SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

SOULSTIRRERS

SOULSTIRRERS

Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

Ike Okafor-Newsum (Horace Newsum)

Foreword by Demetrius L. Eudell

Introduction by John W. Roberts

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2016 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in Singapore

First printing 2016

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newsum, H. E., 1951– author.

SoulStirrers : Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse / Ike Okafor-Newsum (Horace Newsum) ; Foreword by Demetrius L. Eudell ; Introduction by John W. Roberts.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-225-8 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-62674-634-3 (ebook) 1. Neo-Ancestralist Artist Group. 2. African American art—20th century—Themes, motives. I. Eudell, Demetrius Lynn, writer of foreword. II. Roberts, John W. (John Willie), 1949– writer of introduction. III. Title.

N6512.5.N33N49 2016

700.89’96073—dc23         2015011845

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In Memory

of

Evelyn Forrestine LaMondue Newsum

1931–2002

In the course of my career I have published many things, but (until now) nothing of real interest to my mother, who nevertheless was very proud of me and my accomplishments. This book is one she would have liked. Unlike my other works, which during her life were deposited on a shelf in my father’s study, copies of this work would have been boldly displayed on the two coffee tables in her house. If there are books in heaven, she is enjoying this one, so I dedicate it to her.

Ikechukwu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword: The Counterpoetics of the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

by Demetrius L. Eudell

Acts of Memory: An Introductory Comment

by John W. Roberts

Chapter 1

How I Became a Neo-Ancestralist: African American Art and Artists in Cincinnati

Chapter 2

The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in Cincinnati

Chapter 3

The Neo-Ancestralist Aesthetic

Chapter 4

Neo-Ancestralist Art as Counterhegemonic Expression

Chapter 5

Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art

Conclusion

Appendix: Neo-Ancestralist Online Manifesto

by Ipori Lasana (Karen Lake)

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Meeting Thomas R. Phelps, Kenneth Obasi Leslie, and James A. Jones changed my life. This book is a culmination of events, philosophical conversations, meditations, and collaborations that made possible a common vision we call the Neo-Ancestral aesthetic. So let me begin by thanking Tom, Ken, and Jimi.

No matter what, some folks are always in your corner, namely family. I wish to thank my siblings, Floyd Jr. and Vicki; my children, Okpara and Chinyere; their mother, Diane Louise Middleton; and especially my father, Floyd Newsum Sr., for the encouragement he has given me and for being everybody’s rock. I am also grateful to my neighbors for their support and understanding throughout the creation of this book.

I want to express gratitude to my coworkers and friends who have helped me through this process: Jeanne Boykin, for providing much-needed technical support during the entire course of this process—your contribution is greatly valued; Alamin Mazrui, John Roberts, Demetrius L. Eudell, Judson L. Jeffries, Adeleke Adeeko, and Pat Mullen for their kind support at various stages of the book’s development; Antoinette Errante (my huckleberry) for her critical feedback and encouragement; Aneb Kgositsile for being there for me when I was lost and searching for something; and Ruthmarie Mitsch, former managing editor of Research in African Literatures, as well as the current managing editor, Molly Reinhoudt, for their invaluable help. Thanks to the artists who contributed images to this project. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the photographers J. Michael Skaggs, John Hunt, Melvin Grier, Pete Diehl, Thomas R. Phelps, and Rich Stadler for your digital edits—thank you all. I especially would like to thank Constance Sue Richards, without whom I could not have completed this work—you are the best friend I’ve ever had.

I am indebted to the University Press of Mississippi and to the Department of African American and African Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University for the support they have given me. The Shot Tower Gallery director, Teresa Wienbush, and the faculty and staff at Fort Hayes Educational Center are owed a debt of gratitude for their support of the Bloods exhibition. Others to whom I owe thanks include Nia Gadson-Clay (wife of Kwame Clay), David Washington (father of Harry Washington), Laverne Washington Purce (Laverne Brown, wife of Smoky Brown), Greg Edwards (husband of Gilda Edwards), and Denise Batchelor (daughter of James Batchelor). I must also thank those faceless and unnamed readers for guiding me through this project: your careful reading of my book, and all of your suggestions, made this piece a better product—thanks.

FOREWORD

The Counterpoetics of the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

Demetrius L. Eudell

Ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole

Ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter ni la vapeur ni l’électricité

Ceux qui n’ont explore ni les mers ni le ciel

mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serrait pas la terre …

Ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale

Elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol

Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass

Those who never mastered neither steam nor electricity

Those who explored neither the seas nor the sky

But those without whom the earth would not be the earth …

My Blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral

It plunges into the red flesh of the earth

The above quotation, taken from Aimé Césaire’s epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land),¹ can serve as a useful point of departure to contextualize the present study of the artistic movement in Cincinnati identified as the Neo-Ancestral impulse. In this poem, Césaire effects what can be described as a counterpoetics, one that calls into question the dominant Imaginary’s representation of the figure of the black and, by extension, of what it means to be fully human. Therefore, how can we define Africans/blacks as having civilizations without their having explored the seas or erected cathedrals, that is, without having obtained full human status within the culture-specific technoscientific terms of the belief system of the secular Judeo-Christian West?

As an expression of Césaire’s concept of négritude, the Cahier has been critiqued for glorifying the suffering of blacks as well as remaining at the level of emotion, and thus not engaging the real social and economic issues confronting black and colonized peoples. Thus, according to this interpretation, it has been argued that négritude represented a vain and sentimental trap that was essentially based on an illusory racial community founded on a history of suffering, an approach that thereby rendered it a violent and paradoxical therapy … that replaced the illusion of Europe by an African illusion.² However, since the social can never analytically be separated from the symbolic, by calling into question the Western self-conception as the embodiment of civilization and rationality, Césaire, it can be asserted, was attempting to come to terms with the conceptual foundation of the racialized, global colonial system brought into being by the West. And, moreover, he did so by not attempting to imitate the Western definition (that is, ontology) of what constitutes the being of being human.

Moreover, being made into objects of property laid a foundation for original creative responses that suggests a dialectic of subordination and regeneration at work. Thus, Césaire noted that those whose only voyage was that of being uprooted (ceux qui n’ont connu de voyages que de déracinements) would be nonetheless captivated by the vitality of life (saisis, à l’essence de toute chose).³ Thus, the paradoxical result of the horrors of the Middle Passage was the dynamic invention of new cultural forms that became indispensable elements in the formation of societies in the Americas and, indeed, a central component of Western culture, even while such forms would be forced to contest this very mode of being and behaving in the world.

It is within such a framework that one can begin to understand the creative explosion, what Césaire described as the spark of the sacred fire of the world (étincelle du feu sacré du monde),⁴ of the Neo-Ancestral impulse. What is referred to as the Neo-Ancestral impulse can be seen within the intellectual trajectory of the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement, and in the wake of the 1960s the Black Arts movement. A central thematic running through these artistic and intellectual movements was the impulse to rerepresent the primitive and savage figure of the black and African outside the terms of the dominant system of meaning/knowledge, within whose conceptual framework the ontologically Other remained incapable of producing something called art. Here, the challenge mounted therefore operates on two levels, that of form and that of content.

In SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse, Ike Newsum chronicles well the birth and development of this artistic movement, which, like its intellectual antecedents, does not separate something called art from something called life. Indeed, when I attended the Bloods exhibition during the fall of 2003, one viewer made a useful point with respect to one of Tom Phelps’s evocative muralistic installations, which reproduced an urban scene where announcements of concerts, pageants, commercial products, parties, and rallies were pasted over the residue of other posters together with much political (and not so political) graffiti. The viewer mused ironically that all of her life she had been living around art and didn’t know it. This provocative statement raises a central question, one that the soul stirrers of Cincinnati are implicitly engaging in their artistic productions. For it is this very approach, this collapsing of the sacred and the profane, that Newsum defines as a central tendency of an African (that is, transformed and rearticulated in the Americas) aesthetics.

It is clear that much art iconizes the ordinary. Even European-defined high art has often been known for its simple scenes such as Salvador Dali’s woman standing by a window; Pablo Picasso’s ladies of Avignon (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon); or the Dutch still art painting tradition. Such is a logical inclination, for what is more important to humans than that which exists around us all the time. As Lawrence Levine has detailed in the context of the nineteenth-century United States, it is only with the rise of a specifically Western world view (and in its post-Enlightenment bourgeois modality) that we see the use of art becoming the exclusive possession of a select group.⁵ As the result of a series of intellectual and political revolutions beginning in the mid- to late eighteenth century, the aesthetics that had been defined by the European aristocracies gradually gave way to those of the industrial bourgeoisie as this group came into power. Now, rather than a noble line of descent serving as the marker of distinction (a status-hierarchizing principle), it was an ostensible eugenic descent of an ethnoclass elite that determined who embodied what Kant identified as the taste of reflection, defined in opposition to the taste of senses of the massa damnata.

It is in this context that the original creativity of the Neo-Ancestral impulse can be understood. While on the one hand, what some would reductively call protest art functions as a central thematic throughout many of the works, there is also this important dimension of representing the sublime of ordinary life. In a most moving tribute to his mother, Newsum reinterprets the African tradition of grave decoration in Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes and Untitled, Movement #4. In these installations, Newsum takes the routine preparation for church and reveals the depth and power of the aesthetic quality implicit in this act. What would normally be seen as simply ironing and laying out clothes on the bed has now become ritualized, brilliantly demonstrating the art of life as well as the art in life. For it is precisely these kinds of ceremonies and rituals that have for a long time given meaning to blacks in the Americas, and yet they have so often had to go unrecognized by the dominant society in order to enact the governing symbolic code of life and death in which the figure of the black must be represented as the ontological lack of what it means to be fully human. In other words, such installations can be seen to embody a counterpoetics that makes visible the systemically invisiblized rituals, ceremonies, and artistic ways of life, and to do so while paying homage to the présence Africaine and the contemporary reality of the black Americas.

Therefore, what the Neo-Ancestralists have also done with their representations of ordinary, everyday black life involves recognizing not only its inherent sublime qualities but also the tragic political dimensions of its experiences in the Americas. In Phelps’s Middle/Passage, the ironing board that on the one hand can represent creativity becomes a symbol of incarceration when it takes on the form of a slave ship. In his evocative Movement #2: Strange Fruit/The Crucifix, Newsum has the viewer look through a window decorated with frilly lace curtains below which lies a Bible on an upended crate with other symbolic artifacts, including a moist towelette with a label claiming that it can wash all your sins away. Through the window, one sees the figure of a young black man hanging; it becomes clear that a lynching has taken place. It is a compelling act of framing, for it juxtaposes the horror that has defined much of the black experience in the Americas with the matter-of-fact nature of the carrying on of regular activities in bourgeois and Christian North America.

It is in response to such a dynamic in our present contemporary reality that Jimi Jones’s Riot Series becomes extremely profound, for in present-day Cincinnati the routine killing and incarceration of young black men is no longer performed by lynch mobs but rather by the city’s finest who, in the name of all of us, are saddled with the task of maintaining law and order. In his massive mural installation, Ken Leslie further exposes the contradictions of race and xenophobia in America. The face of Johnnie Cochran confronts the viewer, reminding us of the racial politics of the O. J. Simpson trial. The image of Osama bin Laden not only evokes our fear of jihad but also nudges us to acknowledge our silent complicity in the backlash against the Arab community and in the enhanced government surveillance of US citizens in the aftermath of 9/11.

What then becomes our role as intellectuals, as artists, as blacks, or as humans in this modern-day lynching? It is this question that these artistic productions pose by attempting to shift the way in which we view the ordinary. The works of these artists, therefore, are not only about the survival of African-derived cultural forms, although such remains one of their central thematics. In one way or another, these extraordinary pieces, installations, movements, consistently refer us to the cultural reality of the Americas and the need for political and intellectual transformation. They therefore constitute important intellectual interventions that serve as indispensable elements in the redefinition/reinterpretation of our social reality. It only remains, to invoke Harold Cruse’s still relevant assertion regarding the crisis of the Negro intellectual, that a counterdiscourse be fully articulated to accompany the counterpoetics so provocatively put forth by the Neo-Ancestral impulse in Cincinnati.⁶

Demetrius L. Eudell is professor of history and African American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and author of The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South.

ACTS OF MEMORY

An Introductory Comment

John W. Roberts

While growing up in the South, I attended a church fronted by a cemetery deep in a wooded area in a seemingly forsaken part of the county. There was nothing unusual about churches having cemeteries only a few feet from their front doors in that region in those days. The black church cemetery was simply a part of the legacy of the South that segregated people racially in death as they had lived their lives. This church and this cemetery, however, were ours and served as the final resting place of my father’s family along with all the families who claimed membership in that church. My father rested there, or so I was told, killed in a car accident when I was still an infant. I had no memory of my father, yet each Sunday morning found me standing at his grave or, along with my cousins, searching among the brambles for the graves of relatives, both remembered and never known. From these Sunday morning strolls among sunken graves, however, we came to know them not through stately tombstones with messages proclaiming their identities to a living world. Rather, our knowledge came from objects strewn about their graves that meant little to us, who, in some instances, were generations removed from their lives. My father’s grave was unusual in some respects in that it was fronted by a stark, white tombstone with an emblem of the Masonic Order to which he had belonged. The unusual appearance of a tombstone on my father’s grave was not a sign of familial wealth but rather a simple testament to his service in the army, which had provided it. In its singularity, it provided me with no memories of the man that would allow me to easily discover the place where he was buried.

I did not need the tombstone, however, to know my father’s grave. I could always look across the cemetery and know his place in it by the shiny object that held great sway over my imagination as a child, even though similar objects on graves were very common in this cemetery. On my father’s grave was a silvery coffeepot, half buried with a broken handle. On others were broken crockery, mirrors, colored glass, and other objects of various shapes and hues. These objects, I later learned, identified various relatives to the living and told stories about their lives of which our youthful innocence knew few details. I am sure that I was a teenager when I first learned that the coffeepot on my father’s grave was the one that my mother had used to brew his coffee every morning during their lives together. When I asked my mother why it was placed on his grave, her response was that she did not know but that people always put some favorite thing of the deceased on their graves in those days. And it was not until I became a student of African American vernacular culture that I came to understand the cultural and deep spiritual significance of these flashes of the spirit, as Robert Farris Thompson was to name them, and the ways that they connected me and my ancestors to an African cultural past that lay buried as deeply in cultural memory as the bodies of my dead relatives lay buried in the ground.

I recount this moment from