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[Letterhead] Arizona Historical Society founded by Arizona pioneers in 1884 Headquarters, 949 East Second Street Tucson, Arizona 85719 (602) 628-5775
April 8, 1987
Dr. David Driscal[sic] [address redacted]
Dear Dr. Driscal:
Peter Birmingham recommended you as a potential speaker for a one-day symposium focusing on black history and culture in September of 1987. The symposium is part of an exhibit entitled "Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth Century America" opening at the University of Arizona Art Museum.
We would be very pleased if you would be able to come either on September 5th or 12th to disucss[sic] the black artists in the exhibition in the context of their times. There will also be a dance performance derived from the exhibition as well as other lectures dealing with aspects of black history.
If you are interested please advise us of your honorarium and fees. If you have any further questions please call me or Peter.
Sincerely,
/S/ Michael F. Weber Director Southern Arizona Division
MW/f j
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Howardena Pindell [2 lines blacked out]
April 18, 1987
Dear David, I would like to bring to your attention comments about the Black visual arts made by Cornel West in the April issue of Flash Art. Cornel West is Black and teaches at Yale University's School of Divinity. Flash Art reaches a large audience in Europe and the United States and very rarely has articles concerning artists of color.
I find his comments upsetting and discouraging beyond words. He has virtually exonerated the racism in the art world which prevents Black artists from getting their work shown. He is totally and completely uninformed about our visual arts history.
I would like to encourage you to write him as well as the magazine: Professor Cornel West Yale University School of Divinity New Haven, Connecticut 06520
Giancarlo Politi Editor Flash Art [2 lines blacked out]
Regards, Howardena
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yourself in performance in ways so that you are at one with a certain flow of things. By "one" I do not mean any romantic kind of unity between subject and object or pantheistic unification with nature, but at one with the craft and task at hand. It is also to risk something. Baraka has spoken of the African, deification of accident, by which he indicated the acknowledgement of risk and contingency: to be able to walk a tightrope, to be able to do the dangerous and to do it well. But it is a form of risk-ridden execution which is self-imposed.
AS: Among the various black modes of cultural expression, pictorial art has not been much in evidence. The black middle class seems uninterested and so does the underclass: art as a practice is esoteric and largely without rewards.
CW: The access to the kinds of education and subcultural circles is much less available to potential black artists. It is not so much that the avant-garde world is racist but that it is too far removed from what black artists would be exposed or even open to. You are talking about extreme marginality for the few blacks involved.
AS: Beyond impediments of entry, is there not also some Indigenous cultural element at work here? There are, after all, many black writers and dancers.
CW: The strong, puritanical Protestantism of black religion has not been conducive to the production of pictures. For the same reason, there is a great belief in the power of the word, in literate acumen. Painters, consequently, have no status in the black community and writers do. In fact, writers are sometimes given too much status and become "spokesmen" for the race. Yet there is an openness, diversity, multiplicity of artistic sensibility when developed and cultivated in the black community. Realist modes of representation are, for example, not inherently linked to Afro-American culture.
AS: It is a cliche to say that we live in a society of images, but we obviously do. Blacks watch more television than the average. Do they appropriate these images differently?
CW: There is an element of scrutiny involved. The images have been so pervasively negative, so degrading and devaluing of black people - especially of black women - that the process has always been one tied to some scepticism and suspicion.
AS: Images are seen through a sceptical racial grid?
CW: A racial grid as transmitted from one generation to the next. This does not mean it is always critical. Think, for example, of all the Italian pictures of Jesus that hang in black churches at this very moment, pictures of Michelangelo's uncles when the man was actually a dark Palestinian Jew. Suck images are widely accepted. But that particular one is, of course, different because it is sacred and therefore much more difficult to question. There is a much more critical attitude towards television. With the exception of the new phenomenon of the Cosby Show, black folk are still usually depicted there as buffoons, black women as silly.
AS: Images of blacks are sometimes produced by blacks as in the case of a lot of music videos. Those I have watched tend either to be sentimental ones about people yearning for the Right One or highly charged ones featuring minutely choreographed movement.
CW: You also find a lot of conspicuous consumption: a lot of very expensive cars, and furs, and suits and so forth. The American dream of wealth and prosperity remains a powerful carrot because television producers know the reality that the black audience cannot not know. Another big problem is the relation between black men and women. Different kinds of women are projected as objects of desire and quest, but they are either downright white women, or blacks who look entirely white, or very lightskinned black women. Rarely do you find any longing for the really dark woman. And when a black woman is the star, she is usually yearning for a black man who is light--never a white man, but a black man who is light.
AS: Black culture is of course as sexist as the rest.
CW: In a different way. The pressure on blacks as a people has forced the black man to be closer to the black women in some sense, even though the relation is often internally mediated by violence. They are in the same boat, even as they are at each other's throat.
AS: There has been an extreme destruction of the family within the black underclass. Aside from the obvious causes, why is this?
CW: Aside from the changes is society as a whole, developments like hedonistic consumerism and the constant need of stimulation of the body which make any qualitative human relationships hard to maintain, it is a question of a breakdown in cultural resources, what Raymond Williams calls structures of meaning. It is the imposing of closure on the human organism, intentionally, by that organism itself. This is what I mean by "walking nihilism". Except for the church, there is no longer any potent tradition on which one can fall back in dealing with hopelessness and meaninglesness. There used to be a set of stories which could convince people that their absurd situation was one worth coping with, but the passivity is now overwhelming. Drug addiction is only one manifestation of this: to live a life of living death, of slower death, rather than killing yourself immediately. I just spoke at a high school in one of the worst parts of Brooklyn, and the figures were staggering: almost thirty per cent attempted suicide, seventy per cent deeply linked to drugs. This kind of nihilism is not cute. We are not dancing on Nietzsche's texts here and talking about nihilism, we are in a nihilism that is lived. We are talking about real obstacles to the sustaining of a people.
AS: Which is not quite how Nietzschean nihilism is normally conceived.
CW: There are a variety of nihilisms in Nietzsche, and this is not so much one where meaning is elusive, certainly not one with a surplus of meaning. What we have, on the contrary, is not at all elusive: meaninglessness, a meaningless so well understood that it can result in the taking of one's own life.
JOHN BALDESSARI REBECCA HORN CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI SOL LEWITT JAMES COLEMAN GIULIO PAOLINI DAN GRAHAM LAWRENCE WEINER
APRIL 7 - APRIL 28
MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY 21 West 57th Street New York New York 10019 (212) 977-7160
FlashArt 55
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2 - May - 1987
Dear David: It was good seeing you in New Orleans as usual. The proposal that you and the others were discussing looks really exciting. Good luck. I was hoping that we could get together while you were here but I know how packed your schedule was. Thanks for the information on Martin, I will write and ask him about the recommendation. I would also greatly appreciate your writing a letter for me when the time comes. The work is going well and I feel really good about it. I am beginning to understand where these ideas are going, the use of color on the steel combined with the kinetic system of the "Diddlie Bow" has open tremendous options for me. This visual vocabulary has given me great freedom in dealing with the themes that excites me. Maybe someday we will get to discuss some of these ideas. Please give Thelma my warmest regards. I hope your time here was fruitful. I did talk to Keith before he left. It was good meeting him. Until later. Peace, Scott
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3 May 87
Dear Professor Drishell,
I started carving wood last month. Today, as I was outside chipping away at my log, I thought it was time for me to write before you come home. It is finally spring here. I carve, drink a beer and sing; my neighbors stare and shake their heads. I like wood carving. I hope you are well and that your sabbatical has been restful for you. No more canes and back pains. Working as a T.A. helped me to understand how important it is for faculty to get away from academic demands. It will be good for us to have you back, though. In February, Stephanie called to say she needed a "puppy fix". She has these attacks periodically. I had just bought a Yorkshire Terrier. Stephanie got her "fix." I occasionally bring the dog, which I named Hannah, to school. Hannah gets a huge greeting from Stephanie and I get "oh, hello Delia(?)." I haven't had a dog in 20 years; she has brought me much satisfaction. Stephanie nearly took up residence in the printmaking mezzanine until her show opened in March. On some days, she looked a bit bleary eyed + ragged around the edges. I can't fathom how she can work like that but she does. Her opening went well (I saw your family there. Daphene(?) remembered me but Erik didn't). Stephanie looked relaxed and pleased with herself. Things are more settled down now. I bumped into Mrs. Truitt last week. She wanted to know how my review went and I said "it's gone, yes" and she looked baffled. She asked to