Arts and Culture
Marin County Theatre Presents August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean”
By Chanelle Bell
Daniel Alexander Jones, a professor at Fordham University and a well known artist, is directing the August Wilson play “Gem of the Ocean,” at the Marin County Theatre Jan. 14-Feb.14.
The play follows Citizen Barlow, a young Black man with a terrible secret. When he meets a legendary healer, who is rumored to be able to wash souls, it initiates a series of events that lays bare the tensions within the community that reflect the broader historical tensions for Blacks in the first decade of the 1900s, at a time when the promise of Reconstruction faded for good.
Jones who has had a professional career directing, writing, and performing for over 20 years, jumped at the chance to direct his first August Wilson play when Marin Theatre Company Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis extended the invitation.
Minadakis has taken a pledge to produce all of August Wilson’s 10-play cycle. Each play explores the lives of Black Americans in a different decade of the 20th Century,
Jones believes that “Gem of the Ocean,” a play takes place in 1904, has much to to say about our lives today.
“Any illusions regarding the precarity of Black Americans’ lives in our society, particularly as regards violence from the state, and the profound difficulties of navigating citizenship and embodied concepts of freedom and liberty for Black Americans, have been wholly stripped away,” he said.
The plight of Black America is nothing new and the growing body count of Black men and women who have been killed senselessly is an constant reminder of how little times have changed in the course of 400 years of history.
Jones, like many Black artists before him, creates art that puts a critical lens on the ill treatment of Black Americans. “My goals have been intensified by our current social and political climate. I seek vital, vulnerable and transformative communication. I seek truth and authentic testimony…Artists need to imagine a generative future in this time of darkness,” he said.
“This time of darkness,” of which Jones is speaking, not only refers to the gut wrenching list of victims who have lost their lives because of their skin color, but also for the second year in a row the Oscars have chosen not to recognize the incredible work of Black actors.
Jones says that, “Same equation equal the same results. Change the equation, starting with an honest interrogation of the pursuit of any external accolade as a marker of worth.”
He then poses an important and critical question to the conversation. He says, “How willing are we to see ourselves and one another, and to recognize one another’s work in ways that don’t reinscribe hierarchies, and how willing are we to experience and evaluate work by criteria other than how much it affirms what we know, or how much it may be worth in a market?”
To learn more about Daniel Alexander Jones and his work check out danielalexanderjones.com.
For information about the production of “Gem of the Ocean,” call or call (415) 388-5208, or go to www.marintheatre.org/
Arts and Culture
MacArthur Fellow Jennifer Morgan’s Work Focuses on Slavery’s Impact on Black Women
When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.
Special to The Post
When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.
Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the fourth in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.
Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America.
A life-long New Yorker, professor Morgan, 59, is currently on leave from New York University as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
She is a 1986 graduate of Oberlin College where she majored in Africana studies and received her PhD in history from Duke University in 1995.
Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the 16th and 17th centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world.
Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.
Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, “Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery” (2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men.
In Laboring Women, Morgan argues that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because of their reproductive potential. Enslaved women were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement.
Morgan’s analysis of wills, probate proceedings, and purchasing records reveals how slaveowners understood forced procreation as a strategy to maintain their labor supply (rather than importing more people to enslave as laborers from Africa).
In her second book, “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic” (2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade.
She argues that such data obscured and justified the violence enslavers inflicted upon human beings. Record-keepers largely left gender and parentage out of demographic and accounting records. By refusing to acknowledge kinship among enslaved people, enslavers could rationalize family separation.
Morgan links the so-called neutral data of the slave trade to the consolidation of a hierarchy of race, based on false narratives about the difference and inferiority of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Morgan recovers the humanity and agency of enslaved women.
She demonstrates that enslaved women understood that their captors exploited their ability to produce children to create wealth. Morgan also charts their efforts to resist the commodification of their motherhood.
Morgan is currently at work on “The Eve of Slavery”—a book about African women in 17th-century North America. It is organized around the life of Elizabeth Key, a woman of color who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free white man.
The lives of Key and other Black women who tried to protect themselves and their children offer an intimate window into the development of American slavery.
Art
Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees
When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.
Special to The Post
When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.
Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.
Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.
According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.[5]
His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.
Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.
In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.
He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).
Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”
Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.
The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.
More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.
Activism
San Francisco Foundation Celebrates 76th Anniversary
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the past couple of years have been tough. From uncertainty about the future of our nation to ongoing wars and violence globally to Supreme Court decisions that rolled back decades of work on racial equity and reproductive rights – it’s easy to become cynical and fatigued,” said San Francisco Foundation CEO Fred Blackwell.
By Conway Jones
The San Francisco Foundation celebrated the 76th anniversary of its founding in 1964 on Thursday, Oct. 24, at The Pearl in San Francisco.
Over 150 people came together with members of the SFF community whose intent was to fulfill the promise of the Bay: democracy, racial equity, affordable housing, and more.
A fireside chat featured SFF CEO Fred Blackwell in conversation with KQED Chief Content Officer and SFF Trustee Holly Kernan.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the past couple of years have been tough. From uncertainty about the future of our nation to ongoing wars and violence globally to Supreme Court decisions that rolled back decades of work on racial equity and reproductive rights – it’s easy to become cynical and fatigued,” said Blackwell.
“Resolve is what is necessary to keep us moving forward in the face of attacks on DEI and affirmative action, of an economy that undervalues arts and caretaking, of a housing shortage that keeps too many of our neighbors sleeping in the streets,” he continued.
Youth Speaks provided poetry and a musical performance by Audiopharmacy, a world-renowned hip-hop ensemble and cultural community arts collective.
The San Francisco Foundation is one of the largest community foundations in the United States. Its mission is to mobilize community leaders, nonprofits, government agencies, and donors to advance racial equity, diversity, and economic opportunity.
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