Daily Archives: August 6, 2022

In 1860, a ship named the Clotilda surreptitiously slipped into the Mobile River Delta in Alabama carrying an illicit cargo of 110 enslaved Africans. While slavery was not illegal in the United States at the time, importing slaves into the country had been outlawed in 1808. To destroy evidence of the crime, the owners of the ship quickly had it burned and then distributed the Africans among themselves to work their plantations. Twelve years later, long after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, 32 of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Clotilda returned to the western banks of the Mobile River. Close to where they first set foot on this nations soil, they founded the community of Africatown, a place where they could maintain their culture and language in an otherwise foreign and hostile land. It was among the first towns established by African Americans.

Today, Africatown (also known as Africatown USA or Plateau) has been incorporated into the Mobile metropolitan area. Aside from a mural of the Clotilda on a retaining wall and a plaque at a local cemetery, there is little that signals the neighborhoods connection to this history. As with so many African American communities, Africatown has become blighted through industrial pollution and disinvestment. Abandoned and dilapidated houses and businesses define much of the built environment. A paper mill located there in the 1920s but shuttered in the early 2000s, and in the 1980s much of the land that the town occupied was seized for the construction of the Cochrane Bridge. From a peak of 21,000 residents in the early 20th century, when the paper mill was operating, the population has dwindled to approximately 2,000, about 100 of whom are thought to be direct descendants of Clotilda passengers. Despite decades of organizing and advocacy to improve these conditions, there has been little cause for hope. Now, however, it seems that the very slave ship that started it all might be the key to a brighter future for Africatown.

In 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that the remains of the Clotilda had been found in the Mobile River Delta. The discovery sent a ripple of excitement through Africatown. Residents quickly mobilized to establish the importance of their role in the evolving narrative surrounding the illegal slave ship. The culmination of this has been the launch of The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, which aims to imbue the area with programs and architecture that demonstrate its rich, complex history.

The idea competition is one of the many ways the residents of Africatown are harnessing the power of their cultural legacy to uplift the blighted community. M.O.V.E. (Making Opportunities Viable for Everyone) Mobile~Gulf Coast Community Development Corporation commissioned designer, writer, and activist Renee Kemp-Rotan to help achieve its goal of making sure that Africatown interprets and controls its own narrative, with the huge economic opportunity it now represents because of the Clotilda. What began as a design for a museum honoring the history of one of the few African-owned settlements in America evolved into a complete creative placemaking of the Africatown/Prichard/Mobile area, steeped in the unique history that shaped it. After extensive community engagement, four sites were selected to host a total of 16 venues, each with distinct programs that honor and interpret the history of Africatown while designing for a hopeful and prosperous future for the community.

Each site selected for the competition is part of a greater whole, dubbed the Africatown Cultural Mile. The goal of the cultural mile is to provide the area with economic stimulation and a cultural heritage. We are asking designers to redefine Africatown so that it could be known and admired as a world-class cultural heritage and creative destination system, with the story of a resilient Black people at its heart, said Vickii Howell, president and CEO of M.O.V.E.

According to The Architectural League of New Yorks American Roundtable report on Africatown (also led by Kemp-Rotan and Howell), when Mobile annexed the community in the 1960s there were hopes that the city would take responsibility for its new neighborhood and halt the industrial sprawl and pollution that have plagued the area and cause high levels of cancer and autoimmune disease. Instead, the City of Mobile rezoned much of the neighborhood, shrinking its residential footprint, and opened aboveground waste storage facilities in the vicinity. The community fought back, culminating in a lawsuit against International Paper and a redrafting of the zoning code.

The design competition encompasses this more-recent history as much as it does the origins of Africatown. The competition sites stitch together the long, intricate history of the area, including the Josephine Allen public housing complex (demolished by the City of Mobile in 2019), parts of the industrial waterfront, and the cemetery where the original African founders were laid to rest. You can connect to all of this history by land and water, said Kemp-Rotan. Thats what the competition is really aboutcultural tourism as an economic development engine with really cool architecture.

The winning proposals will be picked by a jury of 16 designers, historians, and local residents. The results will be compiled in a book and given to the community to provide design inspiration and guide the redevelopment of Africatown into a thriving community. Kemp-Rotan adamantly advocates for a community-scale Afrocentric utopia that embraces the entirety of African architecture and celebrates its role in the legacy of Black spaces. Most of the stuff written about Africatown has been written about the boat and the past and the history, she said. Nobodys really talking about what the future of this place is going to become. Those wishing to participate must register by September 19. Designs must be submitted by January 19, 2023, and the winning proposals will be announced on March 19 of that year. The winning teams will be invited to Mobile for the first annual International Conference on African Monument Design and Heritage Tourism on Juneteenth (June 19) 2023.

Alaina Griffin is a regular contributor to AN.

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A design idea competition seeks to turn the troubled history of Africatown through heritage tourism - The Architect's Newspaper

When the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors on July 15, the city lost one of its oldest and most important cultural institutions. The 148-year-old art school on the northeast slope of Russian Hill had been struggling for years, plagued by declining enrollment and financial woes. Yet for decades, the school known as the California School of Fine Arts until 1961 was a major force, not just on the Bay Area art scene, but on the national one. The artists and movements associated with the institution include Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Manuel Neri, the Bay Area Figurative School, the funk movement, and too many others to list.

But the most crucial period in the schools long history, when it transformed itself from a moribund finishing school for debutantes into a white-hot center of artistic experimentation and a force to be reckoned with in modern art, took place in just five years, from 1946 to 1950. During that time, the school played a significant role in the development of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. And remarkably, it was a bunch of World War II veterans who made that development possible.

In 1945, few expected the California School of Fine Arts to even survive, let alone become a center of cutting-edge art. Founded in 1874, the CSFA was a typical fine-arts college of its era, attracting large numbers of female students who wanted to acquire accomplishments to make themselves more marriageable. In the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Candida Smith writes in Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California, it had the reputation of having the most conservative curriculum in the state, with a faculty that steadfastly clung to the beaux-arts academic tradition.

The Great Depression and World War II hit the school hard, and by the 1940s it was on life support. Enrollment plunged, and in 1942 the schools director quit because there was no money to pay his salary. Most of the faculty soon followed. In 1944, the board of trustees considered closing the dying school and selling off the real estate.

At that moment, salvation appeared in the form of 32-year-old Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. MacAgy offered to run the school, on the condition that he be allowed to revise the curriculum and hire faculty as he saw fit. The board agreed, and MacAgy was appointed director on July 1, 1945. It was a momentous hiring.

MacAgy and his then-wife, Jermanyne, who was acting director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, quickly became the most important champions of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Jermanyne MacAgy staged the first Jackson Pollock exhibition in San Francisco in 1942, following that with one-artist shows by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.

The last question: After benches were installed in Golden Gate Park around 1880, what supposed crisis erupted?

Answer: An epidemic of hugging.

This week's question: What San Francisco intersection was known in the late 19th century as "Cape Horn," and why?

For his part, Douglas MacAgy set about remaking the staid CSFA into a center of artistic experimentation. To make up the core of the new painting faculty, he hired four painters he had met as curator Edward Corbett, David Park, Hassel Smith and Clay Spohn. The next year, he hired Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still. In 1948, he added Richard Diebenkorn. Ansel Adams was brought in to head the photography department, with Minor White as principal instructor. MacAgy engaged Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhardt, Man Ray and Salvador Dali to teach, and even tried to convince Marcel Duchamp to come out of retirement and join the faculty.

MacAgy swept out the cobwebs at the venerable school. He got rid of its old pedagogy, which stipulated that students had to take courses in a prescribed order. He ordered that the studios be kept open 24 hours a day, so that students could work whenever they wanted. He brought in jazz musicians and poetry readings. And symbolically, he hung a curtain over the Rivera mural in the schools exhibition hall.

MacAgy was not only a passionate believer in artistic modernism, he was also sure that his avant-garde vision would attract students. As Smith writes, MacAgy was convinced that only by making the school the center for the most advanced thinking in the visual arts would it be able to survive.

This remarkably idealistic plan Jackson Pollock as a business model? would probably have crashed and burned, had it not been for perhaps the most unusual crop of new students in the history of liberal arts education in the United States: a flood of military veterans.

What led more than two million U.S. veterans between 1945 and 1956 to put down their M-1s and start studying Abstract Expressionism, or Samuel Beckett, or Karl Marx, was an epochal piece of legislation: the GI Bill of Rights. Passed by Congress in 1944, the GI Bill offered generous educational and other benefits to returning World War II veterans. Congress did not stipulate what type of education veterans would receive; in fact, it voted down a plan that would have restricted benefits to courses of study focused on employable skills. Neither politicians nor educators expected that the veterans would prefer a liberal arts education over professional training and certainly not that they would pour into art schools.

But in that era, when the military was a true cross-section of America, they did. As Smith notes, a 1946 UCLA survey found that veterans were more likely to take humanities courses than non-veterans. Veterans were driven far less by practical concerns than non-veterans: 44% of veterans in a 1946 survey of 25 institutions of higher learning said their principal aim in returning to school was self-improvement, compared to only 12% of non-veterans. The veterans also got better grades than the non-veterans.

Thanks to the GI Bill, veterans swelled the ranks of liberal arts colleges and proportionally, still more of them enrolled in art schools. As Smith points out, between 1946 and 1952, the percentage of veterans who were full-time students at the five most important art schools in California the CSFA, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and three in Los Angeles was never less than 70%. At CSFA, veterans in 1947 and 1948 made up 74% of full-time students; in 1949, a staggering 87%.

The first veterans began enrolling in fall 1945; by the following spring term, enrollment had grown to 1,017 full- and part-time students, 350% greater than in 1944, and far greater than the schools previous high in 1929. Registration and school income increased every year through 1949.

It was a unique cohort. Smith calls it a special group of students, those veterans who, for absolutely no practical reason, turned to art when they were given the opportunity to achieve their educational dreams. When they entered the CSFA, they threw themselves into the world of art. They devoured the intense, demanding, at times quasi-religious courses offered by Still, Smith and others. And they saved the school.

In the years to come, the CSFA evolved. Still and other faculty members departed. MacAgy resigned in 1950. Abstract Expressionism was followed by the Bay Area figurative movement, which was followed by funk, which was followed by pop, and on and on, in a pattern of change as old as art itself.

The long run of the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, came to an end this year. But while mourning that loss, its worth remembering the five unique years when the schools modern era began driven by brilliant artists and administrators of vision, and by a bunch of veterans who wanted to expand their lives.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. His most recent book is Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.

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How veterans and avant-garde art saved the California School of Fine Arts - San Francisco Chronicle

Taking the mic at the Local Progress national meet-up at the Colorado Convention Center on August 5, Denver City Councilmember Robin Kniechhighlighted some regressive moments in Colorado's recent history with the progressive politicians, advocates and government workers who'd gathered there.

"In 1992, Colorado was dubbed the 'Hate State' because our voters passed a measure prohibiting anti-discrimination ordinances for gay and lesbian individuals. Now, it was overturned by the Supreme Court, but our divided state government also passed laws targeting immigrants, excluding them from government. And we have also had we still have a quasi-right-to-work state that's anti-labor," Kniech recalled.

But then she began to talk about more contemporary progressive victories in Denver and the state: earmarking significant city dollars for affordable housing, enacting a minimum wage in Denver and across Colorado, and giving undocumented immigrants the right to access unemployment benefits.

After two years of Zoom meetings, the return of the Local Progress convention to an in-person format was an opportunity for progressives such as Kniech to share what they've accomplished with people who'd flown in from across the country, including Teresa Mosqueda with the Seattle City Council, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union.

Local Progress, which was founded in 2012, describes itself as a "movement of local elected officials advancing a racial and economic justice agenda through all levels of local government." The organization has a network of over 1,300 local elected officials in 48 states; over 200 people showed up for the three-day convention in Denver, including 24 from Colorado.

The August 5 session focusing on "abusive state preemption" came on the second day of the gathering, and was the only one open to the press.

During Colorado's "Hate State" days, local municipalities were preempted by the state from establishing anti-discrimination ordinances related to LGBTQ individuals. But while that preemption went away when the amendment was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, local officials have had to battle against many other measures over the past few decades.

"We were preempted from local minimum wages, inclusionary housing, lots of other things," said Kniech, who'd lobbied for the convention to come to Denver during her last year as an at-large council rep.

In 1999, Colorado passed a minimum wage preemption law that prevented municipalities from enacting their own minimum wage levels. In 2019, however, the Colorado Legislature repealed that law. Led by Kniech, Denver City Council soon approved a new minimum wage, which hit $15.87 per hour in 2022. Starting next year, the city's minimum wage will increase in line with the Consumer Price Index.

Joe Neguse, the Democratic representing Colorado's 2nd Congressional District, was at the event, and praised Kniech for leading Denver's efforts to increase the minimum wage.

"That does not happen. It does not happen without Robin Kniech," Neguse said.

Lizeth Chacon, the founder of the Colorado People's Alliance who recently transitioned to a job as co-executive director of the Workers Defense Project in Texas, discussed the 2016 campaign to raise the minimum wage statewide through a ballot initiative. That effort ultimately resulted in the minimum wage hitting $12 in Colorado at the start of 2020.

"We were really clear that $12 an hour was not enough. We also knew that $15 was not going to do in a state like Colorado," Chacon said. "We made a commitment that we actually needed to continue the fight."

That led to a "big preemption fight" in the Colorado Legislature that lasted three years, until lawmakers passed the preemption repeal bill in 2019. "Local elected officials really shifted the narrative of this campaign," Chacon said, noting that they were able to say what their cities and counties needed.

Many of the elected officials at the conference work in blue cities in red states, where preemption fights are heating up. The issue of abortion, for example, will continue to be a major battle for some states and municipalities.

Throughout the years, state preemption has been used to prevent progressive achievements, according to Courtnee Melton-Fant, an assistant professor in the Division of Health Systems Management and Policy at the University of Memphis. "Its being used to maintain the tool thats already there," Melton-Fant said of state preemption being employed to maintain homophobia and racism.

Jamie Torres, who just became president of Denver City Council, told Local Progress members of her sponsorship of a land acknowledgment that's now read at council meetings.

"It would be a disservice, it would be offensive, for these words to be left to symbolism. They have to spur action, or we should not say them. After adopting this acknowledgment, we were able to convert Denver's annual bison public auction to an annual bison donation program, exclusively to tribes re-establishing their bison herds throughout the country," Torres added, noting that she's witnessed two transfers of nearly fifty bison through the program.

But while progressives have enjoyed successes in Denver, Torres and Kniech acknowledged that the city still has issues.

"Denver is not utopia. Police use of force, housing-price increases and displacement, homelessness these challenges are as bad as theyve ever been," Kniech said. "We have a lot of work to do. And we have a lot to learn from all of you."

As the session wrapped, Smalls, the keynote speaker for the Local Progress convention, offered one major takeaway.

"We all have to be Davids versus Goliaths," said the man who stood up to Amazon.

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Local Progress Convention Brings Progressive Politicians Together in Denver | Westword - Westword

We're all familiar with hard-boiled Christian clergy who rail against the sins of other people and with culture-wars lobbyists who push restrictive laws against what they see as society's larger evils.

What often strikes their critics is the disconnection between the gospel they claim they're defending and the human foibles so visible in their own lives.

Of course, outspoken Christians aren't the only people to preach one thing and do another. That's a problem endemic to the human race. It's just more noticeable when it comes from self-proclaimed spokespeople for God.

One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr, addressed this problem recently in a series of devotions taken from his earlier writings.

In these devotions, Rohr suggests a radical path for the religious: learn to live your beliefs so fully you don't have to talk about them -- and then let others infer from your example what they will, without direct input from you. I offer up his observations as food for thought.

The core principle of Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation is taken from the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi (11821226): "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better."

In one devotion, "The Joy of Not Counting," Rohr hearkens back to Francis, who chose a remarkable approach to improving himself and maybe in the process quietly nudging the larger culture toward its own betterment as well. See tinyurl.com/3z8b7ra3

Francis arrived on the scene "in the pivotal period when Western civilization began to move into rationality, functionality, consumerism, and perpetual war," Rohr writes.

He was the product of that same complicated culture, but as his faith developed, he began to rethink his assumptions.

"Rather than fighting the systems directly and risk becoming their mirror image, Francis just did things differently," Rohr says. "He moved from the common economy of merit to the wondrous economy of grace, where God does not do any counting, but only gives unreservedly."

As the West entered a long, still ongoing cycle of economic production and consumption that would, by our time, threaten the whole planet, Francis chose to love nature and go about barefoot.

"Francis didn't bother questioning Church doctrines and dogmas," Rohr says. "He just took the imitation of Christ seriously and tried to live the way that Jesus lived."

To him, serious believers should function primarily as living, breathing, organic practitioners of Christ-likeness rather than what the contemporary Pope Francis has called "word police," "inspectors" or "museum curators."

Rohr summarizes Francis' tenets: "As the popular paraphrase of a line from Francis's Rule goes, 'Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.'"

In a subsequent devotion, "Living What We Are 'For,'" Rohr takes this idea a step further. See tinyurl.com/yeyphksr

To become spiritually effective, he suggests, people who claim to be followers of Jesus should practice what Rohr calls "non-idolatry ... the withdrawing of our enthrallment from all kingdoms except the kingdom of God."

This nonattachment is more peaceable, and more effective to boot, than constantly lashing out at everybody who isn't part of your particular sect or political party.

"Nonattachment (freedom from loyalties to human-made, domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior," Rohr writes.

Mainly, Christians shouldn't be obsessed with all the things they're against.

That's a pet peeve of mine, if you want to know: those activists, religious or not, Right or Left, who define themselves by the people and things they hate, never by what they love.

"There is nothing to be against," Rohr argues. "Just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!"

We've gotten so much of Christianity backward, he says.

In the New Testament, St. Paul taught that Christians "were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness 'go to the world,'" Rohr says.

"Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender -- and sometimes 'go to church.' This doesn't seem to be working!"

This could be why church membership and attendance are declining:

"Some new studies indicate that Christians are not as much leaving Christianity as they are realigning with [alternative] groups that live Christian values in the world -- instead of just gathering again to hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday."

Such alternative groups include support groups, prayer groups, study groups, house-building projects and the like, he says.

Now this is a radical concept, isn't it?

What if we who hold what we believe to be Christian views quit trying to push our agenda on others -- and instead concentrated on trying to live our own lives like Jesus lived his life, full of acceptance, mercy and faith? What if we sought to broaden our own relationship with the Lord more than we sought to judge everybody else's relationships? What if we felt more allegiance to the kingdom of God than to some earthly political agenda?

Why, I imagine we'd not only become better disciples, but we'd be more effective at spreading the faith. We'd say less, but accomplish way more.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at

pratpd@yahoo.com

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Live what you preach so you don't have to preach - Arkansas Online