1.
I’m the next coming to suffering, but I remember my birth
When I first brought pain to the table as an offering to my people
It was accepted and passed down; I give it rhythm … .
The horn played the time my wife left, when Daniel died,
when Nigger was a noun and boy was my last name.
2.
Lives are expensive
It cost me power to take one
with no promises but a come around
All my ends never filled the hole
3.
May power respect my ritual
May my body have head to see the villain at my table
May it affect me
May we agree
May it be true that if I hurt you, then I meant it
May apologies reach my right side before my left hand
May instructions hold me till my word works and my face is enough
May I love this when I meet me
Hope we still cool
Interrogating constructed behaviors of intimacy.
Decade of Fire is a remarkable tale of the Bronx’s rise from ash, standing to set the record straight about the fires that ravaged the borough in the late ’60s and ’70s.
A 1971 photograph by Jan van Raay shows artist Cliff Joseph leading a group of artist-activists—members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC)—in the dead of winter protesting the Whitney Museum’s controversial exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America (months before its opening on April 7, 1971).
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Tim Roth, Amy Hempel, Emmylou Harris, Matthew Ritchie, Wallace Shawn, Christian Wolff, Gilles Peress, Kendall Thomas, and George Walker.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
