The Chicks - March March

Black Lives Matter!

.@Markos @DailyKos & @Civiqs have the receipts. According to three years of daily tracking of attitudes toward #BlackLivesMatter, the protests are a massive success. For the first time ever, we have white majority support for BLM.https://t.co/Ijve8zubqX

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) June 3, 2020

The Resistance Turns to the Arts

Gregg Chadwick speaks at the AACN Symposium at UCLA
on Art as a Tool for Social Justice

by Gregg Chadwick

Last Thursday, I spoke at the AACN Symposium at UCLA on Art as a Tool for Social Justice. It was an honor to speak at my alma mater. UCLA's proud history of advancing civil rights was a prime reason I attended the university as an undergraduate. I was inspired by the heroic stories of  UCLA alums: 

Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

Kenny Washington as he broke the color barrier in the National Football League in 1946

Ralph Bunche at the UN.  And as I learned later the advocacy for social justice by UCLA Nursing Grad AfAf Meleis.

As I write this, I am reminded that six years ago today, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed for simply being black in America. His death fueled a movement. I also remember that with millions of others, I marched on January 21, 2017 in the #WomensMarch. Our crowd in Los Angeles numbered around 750,000. This year on January 20, 2018, I marched again, and the crowd was estimated by L.A. Mayor Garcetti at 600,000. Artists often use their creations as a sort of reflecting device that mirrors and focuses the viewer’s attention on social and political change.  As Marvin Gaye sang so poignantly- “What’s going on.”

Margy Waller on her blog The Bright Ride has a powerful post up entitled Artistic Resistance In Our America .  Poignant and on point.  She points to Jeffrey Kahane's minor keyed interpretation of America the Beautiful. In our time, where does art stand in the current climate of Resistance against violence, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBT bigotry?  As I said at UCLA, art possesses an uncanny ability to communicate ideas and feelings that journalism  sometimes struggles to convey. It seems that especially in times of struggle or unrest, art helps us connect to the personhood of others. Jeffrey Kahane helps us connect to the intertwined history of the United States. Kahane seems to play a lament, not for our lost innocence - as Americans we never were innocent with our history of enslavement and brutal conquest. But instead, in Kahane's notes, I hear the slow, dogged pursuit of justice. In my mind's eye as Kahane plays, I see the heroic faces of the justice workers who have come before us and the faces of the current generation of students fighting oppression, gun violence, and tainted water supplies. As Margy Waller writes,"We will resist. We will return.Thank you, Jeffrey Kahane—for a moment of stunning artistic protest."

From Teen Vogue
Photo by Michele Sandberg/Getty Images

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

                                                     Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy 100th Birthday Jacob Lawrence!

by Gregg Chadwick

100 years ago today, the seminal artist Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. When Lawrence was in his teens his family moved to Harlem in New York City, where he studied art with Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop.

When Lawrence graduated from the American Artists School in New York he became a participant in the WPA Federal Art Project.  The young artist broke new ground in 1941 with The Migration Series which garnered national attention.

I find the video below from the Phillips Collection in which Lawrence discusses The Migration Series fascinating:



During World War II, while in the United States Coast Guard, first as a public relations specialist on the USS Sea Cloud, and then as a combat artist on the USS Gen. Richardson, Lawrence created a series of artworks documenting his vantage point on the war.

 
Jacob Lawrence
No. 2 Control Panel, Nerve Center of Ship,
gouache and watercolor on board
Collection USCG Museum

Shipmates and Jacob Lawrence with one of the paintings
he made while serving in the US Coast Guard during WWII.

After the war Lawrence was invited by Josef Albers to teach painting at Black Mountain College. Lawrence's exposure to Albers’ Bauhaus-inspired theories and teaching methods greatly influenced his artistic explorations.  Lawrence wrote, “When you teach, it stimulates you; you’re forced to crystallize your own thinking … you’re forced to formalize your own theories so that you may communicate them to the students … you go back to your studio and think about this again.”

Faculty of the 1946 Black Mountain College Summer Art Institute,
including Jacob Lawrence and his wife Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center collection

In 1949, Lawrence  and his wife Gwendolyn returned to New York where Lawrence continued to paint. Lawrence, aware of his depression, checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he stayed for 11 months and painted as an inpatient.

Jacob Lawrence
Depression
Tempera and Watercolor on Paper  1950
22 3/4"x31"
Whitney Museum

 After many years in New York, in 1970 Lawrence and Knight moved to Seattle when he was invited to teach at the University of Washington. Lawrence was an art professor at UW until his retirement in 1986.  He continued painting until just a few weeks before his death in June 2000 at the age of eighty-two. Lawrence's last commissioned public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit, was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City.

 Lawrence's powerful artworks grace numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. The vibrant paintings of Jacob Lawrence tell stories of liberation, resistance, and resilience.

More:
Why the Works of Visionary Artist Jacob Lawrence Still Resonate a Century After His Birth

Powerful New Time Magazine Cover

Gregg Chadwick ‏@greggchadwick  12m12 minutes agoSanta Monica, CA

Powerful new @Time Magazine cover - photo by 26 year old West Baltimore resident, Devin Allen - @byDVNLLN