Collins Unbound

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change:  Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes:  Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

(Right) Kendrick Lamar, photograph by Andrew Lih, 2018.

Myth-Breakers:  Kendrick Lamar
African-American musician Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 LP Damn became the first Hip-Hop album to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Music, recognized by the awards organization as being “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” Hailing from Compton, CA, Lamar rose to mainstream prominence with his second studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly, which won the Grammy for Best Rap Album in 2016. Damn, in addition to the Pulitzer Prize, also won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. In total, The Recording Academy has awarded Kendrick Lamar thirteen gilded gramophones. His explosive performance at the 58^th Grammy Awards became one of the cultural touchstones of 2016. Lamar was also responsible for curating the soundtrack for the 2018 Marvel film, Black Panther, directed by another of the exhibition’s Myth-Breakers, Ryan Coogler.

Photograph of Kendrick Lamar by Christopher Polk. Figure in the Urban Landscape #25
(portrait of Kendrick Lamar) [Kendrick Lamar], 2018. Derrick Adams. Courtesy of the artist.

• Section.80 (2011)
• Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012)
• To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
• Damn (2017)
• Black Panther Soundtrack (2018)

Bio and photograph from artist website;
photograph by Mark Poucher.

Portrait Artist:  Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another. Adams is also deeply immersed in questions of how African American experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism.

*Burton, Justin Adams. “ “Cheap and Easy Radicalism”  The Legible Politics of Kendrick Lamar,” Posthuman Rap. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2017. Web. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190235451.001.0001/oso-9780190235451-chapter-3

*Exhibit photographs by Angela Weaver, 2020.

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change:  Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes:  Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

Photograph of August Wilson by Adger Cowens. Lost and Found [August Wilson], 2013. Radcliffe Bailey. © Radcliffe Bailey. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Storyteller:  August Wilson
August Wilson was born April 27, 1945 in Pittsburgh, PA and died October 2, 2005 in Seattle, WA. A celebrated playwright, he dramatized the African American experience via his ten-play cycle. Each of the works in the cycle take place in a different decade; the earliest, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set in 1911 and the most recent, Radio Golf, the year is 1997. His plays have been both critical and box office successes, garnering Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards. Fences and The Piano Lesson were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Drama; and Wilson is the only playwright to have won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play seven times. On October 2005, shortly after Wilson’s death, the Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre, becoming the only Broadway theater to bear the name of an African American.

Photograph (left) by Jackie Cotton, 2015.

August Wilson Plays
Plays not owned by Collins Library can be borrowed from libraries in Summit.

• Jitney, 1982
• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts, 1984   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 M3 1985
• Fences, 1985   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 F4 1986
• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: A Play in Two Acts, 1986   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 J64 1988
• The Piano Lesson, 1987   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 P54 1990
• Two Trains Running, 1990   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 T96 1992
• Seven Guitars, 1995  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 S48 1997
• King Hedley II, 2000
• Gem of the Ocean, 2003  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 G46 2006
• How I Learned What I Learned, 2003
• Radio Golf, 2005  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 R33 2007

Portrait Artist:  Radcliffe Bailey

Radcliffe Bailey is a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist who utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, and memory. Bailey believes that by translating his personal experiences, he can achieve an understanding of, and a healing from, a universal history. His work is often created out of found materials and certain pieces from his past, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, piano keys, and Georgia red clay.

Bio from the Jack Shainman Gallery; image from the New Gallery of Modern Art

Exhibit photographs by Angela Weaver, 2020.