Chimera Speaks

Bringing Some Color to the Guggenheim:

What with planning for her retrospective at the Guggenheim, helping inner-city youth enter the music business, fighting gun violence in an advertising campaign, and managing to get a peony named after an African American hero, Carrie Mae Weems was pretty busy even before she got The Call last week from the MacArthur Foundation. So the news that she won a “genius grant” added another whirlwind of activity on her already intimidating schedule.

“I was floored,” the artist said on the speakerphone from her car as she raced between engagements in Syracuse, New York, where she lives and teaches. “It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.”

Along with the 23 other MacArthur recipients this year, Weems will receive $625,000 over the next five years, no strings attached.

“I’ll buy a new dress and a new pair of shoes for sure,” she says. “But everything will go back into my work because that’s what I do. It will go to the projects I care about.”

A charismatic artist, activist, and educator, Weems is best known for installations, videos, and photographs that invite the viewer to reflect on issues of race, gender, and class.

A wry wit infuses even her most uncompromising works, which comment on stereotypes, slavery, miscegenation, and the exclusion of blacks—as artists and subjects—from Western art history. Her traveling retrospective, which began at the Frist Center in Nashville last year and opens at its final stop, the Guggenheim, on January 24, includes the naughty “Ain’t Jokin’” series (1987-88); “The Kitchen Table Series” (1990) photographs of domestic scenes that inspired Mickalene Thomas to be an artist; and the fabulous Afro-Chic fashion video (2009), among some 200 objects Weems has produced over the last three decades.

She’s been talking to Guggenheim staff about ways to jumpstart a demographic shift in the museum’s typical audience.

“ I want to make sure I have a dynamic presence of people of color flowing through the space,” she says. One idea she’s thinking about is a live-broadcast performative conversation, maybe something along the lines of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Maybe with a comic and a house band.

“There could be a night around art and activism, with people who are troubling the waters, as they say,” she comments. “A night called Laughing to Keep from Crying or, Jewish Comedy, Black Comedy, and the Power of Resistance.”

Read more at artnews.com

LOUIS PHILLIPE DE GAGOUE

I know it’s been a while. My fingers have been off trying to create beautiful things but your name is just such an easy way to do it, you know? So here we are again. I think it’s getting harder- this whole loving you thing. Sometimes I wake up at 2 a.m. and check my phone just to see if you’ve replied, sometimes I don’t fall asleep simply waiting for you to say something, most times, you never do. Every time I try to talk myself out of loving you it feels as though my mind is waging a war with my heart that it can never win because these days it actually feels like my heart isn’t even here to begin with. It’s as though I packed it off to you in some poetic gesture and hoped you’d handle with care. Or just that you’d care enough to open it up.

I miss you a lot. This last week has been one of the hardest I’ve made it through and even as everything was happening, this unrelenting voice kept whispering that just a glimpse of you would ease the pain. A flicker of that stretch soul smile of yours, that winter crust voice, those honey dipped eyes. You make things bearable- or at least worth bearing if they lead in your direction. And in the same way, beauty tastes bland without you here. Everything is perfect but then I feel your absence and nothing is worth it anymore.

You take up so much of me and don’t even know it. You do so much to me and don’t even flinch. Have you ever wondered if it’s you? Have you ever thought that maybe you actually are the person that’s been spilling into my morning sadness, my midnight madness, my everywhen? I wonder too often about the parts of your mind I’ve touched. Have I come to you in a dream, in a fleeting thought, in a lingering memory?

I’ve been falling for you gently, you know. Trying not to bump into things in the dark so you don’t wake in the middle of the night and never find peace again because of the truth of what this is. I’ve been tip toeing with this feeling. Been telling you I love you by saying your hair looks nice today. Been staying around just so that I’d be there if you need me. Been waiting for you to need me like I’ve been needing you too long.

If you ever fall, I hope it’s in love. If you ever love, I hope you love as fiercely as you have let me by simply being who you are. I hope you always are this person. This intoxicating bundle of atoms that could send every scientist searching their telescopes for a way to recreate you. In a way, I’ve been recreating you- in these poems and pieces and letters. I’ve been keeping you here because your absence is too loud sometimes, and my heartbeat gets too lonely. I’ve been getting too lonely these days.

If you ever love, I hope it’s never this quietly. I hope every cell in your skin is allowed to scream their name, that you can kiss their lips and find your center of gravity in their chest. I hope you can tell your friends about them. Not have to write over their name in your notebook, or hide their picture in your drawer. I hope you can love loud. Love well. Love ‘til that thirst is quenched.