Where Does Art Belong?
Dear Langston,
Sissieretta Jones stood at the back door of Carnegie Hall—not the front, never the front—and that image has lived in my head for years, the way certain images do when they're teaching you something you're not ready to name yet. And I think about Amy Sherald last summer, pulling American Sublime out of the Smithsonian because they wanted to "contextualize" one of her paintings before letting people see it whole, and I realize these two women are standing at two different thresholds, two doors. One that wouldn't open and one that opened and still wasn't worth walking. One question, the same question: what do you do when the door won't open, and what do you do when it opens and the room still isn't yours?
I keep thinking about your hands on the cards. How you saved them—not once, not casually, but methodically, deliberately, stuck them in a red box that once held your checkbooks and carried that box from country to country like they were receipts for something that couldn't be calculated in dollars. "Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear / If you don't dig this party you ain't no where." Little printed rectangles advertising what they could never quite name. "Social Whist Party." "A Midsummer Frolic." Twenty-five cents at the door.
What did it feel like to get one? To pull it from the grille of the elevator in your building, somebody's cousin's handwriting on the back with the apartment number circled twice for emphasis. To know that Saturday night was coming and somebody you half-knew was opening their door because the rent was due and the rent was always due and the rent was always thirty percent more than what white tenants paid for the same walls, the same three rooms, the same radiators that clanked and hissed but never quite heated, the same windows that stuck in summer and leaked in winter.
So they opened the door. Not because they wanted to. Not because it was a vision or a movement or a manifesto. Because it was the first of the month and the landlord didn't care that your hours got cut, didn't care that the factory laid off half the floor, didn't care about anything except the number on the lease. You had to make twenty-three dollars appear by Monday morning or you had to leave, and there was no Carnegie Hall offering you a cut of the gate, no opera house passing the hat, no jazz club downtown saying come play for us, we'll split it fair. There was just your living room and your neighbors and the piano somebody's uncle brought up three flights of stairs five years ago and never took back down.
So you pushed the furniture against the wall. You fried fish in the kitchen until the whole floor smelled like Saturday night. You poured bootleg whiskey into mismatched glasses. You charged a quarter at the door and you smiled when you took it because a quarter was a quarter and you needed twenty-three dollars by Monday and if you got a hundred people through that door—if you got them dancing, if you got them loose, if Fats Waller showed up and played until sunrise—then maybe you'd make it another month. Maybe you'd make rent and buy groceries and still have enough left over to press another set of cards for next Saturday, because next month was coming and the rent would be due again.
Nobody at those parties thought they were making history. Nobody thought they were building infrastructure or creating an alternative economy. They were trying to make rent. They were trying to stay. But in the trying, in the turning of the living room into the venue, in the quarter charged at the door and the piano in the corner and the bodies packed in so tight the floor shook—they already knew it and the party was just the practice of what they knew: that when the system overcharges you, you don't beg the system for relief. You charge admission. You turn survival into a Saturday night.
You make the room they're trying to take from you into the room they can't enter without paying you.
Twenty years after your rent parties, a teenager in the Bronx was trying to solve a problem. Grandmaster Flash wanted the break to last longer—that ten-second drum part in the middle of the record that made everybody move, he wanted it to go for ten minutes. But there was no equipment for that. No store selling the setup required to loop a beat seamlessly. So he went to the junkyard and started building.
Pulled apart stereos people had thrown away, spliced wires into a mixer with Krazy Glue. Saved up seventy-five dollars from his messenger job, bought a Technics SL-23, saved another seventy-five, bought a second one. Cut felt and wax paper into circles and slipped them under the records so they'd spin smooth when he turned them backwards. Tested every needle he could find until he figured out the spherical ones stayed in the groove even under pressure. Practiced at 2730 Dewey Ave in his parents' house, spinning the record counterclockwise, counting the revolutions—six, exactly six—landing back at the top of the phrase every time until his hands knew it without thinking.
He built the instrument because the instrument didn't exist. And when he took it to the park in 1973 and made ten seconds last ten minutes, he wasn't waiting for distribution. He was the distribution. The park was the venue.
The sound system he wired himself was the label. And the people who stopped walking and started dancing were learning the same thing the rent parties taught:
you build what you need.
A few years later, in Chicago, Jeff Donaldson stood in Wadsworth Jarrell's studio on the South Side looking at color. Not the color the Institute taught, not the palette the galleries wanted, but the color that was already there—on the streets, in the clothes, in the way people moved through Bronzeville like they owned the light. They'd all worked on the Wall of Respect the year before, that mural at 43rd and Langley with Malcolm and Nina and Du Bois painted twenty feet high on the side of a bar, and now Donaldson wanted to know: if we can paint our heroes on a wall the neighborhood walks past every day, can we name the colors we're painting them with?
He called the meeting. Five artists in Jarrell's studio, looking at each other's work, trying to see what kept showing up. Bright color. Human figures. Text woven through image like the letters were part of the body. And somebody said it—maybe Donaldson, maybe Barbara Jones-Hogu, maybe it doesn't matter who said it first because once it was said they all knew it was true: these aren't "bold hues." These are Kool-aid colors. Orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime, grape. The colors a kid knows from the packet, from the pitcher on a hot day, from Sunday and summer and the specific brightness of things that don't apologize for shining.
They wrote it down. They called it a manifesto but it read more like a recipe: "We want the things to shine, to have the rich luster of a just-washed 'fro, of spit-shined shoes, of de-ashened elbows and knees and noses." They priced the prints so the community could own them. They put murals on Bronzeville walls, not in galleries downtown. They called themselves African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists and the whole thing was a claim: you don't ask an institution to validate your aesthetic.
You gather the people whose work makes sense together, you look at what you're all doing, and you say this is beauty. These are the principles. This is what shine looks like when it's ours.
And then, two brothers—Larry Wright and his younger brother Jared, both thirteen—took five-gallon plastic buckets into the subway and started playing. No drum kit. No stage. No invitation from the MTA to perform. Just buckets and sticks and the refusal to wait until someone gave them a place.
They played the A train platform near 59th Street. They played Times Square. They played anywhere there was foot traffic and a wall to lean the buckets against. Larry developed a technique where he'd use his foot to lift the bucket mid-beat, changing the pitch and the resonance. Jared watched and learned and added his own patterns. People stopped. People listened. People dropped quarters and dollars into the buckets between songs. And here's what's important: they weren't busking as a side hustle until they got the real gig. This was the real gig. The subway was the venue. The platform was the stage. The bucket was the instrument because the bucket was what they had.
Years later, Jared—calling himself Choclatt by then—would play on Lauryn Hill's Miseducation, would perform on Broadway in Bring in 'da Noise Bring in 'da Funk, would teach bucket drumming workshops and call it iBucketdrum. But the foundational skill wasn't learned in a theater or a studio. It was learned on the platform. It was learned by playing for people who didn't ask for a show but got one anyway. It was learned by refusing to accept that "not having a drum kit" meant "not being a drummer."
Don't wait for the stage. Play where you stand.
I think about Walker's mothers when I think about all of this. The ones who made art that never entered the discourse of art because the discourse was never built for flowers that bloom without permission. Walker's mother had a garden in the red clay of Georgia—zinnias and petunias and dahlias, colors so bright they looked like they were arguing with the dirt they came from. She worked it after coming home from cleaning white people's houses, after cooking white people's food, after raising white people's children. She worked it with her hands, ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty, and Walker watched her become radiant in that space, almost invisible except as Creator—hand and eye and the particular knowledge of what needed water, what needed shade, what would bloom if you just gave it room.
Walker wrote about this in 1974, looking back at her mother's garden in the 1930s and 40s, and what she was doing—what she knew she was doing—was the same thing I'm doing now, the same thing you did with those rent party cards in the red checkbook box, Langston. She was looking back at what had already been built and saying: this was art. This was always art. This was always refusal. Her mother didn't have access to the gallery or the museum or the art school, so she made the backyard into the gallery. She made beauty anyway. She made it in the only space she could claim, and that space—because she claimed it, because she ordered it, because she planted what she wanted and let it bloom how it wanted—became autonomous. The creative spirit, muzzled and mutilated but still vibrant, found its way out. Not eventually. Immediately. The same way the rent party found its way out of economic necessity, the same way Flash's hands found the break in the record, the same way the bucket became a drum because it had to.
And here's what I keep arriving at, what connects Walker's witnessing to your witnessing to mine: we have never stopped building. Not once. Every time the world snatched something, we made a room. Every time a door closed, we laid a brick. But the room wasn't made once and then preserved behind glass. The room is a practice. The garden doesn't bloom one season and stay blooming—you have to plant it again, tend it again, pull the weeds again, know again what needs water and what needs shade. Somebody's mother is outside right now with her hands in the dirt, ordering the universe. Somebody's living room is getting turned into a venue this Saturday. Somebody's building the instrument that doesn't exist yet because the music they need to make requires it.
Who has the privilege of saying no—the mothers couldn't say it the way Sherald can say it, and that difference matters, and we have to hold both the progress and the cost of that difference at the same time. What does collective refusal look like when some of us are still trying to get in the door and some of us are walking away from the room—how do we build in relation to each other instead of in competition, how do we hold the door open from the outside instead of from the inside? What is the relationship between the fugitive space and the plantation economy we still have to trade with sometimes to survive—can we be in the mountains and in the market at the same time, or does one always compromise the other, and if we have to choose, how do we choose without abandoning each other?
These aren't questions with answers. They're the questions the practice asks of us. The mothers sat with them in the garden. Walker sat with them looking back at the mothers. You sat with them in Harlem watching the rent parties happen. I'm sitting with them now watching Sherald walk away from the Smithsonian. And what we keep learning, what the practice keeps teaching, is that the elsewhere is not somewhere far off. It is not a destination. It is not the place we get to after we've solved all the problems. It is the practice itself—the making of the room, the planting of the garden, the building of the instrument, the gathering of the people whose work makes sense together. The room is not new. It has always been here, behind every refusal, waiting.
We already know how to build. We're building right now.
Ellis Sawyer
