Mitchell Squire "no 'nother country"
CUE Art Foundation
This event has ended.
In a July 23, 1968 essay for LOOK magazine, James Baldwin wrote through a set of concerns about the creative career of the black artist, particularly that of the actor Sidney Poitier. His words illuminated a dangerous location in the life of the actor that was uncomfortable and difficult to navigate. It was the threshold on which he stood when called upon by Hollywood to fulfill his creative capacity as an artist (which I took to mean participating in more expansive, albeit culturally estranged and personally challenging, roles) while being buffeted by an insistent demand from the black community to fulfill his responsibilities as a citizen (which I took to mean the true keeping of the realities of black life). We owe much to Baldwin's capacious mind but more to his will to essay publicly before a mass audience that would likely never get, much less agree with, his rendering of a space only few would ever experience. He manifested the same truth, beauty, and vividness in his writing that he characterized in Sidney's craft and that he hoped would assist in providing his audience the necessary perceptual stays by which to view the actor's life and work, knowing all too well the irony of achievement and the need to escape the isolation imposed by a creative career; or as he stated precisely, "the difficulty to remain in touch with all that nourishes you when you think you have arrived at Sidney's eminence and are in the interesting, delicate and terrifying position of being part of a system that you have to change."
But that was 1968. It seems hardly necessary to consider the agency of that threshold today, given the varied cultural evolutions occurring since. Or so it seems. But what can often be affirmed as a non-necessity for some, can for a great many others be figured a trump. Set against the backdrop of Baldwin's rhetorical question regarding Sidney's presence in the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,[1] the exhibition of work under the title no 'nother country engages a notion of instrumentality more accurately perceived as a patient form of activism. As the exhibition's anchor, One Year Later Same as Fifty Years Before (when all I want is a boat) (2010), depicts an alternating cycle of anticipated destiny, this project expands a particular conversation about "from whence you came" as it questions a set of personal and cultural plots bounded by realness and fantasy, romance and estrangement, and the thrust and distrust of celebrity. It has as both subject and object a taking stock amidst difficult moments through acts of appropriation and the consideration of unlikely if not "strange instruments."
Media
Schedule
from November 19, 2011 to January 14, 2012
Opening Reception on 2011-11-19 from 18:00 to 20:00