33 Show Closing Reception (Free PARTY) Friday

Long post — what else is new? — over 4,500 words, with 62 fotos. Yes, 62 fotos. I must be stopped! I feel like "Crazy Eddie" — 'Our fotos are in-SANE!' As always, feel free just to look at the pictures.

This blogpost's original title was "OD '09 Day 4, Part D (and end): 33 Show", but I wanted to draw people's attention to the fact that there is a show still open, but just barely, that they might want to get to before it's gone. And there's a free party to give it a good sendoff. This was the musical group that played on October 25th.

The last event I attended in this year's Open Doors artsplendor was the last event of the weekend, the closing reception at the 33 Washington Street available-space venue. This is an entire, 25,000-square-foot floor of the building with striking vertical piers that soars skyward alongside the Ballantine House annex to the Newark Museum. The foto above shows one area of that floor, before many people had arrived. Unlike most of the exhibitions during Open Doors 2009, this show is still open, for one more day, until its closing reception this Friday evening. (See the end of this post for info about that party.)

The lobby contains images of some of the good things about Newark. The picture below includes a view of 33 itself, at lower right.

I don't have many ID's of the artworks in this show. There were just so many pieces, and some weren't labeled clearly. So I won't try to track down websites for the various artists. I did get some bizcards with websites, but not even all the bizcards showed websites. If I know a website, I'll put a clickable link to it in the text. However, the text portion of today's entry will be lite — well, for me; the visual, heavy. In that the show is still open, if you want to know about any work shown, you still have time to get there yourself, check the label, and make note of whom to check out on Google. Indeed, if you attend the closing reception Friday, you might even meet the artist.

This alcove contained a series of ragged-edge bits of papers with notes about fears.

Here is a sample fear. The artist is apparently a foreigner. She could just have stayed home. But she's quite right. The heavily trafficked parts of New York are often dirty. If only one person of every thousand drops something on the street, the streets can get very dirty very quickly in a city of New York's dense population. The parts of Newark that most tourists would tread are relatively clean, at least by contrast with much of Manhattan.

Here's another of her fears, vaguely amusing.

These bold, two-dimensional pieces in an adjoining room are, I think, by Athena Lynch, but my foto of the label was too fuzzy for me to be sure.

This group is various fruits (pineapple, kiwi, cherries, pink grapefruit) drawn in pastel on sandpaper by Michelle Butler. I was astonished that someone could get such intense colors from pastels. My one experiment with pastels at an adults' workshop at a Newark Museum Members Morning, produced no such intense imagery. Perhaps you need sandpaper to rip the color off the chalk sticks.

This group of fotos focuses on the lives of women in the Third World.

This mixed-media work, which incorporates part of a wasp's nest, has a label alongside it that tells you that, but does not tell the name of the artist. She is apparently the same Canadian who did other things in the same vicinity, but I didn't see a name anywhere.

This work also incorporates things you might not expect in a work of art: shell casings!

Here, a sculpture on a dress form appears before what looks like an artwork but is actually the very handsome view from a window.

There are other works incorporating dress forms.

My one complaint about the show is that there was an awful lot of open floorspace that was not used for sculptures, for instance, Matt Gosser's mechanistic statues and furniture made from found objects, or Kevin Blythe Sampson's fantasmagorical sculptures of ships and other things fashioned from multitudinous small, found objects. There weren't even zaftig ladies by Mary Ellen Scherl, fabric veiled pavilions by Beth Ann Morrison, or glorious hanging nests by Robert Lach.

Button, button, who's got the button?!

There is a whole room with wonderful fotos ("Free Expressions Photography") by fotografers from The Star-Ledger. This one (the name of the fotografer in the caption below was too fuzzy to read; John [Somebody]) shows limos dropping people off at the Bon Jovi concert that opened the Prudential Center. This had to have been taken from a plane or blimp, because there is no tall building in the area from which it must have been taken.

Also in that room was this contrived but compelling foto of pitcher Randy Johson when "The Big Unit" was in Yankee pinstripes. He is not remotely a goodlooking guy. Ergo, this fotografer is a magician.

Also magical are the views out the windows. I hadn't realized what a wonderful location 33 Washington occupies. This first foto shows romanesque arches of a low building (the former Second Presbyterian Church), and the golden leaves of locust trees in autumn.

This second shows late afternoon sun on the heights of 15 Washington. 33 is striking to look at, even at nite, when the top is bathed in blue lite. The views out from it are also striking.

Among the Star-Ledger fotos were the next two images. In the first, by Jerry McCrea, Tyrone Muhammad poses inside a coffin in his home. He is an undertaker, and co-founder of Morticians That Care, a small organization dedicated to trying to scare young Newarkers away from guns, gangs, and drugs.

This second image is a composite of a man's profile and an MRI view of his brain.

Here is Bob Bonanno ("born in Orange, N.J. in 1958, ... living and making art in Newark since 1988"). I had seen and shown in my blog the work behind him, Rainbow Bridge, when it appeared in last year's ArtReach exhibition at City Without Walls ("cWOW"), but hadn't met the artist. I introduced myself, told him I have a fotoblog about Newark, and asked if he'd like to pose for a picture. When I handed him my card, he realized that he had seen my foto of Rainbow Bridge, and was happy to pose. Note his necktie. (I reproduce the close view of Rainbow Bridge from the ArtReach XVI show, 3d below. The "Daleaner" piece is also his; all melted crayon. I have no idea what "Daleaner" is supposed to mean.)

He had a two-sided sheet of information that describes his process:

Bob Bonanno makes artwork by melting Crayola Crayons with a propane torch. He manipulates the wet drops to mix, layer, or build to form works of art, usually on a wooden base [that is, on a flat, movable base, not a structural form for objects that are then coated with wax]. The art form is called the art of "Melting," the pieces are called "Meltings," and Bob is "The Meltist." * * *

Of the Rainbow Bridge, Bob says:

I began melting crayons when I was fifteen in Nutley, N.J. In 1975 I decided to take on this enormous arch! It may not seem large, but when it is being built one drop at a time, it seems big enough! * * * I don't put anything inside a sculpture to form, or shape it. There are no wires, and there is no wood under the wax. They are built from the bottom up, one drop of wax at a time. It is pure, but ... it is not very strong. ... I have had three arches break over the years [from their own weight].

The thought of another collapse was always on my mind. What can I do to strengthen the arch without "cheating"? I needed to do something, and soon! And then it hit me. I would coat the wax with clear, fast curing epoxy. Every few inches of melting would get coated and become one with the previous section. Eventually the left and right sides met somewhere near the middle to complete the arch. This final seciton was also coated with epoxy. The inner skeleton of Rainbow Bridge is essentially encased in a plastic shell! It is strong and unseen, and I don't think it destroys the integrity of a Melting. I melted more wax over the epoxy as well, to shape, and strengthen the arch.

I'm afraid I don't see much difference between an epoxy casing (exoskeleton) and a wooden or wire internal structure (endoskeleton). But Bob does, and he likes the idea of there being no internal frame upon which the wax is melted.

I spotted a very tall, thin, black man I had met a couple of years ago at a Newark Public Library reception thru Julius Spohn (of the Old Newark Web Group), who had met him and his friend earlier that evening. He came over and we started to talk — while I rummaged thru what I laffably call "my memory" for his name.

I knew he was involved with the Forest Hill Community Association and was an enthusiast of Newark whom I had also seen other places, such as the Newark Preservation & Landmarks bus tour of different types of housing a couple of years ago. Eventually, two or three of my remaining synapses managed to connect, and I came up with the name "Byron" (which turned out to be rite).

In any case, Byron was mildly annoyed that this wonderful show was so poorly attended. Actually, it's not that there weren't many people there, because quite a few eventually did turn up, but that the space was so large that it could have accommodated a great many more, and we are certain there are a great many more people in the Greater Newark area who would love this show. "This should be packed", and would be packed, he thought, if Mayor Booker were doing his job right.

Byron seems to think Booker has been too much on the defensive, and not enuf the booster. Booker has not confronted sufficiently head-on, to Byron's way of thinking, the seriously out-of-date (mis)perception of "Newark" — meaning all of Newark, every last part — as an urban hellhole of crime and violence into which no sane person would ever venture, lest he return in a box or bodybag. I remarked that yes, outsiders still have that insane notion, and think that the Riots burned the entire city to the ground, whereas they actually ravaged only a small part of Central Newark, while other areas, like his (Forest Hill) and mine (Vailsburg) were entirely untouched.

Byron appears to think that Booker has been too timorous and deferential to outside misperceptions, and I got the feeling that Byron thinks that might be due to Booker's having been an outsider himself. Byron is from the Kansas City area, so knows something about having been an outsider in Newark. In my usual, pleasantly confrontational way, breaking thru the hedging language to cut to the chase, I asked Byron something like, "So you think Booker's a carpetbagger?" He wasn't fazed at all but replied something like, "C'mon, of course he's a carpetbagger." His tone and expression said more than the bare words (what follows is my interpretation of his tone and expression, not an actual quote): "Booker's from the suburbs, I'm from Kansas City, you're from someplace else than here originally too, and we all came to Newark. But whereas you and I are proud (rabid) about Newark, Booker seems to feel that he has to appear more balanced, more measured in his defense of this city's reputation than we do. He's TOO balanced and TOO measured, and leaves people who hear him speak, feeling that he's not admitting how bad things are, when all he's trying to do is not gloss over remaining problems. He needs to be more forthright and positive to explode the myths that are keeping this city back."

Byron and I agreed that when it comes to outsiders' fears of Newark, Booker, our public face to the Nation, needs to be more outspoken about the actual nature and locus of crime in Newark. Most crime here (and in much of the rest of the Nation) revolves around drugs and turf wars over drugs; and around gangs. Further, most of Newark's crime, as is the case with most other cities as well, occurs in specific areas where drug pushers and gangs are in conflict with one another. Most of the city has a relatively low crime rate, and the areas that SHOULD be, but are not yet tourist areas (for having a lot worth seeing) are almost entirely crime-free: the Prudential Center-Gateway Center area, Penn Station, the Ironbound, the Arts District, University Heights — all safe, day and nite.

This was one of two striking works with letters and numbers, Alex Masket's Untitled (Convergence), vinyl adhesive on posterboard (in the Guerrilla Galleries part of the exhibition). I actually liked the other a little better, but it wasn't as britely colorful. If you want to see what it looks like, you'll have to get to the show before it closes.

Byron and I know that. Surely Booker does too. But Booker seems to feel he's got to be more circumspect than we are, in order not to be held accountable for giving tourists a false sense of security, lest they fall victim to a (rare) crime. Nobody wants people to let down their guard, here or anywhere else. There are bad people almost everywhere. Crime happens in small towns and the best neighborhoods of even the best cities, like Newark. But couldn't Mayor Booker just say, "Newark is a city of the United States, and the United States has a higher crime rate than other industrialized nations. The tourist areas of Newark are safe, as cities in the United States go, but Newark is still a city of the United States. Be alert, and you should be OK."

There were lots of cameras in evidence. I hope that the pictures are used to good effect, to transform the 'image' of Newark not just in the friends and family members who are shown such fotos, but also the readers of publications or viewers of websites on which such pictures might be displayed.

This next foto shows a group of small plaques that surround a pillar. They are by Melissa Marie Johnson, untitled, and made from "tumbled marble, marble, acrylic[;] Watercolors and mixed media".

This year's Open Doors arts whirl did bring in a lot of suburbanites. We can expect that they told their friends, neighbors, and co-workers that Newark is much different than they thought — nicer, cleaner, safer. The people are friendlier, there's no intergroup tension. Everybody gets along fine. And the artists are happy to talk to anyone who appreciates their work, explaining what it is they intend, what a given piece means, what materials and methods s/he used, whatever.

Just after I took the foto above, the artist introduced himself (Shawn Dray), I introduced myself, with my bizcard for this blog, and I asked if he'd like to pose by his favorite of his pieces in the show. He puzzled a moment, then chose this to stand by.

Somewhat later, I encountered another artist, Alonzo Kennerly, whose work I had already fotograffed in its own, partially darkened room.

He stood by this largest of his pieces in that room, and pointed to the reason the blue areas glowed so, a "black lite" (yes, a contradiction in terms) up on the wall.

Alonzo explained that all the pieces in the room served as both visual objects and musical instruments of the percussion type. They contained some granular substance (sand? grain?; I forget) that made a sound when tilted or shaken. He gave me a small envelope in which was a notecard on the cover of which was a foto of this next work of art, made, as I remember, from a recycled bottle. So his works were not just made from recycled materials but they also took on a new role, as musical instruments, so were twice recycled.

Inside the card was the same text as on this sign above the entrance to his room in the show.

One area of the larger 33 Show was devoted to a subshow, of which the Brick City painting above is part. (We might call the subshow a "show within a show", tho that is more a term of film, like the movie 42nd Street, recently shown on Newark's stolen WNET/Channel 13, about a Broadway musical. I actually saw, very briefly, "Newark" in a station-identification placard after that movie, before, of course, it was replaced by "New York".)

Given that they live in a state that has as much to brag about as any other of its demographic size — and far more than for any state that is anywhere near its geographic size — New Jerseyans sure aren't very proud. Too much of our fame is in things that recent generations don't value: history ("Cockpit of the Revolution"), inventiveness (Thomas Edison, Seth Boyden), intellectual contributions (Einstein, Wilson). Perhaps NJ artists can provide some images to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. This is one major reason countries have flags (tho the City of Newark doesn't have a widely recognized flag; which we should fix). The Statue of Liberty is a visual symbol for the United States and New York City, even tho everything around the island it stands on is New Jersey, and the closest views of the Statue, even if partly from the back, are from NJ. But, then, the Statue faces seaward, not Manhattan either.

NJ itself has no visual symbol that is widely recognized in other places, tho within the state, NJPAC in Newark and the State House in Trenton are reasonably well known. NJ arts have not yet produced anything like the Hudson River School in New York. Maybe artists now working in Newark can fix that, or at least create for New Jersey (and, more specifically, Newark) respect for New(ark) Jersey art.

The [New] Jersey Fix room was very well attended, which might be an indication that New Jerseyans want to be artistically (re)connected to their state.

I think this political-cartoon-like work (Michelle D. Ferrera's Not So Much Fun) was in that room, but I don't recognize the face in the mask.

There were a couple of 3D works, something like trophy heads but without recognizable heads as such, by Grace Marquinhos. This one is Cherub Fossil (plaster casting, mixed media). The 'antlers' appear to be made from fan coral.

Some people brought their kids, but there weren't nearly as many kids and teens as there should be. Snag them young and art will likely become a natural and appreciated part of their whole life. Here, architect Frederick Cooke holds his son Luca, who doesn't speak much yet. When he wants to see something, he points, and his daddy carries him right to it. Decades from now, if Luca wonders why he is comfortable around art, his father can show him pix of him in an art show in Newark. Think about it. Children who are preliterate and who have barely begun to speak, operate intellectually largely at a visual level. When better to get them involved with art?

Ben Goldman, director of cWOW, brought his young dauters. And this toddler rode in style. There are adults who, at the end of OD '09, would have been happy to be carried or rolled from artwork to artwork.

Altho the closing reception at 33 was much less than packed, Linwood Oglesby, Executive Director of the Newark Arts Council, said he thinks this year's Open Doors was the best yet. So maybe OD is building on itself year upon year, and someday not far down the line, whatever venue hosts the closing reception WILL be packed. Who knows? Maybe even the closing reception for this exhibit Friday will be better attended than the closing reception for Open Doors 2009. For one thing, a lot of people might have been exhausted at the end of OD'ing who will have energy aplenty on Friday.

I quite liked these two abstract works by Mansa Pryor. This first is Ancient Sight.

Linwood's remarks began with thanks to the liaison from Prudential Financial, Newark's artangel.

Then he brought up more and more people to receive the assembled less-than-multitude's appreciation.

I liked this one even better, for its richness of color. I have no idea what either is supposed to represent, if anything in particular (or even in general). And my foto of the label for this second work was too fuzzy to read the title.

A bit later, Jerry Gant, who seems to be known to EVERYONE in the Greater Newark arts community, shouted out for all the artists and curators present to join him for a group foto. I found myself standing next to Donna Kessinger, who curated some show or other in OD '09, who initially did not head for the group foto. I nudged her with my elbow (yes, I know that can be annoying; that's the point) and urged her to join the group. She did. (Anything to get away from being elbowed?)

It took quite a while for this very sizable group to assemble. The group was indeed so large that I could not fit it all in one picture (since I don't have a wide-angle lens). So I took first one side, then moved and took the other side. Here's the first (left side).

And now, the second, but only from the end. I have another foto more head-on, but it is cluttered with extraneous things in the foreground.

The Great City. Here you see the future of Newark, four and five deep: the creative people who have come here from many places and now reside in or show their work in Newark. Art is everywhere, in small towns and great cities, poor countries and rich. In some places, it is an impulse more than an industry. In others, it is a thin layer of briteness over a dreary and miserable reality. In yet others, it is a hearth, warm from the glow of creative fires. In a few places, it is a bonfire, with flames leaping high and illuminating everything around. And in a very few places, it has become a cauldron of hellish images and twisted, drug-sodden nitemares. Newark's art scene is the sane fire that illuminates the human condition and warms the welcome visitor. Long may it reign.

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If you didn't make it to the 33 Show by the end of Open Doors 2009 on October 25th, you're in luck. It's open for one more day. You can see, up close, pieces that my fotos do not show in sufficient detail.

The closing party for the exhibit at 33 Washington Street, 3rd floor will be held this Friday, November 20th, from 5-8pm. Food, beverages, live entertainment. FREE ADMISSION.

Most of the art is for sale, so if you'd like something to briten a wall, or a spot in the corner, bring a camera to snap pix of anything you like, and a closeup of the label beside it immediately after that picture, so you'll know which work by which artist you're interested in. Then you can contact the Newark Arts Council after the show has closed to inquire as to whether anything you really liked has already been sold.

"33 Open Doors"
Multiple exhibits, individually curated exhibits, and installations in 25,000 square feet of available space. Coordinated by Luisa Pinzon. Shows include: • 33 Open Doors • Olivie Ponce • Female Expression • WAE Center presents: Finding the Spark Within • Guerilla Galleries • Jersey Fix • Free Expressions Photography by Star Ledger Staff Photographers.

If you like art and free entertainment in a cultured, restrained party atmosphere, join the celebration Friday from 5-8pm. But don't worry about crowds. The place is so large that you will be able to get close to anything you want to spend a moment with.

You may find that the art, and the event, speaks to parts of the human condition that TV, iPods, and the Internet do not.

(Whew! This is finally done. You may have no idea how complicated putting together a blogpost with 62 fotos is. Take my word: all your systems have to be in place to use everything, in the right place, and keep from using any foto more than once. You may also think that some of the fotos would be better elsewhere than where I have put them. "Different strokes..." I should have put this up a week ago, so people would have more notice to see this wonderful show. And I could have if I had taken few pictures, so not have been convinced that a great many needed to be seen. I was split between the desire to show everything and a simultaneous desire to induce people to see the show themselves for all the HUNDREDS of works I did NOT show, at least not up close.)

Robeson Fundraiser Wednesday, Free Reception Thursday

The Robeson Galleries, in the Paul Robeson Campus Center of Rutgers-Newark (350 MLK Boulevard), have two events this week, to celebrate their 30th Anniversary. The first is a fundraiser ($50 per ticket, $35 of which is tax-deductible), with cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and entertainment, from 6-9pm on Wednesday.

"Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: Here We Stand"
HOST Dr. Clement Alexander Price
KEYNOTE SPEAKER Paul Robeson, Jr.
HONOREES
Judith Brodsky, professor emerita, Rutgers University
Dr. David Hosford (ret.), dean, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
New Jersey State Council on the Arts,
Sharon Burton Turner, chair
Philip Jones (ret.), assistant dean for student affairs
Dr. Charles Russell, professor of English
Alison Weld, former director, Robeson Galleries

The following day there will be a free reception, for us ordinary people, of the new show, "The Exquisite Corpse", which will have opened for the bigwigs on Wednesday and which is explained thus:

In 2009 the Paul Robeson Galleries celebrate[s] three decades of activity. The Main Gallery was founded in 1979 to provide a forum for the work of professional artists, visual arts faculty, and student artists. Throughout its history, the Paul Robeson Galleries have mounted an interesting range of challenging and provocative exhibitions. To mark and celebrate our anniversary we invited artists of the region to play the surrealist drawing game – the Exquisite Corpse. "Le Cadavre Exquis" was a favorite surrealist game from the early 1900s, and continues to be played by artists around the world. The game involves multiple participants contributing to a single drawing. Traditionally, the participants create their section of the drawing and then cover it so the next person is drawing blind. Only after all participants have finished is the drawing unfolded and revealed. The Paul Robeson Galleries play[ed] the Exquisite Corpse with 92 artists [from NJ, NY, and PA] to produce 30 drawings. This exhibition literally manifests our mission of inclusivity, participation, and community outreach.

Exquisite Corpse Drawing 12
Jerry GANT, Jordan EAGLES, Bonnie GLORIS
Untitled/FKEC/Home Base
2009
Ink, blood, charcoal, spray paint on paper
30” x 22”
Courtesy of the artists
(Foto © Robeson Galleries 2009)

Participating Artists
Perry Angelora, Nakeya B, Nina Lola Bacchuber, Suzanne Kammin Baron, Alaine Becker, Lauren Simkin Berke, Pat Brentano, Michele Brody, Karen Brummund, Emanuele James Cacciatore, Robert Carioscia, Megan Cedro, Nancy Cohen, Yvette Cohen, Copie, Laura Cuevas, Patricia Dahlman, Agnes DeBethune, Paul Di Zefalo, Molly Dilworth, Marisa Dipaola, Asya Dodina, Nisha Drinkard, Jordan Eagles, Eileen Ferera, David Rios Ferreira, Sean Patrick Gallagher, Jerry Gant, Florencio Gelabert, Irene Gennaro, Beth Gilfilen, Bonnie Gloris, Dan Gluibizzi, Jr, Michelle Orsi Gordon, Matt Louis Gosser, Jaz Graf, James Horner, Jenny Kanzler, Jen Keshka, Ana Garces Kiley, Sol Kjok, Nick Kline, Nadine LaFond, Yen-Hua Lee, Greg Leshe, I-Ling Eleen Lin, So Yoon Lym, Mary Kate Maher, China Marks, Caitlin Masley, Caroline Anne McAuliffe, Anne Queeny McKeown, Terina Nicole McKinney, Darren McManus, Meridith McNeal, Lucia Warck Meister, Emmy Mikelson, Hannah Joanne Mishin, Jason Mones, Narciso Montero, Brian Oakes, Amy Ortiz, Roberto Osti, Courtnay Papy, John A. Patterson, Jaanika Peerna, Chris Pennock, Slava Polishchuk, Alina Poroshina, Stephanie Rauschenbusch, Babs Reingold, RoCa, John Ros, Tara Raye Russo, Claudia Sbrissa, Sasha Su Shaw, Katherine D. Singh, Laurinda Stockwell, Amy Tamayo, Nancy Tobin, Leah K. Tomaino, Robin Treadwell, Raul Villarreal, Amanda Wachob, Shoshanna Weinberger, Eileen Weitzman, Alison Weld, Usoon Woo, Suhee Wooh, King-Yan Yeung, Martin Zlotkin, Deborah Zlotsky

I know only four or five of those artists. An institution with the name of a state university attached has the clout to get lots of artists from the entire region to sign on to such a project. I guess I'll see Thursday what they came up with. 92 artists into 30 artworks yields 3 per work — plus 2 to which 4 artists contributed? The picture above reminds me of those children's games in which a human figure is divided in vertical thirds and then you swap out a different middle and bottom for the same head.
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(The "Exquisite Corpse" show will be on view from November 19, 2009 – April 8, 2010; M-W, 10am-5pm; Th, 12-7pm; 350 MLK, First Floor.)

Bizcard File

I've been accumulating business cards as I navigate Newark arts and events, and especially during this year's Open Doors artabaloo, but didn't have any place to file them alphabetically. I found a business-card filebox at the Container Store online some months ago, but it was $8 (now $6) and the only store in North Jersey is in Paramus, which is much too far to go for a $6 item. Nor did I want to buy online and have a shipping and handling charge tacked on. And package deliveries to my house are problematic, especially if I'm not awake when the guy arrives.
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I stopped in to two different Staples stores for other things, and asked if they had a business-card filebox when I didn't see one. No, they decidedly do not. And why would they? Nobody but businesspeople accumulates business cards, and they can either staple them to Rolodex cards and put them into their existing Rolodex, or they can buy a Rolodex designed for business cards, with plastic sleeves for the cards, at a mere $23! They also had a leatherette portfolio with plastic sleeves for business cards, but fixed to individual 8½" x 11" sheets, so that you couldn't maintain alphabetical order without moving lots of cards whenever you got a new one. I said to the helpful lady at the West Orange Staples that she should suggest to management that they add a business-card filebox to their line. She said she felt that management doesn't listen to anything employees have to say, but I said that if ever a manager does ask if customers have asked for anything they don't offer, she should mention a business-card filebox. She said she would, but Staples still, months later, does not offer such a simple, inexpensive plastic box with dividers.
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A couple of weeks ago, I saw that I was running very low on kitchen matches. Looking at the nearly empty matchbox made me think that maybe I could use that for business cards. It turned out to be too narrow in the short dimension to fit standard business cards. But sideways, there's room to spare.

It's less than ideal, I grant. It's a little flimsy, and the cards are too tall for the cardboard boxtop sleeve into which the match-holding portion of the package ordinarily fits, to slide back into place, so there's no cover. But it looks like it will hold about 100 (dusty) cards, and by the time I need more space, I'll have run out of matches again! Meanwhile, if ever I'm near a Container Store (there are two in Manhattan) when it's open, maybe I will splurge on a neat, sturdy, plastic, covered filebox, blow the dust off the cards in my matchboxes, and have a professional business-card filebox on my desk. Who knows? By then maybe even the stolid management of Staples will have woken up and offered such an item themselves.

OD '09 Day Four, Part C: Nick's

When I left the Coffee Cave, I headed for 33 Washington again, but as I reached the corner of Halsey and Central, I saw a young Oriental woman standing on the sidewalk with a badge on, so looked to see if she was by another Open Doors venue. She was. Nick's Bar and Restaurant was hosting a show called "Symbiotic", so I checked it out. The theme is explained in a document offered by the NAC website:

Multi-media creations by local Newark artists exploring the universal theme that all life is Symbiotic: a mutualistic relationship from which both organisms benefit, the living together of unlike organisms.

Once inside, I asked around as to which of the artists were on hand to talk to and fotograf. The first one I spoke with was Newark-born artist Sylvia Alejandra Padilla, who posed for me by her works, at least some of which are made from ripped paper and wire.

As she explains on her Facebook page, her:

paintings deal with the idea of struggle and the expression of a violent act. Using journalist war imagery of the Iraq War and everyday materials to create chaos in form, her works stand as a reflection of her personal struggles and experiences that come with living in our age of war.

You can see a closeup of the rightmost piece above in Sylvia's Facebook gallery "My Work Up to Date". She gave me an envelope with a little painting/collage, a bit larger than a business card, that has her signature, "9 of 12", and email address on the back, so serves as a business card (tho the envelope itself had an actual printed business card attached to the outside). This is ingenious marketing, because everyone who receives such a miniature original artwork is going to hope she becomes hugely famous, because they will have an original Padilla (like all those sketches Picasso did on napkins and such in exchange for meals at restaurants). This subtly enlists them in enlarging her fame. Newark-smarts.

The next artist is also a Newark native, Al-Tariq H. Graves. His webpage in the Newark Arts Council's artist directory has his name quite wrong ("Altariqh Graves"). I hope the text is his. It contains his name as given on his business card, so that's an encouraging sign:

Newark native artist Al-Tariq H. Graves began drawing at the age of three. Using ink and paper as his preferred medium, his work has always been a form of visual social commentary on the world and society around him.

His time in the Army broadened his life perspective and therefore his work evolved to become more critical of political policies both foreign and domestic. Upon returning home from his military tour of duty he took on the moniker BlaqInk, a name derived from the phrase Blaq in Newark and the name of his clothing company. He also began to incorporate multi-media aspects in his work including canvas painting, digital illustration, wood and glass manipulation, cartooning and sculpture. His work ranges from satirical to introspective themes. All the pieces are intricate images with layered meanings and messages incorporated throughout the work.

While his most recent artistic career has focused mainly on graphic design the artist is now currently actively pursuing the art exhibition scene. His art continues to be his social dialogue. His means to encourage the examination of world events, in order to stimulate social change.

He also has his own website, titled "da Ink Spot", with 16 examples of his poster work, not including the two in the Symbiotic show. Here is the text in the Booker poster.

The next artist I spoke with was Jeffri Nebres, who was born in northern Luzon, the Philippines but has no accent. Still, the Philippines affects his world view, and both of the works shown behind him have a Philippine connection. On the left appears a screenprint from a video that was also in the exhibition, playing in the basement room. It mixes a natural foreground from the Philippines with disordered images from urban America. The image on the right shows an oil drilling platform in the distance, and oil-pumping equipment in the foreground, along with a man with a gun. The theme, as I remember his explication, is the natural world disturbed for the exploitation of natural resources, and the conflicts that competition for natural resources can produce.

For the foto below, I waited until the boy on the raft had moved to a different location from the one shown in the foto of Jeffri, to make plain that this was the video (seen past someone's shoulder), not another screen capture.

Jeffri has a blog, but the text is essentially unreadable, for being dim gray on a black background, and I don't know if there are more entries than the one that appears when you go to the main URL. The only way I could read it is by Selecting the whole page (Control-A), which reversed some colors. Even then, I couldn't see more than one page as being on that blog as of yet. It has some slideshows of his work in various genres, but very little text. I found a Friendster page for him that provides less in the way of visuals but much more text.

Another artist who was in the Symbiotic show is Gabriel Fonseca, who did astonishing charcoal drawings of the moon. Yes, I said drawings. Gabriel uses both black and white charcoal. I never heard of white charcoal, and after doing a little online research am left wondering if what art-supply companies call "white charcoal" is actually charcoal at all, or some kind of chalk. Wikipedia is among the sources that speak of genuine white charcoal being very hard and making a metallic sound when struck, which suggests it cannot be used like chalk (unless it is somehow ground up and reconstituted into drawing sticks). Anyone?

Gabriel's moonscapes (in the good sense, unlike the way some people think of the part of NJ you can see from the Turnpike) proceeded from the wall on the first floor down the stairwell to the basement level. There, he had a small work of a different sort. He had experimented with dripping ink down paper held in a vertical plane. For some reason, my camera couldn't focus sharply on this piece.

I didn't find much about Gabriel on the Internet, only a perfunctory Facebook page about his interests that didn't show any of his artwork — if that is even the right Gabriel Fonseca from Newark (the foto does not show his face, but a hat falling over his face). I guess you'll just have to see his work in person.

At the bottom of the stairs was the piece above by Mars Robinson, who was not there when I was. I had to use flash to bring out the colors and detail, because it was in bad lite. A bit farther along in the basement was this jazzy work of his. (It came out a bit fuzzy. I don't know why.)

M.R. also had this other work, Mosaica, in the show. Unfortunately, I found absolutely nothing about him online except mention of his inclusion in the Symbiotic exhibition. The three works I show are plainly not of a single distinctive style. I don't know whether that is because he has not developed a personal style or because he approaches different subjects in different ways.

Rob Cruz was present, and posed by his digital artwork. Or is it Immanuel Morales? In the immortal words of Vinnie Barbarino (the breakout role of Englewood's John Travolta), "I'm so confused!"

I found nothing at all about him online. I am sending word of this blog entry to Yvonne Lardizabal, the Filipina who was outside, steering Studio Tour-ists into the Symbiotic show — which she also curated. If she knows of websites for the artists that I couldn't find, or better websites for those I did find, I'm sure she'll let me know. She seemed a very efficient young woman.
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After I had reviewed the Symbiotic exhibit, I explored the rest of Nick's. I found a back yard with tables and chairs for relaxation in good weather. In that area were Ron(?) — I must get my memory fixed — and Louann, co-owners of Nick's (which is named for their son, who works the bar). They live in Morris County and commute. I suggested they move into Newark — in fact, I think both Jeffri and Gabriel said that they lived for a while upstairs in the very building the restaurant is in. Of course, suburbanites are likely to want more space than that, but there are plenty of places closer in than Morris County. Even my area of Newark, leafy, semi-suburban Vailsburg, is under 4 miles from Nick's, and there are plenty of big houses surrounded by big trees in Vailsburg.

The yard, as you can see, is a lovely space, with elegant liting fixtures. My last foto today shows Nick (whom I did not meet) at the bar.

Nick's seems a refined but congenial place. I hope it enjoys many years of great business, even in this time of reduced discretionary income for many potential customers. Like so many of Newark's businesses, if Nick's can get thru the months that remain before full recovery from the worldwide recession, it should have a brite future as a vital part of a vibrant Downtown art and entertainment district.

NJ Pix Galore

Fotos today are taken from Flickr. (All displayed the notation "Anyone can see this photo".) The name in each caption is clickable to their Flickr "photostream".

Foto by JerzeyNomad.

Let's take a short break from my summary of what I managed to see during this year's Open Doors arts whirl, to show pix of other things. Anti-MUA activist Bill Chappel alerted me to a "Best of New Jersey" Flickr "pool" of pix from 80 fotografers. The group's extremely long slideshow is, for the most part, very artsy, with a lot of pix that could be from anywhere. I suppose that makes a valuable point for some people who think NJ somehow uniquely freakish rather than much like anyplace else, with as much beauty as anyplace else. Flickr says the group has 1,029 fotos, but I clicked on the right arrow of the group of 16 thumbnails at the bottom of the screen repeatedly and counted 68 groups, which would be 1,088. In any case, there are far too many fotos to view at one sitting, unless you are far more patient than I am. If you can figure out a way to keep your place, you might eventually get thru all of them. Or if there's a slow TV nite, you could watch that slideshow in place of a movie about someplace not New Jersey. At this point, it seems to me the administrator of that group, John Stringfellow, would be well advised to break it down into smaller sets of fotos, perhaps by category (flowers, landscapes, cityscapes, fireworks and hot-air balloons, animals, widely known landmarks; whatever).

Foto by k_nelson885.

This is a juried foto pool, in which a moderator decides which pix get into the "Best" show. He wants only "drop dead gorgeous, incredibly beautiful, perfectly composed" fotos (as he views them). I am disgusted by violent language, and would like to see universal agreement that terms like "drop dead gorgeous" should be banished from the English language. Expressions like that, "to die for", [the comic] "killed" or "bombed", etc., trivialize and normalize violence and murder. Combined with tens of thousands of images of graffic violence in television and film each year, such casual references to violence have made society callous to crime, pain, and murder. It's got to stop. The only way to know if violent language really does, as I believe it must, produce a higher tolerance for violence is to stop the violent language. The English language has hundreds of thousands of words, which can be formed into an infinite number of expressions. Why should a description of beauty involve violence?

Foto by Paul Marotta.

In any case, the "Best of New Jersey" slideshow includes lots and lots of water and sky. Plainly, there is nothing uniquely New Jersey about water and sky, nor about fireworks or closeups of flowers or birds. And while NJ views of the Manhattan skyline may be just barely valid, the "Best of New Jersey" slideshow includes very few pix of the skylines of NJ cities (e.g., Newark), nor of distinctive structures around the state. I'd like to see many more fotos specific to NJ. So perhaps there needs to be at the least a separate group for the best fotos about New Jersey, or New Jersey Landmarks. Something specific to New Jersey, and recognizable on sight as pertaining to NJ.

Foto by Robert Scheuerman.

A comment from the formation of the "Best of New Jersey" group site on Flickr, by the user "BestofNJ.com" says:

We started this group to highlight everything that is beautiful and good about New Jersey. We started another Flickr photo group years ago called Flickr New Jersey. We have always kept that group as open and free form as possible. With Best of New Jersey, we seek to do things a little differently.

Our goal here is to highlight the truly outstanding work of all of our members by applying a jury process to all submissions. We only want your best.

We also seek to keep a certain refined focus to the group. By that I mean that we want every photo to reveal something wonderful about life in New Jersey. We strive to highlight work here that goes beyond the personal to reveal something more universal. * * *

We also want the group to be a showcase for every photographer to get publicity for his or her work and possibly to sell more photos or get more commissioned photo-shoots. By linking the photo group with BestofNJ.com we can do features on our members and through the use of our slideshows, expose our member's [sic] work to new audiences that might not normally see it.

We seek to showcase the beauty of our state that is found in the reflective surfaces of modern skyscrapers and in the rustic rough textures of the wood and stone that make up the historic structures throughout the state.

Foto by lakewentworth.

Alas, relatively few of the fotos are identifiable as having been taken in New Jersey. The default when you click on "Slideshow" is for fotos only, no captions, and without captions, you would have no way of knowing that almost any of those fotos had anything to do with NJ. I experimented and found that to see captions, you have to click on the full-screen icon (a box on the lower right with four small arrows pointing out to the corners of the box), then on "Show info", at which point captions appear. The slideshow is defaulted to medium speed, which seems to be four seconds per foto. You can adjust that slower or faster, but again, only in full screen, by clicking on "Options". If you want to pause on a particular foto to read the caption, just move the cursor onto the caption box and the foto will stay onscreen until you move the cursor off the caption. You can, of course, also pause a slideshow by clicking on the pause icon (two short, uprite bars) on the lower left, and resume by clicking on the right-pointing triangle.

Foto by eyepenn.

But even if you choose to display captions, you find that many of the captions do not mention a specific place in New Jersey. If you go to the particular foto's location on Flickr, you may see a location under "Tags". But if you can't tell it's New Jersey, what's the point? The site might just as well be called "Pretty Pictures", for all its apparent connection to NJ.

Foto by mhpics86.

Only if you read the Comments at the Best of New Jersey Flickr site do you find that there is a BestofNJ.com website, which I have now added to my "Favorites" folder in my AOL software (the term would be "bookmarked" in MS Internet Explorer and other browsers). I'll have to explore that site as I find time. There are a few of the Flickr fotos at the bottom of that website, but not many. And the cross-promotion that was intended has not as yet been implemented very well. The phrase "BestofNJ.com" within the comment quoted above isn't clickable. Nor is there even a clickable link at the phrase "Flickr New Jersey", and a Search of Flickr did not produce such a group on the first page of results. Nor is there any person's name shown at the comment, and the profile for that Flickr user shows no human name nor email address by which to contact the user.

Foto by Steve Stanger.

Still, the "Best of New Jersey" Flickr site is worth seeing. New Jerseyans might spot some familiar places, amid all the generic (if pretty) fotos. Outsiders who think of New Jersey as hideous moonscape will be astonished. So if you know some outsider who needs to be gently corrected as to misimpressions of NJ, that can be one more website in your arsenal.

Foto by Michael Hogan.

OD '09 Day 4, Part B: Studio Tour

We resume now the tale of the fourth and final day of the Open Doors 2009 artstravaganza. In our last episode, our hero Craig and his fearless companion Ingé had met at 744 Broad Street to take the Artists' Studios & Available Space Tour.

Two pieces by Katherine Mangiardi in 744 Show. Top, Self-Portrait (how?); bottom, White Work.

The trolley took off, with artist Noelle Williams as our guide. She had the unenviable task of trying to tell drivers from NYC how to find the various stops planned. I have a suggestion for next year: hire a company based in Newark, with Newark drivers. The drivers we had were perfectly pleasant, but their lack of familiarity with Newark caused us some unease.
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First stop was a foto show at Gallery 1, in the space within One Gateway Center where City Without Walls used to be. The pricelist and guide at the front desk describes the show thus:

"CLICK"
Photography Exhibit
Curated by Luisa Pinzon

"CLICK" is a group of Photographers from the Tri State Area coming together for Newark Arts Council Open Doors Studio Tour to show the beautiful diversity that the art of photography brings to the art world. This group of photographers, come together under one rove [sic] to share their love and influence photography has brought [sic] to their lives as artists and people.

Proofreaders — indeed, copy editors — people!

John Masi (who, I later discovered, is a member of the Board of the Newark Arts Council) was at the desk and was very helpful. Above, he discusses the show with Ingé. This group of fotos is his.

I recognized one of the subjects immediately, but was puzzled when I saw it labeled "‘Evil Clown’ Keyport, NJ", because it looked exactly like the Food Circus clown in a different Monmouth County locale, my hometown, Middletown Township (near the Five Corners). I used to pass it on the bus to high school every day. He said it was Middletown; he didn't know how Keyport attached to the description. And it's actually quite famous.

This next foto is also John's: Carolina, taken in High Point, NC.

This group of fotos is Matthew Johnson's "In der Dunkelheit" (Into the Darkness).

We headed out in time to catch the next trolley to the next stop, Central Avenue and Broad Street. There were three places to go nearby. The closest is Index Art Center (585 Broad Street), described at the Open Doors 2009 webpage thus:

IAC was established this past May by three of Redsaw's former founders; Lowell Craig, Seth Goodwin, and DC Smith.

IAC’s mission is to help strengthen and revitalize Newark’s emerging art scene. We believe it is possible to create an environment where the local community and artists of all medium [sic] can come together and take part in a unique dialogue, one which would affirm Newark as a center for contemporary art.

The website shown there for Index is not being kept current.

Ingé had been there once with me during that gallery's earlier incarnation as Red Saw and was no fonder of the two steep flites of stairs than I. But we managed. Anything for art, right? That reminds me of a little grammar joke. Yes, grammar joke. A professor was telling the students in a lecture hall that in English, unlike some other languages (e.g., Spanish) we don't use a double negative (English: "Nothing works"; Spanish "No funciona nada") because that produces a logical positive. But the reverse is not true. You can use a double positive, because it doesn't make a negative, at which point a student calls out from the back, "Yeah, right.")

The title of this large painting by Rebecca Jampol is visible within it. It is not "Shirt Factory", as I first thought. This reminds me of an incident from my (advanced) biology class at Middletown High. Bob C. started to ask what was a perfectly sensible question: 'Why is it when foods go into our body they are of many different colors, but when they come out ...'. As soon as the class saw where the question was headed, groans of distaste cut short the question, and we never did get an answer.

The painted drawing above is the wide view. The foto below focuses on the central frame.

Among the people in our small group on the trolley happened to be a friend of Ingé's, Eunice (or was it Bernice? I think Eunice). They chatted happily thru our tour of Index, but when Ingé and I headed for the next gallery, Eunice went to look for something to eat, more substantial than the bagels in the back at Index.

Ingé and I moved on to Aljira (pronounced with a long-I sound in the second syllable, not long-E as in Al-Jazeera; it's from an Australian aboriginal language, not Arabic), a Center for Contemporary Art (591 Broad Street). I didn't tell Ingé what the show was. Edwin Ramoran, Aljira's Director of Exhibitions and Programs, whom I had met and introduced Ingé to, was at the front desk with someone I hadn't met, Larry Wilcox (like the CHiPS actor, but black). I didn't want to spoil the surprise as to what the show entailed, but Larry (we ran into each other at the 33 Show later, where I also saw Eunice again) said it related to something about his family history that he would tell us later. This is part of the description of the show from an Aljira handout:

JORDAN EAGLES: HEMOSAPIEN
A Major Exhibition of New Blood Works * * *

This exhibition is the first public opportunity to view Eagles' largest and most experimental blood works to date — a massive, 30-foot, multi-panel, abstract mural in which animal blood is suspended, encased and fully preserved in plexiglass and resin.

Ingé took one look at the panels shown above and asked "Is that blood?" I said 'yes, but how did you know?' She said, "It looks like blood."
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Curiously, the info about the artist on the Aljira handout does not mention the place where I saw his works, Rupert Ravens Contemporary right here in Newark. (See the 25th, 32nd, and 41st fotos in my post of November 1, 2008.)
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There was a further fillip to Eagles' bloodwork this time:

new forays into large-scale projections and color photography. Eagles utilizes overhead classroom projectors to set the entire space aglow in luminous, wall-to-wall projections of "blood light."

There are two full-length mirrors in which you can see yourself patterned with the red and white lite from his projections. Here I am in one of those mirrors.

Before we left Aljira, Larry told us that when he was a child, his father, uncle, and other relatives worked in a slauterhouse, in Newark (the Ironbound, I think)! I didn't know Newark had a slauterhouse. But it apparently provided quite a good income for much of Larry's family for years.
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Then Ingé and I walked to 31 Central Avenue, about 3 blocks from Aljira, and up another steep flite of stairs to see some working artists' studios. The first we found was only recently rented by Israeli artist Hila Sela and Philadelphia-born artist Mustafa Mohamed.

In this next foto, the painting on the left appears to be what I said looked like an older, disgruntled Nefertiti. It turns out that both Hila and I had seen the famous Nefertiti bust in a small museum in Berlin.

Hila works in both 2D and 3D. Here, you see one of her sculptures by a window flooded by brite but indirect, northern lite.

And here you see Mustafa by some of his work.

Between that first studio and the next that was open to visitors was this decorated door.

The next studio we visited that of Kati Vilim. I had been to her studio once before, then on the northern side of the building (perhaps even where Hila and Mustafa now are); but her present studio is on the southern side of the building. I showed pix of her earlier studio within a long interview about her work, on October 7, 2008. This area of the studio shows a very different work on the left, nearer the camera, along with more familiar geometric works at the top.

These two walls also show works of Kati's that are more like the things I have seen of hers in various shows.

The third studio open to visitors in 31 Central was that of Akintola Hanif. He was not himself there at the time, but we saw some of his fotograffic and video work.

His main concern at present is gangs. This framed article on the wall speaks to that work.

The glare of the more direct lite on the south side of the building caused some problems in viewing some of his work.

This group of fotos shows that he is not just a documentarian, however. Some seem to me to look directly into the "soul" of the person portrayed (tho I don't believe in a "soul" in a supernatural sense). And the top-leftmost shows a man willing to appear slitely silly for the sake of a striking image. Is he a 'gangbanger'? or is that image merely included with images of actual gangbangers/"gangstas"? (The word "gangbanger" has gang and sexual meanings. Here, I intend only the gang meaning.)

Ingé and I then walked back to Broad and Central, past various artists (including William Oliwa and Vera Soares) on their way somewhere or other, and past Mi Gente Café, which also shows art on its walls but was not open Sunday. They probably missed a good bet on making new customers. Ingé remarked that a lot of coffeehouses nowadays serve as small galleries.

When we got to the corner, we saw this all-too-unobtrusive sign, which we hadn't noticed before, and waited for the next trolley. Such a sign is a very good idea, but perhaps it should be a little larger and a little more drastically different from street signs in general. The adjacent street signs are also in sans-serif type, albeit in block caps. The landscape orientation is different, which is good, but more has to be different to stand out. The orange Open Doors logo may seem adequate in other contexts, but it really does not stand out enuf, outdoors. Perhaps it would, reversed within a black rectangle. But bare, no. And the text should probably be more specific to the arts council: "Newark Arts Council [or "NAC", or "Open Doors 2009"] Trolley Stops Here", or some such.

While we waited, Ingé noted the sign for the prior week's bicycle tour, still up under a group of informational signs posted by the City. I told her that the bicycle event may have been completely rained out, tho I wasn't sure of that. It was originally scheduled for Saturday, but a dismal forecast induced the organizers to move it to Sunday. And then Sunday turned out to have more rain than Saturday! The signs for special events should, in any case, be removed soon after those events have passed. And the City should partner with local businesses or organizations (for instance, the Newark Downtown District) to scrape away stickers that morons might put on the City's attractions signs.

Ingé was running out of time that she felt she could devote to the Studio and Available Space Tour, since she works full-time, so weekends are her only chance to catch up with chores. So we stayed on the trolley as it passed various venues. It did not go to some that I thought it should have, such as Arts High. The route needs work — next year. Before we would have gotten back to 744, near which Ingé's car was parked, the trolley stopped opposite Rupert Ravens Contemporary, and I said she really had to see this place, the largest in the city, with a splendid show. So she relented and went to one more gallery. Rupert was there, and I introduced them. Rupert thought her name sounded familiar, and they may have met on a prior occasion, but I'm not sure about that. I know Rupert met my friend Lisa, in a Jersey City show of Kevin Darmanie's work a couple of years ago. Rupert used to live in J.C. (until he saw the heavenly lite that drew him, like the star of Bethelehem, to Newark). When I tracked down my post (March 11, 2008) about that nite, I found that she had indeed met Rupert at Red Saw.
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Ingé was favorably impressed by Rupert's, but that was her last gallery. The driver of the trolley, which was still parked across Market Street, was going on break, but he gave us a lift back to 744. Very nice guy, with whom we had a very pleasant conversation along the way. I tried to persuade Ingé to go to at least 33 Washington, but she had to get back to her responsibilities at home. Still, she gave me a lift to Washington Street and Raymond Boulevard, and I intended to walk to 33 from there. But I was starting to run out of steam, so backtracked one block east to Halsey, and walked up to the Coffee Cave first.

That too was an Open Doors venue, with an exhibition entitled "Missionary".

The Coffee Cave is one of those coffeehouses that serve as art galleries too. Theirs is termed "The Ice Gallery". I don't know why. I have shown this same structure (below) with different artworks on prior occasions. This time, it includes a picture of our first blue President.

I ordered a large coffee, and asked if the garden was open (this late in the season). The barista said it was, but there was a paid, gospel concert scheduled to start there fairly soon. She asked if I'd like to look around at the artwork before I got my coffee. Perhaps she remembered me from a prior occasion, tho we had never been formally introduced. Or perhaps a lot of people want to look at the art before they settle on a place to sit and drink their coffee. I said, please (do), and she held my coffee until I had a chance to take some pix.

Here's an artwork incorporating the Statue of Liberty, which some people, if not indeed the Federal Government, regard as being within the territory of the State of New Jersey. I'm going to tell you something that not everybody knows: many white Americans do not think that black Americans are as attached to the United States as "we" (white people) are. Some might even wonder if "Ebonics" is the whole of linguistic difference between the black minority and the white majority, or if black Americans aren't unilingual in English, like the bulk of white people in this country, but have their own language, some African or New World creole language, that they speak to each other in. If they thought about it, they would have to wonder how another language could have gone undetected for centuries, but that doesn't keep some white people from thinking that blacks are so different that they MUST have their own language, because Ebonics isn't different enuf to keep "ofay" from listening in and understanding. (Consider phrases like "Fo shizzle my nizzle" and other 'secret' language that, once pierced by outsiders, is abandoned in favor of other 'inside' language.) The word "ofay", in turn, has an unclear etymology, such that even professional linguists, who spend all their time studying such matters, don't know for sure whether it is "pig Latin" for "foe" or derives from "Yoruba ófé 'to disappear' (as from a powerful enemy), with the sense transf. from the word of self-protection to the source of the threat".

For their part, however, black Americans think that a lot of white Americans are too attached to the countries of their ancestry. The typical black person in the United States is incapable of saying what specific part of Africa s/he is from, nor, thus, what present-day country in Africa they might be thought to owe allegiance to. Nor whether the current African country from that part of the world was a country at the time their ancestors were kidnapped and stolen away across the Atlantic. And, tho it is certainly politically incorrect to say anything remotely like this, the great preponderance of black Americans are glad their ancestors came here, even if it had to be in chains, because they sure as hell don't want to be in Africa. They are Americans, not Africans. If they visit Africa, they think, "OK, I've been to Africa. But it's not my country. The United States is my country, and I am going HOME — from Africa, not to Africa. I'm an American. And if I wasn't completely sure before I got to Africa, I'm sure now."

Some white people have even have gone so far as to get an Irish or Italian passport or take dual citizenship with one of their ancestral countries, so that in case things go terribly wrong here, they have someplace else to go. Black Americans don't look for anyplace else to go. They are pure American, absolutely untainted by temptations to foreign loyalty. Black Americans are, thus, MORE American than many white Americans. When they see the Statue of Liberty or hear things like "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..." their pride soars, as Americans. When they recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and come to the part that says, "with liberty and justice for all", they mean it. Every word. ALL of the notorious traitors to the United States have been white. NONE have been black — or gay. The "majority", whatever that might mean, is LESS American than the minorities. Ain't that a kick in the head!
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In any case, the Coffee Cave's yard is not presently a yard. The manager told me he had just that week enclosed it for the cold-weather months, and it was then set up with rows of seats for the concert.

I don't know what seating arrangements it will ordinarily have.
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Once I'd finished my coffee, I got underway again, headed to 33. Along the way, I saw that the fuel tank(?) on Halsey Street that Jerry Gant had painted in many colors had been repainted, probably by Jerry again, tho I don't know that. Just as I was lining up this shot, some people came along and I snapped the picture before they got in the way. Serendipitously, the young woman's scarf is a perfect match for the tank.

Before I could get to 33, I saw another venue. But that will have to keep to Part C of OD '09 Day 4.
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The Aljira "Hemosapien" show is still open, thru December 12th (Wednesday–Friday, 12–6pm; Saturday, 11am–4 pm).
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Note: I am FURIOUS at Google Blogger. Google is supposed to be the TOPS in Internet services, but Blogger, a Google service, puts in line spaces I don't ask for, takes out nonbreaking spaces I arduously put between things that should not be separated at the end of a line, and inserts italics in hyperlinks where I do not want italics. I take out the line spaces. Blogger puts them back in. I put back the nonbreaking (horizontal) spaces. Blogger takes them out again, over and over. Blogger puts in 28 extra line spaces above 8 fotos. I take out all 28. Blogger puts back 9. In HTML mode, I put in 10 nonbreaking horizontal spaces, then go into the "Compose" mode, and Blogger takes out every single one. If I put in a crosslink, Blogger puts it into italics, even tho I don't WANT italics, and everything AFTER the link is in italics! When I look at the HMTL code, Blogger may have put in TEN SETS of italics-on/italics-off codes, but leaves the last one unclosed, which tells the browser to put everything thereafter into italics! Further, if I adjust the horizontal position of a graffic/foto, the Blogger program may accept the change, then throw me to the very top of the post, even if I was only two inches from the bottom of that post. Depending upon the length of a post, then, I can lose between a quarter hour and two hours of my life EVERY DAY to this insane STUPIDITY on the part of what are supposed to be the smartest people on the Internet. Why? You cannot, of course, ASK why, because Blogger refuses to accept email complaints. You have to spend an HOUR searching FAQ's and "known issues", then pose a question to a message board. Why? Do we have to send Google executives to JAIL to get them to stop screwing with people's HTML code, and to accept emails? Yes, Blogger is a free "service". But when it steals an hour and more a day from the life of thousands upon thousands of people by doing things it should not do, there have to be consequences to Google's time-thieves.

Robeson Show Closes Wednesday, Lincoln Event at NuMu Thursday

I showed here October 21st a couple of pix of the Robeson Gallery show "Decadence & Decay: The Mansion Project", which closes Wednesday (November 11th). Fotos today show the opening reception in September.

Built in 1889 on a vantage point in Newark, New Jersey, the Krueger-Scott Mansion is a Louis XIV-style Victorian mansion and the largest, most expensive home ever built in the city. The original owner of the mansion, Gottfried Krueger, was a German immigrant who arrived penniless in the United States and became one of the wealthiest men in the city through working in his family ’s beer company. After his death, it was occupied by Louise Scott from 1966 until 1982. From here she ran a string of beauty parlors and became one of the wealthiest women in the city (and Newark’s first African-American millionaire).

This exhibition consists of works by contemporary artists who have responded to this site, literally and metaphorically: Hannah BERTRAM, Sarah BLISS, Chakaia BOOKER, Corinne May BOTZ, Sonya CLARK, Beth DOW, Raeford DWYER, Sara JONES, Lisa M. KELLNER, and Montana TORREY.

The Main Gallery, which includes the Rumble Room video theater, is open Monday-Wednesday, 10am-5pm. The Rumble Room feature is:

Castle Newark: The Krueger-Scott Mansion
Samantha J. Boardman * * *

This documentary, produced by Rutgers-Newark graduate student Samantha J. Boardman, presents material collected from numerous archives as well as interviews with key people connected to the mansion. It covers the history of the mansion, from the time of construction to the present day.

I was unable to get a seat in the Rumble Room during the reception, so merely took a couple of indicative fotos and decided to try to see the documentary some uncrowded day before the close of the show. I have to get my...self in gear by Wednesday. Here is one of the fotos.

Liz Del Tufo, the grande dame of Newark history guides, was at the reception and smiled graciously on seeing me. I told her that I had just seen her face this big (holding my arms wide), in the video.

Lisa Kellner poses by her piece, The Walls Were Paper Thin; Mansion Cellar, which comprises an outline of the floor plan in wood and recycled newspapers bent into undulating folds.

Perhaps after the video is no longer being shown in the Robeson Gallery, it will be offered to the general public on the Rutgers-Newark website, Blip.tv, or YouTube, like the Newark Public Library's Special Collections video. I thought Ms. Boardman might have done that video too, but I see it is by Samantha Johnston and Rosie Uyola. I suppose I could keep the Samanthas straight if I met them, but I haven't met either of them, much less both.

This is Sarah Bliss's All the King's Horses.

Lincoln Bicentennial Presentation at the Newark Museum. On Thursday, there will be a panel discussion in the Billy Johnson Auditorium, entitled "The Humane City: Race, Ethnicity, and Freedom in Urban America". This is co-sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which is holding events around the country. You may recall that Lincoln's Birthday is a New Jersey state holiday, February 12th (tho it was subsumed into the "President's Day" national holiday outside of a handful of states). So I guess the Bicentennial runs to next February 12th.

These sacks in Ms. Bliss's piece are supposed to be "salvaged materials". From the Mansion? I don't know why brewer's malt would be in the home of a beer baron.

The Commission sent out email about this "town hall discussion":

[O]n November 12 at the Newark Museum[, a] panel of esteemed speakers, including Pedro A. Noguera, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, Jeff Johnson, award-winning journalist, social activist and political commentator, and James O. Horton, Historian Emeritus at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, will lead a stimulating discussion on the topic of "The Humane City: Race, Ethnicity and Freedom in Urban America."

Panelists will discuss issues surrounding our urban communities today, and how we can collectively utilize the resources available in those communities to work towards a more successful future. This event seeks to critically examine the current situation in urban America when viewed through the lens of differences in race and ethnicity, while bringing together a group of scholars who are willing to give their recommendations for how communities in urban America can best achieve their collective potential.

[F]ree and open to the public, but an RSVP is required. Please visit http://lincolnliveson.com/ for more information or to RSVP.

You can also connect with us and join the discussion today through Facebook http://facebook.com/Abraham.Lincoln.Bicentennial.Commission and Twitter http://twitter.com/lincoln200yrs.

The RSVP webpage linked to, mentions other panelists, including the only one I have heard of, Eric Foner, whom I saw in some documentary series on PBS a few years ago. I see now that he was at one time married to the woman who in her second marriage bore actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

I don't know that I'll attend. As I told the publicist from the Lincoln group by email November 4th:

I'm not particularly interested in Lincoln, whose reputation has always seemed to me hugely exaggerated. After all, he nearly lost the Civil War (had it gone on another year, the public might have said "It's not worth the trouble — just let the bastards go"), did not emancipate slaves within the loyal states, and stated publicly that he did not believe in the social equality of blacks, nor in integration. * * *

I'm not a fan of Lincoln, and I deal with the issues to be discussed, all the time. We just had a very bad setback in yesterday's election to all progressive causes in this state, which was probably due to minorities not voting, so I'm more than a little bitter. Their alienation and defeatism have given us four years of a Republican governor, and I don't want to hear any rationalizations. The event remains on my online calendar, however, for anyone who is interested.

And now I've mentioned it here. There is a reception at the Museum afterward, and I like those receptions. The panel discussion is free, if one can find a seat. But I'm a member of the Museum, so I assume I could get in free anyway. As for low turnout giving us a Republican Governor, I'm still bitter, but I dare to hope that Christie will be (what passes for) a moderate Republican who can fite for the soul of that "Party of Lincoln" and take it back from the neo-Confederates who, grotesquely, now control it.