Culture Watch
Etta James in 2006 / Photo by John K. Addis
CONFESSION: I HAVE a bone to pick with the word “curated” this month. I’m finding that the word, while generally useful in art contexts, let me down during Lent this year.
Let me explain.
“Curation” evolved from the word “curare” (to take care of) but, as it exists now, covers anything from making playlists to putting on a painting exhibition. I don’t have an issue with the chameleonic nature of the term, though I know it’s beginning to vex actual museum curators. What is difficult for me to wrap my mind around is the fussiness that curation implies.
It’s synonymous with caring for objects and, subsequently, caring for an audience by displaying the objects in an interesting and informative way. But, as a representation of spiritual wilderness, Lent seems diametrically opposed to the idea of a carefully considered experience. In Lent, nothing is planned. This year, I simply showed up in the metaphorical desert and started walking.
Photo: Sam Marx / Unsplash
I WAS GOING through a period of grieving when a friend in my St. Stephens’ family told me about a centering prayer/meditation group that met Thursday afternoons at the church. I had never heard the term “centering prayer,” but I had tried meditation a number of times. “I’m no good at that,” I explained, but her quiet kindness was persuasive. Hey, maybe there was something in it for me, too. I thought I’d give it a try.
As I attended more sessions and read more and more about centering prayer, I realized that my initial reaction revealed what was impeding growth. Being good at something, succeeding at it, was how the hardworking, achievement-oriented me had (mis)understood this spiritual practice. That hardy, eager little self—going also by the name of ego—had served me well to get to where I had gotten, but it was often a handicap in the territory I was beginning (cautiously) to enter with my Thursday afternoon group.
I recall at one point complaining, as little selves are wont to do, that I felt like a too-large Alice crammed into a small box when I meditated. I was right. My robust ego, with whom I was overly identified, would never make it through the narrow meditation door and into the beautiful garden. No wonder I had been baffled by phrases such as “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Really? Wouldn’t Jesus want us to be rich in spirit? Poverty empties us for the hugeness of God. I had to let go.
Netflix
ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE'S Poetics, art is supposed to imitate life. However, Oscar Wilde claimed that life more often imitates art. In the case of the recent Netflix movie The Two Popes and warring camps within the Catholic Church, it may be hard to tell which is which.
The Two Popes —which depicts an imagined relationship between Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and his successor, Pope Francis—was bound to inflame tensions between those who believe that Francis wants to toss out historic church teachings on marriage and sexuality and those who suspect that anyone with a soft spot for the Latin Mass wants to bring back the Inquisition. Then, within weeks of the movie’s release, we had the spectacle of Benedict appearing as co-author on a book about priestly celibacy that seemed like a timed rebuke to the limited openness to ordaining married men expressed at the Amazon Synod that was called by Francis. Benedict later asked that his name be removed from the book.
Singer FKA Twigs performing a track from Magdalene
TWO WEEKS AFTER Kanye West released a gospel album with watered-down theology in October 2019, British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs dropped a marvelous piece of sparse electronica with a spiritual tenor. Twigs’ album is gospel in its theological significance. West’s record is not.
Titled Magdalene, the 32-year-old Twigs’ second album is a “revelation,” according to Pitchfork. Throughout the album, the dancer-turned-R&B-genre-bender finds strength in the story of Mary Magdalene. The record’s title track focuses on the Magdalene and the social implications of Jesus’ relationship with her.
Twigs frames the album as a feminist reconsideration of Mary’s story, pushing back on the fact that her narrative was ultimately told by male writers. Outside of Jesus’ family, she is the woman most mentioned in the gospels. She was a patron of Jesus’ ministry and among the first to have seen him resurrected. However, throughout much of history she has been conflated with the “sinful woman” in Luke 7 and, as a result, seen as sexually promiscuous. Twigs pushes against this patriarchal gaze and turns to the Magdalene for inspiration.
Members of The Many / Gregg Webb
AT THE TIME most people head home after a typical workday, four musicians are just getting started. In a living room filled with holiday decorations and religious artwork, with inspirational phrases on the walls and bookshelves, Darren Calhoun, Leslie Michelle, Hannah Rand, and Gary Rand are rehearsing.
Together, with Leonora Rand, they are The Many, a Chicago-based, social justice-focused worship band that pulls from gospel and indie pop to sing about topics not usually mentioned in worship music or church. Their songs touch on police brutality, LGBTQ and immigrant inequalities, economic hardship, identity and uncertainty about faith and God, and doubt and justice amid violence.
“We were trying to find some songs that could give honest voice to our congregation, to what we were dealing with,” says producer Gary Rand, a longtime musician and former director of worship at LaSalle Street Church in Chicago, as well as former director of worship and adjunct professor at McCormick Theological Seminary for 20 years. He says the band always felt a need for this kind of music, but once the group solidified in 2016 with its current members, its mission of speaking truth with a social justice lens to community issues took off.
Security guards and their supporters announce the Art Workers Union outside Seattle's Frye Art Museum in June. / Photo by Brendan Kiley / The Seattle Times
A FEW MONTHS ago, I found myself in a familiar position: at a museum, taking selfies with an artwork, which, in my defense, was made of mirrored surfaces in the shape of Queen Elizabeth II’s face. The opportunity was too good to resist. There I was, snapping away, long coat and checkered socks coordinating with a print near me that read, “Empire buying begins at home.” That’s when I heard disgruntled murmurs.
I pretended to photograph more art, all the while inching closer to the source—museum security guards. I listened to them commiserate over their low pay and meager benefits compared to salaried employees, and the unfairness of hourly wages in the case of emergency museum closings. I completely agreed with them.
Since my introduction to art museums, it’s become increasingly clear that the values many tout (equity, multiculturalism, and inclusion, for example) are far too vulnerable to the wiles of capital, capital, and capital. Not only is there a problem with wage and benefit gaps, there’s an interesting breakdown of who works in museums and what positions they hold. I remember my first visit to the Art Institute of Chicago: I was an awed high school freshman racing down hallways with my friends, trying to complete an educational scavenger hunt. I did well, but that’s in part because my teachers didn’t ask me to find a person of color who wasn’t a security guard.
Dorothy Day in New York City, circa 1969, protesting the Vietnam War / Getty Images
WHEN POPE FRANCIS addressed Congress during his 2015 visit to the U.S., he named four great men and women whose legacies helped shape the fundamental values of the American people: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist and pacifist. It was among his most audacious statements during the trip, and he got away with it because—outside of churches and the peace movement—Dorothy Day, the woman who could become America’s next saint, is largely unknown.
Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story, a new documentary film by Martin Doblmeier, wants to put that right. More than a biography, this tapestry of archival footage and new interviews—which include Day’s granddaughters, plus devotees such as Martin Sheen and Sister Joan Chittister—is narrative theology, an argument for why an anarchist grandma could be a patron saint for those countering Trump’s America. “Dorothy Day spoke out publicly and forcefully in support of fair pay for workers, against the great imbalance of wealth, excessive expenditures for weapons, nuclear proliferation, and unjust wars overseas. We struggle with these same issues today,” Doblmeier tells me. He believes her life story is a roadmap, a spiritual guide for troubled times.
The film opens not with Day’s birth in 19th century Brooklyn, nor the years before her conversion, which she spent darting from bohemian parties to inner-city Masses, but in the 1950s, when the Catholic Worker movement she co-founded as a network of “houses of hospitality” took to the streets to protest the arms race. We see Day’s Catholic personalism—her belief that Christians must take personal moral responsibility for injustice—in action, and it is bracing and alienating. We meet her isolated from the Catholic Church: a voice crying in the wilderness. Doblmeier’s nods toward contemporary politics make this a challenging introduction. “I think Dorothy Day presents a direct path that we all can take,” he explains. “She believed if you see someone in need, you fix it yourself. You don’t wait for the government or a social service agency to intervene.”
From Parasite
IN BONG JOON-HO'S Parasite, being upper class means loving Western culture—and its colonialism.
Spatial metaphor structures the award-winning dark comedy from the Korean director. Families and living spaces are the primary characters and settings for the film. The poor Kim family lives in a cramped basement apartment, and the rich Park family lives high up in the hills of Seoul.
(Warning: Spoilers)
In the first half of the movie, the Kims’ son Ki-woo is hired as an English tutor for the Parks’ daughter, and the Kims scheme to get each member of their family employed by the Parks. Their plot runs smoothly, and the Kims relax at the Parks’ luxurious home while they are away. But the movie’s clean narrative line drops when a third family and their living arrangement are revealed. The former housekeeper returns to expose a subterranean bomb shelter in the Parks’ home where her husband has been living, unbeknownst to the Parks.
The former housekeeper and her husband sit even lower in the class hierarchy than the Kims by living completely below ground.
Larycia Hawkins photo courtesy of Same God film
IN THEORY, FACULTY with tenure have safety to pursue academic freedom, but four years ago Dr. Larycia Hawkins, then an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, exposed the reality that for women of color tenure is vulnerable, even to online trolls. When Hawkins became the center of a national controversy over a Facebook post expressing solidarity with Muslim women during a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric sweeping the nation, her employer did not protect her. Instead, it hung her out to dry. Now Hawkins is at the center again, this time as the subject of the documentary film Same God, directed by Wheaton alumna Linda Midgett.
Wheaton, an elite evangelical liberal arts school in the Chicago suburbs, touts a proud abolitionist past as a stop on the underground railroad and the first institution of higher education in Illinois to admit a black man. “Doc Hawk,” as Hawkins’ students lovingly call her, was celebrated as the first African American woman to receive tenure in the school’s 159-year history.
Same God begins in the aftermath of the mass shooting on Dec. 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, by a Muslim couple influenced by Islamic extremism. Barack Obama was president and Donald Trump was on the campaign trail, promising a ban on all Muslims entering the country. Two days later, Jerry Falwell Jr. escalated tensions from a stage at Liberty University. “I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed us,” he said, after cavalierly asking the cheering audience if it was illegal to pull out the weapon he hinted was in his back pocket.
Photo by Christopher Smith
DONALD TRUMP'S VICTORY came mostly from non-college-educated whites in the Appalachian parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio and the deindustrialized Rust Belt regions of Michigan and Wisconsin, including many areas that had voted twice for Barack Obama. As this realization dawned, many affluent, educated, bicoastal liberals began to ask: What’s the matter with our white working class? J.D. Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis (2016) and grew up in the Rust Belt, in a family still moored to Appalachian Kentucky, turned out to be just the guy to tell the neoliberal elite what it wanted to hear.
Sure America’s industrial economy went to hell in the past four decades, he acknowledged. But Vance said his people haven’t pulled out of that slump because of what he called “hillbilly culture”—which, in his telling, seems to consist mostly of drug and alcohol abuse, hair-trigger violence, and a debilitating tendency to blame others for one’s problems (i.e. the government, coal or steel companies, Obama, etc.). This, of course, is in stark contrast to what Vance did with his own impoverished circumstances: joined the Marines, went to college and law school, and became a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Now, Trump is campaigning again, and Vance is back, too, with the pending release of a Hillbilly Elegy movie directed by Ron Howard. In the interim, a steady stream of other books have appeared, offering more systematic reflections on how some in the white working class became angry enough to give us Trump.
White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America , by Joan C. Williams (2017), was one of the first and, given its limitations, best of the books. Williams confesses to her membership in what she calls the Professional-Managerial Elite (PME). But she’s married to a man from working-class origins, a “class migrant,” she calls him, and that’s helped her see the “cluelessness” of her peers. Williams’ message is simple: “When you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice.”
Detail from Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's "1 pm, Mason's Yard"
Dear friend,
It was quite a year, wasn’t it? Some might say 2019 was grim: I wish I could disagree. I wish I could offer artwork to capture the world’s ills, move us to radical change, or even get us to be kinder to our neighbors. Unfortunately, there is no one piece existing on these terms.
Instead, I will tell you something I witnessed in 2019, hope and wonder that I tucked into my coat pocket because it reminded me of what the Kenyan filmmaker Likarion Wainaina said: “I want to make work that makes people more human.”
The following, my friend, is a human moment.
In October I attended a deeply moving talk at the Yale Center for British Art. Hilton Als, theater critic for The New Yorker and occasional curator, spoke about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work and what it means to him. Yiadom-Boakye is a British-Ghanaian painter creating transcendent worlds with her brushes. The results are beautiful images of black people plucked from her imagination, combined with Western canonical influences—particularly Johannes Vermeer’s interiority and Alice Neel’s frankness. In his engagement with her style, Als toggled assuredly between philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, writer Jamaica Kincaid, artist J.M.W. Turner, and others.
City of Refuge / Waging Nonviolence
Ordinary Heroes
The 10-part podcast City of Refuge tells the little-known story of a French village that resisted the Nazis during World War II and saved 5,000 refugees. A model for collective strength, City of Refuge shows what happens when ordinary people act in extraordinary ways. Waging Nonviolence.
Black Brits
Girl, Woman, Other , the Booker Prize winner by Bernardine Evaristo, explores the U.K.’s deep roots of racism and how 12 black people in Britain—11 women and a gender nonbinary person—navigate their multifaceted identities. Black Cat.
From The Farewell
You may know 別告訴她 by its English title: The Farewell.
The second feature film from director Lulu Wang stirred audiences with a story from Wang’s family. In the film, the main character, Billi, joins her family in China as they convene a wedding as an excuse to say goodbye to her grandmother, who has a terminal illness but does not know it.
At the wedding, the grief of imminent loss peeks through the haphazard nuptials. In some of the film’s most memorable moments, toasts take heartrending turns into breakdown, and a drinking game provides space to drown sorrows with alcohol and laughter.
In the game, Billi’s family is seated at a round table. Chanting in Chinese, one person repeats a phrase while flapping their arms like wings, then looks to another person, who takes over the chant. Whoever makes a mistake takes a shot. The general mechanics of the scene are clear, but unlike most of the film, there are no English subtitles.
From HBO's Gentleman Jack
ANNE LISTER WAS a woman, but she was certainly no lady. That’s clear from Gentleman Jack, the HBO television series based on Lister’s life, which spanned 1791 to 1840. Gentleman Jack covers her daring ascent of the Pyrenees, macabre interest in human dissection, penchant for risky business dealings, and delight in women—both high-born and low—all while she gads across Europe in a man’s greatcoat, cravat, and waistcoat. We know of Lister’s exploits because she wrote them down, in a secret code of her devising. In between her romps, she recorded everything from the weather and her breakfast to her deepest thoughts and cares. All told, she wrote some 5 million words over 26 volumes. Lister’s diary is so important to the understanding of the private lives of British women in the 19th century that it has been called the “lesbian Dead Sea Scrolls.” “I love and only love the fairer sex,” Lister proclaims in its pages, “and thus, beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.” But while Lister may have been largely unconventional for her time, she was a rather traditional 19th-century Anglican. Gentleman Jack’s focus in its first season (which concluded in June 2019) is Lister’s desire to find a wife and marry her in the eyes of God—something she accomplished by force of will and a prescient faith that, to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda, “love is love is love.”
Neon
Blessed Are the Merciful
In Clemency, Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a prison warden preparing to oversee her 12th execution. Viewers enter Williams’ mind as she grapples with executing another prisoner. A film with emotional weight and pertinent themes, Clemency raises important questions.
Neon
Detail of James Turrell's "Aten Reign" (2013) / Photo courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
A YOUNG WOMAN armored in her blazer, caffeinated and tethered to the phone line of a Manhattan hedge fund, hardly seems the optimal audience for an artist whose work hinges on stillness and contemplation. And yet—if you saw an enormous book of James Turrell’s installations perched on your desk, how could you not open it?
That was my reasoning as I re-encountered Turrell’s oeuvre, third cappuccino in hand. I didn’t know it then, but Turrell’s artistic framework would provide a new way to think about New York City. More specifically, his clarity of vision vis-à-vis light and space stands in contrast to a city replete with people the critic John Berger describes as “resigned to being betrayed daily by their own hopes.”
The city that allegedly never sleeps is wonderful in many ways, but by the end of my tenure there I was increasingly overwhelmed by the hustle, noise, and collective anxiety around, well, everything. Temping at a capital investment firm, while a welcome paycheck, was not my idea of meaningful work, and sitting like a bird in a glass tower, detached from the people below, even less so. Reaching for Turrell’s book, which was likely deemed politically neutral enough for an office setting, was an act of desperation and belief that I could still be surprised, awed even. And I was.
Photograph of Robert Lax from Beshara Magazine
IN 1948, A HERMIT was made known to the world by another hermit. Like many Christian holy men, the Jewish-born Catholic contemplative and poet Robert Lax had his early spirituality enshrined in a book: The Seven Storey Mountain, the bestselling autobiography authored by his friend, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
“He had a mind naturally disposed from the very cradle to a kind of affinity for Job and St. John of the Cross,” Merton wrote about Lax. “And I now know that he was born so much of a contemplative that he will probably never be able to find out how much.”
Better known to many for what was written about him than for what he wrote (and he wrote a lot), Lax, who died in 2000 at age 84, wanted, according to his archivist Paul Spaeth, “to put himself in a place where grace can flow.” For Lax in the 1940s, New York City was not such a place. Though he worked with the poor at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House in Harlem, and had enjoyed jazz with Merton, he balked at the gaspingly fast pace and materialism of the city. He was also unhappily employed at The New Yorker.
Photograph by André Chung
SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA, surely there lies a graveyard filled with racist bones. It’s abandoned and dry as Ezekiel’s valley. No one is asking if these bones can live, least of all the many people who proclaim they don’t have a racist bone in their body. Better they turn to dust, lest they be DNA-tested and matched.
But Ibram X. Kendi is laying claim to his. Founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in D.C. and award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Kendi identifies his own racist beliefs and actions in his latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, a deeply researched blend of history, sociology, law, and memoir.
“One of the central messages in How to Be an Antiracist is that we’re all on a personal journey to move away from our upbringing in a racist nation. And that journey must be deeply self-reflective and self-critical,” Kendi told me. “This is hard work. It’s easy to be racist. It’s extremely hard to be antiracist. But it’s possible, and I wanted to model how we could do that.” Kendi defines a racist as anyone (including a person of color like himself) “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” Likewise, an antiracist is anyone “who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”
Mitski's fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy / Dead Oceans
IN A SMALL VENUE, I watched Mitski perch on a white chair behind a white table, fold her hands, and start to sing emotional ballads.
The 29-year-old musician was performing in Carrboro, N.C., from her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy. It’s one of my favorites from 2018 and plays with the American cowboy mythology in its loneliness (“My God, I’m so lonely ... still nobody wants me,”) and longing (“I just can’t be without you”).
I expected a typical concert, hearing favorite songs and seeing Mitski’s personality. But I was jarred by the lack of emotion she showed. The entire time she sang, her face was resolute and hardened, a seeming contradiction with her heartrending lyrics.
Second, she danced sensually, even while her face remained impassive. She wore nothing “sexy”—a white T-shirt, biker shorts, and kneepads—as she executed carefully choreographed sequences. But she leaned forward, slanted her hips, and flicked her hair. She climbed onto the table and spread her legs toward the audience. Yet she never broke a smile, never performed the emotion of eroticism.
Deluge, 2000-2001, John Goto / Yale Center for British Art
At higher educational arts institutions, green has become the new black. In the last year, museums at Bowdoin College, Brown University, Princeton University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Utah, and Yale University have convened environmental and climate change-focused programming and exhibitions, with titles ranging from “Sea of Troubles: Rising Seas & Sinking Cities” to “Before the Deluge: Apocalyptic Floodscapes from John Martin to John Goto, 1789 to Now.”
The focus on nature and the dangers facing the environment raises the question: Are there unique opportunities and challenges for college and university art museums when addressing the environment? And more fundamentally: Can an art exhibit do more than simply preach—albeit beautifully—to the choir?
First and foremost, the humanities offer “effective, compelling storytelling,” according to Jeffrey J. Cohen, dean of humanities at Arizona State University, co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, and a teacher of environmental humanities.