The Renaissance is far from over. On Thursday (Dec. 21), Beyoncé made a grand return to Brazil to celebrate the premiere of her Renaissance documentary concert film in a slew of new international territories, marking her first visit to the country in a decade.
Queen Bey had days earlier shared on Instagram the latest KNTY 4 News update: Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé would premiere in 15 new countries, including Brazil, on Dec. 21. “Y’all didn’t have to break my website,” she said in a voiceover. “But I told y’all, the renaissance is not over.”
To celebrate the film’s release around the world, Parkwood Entertainment and TV Globo teamed up to co-sponsor an event in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Fan-captured footage shows what appears to be a replica of the Renaissance World Tour stage and exclusive Club Renaissance merchandise.
Beyoncé teased her arrival in Brazil with a cheeky meme of the Renaissance disco horse — nicknamed Reneigh by fans — peeking out of a private jet. Sure enough, the music icon surprised fans with her first public appearance in Brazil in 10 years. She last visited the country during her Mrs. Carter Show World Tour back in 2013.
Once at the event, a visibly overwhelmed Beyoncé addressed the crowd, saying in fan-captured video, “I was not able to come for the Renaissance tour, but I’m so happy to give y’all the Renaissance film … You are the Renaissance!”
“I came because I love you so much … It was very important to be here, right here,” the “Cuff It” singer continued. “Thank you for all your support over the years. There is no one like y’all. You are one of one, No. 1 and the only one!”
Immediately following her brief appearance — during which she wore a stunning silver hooded grown — Beyoncé shared some snaps on her Instagram page featuring her chucking up the deuces on her private jet, holding the Brazilian flag, and taking in the enraptured crowd.
The “Break My Soul” singer originally hosted two premieres for her film: a private premiere at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles on Nov. 25 and a public premiere at Leicester Square in London on Nov. 30. At both events, Beyoncé sported brand new platinum blonde hair.
The film made its U.S. debut on Dec. 1, topping the domestic box office in its first weekend and earning acclaim from critics and fans alike. The behind-the-scenes look at her Renaissance World Tour and accompanying Grammy-winning album featured Beyoncé at her most vulnerable in years.
Beyoncé’s record-breaking tour visited the U.S., Europe and Canada, selling more than 2.7 million tickets and grossing $579 million. The trek, which was in support of her Billboard 200-topping Renaissance album, is the highest grossing tour by a woman, by a Black artist and by any American soloist in Billboard Boxscore history.
Check out some fan-captured footage of the Beyoncé’s momentous visit to Brazil below:
🚨 BEYONCÉ SPEECHING IN SALVADOR! “It was very important for me to be here in Bahia. Renaissance film is about freedom, beauty, joy. Everything that you Brazilians represent. I’m very happy to be here and see your beautiful faces.” pic.twitter.com/iviZmBaeOc
Lehmann Maupin presents SpaceRace, an exhibition curated by Dexter Wimberly, that gathers five artists whose work is informed by a masterful understanding of pattern, materiality, and symbology: Leonardo Benzant, McArthur Binion, Alteronce Gumby, Nicholas Hlobo, and Brittney Leeanne Williams.
The works on view, which include painting, sculpture, and mixed media, use light, color, and unexpected source materials to prompt us to contemplate our place in the universe, explore ideas of spirituality, and engage with varied perceptions of reality. In this context, the term SpaceRace has a dual meaning. It is a reference to the 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals (the United States and the Soviet Union), who sought dominance in space beyond our planet. It is also a satirical reference to the commodification of Black art in the 21st century.
Leonardo Benzant creates structures that reflect multiple patterns and chance operations that suggest the influence of spiritual forces behind the work and its ideas. Aesthetic principles like improvisation, polyrhythms, and “call and response,” express themselves in the materiality of his work. Working with materials such as fiber, textiles, and beads, Benzant transforms them into artistic expressions beyond the Western canon. Each bead, each strand, each form wrapped and bound, pulls from traditional African healing and spiritual practices.
Alteronce Gumby’s vivid interstellar paintings emerge from his profound fascination with the cosmos and theories of energy. His prismatic fields add new perspectives to the history of abstract painting by proposing deliberate connections between color, society and the universe. Alteronce’s desire to interpret unknown territory is enhanced by his query into how societal conditions impact life on our planet. His practice serves as a portal into untouched worlds. It is in this context that Alteronce develops his extraterrestrial vistas.
McArthur Binion creates highly personal and labor-intensive works that assert his unique position between minimalism, identity politics, and abstraction. Binion employs elemental materials such as oil stick, ink, and graphite to create a dense interlacing grid on the surface of his paintings. This hand-made geometry is applied to a ground layer of neatly tiled images—reproductions of personal photos and documents— that offer glimpses into the artist’s life: his birth certificate from Mississippi, the farm house where he was born, a passport-sized self-portrait, or an address book capturing his formative years in New York City.
Highly influenced by poetry and bebop jazz, Binion swings between improvisation and order, abstraction, and biography. His works refuse easy categorization, continuously shifting between a critique and an acceptance of the minimalist aesthetic, ultimately rooting the works in an individual dedication to the process of painting.
Nicholas Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual, and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around post-apartheid nationhood and bodily healing. Using the metaphor of himself as a surgeon, Hlobo treats the
canvas like a physical being, ready to be cut open and sewn up at his discretion. Guided by the subconscious, Hlobo allows the kaleidoscopic gradients of paint to conjure abstract figurative renderings on the canvas.
Brittney Leeanne Williams focuses on the body as the primary subject of her pictorial investigations. Her works depict human-like forms in a state of transformation, with bodies contorted and shaped in unusual ways—figures entangled in draperies, all subject to unseen pressures or forces that extend beyond the visible.
These figures twist and knot themselves into emotional compositions, enduring complex physical maneuvers to the extent that bodies, skies, and landscapes merge into a transcendent fusion, where corporeal presence blends with the intangible. With a rich and deep color palette, Williams infuses an interplay between the seen and the unseen, echoing the delicate balance between the presence and absence of the
body on the canvas.
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
As of December 17th, I finished 111 books in 2023.
I sleep surrounded by books. I am always reading. Besides my wife, kids, and my city, books are everything to me.
I read widely across genres, though I especially focus on Los Angeles, architecture, crime fiction, music, and poetry. But this list also includes books about California, the Southwest, hip hop, urban studies, deep ecology, and ethnomusicology, along with some unexpected selections.
This is my 4th time creating an annual book list for L.A. TACO.
As someone who has spent the better part of the last two decades reciting poetry in bookstores, galleries, museums, and cultural centers, my book list includes titles from both indie publishers and major houses. Some of these writers are famous, others might be one day, and a few you might even see rocking a local coffeehouse.
Almost all of these books were released in 2023, with the exception of a few from late 2022. Books change lives when they are read wholeheartedly and must be shared. So, this list includes as many titles as I could fit in one place. There are two writers on this list who have two books each: Terrance Hayes and Jack Skelley.
Before jumping in, I want to dedicate this annual book list to Mike Davis and Amy Uyematsu, two of my mentors who passed away over the last year. For those who do not know, they are two prolific L.A. author-teachers. Both of them gave me big boxes of books over the years. In August of 2020, Uyematsu gave me two boxes of mostly poetry books, including rare titles by Janice Mirikitani and Langston Hughes. Uyematsu was a pioneering, Pasadena-born Asian American poet who seamlessly merged the personal and the political. I knew her for over 15 years, and she was as kind as she was brilliant. She wrote six poetry books over 30 years. I wrote about her last one, That Blue Trickster Time, in the L.A. TACO list last year and also here.
Mike Davis needs no introduction for anyone familiar with LA letters. What’s less known is how generous he was. He gave me a couple of boxes of books on more than one occasion, including Carey McWilliams and Kevin Starr titles.
First, when he retired from UC Riverside in 2015 and then another time at his house in San Diego in 2018. Aside from being a fierce social historian, he was gracious. Davis gave me well over 100 books in the 25 years I knew him. He was my professor at UCLA in 1997, teaching me terms like atmospheric river, fire ecology, and fortress architecture, expanding my vocabulary in the same way Chick Hearn and Vin Scully did before him.
I wrote a 3,000-word essay about Davis in the just-published 2nd edition of my book, Letters To My City. The book’s essays and poems celebrate dozens of L.A. neighborhoods while honoring giants like Davis and Uyematsu. With their incredible writing and generous spirits, Davis and Uyematsu showed me how to be a literary citizen sharing books and wisdom. I do my best to continue their ethos with my own students. This book list is dedicated to Davis and Uyematsu.
There are 37 books here listed alphabetically by author. If I had more time, I’d list more.
Let’s dive in…
Spoken Word: A Cultural History ~ By Joshua Bennett
In 2009, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a poem at the White House for the Obamas at a big event where Lin-Manuel Miranda and Esperanza Spaulding also performed. Bennett was only 20 at the time, a senior in college and a poetry slam champion. 15 years later, Bennett now has a PhD. and works as a Professor at Dartmouth. Bennett considers the East Coast roots of spoken word and how oral poetry is actually the first literary form even before the printed word. He covers and unpacks seminal names like Miguel Algarín, Ntozake Shange, Miguel Piñero, Patricia Smith, and Saul Williams. The book is an autoethnography of Bennett’s own history as a poet and a 50-year narrative history that traces the Black Arts Movement, the birth of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the rise of the poetry slam in Chicago at the Get Me High Lounge to Def Poetry Jam, inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, and the bridge between hip-hop and spoken word.
The Writing Life: 55 Years at Beyond Baroque Edited ~ By Laurel Ann Bogen & Liz Camfiord
The Venice-based Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is the oldest poetry venue in Los Angeles. It’s been so influential that both the punk band X and Amanda Gorman can brag that they started there, though about 30 years apart. Founded by George Drury Smith in 1968, Beyond Baroque emerged from the 1950s Venice Beat movement to evolve into one of America’s premier literary arts venues. This book is a history of the space with contributions from over 50 scribes while honoring literary giants like Wanda Coleman and Scott Wannberg. Peter J. Harris declares that Beyond Baroque is “sacred ground on which we can ponder.”
Incidental Takes ~ By Tuệ Mỹ Chúc aka Teresa Mei Chuc
Teresa Mei Chuc’s book of eco-poems presents pieces in both English and Vietnamese. One of the book’s shortest poems, “A Lesson on Interbeing,” captures the book’s central idea. Here it is in its entirety: “Thích Nhất Hạnh says that when I eat an orange, / I could taste the clouds, the rain, the sunshine, / my late grandmother’s love when she planted this tree nearly half a century ago. / Hear her voice conversing with leaves. / Feel the fluttering wings of bees covered / in pollen and see the iridescent hummingbird / that visits daily drunk on the nectar /of orange blossoms.” Mei Chuc paints aquatic ecosystems, Vietnamese villages, whale bones, and Buddhist temples, reminding us that we are all connected. The book’s title comes from the hundreds of whales and dolphins killed by the U.S. military annually, classified as “incidental takes.”
Dreaming Under Polka-Dot Stars By Cory Cofer
Published by World Stage Press, this is the long-awaited debut book of poetry from Cory Cofer,aka Besskepp. You may know Cofer from A Mic & Dim Lights, the open mic he started in Pomona 23 years ago. As a poet, educator, husband, father, and community ambassador, the HBO Def Poet makes the personal universal with Polka-Dot Stars. Cofer takes us from Trinidad, Texas to Stockton to the Inland Empire with candid poems that make you wanna join in call and response. His poetry removes the mask and finds time to laugh about the incongruities. Cofer owns his own story by being vulnerable—then laughing his way through it.
Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets ~ By Wanda Coleman
Though Coleman passed in 2013, her legacy looms larger than ever. As the author of over 20 books, she probably wrote more poems about LA than just about anybody with the possible exception of Charles Bukowski. This new collection is the first time all of her American Sonnets are all grouped together in one book. Coleman took the traditional sonnet form and reinvented it with more music for the postmodern. Her American sonnets are irreverent and honest and zip straight to the heart. “Here’s to / my uncompromising vision,” Coleman writes, “and to the young blood who / tells me I carry the broom like a cross.”
Counter Culture ~ By Joshua Farrell
This unique book is a hospitality guide that spotlights the importance of connecting with people and thoughtful guest service, especially in restaurants, coffeehouses, wine bars, and other small businesses. Quick-hit essays, professional advice, and mini oral histories with celebrated Angeleno chefs are sprinkled throughout the text. “This industry,” the author writes, “is built on our ability to share our skills, teach each other, and learn from each other.” Equally a how-to-guide and glossary of local culinary culture, there’s a lot of wisdom here.
Kaos Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell ~ By Robeson Taj Frazier w/ Ben Caldwell
The filmmaker, educator, and community activist Ben Caldwell has long been one of Los Angeles’s most important community artists. Based in Leimert Park, Caldwell’s long career has centered around fellowship, community and using film and music as a social force. Whether he was teaching at CalArts, teaching youth in the Crenshaw district how to use computers and cameras, making films as a part of the Los Angeles Rebellion Film Movement, or providing a space for 25 plus years for the Project Blowed hip hop open mic, Caldwell and his KAOS Network space in Leimert has been integral to our city’s cultural landscape. This book uses vivid illustrations, photographs, and countless stories to show Caldwell’s 50-plus years of cultural work.
Meet Me at the Lighthouse ~ By Dana Gioia
“You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles / Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark,” asserts Dana Gioia. The former California Poet Laureate laments about the Los Angeles he came up in the 60s and 70s while interrogating our city’s state in 2023. Raised in Hawthorne before studying at Stanford and Harvard and living in New York City for 15 years, Gioia now splits his time between LA and Northern California. The 26 poems here take us to the Lighthouse nightclub at Hermosa Beach, high into the Hollywood Hills and over to Olvera Street where the poet tells us: “Pray for the city that lost its name. / Pray for the people too humble for progress. / Pray for the flesh that pays for profit. / Pray for the angels kept from their queen.”
Gangsters Don’t Die ~ By Tod Goldberg
The final book in Goldberg’s “Gangsterland” trilogy moves between Chicago, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles following the protagonist, the hitman turned rabbi, Sal Cupertine. The twists, turns and reversals are never-ending and the dialogue is off the hook. Goldberg is gifted in using artful F bombs and his candid observations through the narrative almost come off like Samuel Jackson: “Palm Springs was an open city, which to the Italian families meant you could do whatever you wanted provided you didn’t kill anybody or fuck them over too badly. In either case, any revenge on that shit would happen outside the city limits.”
So to Speak & Watch Your Language ~ By Terrance Hayes
Releasing two books on the same day is par for the course for the award-winning poet and NYU professor Terrance Hayes. So to Speak is his seventh poetry collection, and as usual Hayes flexes inventive poetry forms like the golden shovel, American sonnets and even ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas. A master of disrupting poetic form in order to make a new one, only Hayes could write poems bridging Bob Ross, Lil Wayne, Kafka, and Marvin Gaye. Watch Your Language is Hayes’s second prose collection. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, it functions like a poetic guidebook, charting a lyrical geography featuring illustrated micro-essays, biographical prose poems, and graphic book reviews accompanied by his own original drawings. He even asks 255 questions, for example: “Which matters most: the poem, the poet, or the state of poetry?” There are also tributes to mythical, lesser-known poets like Frank Stanford and Joel Dias-Porter, aka DJ Renegade. Hayes’s tribute to Renegade is so compelling I just picked up Renegade’s book Ideas of Improvisation.
Evergreen ~ By Naomi Hirahara
This crime novel takes place in Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in 1946, just after World War II ended, as Japanese Americans are returning to Los Angeles after being in the wartime concentration camps or fighting with the 442nd Battalion’s Go For Broke unit. A sequel to her award-winning last book, Clark and Division, which was set in wartime Chicago, this novel addresses the Great Migration, Bronzeville, jazz history, and Boyle Heights’ multiethnic landscape. Hirahara is a master of using real people and real events in her fiction, like the historic Japanese Hospital on East First Street, the Breed Street Shul and the Rafu Shimpo newspaper. Equally, a love story and murder mystery, the protagonist, Aki Ito, encounters discrimination from the law and unexpected visits from the mafia. Evergreen is a riveting narrative tackling race relations, the American Dream, and the sacredness of family.
The Dark Tree ~ By Steven Isoardi
In 1961, the pianist and conductor Horace Tapscott formed the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA) to preserve the Black Arts. Playing shows at parks, schools, and churches in South Central Los Angeles as well as at political rallies and in prisons and events like the Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz Festival, the group evolved into what eventually became the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1971. The Dark Tree tells the story of the Arkestra with over 100 in-depth interviews to illuminate the community arts movement of Black Los Angeles over the last six decades. Originally published in 2006, this revised and updated edition was just published in September 2023 by Duke University Press. And though Horace passed away in 1999, his Arkestra continues to play with three generations of players while moving forward with playing international festivals. This book is essential to understanding their ethos of paying the music forward.
Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters ~ Edited by David Kipen
Using a date-by-date structure that moves through the calendar year, this book employs California diary and letter excerpts and even a few tweets, blogs and quotes from speeches to catalog nearly 400 years of California history. Following up on the book’s progenitor, Dear Los Angeles, entries range from “The Creation Story of Turtle Island” to a recent Bukowski exhibit at the Huntington Library to a 2021 tweet. Among the book’s nearly 200 contributors are famous voices like John Lennon, Octavia Butler, and Mark Twain, next to dozens of other forgotten voices from yesteryear. As Faulkner declares in the text: “This is a strange and curious place.”
Three Hundred Streets of Venice California ~ By Tom Laichas
Combining cartography, dreamscape, Los Angeles lore, and his own family history, the prose poems in Laichas’s book circle around every intersection in Venice from Centinela to the water, Washington to the Westminster Dog Park. Fans of DJ Waldie’s Holy Land will savor these vignettes. Each piece is based on a different Venice street, such as Horizon Avenue, Jefferson Way, Rose Avenue, and Venice Boulevard, among almost 50 other Venice thoroughfares. The narrative shape-shifts between literal, metaphorical, and surreal from line to line, but true Angelenos will recognize the references and imagery instantly. “There’s an ocean,” Laichas writes. “The Pacific. I live at its edge, my otherselves behind me.”
A People’s Guide to Orange County ~ By Elaine Lewinnek, Gustavo Arellano & Thuy Vo Dang
This guidebook is for those who know Orange County is much more than just Disneyland, tract houses, or exclusive beaches. This book aims to feature a deeper, more diverse political history like civil rights heroes, family eateries, labor movements, indigenous resistance, and L.G.B.T.Q. victories. Showcasing murals, strawberry farms, Asian enclaves like Garden Grove and Westminster, the Latino bohemia of Downtown Santa Ana, and the wetlands of Bolsa Chica, the social and environmental histories of O.C. here are extraordinary. Chock full of hidden gems, the authors reveal the lesser-known stories of America’s fifth-most-populous county.
Asada: The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling ~ By Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral
Why did publishing a handy guide to the great, L.A.-style carne asada take this long? Who knows. But it’s out now, and it’s written by two people who have dedicated their lives to serving and writing about Mexican food culture in Los Angeles. Lopez, with her pioneering Oaxacan restaurant in the heart of Koreatown, Guelaguetza, and Cabral, with his tenure as the late Jonathan Gold’s restaurant scout and editor-in-chief of L.A. TACO for four years. This book walks you through many foolproof recipes to make your own marinades for your favorite cuts of meat, seafood salsas, tortillas, vegetarian side dishes, and even pre-batched cocktails. If carne asada is a way of life for you, this will be your new bible.
Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles ~ By India Mandelkern
Who would have ever known that a book on the history of the Los Angeles streetlight would be so fascinating? “Rather than holding it up for scrutiny as an inert object, as if she were painting a still life, or slipping it under the literary equivalent of a microscope, to squint at its tiniest details,” writes Christopher Hawthorne in the book’s foreword, “she instead takes a more active and critical role in analyzing the relationship between the history of this piece of urban design and the political, civic and cultural life of Los Angeles.” Mandelkern calls streetlights “totems of everyday life: unsung local emblems that we tend to overlook.” At the end of the book, she spotlights L.A.’s Top 40 street lights, including the Wilshire Lantern and the Broadway Rose.
The World According to Joan Didion ~ By Evelyn McDonnell
Rather than a biography, this book explicates the people, places, and time periods that defined the prose of Joan Didion. Moving from Sacramento to New York to Los Angeles to Malibu, then Miami, Hawaii, and back to Manhattan, McDonnell presents a literary map tracing Didion’s legacy from the late 1950s to her emergence as an iconic California writer in the 60s and 70s to her eventual passing in 2021. Combining interviews with Didion’s inner circle and close reading of her books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Where I Was From, McDonnell reminds us of why Didion was so beloved in the first place. McDonnell’s aims are somewhat similar to Lynell George’s 2020 book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, because it humanizes Didion and gives readers instructions on how they might become a writer if they work hard enough with the right fortitude like Didion did.
Dublab: Future Roots Radio ~ Edited by Mark “Frosty” McNeil & Jeremiah Chiu
Ever since its founding in 1999, the LA internet radio station dublab has been breaking new ground sonically. The book’s subtitle captures this: “Collapsing Time, Space, and Place on the Internet Airwaves.” As an incubator for DJs and musicians like Ras G, Carlos Nino, Al Jackson, Daedalus, Kutmah, Flying Lotus, Nobody, and Gaslamp Killer, a homebase for record labels like Plug Research, Stonesthrow, and Brainfeeder, and the internet extension of venues like Sketch Pad and The Low End Theory, it’s no exaggeration to say dublab has played a central role in Los Angeles’s musical landscape and even internationally. This book documents this story properly with dozens of interviews, candid photos from the studio, and vivid ephemera like technicolor event flyers, record sleeves, and fantasy album covers. Published by Hat & Beard Press, the book’s aesthetic is glorious, like an issue of Wax Poetics.
Acid Detroit ~ By Joe Molloy
Molloy crafts an inclusive musical history of Detroit from the postwar period to the present, covering Motown, MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, the White Stripes, J Dilla, and the rise of techno in the Motor City. Frequently discussed Detroit artists like Bob Seger, Eminem, and Kid Rock are briefly noted but the book mostly spotlights musicians like Iggy Pop, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Danny Brown. Surveying the rise and fall of late capitalism as expressed in Detroit music, this is first-rate radical history. The author presents Detroit, “not as a city of crushed dreams, but as a resilient bastion of consistent, cutting-edge American culture.” I found this at Stories in Echo Park.
God Went Like That ~ By Yxta Maya Murray
Taking the form of an Environmental Protection Agency report, the award-winning novelist and legal scholar Yxta Maya Murray’s new novel investigates the real-life nuclear reactor meltdowns and accidents that happened in 1959, 1964, and 1968 in the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Simi Valley. The long-hidden nuclear catastrophe created generations of toxic pollution and radioactive contamination. Murray’s novel uses the federal agent Reyna Rodriguez as a protagonist, uncovering the environmental impact. Rodriguez’s assertions in her reports are taken from actual research Murray conducted for the Huntington Library. Her knowledge as a legal scholar combined with her deft fiction writing skills meld here to create a unique, believable novel grounded in science but still engaging as a work of literature.
Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings ~ By Keenan Norris
Keenan Norris is a novelist, journalist, and professor who melds memoir, cultural criticism, and literary history to examine the last century of Chicago. Using the work of Richard Wright as a throughline, Norris also dives deep into the history of his father Butch Norris, who grew up in Chicago following the Great Migration. Cameos in the narrative include Barack Obama, the Black P Stones, Common, and Chief Keef. Eventually, Norris’s father moved to San Bernardino and the author spends part of the time showing the similarities between the disenfranchisement of the Inland Empire to the Windy City. “Wherever we go, there we are,” writes Norris. “Whether in Chicago or any other city, we find ourselves, our frailty, our survival.”
L.A. Interchanges ~ By Lydia R. Otero
Lydia Otero’s journey, as the title suggests, travels from East Los Angeles to Alhambra, West Hollywood, and Venice, as the author plays a major role with groups like Lesbians of Color and Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos. Their memoir combines archival storytelling, photographs, and protest flyers to catalog their own rite of passage and the political and cultural landscape of 1980s Los Angeles. Otero was also an electrician who worked on the U.S. Bank Tower, the Metro Rail, and the Universal Citywalk. Covering from the late 1970s to 1998, Otero was in the middle of it all. “My quest to join and build alternative sites that made connecting with Brown queers outside of bars possible,” Otero states, “was motivated by my feminist leanings and knowing that I found women whose politics aligned with mine the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
The Unvarnished Gary Phillips ~ By Gary Phillips
Gary Phillips has long been one of the West Coast’s most prolific scribes. The award-winning novelist, editor, and screenwriter has specialized in showing L.A.’s dark side and the lesser-known streets of South Central. Still, this latest book of his short stories merges bizarro, noir, SciFi, and madcap pulp fiction. The 17-story collection ranges “from a centuries-old Aztec vampire, an astral projecting killer, celestial vigilantes, an undercover space ranger, a right-wing specter haunting the ‘hood, and of course, a mad scientist plotting world domination.” These pages are where “grindhouse meets blaxploitation with strong doses of hardcore B movie drive-in fare.” Dedicated to Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone, it’s otherworldly and laugh-out-loud funny.
Cantadora—Letters From California ~ By Linda Ravenswood
The Chicana and Jewish American scholar and performance artist Ravenswood presents 44 hybrid texts that read as maps, diary entries, dream fragments, poetic manifestos, and prose poems dedicated to working against the erasure of history. Allison Hedge Coke characterizes it as “being in the world with fixed and shifting perimeters. It speaks to Being Mixed with a luminous medley. It is a ricochet of childhood seasonings.” Ravenswood writes about it all, from the conquest of Mexico by Cortés to a post-it in the pandemic.
Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry ~ Edited by Ruben Quesada
Spotlighting the cultural experiences found in Latinx poetry, this book of essays goes a long way to show that Latinx culture encompasses people with connections to not just Mexico but the Caribbean, Central, and South America. Moreover, there is no singular voice or common theme in Latinx poetry, instead, there are “fissions of multiple identities, the out/in transcendent channels of word, body, and memory,” as Francisco Aragon states, and “deep examinations, personal stories, senses of a damaged cultural self, and the ‘war’ to reclaim and honor our injured self,” as Blas Falconer writes. The Pomona poet Michael Torres pontificates on being “A Graffiti Artist in Academia,” and Adela Najarro riffs on “How I Came to Identify as a Latina Writer.” The 24 essays here honor the history of Latinx poetry while presenting a spectrum of voices that are creating its future.
West: A Translation ~ By Paisley Rekdal
Rekdal’s collection of poems and essays commemorates the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad while also looking at the Chinese Exclusion Act. Rekdal was the Utah Poet Laureate for five years. This book covers a lot of territory as a sort of documentary poetry. Every poem in it also has a short essay in the book’s second half, filling in the historical context of mentioned figures like Frederick Law Olmsted, A. Philip Randolph, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Helen Holmes. The essays read as prose poems, and the book folds into itself like Russian dolls. “The bombs, the state historian warns me,” Rekdal writes, “didn’t all go off when they were dropped. Never leave the safety of the road. Truck tire rusting in the salts. When it rains, it pours.”
Under A Future Sky ~ By Brynn Saito
Fresno-born poet, professor, and organizer Brynn Saito took a pilgrimage with her father to the Arizona desert prison, where her paternal grandparents met during World War Two. Many of the book’s 27 poems are epistolary, poetic letters addressed to her grandparents, father, mother, sister, and future child while unpacking her grandparents’ plight of wartime incarceration and generational trauma. Saito sings about Southwest flora and ancestral memory. Calling out the beauty within California’s Central Valley and the Arizona desert, she beholds rhododendrons, peony buds, sagos, azaleas, and night-blooming lantana–all while “divinating history.”
Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California ~ Edited by Jason Sexton
Kevin Starr’s eight-volume Americans and the California Dream series is probably the most ambitious interpretive project about not only California but of any American state. And though Starr died in 2017, he continues to be quoted, cited, and referenced in countless accounts about the Golden State. The nine essays in this collection showcase why Starr matters and how his interdisciplinary American Studies approach to narrative history made his work accessible to everyone, not just academics. Anthea Hartig calls Starr “a public servant and a public historian” in the Foreword. Truly a public intellectual, Starr was almost like a literary Huell Howser writing history for the world at large. This book also includes one of the last interviews with Mike Davis before he died. Though Davis and Starr were sometimes depicted as rival California historians, the two leviathans became good friends. Davis reflects on Starr’s legacy, what he got right, what he missed, and how Starr “really believed that people can be changed by dialog with people who have different or opposing views.”
The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker & Interstellar Theme Park: New & Selected Writing ~ By Jack Skelley
2023 was a big year for Jack Skelley with these two books. The poet, journalist, and editor has a 40-year track record dating back to his early days with Beyond Baroque and as a seminal figure in LA’s Performance Art/Punk rock/spoken word movement of the early 1980s. Fear of Kathy Acker is his experimental novel that was published in piecemeal, serial form in mid-1980s chapbooks and magazines. The new version from Semiotext(e) is the first time it’s ever been published in its entirety. Both a homage to Kathy Acker’s cut-up novels and a deep dive into the 1980s LA underground, it reads like Burroughs shopping with Billy Idol. And Interstellar Theme Park collects 40 years of his poems with a lot of new work. Whether it’s his poems connecting the Beach Boys and Charles Manson or meditating on avant-garde cinema, Skelley’s been there and done that poetically: “At the Think Tank for collective amnesia / we gutted the basement and found a tiny time capsule.”
The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals ~ By Mimi Tempestt
Mimi Tempestt wants to know: “what you know about about a L.A. woman?” In particular a Black LA woman. Tempestt’s second book of poems, her first with City Lights, is a tour de force. Starting with reflections on her own personal struggles before spiraling out into larger themes of social and political critique, the poems employ a visual and surreal sensibility that eventually culminates into a poetic play. And though Tempestt is from L.A., she came to rise in the Bay Area’s poetry community with the likes of San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin. “She carries Coleman and Kaufman with her to make a poetry I found too livid to be abject and too vivid to forget,” blurbs Douglas Kearney. “I escaped from los angeles with a skeleton in my suitcase,” Tempestt says.
Boom Times For the End of the World ~ By Scott Timberg
For over two decades, Scott Timberg was one of Los Angeles’s most prolific journalists championing artists, musicians, writers, architects and filmmakers. The former reporter for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times committed suicide in December 2019, just months before the pandemic. The 26 essays in this posthumous collection showcase his prescient eye, omnivorous mind and the deep longing behind his words. Timberg’s 2015 viral essay “Leaving Los Angeles,” is included here and the questions it raises about economic and cultural shifts are more relevant now than ever. Timberg also co-edited a book about Los Angeles in the early 2000s called The Misread City. “It’s human nature to try to make meaning out of life, to build narrative shapes out of events and images,” writes Timberg. “That may be, in the end, what creativity is about.”
Auto/Body By Vickie Vertiz
“I’m a bad bitch of high gloss / and matte juxtaposition / My body is the decolonized, sustainable thing,” asserts Vickie Vertiz in her poem “‘85 Chevy El Camino.” Vertiz grew up in the industrial streets of Southeast L.A. County near the Los Angeles River and auto body shops. In her second book, she examines cars and their maintenance poetically as a vehicle to examine her life experiences, what’s underneath the hood, and if it’s firing on all cylinders. Vertiz studied with Juan Felipe Herrera, Mike Davis, Allison Hedge Coke, and Susan Straight at UC Riverside a decade ago in their MFA Program and she makes her mentors proud with poems that work in the past, present and future: “Is it talking dirty if you’re just listening? What you see in the picture is me riding shotgun.”
I’d Rather Be Lightning ~ By Nancy Lynée Woo
The Long Beach based eco-poet Nancy Lynée Woo is such a skilled bard that she can make a poem about the climate crisis beautiful. Humanizing deep ecology and ecofeminism into playful humorous poems that still manage to evoke hope, Woo waxes poetic on wetlands, rain storms, and having a good relationship with her third eye. These poems meld youthful optimism with a sober worldly understanding. Moving into the realm of magic, she reminds us she’d “rather be lightning.”
The Sparring Artists (Anthology of Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts) ~ Edited By Daniel Yaryan
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s done more to unite West Coast Poetry than Daniel Yaryan. His “Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts” readings have included over 90 shows between the Bay Area and LA. The Sparring Artists book edited by Yaryan celebrates the 15th Anniversary of the celebrated live poetry series with 125 contributors like Michael C. Ford, Lewis MacAdams, and Pam Ward. Bridging the Beat Generation poets with the 21st Century, this collection screams punk rock, spoken word, jazz, hip hop, surreal, avant-garde, it’s all in here.
If you made it this far, I encourage you to share books with your friends and loved ones. Reading builds empathy, encourages critical thinking, and helps us remember what it means to be human. Thank you for reading, and happy new year! I wish you a great 2024 and beyond!
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
A few days ago, I wrote about all the accolades Hyundai and Kia have been getting for their great electric vehicles. The Kia EV9, Kia EV6, Hyundai IONIQ 5, Hyundai IONIQ 5 N, Hyundai IONIQ 6 — they’re all award winners! These are top-notch electric vehicles built on a decade of good EV design and development. But what’s next? What do Hyundai and Kia have planned next to keep the momentum going and win more awards? I’m glad you asked.
There are some modest new versions of existing electric cars that have just been introduced, there are electric flying machines coming next month, and there’s a bit in between those two levels.
Kia Horizon EVs
EV6 Horizon
Kia now has some special “Horizon” edition versions of the EV6 and Niro EV in the UK. In the case of the EV6 Horizon, it sits between the “Air” version and the “GT-Line” versions. In addition to the features of the EV6 Air, the EV6 Horizon comes with:
Automatic body coloured flush exterior door handles
Solar glass windscreen
Dual LED headlights with adaptive driving beam
Front parking sensors*
High gloss black door trim
Driver’s power adjustable memory seat
Front passenger power seat with two-way electric lumbar support
Heated outer second row seats
Wireless mobile phone charger
Smart power tailgate
Black artificial leather in the interior
Premium paint (Midnight Black, Interstellar Grey, or Gravity Blue)
“The EV6 ‘Horizon’ is offered exclusively with a 225bhp rear-wheel drive powertrain, paired with a long-range 77.4kWh battery pack. It’s capable of driving up to 328 miles on a single charge (WLTP combined cycle)**. The EV6 ‘Horizon’ also offers ultra-rapid 800V charging technology, enabling the car to recharge from 10-80 per cent in just 18 minutes*** when plugged into a 350kW charger.” The on-the-road (OTR) price starts at £45,995.
Niro EV Horizon
Similarly, the Niro EV Horizon sits somewhere between the base “2” and the mid-level “3” (but don’t call it a 2½). In addition to what’s included in the base Niro EV, the Niro EV Horizon comes with the following as standard:
LED headlights
Front fog lights
Rear privacy glass
Electrically folding high gloss door mirrors
Front parking sensors*
Rain sensing front wipers
All-round electric windows with driver’s and front passenger auto up/down
Black artificial leather upholstery
Heated front seats and steering wheel
Driver’s power adjustable seat with aircell type lumbar support
Wireless mobile phone charger
Vehicle-to-Load (V2L)
Blind Spot Collision Avoidance Assist (BCA)
Highway Driving Assist (HDA1.0)
Premium paint (Mineral Blue, Interstellar Grey, and Midnight Black)
“Like the rest of the Kia Niro EV line-up, the ‘Horizon’ model is offered with a 64.8kWh battery pack, capable of up to 285 miles on a single charge, according to the WLTP combined cycle**. Paired with a 150kW electric motor sending power to the front wheels, the Niro EV offers efficient running with smooth and spritely performance.”
Kia plans to have 15 different electric vehicle models available around the world in 2027. The Niro EV and EV6 are two of those models. Additional EVs will be part of a new PBV line. …
Kia PBV Vision
At CES 2024 in Las Vegas next month, Kia will be launching its new PBV, or “Platform Beyond Vehicle,” vision and business strategy. This includes more than just vehicles, but it does also include new vehicle models. “Kia PBV is a total mobility solution combining fit-for-purpose EVs with advanced software solutions that will open the door to new businesses and lifestyles,” the company writes.
“Marking its first return to the CES in five years, a series of keynote speakers will expand on the brand’s future PBV business strategies and vision for the future, including dedicated hardware such as Easy Swap and Dynamic Hybrid modularisation technologies, digital solutions developed under the Hyundai Motor Group’s advanced software capabilities, and plans for global partnership integration. …
“The Kia PBV exhibition will feature five concept models, including its first PBV scheduled for mass production starting in 2025, a range of Kia-exclusive PBV technology, and a PBV-dedicated presentation and demonstration highlighting the company’s software-defined vehicle strategy and plans for partnership integration.”
That’s what we know for now about the PBV launch. But Kia will have more on display and launched via the interwebs at CES as well. “The brand’s EV exhibition will introduce Kia’s vision of ‘EVs for All’ by displaying the EV3 and EV4 concept cars alongside the EV9 and EV6 GT, while showcasing the numerous lifestyle benefits customers can enjoy from Kia’s rapidly expanding EV line-up.” I feel like we will have a full EV1–EV9 line (or maybe just EV3–EV9 line) before long.
Hyundai IONIQ Lab Opens in Thailand
Now, switching over to the Hyundai side, Hyundai is expanding its EV network to Thailand, offering the IONIQ 5 there and opening a new IONIQ Lab. “Hyundai Motor Company to lead the electric vehicle (EV) revolution in Thailand with the opening of the IONIQ Lab at True Digital Park in Bangkok,” Hyundai wrote last week. “The arrival of the new facility marks a significant milestone for Hyundai and its award-winning IONIQ 5, showcasing the company’s steadfast commitment to achieving a greener future through sustainable innovation in Thailand and around the world.”
I have to admit — my first thought was that the “Lab” was a place where Hyundai would be designing and developing and improving EVs. It seems that it’s really just a place to showcase/market Hyundai’s EVs. Nonetheless, it’s notable the company is bringing EVs to another big market.
Hyundai eVTOL Concept & Vertiport
Hyundai has its own big announcements planned for CES 2024 in Las Vegas. Its “advanced air mobility” company Supernal is going to unveil a new electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) concept vehicle and vertiport at CES.
“Supernal is building a ‘vertiport’ exhibition in front of the West Hall entrance to the Las Vegas Convention Center where attendees can step inside the future of transportation to:
See the company’s vehicle product concept,
Take a flight simulation through the city of LA,
Learn about potential flight networks,
and understand how future ‘mobility hubs’ will create quicker and easier travel journeys.”
Jaiwon Shin, CEO of Supernal and president of Hyundai Motor Group; Ben Diachun, chief technology officer of Supernal; and Luc Donckerwolke, president and chief design officer of Hyundai Motor Group, will be presenting and available for media interviews on January 9. That’s it for now. We’ll learn more on January 9!
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RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
View of sculptures in The Kreeger Museum’s grounds. Photo: Anna Savino.
The Kreeger Museum & Washington Sculptors Group “Still Something Singing” Through January 27, 2024
Currently on view on The Kreeger Museum’s expansive grounds, visitors will find a group sculpture exhibition titled “Still Something Singing,” a collaborative endeavor between the museum and Washington Sculptors Group. Betsy Johnson, Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, guided this artistic exploration. Outdoor sculpture has been curated to capture “[…]the role of art in our contemporary moment,” according to the exhibition catalog.
“Still Something Singing” introduces viewers to a captivating collection of eight artworks, each serving as a catalyst for a fresh perspective on our surroundings and our own viewpoints. These pieces encourage a shift in how we see the world, promote the practice of compassion, uncover the beauty found within life’s dissonance, and inspire a sense of unity and healing. They carry the profound message that art holds the power to empower individuals to effect change in the tapestry of our world, even in moments when we might feel powerless.
Among the featured artists contributing their creative visions to this exhibition are Adam Bradley, Donna Cameron, Roger Cutler, Hyunsuk Erickson, Donna M. McCullough, Barbara Josephs Liotta, Maryanne Pollock, and Steve Wanna. “Still Something Singing” is a significant component of The Collaborative, an initiative initiated by The Kreeger Museum in 2021, aimed at supporting local artists from the Washington, DC region.
“Still Something Singing” stands as a poignant reminder that, even in challenging times, art remains a source of inspiration and empowerment, capable of driving meaningful change. 2401 Foxhall Road, NW. Sun.-Mon.: Closed. Tue.- Sat.: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. (Grounds close at 4:15 p.m.). 202-337-3050. Ticketed entry required.
“Julie Packard” by Hope Gangloff Acrylic on Canvas, 2019. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; funded by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Board of Trustees. Copyright Hope Gangloff
National Portrait Gallery “Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism” October 20, 2023 – September 2, 2024
“Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism” at the National Portrait Gallery introduces a selection of influential individuals, including scientists, politicians, activists, writers, and artists, who have played pivotal roles in shaping American attitudes toward the environment. This exhibit offers a historical journey, tracing the evolution of the environmental movement in the United States from the late 19th century to the present day.
The exhibition explores the transition from early 20th-century conservationism to mid-20th-century environmentalism, the subsequent challenges faced, and the contemporary efforts focused on environmental justice, biodiversity, and climate change. Drawing predominantly from the National Portrait Gallery’s own collection, “Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism” showcases over 25 portraits of individuals who have left a lasting impact on how the public perceives the natural world.
Among the featured figures are well-known luminaries like Rachel Carson, George Washington Carver, Maya Lin, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward O. Wilson. The exhibition ingeniously combines portraiture, visual biographies, and, wherever possible, the subjects’ own words to delve into the intricate and multifaceted history of the environmental movement.
Guest curated by Lacey Baradel, a science historian at the National Science Foundation, “Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism” provides an insightful exploration of the individuals who have shaped America’s environmental consciousness. 8th and G Streets, NW. 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Closed December 25.
The Phillips Collection “African Modernism in America, 1947-67” Through January 7, 2024
In the pivotal year of 1967, Fisk University received a transformative collection of modern African art courtesy of the Harmon Foundation, a prominent American organization dedicated to supporting and promoting African and African American artists. This significant gift marked a two-decade period during which African artists gained increasing visibility among American audiences. This era unfolded against the backdrop of profound social and political changes in Africa, the United States, and the world.
Following the upheavals of World War II, there was a renewed commitment to Pan-Africanism as a cultural and political movement that fostered racial solidarity among people from Africa and its Diasporas. As independent African nations emerged from colonial rule, artists crafted new visual languages in response to the changing times. Organizations and institutions such as the Harmon Foundation, historically Black colleges and universities (including Fisk University in Nashville), the Museum of Modern Art, and Merton D. Simpson’s New York gallery provided fresh opportunities for engaging with African modernisms. Through their presentation of African artists, they encouraged American audiences to recognize shared aesthetic and political concerns.
This vibrant period, marked by the Harmon Foundation’s gift, serves as the foundation for “African Modernism in America, 1947-67.” Featuring the works of 50 African and African American artists, this exhibition is the first to explore the intricate connections between modern African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations. It unfolds within the intertwined histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War, revealing a rich network of transcontinental cultural exchange.1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC. Tue.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Mondays. 202-387-2151. Ticketed entry required.
University of Maryland Global Campus Gallery “Eternal Paper” October 22, 2023–May 19, 2024
The Eternal Paper Exhibition at the University of Maryland Global Campus is a must-see event for art enthusiasts and anyone interested in exploring the creative boundaries of paper as a medium. This exhibition brings together 20 exceptionally talented artists who have collaboratively crafted intricate hand-formed art on and with paper. What sets this exhibition apart is the diversity of artistic approaches on display, ranging from representation to abstraction, and an exploration of pressing political, ecological, and social themes.
The exhibition is curated by renowned artist Helen C. Frederick, a master printmaker, educator, and the visionary behind Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, a leading Maryland organization specializing in contemporary printmaking.
“Eternal Paper” is a remarkable exhibit that offers a thought-provoking exploration of various perspectives, showcases the triumph of collaboration while reimagining paper as both an art form and as a medium. This endeavor could only have come to fruition from a group of artists who come from incredibly different backgrounds but who are all accomplished in their own right.
Artists in the exhibition include Maria Barbosa, Elsabé Johnson Dixon, Nicole Donnelly, Cheryl Edwards, Susan Firestone, Helen C. Frederick, Claudia “Aziza” Gibson-Hunter, Alexis Granwell, Ellen Hill, Ken Polinskie, Tongji Philip Qian, Randi Reiss-McCormack, Tara Sabharwal, Soledad Salamé, Preston Sampson, Gretchen Schermerhorn, Joyce J. Scott, Buzz Spector, Mary Ting, and Anne Vilsboell.3501 University Blvd. East, Adelphi, MD. 9 a.m.–9 p.m. daily.
Phil Hutinet is the founding publisher of East City Art, DC’s visual art journal of record. For more information visit www.eastcityart.com
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
If warning were needed that progress towards equality between men and women is at best slow and uneven, and at worst sliding backwards, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report for 2023 provided it. But on the face of it, the art world would seem to be bucking the trend, with a cascade of challenges to the status quo. In London alone, these include a rehang at the National Portrait Gallery, bringing more women into focus, and the first solo takeover of the main galleries of the Royal Academy by a female artist.
Internationally, the year was topped off by ArtReview handing the top slot in its Power 100 list of art’s most influential people to the American photographer Nan Goldin. Her most conspicuous achievement has been her campaign against the billionaire Sackler dynasty, whose company, Purdue Pharma, fuelled the opioid epidemic in America. But her activism, which has resulted in a slew of institutions cutting ties with the family, and striking their name from buildings, is rooted in her work as a pioneering photographic observer. Her 50-year focus on the intimate lives of people pushed to the margins of society by sexuality, addiction, or a simple refusal to fit in, has documented alternative histories, and inspired younger generations of artists to do likewise.
The rich and various history of confrontational feminist art is currently on show in Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! – a show billed as the first to survey the activist art made by women between 1970 and 1990. It is fascinating to see footage of the bewilderment on shoppers’ faces as second-wave feminism took to the streets; it is chastening to see the ferocity of the challenge that punk posed to gender expectations, and to wonder where all that snarling, devil-may-care energy went.
ArtReview’s Power 100 doesn’t only include artists but gallerists and collectors. And rightly so. Women In Revolt! was curated by five women. But those who rebalance the picture are not necessarily either art-world insiders or women. The attention paid to the pop artist Pauline Boty, who is currently enjoying one of her periodic rediscoveries, has been attributed by the Scottish novelist Ali Smith to four people: alongside the two curators/art historians who tracked down and rescued her paintings were her dairy farming sister-in-law, who kept them in a barn for years after Boty’s untimely death from cancer aged 28, and Ken Russell, who included her in his enduringly influential 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel.
To these can be added Smith herself, who made Boty one of the guiding spirits of her Seasons quartet of novels, thus bringing her to the notice of a readership beyond the art world. For Smith, in Autumn, she represents all those women who are “Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum.”
For centuries, the history of art has been haunted by its forgotten women. “Things seem to come in cycles and waves, and I wish they didn’t,” said Sonia Boyce, one of the artists included in a section of Women in Revolt! devoted to the 1980s British black arts movement. Nearly four decades passed before Boyce and another of the featured artists, Lubaina Himid, became the first British women of colour to win, respectively, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and the Turner prize. While these achievements are cause for celebration, the work of remembering them starts now.
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
It was a great year in Black art from New York to the San Francisco Bay. In 2023 it was featured throughout the country in a wealth of blockbuster exhibitions that garnered considerable attention, establishing Black artists as some of the most esteemed in the world.
Black art speaks to diverse audiences about the lived experiences of Black artists and Black people. It is an ideal way to connect to and understand the conditions under which they exist through unadulterated dialogue between artists and audiences.
Fresh off her epic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022, Simone Leigh was given a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; it traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and will continue to move audiences as it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” the astounding mid-career retrospective showing the dynamism of Mutu’s skills in artistic mediums including painting, sculpture, and video art, debuted at the New Museum in New York City and will move to the New Orleans Museum of Art early next year. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with almost 90 artists exhibited, including Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and Arthur Jafa. There were also noteworthy exhibitions of Faith Ringgold, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Amoako Boafo, Charles White, and Betye Saar.
Unfortunately, not all the exhibitions featuring work by Black artists can be covered in a single article. Unlike Leigh and Mutu’s retrospectives, which were surrounded by much hype, the artists below had major exhibitions—equally expressive of the Black experience—that deserve more notice.
“Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For”
Image Credit: Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.
Kwame Brathwaite’s photography produced an Afro-diasporic shift in thinking about the physical characteristics of Blackness. His 2023 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For” (named after a review the photographer penned about Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life), surveys a 20-year span of the artist’s work.
Grace Deveney, curator of the exhibition, told a PBS outlet, “He’s essentially synonymous with the Black Is Beautiful movement, in developing the aesthetic that we associate with it and creating the images that allow us to look back and understand its trajectory.”
The exhibition that occupied two galleries at the museum displayed a broad swath of Brathwaite’s work, including magazine photography and articles, album covers, and color slides from the 1960s to the 1980s. Because most of Brathwaite’s work was commercial in nature, much of this material was on view in an exhibition for the first time.
In 1974 Brathwaite traveled with the Jackson Five to Africa to document their tour, and in the same year he photographed Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was also a photographer of album covers for the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records. And he photographed legends, including Bob Marley, Thelonius Monk, Cicely Tyson, and many others.
In addition to the star power that his camera captured, he also documented the social and cultural dynamics of his time in photographs that depicted Black people as beautiful. Sadly, Brathwaite passed away five weeks after the exhibition opened.
“Henry Taylor: B Side”
Image Credit: Ron Amstutz.
Henry Taylor is known for his effervescent figurative paintings of Black families, celebrities, and people on the street. “Henry Taylor: B Side,” his first career survey, originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, includes more than 130 of Taylor’s works from the 1980s to the present.
“His paintings brilliantly balance a sense of tenderness, care, and community with keen wit, pointed critique, and a sense of broad social awareness,” Scott Rothkopf, senior deputy director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney, noted in the press release announcing the opening in New York.
One striking artwork in the exhibition, The Times Thay Ain’t A Changing, Fast Enough (also featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial), depicts the deadly interaction between Philando Castile and police officer Jeronimo Yanez during a traffic stop.
In addition to paintings, the exhibition features rarely seen drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where Taylor worked while attending art school, and “painted objects,” a grouping of artworks created by painting on everyday items like cigarette packs and cereal boxes. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, this exhibition celebrates Taylor’s penchant for artistic experimentation, as well as his social commentary.
“Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon”
Image Credit: Hai Zhang. Courtesy Queens Museum, New York.
Tracey Rose is known for her performative practice that is often accompanied by photography, video, installation, sculpture, film, and digital prints. Her retrospective “Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon,” an overview of the artist’s work since the 1990s, was exhibited at the Queens Museum in New York City. It was originally conceived at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, and in its American iteration it became tamer with the expectation that children would be part of the Queens Museum audience.
Rose is a radical voice who speaks to issues of colonialism, gender, sexuality, race, and repatriation in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, where she lives and works. She often uses her body as a site for protest, outrage, resistance, and discourse. In one work, Span II, performed in 1997, the artist sat in a glass box and shaved off her body hair and then knotted it in strands like rosary beads, a pointed reference to the practice in which South African authorities would place a pencil in a person’s hair to see if it slid out or stuck, thereby classifying the subject as white, colored, or Black. “Tracey’s work, for me, isn’t afraid to talk about topics such as post-apartheid South Africa, racism, all the things that are still incredibly relevant now, and especially in a U.S. context,” Lauren Hayes, director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Queens Museum, told theNew York Times.
“Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975”
Image Credit: Don Ross. Courtesy SFMOMA.
Though abstract expressionism has been considered the domain of white male artists, Frank Bowling—along with peers like Howardina Pindell, Sam Gilliam, and Jack Whitten—exists in the space as somewhat of an outlier. “Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975,” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was his first retrospective in more than 40 years.
The decade featured in the show was an exciting time in art, and Bowling’s work exemplifies that excitement. The exhibition featured 43 works through which he developed painterly techniques such as pouring, using gravity to create depth and spontaneity on his canvases. Because he was a Black artist, many expected Bowling to work on art that had political undertones. But he was drawn to abstraction and argued for his rights as a Black man to paint about matters aside from politics.
Bowling grew up in Guyana when it was still colonized by Britain, eventually moving to the colonizing nation to attend the Royal College of Art in London on a scholarship. Frustrated with the London art scene’s focus on figuration, he moved to New York in the 1960s, shortly after the Civil Rights Act became law and during the time of Vietnam protests.
“This move quickly propelled his work as he developed his large-scale ‘map paintings’ that bridge recognizable imagery in the hazy outlines of continents with vast textured expanses of color,” Marin Sarve-Tarr, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, told Forbes.
“Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other”
Image Credit: PD Rearick.
Community is pivotal to Sonya Clark’s art. “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other,” a mid-career survey of the artist’s work over the past 25 years, allows museum visitors to actively engage with a sordid American past and imagine a more collaborative future.
Clark commits to issues of history, race, and reconciliation by using a range of textile techniques including weaving, braiding, quilting, and beading to center her participatory projects. Instead of presenting herself as the sole author of her artwork, Clark aims to build community relations through it.
“Selfhood, especially when it comes to artistic practice, especially when we think about it through a Western mode, which I resist, is this self-identity, the artist as genius—I’m not calling myself a genius, but this solo person who makes this thing,” Clark explained to Forbes.
Unraveling is a performance piece in which Clark and community members unravel a Confederate flag thread by thread. She considers a replacement flag in Monumental Cloth, a replica of the dishcloth that served as Robert E. Lee’s white flag of surrender to end the Civil War; community members, too, can loom their own monumental cloths. Debuting at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, the exhibition traveled to the High Museum in Atlanta and will later move to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
“Gary Simmons: Public Enemy”
Image Credit: Sean Drakes/Getty Images.
Gary Simmons confronts critical issues concerning race that are as important today as they were when he started his art career 30 years ago. “Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,” the artist’s first comprehensive career survey, was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and is now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Through the lens of sports, literature, music, architecture, and urbanism, Simmons looks critically at white supremacy through 70 works comprising painting, sculpture, and video.
Since his 1993 inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial, co-curated by Thelma Golden, Simmons has used conceptual art to confront how racial ideas proliferate throughout society. In the 1993 biennial, the artist exhibited one of his wall drawings, Wall of Eyes, in which cartoonish eyes referencing racist imagery were rendered by smudging chalk on a painted wall. This technique of erasure would become his signature gesture.
“His work is about collective memory—what do we forget and why,” Rene Morales, chief curator at MCA told The New York Times. Simmons entered the artworld in the early nineties after the collapse of the art market, which paved the way for politically engaged artists to emerge, as the artworld became interested in confronting the social and economic realities of that decade.
“Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew”
Image Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.
Self-taught artist Lonnie Holley is known for using discarded objects to create meaningful art. “Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew,” exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, focused on the artist’s improvisational turning of personal hardships into drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound.
As one of 27 children, the 73-year-old artist spent time in foster care and in a juvenile detention facility. Holley focuses not on hardship, but on art, showing that anyone or anything can be greater than the sum of its parts. “Holley’s work is not just aesthetically compelling, but it also challenges viewers to rethink their relationships to objects, discarded items, and the environment,” MOCA curator Adeze Wilford explained to See Great Art.
The exhibition of sculpture, painting, and music included 70 works, including sculpture, drawings, and large-scale quilt paintings. Holley’s passion for inspiring social change through art has resulted in a body of work that explores US history, the environment, and his own memories. For the North Miami exhibition, Holley also curated a section dedicated to outsider artists Purvis Young, Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, and Hawkins Bowling. Although he is an Alabama native, it was Holley’s first retrospective in the South.
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
<img decoding="async" width="780" height="520" data-attachment-id="197195" data-permalink="https://roughdraftatlanta.com/2023/12/22/cord-jefferson-talks-american-fiction/american-fiction/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/roughdraftatlanta.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/american-fiction-F_00216_R2_01_rgb.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&quality=89&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1200,800" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"4","credit":"Claire Folger","camera":"X-T3","caption":"F_00216_R2\r\nWriter\/director Cord Jefferson on the set of his film\r\nAMERICAN FICTION\r\nAn Orion Pictures Release\r\nPhoto credit: Claire Folger\r\n\u00a9 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.","created_timestamp":"1661363108","copyright":"\u00a9 2023 ORION RELEASING LLC. All Rights Reserved.","focal_length":"37.6","iso":"1250","shutter_speed":"0.002","title":"AMERICAN FICTION","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Cord Jefferson/American Fiction" data-image-description data-image-caption="
Writer/director Cord Jefferson on the set of his film “American Fiction.” (Photo: Claire Folger/Orion Releasing)
” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/roughdraftatlanta.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/american-fiction-F_00216_R2_01_rgb.jpg?fit=450%2C300&quality=89&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/roughdraftatlanta.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/american-fiction-F_00216_R2_01_rgb.jpg?fit=780%2C520&quality=89&ssl=1″ src=”http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction.jpg” alt=”Writer/director Cord Jefferson on the set of his film "American Fiction." (Photo: Claire Folger/Orion Releasing)” class=”wp-image-197195″ srcset=”http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-1.jpg 1024w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-2.jpg 450w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-3.jpg 768w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-4.jpg 600w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-5.jpg 400w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-6.jpg 706w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-7.jpg 150w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-8.jpg 1200w, http://www.akh99.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/in-conversation-with-cord-jefferson-writer-director-of-american-fiction-9.jpg 370w” sizes=”(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px” data-recalc-dims=”1″>Writer/director Cord Jefferson on the set of his film “American Fiction.” (Photo: Claire Folger/Orion Releasing)
Cord Jefferson is interested in putting life on screen.
That’s what he hoped to accomplish with his film “American Fiction,” which is now playing in theaters. This is Jefferson’s feature directorial debut, having mostly worked in television up until this point. Alongside Damon Lindelof, he won an Emmy Award in 2020 for his work on the series “Watchmen” for Outstanding Writing For A Limited Series for the episode “This Extraordinary Being.”
“American Fiction” is written and directed by Jefferson, adapted from Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure.” Part satire, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor and writer who is fed up with a white publishing industry that dines out on stereotypical Black entertainment, exemplified by the critical adoration of a book by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) called “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.”
Monk hits a breaking point when his newest novel is deemed “not Black enough” and decides to write his own version of the hackneyed stories that he hates. But when the novel (“My Pafology”) becomes a surprise hit, Monk has to reckon with his own blindspots and prejudices, culminating in a conversation between he and Sintara that dives into the danger that comes with putting an entire group’s experiences onto the shoulders of one person.
But that’s really only part of the story. The satire is very funny, if a little broad. But where “American Fiction” really shines is its familial focus. Monk’s bitterness at his profession bleeds into a family life that’s riddled with hardship – his mother is suffering from dementia, and the bonds between he and his siblings are growing weary with the weight of their family history.
It makes sense that Jefferson would be well suited for that type of old school dramedy. Some of his favorite writers and directors include the likes of Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcenter and their focus on naturalistic, grounded stories.
“That stuff always really spoke to me, and I think that they do an excellent job of just getting at the realities of life,” he said. “It’s a little bit more elevated and sort of stylized, obviously, but I think that Wes Anderson is also a huge influence on me. I think Wes Anderson movies, you know – you’ll go from a scene in which you’re laughing your ass off, and then next thing you know, Gene Hackman is dead … That’s the reality of the world, and that’s sort of what I was trying to capture.”
Prior to the wide release of “American Fiction,” Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Jefferson about his career and the adaptation process. There are some spoilers for “American Fiction” and “Erasure” in this conversation, which have been noted. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
“American Fiction” is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” You recently read that book, if I’m mistaken, only a few years ago. What drew you to it?
Cord Jefferson: I read it in December of 2020, which was, as you may know, a terrible year. [Laughs] It was not a great year. I had, besides just the same stuff that had happened for everybody, I had some major professional failures that year that were sort of bugging me, and I always kind of get gloomy around the holidays too anyway. So I was kind of going into Christmas a little dejected. I was reading this review for a different novel called “Interior Chinatown,” and the review for that novel said that there’s a satire reminiscent of Percival Everett’s “Erasure.” I had never heard of “Erasure.” I went and bought it, and then just almost as soon as I cracked it open, I was just like – oh, this is amazing. It was one of those books where every time I put it down, I sort of wanted to come back to it immediately. I just kept finding myself back in my room reading it – and I’m a very slow reader, so that doesn’t really happen to me a lot.
Within 20 pages, I knew I wanted to write the screenplay. Halfway through, I was like – I maybe want to direct this. I started reading it in Jeffrey Wright’s voice, like that’s how early I’d already cast Jeffrey in my mind, when I was reading the material. It was not just the sort of satirical, professional themes about what it means to be a Black artist and what people want from creatives of color and what stories people choose to tell – that stuff had all been swirling in my mind for a long time – but also, the thing that was even sort of stranger was there was this sibling dynamic between three siblings, and I have two older siblings. There was this ailing mother, and I had an ailing mother. My mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s, my mother died of cancer years ago. One of my siblings was living in our hometown and taking care of her, taking her to chemo appointments and going to buy her groceries, and sort of shouldered that responsibility while me and my other brother were sort of away, gallivanting around the world, doing our jobs and stuff. So there was some tension there. The overbearing father figure – you know, I love my father, but he’s an overbearing presence. My brothers and I, all of us have our own issues with him.
So, there was just all of these weird overlaps with my personal life,besides just the professional. Because the professional stuff is you know – that’s one thing. But the weird overlaps in my personal life felt like … I really understood the material deep in my bones. It felt like I can do this as well as any other director on the face of the earth right now, because I just understood the material. I don’t know as much about cameras or whatever, that other directors probably know. But … I understood the intention of the story in a very, very deep way, and I understood the emotions of it in a very, very deep way. So that’s what I think gave me the courage to try to take the project on despite the fact that I had never directed anything.
So within 20 pages, you were thinking about directing this. Had you ever considered directing anything else? How much at the forefront of your mind was that?
Jefferson: I was working on “Master of None” season two, and Aziz Ansari had asked me if – you know just casually, he wasn’t asking me to do it on the show – but he asked me if I had ever thought about directing. I said, no. I’ve never been to film school. I don’t know anything about cameras or lighting. And he said, I went to NYU for business school, and I got nominated for a Golden Globe for directing. You don’t have to have gone to film school. All you have to do is – it’s obviously more than this, he was being reductive, but he was like, all you have to do is have a vision and then go to set and be able to articulate that vision to people. Just tell them, this is what I think the room should look like, and this is what I think the camera should move like, you know? Just be able to tell people that, and then you have people who are really good at their jobs who understand the technical aspects of that stuff, and they can execute on that.
He put the seed in my mind in like 2016, but then I said, you know, I’m not going to do this until I feel really passionate about the material. I didn’t want to just become – you know, there are some directors who are journeyman TV directors, and they’ll just go shoot different episodes of stuff. Totally fine, it’s a great living. I’m sure that they enjoy it. But I always felt like I wouldn’t want to do that as my first directing project, just because I felt like I didn’t know if I’d be as passionate about the material. I think that I wouldn’t be as good at it because of that. I really wanted to wait until I found something that I was hyper, hyper, hyper obsessed with, and really wanted to throw my entire self into. And this was that.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Thinking about the adaptation process, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read somewhere that the conversation that Monk has with Sintara Golden, Issa Rae’s character, is not actually in the book. That’s really interesting to me, because that tête-à-tête feels like the linchpin of everything in a lot of ways.
Jefferson: So Percivals’ novel is – you’ve seen the film now, so I can spoil this for you – Percival’s novel is great, because you know, the thing that’s great about novels is they can be discursive and weird and expansive in a way that movies can’t necessarily be. Particularly movies that need to be made on a limited budget. So his novel is just very big and much bigger in scope. So for instance, in the novel – this is a spoiler, I’m spoiling stuff for you – but in the novel, for instance, his sister was murdered. Lisa is murdered by an anti-abortion activist who comes into the clinic and kills her and some other abortion doctors.
The movie becomes very different if that’s the way that his sister dies, right? And in the book, they find out that his dad hasn’t just had affairs, but has a secret family in a different city. So Monk actually travels to meet this half sister that he never knew he had, and he has an interaction with her. So there’s just all these things that really get super big in ways that I couldn’t do in a movie, or the movie would have to be like, four hours long, or it costs like $50 million.
There’s a lot of flashbacks in the book too, to childhood, and I initially put those flashbacks in the script., because I was like, oh – this is how the siblings got to be the way they are, and this is how the father treated them when they were children, you know? That was giving some perspective into that. So there were about four or five flashbacks. I sent the script to people who I trusted and who were giving me good notes. Not all of them, but a lot of them came back and were like, you don’t need these flashbacks. Not only do you not need them for the narrative, it’s also they’re going to be expensive. Because for flashbacks, you have to have period costumes and cars, and you have to hire all new actors. It just becomes super expensive. So you can strip these away and still … make the father feel like a looming presence, you know? You still feel him despite the fact that you never see his character on screen. It’s a lot of streamlining, but in a way that doesn’t strip away the spirit of the novel. The spirit of the novel, to me, is still there. I still kept that stuff, but tried to make things a little more cinematic, and tried to get at what the intention of the story was without taking a million hours.
But when I was reading the novel, I was really excited for that scene [between Monk and Sintara]. I was like, oh man, I can’t wait until Monk meets her and they have this kind of showdown and they talk about their ideological differences and stuff. And it never came. So that to me, I was really excited to write that scene because it felt so important, as you said, to the film. It’s one of the most important scenes in the whole movie, and it remains one of my favorites. It was one of my favorites to write, because I always love – I think the best arguments are sort of ones where you walk away not knowing who’s [right]. I mean, the best arguments in my own life – I want to win every argument [laughs]. But on screen, that to me is the most fun stuff to watch, and most interesting stuff to watch. I wrote that scene, and I still don’t know who I agree with more, you know? Every time that I watch it, it kind of changes depending on the day. I think they both make really interesting points, you know?
[END SPOILERS]
Obviously, there’s a lot of satire in this, but then there’s the family drama aspect, which feels a little more straightforward and honest. Did you find it difficult to meld those two tones together?
Jefferson: I didn’t. I don’t think so. Because I think that the tone that I was after in the movie was life, you know? To me, life is neither comedy nor tragedy. I would say probably the lowest point of my life was when my mother was dying. It was 2015. And it wasn’t just because she was sick, it was also because I just started this new job that I wasn’t really enjoying. I mean, I enjoyed the work, but it was very, very hard. I was working too hard and then staying out too late, and just running around trying to keep my mind off the fact that my mother was sick. I needed therapy and was not getting therapy. It was just a very, very bad year in many ways.
And yet, even in the depths of all that, I still found ways to enjoy myself. I still found ways to laugh. I still found ways to celebrate. I still found ways to, you know, persist and continue. I think that human beings are resilient, and I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about us, is that we persevere, despite all the tragedy that befalls us constantly, right? Life is a series of tragedies, and as you get older, there are more tragedies. People start dying around you, your parents start getting sick. You start having to figure out, oh my god, what am I going to do? I don’t have the money that I thought I needed. I’m getting older. All of these things start to pile up. If we don’t have the ability to persist and persevere, then it just gets miserable.
A staff member from Rust Belt Natives will host a Jan. 16 presentation on gardening with native plants at the Murrysville Community Library.
Participants will learn how to create a low-maintenance, environmentally friendly garden space, how to choose the proper plants to attract birds and butterflies, and how to keep deer away. The evening will include a Q&A session.
It will be at 6 p.m. at the library, 4130 Sardis Road in Murrysville.
There is no cost to attend. Register by calling 724-327-1102.
‘Brawl in the Burgh 20’
247 Fighting Championships will host an evening of mixed martial arts, “Brawl in the Burgh 20,” on Feb. 24 at the Murrysville SportZone.
Tickets range from $50 to $115.
For more information, including fights that will be part of the card, see 247Fighting.com.
Tree recycling
The Murrysville-Export Rotary Club will accept Christmas trees from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Jan. 6 and 13 at the Windstream parking lot, 4792 Old William Penn Highway near Market District.
For more, see WestmorelandCleanways.org.
‘Winter Wonderlab’
The Murrysville Recreation Department will host a Jan. 15 “Winter Wonderlab” at the Murrysville Community Center.
It will be from 9 a.m. to noon at the center, 3091 Carson Avenue. Participants will learn about the science of dry ice and take part in different experiments. Each child will make their own “sparkly slime” to take home.
The cost is $45, with a 10% discount for multi-family registrations.
Register at MurrysvillePArecreation.com by clicking on the “Program Registration” link. For more, call 724-327-2100, ext. 131 or 115.
Delmont park rentals for 2024
Rental reservations for Delmont’s park pavilions will open on Jan. 2 at 8 a.m.
Reservations can be made at DelmontBoro.com or by calling 724-468-4422.
‘Rock Talks’ speaker will focus on music
The Murrysville Recreation Department and Murrysville Community Library will host speaker Erik Selinger for two “Rock Talks!” presentations in the new year.
“Have a Drink On Me: The Science and Songs of Alcohol,” will take place at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 18 at Devout Brewing, 1301 Pontiac Court in Penn Township.
“Credit Where Credit is Overdue: Recognizing the Contributions of Black Artists to the History of Rock Music” will be at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 6 at the library, 4130 Sardis Road in Murrysville.
Both presentations are free to attend. For more, or to register, call 724-327-2100, ext. 131 or 724-327-1102.
‘Hot Chocolate Hikes’ explore local nature
The Murrysville Recreation Department and Westmoreland Conservancy will partner for “Hot Chocolate Hikes” this and next month.
• Jan. 15, 2 p.m. at Pleasant Valley Park, 2557 Pleasant Valley Road in Murrysville.
• Feb. 14, 10 a.m. at Murrysville Community Park, 4056 Wiestertown Rd. Meet at the Field 3 parking lot.
For more, call 724-327-2100, ext. 131.
Foundation seeking grant applications
The Community Foundation of Murrysville, Export and Delmont is accepting applications through Dec. 15 for grants to nonprofit organizations in all three towns.
Grants in the range of several hundred dollars will be awarded to groups demonstrating a need for small sums to make a significant, long-term impact on the local community.
The Murrysville-Export Rotary Club is continuing to collect plastic to be remade into public benches placed throughout Murrysville and Export. So far eight benches have been placed in six locations.
Collection points for plastic include the Murrysville municipal building lobby and the Murrysville library, both on Sardis Road; First Presbyterian Church’s Laird Hall, 3202 North Hills Road in Murrysville; ProTrucks and Virgin Flooring, both on Route 22; Completely Booked in the Blue Spruce Shoppes; Franco’s Expert Nails and the Rewind Reuse Center, both on Washington Avenue in Export; Friends Thrift Shop on Old William Penn Highway.
Plastic film, stretch wrap, and shopping bags can be donated.
Upcoming live music
• Red Barn Winery, 275 Manor Road in Salem, all music 6-9 p.m. except where noted: Peter Drew, Dec. 22; Shakey and the Beers, Dec. 23; Billy Postle, 10 a.m. Dec. 29; Tim Schmider, Dec. 30.
• Joey’s the Edge, 5904 Washington Ave., Export: Weekly Tuesday jam session with host Kenny Blake, 8-11 p.m.
• Yellow Bridge Brewing, 2266 Route 66 in Delmont: Weekly open stage, 7-10 p.m. every Wednesday with host Dave Stout.
Patrick Varine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Patrick by email at pvarine@triblive.com or via Twitter .
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
