um, wtf?????

Soft fleece inner lining. Fits 1-9 months.

Quantity :

“For your little miss thang. Sassy pink locks for the diva in diapers”

(truthfully, it's so awful I kinda love it)

and now the academics have at her

JOSEPHINE BAKER:100 YEARS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
www.josephinebaker2006.com

6.00 PM FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – ALTSCHUL ATRIUM – BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA

KEYNOTE ADDRESS – “THE INTELLIGENT BODY AND EROTIC SOUL OF JOSEPHINE BAKER”
MARGO JEFFERSON, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC, AUTHOR – WRITING DIVISION – COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

7.00 PM “HOOFER’S HOUSE” PRESENTED BY THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
HOSTED BY RASHIDA BUMBRAY, ASSISTANT CURATOR, THE KITCHEN

FEATURING: COURTNEY BRYANT (PIANO); TASSILI BOND(BASS) & PHEEROAN AKLAFF (DRUMS)

WITH PERFORMANCES BY: ADENIKE SHARPLEY (OBERLIN COLLEGE, AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES DEPT); CHLOE ARNOLD; MAUD ARNOLD; DORMESHIA-SUMBRY EDWARDS; MAYA JENKINS AND AYODELE CASEL

8.00 PM RECEPTION

____________

_________


SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 - SULZBERGER PARLOR, HELD AUDITORIUM - BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

9:00AM COFFEE

9:45AM OPENING REMARKS
KAIAMA L. GLOVER, FRENCH, AFRICANA STUDIES - BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

10:00AM PANEL I - A PRESET STAGE
CHAIR: SERGE GAVRONSKY, FRENCH - BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"SYNESTHETIC RHYTHMS: AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC AND DANCE THROUGH PARISIAN EYES"
TERRI GORDON, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE - THE NEW SCHOOL

"THE NEW WOMAN AND THE NEW EMPIRE: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND CHANGING IDEAS OF FEMININITY IN INTERWAR FRANCE"
TYLER STOVALL, HISTORY - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

"THROUGH A LOVER'S EYES AND A CULTURE'S DESIRE: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE ART OF PAUL COLIN"
NOLIWE ROOKS, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES - PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

11.45 AM COFFEE

12.00 PM PANEL II - BAKER'S CRAFT
CHAIR: MONICA MILLER, ENGLISH, AFRICANA STUDIES - BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"WHOSE CHOREOGRAPHY?: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE QUESTION OF (DANCE) AUTHORSHIP"
ANTHEA KRAUT, DANCE - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

"THE END OF THE LINE: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN'S CORPOREAL COMEDY"
DAPHNE A. BROOKS, ENGLISH, AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES - PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

"JOSEPHINE BAKER AS DIASPORIC DANCER"
MAE GWENDOLYN HENDERSON, ENGLISH - UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL

1.45 PM LUNCH

3.00 PM PANEL III - STAGING TENSIONS, CROSSING BORDERS, DANCING IN-BETWEEN
CHAIR: ROBERT G. O'MEALLY, ENGLISH, JAZZ STUDIES - COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"FOIL, FICTION AND PHANTASM: 'JOSEPHINE BAKER' IN PRINCESSE TAM TAM"
CLAUDINE RAYNAUD, ENGLISH - UNIVERSITÉ DE TOURS

"JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE DAWN OF TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA"
ELIZABETH EZRA, SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES, CULTURES AND RELIGIONS - UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

"THE USE VALUE OF 'JOSEPHINE BAKER'"
FELICIA MCCARREN, FRENCH AND ITALIAN - TULANE UNIVERSITY

4.45 PM COFFEE

5.00 PM FILM SCREENING - ZOU-ZOU (1934)
INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE WITH JEAN-CLAUDE BAKER AND LYNN WHITFIELD

_________________________


SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1 - MAISON FRANÇAISE, CENTER FOR FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES - COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

10.00 AM COFFEE

10.30 AM PANEL IV - JOSEPHINE BAKER AND OTHER "OTHERS"
CHAIR: BRENT EDWARDS, ENGLISH - RUTGERS UNIVERSITY


"KATHERINE DUNHAM ON THE FRENCH STAGE (NO REPEAT OF LA REVUE NÈGRE)"
GENEVIÈVE FABRE, EMERITA - UNIVERSITÉ DENIS DIDEROT

"BODY AND SOUL: JOSEPHINE, JANE AND PAULETTE"
MARYSE CONDÉ, EMERITA - COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"REDISCOVERING AICHA, LUCY AND D'AL AL, COLORED FRENCH STAGE ARTISTS"
MICHEL FABRE, EMERITUS - UNIVERSITÉ DE LA SORBONNE NOUVELLE

"AFTER JOSEPHINE: BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE FRENCH MUSIC SCENE"
GRETCHEN HOLBROOK GERZINA, ENGLISH - DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

12.45 PM COFFEE

1.00 PM PANEL V - "AGENT JOSEPHINE"
CHAIR: KIM HALL, ENGLISH - BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

"FROM THE SECOND GREAT WAR TO IRAQ: BEAUTY, PATRIOTISM, AND LIEUTENANT JOSEPHINE BAKER"
T. SHARPLEY-WHITING, FRENCH, AFRICAN AMERICAN AND DIASPORA STUDIES, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

"SAMPLING JOSEPHINE BAKER: CUTS FROM TOUKI BOUKI, ALMA'S RAINBOW AND MADAME SATA"
TERRI FRANCIS, FILM STUDIES, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES - YALE UNIVERSITY

"ADOPTIVE AFFINITIES: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND BLACK INTERNATIONALISM"
JONATHAN EBURNE, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, ENGLISH - PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

"JOSEPHINE BAKER, PERFORMANCE, AND THE TRAUMATIC REAL"
WALTER KALAIDJIAN, ENGLISH - EMORY UNIVERSITY

3.15 PM CLOSING REMARKS
FARAH GRIFFIN, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES - COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

more baker love

This is from New York radio personality K. Foxx's 2007 calendar "I Am Every Woman" (sighted at Afrobella).


Compare to Ifétayo Abdus-Salam's "Josephine Baker" (below) from her American Exotic series (she's also got a page in the forthcoming exposure).

Both are gorgeous pictures, but their intentions, I think, are quite different (check both the statements on their respective sites). Could Ifétayo's work be a calendar? Could K. Foxx's portrait function as art? Does it matter?

this don't seem like a good idea, either

something about this ain't right

(I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but those aren't skeletal remains.)

Famed hominid 'Lucy' to leave Ethiopia for first exhibit abroad

Wed Sep 20, 10:39 AM ET

"Lucy," the celebrated skeletal remains of a female hominid who lived 3.2 million years ago will leave Ethiopia next year for her first-ever foreign exhibition, officials said.

Beginning in September 2007, Lucy will enjoy top billing among 200 other Ethiopian exhibits that will tour museums in 10 US cities for four years, they said Wednesday.

"Lucy has been in Ethiopia over the last 30 years," said Gezahgen Kebede, Ethiopia's honorary consul in Houston in the US state of Texas, where the exhibition begins at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences.

"It is time for us to share her with the whole world because she is the origin of mankind," he told AFP.

The trip will be Lucy's first overseas visit for exhibition purposes since she was discovered by American paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 in Ethiopia's northern Afar region.

Named after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," she was taken once to the United States for lab tests but has remained in the country since, stored in a special vault with a replica on display at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

Gezahgen said he hoped the traveling exhibit would help alter the image of the Horn of Africa nation, which is perhaps better known to the outside world for famine, floods and other human suffering than science.

"The idea is to promote Ethiopia in a positive way," he said. "We have a lot of attractions but it is not well known abroad, where images of drought and poverty are still dominant."

Lucy, part of a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis, was for more than 20 years, the earliest known member of the hominid family.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago and are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200,0000 years ago.

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for many experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.

Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.

I'm suddenly hooked on this site The Sartorialist. Maybe it's because lately I've been thinking a lot about how much I dislike the culture in which I live, and this site reminds me of a different one, perhaps one that's really a fiction. It's his reverence for quality and style, the love of fabric and color, fit and proportion, and especially his respect for real old-school splendor, that makes me want to go home and hand-sew a great-coat (because it certainly isn't the preponderance of starving-looking women). Part of it is that I've really been in a sewing mood, in part because of the Gee's Bend quilts at the deYoung (which prompted Deirdre and me to finally start ripping up old fabric to make our own) but also because of Erica's site, which totally inspires me to step up my stitching game.

Almost makes me want to live in New York.

speak on it

UNITED NATIONS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his verbal battle with the United States to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, calling President Bush "the devil." "The devil came here yesterday," Chavez said. "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world."

A Girl Like Me

I posted about this amazing short film by Kiri Davis when I first saw it months ago. Since it's deservedly gotten much attention on the web and is now on YouTube, I'm adding it to my site.

"Black females are valued by no one."

Did I post this before? If I did, here it is again; if I didn't, I meant to. I'm thinking a lot about black women (when am I not, really?) for a current project and Deirdre reminded me of this article. It's just...devastating. How did we get here?


The Height of Disrespect
New study on 'hip-hop' sexuality finds anti-woman strain—even among young women
by Thulani Davis
March 17 - 23, 2004


Teens in New York: Who's baggin' whom?
photo: Cary Conover


While statistics tell us that across the country teen pregnancy is declining and sex education is increasingly effective, most of the adolescents who are getting pregnant are the very poor. A recent study of sexuality among African American youth in households earning less than $25,000 per year was prompted in part by figures showing that black adolescents are becoming sexually active at younger ages than other youth, and are suffering from HIV/AIDS in the highest numbers.

For some, listening to the young people videotaped (but not named) during focus groups for the recent study might be more disturbing than reading the stats.

Although the study gives short shrift to its second mission—to explore the connections between the teens' attitudes and media consumption—their comments overwhelmingly display the "hard" and cavalier posturing of some segments of rap and hip-hop culture. The tones are generally dismissive, the bravado is amped, and the vocabulary is objectifying. "Everything is flipped. We used to bag chicks—now they're baggin' us," said one New York male. And even those who expressed these attitudes cited certain hip-hop artists as more "positive" and called for more "message" in the music.

The study, conducted by Motivational Educational Entertainment (MEE), a Philadelphia communications firm that researches and markets to urban and low-income groups, refers to these teens as "the hip-hop generation." In reality, the teens interviewed—between 16 and 20 years old—are probably children of the first hip-hop generation (usually considered people born between 1965 and 1980). The subjects of this study, then, have been raised during the rise of this influential culture and may reflect the long-term effects of the devastation of black communities following the civil rights and black-power movements.

The most telling attitudinal change from the "movement" years is the absence of any influence of feminism and the open disdain for black women. As the authors put it, "Black females are valued by no one." The study's glossary includes six nouns used to describe males: Dog, homeboy, playa, lame, sugar daddy, and payload, another word for sugar daddy.

For women, there are at least 15, none good: Block bender, woo-wop, flip-flop, skeezer, 'hood rat, 'ho, and trick all mean promiscuous female. In addition, there are freak, bitch, gold digger, hoochie mama, runner, flipper, shorty, and the more ambiguous wifey. Young women in the interviews also use some of these terms.

In the survey of 2,000 teens, who were contacted through 80 community-based groups in nine urban areas, the "play or get played" ethos is equally influential among males and females, along with this disrespect for black women. The survey found that urban youth continue to engage in risky sexual behavior in relationships the teens themselves describe as lacking emotional intimacy and trust.

MEE's study, funded by the California Endowment and the Ford Foundation, was conducted with the help of a multicultural group of 10 scholars—social scientists, clinical psychologists, and media experts. The group's goal is to get community-based service organizations and creators of entertainment programming to make more effective interventions with this generation of adolescents.

Professor Beth Richie of the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the study's scholars, said, "Young people today in lower-income black communities are facing a . . . whole set of stereotypical images of themselves—hypersexual, sexually irresponsible, not concerned with ongoing intimate relationships. [They] can't help but be influenced by those images." When several young women were talking about their reluctance to use condoms, one said that no one on TV or in films is ever shown using them.

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, African American adults and adolescents in 2001 had an AIDS case rate 10 times higher than whites. African American youth account for 60 percent of new AIDS cases, and black females ages 13 to 19 represent 66 percent of AIDS cases reported among young women, according to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health. Teens repeatedly reported that "everybody" is having sex and complained that most sex-ed classes begin in eighth grade, by which time, they thought, most kids have already had sexual intercourse.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that black teens are more likely than whites to have had sex, more likely to have begun at an earlier age (13), and to have had more than four partners by that stage of life. Blacks are also much more likely to have been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant.

The MEE survey reveals some of the attitudes behind the behavior. On several occasions in the MEE focus-group videos, males casually mentioned group rape—doing "bust-outs," or handing off partners for others to "try out." Even if bravado or "lying on [one's] dick" may account for some of the tales and blasé attitudes toward this sexual violence, the fact that young women reported it too, along with some admitting to having had sex with more than one partner at a time, suggests a disturbing acceptance of the abuse of women.

One Atlanta teen explained his promiscuity by saying, "I ain't cheatin' 'cause I ain't shit; I'm cheatin' 'cause she ain't shit." And sadly, both males and females frequently displayed their distrust of females as a group. A young New York woman said, "If I have a problem, I prefer to take it to a man rather than a girl. A girl might try to take your man." Women are "girls" but boys are "men"? An Oakland male said girls "don't trust each other, that's why I can't trust them."

A number of women said having multiple partners was the way to combat this devaluation. As for the chance to have lives of their own, these girls, the study's authors said, do not expect or "feel empowered" to achieve them. Since many do not expect exclusive relationships with partners, and sex is spoken of as a transactional relationship rather than an emotional one, keeping a partner by way of sex or pregnancy seems a viable strategy, at least temporarily.

A partner whom a male turns to purely for sex, dubbed a "shorty," is not a person he wants to take out—and if so, only "to McDonald's," and there is no escape: "Once a shorty, always a shorty." Marriage is not a priority, and committed relationships are often disdained by both sexes, though some males have steadies they call "wifey." One man described his preference: "That's the chick you want to be with; she's always got a condom, she don't want to have no kids, she doesn't want to catch nothing."

The prevalent disrespect for women has also, some teens suggested, resulted in more open homosexual relationships among females. According to the study, "overwhelmingly, across all nine cities, youth of both genders spoke openly about the increased occurrence of female-on-female sexual relationships." While some teens attributed the phenomenon to mutual understanding among women, others, including one of the scholars, cited mistreatment by men. Only lesbians cited same-sex attraction.

Dr. Maisha Hamilton-Bennett, a clinical psychologist, said, "Young women have told me they are choosing homosexuality in response to this whole ' 'hood rat/skeezer' definition that some of the heavier, darker, and less attractive women are getting." A study of factors such as color and size in the disparagement of black women in pop culture would be welcome information. Among black women, there are volumes of anecdotal material affirming our sense of marginalization from the beauty norms, and magazines and music videos imply that Beyoncé is the ideal of the moment.

The scholars who worked on the study suggest broad reforms along with further outreach on health issues. "What we're finding out from our HIV prevention research is that if you're able to re-create social fabric within a very poor black community, you have a greater level of social control over youth," said Carl Bell of the University of Illinois, "and they tend to delay their sexuality expression and their risk-taking behaviors. So [for] intervention strategies, the whole issue is rebuilding the village and trying to re-create social fabric if it's not already there."

Coco Fusco's U.S. Premiere

Image courtesy Paula Court

A Room Of One’s Own:
Women And Power In The New America
Performance Space 122, 150 1st Avenue, NYC
September 28 – October 1
Thursday – Saturday, 8:00 p.m., Sunday at 5:00 p.m.

In this multi-media performance, Coco Fusco portrays a seasoned interrogator who presents an unflinching examination of the emancipated role of American women in the military and the sexual politics of interrogation in the “War on Terror.”

>> GET TICKETS ONLINE or call PS122: 212-352-3101
$20, $15 (students/seniors), $10 (P.S. 122 Members)
Free (Creative Council Members) Running Time: 75 minutes

Erin Aubry Kaplan: Not So 'Hot,' Arnold

Why are so many politicians of color casually dismissing the governor's racist comments?

September 13, 2006

WARNING: THE column you are about to read is hot. Real hot. McDonald's-drive-through-scalding-coffee-see-you-in-court hot. Given the state of the world, which erodes almost daily because of the seemingly unlimited ineptitude of certain politicians, steamy has been my default state of mind for many years now. The latest fuel on my fire is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's tape-recorded assertion last week that Latina women with black blood are "very hot."

He has no idea.

Let's be clear: This was not a compliment. His supporters may argue that Schwarzenegger was expressing a kind of admiration for feisty women of color, but there is a strong current of crudeness, lewdness and racial fecklessness in his remarks that also marred his career as an actor and bodybuilder. And the governor's prompt apology, offered to "anyone out there that feels offended by these comments," doesn't exactly make up for it.

Reading his analysis that Cubans and Puerto Ricans "have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it," I got not a glow but a chill. Allegations and anecdotes reported three years ago of groping, sexual harassment and racist incidents came back to me in a rush.

I especially recalled — with a cringe more intense than Arnold's, I assure you — the story Schwarzenegger himself told a porn magazine in 1977 about how he and other bodybuilders "jumped" on a black woman at Gold's Gym in Venice; asked if it was a "gang bang," he said yes. The colonialist notion that blacks, especially mulatto women, are notable only for their sexual prowess and availability is hardly new — which is why it's so disturbing to detect it in the remarks of the governor of California in 2006. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Even more uninspiring is the so-what response by some Latino and black politicians to this whole affair. Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia of Cathedral City, the Puerto Rican lawmaker who was the subject of his remarks, is a Republican before she's a Latina, so she can be expected to accept (or decline as unnecessary) his apology.

But it's discouraging to see Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) and Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) blow off any negative implications of Arnold's remarks. Is the price of success for Latinos the sense of ethnic identity and common destiny that fueled their rise in the first place?

The black acquiescence bothers me even more — because we know what Arnold meant. The media led with the Latino angle, but the governor's most incendiary comment was that it's "black blood" that makes the difference. Such a worldview calls to mind Jim Crow, the Southern legal system based on strict percentages of "black blood" — also known as the one-drop rule — that segregated public facilities and governed daily life for much of the 20th century.

His supporters will protest that the governor was referring to positive differences, like the edge blacks have over everybody else on the dance floor or the basketball court. Uh-huh. Let's just say that certain praises are better left unsung, especially by public figures with a past like Arnold's.

Yet the only criticism from California's black elected officials came from Rep. Barbara Lee, an Oakland Democrat, who called his comments "disgusting." State Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton), the presiding elder of California's black politicos, dismissed the governor's gaffe as the "usual political banter" and suggested that former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a garrulous African American, was guilty of worse. All of which obscures the issue at hand and makes me wonder if this is a locker-room guy thing more than anything else.

So I'm left with the question I'm increasingly left with these days: Who will stand for me? I've reached zero tolerance for entitled types like Schwarzenegger. As a black woman of Louisiana Creole descent (i.e., hot) who fantasizes about radical social change (hotheaded) but who shops compulsively in the meantime (for hot fall fashions), I'm looking for a party to get into. And I don't mean the kind you dance at.

---

o7ekaplan@latimescolumnists.com

Tropicalisms (Deborah Jack exhibition)

"The first frontier was the water’s edge, and there was a first moment, because how could there not have been such a moment, when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary, and found that it could be breathe."

S. Rushdie

September 14, 2006 - January 14, 2007

This exhibition asks fundamental questions about the tropical landscape and how contemporary artists have used it in their work, either to subvert common (mis)conceptions or simply quote this scenery as part of an everyday experience. Exploring the history of the colonization of the New World as a land of savage and unexpected beauty, this exhibition rejects utopian visions of the tropical landscape that continue to mark their presence in contemporary tourist literature. Instead, artists explore the difficulties inherent in the development of this problematic reading of the tropical landscape.

Featured artists are: Manuel Acevedo, Matías Aguilar, Elia Alba, Adriana Arenas, William Armbruster, Nicole Awai, Terry Boddie, Norton Bush, José Camacho, Javier Cambre, Vladimir Cibyl Charlier, David Antonio Cruz, Jon Cuyson III, María Dominguez, Jeffrey Gibson, GULDSVEINEN (Monika Broz+Andrew Wilkson), Andre Juste, Vandana Jain, Deborah Jack, Kristina Jacob, Jeff Jacobson, G. Jerome, Rajkamal Kahlon, María Lau, Builder Levy, Miguel Luciano, Lynn Mullins, Joan Pamboukes, Wanda Raimundi-Ortíz, Gloria Rodríguez, Natalie Shook, Joseph Stella, Rhonda Tymeson, Mary Valverde, Juana Valdes, Raul Villarreal, Amy Wilson.

Jersey City Museum

350 Montgomery Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302

(at the corner of Monmouth Street)

Mass transit from Manhattan

Take the Newark or Journal Square PATH train to the Grove Street station in Jersey City. Exit the station and make a left (walk southwest) on Grove Street. Walk three blocks to Montgomery Street and turn right. Walk four blocks to the corner of Monmouth Street.

Photographer Brings Amistad Exhibition to Rockland County

Collette V. Fournier, Photographer will have a photography exhibition entitled "Amistad: From Mystic Seaport to Halifax, Nova Scotia" from October 1 - 31, 2006 at Garnerville Arts and Industrial Center, GAGA,

55 W. Railroad Ave. Garnerville, NY 10923 (845) 947-7108/ 641-5836 gaga@garnervillearts.com This exhibition is in collaboration with the Rockland County Amistad Hudson River Valley Tour 2006-Haverstraw Visit Committee Oct. 7 – 11 and Oct. 22 - 23, 2006 at the Haverstraw Marina. A reception will be held on Sunday, October 7 for the Amistad exhibition at 7:00pm in the GAGA Gallery.

The exhibition will travel to The Rockland County Courthouse, 1 So. Main St., Room 200, New City, NY 10956 Hours: 8:30am – 5:00pm November 6 – December 22, 2006. For further information please contact Ms. Patricia Zippelli, (845) 638-5350, pzippill@courts.state.ny.us

The exhibition then travels to SUNY Rockland Community College145 College Road, Suffern, NY 10901 Rotunda, Library Media Arts Center from January 15 – February 26, 2007 during the College’s annual African American History Month. For information call (845) 574-4409 for Library Hours, or Ms. Fournier in Campus Communications at

(845) 574-4549 www.sunyrockland.edu/campuscomm

Ms. Fournier has been documenting the Amistad’s activities since 1999. She became interested in photographing the freedom schooner when she heard Warren Marr lecture on Amistad’s history and then met Wayne Bartow, an African American shipwright (boatbuilder) who is part of the Mystic Seaport crew. The photographer has followed Amistad’s adventures from Mystic Seaport, Bridgeport, CT, New York City to Halifax, Nova Scotia. She plans to continue her documentation when the Amistad visits

Charlestown, South Carolina and Washington DC during the Transatlantic Freedom Tour in 2007 - 2008.

Ms. Fournier has worked at SUNY Rockland CC in Campus Communications, as the campus photographer and as an adjunct professor in the Photography Department since 1992. Ms. Fournier has worked as a staff photographer for The Bergen Record, The Rockland Journal-News, about...time magazine, and freelanced for The New York Post.

The photographer has had three one-woman exhibitions including a nineteen-year retrospective. Her works have been shown in galleries in Rockland, New York City, New Jersey, Texas, Rochester, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Canada and the USSR. The photographer’s works are in the photographic collections of EnFoco, Inc., The Smithsonian Institute's National African American Museum Project, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Women in Photography International Archive, Kamoinge, Inc., various books, magazines and in private collections. Ms. Fournier is currently writing a personal narrative.

For further information please e-mail Ms. Fournier at fournierandco@juno.com or fournierandco@aol.com

hmmm...this isn't exactly how i'd pictured her...


You know, I'm all for poetic license, and I'm always interested when Hollywood tries to portray artists, but this just looks ri-damn-diculous.

i guess she didn't want anyone to miss the josephine baker reference this time

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken a performer this long to bite Josephine's fabulous style. Wonder why that is?

Now when one of them has the cojones to pay homage to Grace Jones, then I'll bow down.

why do artists need "charity?"

(I got this from a couple of difference sources this morning.)

September 5, 2006

New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artists’ Grants

By STEPHANIE STROM

A new charity, United States Artists, will announce today an ambitious plan to provide support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence.

Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4.

“The individual artist has been at the back of the line in terms of support in American funding over the last decade, so any new system designed to get support directly into the hand of working artists is important,” said Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Panels of artists, critics, scholars and others in the arts are reviewing the applications of 300 artists who were nominated by 150 anonymous arts leaders around the country.

United States Artists declined to reveal any of the applicants’ names but said they range from an American Indian weaver who earns her living demonstrating her craft on the cruise ships that ply the Alaska coast to a Chinese-American photographer working in Minneapolis to a mariachi bandleader from Los Angeles.

“No one is a household name,” said Katharine DeShaw, the group’s executive director. “We want these awards to demonstrate the diversity of American art and the artists who create it.”

Four foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and the Alaska-based Rasmuson— have put up a total of $20 million to create the organization and seed its initial operations, but the goal is for it to become a conduit between artists and individual donors.

“I believe there are individuals who would like to give to artists directly but worry they lack a system to help identify talent,” said Susan V. Berresford, president and chief executive of the Ford Foundation, which put $15 million into the project. “This creates a mechanism through which people can do that.”

This new charity plans to use gifts from individuals to build a permanent endowment to support and expand the grant program, but that, Ms. Berresford and others said, will be its biggest challenge.

United States Artists has attracted support from prominent national arts patrons like Agnes Gund and Eli and Edythe Broad.The hope is that these and other donors will eventually contribute $1 million each to endow a fellowship, much the same way that donors underwrite faculty chairs at universities, Ms. DeShaw said. “This could do for artists what the MacArthur Awards do for those recipients,” Mr. Broad said in a telephone interview, referring to the coveted “genius” grants that the MacArthur Foundation makes annually. Those grants total $500,000, paid out in $100,000 installments over five years.

This new charity was spurred in part by a 2003 Urban Institute study, “Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for U.S. Artists,” that documented the plight of artists since the mid-1990’s, when the federal government abolished many of the grants that the National Endowment to the Arts had made to individual artists amid controversies over works involving nudity, sexuality and other provocative themes.

State and local financing of the arts had also declined, as had foundation support, trends that have started to reverse only in the last year or so.

In any case, most public money goes to arts institutions, not to artists directly. “The chance for an artist to get money through an individual grant is something extremely rare,” said Barbara Kruger, an artist working in New York, Los Angeles and, increasingly, abroad.

There is no precise measure of how many grant programs directly support artists. The New York Foundation for the Arts, which itself makes such grants, maintains a database of about 2,900 such programs. The Urban Institute study found that more than $91 million was available to artists, but that two-thirds of cash grants that could be quantified were of less than $5,000. Only 21 percent of grants were of $10,000 or more.

Ms. Gund said the grants from the new charity come at a critical time, when basic costs of living like health costs and rent are rising and public support continues to ebb. “It’s a myth that most artists make money,” she said. “Most of them don’t even get a chance to show, and even if they do, they don’t make enough with sales to meet their needs and still have to work teaching or waiting tables or at another kind of job.”

For Roxane Butterfly, a tap-dancer, the $33,000 she got from the Guggenheim Foundation this year allowed her to continue her work after an injury sidelined her. “It literally saved my artistic career,” she said in a telephone interview from her native France. “If you don’t dance, you just don’t eat.”

John Waters, the iconoclastic filmmaker, is one of the United States Artists nominators. “I nominated people who have been doing work for a long period with great critical success but are still struggling financially,” he said in an interview from Provincetown, Mass. “They’re very representative of most of the artists in this country.”

Mr. Waters said he had never applied for a grant. His films were made with loans from his father and friends or, later, through investment partnerships. “I still don’t think if I was making ‘Pink Flamingos’ today I would ever get a grant,” he said, “no matter how liberal the organization.”