Warrior Charge and Gold Coast event (this post is very late but never more present)

Don’t listen to Mr Ocean, I say “when the going get’s tough, the tough get tougher, Yeah (yeah) Yeah (yeah) Ye-yah”!

When creative and financial battle lines have been drawn, and all that is fresh is at stake, revolutionary culture warriors must command their troops to face the oppressive, sponsorship swooping, credit chopping global fiend head on, whilst deploying their ‘big guns’ to gather by stealth at cleverly plotted ambush positions, ready to vanquish the enemy with fabulousness before the suckers even know they’ve been got.

And so goes the philosophy guiding “Warrior Charge” – an international collective of creative hustlers, who, undeterred by the hostile financial terrain, are valiantly fighting the good fight to keep the freshest underground music, art and fashion talent solvent by allying them with the most progressive brands and influential cultural mavens.

How? Well chief architect Dwaine Freeman has not made me privy to all the details, but the assault strategy includes cross-arts spectacles and other furtive promotional schemes.

Last month I attended the latest “Warrior Charge” event in collaboration with the Gold Coast Trading Co (a searing creative/enterprising force of Nigerian and American – aka colossal – proportions). My night went a little something like this:

An inelegant high-healed solo search, minutes to midnight, along a grimy city high street for the non-descript venue entrance, followed by a scary/smelly ascent up a scabby concrete stairwell to a vast, floor-wide warehouse space, transformed by DJ station/ the right music/ stage area/ drinks bar/ comfortable seating/ barber’s den and freshly commissioned art adorning the walls. Sonic hotness was provided by a cheeky line-up of live performances from Afrikan Boy (LDN/LGS) The Lingo Scott Experience, (LDN) and Cubic Zirconia (NY) for an appreciative array of publicists, artists, writers, stylists, designers and partygoers.

My scotch bonnet chili award for fiyah on the night went to Afrikan Boy, who burned the house down with his Eba eatin ways!

The Evidence:

Post-Black Art Now, Thelma Golden at Tate Britain

Last summer I was lucky enough to catch ‘flow’, the last in the Studio Museum of Harlem’s trilogy of vangaurd exhibitions examining works by emerging African diaspora artists (all under the age of 40). I found the show exhilarating and was blown away by the kalaidoscope of ideas, familiar and unfamiliar, relating to what it can mean or how it can feel to be a part of the African diaspora. As a British born daughter of African-Caribbean immigrants, feeling part of and yet detached from an African identity, is a conundrum I both relate to and am inspired by.

Works by artists like Mustafa Maluka and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye challenged my own expectations and offered up tantalising questions about what African diaspora art should represent. And they steered me towards a head on collision with the idea of a “post-black” artistic position, a term coined by Thelma Golden – senior curator at the Studio Museum of Harlem and renowned champion of African diaspora artists.

So, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to listen to the diminutive curatorial powerhouse speak about this idea at Tate Britain earlier this month . To a packed audience sprinkled with friends, collaborators and luminaries including Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce, Thelma explained that the term “post-black” had arisen from an attempt to capture a creative “attitude or  stance” taken by younger artists who felt liberated from increasingly entrenched expectations of what ‘black art’  should represent. It was never meant to  describe “an aesthetic way of working” and she expressed  regret at the way the term has since “become collapsed”  and used as an adjective to box in and essentialise work or artists that were in fact challenging that very effect.

Thelma went on to tell us that her intention with her exhibtions is always to open debate, create spaces for questions to be posed, for answers to be interrogated and explored. On my way home I found myself happily perplexed and even more grateful for it.

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The Thelma Golden Talk was part of a year-long series, which ends in Decemer 09, called the Status of Difference. It’s aim is to provide a platform for leading artists and thinkers to layout their visions about the status of cultural difference in the fast-evolving visual arts landscape. Click here for more info.

Anti-Valentine’s Day post, Kanye West’s Love Lockdown

Most of my music purist friends have turned their back on Kanye’s latest Auto-tune offering. But I like it. I admire the guys pioneering creative spirit. Mr afro-mullet is not afraid to take risks, afterall it’s easy to go very wrong with visual references to “tribal” Africa, but I love the way it complements the songs trance like b-line. Enjoy the love lockdown, who need’s Valentine’s Day anway?

Nicola Vassell, A Shaper of Talent for a Changing Art World

This is what I like to see! Read here for the full story

The Real Africa, by Zena Saro-Wiwa’s Africa Lab

With this film, broadcaster and journalist Zena Saro-Wiwa says she wants to challenge viewers’ perceptions of Africa and to make them think about the ways in which Africa can actually enhance their lives. Last year, the film toured the film-festival rounds and promises to be the first of many to come from her new film production company Africa Lab. Check here for more information and a longer excerpt of the 50 min documentary.

New Director for Smithsonian Museum of African Art

The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Johnnetta Cole, an anthropologist and former college president, as the new director of the National Museum of African Art, according to the Washington Post. Cole made national headlines in 1987 when she became the first African-American woman to lead Atlanta’s Spelman College, the country’s oldest historically black women’s university. During her tenure, attendance soared and the school’s ranking on lists of the best liberal arts schools went up. Cole also spearheaded a $113 million capital campaign, $20 million of which came from Bill and Camille Cosby. After a decade at Spelman, Cole taught at Emory University, also in Atlanta, and then served as president of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. At Bennett, she also founded an art gallery. Cole said, “For my adult life, I have had a passion for African art. I just couldn’t resist this opportunity to combine that passion with my field of knowledge of anthropology and knowledge of the [African] diaspora.”

source:http://artforum.com/news/ 11.02.09

Next Level Magazine, Autograph ABP Issue

Next Level is a quartely arts magazine that showcases cutting edge contemporary photographic art. The current edition celebrates the groundbreaking work of Autograph ABP, an organisation dedicated to the representation of the photography from culturally diverse artists world-wide. Featuring the works of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Franklyn Rogers, Santu Mofokeng and Joy Gregory amongst others, this edition is a beautiful collectors item. It also highlights the important work Autograph has undertaken in bringing artistic voices from the margins into the centre.

Autograph ABP shares its new home with INIVA at Rivington Place, the first new arts venue to be built in London for 40 years. An amazing resource. Seek it out.

Jasmine Murrell at the National Black Fine Art Show, New York

Why don’t we have a show like this in the UK? OK, maybe i know why *sigh*. If you’re near NY, check it out and make the most of what you have. And make sure you check out Jasmine Murrell. Interview to come soon.

Double Club, London

The Double Club made its glamarous London debut in the fashionable hinterlands of East london to an expectant flock of a-listers and culture vultures. Conceived by the artist Carsten Holler and produced by the Fondazione Prada, the venture brings together the divergent worlds of London and Kinshasa through three distinct spaces: a bar, restaurant and disco.

Transforming a formerly abandoned warehouse in East London into a luxuriously stylized hang out for the transnational hip-elite, the venue boasts a spinning dance-floor, authentic Congolese menu, wall spanning art from Africa’s finest artists including one of my favourites Cheri Samba, as well as a fresh line-up of live acts and dj’s.

I dipped my toe into this “shizophrenic wonderland” last week and true to its name, it left me feeling in two minds. A genuine appreciation for contemporary African art is interlaced in the detailed design of each distinct space. Amplified by the rich body moving sounds on offer, the result was an uplifting sense of cool, which was only deflated by the night’s profound exclusivity, and dare i say it, a whiff of the old post-colonial.

In my view any ‘art’ project that wants to effect a true meeting of worlds can’t stop at art alone. I expect London’s world renowned diversity to be represented by the club’s patronage as well by as by all of the well dressed black African staff! But saying that, maybe I just left there too early? It’s definitely worth a re-run.

Judge for yourselves, but dont wait too long, doors close in April.

Profesor Paul Gilroy in conversation at Rich Mix, London

Professor Paul Gilroy, author of pivotal books exploring the politics of race, such as ‘There aint no Black in the Union Jack’ and ‘The Black Atlantic’, held an audience in conversation at Rich Mix last month, just days after Obama had been inuagurated into his Presidential Post.

He raised some poignant questions, like:

• Does Barack Obama’s nation-wide electoral victory really present a seismic shift in the politics of race in the US? And in the UK, 10 years after the Macpherson report, is the term “institutional racism” really defunct?
• Does Obama’s, business-like rallying cry “Yes we can!” have the same transformative power as Martin Luther King’s visionary “I have a dream”? And does Obama’s monumental achievement mark the completion of King’s project?

The talk provided good food for thought. The kind of food that seems scarce in these heady and desperate days.