her personal history, intersects with the fields of bioscience, social history, and public policy in ways we hope will invite conversations across the campus and community.”

Mix-MATCH: A Mixed Arts Festival at MATCH (January 13)

For Houston art-lovers, there’s no such thing as too many festivals, so this brand new performing and visual arts festival at the MATCH is definitely pinging our radar.

Billed as a one-of-a-kind celebration of the creative spirit of Houston’s small to mid-sized arts organizations, the fest will feature captivating live performances, interactive activities, and a chance to connect with the local arts community.

From theater to dance, from visual arts to community engagement, this festival will have some art for almost every taste.

“Fiber in 3D: Indigo Houston” at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (January 27-May 4)

A historical and quintessential American fabric gets deconstructed, literally, in this large-scale, site specific installation of denim as a medium for art. HCCC partnered with the national craft organization Fiber Art Now for this special Fiber in 3D exhibition, with Baggs McKelvey’s immersive installation the selected work.

Using material from 67 pairs of donated denim jeans, McKelvey disassembled, cut, tied, and spooled the fabric, turning it into nearly 6000 feet of handcrafted denim rope.

Then installed to best interact with the Asher Gallery space, the installation serves as both commentary on the “fraught social history of denim in the United States” and as a reminder of the history of denim as a material of art and craft.

“This Side Up” at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (January 27-May 4)

There’s an art to installation as this unusual exhibition will prove. The first of its kind will feature the work of mount-makers, crate-builders, and exhibition-fabricators — as well as artwork informed by these practices — in order to figuratively, and sometimes literally, put a frame on the process of framing and installing art.

The exhibition will give visitors a behind-the-scenes peek at the process of installing and putting art together within a space once the art is created, highlighting the craftsmanship of these makers and their vital role in facilitating the art viewing experience.

“This Side Up is an exhibition about the making of an exhibition,” describes exhibition director Sarah Darro. “Its design and layout reflect the art object’s journey from artist studio to art-shipping transit facility to clandestine preparation room, and finally, to public presentation in the museum gallery.”

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

ArtRoot Racine has named Earth Talinna as the 2024 Writer-In-Residence (WIR).

16th writer to serve Racine

Earth Talinna (also known as Talinna Holton) is officially the sixteenth resident to date to serve in this role. She comes after Nicholas Ravnikar, who most recently served the position. ArtRoot Racine commented saying that he has done a stellar job.

“We are an extremely blessed community to have so many incredible writers,” said the organization.

About Earth Talinna

Earth Talinna is no stranger to Racine as she was born, raised and currently resides in the city.

Talinna has been writing since she was 13 years old, but has only recently fully embarked on being an artist.

She is now the owner and artist of Protected by Divinity. She is a master energy healer, poet, and oracle.

According to the art-based organization, aside from being a full-time entrepreneur, she works part-time as an extended learning language arts facilitator at two schools in the Racine Unified School District.

In her biography provided by ArtRoot, it states she is also a 2023 Emerge Artist Development Fellowship Program Awardee through the Mahogany Black Arts & Cultural Center.

Artist’s beliefs

The following statement about Earth Tailinna was provided by the organization:

Talinna believes that self-expression and creativity brings healing to the mind, body, and spirit. She approaches writing as a form of therapy. Transforming thoughts and emotions into writing helps her to reflect and release different experiences along her journey through life. She aspires to inspire others through her spoken word and storytelling in hopes that they too can find writing, reading, and creative expression as a form of therapy.

About ArtRoot

With projects like Wall Poems of Racine, ArtsMixers, Writer-In-Residence and Welcome Wagon, and Art Card, ArtRoot exists to “be an arts activator that nurtures collaborative creative networks which sustain an inclusive, innovative and flourishing community.”

Per their website:

ArtRoot is a committee of artists and arts advocates who are determined to reinvigorate Racine through the arts. We aim to do this by building arts infrastructure, fostering connections and facilitating collaborations among artists, arts organizations, community groups, businesses and government.

To learn more visit ArtRoot.

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VALDOSTA — The Valdosta National art exhibit has become one of the top annual art shows in South Georgia.

While the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts’ “Spring Into Art” is the premier exhibit to showcase local and regional artists, Valdosta State University Art & Design’s Valdosta National has become the region’s premier showcase of art from across the nation.

Granted, anyone from across the country can enter “Spring Into Art” and anyone local can enter the juried Valdosta National, and these lines do cross, the Valdosta National allows area art patrons the opportunity to see distant artists’ styles and themes.

The show opening Wednesday, Jan. 10, will be VSU’s 36th annual juried art show open to artists nationwide.

Mark T. Errol, who curates the VSU’s Dedo-Maranville Gallery exhibits, said Valdosta National 2024 has an additional title: “Art Spoken” … “in celebration of African American arts. In joining together, we have asked artists to submit works of art that speak to the power and impact of Black, indigenous and other people of color inclusivity, education and this exhibition is a celebration of Black culture.”

Valdosta National 2023 had the theme “Change in Weather,” focusing on topics of climate and weather from across the United States.

Errol said the 2024 Valdosta National received more than 60 pieces from 12 states. Twenty-four pieces, representing 19 artists, were chosen for the show.

“Chosen juried artworks will be exhibited alongside the artwork of Valdosta State University students,” Errol said. “During this month-long exhibition in the Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery, departments from the College of the Arts will participate in a variety of programming to further strengthen the engagement and celebration with song, dance, music, poetry and other forms of art open to students, faculty and our community to enjoy.”

Artist Olivia Richardson made the choices for the juried exhibit. She lives in northern Virginia and “identifies as an interdisciplinary artist, most closely working in printmaking,” Errol said. “Her master of fine arts in studio art is from the University of Arizona.” She also has a certificate in museum studies.”

A statement notes that Richardson “sees her work as a vehicle that allows her to exploit the existing social structure that works against her voice. Her objective is to use her personal experience to help catalyze conversations that aid in a broader understanding of marginalized identities.”

Errol said, “I am most excited about … how we are using the Valdosta National as a catalyst for the gallery to not only (be) an exhibition but a space of expression for many other forms of art such as live music, dance, spoken word and others. … My intention is for the space to provide ample opportunities for our students, faculty, staff and community to participate in conversations, find their own creativity, question and celebrate the art we share. The gallery is not meant to be static but rather a lively, vibrant place of engagement, pushing all of us forward.”

VSU Art & Design presents Valdosta National 2024 with a free, public reception, 5-6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 10, Dedo-Maranville Fine Arts Gallery, VSU Fine Arts Building, corner of Oak and Brookwood. The exhibit runs Jan. 10 through Feb. 9. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Fridays. More information: Visit www.valdosta.edu/art/gallery.

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Detroit is synonymous with Motown, the Great Migration, and the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, recorded in 2013. That same year, the New York Times and Vogue highlighted the city’s emergence as an arts hub. Less than a decade later, the pandemic brought life to a slowdown, derailing many plans, including the popular but short-lived Detroit Art Week. As of late, there’s been very little chatter on the wire touting Detroit’s art scene—until now.

Last year, the Detroit Institute of Arts earned the top slot in a USA Today Readers’ Choice survey of best American art museums. This May, the DIA will open Tiff Massey’s 7 Mile + Livernois, the most ambitious solo show for a Detroit artist in the museum’s history. Since 2012, Library Street Collective has hosted dozens of exhibitions with blue-chip and emerging artists alike (think Daniel Arsham, Cassi Namoda, Charles McGee, Marcus Brutus, and Nina Chanel Abney, to name a few). This year, their team will open the Shepherd, a public arts campus in a 110-year-old Romanesque-style church in Detroit’s East Village neighborhood. Below, CULTURED introduces you to five people and places responsible for the tectonic shifts occurring in Motor City’s cultural landscape—and tells you what to look out for in 2024.

Detroit Institute of Arts

As one of only a handful of encyclopedic museums in the United States offering free admission to locals, the DIA, which last year saw 50,000 students walk through its doors, is reimagining its contemporary program with exciting new exhibitions this year. Next month, Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898-1971 opens, celebrating the history of African American filmmakers and centering Detroit artists. This spring, Detroit native Tiff Massey will debut the museum’s “most ambitious installation to date,” according to the institution. Recent acquisitions of art market darlings and new found household names like Firelei Báez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Mario Moore reinforce the museum’s growing commitment to contemporary art.

JJ and Anthony Curis

The husband-and-wife duo conceived Library Street Collective over a decade ago, and since then, it has become a pillar of the local scene. Later this year, the founders will open the new headquarters of LSC’s print-focused and collaboration-driven sister gallery, Louis Buhl & Co. The flagship will feature an in-house production studio outfitted with more space for experimentation. Since 2012, LSC’s projects have drawn national buzz, from star artist Jammie Holmes’ first solo gallery show, Pieces of a Man, to a forthcoming skate park designed by the unlikely but delightful pairing of abstract painter McArthur Binion and celebrity skater Tony Hawk.

Mario Moore

Last year, Detroit native and internationally acclaimed artist Mario Moore co-curated Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit with Laura Mott at the Cranbrook Art Museum, located right outside of Motor City. Focusing on representations of the Black body and featuring 20 Detroit artists who’ve worked locally for the last decade, the exhibition is on view through March 3. For the Yale MFA grad who returned to Detroit in 2020, the city is nearly unrecognizable: “In the last 10 years, Detroit has gentrified drastically. Another monumental change is the support of Black artists by institutions in Detroit. That change has come with the global movement of acknowledging the brilliance of Black artists.” Moore currently has a solo exhibition on view at the Flint Institute of Arts, an hour’s drive from Detroit. 

The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

Before the inauguration of DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History stood as the most prominent cultural institution honoring African American culture in the United States. Last year, the museum received nearly $2 million in federal funding for major renovations including the redesign of the General Motors Theater, which will feature state-of-the-art technology and expanded capacity for performances. This spring, the museum will open Double ID, an exhibition of depictions of Black men in contemporary art pulled from the collection of actor and avid art collector CCH Pounder. 

McArthur Binion

The renowned Detroit-raised artist opened his first hometown show in nearly 20 years at the Library Street Collective last winter with “Self:Portraits.” In 2019, he launched Modern Ancient Brown, a foundation committed to supporting the work of Black and Indigenous artists in Detroit. This year, MAB is set to open its post-baccalaureate artist residency program to artists within the Great Lakes region, from Detroit to Chicago. LSC’s soon-to-open Shepherd space will house the foundation’s headquarters. Binion told CULTURED he’s excited about “the possibility of the advancement of young painters in Detroit.”

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

“Why are these books here?” asks Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the writer protagonist of the film American Fiction, as he points to four novels stacked neatly on the shelf of a chain bookstore. The name Ellison sticks out from their spines.

Monk wants to know why his Greek-tragedy-inspired novels are housed not in “Mythology” but in the “African American Studies” section. A bookstore employee offers the obvious explanation: “I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is … Black.” He has the decency to stammer the response, but this does little to alleviate Monk’s fury. “That’s me, Ellison. He is me, and he and I are Black,” the writer fumes. “These books have nothing to do with African American studies.” He taps one of his titles with an impatient finger. “They’re just literature.”

“He is me, and he and I are Black” is something like a thesis statement for American Fiction. Like the 2001 novel on which it’s based—Erasure, by Percival Everett—the film trades on the gap between this he and I, between how Monk is seen by others (as a Black novelist) and how Monk sees himself (as a novelist who is Black). It trades, too, on the distance between a writer who insists that his work is “just literature” and an industry that demands that any novel by a Black writer is just literature: a tool for social justice. This latter component is what distinguishes the film from its novelistic predecessor: Whereas Erasure has its sights set on political correctness (a very early-2000s bugaboo), American Fiction is largely about politics. If 2001’s Monk recoiled against the racial stereotypes favored by bleeding-heart liberals, his 2023 successor resents how Black writers are recruited for anti-racism, progressive politics, and invectives against what one white character calls “the carceral state.”

Read: American Fiction is more than racial satire

Some commentators have noted that American Fiction shares much in common with earlier works about Black tokenization in the arts: films such as 1987’s Hollywood Shuffle, which skewers the movie business; 1993’s CB4, which satirizes the music industry; and 2000’s Bamboozled, which takes aim at television. American Fiction belongs to a popular if loosely constructed genre we might call the “tokenism exposé”: works that reveal the pressures placed on minorities to be “authentic” (read: stereotypical) representatives of their identity group. As NPR’s Aisha Harris recently remarked, “Every era gets at least one or two notable social satires wrestling with the tension between Black art and commerce.”

Yet American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, a former journalist who once wrote another viral tokenism exposé about the “racism beat” in American media, is also clearly a product of the year it was released. The film joins other 2023 send-ups of the literary landscape—R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans—in its remorseless ridicule of the progressive identity politics of the moment. These recent entries in the tokenism genre stand out from their predecessors because of the deep pessimism they bring to bear on their subject matter.

Jefferson, Kuang, and Taylor shine mortuary lighting on the post–George Floyd era, exposing how 2020 brought a reification of racialism in the publishing industry and academia. But compared with some earlier tokenism exposés—such as CB4, which concludes with its protagonist shedding stereotypes and finding success on his own terms—these recent works are decidedly more cynical about the possibility of escaping tokenization. Even as American Fiction, Yellowface, and The Late Americans offer withering portrayals of a race-obsessed culture, the works themselves can’t exit that world’s gilded orbit. These works succeed because the authors don’t try to extricate them from the web of the industry they so deftly lampoon.

Under the unsparing eye of Jefferson, American Fiction trusses and roasts the pieties of the contemporary publishing industry. Monk is the wrong kind of Black writer: an aesthete, inaccessible, disinterested in politics and tetchy about feel-good progressivism. From the point of view of the publishers who rebuff his advances, his great sin is that he is a silver-spooned, elite-educated Black novelist who doesn’t write gritty, digestible books about Black poverty. Everyone wishes Monk were more like his authorial nemesis, Sintara Golden, a silver-spooned, elite-educated Black novelist who does write gritty, digestible books about Black poverty.

Demoralized by the fallen state of African American literature, Monk dashes off a racist satire—which he titles My Pafology—that is chockablock with crass stereotypes, and demands that his agent send it off to editors as a half practical joke, half fuck-you meant to call Big Fiction on its penchant for pandering. To Monk’s surprise (and not inconsiderable horror), a major publisher buys the manuscript to the tune of nearly seven figures. Having written My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, Monk spends much of the film adopting, to great comic effect, a street-soaked alter ego: Stagg is definitely a fugitive, maybe a murderer. He speaks in hard grunts and splits at the sound of sirens. He is precisely what Monk—the Harvard man, the son of a doctor—is not. “Raw.” “Urban.” “Authentic.” The right kind of Black.

At the center of Monk’s acrimonious relationship with American literary culture is the question of representation: namely, what gets to count as Black representation and who gets to count as a “Black voice.” In Erasure, the novelist professes “not to believe in race” but concedes that “the society in which I live tells me that I am black.” The social imposition of race is the primary crisis of Monk’s professional life: Editors say they want to publish Black writers, but their vision of “Blackness” is in fact quite particular, underwritten by a hidden rubric that curates what forms of Black experience are desirable and (which is to say the same thing) marketable.

In his superb new book on the publishing industry—appropriately titled Big Fiction—the Emory University English professor Dan Sinykin remarks that Everett’s primary target in Erasure is “a publishing industry in which agents, editors, booksellers, reviewers, academics, and writers are all complicit in conflating fiction with the authentic experience of race.” In Sinykin’s view, what Everett offers is not so much a rejection of the transformation of books into commodities but rather a rejection of the “constraining racial fantasies” that dominate mainstream publishing, an industry that trafficks in highly circumscribed—largely low-income and urban—representations of Black life. In other words, the kind of representations that tend to confirm and conform to rather than trouble and unseat racial stereotypes. “Look at what they publish,” Monk summarizes in American Fiction. “Look at what they expect us to write.”

Read: The invisible forces behind the books we read

And the problem isn’t just that publishing houses reduce Black novels to curios that get racially categorized—alongside other “exotic” texts—for the perusal of fascinated white audiences. American Fiction suggests that the increasing balkanization of literature into identity subcategories is indissociable from the creep of American narcissism. So-called minoritized audiences want stories that speak to their “lived experiences,” while upwardly mobile white audiences want stories that flatter their preconceived notions about those same minorities. In each case, identitarian literature fans the flames of self-obsession, reducing reading to either an act of racial mimesis or racial voyeurism. At one point in American Fiction, Sintara, the author of one of the pandering “Black experience” novels Monk detests, asks a mostly white audience: “Where are our stories? Where is our representation?” She doesn’t seem much troubled by the fact that the stories she wants to tell are the same stories good white liberals want her to tell. Black representation and Black fetishization turn out to be a horseshoe.

American Fiction isn’t just a satire. It’s a lament about the impossibility of making—or at least getting paid handsomely or becoming famous for—apolitical Black art. Monk grates against the encroachment of politics upon aesthetics, but his ethos can’t be accommodated within either the world of the film or the real world beyond it. The very idea of Black “art for art’s sake” sounds like a paradox, so habituated are we to associating Blackness with social critique.

Consider how reviewers have interpreted American Fiction’s subplots involving Monk’s recently divorced brother and his ailing mother: A number of critics have described the “tonal tension” between the film’s family drama and the more boisterous comedy that encases it. Rather than view this uneasy and sometimes awkward balance as a shortcoming, however, we might instead read this tension as part of American Fiction’s message. A movie about the struggles of a Black family that isn’t told as a racially charged melodrama would never be greenlit by film studios. Instead, that plot must be snuck into the racial satire like a child’s unwanted vegetables because it is the satire, not the family story, that brings liberal white audiences to the theater. Artistic neutrality, disconnected from the messy world of politics, might be a fiction, but it’s also a pleasant fiction, one that “marginalized” writers—Monk, Everett, and Cord Jefferson alike—are not often permitted to enjoy.

While Monk grapples with whether to cash in on his identity for professional success, June Hayward, the narrator of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, decides to steal an identity to achieve that same end. A struggling white writer who daylights as an SAT tutor, June is deeply jealous of her college friend Athena Liu, a novelist—“Born in Hong Kong, raised between Sydney and New York”—who is catapulted into literary stardom almost immediately upon graduating from Yale. June thinks, “Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, ‘diverse’ enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them.”

When Athena dies in a freak accident (a pancake is involved), June steals her manuscript and passes it off as her own, later adopting the equivocally Asian nom de plume “Juniper Song,” all the better to perform the titular act of “yellowface.” The self-described “racist thief” doesn’t get away with it, but June’s moral and professional shortcomings are perhaps not the core of the novel’s critique. Like Erasure and American Fiction, the real villain in Kuang’s tokenism exposé is a publishing industry that boils down the richness of human experience to a few readily commodifiable identity archetypes. And as with these other entries in the genre, Yellowface is marked by a thoroughgoing pessimism. When June is found out, the literary fraud is only temporarily defeated. She immediately envisions a strategy to transmogrify her humiliation into another fat book advance.

“I will craft, and sell, a story about how the pressures of publishing have made it impossible for white and nonwhite authors alike to succeed,” June muses. “About how Athena’s success was entirely manufactured, how she was only ever a token. About how my hoax—because let’s frame it as a hoax, not a theft—was really a way to expose the rotten foundations of this entire industry.”

To be sure, June ends the novel in monstrous fashion. But equally apparent is that she is a monster who has been made: a product of a contemporary literary culture that treats identities like ladder rungs, and that favors writers who are willing to practice the dark alchemy of converting racial pain into profit, shame into stacks of cash.

If a moral is to be won from Kuang’s novel, it is that literary conglomerates are a lot like casinos: The publishing house always wins. Recent years have seen them place their bet on politics. In our hyperpartisan nation, culture war sells, and one way to understand works like Yellowface is as a rejection of the lazy politics of literary fiction. June’s great epiphany is that the planet of publishing is held up by identitarian turtles all the way down: The limpid multiculturalism she takes advantage of and abhors is a form of identity politics, but so too is the white grievance politics she inevitably turns to when the jig is up. Even her planned memoir is not her own but a mirror held up to a squalid culture.

Like American Fiction and Yellowface, The Late Americans likewise lampoons the literary world’s narcissism and class-blindness, which have turned race into a fetish and poets into trauma pornographers. Set in Iowa City—and drawing on the author’s own experiences as an MFA candidate at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop—Taylor’s novel is a series of portraits of students and their affiliates. Its depiction of the identitarian limitations placed on writers is especially damning. Indeed, the novel is both a response to and a rejection of the racialized restraints that the market has forced upon Taylor as a Black novelist: “I’m pressured as a working-class African American to commodify my experience for prestige,” the author, who grew up in a family with relatives who were illiterate, said in an interview this summer. “I find that really suspect.”

A working-class, gay, white poet is the vehicle for The Late Americans’ novelistic broadside. Seamus despairs of the therapeutic turn of contemporary poetry, which he subjects to withering appraisal: “His classmates wrote only about the present and its urgency,” Seamus observes. “The very act of comprehension or contextualization was centered on the self, but the self as abstracted via badly understood Marxist ideology.” He decides that poetry has been reduced to “just a matching game, the poems simply cards.”

Literature more broadly has been reduced to a game of identitarian self-audit. But Seamus refuses to play. Reflecting on his poverty-stricken upbringing and his construction-worker father—a part-time actor who lost his foot to sepsis—Seamus muses “with a silly kind of meanness that if he were another kind of writer, a tacky writer, he could write about that. About the smell of his father’s rotting foot.” His classmates find his dense and technical poems—about abstruse topics such as Alsatian nuns—lifeless and problematic for their lack of social commentary. Seamus recognizes with bitterness that if he wrote about his traumatic childhood, those same peers “would call it brilliant.”

In this context, Taylor’s decision to cast what is perhaps the novel’s most autobiographical character as white counts as an act of defiance. It’s an attempt to loosen the racialized manacles placed on minority writers while also slyly highlighting the double standards of a literary culture that allows Black novelists to write poor white characters but balks at the inverse dynamic. Publishers expect Taylor to spin his working-class Black experience into profit, and instead he paints white poverty, creating a character who works as a mouthpiece with which to criticize the wispy values of those same publishers.

Tyler Austin Harper: I am a black professor. You don’t need to bring that up

And like the author of American Fiction, Seamus is keenly aware that if he leaned into his gayness, his poorness, his “downscale” whiteness, the literary world would instantly regard him as a promising young talent instead of a try-hard hack. Yet the poet refuses to bend his artistic vision to the dictates of the moment, or the crass moralizing and trauma profiteering that characterizes it. Unlike Monk or June, who succumb to the tokenizing imperatives of the publishing industry, Seamus takes a stand for aesthetic autonomy and independence.

This is a goal that Taylor, Seamus’s own creator, cannot quite reach—which is no doubt the point. The message of this tokenism exposé is that no minority who aspires to be a successful writer can fully win this freedom. Even as The Late Americans features a character who struggles valiantly against tokenism, it is deeply pessimistic about the prospect of real-world authors resisting it in the long run.

As American Fiction winds to a close, Monk meets with a Hollywood executive who is interested in bringing his cash-grab novel to the silver screen with a new, more cinematic ending. After workshopping multiple final scenes, the novelist (who wants to reject racial caricature) and the director (who wants a racially cartoonish conclusion) ironically prefer the story to end the same way: Stagg R. Leigh is shot to death by a multiracial police force. When Monk realizes that he has at once pleased the executive and landed on a conclusion that realizes his own artistic vision, a strange look—confusion, wry wonder, a tinge of horror—passes across his face. It becomes apparent that his desire and the desire of the exploitative filmmaker are one and the same. That American Fiction ends by tying a decisive bow on the satire—without resolving its protagonist’s family struggles or girlfriend trouble—is a savvy narrative choice that only drives this point home: Monk and Jefferson both know what their audiences do, and don’t, care about. We came to the movie lured by the promise of race talk, not for universalistic depictions of familial fracas.

The lesson the tokenism exposé leaves us with—a lesson uniquely calibrated to 2023, a year in which pundits asked, again and again, whether we had passed “peak woke”—is that every writer is subject to the publishing industry’s racializing gaze, and every writer who craves renown will eventually bend the knee. In this genre, characters bristle against the insistence that the only novels worth writing are those that stand in for social justice, and the texts themselves twist against the progressive niceties of Big Fiction. But their authors also deliver these acerbic critiques with a wink, keenly aware that even as they lambast identitarian literature, they’re partaking in it, and even as they denigrate the sellouts, they’re cashing their checks.

One might be tempted to charge Everett or Jefferson, Taylor or Kuang, with hypocrisy. One might even argue—like the author of Yellowface herself has—that race satires place “all the focus back onto white people.” But their works seem to furnish their own defense. After all, what other choice do these authors have? The logic of the market is without remorse. Every minority’s story becomes a Minority Story in the end.

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When Kronos Quartet traveled to Hungary in 2018 to perform at Esterházy Palace – the home of Franz Joseph Haydn’s patrons that served as a center for string quartet development in the 18th century – many people thought they’d perform Haydn’s music as a tribute. Instead, the group wanted to showcase the innovations of today’s composers. “There are people living among us right now who are writing fabulous music,” said David Harrington, founding violinist of Kronos, on a Zoom call. “There’s this sense of creativity, this sense of working with this artform — two violins, a viola, and a cello — and finding new ways of thinking about it.”

For the last 50 years, Kronos Quartet has been committed to new music. Founded in Seattle in 1973, the group, which now comprises violist Hank Dutt, violinist John Sherba, cellist Paul Wiancko, and Harrington, provided a platform for reimagining the string quartet and amplifying the voices of living composers. And since their establishment, they’ve commissioned more than 1,100 new works, gradually building a vision for the future.

Throughout their 2023-24 season, titled “Five Decades,” Kronos is celebrating the last 50 years of commissioning with 10 new works by both longtime and first-time collaborators, including Sahba Aminikia, Peni Candra Rini, inti figgis-vizueta, Michael Gordon, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Gabriella Smith, Trey Spruance, Mazz Swift, Vân-Ánh Võ, and Aleksandra Vrebalov. These 10 new works spotlight Kronos’ commitment to diversifying the string quartet repertoire, and highlight the themes that have graced Kronos’ work since the beginning, such as folk traditions, social issues, and creative experimentation with the string quartet format.

Kronos Quartet, 1988 — Photo by Michele Clement

By commissioning new works that touch on a variety of musical styles, Kronos aims to expand the potential of the string quartet. “What we want is really wonderful music and wonderful experiences that will give all of us more energy, and more perspective on possibilities,” Harrington said. “It’s going to make us all better musicians and better listeners.”

Premieres of Kronos’ Five Decades commissions began in the fall with inti figgis-vizueta’s clay songs, first performed in November 2023. For the piece, she looked to the Andean whistling jar, a pre-Columbian vessel that made a variety of ringing tones; clay songs conjures the spirit of these instruments by mixing thimbles, mules, and modern whistling jars with Kronos’ strings, creating a lattice of bird-like chirps.

Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Gold Came From Space also premiered this fall. The piece is a celebration of Kronos’ groundbreaking work and explores ideas of memory and freedom, which have colored her writing for the ensemble since their early collaborations. Vrebalov first met Kronos in the 1990s while she was studying composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; since, she has composed 16 pieces for the quartet, and her Five Decades commission spotlights the individual members of the ensemble, giving each of them a solo cadenza.

“Five Decades” composers Michael Gordon, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and inti figgis-vizueta

In addition to Vrebalov’s work, several other Five Decades commissions pay tribute to longtime collaborations. On Mar. 2 in Berkeley, CA, Kronos will premiere gfedcba by Michael Gordon, his fifth piece for the group. In an email, Gordon detailed his long appreciation for Kronos’ vision, recalling how, when he was a kid in the ‘70s, new music wasn’t always well-received. He remembers going to a classical concert with his mom, and the room emptied when it was time for the newest piece on the program. Around the same time, Harrington launched Kronos and committed to playing music by living composers, opening up new avenues for the string quartet. When Gordon later teamed up with Julia Wolfe and David Lang to start Bang on a Can in the ‘80s, the three of them looked to Kronos’ vision for inspiration.

When reflecting on his collaborations with Kronos, Gordon recalls the group’s thoughtful involvement in sharing ideas and trying out different ways to articulate the music. “They knew so much more about how to make the music speak than I did,” Gordon said. “In the end, they completely ignored my markings and turned the music into something vibrant that jumped off the page. That is the mark of a great musical ensemble.”

Mary Kouyoumdjian’s first collaboration with Kronos was in 2014, and her new Five Decades commission will explore what is left after losing someone you love. Kouyoumdjian remembers learning about Kronos as a kid at her local record shop, Tower Records. Later, she participated in Kronos’ “Under 30 Project,” during which she composed Bombs of Beirut, a piece that shows the turbulent day-to-day life of people in the Middle East in their own words.

Kronos Quartet, 1999 — Photo by Caroline Greyshock

Since that first collaboration, Kouyoumdjian’s work with Kronos has been formative. “Meeting them through this call for music makers has completely changed my life – both in helping me grow into my artistic purpose, and in offering a model on how to be generous to one’s creative community,” she said in an email. Her Five Decades commission, premiering in June in San Francisco, broaches deeply personal and intimate topics — something that can be difficult for her. But she says one of the many things she’s learned from Kronos is that “the topics that feel the most difficult to approach end up being the ones that invite the most fulfillment in personal and artistic growth,” so she is “joyfully embracing the challenge.”

One of the major themes in Kronos’ Five Decades commissions is climate change, drawing on the quartet’s interest in addressing contemporary issues. Sharing the program with Gordon’s new work on Mar. 2 is Peni Candra Rini’s Segara Gunung (Ocean-Mountain), which uses shadow puppets, original artwork, and field recordings to explore the volcanic and seismically-active ecosystem of her home country of Indonesia, and its vulnerability to the effects of climate change. Then, on Apr. 4 in Rohnert Park, CA, Kronos will premiere Sahba Aminikia’s Chahar Fasl (Four Seasons), which tells the story of Iran’s Lake Urmia, one of the largest salt lakes in the world that, due to global warming, drought, and lack of management, began to shrink; now, with the government’s revival efforts, the lake is growing again. Like Vivaldi’s famed Four Seasons concerti, Aminikia’s piece follows the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth.

Next up for Kronos is the premiere of Keep Going by Seattle-based composer Gabriella Smith on Jan. 27 in Stanford, CA. The piece explores how we can interweave music and environmental activism. Growing up in the Bay Area, Smith fell in love with the rich nature around her, hiking the mountains and spending time on the shore; now, she works as both a composer and environmental activist. Keep Going synthesizes these interests and is built around interviews Smith conducted with a wide variety of people working on climate solutions. To compose the music, she pieced together the interviews, then improvised on violin around the words, filling out each story with melodies.

“Five Decades” composers Peni Candra Rini, Sahba Aminikia, and Gabriella Smith

At its heart, Keep Going honors the climate justice movement, offering a glimpse into the work many are doing to improve our Earth. “I wanted to provide listeners with an experience that many aren’t used to associating with the climate crisis — joy, fun, even humor,” Smith said in an email. “At a time when it feels so easy to slip into despair at the magnitude of everything we’re facing, this piece celebrates the people and communities all around us who refuse to give up and who are dedicating their lives to climate solutions in incredibly joyful ways that we all can, and all need to, be a part of.”

Kronos’ Five Decades commissions also draw on cultural histories and traditions. On Feb. 22 in Tucson, AZ, Kronos will premiere Trey Spruance’s The Black Art Book of St. Cyprian the Mage, which draws from a Byzantine epic poem to highlight the experiences of people currently in exodus around the world. And premiering on Apr. 28 in Los Angeles, Mazz Swift’s commission will look to American slave songs and spirituals to explore the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, the idea of looking back to learn how to move forward.

RIVER by Vân-Ánh Võ, a composer and 16-string đàn tranh (zither) player finds inspiration in the Vietnamese tradition of using every part of the coconut tree and fruit, and provides a vision for a more sustainable future. For the premiere of the work on Apr. 9 in Beaverton, OR, Võ developed a communal musical instrument for Kronos to play.

“Five Decades” composers Vân-Ánh Võ, Mazz Swift, and Trey Spruance

Võ has had a long relationship with Kronos, who have deeply supported her vision. “When I was about to start working on my first commission for Kronos 12 years ago, David Harrington told me that I should feel free to work on music I have always wanted to bring out, but could never share before,” she said in an email. “Coming from a culture where, still today, censorship is a very real thing and women in arts are for men’s entertainment, being encouraged to freely express myself artistically was a dream come true.”

With her latest Kronos commission, Võ is exploring new areas of expression. “For RIVER, I have created a whole new instrument called ‘đàn Cây Nêu’ that is the bridge between the sound of the quartet and my instrument,” she said. She developed the piece from a research trip to the Greater Mekong Subregion, in which she researched the lives and cultures of the people living in the area. After the trip, she shared her findings with Harrington. “As the best artistic director I have worked with, David has not only been my mentor, but also the one who challenges me and encourages me to bring my best and deepest artistic ideas,” she said “Stories about the water, people, and river have been the center of our conversations, and questions of how we can share the region with audiences here have always been on my mind.”

When Harrington looks back on 50 years of commissioning and performing new works, he always returns to his eternal love of the string quartet. He has a sparkle in his eye as he describes his “inner Haydn” that blossoms whenever he sits down to play. He gestures toward his heart whenever he brings up the idea — it’s where he finds this never-ending spark for the string quartet, and his passion for the artform radiates through the new music he commissions and beyond. “What can I say?,” Harrington said with a smile. “I just infinitely love what Haydn started around 1770.”

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, funded with generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF. 

A gift to ACF helps support the work of ICIYL. For more on ACF, visit the “At ACF” section or composersforum.org.

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To the left of the Sarasota City Commission chambers, two long, skinny Florida Pine trees stretch toward the sky, alone in marshland that shines gold in the daylight. Near a hallway that leads to city offices, a palm tree curves off the shore over a swamp that mirrors the orange sky above as Spanish moss hangs from the surrounding foliage.  

The paintings featuring these images, each harkening back to when Florida was more known for its unique natural beauty than its real-estate development, are part of the newest installation of Sarasota City Hall’s Cultural Heritage Exhibit.  

The goal, according to Sarasota Public Art Manager Mary Davis Wallace, is to inform and educate the public on one of the state’s most celebrated art movements: The Highwaymen.  

“It’s not just an opportunity for us to share the stories of our local heritage, but it’s also contributing to the broadcast of such a fantastic legacy.”  

In the 1950s, 26 Black landscape artists, primarily hailing from Florida’s Treasure Coast, sold their vivid landscape pieces off roads like I-95 and U.S. Highway 1 (hence, their name). At the time, Florida’s codified segregation made it nearly impossible for Black artists to see their work displayed in galleries.  

The group is estimated to have painted around 200,000 pieces.  

Wallace said it’s important for the city to provide free, accessible exhibits displaying the history and culture of Sarasota and the state of Florida.  

“I’ve had a lot of people coming into City Hall, thinking they were just going to pay for their parking ticket, and ending up being educated and informed and enlightened by the exhibition,” Wallace said.  

Roger Lightle is a collector and amateur historian of The Highwaymen, their art, and their story. He and his wife operate Highwaymen Art Specialists, Inc., which possesses about 600 paintings, and he has helped some of their artwork be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Orlando International Airport.

Lightle, who loaned Sarasota the artwork for the gallery, said he remembered first seeing The Highwaymen’s artwork as a child growing up in Florida – displayed at homes and businesses in Vero Beach and Fort Pierce. He said that even as a child, he was mesmerized by the paintings.  

Greater recognition of the Florida Highwaymen for their contributions to the cultural and artistic history of both Florida and the South has put their artwork in high demand, Lightle said. The demand is much more than the original artists, who sold pieces door-to-door or out of the trunks of their cars for as little as $20, just hoping to survive, could have ever dreamed.  

“Now, we’re in demand by these major museums,” Lightle said. “It’s not stopping, but it shouldn’t stop. It’s such a relevant story.”  

Lightle will lead two public lectures on the Florida Highwaymen on Feb. 13.   

Cultural Heritage Exhibits typically last six months, according to Wallace. In the meantime, City Hall will not only be the premier spot in town to hear dry debates on parking policy and zoning rules, but to also to be transported into Florida’s heartland, by paintings that represent some of the most significant work in the state’s history. 

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