Amiri Baraka ‘Blues People’ Then And Now At Express Newark

To anyone without the benefit of an African American studies degree or who has spent time in Newark, NJ, the name Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) may be unfamiliar. too bad When I thought of 20th century writers and thinkers, my peers would be WEB Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, those people.

Langston Hughes described Baraka's 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America, written as LeRoi Jones before he changed his name, “A necessity for all who appreciate and better understand the most popular music of the United States”.

The book did much more than serve as the first history of the blues written by an African-American author. “Blues People” traced “the slave's path to 'citizenship'” – Baraka's words from his introduction – through the prism of black music, blues and then jazz, expanding -se even more to consider how these genres transformed the American social, musical and economic world. , and cultural history.

“He's the first to give us this broad history of African-American music and he does it through a lens of American citizenship, that you can understand African-American political identity from slavery, freedom, civil rights , through African-American music,” Express Newark. Executive Director Salamishah Tillet told Forbes.com. “Why this is important is because African American music is often considered one of the freest expressions of African American culture. Unlike the novel, film or photograph that required resources and funding to be able to mass produce , African-American music has always been a place that has been available to black people in the United States, even under the most terrible conditions of slavery, and a place of experimentation and resistance”.

Inspired by the 60s^th anniversary of “Blues People”, Express Newark, Baraka's hometown, presents an exhibition of the same name, inviting visual artists Derrick Adams, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Cesar Melgar and Accra Shepp to reimagine their seminal works in five recently commissioned works. art installations that explore what it means to be a “Blues People” in the 21st century.

Each considers “Blues People” and Baraka to be central to the ideas developed through their artwork.

Shepp grew up around Baraka. His father, avant-garde jazz musician Archie Shepp, was a good friend of Baraka's. Archie Shepp's music accompanies the exhibition.

Fawundu was a student of Baraka. Gbadebo previously created a series of works on paper inspired by the book. Melgar is a son of Newark, where Baraka is seen as a “patron saint” to quote Tillet. Adams had an artist residency in Newark.

“Each of these artists has a social practice built into their artistic practices,” exhibit curator Alliyah Allen, associate curator and program coordinator at Express Newark, told Forbes.com. “They are all working with this spirit of art and activism, thinking about the communities they work in, the people they work with. (Baraka was) writing about the power of music, but also the power of people and community protest. (The exhibition) feels very much in the spirit of Amiri Baraka.”

In addition to being a successful author, historian, musicologist, sociologist, and music critic, as evidenced by the out-of-print “Blues People,” Baraka was a poet, playwright, novelist, teacher, political activist and pioneer of the black arts movement.

The black arts movement

Baraka was praised during his lifetime, but his praise was generally limited to literary, academic, and African-American circles. And New Jersey, where he was poet laureate. Baraka didn't “break into” popular culture the way James Baldwin or Toni Morrison did.

He might have had to continue down the path as a notable experimental Beat poet in Greenwich Village in the 1950s alongside Allan Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara. The 1960s had other plans for him, and he for them.

“There was the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and a shift in the consciousness of many African-American activists and artists toward Black Power,” explains Tillet. “(Baraka) is a symbol in the art world of this shift from the civil rights movement to the Black Power movement.”

Critics wanted Baraka, as a black man, to “shut up and write,” to use today's parlance. He didn't have it. Baraka was a radical and open-minded, who promoted black nationalism, Marxism, Islam and socialism. He placed himself at the forefront of ideas that frighten America's rich and powerful to the core.

Especially Black Power.

The Black Arts Movement that he helped launch in Harlem in 1965 after the assassination of Malcolm X can be seen as the cultural offshoot of the Black Power Movement.

With Baraka as its driving force, the Black Arts Movement pushed for a new aesthetic for black art and black people. New standards of beauty. Black is beautiful. Natural hair styles. Clothing inspired by Africa. New values. “Say it out loud, I'm black and I'm proud.”

African Americans no longer look to white culture for validation.

Baraka was dangerous to the guardians who granted or withheld fame and fortune in America.

Blues people

What constitutes a 21^St Blues Person of the Century?

“It's somebody who's aware, who's within the community, who's showing up and using their community and what they have to survive and to live and to express who they are and to move our culture forward,” Allen said.

Someone like the artists on view now through July 19, 2024 at Express Newark.

“(Accra Shepp's) work looks at the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 99% of Americans who are vulnerable. It shows that even though this diverse group of Americans of different ages, different ethnic backgrounds, racial backgrounds, backgrounds religious; then add Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020,” Tillet explains. “The breadth and beauty of everyday Americans is a version of the Blues People who are trying to speak truth to power.”

For Derrick Adams, they are the resisters, the last people on a block who refuse to be gentrified. In the exhibition “Blues People”, his social sculpture is surrounded by Cesar Melgar's photographs of Newark and the ways in which residents are pressured to leave their homes.

“Look at (Adama Delphine Fawundu), she has this diasporic lens, you're in Sierra Leone and you're in Ghana, and they're keeping alive this Griot musical tradition of speaking truth to power,” Tillet continued. “(Adebunmi Gbadebo), will return to his family's plantation in South Carolina, True Blue Plantation., and he's literally having the images of his ancestors in his fabrics and thinking about slavery, thinking about enslaved peoples like the original Blues People.

Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka is Blues People. Amiri Baraka's son. Kellie Jones is too. Professor Hans Hofmann of modern art at Columbia University is Amiri Baraka's first child.

Let's talk about a legacy.

In 1963, Amiri Baraka offered “Blues People”; his influence, and hers, continue to profoundly shape the nation today.

Admission to Express Newark (54 Halsey Street, 2nd Floor), right next to the Rutgers University Newark campus, is free.