Hello again,
We hope fall’s shorter days have meant more rest for those of you who seek it. Here in the Bay Area, our warmest days arrive just as summer leaves. It’s a strange paradox—shorter, warmer days atop browning leaves. We’ll take it unless it’s fire or smoke.
Black Life co-curator Ryanausting Dennis spent some of these last summer weeks travelling through the South and a lovely dispatch from Atlanta awaits you below as does a recommendation from BAMFPA featuring a conversation about Black feminist art.
Until soon,
Take very good care.
A Black Life Dispatch
Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia
“Hammonds House is the former residence of the late Dr. Otis Thrash Hammonds, an Atlanta physician and art patron. Shortly after his death in June 1985, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners purchased the house and a collection of over 250 artworks which he had amassed over the years. Dr. Hammonds took an interest in struggling young artists and art groups and supported a number of them over the years. He was a major supporter of Black artists in Atlanta, serving as Chairman of the Board of the Neighborhood Arts Center, a community arts center which since the 1970s has nurtured many Black artists and arts groups, including the African Dance Ensemble and the Southern Collective of African Writers. Dr. Hammonds was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the High Museum of Art and several committees of the museum, including the Young Collectors of the High Museum of Art. Dr. Hammonds donated a major work of art by Romare Bearden to the museum. He also served as a member of the Board of the Sculptural Arts Museum, the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library Art Committee, the Atlanta Public Art Committee, the Atlanta Preservation Society, and the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company in New York City.
In addition to his distinguished career as a patron of the Arts, Dr. Hammonds also had a distinguished medical career, serving as Chief of Staff, and Chief of Anesthesiology of the Southwest Community Hospital, Chairman of the Board of the West End Medical Association, founder of the Westside Anesthesia Association, a member of the Board of the Metropolitan Atlanta Health Plan, a member of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, and the National, Georgia, and Atlanta Medical Association’s “Man of the Year.”—Hammond House Museum
“Nestled on a quiet residential street in Atlanta’s historic West End, Hammonds House Museum is a unique setting to explore the cultural diversity and legacy of artists of African descent. The Museum is the former residence of the late Dr. Otis Thrash Hammonds, a prominent Atlanta physician and a passionate arts patron. Shortly after his death in June 1985, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners under the leadership of Chairman Michael Lomax purchased the house and the collection of 250 artworks which Dr. Hammonds had amassed over the years. The property was purchased with the intention of it becoming the African American research library but the library board passed on the building. Edward S. Spriggs, who had been the director of Studio Museum of Harlem for seven years was now in Fulton County's Public Arts department and was watching the debates about how to use the newly acquired building with great interest. Spriggs submitted a proposal for an African American Museum to the board of commissioners which was adopted. The Hammonds House Galleries, a 501(c)3 organization, opened in 1988. The name was later changed to Hammonds House Museum.
Hammonds House Museum boasts a permanent collection of more than 450 works dating from the mid-19th century by artists from America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Highlights of the collection include 18 works by master artist Romare Bearden and the oldest known painting by acclaimed landscape artist Robert S. Duncanson. Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, P.H. Polk, Hale Woodruff, and James Van Der Zee are among the scores of important regional, national, and international artists represented in the collection.” — Hammond House Museum
BAMPFA Recommendation:
A New Vocabulary: Labor, Narrative, and Radical Possibility in the Work of Black Feminist Artists
A conversation featuring Jacqueline Francis, Kenyatta C. Hinkle, and Courtney Desiree Morris in a virtual conversation taking place on Monday October 25, 6:30 p.m. and presented in partnership with Berkeley Arts + Design as part of Arts + Design Mondays.
For more information and to register for the event, please visit here.
Black feminist thought has been a resource for empowerment of language and creative disruption, used for personal and political transformation. Reprinted in the New Time exhibition catalogue Hortense Spillers’s essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2006) is an exemplar of this tradition. An analysis of the Black woman in cultures, histories and literatures, Spillars’s essay is the inspiration for this conversation, which will build on her enduring insights and explore the labor of Black feminist artists to create a new vocabulary that imagines the human beyond the constraints of heteronormative white supremacy.
Jacqueline Francis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist, and has published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues including Among Others: Blackness at MoMA
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer. She describes her practice as a bridge, merging the intersections of art, activism, spirituality and healing as tools for retrieval. Her artwork and experimental writing have been exhibited and performed at numerous museums including The Studio Museum in Harlem, SFMoMa, and The Hammer Museum. Her work is featured in New Time
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on Black women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, environmental politics in the African Diaspora, and Black visual culture production. She is currently completing a book To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Museum (Madrid).
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE # 12 LET ME DO THAT SH*T AGAIN
1. Darkest Hue
learn something, pay them
2. Lucille Clifton
i am accused of tending to the past
i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
3. Wild Side (ending part) Normani by Murcie
collective desire ~