Belated Post - CAMBA's Shona Gallery

I meant to post this on my site some time ago. It is the long version of an article that I wrote promoting CAMBA's gallery of Shona art from Zimbabwe. I had to truncate it for the Park Slope Food Coop's Linewaiters' Gazette and am in the process of working with some local newspapers to get it published. Here it is:

A Hidden Treasure in Brooklyn: The CAMBA Shona Gallery

Many residents of Brooklyn and our neighboring boroughs know about CAMBA and it’s many programs. Since 1977 CAMBA has provided employment, education, health-related, housing, legal, social, business development and youth services to approximately 30,000 individuals each year.

One of CAMBA’s activities is its Shona Gallery. Occupying 1,500 square feet in CAMBA’s health services building, Shona Gallery houses one of the largest collections of Shona art in the United States. The gallery began in 1991as a way to help support CAMBA’s many services, while simultaneously supporting artists living and working in Zimbabwe. With the aid of an art dealer raised in Zimbabwe and living in Brooklyn, CAMBA’s Shona Gallery is able to have a direct relationship with the artists, whose work is purchased outright.

The word Shona means both the Bantu people and language of natives of Zimbabwe southern Mozambique. The range of dialects spoken and regions where the artists live and work is reflected in the diversity of styles and techniques visible when surveying Shona Gallery’s offerings. While the techniques of stone carving that Shona artists employ have been passed down for hundreds of years, and subjects are culled from traditional folklore and spiritual beliefs, Shona art is decidedly modern. Examples of Shona art can be found in the collections of Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musee Rodin in Paris, Queen Elizabeth II, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the actor Danny Glover among others.

The CAMBA Shona Gallery is home to the work of some of the world’s most renowned Shona artists, including works by Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940 – 2002). On view currently is his work “The Prophet”. Carved from springstone, or black, serpentine, known to be one of the hardest and least available stones used for sculpting in Zimbabwe, the material is prized for its under layer of brown, which adds a rich dimension to the otherwise hard black surface. “The Prophet” exhibits a skill for abstraction in the carving of the head, where the face is reduced to geometric forms and a play between positive and negative space, as if probing the interior of the subjects mind. The beard is carved in undulating, narrow lines, suggesting the thinning, whispy whiskers of an elder statesman. Rough, brown-hued edges suggest that the prophet has emerged from the stone itself to impart its wisdom before reuniting with the stone it was born from.

Other master artists included in the CAMBA Shona Gallery’s impressive collection are Gregory Mustasa, whose “Bathing Beauty” (pictured below) carved in golden opalstone is a quiet, contemplative and wholly unobtrusive representation of a private moment, and the carving of the hair is wholly extraordinary; Lawrence Mukomberanwa, son of Nicholas; Richard Mteki; Lameck Bonjisi; Adam Gatsi; and Fanizani Akuda, among others.



















Gregory Mustasa, "Bathing Beauty," opalstone

I met with Joanne Oplustil, CAMBA’s Executive Director, who stressed the importance of supporting Shona art now, since many of the artists support not only their immediate families, but extended families and beyond with the sale of their art work.

CAMBA’s Shona Gallery, located at 19 Winthrop Street between Flatbush and Bedford Avenues, is open by appointment between the hours of 9am to 5pm, Monday, Wednesday and Friday and 9am to 7pm, Tuesday and Thursday. To set up an appointment and for more information, call 718-287-2600 and ask for Lorelie, or e-mail the gallery at info@shonasculptures.com. For more information on the gallery’s holdings and Shona art and artists, please visit the website at http://shonasculptures.com.
For more information on CAMBA and its services, visit http://www.camba.org.

Rhododendron is a Nice Flower

Christian Bale, still from "Velvet Goldmine"

When I was a pre-teen I remember listening to bad 70's pop - Bay City Rollers, ABBA (I didn't realize that they were pop geniuses at the time, I wasn't that musically sophisticated at 13, nor am I at present), and a lot of other forgettable AM radio fluff. I don't intend to trivialize my banal taste in music as a pre-teen, part of what I listened do I did so because it was on the radio, in my friend's mothers' car, in a store, at the beach, wherever. The other part was what I grew up with as the youngest of four children, with my two oldest siblings being 7 and 8 years older than I.

Growing up and sharing a room with my sister, I was exposed to a lot of 60's/70's folk-rock, singer-songwriter music. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Carole King, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, Gilbert O'Sullivan (yes, good lord, Gilbert O'Sullivan, if anyone remembers him). I group them together not by the degree of musicianship or originality, but by the range (there is a chasm from Joni Mitchell to Gilbert O'Sullivan) that I was exposed to. All that in addition to the requisite Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, Led Zeppelin, Dylan and Kinks.

My oldest brother was listening to Bowie, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, Franz Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno (with Roxy & solo). When I first heard the lyrics to "Do the Strand" I wasn't interested in the particular meaning of he lyrics, it was the stream of consciousness that attracted me. It would start for me an attraction to absurdism, stream of consciousness, and randomness that is still very much with me.

I went with a friend last night to see a screening of Velvet Goldmine at McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint - an out of use public pool that in recent years has transformed into a performance space. I hadn't seen it since it had come out in the late 90's, and it was as good, and as cheesy a guilty pleasure as I had remembered.

Roxy Music were, in the early 70's anyway, were ahead of their time and their musicianship was head and shoulders against most artists considered Glam, but I think the sheer show of Glam, both good and bad, appealed to me because I am a visual person. Yes, I had crushes on pictures of George on Beatles' album covers, and thought Eric from the Bay City Rollers had gorgeous eyes,but the package of Bowie and Roxy Music and T Rex was to me something uncontainable.

When I became more aware of music, particularly how it made me feel, I was listening to the Mo-dettes, the Clash, UK Ska, Joy Division, X, and local Boston bands like the Neighborhoods, Boy's Life, Human Sexual Response and Mission of Burma. I subsequently subsumed the influence that the music of my older siblings had on me. I was pretty immersed in the local Boston scene at the now defunct Rathskellar (The Rat) in Kenmore Square and by the mid-80's the scene was overcome with neo garage bands like the Lyres, Prime Movers, Dogmatics and others. At the time I was heavily into how I looked - I wore 50's party dresses and 60's mod outfits, all to be had for cheap from the local Goodwill/Morgan Memorial and Salvation Army stores. I teased my hair up with Aqua Net and wore a lot of black eyeliner. Music and fashion have always been a likely couple, and even though a lot of the neo garage bands were wearing jeans, t-shirts and sweaters, there was still a retro fascination at the time, especially with the 50's and early to mid 60's.

I don't think it was until I moved to New York that I began to appreciate the music I had shelved for some time. When I look at Marc Bolan, glitter in his hair and on his face, smiling like the Chesire Cat, I think about his music and when I listen to his music, I think about how he looks. The same is true for me with Bowie and Roxy Music - it's the whole package.

Leaving the movie and coming home, I wanted to take out my cd's and blast them, but having house mates, and being a respectable age, I wasn't able to at 11pm on a Tuesday night.

Seeing the movie - with it's laughable, fictional account of David Bowie and Iggy Pop's relationship, and campy original songs ("somebody called me Sebastian"?) - and wanting badly to listen to the first Roxy or T Rex tape or CD I could get my hands on - put me in the mood. Sadly, not having a partner right now, all I could do I could was hum Virginia Plain in my head and dance around my room, pretending to be a glitter queen, while my cat looked on, a bit puzzled. Having just landed a really good job and knowing things are changing for me, I have to believe that part of my life will turn around soon as well. Until then, I can do the strand...

Stickin' it to the Man, 12-year old style/Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls

still from "Radio Riot"video on youtube


It was my friends birthday last night, and I headed out to the old Tobacco Warehouse at Brooklyn Bridge Park for an evening of physics and music, sponsored by Union Hall, a bar/club in Park Slope. I had not heard of the opening band, "Tiny Masters of Today" prior to last night, and I'm more than happy to report that they should have been the headliners, and kicked the asses of the other bands. Well, I only stayed for about 1/2 song by the headliners "French Kicks" and the other band sort of careened between ambient and pop, and then ended up just playing pop. I saw Sonic Youth on July 4th for the second time in my life. The first time they were truly sonic and I was in an auditorum, so the feedback ricocheted off of the walls, and I was enveloped in it. I was gleefully dazed afterwards and while I never bought anything they recorded, I left the show thinking it was the best live show I'd ever seen next to the Ramones at the old Channel club in Boston. The July 4 show this year was good, but I didn't feel the same energy, maybe because I'm older, they are older, or I just found them sounding the same as anyone else. I still have a girl crush on Kim Gordon in that 'I want to be just like her, but I'll never be as cool' way. Last night I found that a bunch of 12 year olds (well, the drummer looked maybe 16 or 17, and I'm still unsure if it was a boy or a girl, like the old Barbarians song goes) rocked harder than Sonic Youth, and were a whole lot more fun. To be fair, part of my reaction was "holy shit, they are so young, and so skinny, and who are their parents?" There is a novelty factor there, but it wore off and the music took over. The sound wasn't great as the vocalist, Ada, was drowned out by the guitar and drums at times, but I could still here her barking out the lines in straightforward song-speak whine. They even did a brilliant cover of House of Pain's "Jump Around." At one point Ada asserted herself, asking the audience to stand up, because seeing all of us sitting down depressed her. Nearly everyone stood up. Kim Gordon move over, I want to be as cool as Ada! Here is a link the their myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/tinymasters

Being at Brooklyn Bridge Park, I finally got to see the Olafur Eliasson waterfallls. When I tried to see them about a month ago, it had just turned 10pm, which meant lights out and water off. I've heard various accounts of how disappointing they are, and all that "well, it's just not like a real waterfall, and I have one at my country house" thing. For all of you who do look out on to a waterfall from your kitchen window upstate, great! But being a fresh air fund adult stuck in NYC for most of the summer, I found them to be lovely. The skeletal fragility of the scaffolding and the patterning of the water cascading off if it, and moving with the wind, was eloquent, especially the one in the distance on the Manhattan side from the Brooklyn Bridge Park. If you look at a natural waterfall, you don't quite get to experience the way the water cascades off the rocks, because you can't see it in the round. Eliasson's waterfalls allow you to do that; to focus on the flow of the water itself. I forgot my camera, of course.

Rocky Point Weekend

This weekend I had the good fortune to spend the weekend with my good friends at their family's summer place in Rocky Point, on the north shore of Long Island. We decided to fly in the face of the weather reports and go regardless of the thunderstorms in the forecast. We made it out at a snails pace, my friend driving for almost four hours, our backsides adhering to the car seats from the humidity. When we did make it to our destination we ate and unpacked, prepped for the next days barbecue and slept.

Saturday turned out to be not as wet as the MY9 news team predicted, but it did thunder and rain. We went to May's farm to pick up some more produce and they sky, pictured above, was pregnant with rain and hued in impending doom blues and grays. Gorgeous. Soon after this photo was taken the heavens did open up and intermittently showered down on eastern Long Island.

Later in the afternoon, friends caravaned from Brooklyn for the barbecue. We slept, read, walked and picked at cheese, crackers, fruit and other good stuff before the real meal began. While out for a walk after the rain seemed to have passed I spotted this lawn fawn stepping out of a bush of echinacea for some sun



















Back from the walk around sweet Rock Point, everyone awoke from slumber and rest and my friend and hostess got down to business on the grill. Eventually we all sat down to a great meal with many dishes, plus beer, wine, some really sweet sparkling wine concoction and other good stuff, leisurely becoming sated from all the food and good company.

Eventually the day guests left, going back to their houses, spouses and pets. Being newly single and having a house mate taking care of my cat, I was able to spend two nights with my friends. All I had to do was stumble into the bedroom and fall into a deep and restful sleep.

Sunday morning I awoke to sun and the promise of a trip to the beach. My friends got up and we drank some coffee, and played some badminton in the yard. Being of sad hand/eye coordination, I was able to play in, what I think my friend called it, a "judgment free zone." Or maybe that's what I thought of it. I forget how easy it is to play badminton and how much I enjoy it until I pick up the featherweight racket and the birdie and whack at it.

Eventually we make it to the beach later in the afternoon. My favorite time of the day on the beach is late afternoon into early evening, when the light changes a mid-afternoon glare to a golden-orange glaze. When we arrived, my friend and I took a long walk on the pebbled beach, and not wearing our footwear, toughening the soles of our feet on the tiny rocks. While on the walk we came across an impromptu shrine for a fallen bird, what my friends thought to be a Plover.

















On first seeing the dead bird I thought of paintings of the subject by Albert Pinkham Ryder and Morris Graves, and I also thought of Manet's "The Dead Toreador," perhaps because of the white breast of the bird and black wings reminded me of the toreador's uniform, or because of the way the bird was still plump and alive looking. With "The Dead Toreador" I always felt that if I turned away from the image, the toreador would get up, brush himself off, and saunter off out of the ring. Somehow there was something a bit unreal about this bird too, as if it were posing for a shoot, my shoot I guess. I was also moved by the act of someone inspired enough to weight the bird down, write "R.I.P" in the sand and leave a cross made of twigs above the beak. Perhaps it was a child or a teenager, I believe an adult would have been too self conscious, or if they weren't they would have added some ironic touch, too inhibited not too.

The rest of the afternoon we spent eating, reading and napping. We returned back at the house, which once belonged to my dear friends grandmother, who I had the good fortune to have spent time with when she was alive. One of those people you don't forget, diminutive, forceful, and very generous. I am grateful to be asked by my friends to return there in the summer.

After showering and having some coffee, we packed things up and loaded the leftovers and our weekend gear into the car.
















I was happy to be going back to Brooklyn, despite all the uncertainty in my life right now, a weekend in Rocky Point renewed my faith that I will find those things that I'm looking for, that things will be alright and that although everything I tried to make work hasn't panned out over the past few months that there new people and opportunities out there waiting for me. I just have to be open to them.

Dreamboat Annie

A few weeks ago I developed a minor obsession with this song. Not "Barracuda" (even though it does kick ass!), "Crazy on You" or "Magic Man", but little ole "Dreamboat Annie." It's not espcially folk, especially here when lipsyched on the Captain and Tenille show (two 70's celebrities I really had forgotten about, despite the fact that they were part of my t.v. diet when I was a full on pre-teen with a mouthful of braces and a Dorothy Hamill meets Moe Howard hair do).

When I mentioned this to someone recently, they said something like 'Isn't one of them still good looking and thin' 'cause you know, that's what it's all about, right? Ok, they were both pretty hot back in the day (well, not so much in the 80's when they went hair band) and yes - Ann did gain weight, but apparently she still has a good voice, and she had a pretty great one back then. And it was distinctively hers. I heard them do a version of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeOHssaIJbM&feature=related) and if anyone could match Robert Plant's shrill, it was Ann Wilson. They had great songs in the 70's and a presence that lacked gimmick or pretense.

"Dreamboat Annie"(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5qsO9Ms7Ns) is a pop song I guess, with a perfect intro from Nancy (the clip here has her first playing "Silver Wheels" - usually the intro to "Crazy on You"), and a little banjo thrown in. Melancholic and sung gorgeously by Ann, and with perfect harmonies by Nancy, her voice mellowed down and nuanced. It's not slow pop in the old AM way, an FM hit for sure. Melancholic, escapist and mellow - a much needed salve for my life as it is this summer.

"The sweet remembrance of the just shall flourish when they sleep in the dust" - anonymous

I happened to be in lower Manhattan this morning and wandered into the graveyard at Trinity Church from the stairwell entrance on Trinity Place. Often I forget about this small urban oasis simply because for the most part, my life right now doesn't take me to lower Manhattan, and perhaps also because of the post 9/11 hoards of tourists that never seemed to frequent the area much when the twin towers were still standing.

Regardless, there I was, weaving through the mostly 18th century markers and recalling some of the old burial grounds in Boston - Kings Chapel, Copp's Hill, the Granary, and the Dorchester North. When I was in undergraduate school I took a class in Tomb Sculpture and wrote about "The Sun in Word and Stone." Basically, the sun, sometimes with a face, and usually sporting wings, represented renewal and regeneration, something like this:














Sitting on a bench and writing in my journal, I looked up while searching for a word and there was the face, not the clearly incised face of a puritan winged sun, but the almost blur of the face of a child. It seemed faded and distant, and barely in relief. I got up and walked over to it, and the closer I came to it, the more faded and distant the image of the infant face appeared to be. Standing back from it seemed to throw it in relatively higher relief.

It's a romantic (and Victorian) vision, and I mean romantic in the sense that what can be read into this face is fictitious, and also infinite. My mind wandered and conjured up thoughts, and even sounds that neither belong to my own history, or to anyone else's in particular. An face like this can elicit a quiet escapism that can take you out of yourself and transport you to somewhere more entertaining than a novel or a movie, many of which could be inspired into existence by it.

Dog Day Afternoon

Red Hook, July 12, 2008


Ahhhhhhhhhhh Summer! A magical time, especially in the streets of Brooklyn. I live across from what I feel is Olmsteads' finest in NYC (being from the Boston area, I have an affinity for the Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park), Prospect Park. But I remember my old neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, in the dog days of summer. Hot Hot Hot! And the guys from the nickle and dime funeral home across the way standing across narrow Sackett Street screaming at one another as if from across the East River. And the car and bus fumes at the corner traffic light wafting up through my second floor window. Except when the air conditioner was on. I am amazed at surviving 15 summers in NYC, and I am not sure if I am really a better person for it, other than to say I lived through it. Summer in NYC induces crustiness, weariness, and general exasperation. Getting away however makes one all the more grateful for time shares, friends with timeshares who invite you out, friends who live near the beach, and the LIRR and New Jersey Transit. Oh, and the floating pool in Brooklyn Heights too! I'm going to be doing both this summer: whining and whinging and grinning widely when I dip my toes in the waters at Smiths Point. Ahhhhhhhhh Summer!

Brooklyn Summer Rag

In order to get to an interview on Monday, I decided it would be more efficient to arrive at Point B from Point A by walking through Prospect Park from my place on Prospect Park West and 12th Street to my destination at Flatbush Avenue and Winthrop Streets in Lefferts Gardens. A very humid, dewy summers day hindered my usually breakneck city pace and I began to stop and smell the echinacea, cornflowers, grass and the loam on the pond and to take in the diversity of Brooklyn's inhabitants while they sunned, lolled, cycled,ran, barbequed, loved, married, photographed and slept in their big back yard. Here are some images taken to and fro.

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine

At Film Forum through Tuesday, July 8th. Showtimes: 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:00, 10:00. 11:15AM showtime added on Saturday and Sunday, July 5 and 6 only.

See this movie at Film Forum, or when it arrives at a theater near you. An amazing look at an uncompromising and fearless artist, along with her ego-less assistant Jerry Gorovoy, and MoMA curator Deborah Wye, a find in herself as seemingly one of the most earnest and honest art world figures I've seen in a long time. Co-directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach.

Jocelyn Shipley's Garden of Unearthly Delights

Jocelyn Shipley's show "The Secret Life of Sculpture" up through July 5th at Canada Gallery on Chrystie Street (one of the smartest galleries around) left me feeling loose, giddy, and as if while walking through Chinatown afterwards was akin to swimming - simulatneously heavy and weightless. When art has the capacity to alter your physical state, it's powerful stuff.

The stark contrast of stepping in from the light and heat of an almost summers day,on the packed and odiferous streets of Chinatown into a black lit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was nothing short of transormative. Her work takes sculpture to a place where the viewer isn't bound by the materials connection with an earth bound material, or an air bourne aspiration, but a phantasmagoric world made of foam, neon paint, and string, with an occasional Rankin Bass-like face eminating from a day-glo rock.

A small part of my response to Shipley's work was a personal remembrance going back to the late 70's, when as a teenager my friends and I would go to the mall and visit the back of Spencer Gifts where the lava lamps and black lights were displayed, knowing that this is the stuff that guys who drove Camaro's around the drag at the local beach bought to help them get laid. While Shipley's work did elicit a distant memory of the trappings of teenage seduction, I ultimately felt free, unselfconcious and content knowing that there is an artist who is not afraid to draw back the curtain and show us the underside, both beautiful and terrifying in it's depth and strangeness.