#blacknouveauriche

[posthuxtabletheory]

March + April 2013 Covers: has U.S. Vogue ever had two covers right after the next like this? Talk about a shift, kudos.

[posthuxtabletheory]

                                                             Beyoncé: Re-branding Feminism

She works, She creates, She's A Daughter, A Sister, A Friend, A Wife, A Mother, A Boss-- She's Beyoncé and She's just like you. As a private person it is interesting to see  Beyoncé's major PR push to show her personal side versus her showmanship side. The concept of focusing solely on the art versus the personal becomes logically contradictory via the ebb + flow of the magazine features, documentary and interviews; yet, when viewers finally get that taste of the personal Bey--the thing that they have longed for for over a decade--they can only focus on that. As  Beyoncé proclaims, "People are brainwashed" when it comes to media. Yet, media: digital and print [GQ, Vogue, the gentlewoman, Presidential Inauguration, Superbowl, Oprah OWN interview, HBO documentary], are the devices she chose to "intimately" communicate with the people. She knows how to meet the people where they are.

  Beyoncé has introduced the world to her new brand in 2013. I must admit my biases: I admire the artist for her work ethic, discipline, respect for private life [I personally am a very private person as well] and showmanship as she is truly a master of her craft. I take nothing away from this Champion woman. Hence, my theoretical assessment lies in the savvy business re-branding strategy and its cultural implications--to personalize the super human persona that has followed Beyoncé over the span of her career while ushering in a balancing act of feminism--is the focus of this post, not the person.

  Independence has afforded Beyoncé the power to control her image and enter into a new realm. Reaching all via sameness is key to becoming the people's woman. Her edited "intimate" revelation repeated keywords of woman, world, independence, love, motherhood...Beyoncé has realized her power  and is therefore free to revel in her purpose. It is now safe to integrate the superstar persona of her alter-ego Sasha Fierce as Beyoncé and re-emerge as self-assured and complete. 

Part girl next door, part mistress of the universe, Beyoncé now exudes a hip-thrusting sensuality that can be a little...intimidating. She's hot, no doubt, but her eminence, her independence, and her ambition make some label her cool to the touch. Her allure lies in the crux of that tension...

She is ultimately declaring, "Women, we can have everything: we can look sexy, be powerful, work hard, run the business be all about family and have equality in a patriarchal world. This is freedom, this is feminism, this is womanhood." The best way to empower others and start a movement is to meet people where they are and show them where they could be. Beyoncé has something brewing and I am very interested in seeing where it all goes. Something tells me it will revolve around the balance in feminism. The way she will serve it is sure to be dichotomous. 

[posthuxtabletheory]

Urban Planner, Artist, Cultural Producer, Cultural Initiator, Influencer, Philanthropist:  THEASTER GATES serves as inspiration for me to keep GOING! As someone who contributes pluralistically to the arts and culture. It is not highly encouraged in the arts to have someone seamlessly contributing on so many levels while being an artist, i.e. visual artist, creative director, scholar and holding an in M.A. Arts Management. I have run into this problem often--they want you to choose one. Yet, I AM a hybrid chic and I can do it all. I hope that the art community non-profit and for-profit can look at Theaster and begin to open up their minds to a generation of pluralistic innovators and welcome us into the folds. Basically, just let us do our work--what we were designed to do. 

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  THEASTER GATES DIDN'T GROW UP pining to be an artist. Born in 1973 to a working-class family on the west side of Chicago, he was taught by his father to tar roofs for $75 a day and nudged by his mother to sing in the Baptist choir on Sundays— his bow tie straight and Florsheim shoes shiny.

While crisscrossing the city to attend middle school in the city's wealthy north, he first noticed the inequity of Chicago's classes, how the white families he saw up there weren't any better than his own and yet their sanitation trucks seemed to trundle by more regularly. Plus, they lived near museums with pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He felt slighted. When he went away to college in Iowa, he quickly settled on urban planning as a major. "I was going to save cities," he says.

Everything changed in the spring of his junior year, when on a lark he took a class about clay. He was shocked by how much he enjoyed seeing "structure in a lump," and watching a form change entirely through heat and the whims of his imagination. After a trip to Los Angeles the following summer, he came back with a nose ring. "My parents thought the devil got me," he says.

He added a minor in ceramics and resolved to meet all those Japanese potters he'd read about in class and see all those Rauschenberg abstracts he now revered. He studied in Capetown, South Africa, focusing on the history of its sacred spaces. Ultimately, though, he felt his conscience swivel back to the Chicago streets he grew up on: "I wanted the bow tie and the potter's wheel."

In 1999, he moved back to Chicago and took a job as an arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority. There, he got to know the myriad city entities angling for ideas to combat social dilemmas like poverty and unemployment. He also noticed how rarely artists were invited into these conversations, except when asked for suggestions on décor. He wondered if the results would be different if artists got a power seat sooner.

Over the following four years, things began to click. First, Gates took a job in the humanities division of the University of Chicago with the mandate to help the school better connect to its surrounding neighborhoods, whose residents resented its perceived aloofness and perpetual expansions into their blocks. That's largely why he moved across town in late 2006 from west Chicago to a former candy store on Dorchester Avenue. It was also there, while seeking fresh ideas, that Gates came up with an alter ego: Yamaguchi.

Gates says Yamaguchi started out as an experiment in the politics of art and race: What would happen to his pots and bowls, which weren't selling so well, if he told people they were made by the mixed-race son of a Japanese master potter who had taught his methods to the neighbors of his black Mississippi bride? The answer, which he gleaned over the course of several rollicking soul-food dinners at his new place, didn't surprise him—people wanted to buy those bowls.

A moment like that could turn some artists cynical, but Gates learned something that changed him. In sketching out Yamaguchi's tall-tale virtues, many of which hinged on the artist as change agent, Gates says, "I realized I believed in him, too. All that fiction was a way for me to work out my best self."

Michelle Boone, now the commissioner of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, was among the snookered, but she says she didn't mind. "All the time he was creating this whole lore, he was also making dinners and comfortable spaces for people to have sometimes painful conversations," she says. "It turned out to be genius."

Gates still adopts personas, but they're more often modeled after historic black characters like South Carolina slave potter Dave Drake, who famously wrote poems on the shoulders of his pots at a time when black people were forbidden to read. Two years ago at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he enlisted a 150-person gospel choir to help him pay homage to Drake in a performance that lasted 40 minutes and left audiences crying and whooping all at once.

At home, he now has a nonprofit of his own, Rebuild Foundation, with a staff of 20 and a rotating program of day camps and on-the-job training specifically targeted to others on his block. When the doors of his buildings aren't locked, his neighbors filter through to borrow books and records or eat occasional communal meals. It's known that anything in his backyard garden is free for the taking; one neighbor says thanks by leaving plates of fried green tomatoes on his front step.

"Whenever people here do better, they move," he says, "but that just means they don't want to be around poverty. I'm interested in the politics of staying."

All of it he pays for by cobbling together grants, gifts and selling his artwork. The latter particularly took off in 2009 with a series of wooden shoe-shine stands he modeled after the kind that line the Shine King, a community hub in west Chicago.

Amid his heavy thinking about sacred spaces, he says it finally dawned on him that his family's go-to shoe-shine shop "mattered as much to me as any museum." If he made art that showed how much he valued it, maybe outsiders would value the place differently.

It worked: Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta took one look at the towering wooden "thrones" that Gates started building and agreed to take a group to the country's pre-eminent art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, in 2009. Chicago collector Larry Fields paid around $15,000 for one upholstered in glittery red and yellow fabric; nowadays, he thinks his throne could resell for at least $60,000.

Nowadays, as Gates rolls out his ever-expanding ideas for Dorchester, he's also ping-ponging to museum shows, art fairs and collector dinners the world over—as befits an emerging artist on the cusp of superstardom. This fall, he helped his father get a passport because Gates wanted to take him to the opening of his debut show at White Cube gallery in London; his father had helped him dip some pieces in tar for the show.

  Photography by Stefan Ruiz Read more: here

[posthuxtabletheory]

My 138 page masters thesis finally became available to the public a year after it was released to academia. It is sorta scary to see my predictions come to fruition--like Blue Ivy Carter and the surge of Post-Black. At the time [2010-2011 the time frame that I researched and wrote this thesis] there was only one book on the market that discussed Post-Black outside of the art realm. A month after I completed my thesis TourÉ  and others began to speak on the concept of Post-Blackness. I have more to add on the conversation of that term as I have thought about it this past year some of my views have changed and some have grown even stronger. Expect an essay soon on this as I have reached my conclusion.

I would love to hear what you think feel free to comment here or e-mail me: [email protected] and I'll do my best to respond.

Enjoy!

[posthuxtabletheory]

Via Forbes analysis: it seems as though tours, product endorsements and owning a product or entity outside of the music industry creates the largest amount of cash flow for the Black Nouveau Riche in "Hip-Hop" (Hip-Hop/Rap depending on how you define it). Of course, their on the field entertainment keeps the artists relevant in pop culture via on stage performances or behind the scenes with production.