Taking It to the Streets
TAKING it to the STREETS Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . , photo still, public performance during the African American Day Parade, Harlem, New York, 1983. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York Journal of Contemporary African Art • 34 • Spring 2014 60 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-2415213 © 2014 by Nka Publications TAKING it to the STREETS African Diasporic Public Ceremonial Culture Then and Now Claire Tancons Tancons Nka • 61 n this article I wonder not “How do collabora- highlights individual artists, or at least artists who tives created by cultural practitioners of African have been credited as such, but whose practices have I descent provide new perceptions, understandings, been concerned with, or in some instances created, and forms of practice?” — the question asked by the black collectivities. conference conveners — but, rather, “Why make this First, the bold assertion of a black collective iden- inquiry now?” Why should we focus on black col- tity summons up the idea of the black radical tradi- lectivities at a time when black artists have entered tion. According to David Scott, “Part of the attrac- the mainstream art market, having established their tiveness, perhaps, of the idea of a tradition that is names and the value of their work, particularly over ‘black’ and ‘radical’ is the way in which it offers an the last decade, which might be called “the F decade,” idiom of belonging, a vantage point from which to one inaugurated by the Studio Museum in Harlem in narrate a shared past and a perspective from which 2001 with Freestyle and ending, maybe, with the 2012 to imagine a common future.”1 Further, African dia- Fore exhibition focused on performance? sporic aesthetic and political practices epitomize the My article will not, of course, entirely answer this notion of the collective, which is nowhere more vis- question; that, to my mind, is the collective endeavor ible and audible than in mass displays, sometimes of this conference.
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