Riche Richardson's Art Quilts

Journal Entries on First Trip to Paris in 2007 (Follow-Up to Prior Post Entitled "Walking by Faith")

2012-03-01T19:11:00.005-08:00

I first began to keep a journal when I was 11 during the summer of 1982. For example, the entry from January 3, 1983 reads, “Good day at school today. So much homework.” My entries tapered off eventually. I picked up journaling again when I was 14 and since that point, it has been one of the rituals to which I’ve been most committed in my life.

Keeping journals is the most consistent and committed writing that I do. They are one of the best reflections of who I am and of my voice. Early on, and for many years, I made journal entries on a daily basis. In more recent years, there have been times when I’ve written an entry every other day, even at the end of a very long day. These days, I typically make entries every now and then.

As a high school senior at age 17, I began the practice of making a special journal entry on New Year’s Eve in which I overview the year and salute it for specific lessons I have learned. I have done one every year since then. One day, I put all of those entries down side by side and read them. I was astonished by the clarity with which they allowed me to track my personal development. Ten years ago, I began to make a similar special entry on my birthday. (I began the practice that same year of reading gospel accounts of the nativity on Christmas Eve, and have also remained committed to that practice on an annual basis since I was 17).

My journals have had different themes and purposes over the years. For example, in graduate school, I began to keep what I called a “Professional Prayer Journal,” which was more spiritual. (Its framing beginning with “Dearest Lord” and ending with “Your Child” was reminiscent of the epistolary format of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple). I kept that basic structure even after professional concerns receded as a thematic priority and others emerged. The themes of my journals have been diverse. I have also seen that journals have always seemed to end at the appropriate place and time, even if extra pages are left over. I have a stack of my old journals at this point, and keep them with the 100-page draft of my autobiography that I wrote in college in a course on Black Women’s Autobiography with Dr. Gloria Wade-Gayles. I love being able to refer back to and learn from experiences in my life that I may have forgotten otherwise.

I spent several years reading through the dense and rich autobiography repertoire of famed French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir and loved the way that she incorporated journal entries in developing her series of memoirs; she is one of the most inspiring journalers I’ve ever read. When I was in Paris as a Cultural Envoy in 2009 and visited Collège Martin Luther King in Villiers-le-Bel in Eastern Paris, I gave a talk to students entitled “Art in Education and My Education As an Artist,” which incorporated an excerpt from my journal entries about my first trip to Paris to discuss the impact that visiting the Louvre had made on me, and to stress the importance of building art literacies. These are points that the teachers underscored and built upon as they translated the content of my remarks to students. At some point, I hope to publish my series of lectures and interviews from that week in an art book entitled An Artist at the Ambassador’s: Notes on Visit to the U.S. Embassy in France as a Cultural Envoy. Thinking back on my comments about the Louvre in that talk and the impact that they made on students in the classroom, and on the blog post I made a just few days ago entitled “Walking by Faith,” I thought it would be interesting to follow up and share the two journal entries that I made about my first trip to Paris, which discuss the trip a bit more comprehensively and in more detail. Here are the two relevant entries below.

7/05/07 Paris, France 1:22 a.m.

Dearest Lord,

I praise you and thank you. I’ve been here in Paris for a week and a half-more now. It’s been an exciting trip! In the Atlanta airport, I felt so sophisticated with my beauty case and “bombshell” luggage. I have looked at passengers fly out for Paris for several years, and looked at an earlier flight depart before mine. There was nothing like the feeling of being among those boarding a plane-finally-for Paris myself. I’d had a first class flight from Sacramento and sat next to a rather cold white man, from whom I kept my distance. On the Paris flight the male flight attendant was nice and it was an elegant experience. But when it was almost over and I woke up the next morning, I could barely move my hand and fingers and my wrist was limp. The man next to me opened my juice and other container and got my suitcase down. This was unexpected. At the airport, I had no choice but to take a cab. I got in w/ ease and went straight to sleep. My room was nice w/ a small closet-sized bathroom. My first view of Paris was not too impressive. “Is this what I’ve fantasized about for years and staked as a life’s ambition!” was my feeling. I got up that evening and walked for a few blocks down Av de Italie and just to see. I felt good. Inspired. I wore jeans and a black top and my sandals. The next morning I had some trouble getting the carte orange until I learned of the necessary photo. (That Sunday, I’d also tried to get a bandage for my hand and a waiter looked at it). I was two hours late to class b/c of confusion on the metro. I then had to figure out how to get the textbooks at FNAC, which was another challenge. Class was that afternoon. It was a full and busy day. The next two were good. Anne, Géraldine and I worked on the film. We met at the Josephine Baker Paradise du Fruit near Le Tour Montparnasse, then they interviewed me at Anne’s brother’s apartment. I felt collected and articulate and wore gold-a yellow cashmere sweater and a skirt. They took me over to Notre Dame and filmed me at the quilting store. The next day, we met at Le Deux Magots, where I had lunch, and they filmed me in front of the Beauvoir-Sartre plaque. We went to the Josephine Baker Pool. To the Thomas Jefferson plaque on Champs Elysee. And to Montmartre, among other places.

In general, it was a great and educational experience, and a great honor. I t was a great intellectual experience to witness such a positive model of collaboration, and enduring.

My first day of class, I had my first views of elegant Paris from the Metro, and the Eiffel Tower. And Thursday, I had to go see about my hand and went to the emergency room. The doctor was nice and diagnosed it as “Lover’s Palsy.” It was free. He took a picture afterwards and wrote a note for my doctor, as well as a prescription for the arm brace. I was intimidated by the idea of going and got lost along the way, but it was a positive experience.

Friday, Géraldine prepared lunch-five courses-at her lovely apartment and we did more interviewing. . . The lunch at Géraldine’s was nice and her apartment looks gorgeous. So lovely. The floors. The windows. The moldings. The ceilings. The ironwork. . . . Her studio a few blocks away is also nice. I appreciated her hospitality and seeing her family. Friday evening I went to class. And then Anne filmed me in front of the Moulin Rouge. I was also contending with a terrible cold and sore throat.

Saturday, I went to Montmartre and bought souvenirs and purses and a picture.

Sunday, I went to Notre Dame again, to Il St. Louis, and walked to Luxembourg.

Talking to my family has been nice. Today was the Fourth of July. I ate at a couple of cafes and skipped class. Ma walked well the other day . . . I called home a lot over the weekend because I felt lonely . . .
Finally, I ask you [will keep this prayer section private]. . . I love you.

YC,

Riche’

7/9/07

Dearest Lord,

I’m on the flight homeward now and thank you again for this mighty trip. I’ve learned a lot from it and am eager to apply it. I went to the Louvre yesterday. To see the sense of history was amazing. Very large marble sculptures. What we would consider mural-sized paintings from the 1600s. Just a beautiful archive. I was excited to see the Mona Lisa and called home while in the room. I was very inspired to walk the halls. In a sense, though, the experience stressed the urgency of learning how to “read” art. For in a museum so large, one can only scan or glance at paintings and sculptures very quickly. Really, it takes time and energy, years really, to fully engage such a vast collection. I stayed until closing time and got a brief look. But the way to see such art is to visit and revisit it. In general, I don’t think that I could have spent my last day in Paris in a better way. The visit to the Louvre also stressed for me the importance of being a good steward and custodian of whatever arts and other things are in one’s possession and in one’s family. It does for one at a local level what the Louvre, by preserving French and other cultural history, does in a more abstract way. It made me long to see the beauty of home in Montgomery and aware of the nice work that has gone into putting it together. It made me realize that my own home reflects Southern history and heritage in profound ways.

The visit to the Louvre brought me out of my shopping addiction I developed last week. Saturday and for two days before that, I went to the Galleries Lafayette. I spent Monday and Tuesday, and perhaps some of Wednesday, looking around in shops, including high-end couture outfits, on the Champs Elysee. I found a few summer dresses-five-for my goal was to have some fashions with that Paris cut that’s so hard to find in the U.S. I had warmed up early in the week with buying lingerie at Valege, four [sets] in all. I never found the Etam set I wanted in the right size in pink. The dresses fit well, though, incl. the one I ended up exchanging. I have a little Paris wardrobe now. I even picked out the kind of Louis Vuitton purse I want-one w/ a bit of structure-at the Galleries Lafayette. This morning, I saw a woman w/ one in that line w/ darker golden straps, which I think I prefer. I saw the beauty case and would love to have one of those, too, along with a couple of pieces of luggage. I spent two or three hours trying to find the right outfit for Ma-she asked me for a skirt and a blouse. I found it at Zara’s. I wanted something that she would like.

I’m pleased with what I bought and the gifts. . .

I had a ball with Efua and Marc last Tuesday. It was pouring rain when I went to see her and then we sat in the hotel lobby and had tea and croissants and just talked-some along with Marc. It was relaxing and good. . . That afternoon, we went over to FNAC and then to a café. Spending time with a friend in another part of the world was just terrific.

Another highlight of last week was seeing the Kara Walker exhibition. It was phenomenal. I was impressed by the range of her work-truly impressed. Films. Installations. I am looking forward to writing the review. This is an event that also shows the unique opportunities that exist in Paris, or the difference that context makes in displaying art. Saturday, I saw Le Defense. It was interesting to see the arcs lined up. The buildings. Really interesting. The idea of purpose, precision, comes through. And perspective. . .

Again, thanks and praises to you for Paris-for seeing it. I put it in your hands and ask that you will multiply that gift. . .

YC,
Riche’

Walking by Faith

2012-02-25T13:17:00.007-08:00

In lobby of Paris hotel visiting friends Efua and Marc Paul,
who were also vacationing in the city after a trip to Spain

For a long time, I have been meaning to make an entry on this art blog about one of the experiences that has most inspired me on my journey as an artist, and that I had during the years that “Portraits: From Montgomery to Paris,” my first solo art quilt exhibition, came together. As I lived and worked in California, I became more and more of a Francophile. There’s a lot of documentation in interviews at this point about the impact of Paris on my art, including my trip to Paris in 2009 as a Cultural Envoy of the U.S. Embassy in France, but I have never told this story. The film “A Portrait of the Artist,” in some ways, is also a reminder of this really unbelievable experience that to this day, I am glad I went through.

I studied Paris and French culture, attended the annual French Film Festival in Sacramento from the time of its inception in 2002, took language courses in French at the Alliance Francąise in Sacramento and, inspired by interior designers such as Claudia Strasser, even decorated my apartment there as a “Paris apartment with a Southern folk and vintage twist.” I dreamed and planned to take a trip to Paris at some point to see the city for myself. My worst fears were that I’d die or go blind before it happened. I longed to see the majestic architecture up close. Meantime, I talked to people I knew who had traveled or lived there. Some days when I was traveling and had time to spare at the airport, I’d even sit in the area where people were boarding flights for Paris, just to check out some of the people bound for this great city and get a peek at their culture and legendary style. On June 23, 2007, after arriving in Atlanta from Sacramento (and after having had the upgrade to first class that has been a constant comfort on those cross-country trips) I could not believe that I was finally one of them. I was finally on my way to Paris for a vacation, on which I would also be taking another French course and would be interviewed about my art quilt project by Géraldine Chouard and Anne Crémieux.

The dinner on the flight that night was sumptuous. I remember being so excited that my very first art print cards were tucked in one of the long compartments on the side of the plane beside the seats, set for distribution in the city. There was plenty of seat and leg room though passengers were three abreast in the rows on this large plane. The flight attendant, a French guy, had asked a couple of times if I was comfortable but I told him that I felt fine and drifted off to sleep, excited that when I woke up we’d be in France or at least very close. When I woke up, as flight attendants were bringing passengers breakfast, I immediately saw that my left wrist was entirely limp. I couldn't move my fingers at all either. The man sitting next to me on the flight noticed the problem, reached over, and gently opened my orange juice and water, a gesture for which I was thankful in the midst of my confusion over what was going on with my hand. As we disembarked, he got my bag down from the overhead compartment. After going through customs, I was in Charles de Gaulle airport with three pieces of luggage and clueless about what was up with my hand. I had no idea what was going on, and expected it to just go away. My mom had urged me to get a cab and I had insisted I would be taking the Metro instead because the maps were straightforward and I was sure I wouldn’t have a problem finding my lodging; why spend so much on a cab when the Metro was much cheaper? Given these unexpected circumstances, however, her advice automatically won out. I got a cab to the hostel where I’d be staying for my extended trip, then called my family and told them what was wrong. They got busy on computers trying diagnose the problem. Meantime, jetlagged, I took a nap, hoping that the hand would be back to normal when I woke up. It wasn’t. I remember going out for a walk that evening. I bought a cloth brace to wrap it up. When I was at a restaurant, a French waiter noticed it and judged that I should go the hospital. I figured that I might need to at some point, but wanted to give it more time to heal on its own.

The next day, I registered in my French course (my third one over the past couple of years), got my books, and attended my first class. The next two days, I met with Anne and Géraldine for the interview, toured the city to the sites linked to quilts in my Paris series such as Josephine Baker and Simone de Beauvoir, had fun, and just enjoyed seeing the city for the first time. I did my best to camouflage the wrist as we taped. Every time I see the film, I notice where the hand gets out of hand a couple of times, like walking up those steps in Montmartre, or when I am wearing the gold chain bracelet to distract from it when the camera is up close on it as I go through the fabrics at the second fabric store we visited. (The first is the famous quilt store near Notre Dame owned by Diane de Obaldia, a former Chanel model). I am also very inspired to know the strength and faith that it took to be optimistic, to keep focused, and to speak in front of the camera as I was interviewed for the film, and to enjoy and savor the whole experience, when the truth was that I did not have a clue in the world about what was going on with my left hand; it couldn’t even move.

There were a lot of European tourists with luxurious double-decker tour buses parked at my hostel. The third night in the city, after our filming had wrapped, I was standing in the lobby ready to go upstairs and rest after a long day and was invited to come along on a two-hour tour of the city on one of those fantastic buses with a group of high school students from Amsterdam. They seated me up front next to a teacher who could speak English and he translated as we were taken on a long drive through the city, culminating, after the sun set, in a visit to the Eiffel Tower where we took photos in the midst of the beautiful lights. Wow!

When my hand had not gotten better after four days, and most of our filming had wrapped, I went to a pharmacy and tried to buy a brace. The pharmacist would not sell it to me, insisted that I to go to the hospital, and wrote down the name and location of the closest one. I found it easily and had a wait for an hour or so. The doctor who treated me looked at the wrist. He’d look at it, and then would speak in French to the nurse, laughing merrily with her a couple of times as I sat on pins and needles wondering what could be wrong. I had presumed it was an extreme form of carpal tunnel. Finally, he gave me the diagnosis-radial nerve damage-also known as "lover's palsy," "honeymoon palsy," and “Saturday night palsy.” I'd never heard of this condition with all of these fancy names that seem far too spicy and free-wheeling for the life I live. Apparently, the damage had occurred on the flight. He prescribed a brace, and recommended scans on returning to California. He then asked me for a “favor,” to photograph my hand for his students to study, a request that I obliged, though as the hand was photographed and documented for medical study (with both arms outstretched, one hand positioned up to reflect normal right wrist movement, the other to show the flaccid left wrist) I could not help but think about the history of Sara Baartman as the so-called “Hottentot Venus” in the early 19th century. I was actually being photographed for medical archives because of my hand injury. When I paid the $100 to my travel agent for international medical travel insurance, I never thought in a million years that I might need it. Yet, the doctor cut me off when I tried to ask about costs and mentioned my travel insurance. Literally, he said, "Ordinarily there might be a 60 euro charge; but forget it. Enjoy Paris." This sobering moment underscored how ironic it is to be able to get such excellent health care in a foreign country given the experiences with health care that many face in the U.S. Even the visit to the hospital in Paris was good and educational for me, to the point that I was thankful to have had that experience. It, too, became one of the things I most appreciated about my first Paris trip!

As the trip continued, I walked by faith that movement would return, put on a good face, and just did everything I needed to do with my one functioning hand. I had to wash and flatiron my hair and put it up with one hand. (There was this one day that it looked kind of disheveled because I could not get it up any better than that, which also made me think that sometimes when we see people out in public, they may have done the best that they can do to put themselves together and should never be judged). I had to shower and dress with one hand. My grandmother had been recovering from falls in 2005 and 2007. It had been one thing to support and encourage her on the road to recovery and to face those challenges with prayer and faith, but one definitely sees one’s own presumptuousness when faced with physical challenges of one’s own. I saw what it meant to look at that hand and will it to move, yet have it stay still. I got sick with one of those terrible colds that one can easily get when traveling, and was literally in a situation where blowing my nose was a challenge because the fingers on that left hand didn’t work.

Back in California, I took the scan, which assessed the level of damage. The wrist and hand were limp and numb; I only felt faint and vague pain now and then. I had not planned to be back on email anyway when I first got back (always my policy for a few days after returning from trips). My box had overflowed and remained full; it bounced emails back until I was ready to empty it. I figured that any important message would reach me eventually, and that if I was meant to get it at any point I would. (Before that, I had actually kept my website profile down for two years at my university). The people closest to me called and life went on. Typing was impossible with my left hand. After two weeks went by, I began to send emails by typing with just my right hand, a process that slowed me down in healthy ways and set a different pace and rhythm. My academic writing was almost impossible to do. I knew the art show was a year away and had no time to lose, so began to work on the quilts by balancing with the injured left hand and stitching with the right. The “Portraits” quilt show, at a point, actually continued to come together when my left hand and wrist were temporarily paralyzed, totally out of commission and could not move.

Years ago, I was working as a volunteer at a camp and learned that the mother of one of the girls with whom we worked (age 11) had inflicted an unthinkable form of abuse on her child and burned off her fingers on both hands by holding them on the stove. Another counselor and I were responsible for taking this child and another girl home in the evenings. The two of us would sit in the car on the back seat and the other counselor and another girl would be in the front. One of the most heartbreaking moments was to realize, while still talking and looking ahead, that I was being stared at. I looked down and saw the child staring at my hand that was flat down on the back seat to steady myself. I retracted my fingers and put my arm around her and hugged her. The truth is that even if my hand had never moved again, God’s grace would have been sufficient to sustain me in the midst of it all. There is nothing that I could have ever said after feeling and knowing the pain of a story like hers and that of so many people who have suffered bodily injuries in ways that few people ever think about or imagine. After losing the ability to function in some way, one learns in a very visceral way not to ever take the ability to move for granted. Getting up and out of bed in the morning is something that most people take for granted, but the ability to do that is a miracle.

I remember getting a manicure because there was nothing else I could do with the hand at the time. A guy at Taylor’s Market, the grocery store where I shopped sometimes in Sacramento, would walk me over to the light rail and help me carry my bags because of the lack of function in my hand. Every little movement of my fingers, every little movement of the wrist-a little twitch to the left that wasn't there before-was something that I noticed and celebrated. I remember what a triumph I felt to have movement return slowly, from finger to finger. My postman and building doorman monitored the brace and observed my progress when I was downstairs in my building; the postman was of the mind that I should go ahead and let the wrist loose from the brace. My wrist definitely felt stronger and better. Finally, after about six weeks, the day came when my wrist felt like an egg hatching and I knew I no longer needed the brace. I felt reborn in a way. The first night without the brace, a Friday, my left hand moved tentatively, and then began to gallop across the keyboard once again. Even after it could move, I still needed to build strength and went on to have two therapy sessions that fall, and then did daily finger and wrist exercises with puddy and one-pound weights.

At the spa, weeks later, during a moment when the memory of my recent experience had receded and was not on my mind, the manicurist excitedly pointed out from across the room that my hand was healed, and came over to greet me. Similarly, the guy at the grocery store, who'd helped me carry my bag to the light rail a couple of times when I had been wearing the brace, did the same thing as I stood in the checkout line. In those small moments, my hand’s movement became something to celebrate. Seeing other people take such joy in my recovery inspired me all over again. I found it odd, puzzling, and funny, even, that the brace also drew the interest and attention of lots of guys who would use it as a conversation opener when I was out in public; it had worked like an aphrodisiac that summer.

That I type this post with both hands today is a blessing, for I lost all ability to do this not five years ago. That summer, other than two medical appointments, I did my own research. I saw that eating well and getting the proper nutrients was important, so I did those things. I took extra good care of myself. A black woman doctor substituting for my Asian male physician who was away on vacation was nice to meet but I was unsettled by her cynicism in making the comment “IF the hand ever recovers . . . ”; I was not about to be discouraged and indicated to her that I was sure that it would move again.

The prognosis I had seen online was that it could take up to a year or more for movement to return, but I definitely wanted to be back on track sooner rather than later. I believed it would be sooner. My positive attitude helped a lot. I did not complain or fret a day in Paris or once I returned to the U.S. I just walked with the faith that my hand would heal. The optimism that I had to have in that situation with my hand translated into optimism about a lot of other things, and helped to give me new levels of strength, confidence, fearlessness and determination. (And it was strength I needed later that fall and beyond as I dealt with an entirely different medical issue, prepared for months to go through surgery, and in the process, went out and interviewed for jobs; those experiences helped me tremendously in that process). I look at myself on screen in “A Portrait of the Artist,” see the brace in certain shots, am always reminded of this powerful and transformative experience, and am deeply inspired all over again.

Dealing with Men, Dating, and Relationships (Thoughts Outlined for College Women)

2012-02-08T07:21:00.001-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day in advance! I LOVE talking and thinking about the subject of relationships. If I were married to the ideal man and in the perfect relationship right now, I’d be as obsessed and devoted to it. I enjoy it in much the same way as the singer Béyonce, who notably released the hit song “Single Ladies” as a married woman and has remained an advocate for them. I very much approach it as I approach almost every topic of interest to me, including those related to home and lifestyle management-as a researcher-at least in a casual and informal sense. The fun ad hoc discussion that came together around my dining room table a few years ago one of the times that my mom was visiting me in California, and had female friends over, convinced me that I know the discursive terrain and all of the popular works-the classics-well enough to teach a course in this area. Precious few people on earth ever see me come to life on this topic and hear what I really think about it. They can almost be counted on one hand. My mother. My grandmother. My aunt and cousins, who are her two daughters. My truly close girlfriends. A close female colleague or two. (And my uncle is positively the only man in close enough proximity to have exposure to my real opinions on relationships now and then). My cousins, for instance, might overhear me sharing opinions about this and that with my mother. The other off-topic post on this blog from a few months ago discusses my all-time favorite relationship manual, The Alpha Male. A few years ago, for instance, I was reading various books and articles on this topic (to the point of even studying the behavior of wolf packs), and to my mom, underscoring my longtime and really lifelong intention to marry “a man for all seasons,” declaring that I intend to “marry at the front line of culture” and that “a strong woman has to be strong enough to deal with a strong man” and not fall for the “nice guy” type who on the surface seems “safe” emotionally but is often a passive-aggressive, jealous, and insecure jerk in disguise. I was discussing the perils and passive-aggressiveness of the “beta” male in this sense, along with the widespread and wrongheaded presumption that this type makes the best kind of partner for a woman with alpha female qualities, while declaring my intention to avoid him and never deal with him at all for the rest of my life in both personal and professional contexts. During this time, I was stunned to get a sense of how much my cousins, college students, had picked up when one of them fed back the basic profile of “the alpha male” to me, explaining why a certain guy in popular culture often presumed to be in this category “is really a ‘beta male.’”

Keeping the bar high and not settling has not ever been difficult for me because I am not the type to compromise my values or my integrity. There’s a book that I once read that argues that men have an “alarm” that a woman either sets off or doesn’t, and if she doesn’t, she will just be “strung along” until he meets the woman who is right for him. I’m kind of like that, too. In the course of my life, I would say that I have been genuinely attracted to very, very, very few men, below 1%. Few are ever “my type,” so to speak. So far, no man has ever come close to setting off this so-called “alarm” for me, whatever that means, which also explains why I’m still single. I would honestly rather remain single for the rest of my life than ever date or marry the wrong man and rising above the fear of being alone is the most liberating thing a woman can ever do.

I take a lot of pleasure in empowering women about relationships. In a public sense, I spoke at a forum on male-female relationships for students at UC Davis around 2006. When he was feeling me out as a panelist for it, the guy who invited me to participate joked when he heard some of my opinions and said that I was “dangerous” because I might help women on campus get “too smart” on relationships with the kind of wise advice I had to offer, and in turn, ruin it for guys who count on women to be naïve and gullible. He was like, “Please stay away from them and in the classroom!” Recently, I was asked to share some reflections in a survey on romantic relationships designed to support college women and help them avoid such things as desperation, the game of “musical chairs” in relationships, and just settling. Though some of what I think about negotiating relationships is not necessarily grounded in a feminist position per se, these issues underscore, too, the need for more feminist dialogue for students on campuses about relationships. What I ended up writing is copied below. In this case, as was the case with a couple of other posts last year, and because I am amazed by how many people actually read this blog and the range of posts that draw their interest, I am taking the liberty during this Valentine’s season to go “off topic” to share perspectives on relationships that may be useful. My thoughts outlined here were originally typed into a box off the cuff and not written as an essay per se, so are more informal and stream-of-consciousness, but include some basic ideas that I think are important for young women to think about in the area of relationships. While these comments were originally pitched to support college women and share strategies and perspectives that might help the specific problems that respondents were asked to talk about, some of this is translatable to women across generations, men, and various relationships beyond the male-female dynamic discussed here. Here it goes . . .

I think that it is important for young women to remain true to their values and to not allow anyone else to lead them to compromise their integrity, including their values about spirituality and sexuality. The important thing is to be able to respect oneself, to hold out for the very best, and to never sell oneself out, or God. For me, it is important to be my best possible woman to attract the best possible man, and to keep the bar high and never settle.

I think that the advice that is offered in lots of contemporary dating manuals has truth in underscoring, for instance, that it is important to have confidence, to not look to another person to complete you, and to “date yourself.” In other words, there’s that saying that “you teach people how to treat you,” and so must understand how to convey a sense of your own worth. Learn how to channel that alpha female/femme fatale kind of energy that has him wondering where the relationship is going with you, instead of coming across as the "needy" kind of woman/"nice girl" ready to be his doormat and whose fate rests on his every word, whim, call and decision. Recognize yourself as “the catch” in the relationship.

I think that women could help themselves exponentially by building their literacies about relationships, reading in the self-help genre on this topic, and understanding how relationships should ideally work. To not have this basic understanding is the equivalent of getting in a car blindfolded, then driving around on roads oblivious to any of the warning signs. With this literacy, for example, one knows how to recognize a relationship that is healthy versus one that is toxic. One understands not to take the bait when he gives you his card and says, "call me," or to understand what it means when he spends the evening talking about himself or says, "come over." I also think that young women need to understand that it is important to be with a person who is truly stable and emotionally grounded, for life itself can feel like a roller coaster. Ideally, two stable people should come together to navigate the ups and downs of life, as opposed to the relationship feeling like a roller coaster in and of itself. Never try to rescue or mother any man. Moreover, part of this aspect of the lesson is learning how to identify men who are “narcissists,” non-committal and “emotionally unavailable” and avoiding them at all costs. Do not waste your time with these types. Lose any obsession and fixation on any guy that is not showing interest and understand that it is okay to be alone rather than to spend your time with someone you always have to wonder about or who makes you feel insecure and like you are on a rollercoaster ride instead of in a relationship that is nurturing and beneficial to the both of you. Men who blow "hot and cold," and who are there one day and gone the next, are manipulative and do not deserve the time of day.

College students can have lots of questions about the future and end up trying to close the deal for themselves with someone sooner than later, but realize that life is long. A younger woman would be best off not trying to focus too much on exclusive relationships and being someone’s “girlfriend,” for the truth is that many younger men can forget a woman the second they are no longer in her geographical vicinity, and do not necessarily see friendship as the lifelong relationship that lots of women imagine and think they are forming during the undergraduate years. The hard truth is that most men are quite capable of sleeping with a woman and then never seeing her again, so women should not put themselves in situations to be used, exploited and discarded in these ways. The “girlfriend” category may seem flattering on the surface but actually tends to be far more beneficial to young men than young women and it is not really in one’s best interests in the long run to get caught up with such titles; in fact, the best thing for the long run is to define an “exclusive” relationship as an engagement and not get too caught up in “nesting” and spending time with a man who may not be a part of your future. Don’t play house and don’t play wife with any man. This is not to say, however, that women should tolerate things like a man's failure to define a relationship as a relationship when it seems logical to do so; it is important to know the signs of a man who is unavailable and noncommittal. My only point is that being called his “girlfriend” does not necessarily mean that he intends for you to ever be his wife, so it is best not to allow oneself to be manipulated by doing things to unconsciously "audition" for a future with a man who may not be imagining you as part of his future, but is simply exploiting someone for the time-being (i.e. while he is in school and in town) because he wants to have someone to hang out with, sleep with, etc. It is needless to say that anyone who allows herself to be treated as a “friend with benefits,” a “f--- buddy,” “hook up” or “booty call” is not understanding her value and is clearly looking for love in all the wrong places. Please do not allow this disrespectful and manipulative treatment under any circumstances.

Yet, good relationships at this age are possible if one is wise. For example, I think that the success of relationships at that young age very much depends on the “type” of young man a woman is dealing with. Relatives of mine who have gotten engaged and married in their early 20s, for example, are dealing with entirely different types of guys from the ones on lots of college campuses these days. It can feel “cool” for some men to exploit as many women as possible for their own convenience, including sex, but who have absolutely no intention of ever making any kind of commitment. Many young men, too, are aware of statistics that bemoan the black female marriage rate and exploit them for their own gain by rationalizing the emotional abuse of women and dating and “playing” multiple women. In no way should young women allow themselves to be “pimped” and exploited like this. Black women cannot operate on these fears about marriage, and allow themselves to be exploited because of them. Walk by faith and know that the right man is out there, as evidenced by the many black women who are in loving and committed marriages and relationships; meantime, do not allow your time to be wasted by the wrong ones.

Young women should cast the net wide and indeed consider guys on campus, but also consider other types, including men in the military, church and other contexts where the climate encourages maturation, the building of commitment, family and marriage. If women stand back, let men call and do the emotional sweating in any relationship, they will tend to feel much more empowered and far less anxious. Never be that type who cares or asks a guy “where is this relationship going?” Or the planet who can be pulled off of her axis the second he comes into the picture. If all of a sudden, you can clear your schedule on his whims and spend every day with him, how much are you really doing and how valuable is your time? What does that say? No man will respect a woman whose world will revolve around him like this, or who converts to his hobbies and everything that he enjoys while ignoring her own needs. Guys respect women more who have a life, who are busy, and who have a sense of self-respect. Never be a “doormat” for anyone.

Remember that you should never judge men by their words, but by watching their ACTIONS, for actions always tell the truth. For instance, saying “I love you” means nothing if his behavior says something different. Learn to be intuitive by watching actions more than listening to words, and you will be better off in relationships. The best thing, as a woman, is to learn to listen to good advice, too. Too many women, instead of heeding good advice, somehow insist on going out and making their own mistakes, whereas learning some basic principles about dating and relating can put young women in a position to attract men who are truly deserving of their time and love.

Relationships also tend to reflect who one is at any given time. Drama queens will attract drama kings, for example, even without realizing it. If you feel that you are being treated in an inferior way, then you must take responsibility and ask yourself what about you thinks so little of yourself to allow someone to treat you like that. Try to reflect back the qualities that you are interested in attracting. You attract the healthiest and most fulfilling relationship when you also establish that balance in your own life.

The best thing I can say is walk by faith, remain true to yourself, and pray and trust God for the very best.

Journeying with Toni Morrison’s Writings and My Toni Morrison Quilt

2011-11-10T12:30:00.001-08:00

A condensed version of the essay below was delivered on October 2, 2009 on the occasion of Toni Morrison’s visit to Cornell University in tribute to the author and as a prelude to her dialogue with two English professors, Dr. Ken McClane and Dr. Margo Crawford.

Journeying with Morrison’s Writings: From Being “Girls Together” to
Becoming Mothers in a New Millennium of Global Change
A Tribute

By Riché Richardson

“Should be immoral or a sin,
If it is according to the
skin I’m in”

From Cameo, “Skin I’m In”

It is exciting and inspiring to see Toni Morrison and to, along with others on campus and in the larger community, welcome her back to her home here at Cornell. Today I am deeply honored and humbled to stand here with my colleagues and offer a tribute to her and to her treasured and truly great body of work in and beyond literature. I applaud and celebrate with her and others 105 years of Creative Writing on the campus here at Cornell. Toni Morrison is a premier and exceptional American and African American intellectual whose work has a global reach and impacts the very fabric and definition of world literatures. Her visit to this campus is also timely and important for me as well as for other scholars in the Africana field, a field that has been, over several decades, strongly impacted and even transformed paradigmatically by her body of work, a field that here and elsewhere around the nation is now celebrating the milestone of a 40th anniversary in the academy, while looking ahead to the future.

In the course of my dialogue, I want to offer some snapshots of what this almost lifelong journey with Morrison’s writing has meant to me. One of the reasons that I am very much in a mood to look to the past and future in this way has to do with the backdrop of the incredible histories and legacies that are being marked on campus in areas such as Creative Writing and Africana studies. As a subtext in this brief essay, the geometry and complicated temporality of these personal “snapshots” provide one testimony to the theoretical and critical primacy of Morrison’s work in shaping these academic areas, alongside the primary argument that I submit. That is to say, from the earliest novel The Bluest Eye to her most recent novel A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s repertoire is a compelling, captivating and indispensable resource to draw on and engage with for critical and theoretical meditation on an inexhaustible range of topics and problematics, including a range of concerns in national and global contexts, in light of its persistently deconstructive look at the making of modernity, modernity as conceptualized in the broadest sense. From her novels to her criticism, we can draw on her body of work to reflect on this nation’s path of development, including its days as what this new novel invokes as an “ad hoc territory,” thinking, for instance, of a passage that registers the slave population as entirely “unspeakable,” to draw on one critical term in the discourse of Morrison, which is captured from the point of view of the character Jacob: “In the fields, he reckoned trying to limit the damage sopping weather had wrought on the crop.” Furthermore, we can use it to examine ideologies of race and questions related to citizenship, democracy, freedom, and the problem of slavery, as the nation emerged as a republic in the late eighteenth century.

Perhaps because she is such an extraordinary intellectual, I have journeyed with the work of Toni Morrison more intimately and passionately than with the body of work of any other writer and thinker. This work, a complex and multifaceted discourse in and of itself, is widely admired for its masterful and brilliant form, use of language and narrative force. It has yielded insights so many times when I have needed and sought them. It has been and will continue to be a vital resource in teaching, study, writing and reading, as well as in my art. As someone who was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971, just a year after the publication of the novel The Bluest Eye, I’ve literally grown up in most of the time during which Professor Morrison’s work has been produced and published, and amidst the immediate historical moments whose streams they each entered, even if in theme and content they frequently take us on journeys into the past, beckoning us, even, back to the trauma and tragedy of the Middle Passage, or to the time of Beowulf. When I finally had my first encounter with her writing as a freshman at Spelman College (The Bluest Eye was one of the selections on our freshman reading list) her work began to feed into my own process of thinking and becoming a woman; I studied it in my coursework and even cited it in a poem.

Her literary criticism in now classic essays from “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” to Playing in the Dark introduced new perspectives and methodologies in American literature and American studies that have helped to transform these fields and forced them to grapple with questions related to the status of blackness, questions about which many scholars had long remained oblivious, indifferent, and silent. I honestly feel that the best and most compelling approaches to American literature acknowledge perspectives like this, and that to evade them in this day and time, from a scholarly standpoint, is anti-intellectual and even irresponsible. The intellectual harassment and hostility that can sometimes occur when minority scholars dare to teach such topics such as American literature is just one thing that underscores the continuing need for literacy in this area. Her critical approaches innovatively expand a long tradition of dialogues on the meaning of America that have unfolded in American and African American letters. It is work that seems vital and urgent to draw on to address from a philosophical standpoint questions such as “What is an American?” given the increasing anti-immigrant sentiments that are emerging in the public sphere in politics.

The Bluest Eye, from its beginning line, suggests that certain times and seasons can make a lasting and unforgettable impression. This past summer began to crystallize as one of those summers that I believe, or at least hope, will be remembered. If the teleological force of history had as much influence these days as it has had in the past, the season would certainly be mentioned down the road as the “Summer of 2009,” in the vein of the ones in the twentieth century that described moments defined by freedom, music, love, and rioting. In general, summer frequently becomes a banner for enshrining in small phrases like this, especially in the media and within historical narrative, what is culturally significant and memorable, obscuring stories lived and witnessed in other seasons, arresting and containing the play and circulation of some narratives. What does it mean to have had to grapple, for example, with the losses of several veritable icons in popular culture such as Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson and in politics such as Senator Ted Kennedy? To have had such widespread public attention and debate drawn dramatically and unexpectedly to the issue of racial profiling in light of the arrest of a distinguished university professor at Harvard such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? To have witnessed the heated debates and demonstrations about health care, including what were in some cases concerted critiques by groups such as the Birthers and Tea Baggers of President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. (Indeed, he is the second one if we think of Professor Morrison’s famous remarks about President Bill Clinton’s “touch of color”).

As we all know, it is crucial to conserve a space for dissent in the nation’s public sphere, which is the sign of a healthy democracy. Yet, the stubborn and persistent questioning of President Obama’s citizenship and therefore the very constitutionality of his presidency by casting him as “foreign” and “other” has been unsettling. The iconography relating him to figures such as “Hitler,” and portraying him hanged in effigy are just a few instances that illustrate that there may be more at stake in these movements than meets the eye. At a symbolic level, this perverse and propagandistic iconography represents a willful displacement, disavowal and repression of the shadowing of these very political movements by vestiges of nativism and fascism.

Though it addresses a very different set of circumstances, there are passages in Toni Morrison’s landmark anthology Birth of a Nation ‘Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case that came to mind as I witnessed certain events in the public sphere of politics this past summer that unfolded during a range of town meetings, including the following remarks in her fine critical introduction: “Spectacle is the best means by which an official story is formed and is a superior mechanism for guaranteeing its longevity. Spectacle offers signs, symbols and images that are more pervasive and persuasive than print and which can smoothly parody thought. The symbolic language that emanates from unforeseen events supplies media with the raw material from which a narrative emerges-already scripted, fully spectacularized and riveting in its gazeability”(xvi). The allusion in the title of this anthology to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which is partly based on the novel by Thomas Dixon The Clansman, a novel set in the state of South Carolina, is instructive. I want to argue that this anthology is no less relevant to analyzing aspects of the contemporary public sphere in this nation when we consider that the plots of this novel is shaped, driven really, by a panic over the expansion of black voting rights, perceived “Negro Rule” and the emergence of an interracial democracy, and rallies the Ku Klux Klan to establish a white supremacist social order as the solution for restoring order in the nation. While one can argue that a fracturing of the conventional Solid South in U.S. electoral politics helped to secure the election of the President Obama, it is important to think about what is at stake in the coalition of governors that aligned against the stimulus plan earlier this year, and in the fact that, in more recent times, a South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, accused the President of being a liar before a joint meeting of the House and Senate, an utterance that reflects a will to criminalize him and delegitimize him, and indeed, to position him in the continuum of “’hoods” invoked in this anthology’s title, notwithstanding his obvious exceptionalism. Most frequently, over the summer months, this anthology came to mind as I pondered some of vile propaganda related to the President in the public sphere, along with the taunting and leering line of Sergeant Vernon Waters that helps to frame Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play: “They’ll still hate you.” Indeed, as a scholar of African American literature and Southern studies, this anthology has long been a very valuable resource, to the point that I borrowed the title of the very first essay that I ever published in this profession from it and invoked its introduction epigraphically.

In 2008 in Charleston, Southern Carolina, as he gave a keynote address to the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society, Houston A. Baker, Jr., cautioned against any superficial comparisons between Toni Morrison and William Faulker’s novels. In this respect, we can think, for example, of the kind of logic that might, in the case of a novel such as A Mercy, lead some critics to try to establish quick and easy analogies between characters such as Jacob Vaark and Thomas Sutpen. At a meta-critical level, and with the cautions against this critical fallacy in mind, I am tempted to allude very provisionally and very momentarily here, in the time that I have remaining, and through some autobiographical anecdotes, to the compelling model that Baker provides in his landmark essay “Traveling with Faulkner” as a strategy for pondering my own intellectual journey with a few more works in Toni Morrison’s rich literary repertoire.

As a freshman at Spelman, the World Civilization classes of Trinidadian scholar Russell Andalcio captivated many of his students, and even drew visitors to every class session to participate in rich class discussions and to view films such as the “Gods Must Be Crazy.” His engaging approach was designed to address misperceptions of Africa as having been uncivilized. I had a roommate from South Africa, Palesa Mohajane, and we, along with another student, Gvanit Efua Godare, first bonded as friends in part through what we learned in and shared from Mr. Andalcio’s class, and discussed him constantly. (I will never forget the silent aura with which the diaspora from this lively class greeted a historian the following semester who informed us on the first day of class that Africa had no civilization because it lacked a written language; after this, he seemed to ensure that the second lecture and the ones thereafter sounded more progressive). Working with Mr. Andalcio that foundational first semester, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was the main centerpiece as I grappled with how and why blackness at an aesthetic level has been “progressively negated” in Western culture. It was also a point of reference as I, as a sophomore and working as campus news editor at the Spelman Spotlight, prepared to interview the famed psychologist Kenneth B. Clark about the doll experiments that he conducted alongside his wife Mamie Clark, which helped to shape the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954. When Professor Morrison visited Spelman my junior year and did a reading, my first time seeing her in person, I stood in the very long line and got my copy of The Bluest Eye signed, and remember saying, “Thank you for everything that you’ve taught me.” I was certainly not pleased the following year when one of my sorority sisters needed the book for a class assignment and I let her borrow mine, for I was shocked when I got it back to see that she had actually written in the margins in some places, in ink! I know I was thinking something to myself akin to, “Father, forgive her, for she knows not what she does.”

Sula I first read freshman year, as our required novel for Freshman Composition, which I took from Christine Sizemore. I remember being unsettled some by the title character Sula as a woman; in some ways, I remember feeling that she was a “bad” woman, whatever that means. As a junior, when I read it again, on the path to a second minor in women’s studies, I had a much deeper interpretation and appreciation of the character and wondered if I’d read the novel carefully enough in the first place. As a professor, I have taught this novel many times over the years, and am enraptured by the narrator’s voice, especially in passages where we hear about the woman in a flowered dress and the elements that would shape the spontaneity of the dancing ritual that a valley man just might see in her community on any day, which reminds me of the beauty and rhythm in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Malindy’s song. When I taught the novel in summer of 2008 to a graduate seminar of high school teachers in the Breadloaf School of English in Asheville, North Carolina-a class for which Toni Morrison Society vice-president A.J. Billingslea, also a former Spelman professor, helped me to arrange a trip to the aforementioned Charleston conference-two students drew on images in American material culture and offered a compelling presentation on the novel’s critique of stereotypes of black children through representations of Chicken Little and the Deweys, and also played clips from the film Ethnic Notions.

After this session, I wondered about my own most primal girl friend in life, in the sense that Nel and Sula were childhood friends? And though I had several, Liletta Nunnery stood out most, the girl who became my best friend beginning when I was 11 and she was 10. This friendship began when she and her mother came over to visit my family on the Fourth of July in 1982. By the fall, Liletta and I had matching olive green corduroy ski jackets and would wear them with designer jeans, like Calvin Kleins, to the mall on Saturdays with our mothers, walking around, in moments spontaneously arm in arm, as we looked around and pretended to be rich sisters, pointing to the clothes that we liked and would buy, or undesirable outfits that we would cast off to “the lady who scrubs the floors.” With others kids we knew, we spent countless Saturdays at Chuck E. Cheese’s playing ski ball and video games like Turbo, Pac Man and Defender, and it was the place where I had my 12th birthday party. We felt endlessly cool and like queens of the world when our whole Girl Scout troop, 535, participated in Alabama State University’s annual “Turkey Day Classic” Thanksgiving Parade wearing olive green sweatshirts, head bands, and pocket towels that said “Girl Scouts Property,” for we two, along with our friend Teri, as the troop marched, rode in the hatchback of a decorated 280z and waved and enjoyed the admiration of the crowd. We were beyond excited one day at the Shoe Emporium when we found spectators like the ones Michael Jackson had worn in the video “Billie Jean,” picked out our sizes and tried them on, and ran show our mothers, exclaiming, “Look!” Indeed, in her pretty, sunny room at her grandparents’ house just two doors from the house of her mother and stepfather down the street, she and her grandfather had a long silent war over the poster from the “Billie Jean” video that she kept putting up on the ceiling over the bed. He’d take it down and put it on the wall; she’d put it up again. It got to the point where he would even just hear her back in her room putting it up and would calmly say, without even going back there, “Take it down, Liletta.” (Indeed, when I was growing up, most of my girl friends lived with their grandparents most if not all of the time, even those whose mothers who had apartments, an arrangement that, I have suspected, was the informal way in some black families of either ensuring that no girls in their family ever lived in a home with a stepfather, or anywhere out of their watchful supervision; for example, my grandparents refused to allow my mother to take me to Chicago when she went to work teaching nursery school for several years in the early 1970s). I had my own Michael Jackson troubles, too. I remember not speaking to my grandfather for three whole days after he refused to allow me to watch The Making of Thriller again because “You’ve seen it once.” Liletta is the only person with whom I think I can most honestly mourn Michael Jackson, other than how I did alone after watching his moving memorial service, when I began to cry in the privacy of my room at the Hilton Garden Inn downtown in Ithaca, exclaiming “Oh God, he’s really gone!”

Our Barbie doll paradise, unlike Pecola Breelove’s ideal, was black, and it was at the center of our friendship. Indeed, it began to come together just as the black Ken was first introduced in 1982. We played for hours and created many characters and voices. They set one foundation for how, even today, I am able to keep my focus and vision as an artist and work for long hours in my art studio. When I got a Michael Jackson doll and she joked about how scrawny it was, I remember saying that “I will pretend that Prince is taller if you pretend that Michael Jackson has more muscles.” (Interestingly, we noticed how much lighter the doll was than him and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if he ended up looking like this doll?) There was the time that I finally had it when a set of twins named Chris and Christopher had remained two weeks old for a whole summer, so she promised to begin to age them; already, Liletta had changed these grocery store-bought miniature baby dolls’ racial identity to black, just as she changed Spanish Barbie’s and made her Vanity from Vanity 6 (now Denise Matthews), whom she adored. Later on, I was stunned that when Prince changed leading ladies, she changed her doll’s identity, too, making her Appolonia, and I had to put up with her refreshing the mole on her every time our play began; she would make lace ensembles for her to wear; I’d insist that everyone be dressed in regular outfits before coming to my full service restaurant in Beverly Hills called DeMirado, and that they order properly from the menu I created, whose many food items I’d drawn and cut out. Her dolls lived in Minneapolis and mine lived in California.

She was a friend so close that she’d come over and go in the refrigerator to get herself something to eat, and then would ask, what happened, so we could set the scene for our doll play. Once my aunt’s husband stepped in to say hi when I was playing with my dolls and, looking in on the paradise of my Barbie Townhouse where I had fixed up several dolls in maids’ uniforms, decorated with elaborate bedding ensembles and had sports cars parked out front, he seemed to fade into another zone, remarked more to himself than to me, that “If I had everything those dolls have I’d be set,” and left the room. Years later, when I read Beloved, and how Paul D. felt when he saw the chicken named Mister, an animal with more freedom than he had as a man, I thought back to this moment. When Liletta lost her grandfather in 1999, she left the guests at her home and came to mine to talk, in part, I think, to hear some of the stories that I’m telling now. Though the years have separated us, she is the kind of friend whose voice I always know, who says I love you and who calls me her “sister.” When I think of Sula and Nel, I think of us; we were “girls together,” in the way that Nel thought of herself and Sula at that novel’s end.

Pilate is my all time favorite Morrison character, and I’ve always had the fantasy of her being cast as Whoopi Goldberg in a film, mainly because I think that she is the actress who could sit at the open window, calmly watch Milkman and Guitar running away with a bag of bones after robbing her house, and say the line “What the devil they want that for?” with just the perfect expression. And there’s something about Morrison’s Hagar in Song of Solomon always makes me think of myself in terms of how I am loved, possibly times like when I was nine and my grandparents took me out shopping for Easter dresses at the fine Montgomery boutiques where they always bought my clothes, in this case, the Junior Vogue, they could not decide which one of three they liked most, and so decided to buy them all.

As a senior at Spelman, I was intrigued by thoughts of Professor Morrison on the difference that the presence or absence of an ancestor has made in the development of characters in African American literature. I was so thankful that my professor, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, obliged me as a junior when I asked to write on all of Toni Morrison’s novels though we were only required to discuss one writers’ novel for African American literature term paper. For with Morrison, I found it impossible to choose just one. By then, I had read Beloved, and had so much to say. Dr. Harper said that it was an excellent paper, and I even ended up submitting it as my writing sample with my application to graduate school.

I will never forget the excitement that I felt when, as a professor at UC Davis, I first read Love at the end of 2003; when a colleague in African American literature asked me what it was about, I told him I’d give him just one clue, that he should “heed Heed.” And in November 2004, after Professor Morrison visited our campus, I developed my first graduate seminar on her novels. During a panel for the students at the Robert Mondavi Center, at a point, Professor Morrison looked to the participants and told us that we, as the future mothers of children who would inherit the world in which we lived, needed to be concerned about what had been at stake in the recent election, and its agendas such as the War on Terror, for all of this had a profound impact. She also talked at that night’s lecture, by drawing on Grendel of Beowulf, about mothers and the influence that they can have for better and for worse, a talk to which many people in Northern, California had driven from miles around, coming to hear her, to see her, to be in her presence; sitting in the huge audience, I thought to myself, as I took in the words of this powerful lecture that “This is the reason that God allows greatness.” Her words have remained with me, and increasingly, have shaped my current perceptions. Indeed, I get it, at last. That is to say, though I am not a mother as yet, I have begun to increasingly think as one might as I, as a woman, have pondered the nation’s public sphere, for example, analyzing the questions about President Obama’s national belonging, the panoply of hostile responses to the changes that he has brought to the nation and to the world’s stage, as well as to the change that he himself represents given his racial background. For in every way, these responses are a barometer for how my children, any son and any daughter, might well be treated in the future, and in fact, for all children who look like him, children destined to live out their lives in this new millennium and who all deserve a world in which they are judged by content of their character and nothing else. For I agree that to be judged by the color of one’s skin, as the epigraph from Cameo suggests, “should be immoral and a sin.” They are one reason that visionary approaches to policy-making are so important. These heated public debates, which at their most extreme are tinged with segregationist and secessionist logic that hearkens back to the Civil War and civil rights eras, encompass what is at stake for them, for you, for me, and ultimately, for all.

I suppose I have incorporated some reflections on Obama as I have discussed Professor Morrison’s work because as an artist, a seed for the “Always” on the backdrop of my Obama art quilt, which articulates my own perception of the significance of his leadership, was planted in part by the curious, mystifying and singular “Always” of Shadrack in Sula. I should say, too, that Professor Morrison has inspired a portrait art quilt that I have decided to develop within my black history series, and hope to share at the Toni Morrison Society conference in Paris next year. Today, I am inspired to say to her, as I first said at Spelman when I saw her at 20, “Thank you for all that you’ve taught me.” I am thankful to be almost twice that age now. Thank you for giving us so much writing to think and grow on as men and women for all the seasons of life, and for being such a woman and intellectual for all seasons. You have my deepest honor, appreciation, admiration and respect.

On My Colleague Grant Farred at Cornell University

2011-11-04T08:52:00.001-07:00

I submitted the letter below about the situation involving the students and Grant Farred at Cornell University in February of 2010, which clarifies my own thinking about him as a colleague more generally. I think that it is important that the ASRC at Cornell continue to move forward. For me, it has never been a matter of "taking his side," whatever that means, for I was also very concerned about the students. Yet, at the time I chose to respect institutional protocols at Cornell and confidentiality and so did not get involved in the public discussion. I have not found use in a lot of the misinformation that has been out there. I do not go along with discussing a department's inner concerns in a public way and that is also one of the main reasons that I have never felt it prudent to discuss or arbitrate matters in Africana in a public context, including confidential matters. There is also the concern I have had about the fine line that exists between speaking out and cyberbullying, which violates the law. A missive circulated last week, allegedly from a group of ASRC faculty, that opposes his selection as the head of the job search committee (from which he resigned this week). According to it, his appointment "further
represents a callous disregard for Black women in the Department and disrespect for the Africana community in general." This "anonymous" statement-for which no one faculty member has taken responsibility- is one that in no way reflects my own experiences with Professor Farred as a colleague. I, like others, am very concerned with and committed to helping to carry on the work in the Africana Center and value and support its great history and legacy. The letter below summarizes my own experiences and perspectives on Professor Farred.

February, 2010

Dear Mr. ______,

I am a colleague of Grant Farred’s in the Africana Studies and Research Center, a colleague who has been accused recently of making “racist and sexist comments” to two graduate students, one of whom is a current student and another who is a former one. I do have a sense of what was said and know how deeply sorry he is that he said what he said, regardless of the colloquialisms that he attempted to invoke, perhaps, I suspect myself, in light of his intellectual and cultural interests in vernacular forms. I appreciate that he has apologized to me, even, as his faculty colleague, though I did not witness that exchange and nor was I present at the conference. He understood how offended and hurt I might be as a black woman colleague. I understand that everybody makes mistakes. He is as human as the next person. In general, I understand and respect the confidentiality of this matter and the protocols that are in place at the university for addressing such issues as they emerge, and with the parties involved. As a faculty member in the Africana Studies and Research Center, I am deeply concerned about the students and, like some other colleagues, am fully committed to maintaining a climate of professionalism and support for them in my department, on campus and in the larger profession.

As a scholar, in thinking through some of the deeper implications of his remarks, I have brought a number of critical apparatuses to bear on this situation. For example, the perspective provided by Hortense Spillers in her now classic essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” sets the standard for me in thinking through the historical and deeply ideological relation of epithets to black women. Professor Spillers, formerly of Cornell, is one of the most brilliant black woman senior scholars in the profession, a rigorous theorist, and helps to set the standard for me in terms of what stands for quality in black feminist scholarship. I do not feel that he meant what he allegedly said in the malicious sense of the range of epithets invoked in this brilliant critical piece.

I think that in the wake of this incident, I have been astonished myself that Professor Farred has been characterized by some other students not directly involved in this situation, and also by a colleague, as someone who is somehow dismissive of black women. That is not true. One of the things that I have most admired and appreciated about him, for example, and what the record shows, is that in the situation regarding the black woman stripper who alleged rape in 2006 by members of the Duke Lacrosse team, he spoke up in her defense by writing a letter clarifying some of the implications of the situation [link to at http://friendsofdukeuniversity.blogspot.com/2006/03/expired-documents-2.html ]. Many of the faculty who had the courage to speak out about this situation, which made national headlines, were threatened, harassed, criticized publicly and were victimized by a very calculated smear campaign. Some eventually moved on, including Professor Farred. I respect the very principled and courageous statement that Professor Farred chose to make in Durham on this case involving the black woman stripper, and do not take the sacrifices that he made in the wake of it lightly. The truth is that Professor Farred put everything on the line at a very prestigious job that he valued to support and help defend a black woman who he at the time believed had been the victim of rape and racist epithets. From an intellectual standpoint therefore I find generalizations about his attitudes toward black women to be quite problematic and short-sighted. There is a part of me, even, who sees the choice that he made to speak up for this woman at Duke in the continuum with law professor Derrick Bell’s decision to leave Harvard Law School because no black women tenured professors were in his department. Professor Farred, through his actions, choices and sacrifices as a professional, has consistently shown deep regard and respect for black women. That he made one mistake does not change this fact. For anyone to suggest anything otherwise about his outlook on black women is unfair and grossly misrepresents him. To do so is even reckless and irresponsible, perhaps even libelous. As someone trained in fields such as philosophy, I always find any recourse to ad hominem in argumentation, including forms of character assassination, to be off-putting.

In general, I feel myself and want to emphasize that he has been a great colleague. Though I attended Duke as a graduate student, my time, to my dismay, did not overlap with his former appointment there; I heard many great things about him from my former professors and peers there. I first met him in 2001 when he was featured as a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University in the English department during my year on the campus as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral fellow. His intellectual work continued to inspire me once I returned to California. The intellectual example that he provided at JHU made all the difference for me and inspired me on the road to tenure in the University of California. I was pleased when finally I had the opportunity to work in a department alongside him. Having him as a colleague is a blessing that I do not take for granted. Since my arrival on campus, it has been a privilege to work in intellectual community with him. That he was working in the Africana Center was one of the main reasons that I wanted to come to Cornell. He is an outstanding, even gifted, editor, has read my work carefully and has also supported and encouraged my new intellectual work on black women and the U.S. South; last fall, he suggested that I focus my intellectual project mainly on black women, the same suggestion that I received from an editor at a major university press, a suggestion that I have finally accepted. Even these kinds of exchanges with him that reflect my own experience make it difficult for me to swallow accusations that he is dismissive of black women. I would not appreciate having my own credentials or attitudes misrepresented in the way that his have been in some instances, which is also unsettling given my concerns about protecting academic freedom, collegiality and all the things that reflect the basic values of academia.

At my former university, we talked a lot about the “principles of community”; all faculty and students were expected to uphold them. These are the values that continue to matter to me, and that govern my thinking across the board on this situation. It is important to me to adhere to the highest standards of professionalism. A climate on campus that creates an intimidating or hostile environment for Professor Farred is not the answer.

I just wanted to share these perspectives to clarify where I stand in my own thinking about Grant Farred, notwithstanding this situation. All best regards.

Sincerely,

Riché Richardson

"Remembering 9/11" By Georgette Norman (a.k.a. "Gigi"), Final Revisions Completed Morning of 9/11/2011

2011-09-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

The tragedy on September 11, 2001 devastated and destroyed many lives and the pain and impact linger a decade later. Like many people in the U.S. and around the world, I spent most of this past weekend reflecting on this tragedy, and watched programs that commemorated this painful and sad day. When we met in August to discuss my upcoming art exhibitions, Georgette Norman, the Director of the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama of Troy University, who is also a poet and author of phenomenal volumes such as "From These Roots"(1993), shared a draft of a poem that she had written to reflect on the 10th anniversary of September 11 and that she was scheduled to read as part of a commemoration in Montgomery on that occasion. With her permission, I am sharing it here in a post on my art blog.

I used to be a poet, poetry was my main form of creative expression, and for years, I composed at least one poem per month at minimum; the highest honor that I could pay to anyone was to honor them in a poem. Now that I no longer write poetry, I believe that my quilts are my poetry. Community service has been an ongoing aspect of my life and work and the same has been true for Georgette. We both believe in the importance of serving our community and giving back. Indeed, I first met Georgette after I finished college at Spelman in 1993 when we were both volunteering at Camp Sunshine, a Girl Scout camp in Montgomery (now many years later a camp for boys). We were assigned to the same unit and worked with a remarkable group of girls ages 11 and 12 for a week, coordinating various activities and projects for them day by day, which culminated with a day trip to Camp Kiwanis in Wetumpka. The girls and I alike were very much in awe of "Miss Georgette," as I also called her back then. I was really inspired to hear about her work teaching college students and the drama performances that she directed; her brilliance and dynamism as a teacher reminded me of that of some of my professors from Spelman.

Georgette and I kept in touch after our initial meeting while volunteering. At that time, she was the founder and executive director of the Alabama African American Arts Alliance. I enjoyed fellowshipping in her veritable arts salon whenever I was home from graduate school at Duke, and attending so many of its fantastic and stimulating gatherings, where I met many people over the years such as veteran civil rights leaders, actors from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and performers in the Montgomery City Orchestra. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to be exposed to such remarkable people as an emerging artist as I completed my graduate work. I appreciated her support for my emergent work as a quilt artist, which she encouraged me to continue and to exhibit someday.

I had begun to quilt during my senior year at Spelman, when I made a Delta quilt in honor of the sorority that I'd joined in the spring of 1992. I made a couple of smaller Delta quilts, and had also started quilt series called "Family" and "Daughters of Africa," and begun an "Africa" quilt. Over several years, I completed about 10 quilts in all across those series. One day, I sat at Georgette's house and cut out 9 small color-silhoutte applique blocks, my earliest quilting style, and was inspired to return a few weeks later and see that she had stitched and mounted them on a beautiful quilt that she had made and featured in her loft study and studio. It was an amazing collaboration when I was 22 and just starting out, and it made me feel as good to see my art quilt work hanging in her home as I felt when I gave a friend a "Daughters of Africa" quilt and then visited and saw that she had it hanging in her hallway and framed in glass. In 2008, she brought it to the opening reception for my debut art exhibition so that the guests could see it, and again, it was gratifying to see that she had kept it all those years.

Once I became a professor in the University of California system, I continued to make art a part of my life's natural rhythms as I did my scholarly work. By the time that I was tenured in 2005 (with all articles from my book manuscript published as lead articles in journals and a unanimous vote by my colleagues), I had also produced a body of art quilt work in the unique applique, three-dimesional, painted-quilt style that I had been developing over the years of living in California. Georgette and I began to work toward my debut art exhibition, which came off beautifully in the summer of 2008, went into an encore, and got excellent feedback. It was a pleasure during that time to work with Alabama State Representative Thad McClammy and the ED Nixon Foundation, who sponsored a field trip for 4th and 5th graders from ED Nixon Elementary School, to see my art quilts on exhibition and to dialogue with me about them. For two years at ages 16 and 17, as student council vice-presisent and then president at the historic St. Jude Educational Institute, I had volunteered weekly every Friday after school at the Cleveland Avenue YMCA (now Rosa Parks Avenue), with the support and sponsorship of Robert James, in a program that I developed for children ages 6-13, where I tutored them, coordinated their play activities, and taught them lessons in social graces. This encounter with the children during my debut exhibition took me right back to the same community where I had spent so much of my time voluteering as a teen, and where I'd had so many meaningful experiences.

It is also an amazing coincidence that my first art exhibition happened to be held at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery when considering that I won a first-place prize for a poem that I wrote honoring Rosa Parks as a high school senior at St. Jude- and that my great aunt, the civil rights leader Johnnie Rebecca Carr, is often referred to as the best friend of Rosa Parks. Their lifelong friendship is depicted in the Disney film starring Angela Bassett. Incidentally, my quilt of Rosa Parks, part of my Civil Rights Movement Series, will incorporate the poem that I wrote on her years ago entitled "Together We Will Win," a dramatic work in three voices that I once performed on the quad for students at UC Davis in a tribute to her. It is wonderful, too, that both Georgette and I happened to be interviewed and featured several times throughout Lauren Cross's phenomenal documentary film on African American quilts, "The Skin Quilt Project," a 2010 pick for the International Black Women's Film Festival.

I have also been enjoying the journey toward my second major quilt exhibition (2015) and some other smaller exhibitions of my work scheduled in between. I was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971 in the post-civil rights era, and attended all-black Catholic schools in the city from grades 1-12; the U.S. South has been my primary site of intellectual formation and artistic development and engagement. Furthermore, the U.S. South and civil rights have been ongoing themes in my art repertoire. I believe that artists and intellectuals achieve their greatest potential when we remain true to who we are and stay grounded. My art project has always been organically grounded in the community outreach that has been an ongoing part of my life's work and purpose and commitment to making a difference. The time that I committed to volunteering and helping children in Montgomery at ages 16 or 17, and the fact that Georgette and I met when both of us were volunteering, are early encounters in life that have blessed me exponentially over the years as an artist and as a person in totally unexpected ways; the choices that I made as a teen and young adult aimed to help make a difference in the lives of children, but have also made all the difference for me.

Georgette Norman is a dream curator and I enjoy working with her. Here is her poem.

Remembering 9/11

It had all the makings of an ordinary day
After navigating the hustle and bustle of getting to work,
People had settled into their daily routine
Who knew that in a few short hours our nation would be forever changed
Live a humble
Humble Lord
Humble yourself, the Bell Done Rung
Out of blue
on September 11, 2001 the Bell Rung
the majestic iconic twin towers reaching upward to heaven from the heart of New York’s financial district
imploded from a directed hit from an airplane
foreshadowing the heights
from which our nation would fall
What happened… the Bell Rung… who’s to blame...the Bell Rung
Exploding buildings regurgitated innocent bodies
Others leapt to their deaths from the inferno
plummeting to the street
Twisted steel missiles flew through the air
mingled with shards of glass
maiming and killing aimlessly
Our Guardians
police
firemen,
military,
valiantly and vigilantly plunged into the wreckage
for far too many it became their funeral pyre

Ash drifted down like snow,
covering everything
burning eyes,
nostrils,
our brains
And then a tidal wave of smoke and debris rushed through the streets
etching fear on our collective psyche
destroying our sense of security and assuredness
and we became one with the rubble of twisted and shattered steel and glass
no longer delusional
fully aware that the impenetrable bubble of our USA was an illusion after all
Out of darkness and flying debris a voice cries, “Somebody help me. Somebody help me.”
The Bell Done Rung
In disbelief we gawked
we gasped
we helped,
we died
And later the open space and gaping hole left in the aftermath,
a wound on our soul
The Bell Done Rung
So many unanswered questions
fallen tears
shattered lives
The Bell Done Rung
10 years later it still seems all too surreal
And our mind’s stored images of terror…grief…anxiety
Still quicken our heart beats and seize our breath
But… catastrophe became our nation’s blessing
We are a resilient people
and
with false pride, arrogance and a sense of entitlement wrung out of us like water from a sponge,
we rebounded with a surge of courage and determination
emerged a more humble people
re-discovering love… individual and collective…
ME became WE
and we unleashed on each other the depths of our HUMANity

However, it was short lived
Let us never forget the attack that signaled the end of a supercilious nation
never forget the innocents, who paid the ultimate price,
our guardians who walked into a blazing inferno risking life and limb, not just out of duty
and continue to support those who need it most …WE, the survivors
Yes, years have passed
Our wounds have not healed
But as the images of terror, grief and anxiety replay in our mind’s eye
Let us not let our fears gnaw us into implosion
Rather let us remember those weeks after the attack when our font runneth over with love
concern for each other
red and yellow, black and white
If we but continue to walk the path we forged
let the last vestiges of greed and power be wrung out of our nation
and put PEOPLE first
we WILL heal
Live a humble
Humble Lord
Humble yourself,
the Bell
Done Rung

The Alpha Male

2011-05-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of posts about one of my favorite topics: relationships.

1. My two responses in a thread of dialogue on Facebook about relationships to answer a question posed on the page of a FB friend, "What I learned from my last relationship . . . "

That I prefer the straight up "alpha" male, who will be most deserving and appreciative of who I am as a woman, to the "beta" type who pretends to be a "nice guy" and "safe" but is inwardly jealous and passive-aggressive. I'd prefer to be married to the former for a day than to the latter for 50 years; I want a man who is truly confident and plan to marry at the "front line" of culture. Also, to always "date yourself."

Also, to not avoid disagreement and that sort of thing too much for the sake of keeping things stable. It's important to have it out if need be, but in a responsible and mature way. Too much decorum is never good. It's best to keep it real. It's best that a man always be a little "afraid" in the sense that ----- fears --------, and my next man will be from day one. I love reading the bios explaining that he knows she'd "kick his a--" if he ever did this or that.

Response: I like your honesty, Riche. You definitely know what you want!

2. Reprint of my review of my all-time favorite dating manual, The Alpha Male, on Amazon

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Match, April 19, 2009
By
Riche Richardson (Ithaca, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Alpha Male: Who They Are, How They Think, What They Want, How To Attract, Meet, Marry & Train One (Paperback)

I enjoy reading in the genre on relationships, including all the recent classics, and have read tons of books over the past few years, but this is the book that has best connected with me and inspired me thus far. It fits best with who I am and have always been. The "type" of man with whom one ends up needs to be taken seriously, for he can shape and define one's quality of life in so many ways, and the lives of any children one has with him. I feel that I am in the best and most mature position that I've ever been in when it comes to making choices about relationships and am able to make them with 20-20 vision. Every woman gets to this position in life at a certain point, sooner or later, and I'm glad that in my case it's sooner. I don't agree with the theories that suggest that an alpha woman is best off with a beta man, and this book certainly clarifies why that's not true. For the alpha guy will best appreciate-and deserve-the talents that the alpha female has to offer-not only as a professional, but also in terms of the classic art of being a woman. I like this book and it provides frameworks for what I've meant since I was 17, in saying that I will only marry a "man for all seasons," or even nowadays, in my resolve that I will only "marry at the front line of culture." The "beta" type of guy can be bad news not only personally, but also professionally, and I try my best never to deal with him. His jealousy, his insecurity, his pettiness, his narcissism, are almost always self-evident. And he's usually the one trying to criticize the alpha types. Spiritually and socially, it's best to keep one's standards high and to hold out for the very best. As a scholar, I theorize masculinity and femininity, but in the end, this is how it all comes home for me.

"Portraits" Art Quilt Exhibition at Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery, Cornell University, March 28-April 29, 2011

2011-03-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

Advertisement in the Cornell Daily Sun Newspaper, March 28, 2011

Many thanks to the sponsors of this exhibition and its April 18th reception, including Diversity Programs in Arts & Sciences; the Africana Studies and Research Center; Black Students United; the Carol Tatkon Center; the Office of the Provost; the Office of the Dean of Students; and the Cornell and Ithaca communities. Special thanks, too, to the exhibition curator Laurie Fuller for all of her work and that of other staff members who worked with her to coordinate and install the quilts and to develop the fantastic posters and catalog accompanying the exhibition.

“The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass" Art Quilt from Black History Series

2011-03-20T21:38:00.001-07:00

“The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday’; Birthday Unknown but Celebrated February 14” (Black History Series)
Dedicated to Class of 2009, Suger High School, Saint-Denis in Paris, France

Remembering Uncle Artis

2010-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

This fall, we have been thinking of, honoring and remembering Artis Jones (July 1927-October 2010), the baby brother of my grandmother. He is my great uncle. When I was a child attending St. John the Baptist Catholic School, he helped to sell raffle tickes twice a year. Back then, there were phases during which he took me to school there daily, along with his granddaughter, my cousin LaTongia, and his grandson Lamont, and also took me to school at St. Jude some as a junior and senior. I appreciate all of the ways in which he supported my education. He was a blessing. His family loved him so and will miss him always. God bless.

Art Quilt Featuring Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (from New Black History Series)

2010-11-15T17:13:00.001-08:00

Here is an image of my art quilt featuring Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. This piece is from the "Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris with a Charleston Twist," which includes 33 mixed-media art quilts in my signature art quilting style and adds two new series beyond those featured in Portraits (2008), including a Black History Series, which features both contemporary and historical figures. Among other figures who will be featured are Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois, Cornel West, Michael Jackson, and Oprah Winfrey. Figures in my political series this time around resonate and overlap with this one, including Barack and Michelle Obama, Rosa Parks, my great aunt Johnnie Rebecca Carr, E.D. Nixon, Condoleezza Rice, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture, and Angela Davis, along with James Baldwin from the Paris series and Sidney Poitier, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington from the Hollywood Series. Quilts featuring E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr are also at the core of a civil rights series.

The Skin We’re In: On Appearing in Lauren Cross's Film "The Skin Quilt Project"

2010-10-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.”

The Holy Bible, Genesis 2: 7

“And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from
Man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

The Holy Bible, Genesis 2:22

“Should be immoral or a sin
If it is according to
The skin I’m in”

Cameo, “Skin I’m In”

The creation story describing God's creation of the world that begins the Bible, along with God's sculpting of male and female bodies in all their uniqueness, is also fundamentally about art, positioning Him as the ultimate and foundational artist. And within this narrative, God judged all that He created to be “good.” For me, the Bible story of humankind’s creation reminds me of the beauty of the body; it helps us to recognize the body as God's unique sculpture. As an artist, this story reminds me that the body at one level is art, and helps me to envision it as a canvas. That art is so much affirmed in this spiritual story inspires me as an artist, and as a human being.

I am honored to have been one of the quilt artists featured in Lauren Cross’s new documentary entitled “The Skin Quilt Project,” which is a 2010 selection of the International Black Women’s Film Festival. Congratulations to Lauren Cross! The film draws on black quilters, male and female, to discuss color politics in black communities, hypothesizing that quilting presents an alternative and more inclusive and empowering vision of black identity and has provided black quilters with a unique sense of self esteem, as well as valuable perspective on black culture. By interviewing members of quilting guilds as well as individual quilters in a range of contexts, including art studios, Cross explores the continuing impact of colorism in black communities, which allows this film to make a valuable political statement, including the powerful message that it sends on black bodies and their beauty. The publicity for the film says it all. The quilt is the primary metaphor in Cross's film's iconography for representing the range and diversity of shades of black people's skin and binding them all together. The film is scheduled for screening, along with nine other films, at the International Black Women's Film Festival in Berkeley, California on October 9, 2010. In general, the topic of colorism is a vital site for critical dialogue among black women.

This film suggests that denial persists about the continuing impact of skin color in black communities, whether people experience discrimination for being thought of as "too light" or not light enough. I think it shows very little intelligence and lots of immaturity for people, including black people, to make judgments about the worth and desirability of others purely on the basis of superficial factors such as the skin's shade and its proximity to whiteness. If even now, the logic is that what is closest to white is only “right”-in the sense of that old rhyme-then how far have we come, and how far can we ever go? There continues to be too much schizophrenia in black communities regarding issues of color. Harboring such self-hatred is the equivalent of walking everywhere backward when the natural thing to do would be to walk forward. Whether politics that devalue blackness come from within or without, they are a problem. As the group Cameo reminds us in the lyrics to their powerful song, "Skin I'm In," which are quoted above, there’s something fundamentally wrong, and even sinful, about judging another person on a quality such as their skin color. And I would add that there's something a little insane, too, about obsessing so much over skin complexion. The song by Cameo, which mainly addresses racism, is a reminder that skin does not define us. The bottom line is that all people, from white to black, are beautiful and perfect in the eyes of God, and He loves all of us.

I’m not sure whether it made the cut, but one of the points that I made in the film as I was interviewed was how important it is for people, including and perhaps especially people of African descent, to remember that we are indeed a people who are “kissed by heaven.” No one with this perspective ever feels a sense of inferiority or inadequacy in the sense described in the film. If anything, one feels special and can embrace and admire the beauty of the human spectrum and wherever one fits in on it. One is more likely to love and value oneself and feel beautiful with this perspective. I’ve never in my life, even as a child, used terms such as “good hair,” never worshipped or had a preference for light skin, and never have felt that light skin is more preferable or more desirable. My art quilts, with human forms classically drawn and sculpted in my foundational felt medium, are meant to show and celebrate a rainbow of faces across the color spectrum in all of their beauty and glory.

The most important thing is how one feels about and thinks of oneself, and how one treats oneself. Because I do in a sense see the body as a canvas, I use my own body as a way to express my creativity. On the surface, I do this through clothes and accessories, as well as through makeup.

I find that investing in the best cosmetics is one of the best things that one can do for one’s skin if one opts to wear makeup, so I always wear Mac cosmetics. My makeup collection, including concealer, powder, mascara, lipsticks, lip and eye liner pencils, blushes, and eye shadows, along with all the Mac makeup brushes on my vanity, contains the basic tools in my personal studio for self-creation and self-invention on a day-to-day basis. I attended poise-charm classes growing up at ages 11 and 14 and have also read many books on makeup, including some of the classics by authors from Beverly Johnson to Cindy Crawford, so knowing the basic principles and tricks of the trade makes putting it on a snap.

One way that I invest time and energy in taking care of myself is by taking good care of my skin. Since I was 25, I have rarely stepped outside without wearing sunscreen, a must for everyone, though it seemed that no amount ever could keep my feet from burning and turning solid bronze in California during the hot summer months! I have also used eye cream nightly since my mid-twenties. Moisturizing, too, is mandatory.

I can’t believe the remarkable transformation that has come about in recent years as a result of giving up the use of all body creams that contain chemicals. Coconut oil is the lotion that I use day to day, and otherwise, whipped shea butter. In addition, I use only natural soaps made of coconut oil and shea butter, and non-aluminum deodorant. My hair shampoos also include these ingredients, and it is important to me that my hair be chemical free. These days, I'm also into good exfoliation. I keep all of these tools under a cream antique wash pitcher and basin on a French wash stand that I call my “Skin Station,” which Cross also photographed when she visited my art studio. A benefit is that natural products such as coconut oil are very cheap (it doubles as an intensive hair conditioner for me), supplies last a long time, and it is a healthier lotion than any I've ever bought at regular grocery stores and drug stores.

To supplement this personal at-home skin care routine, I schedule regular appointments for professional skin treatments. They include a Sothys-based facial from a European esthetician. This facial, which includes a rigorous exfoliation by hand, achieves amazing results and takes two hours. (I used the Decleor system in California as a complement to monthly micro-dermabrasion facials, which led the esthetician to exclaim to me once that “You’re going to have the cleanest skin in Davis!” However, these days, I enjoy getting this old-fashioned hand exfoliation, which works wonders). Most recently, I’ve added a seasonal full-body shea butter exfoliation to my professional skin care routine. I also find regular pedicures to be nurturing to the skin.

Another professional routine I use to care for my skin is an organic soy body wax every few weeks, including eyebrows, underarms, full leg, and a Brazilian. This is a purifying process that I savor. No longer using harsh depilatories or razors has changed my life and is another crucial way in which I’ve gotten away from chemicals and respected the body’s normal rhythms and cycles. Waxing has the added benefit of being another vehicle for body exfoliation and adds to its softness and smoothness. And even when I have a little leg stubble, I feel beautiful and never sweat it or feel self conscious, because I can accept, love, and appreciate myself as a total woman. This organic soy waxing ritual is refreshing and especially makes me feel pampered when I step into the salon during the cold winter months in Ithaca. Books such as Molly Aldrich's "How to Get the Perfect Brazilian Wax" and "Brazilian Sexy: Secrets to Living a Gorgeous and Confident Life" by Janea Padilha of the J. Sisters (who invented this art) are excellent and indispensable resources on the art of Brazilian waxing. And like Brazilian women, I savor spending time on some Saturdays for my processes of self-care, which I enjoy and to which I am deeply committed. My body waxing process also takes two hours. My regular appointments to care for my skin-professional facials, seasonal body exfoliations, organic soy body waxing-are so worth it.

I haven't felt like this since 2000, when I had an excellent massage therapist who made house calls. Once a month, for over a year, until I left California for Baltimore, she'd bring a massage table, oils, music and candles up to my high rise apartment at Capitol Towers in downtown Sacramento and spend an hour giving me a full-body massage. It was a time for me to wind down and shut down. I found the process to be thoroughly relaxing. I first met her and got her card at a "Pamper Party" coordinated by a couple of black women in the city, where six or seven black beauty professionals in the area who specialized in diverse areas were invited to the home of one of them to showcase their techniques for all of the guests, who were mainly newer Sacramento residents. This party helped to build their clientele and to help settle newcomers. Techniques included Sisterlocks (we also screened and discussed a related video), manicures, body massage, makeup artistry, etc. At that point, I was an assistant professor in the third year on my job and invested in home-based massage as a result of attending this party. In addition, hiring housekeeping and having a standing weekly hair appointment were other primary investments for me during that period. In California, I visited some great spas over my ten years living there, including some of the best for black skin care, and still order products from one of them.

Different geographies can literally create different versions of us. I loved the version that emerged from my first 18 years in Alabama, and feel that it is the "truest" so far. (This is not surprising. Very few places can compete with the South in fashioning femininity/womanhood). The ones in Atlanta, Georgia and Durham, North Carolina I liked, well, not so much. In California, I went through many phases, good and bad, but think I became the best version of myself there around age 29. I like the version of myself emerging here in Ithaca and feel that is very true to form. Now I look more like I did originally, before I ever left Alabama, like the adult version of the self I was at 18. I've said that "California made me a better Southerner." I think New York has made me an even better and more perfect one, in part by reminding me of all the things that are unique and exceptional about being a woman raised in the South and whose values were shaped there.

At 39, I feel fine. I don't know what the fuss and fear of turning 40 are about. I certainly do not feel that way. I feel more beautiful and radiant than I've felt in years, feel I am my best and most beautiful woman yet, inside and out, and feel twice as good and confident about myself as I have ever felt in my life.

Really, the soul and the spirit, and not even the body, are the ultimate canvases of life, and they are the elements that mainly matter to God. We often use expressions such as "feeling comfortable in our own skin.“ Yet, this is one feature that does not need to be overly emphasized, and certainly, not romanticized. I will never forget, for example, how uncomfortable I felt when I had a hives outbreak that came from an allergic reaction to a meal I’d eaten at a restaurant in summer 2008, which only intensified with the allergic reaction I had to over-the-counter medication I had tried to use to treat it. I’d never experienced anything like that in my life. I ended up in the emergency room where I was treated with antibiotics.

The truth is that God’s people are made in all shapes and sizes and live amazing, courageous and beautiful lives under a range of circumstances. I prefer to remember the power of heaven’s kiss and to keep the focus on the things that matter and make the difference in a life lived well.

Highlights from Reception, Film Screening, Talk and Exhibition As "Cultural Envoy" at U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Paris, January 2009

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Essay copied below appears in the journal TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal, 1/2009: Homage to Michel Fabre, as part of a forum on "Un Patchwork de Cultures"

Link to version in journal issue and forum on "Un Patchwork de Cultures"

http://transatlantica.revues.org/4321

Binding Nations through Art Quilts and a Visit to the U.S. Embassy in Paris as a Cultural Envoy

Riché Richardson

In the spring of 2008 when Géraldine Chouard, who was helping to coordinate the landmark exhibition in France entitled “Un Patchwork de Cultures,” mentioned the U.S. Embassy in Paris’s interest in inviting me to the city to share some of my quilts as a part of this exhibition and to be a “Cultural Envoy,” I was honored and excited by the possibility. The opportunity to return to Paris under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy, which officially materialized through a grant from the U.S. Department of State as part of its Speaker Series, allowed me to see Paris from a different and wholly new perspective from the one I had on my first trip to the city in 2007. I experienced a lot of support at the U.S. Embassy and deeply appreciate all that the Cultural Affairs Office did to make this visit so memorable and successful. I benefited from spending time throughout the week dialoging with Sophie Nadeau, Lora Berg, Jennifer Bullock, and Randiane Peccoud, among others, and they helped to enrich my perspective on global affairs. For instance, I was inspired by Lora Berg’s commitment to promoting the use of diverse languages within institutional settings on websites to help encourage international exchanges. These dialogues were especially enriching against the backdrop of the upcoming presidential inauguration in the United States.

2On this recent visit, I had accommodations at the Hotel du Pantheon in view of Mairie du 5e (fifth district), the exhibition site, and the Pantheon, which are a block up from the Luxembourg Gardens. I usually began my days with breakfast at one of the neighborhood cafés before reporting to the Embassy. All of the events in which I participated, including talks with three groups of high school students and three groups of college students, several gallery talks and film screenings, as well as my talk, film screening and reception at the Ambassador’s Residence (during the tenure of Craig Stapleton), along with a workshop on diversity at the U.S. Embassy, were deeply enriching and inspiring. These experiences have strongly impacted my missions in teaching and art and reinforced my commitments to making a difference as a citizen. They have expanded my knowledge of French culture, along with its history, and a range of social and political concerns, from contexts such as the academy to the banlieue.

3I was deeply honored to have had five of my art quilts, including two from my Paris series (Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir), two from my family series, and one from my political series (Barack Obama), featured at the Mairie du 5e among the work of such talented quilters in the U.S. That toile fabrics are incorporated into some of these extraordinary works, which highlight figures from George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette, helps to embody the intercontinental connections to which the exhibition itself stands as a tribute. I was particularly moved by works such as the “Bad News Quilt,” which incorporates paper news articles about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, along with others such as “Walk the Walk Fleur de Lys,” which is a reminder of the rich heritage of Louisiana. This exhibition is quite remarkable in its conception and vision, and is a valuable teaching tool for American and French classrooms alike. I used an image of “Let Freedom Ring,” a quilt with blocks featuring Phillis Wheatley and the Liberty Bell, in the lesson on Phillis Wheatley this semester here at Cornell University where I am now a professor, alongside a copy of the frontispiece from her 1773 book of poetry.

4Both my quilts of Josephine Baker and Simone de Beauvoir were completed in time to mark their centennials in 2006 and 2008, respectively. My quilt of Josephine Baker presents a larger than life image of her more focused on performance and singing than the body itself, reminding us of the beauty and dignity of the body. The quilt of Simone de Beauvoir celebrates her intellectual legacy and the thought, energy, passion and commitment of her intellectual journey. Both quilts present their subjects in the prime of their lives to reflect their deep and lasting legacies, and their place in our collective history and memories. The baby quilt featuring my mother and uncle is from my family series and reminds us of the beauty and dignity that existed among blacks in the U.S. South even during the pre-civil rights era. As I explained to audiences on several occasions, the word “Always” in the background of my quilt honoring Barack Obama’s inauguration reflects my view of him as a leader and respect for him as a person from whom I hope to learn for years to come, and as the kind of man whom I also want any children I ever have to know about. On this visit, I was also very much honoring in my own way the 2008 centenary of the African American and Southern writer Richard Wright and remembering his family and all of the celebrations of his life and legacy in Paris the year before.

5This was a very busy trip with long, busy and stimulating days that usually began at the U.S Embassy, sometimes with the required trip through security, or just to meet up with the driver who would be responsible for the day’s transportation to different events. Indeed, this trip gave me a more panoramic and complex view of the landscape of Paris than I’d had before, and I was especially inspired and motivated by the several opportunities that I had to dialogue with students at institutions in the banlieues. These encounters left me with a deep appreciation for the bright students whom I encountered, and a longing to become fluent in French so that I would be able to return to the city at some point for even closer dialogues with Paris youth. It left me with a desire to work to help the effort to bring about change for those who feel marginalized and excluded from French society.

6The first event was a visit to Collège Martin Luther King in Villiers-le-Bel in Eastern Paris. There, I gave a talk to high school students entitled “Art in Education and My Education as an Artist.” It highlighted the role of art in helping to sustain the health and well being of a democracy, the difference that art literacy can make in helping to set foundations for a lifetime of learning, and the importance of students making a commitment to examine local art resources in places like the Louvre. I also discussed the utility of art in my own teaching, and art as a gateway to the humanities. In the rich q&a that followed, students showed excitement about Barack Obama and asked a range of questions. I was impressed that an exhibition of life-size military figures made by students, in the form of cardboard cutouts, was on display in the school’s lobby entitled “14-18/2008: les colonies dans la Grande Guerre,” which the principal Christiane Tyburn gave me a tour of after the talk, along with a gift of the accompanying catalog. The high school also plans to share with me a picture of a mural that will soon be painted on the school building. The translation was provided by Jennifer Bullock and Mrs. Tyburn. As the day ended, I got a reminder of the simple pleasures and adventures in life through the fact that some boys stuck around after school just so they could see us drive off in the Embassy car. This was also a reminder of how removed some citizens may feel from the center of culture in Paris.

7At the U.S. Embassy, where on entering I saw pictures of President George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Dick Cheney, I gave a talk that addressed the public response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the impact of the U.S. South on race and gender politics in the 2008 presidential election. The talk led to a broader dialogue with the newly formed diversity group at the U.S. Embassy, which is concerned about addressing issues of diversity for over 1000 employees. The dialogue, which was held in one of the dining rooms, set off a revealing and productive debate among the diversity group, whose members differed widely in perspectives. This event was coordinated by the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy, Randiane Peccoud.

8I was delighted to offer a brief talk at the exhibition site with a group of girls and one boy from Théodore Monard Vocational High School from Noisy-le-Sec, “On the Legacy of Rosa Parks, St. Jude Educational Institute and the Youth Mission in Montgomery.” I discussed St. Jude Educational Institute of the “City of St. Jude” in Montgomery, which I attended, the campus’s role as a camping place in the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965, and its hospital as a haven for blacks in Montgomery during the era of segregation, and as the backbone for expanding the black Catholic community in Montgomery. Their teachers expressed appreciation that several students who do not ordinarily participate or talk in class were so open in the dialogue with me. Géraldine Chouard provided the translation.

9At the exhibition opening reception in Paris with local and Embassy officials that over 200 guests attended, I made remarks on my quilts featured in the exhibition with the translation provided by Géraldine Chouard, who gave a tour of the exhibition and made extensive remarks on my quilts and the 25 quilts featured in the travel exhibition. I particularly valued the stories that some of the guests at this event took me aside to tell in relation to my Josephine Baker quilt, such as that of a couple who attended the last concert of Josephine Baker in 1975, and a woman among the French quilters who told of a customer whose mother had made costumes for Josephine Baker, and who once attended a costume fitting for her years ago during her childhood, feeling that Baker’s was “the most beautiful body she had ever seen.” For me, another highlight of this reception was meeting Ernest Doo Koo, an artist from the Ivory Coast who had visited and admired the exhibition the day before, and returned to the reception for an introduction.

10The focal point of my trip was a visit to the Ambassador’s Residence on January 14, 2009, where I gave a brief talk entitled “Reflections on Montgomery’s Modernism, the Civil Rights Movement and the Paths to a New Southern Art in the U.S.,” and three of my quilts were shown (Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, and “JoAnn and Junior Man”). Géraldine Chouard and Anne Crémieux’s short film on my art, “A Portrait of the Artist,” was presented by them and screened after cocktails. I understand that this was the last official public event sponsored during Ambassador Craig Stapleton’s term prior to his family’s return to the U.S. My talk began with an emphasis on my own belief that “for its health and livelihood, a democratic society should help to actualize and develop the artistic gifts of its citizens, whether that means supporting community and grassroots initiatives or building institutions that can help to catalyze individual and collective art projects,” noted the centrality of art to how I have lived the truth in the American dream, and acknowledged the connections of my own art project to a background in the U.S. South.

11I mainly drew on my own grandmother’s experience as a teen in the National Youth Administration inaugurated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her later experiences migrating to Pensacola, Florida with my grandfather and working on a job in the Navy Yard, to show how opening up such opportunities as the NYA to black youth in Montgomery who had been shut out of the system by segregation made a difference in her life and prepared her to help support the project of American democracy later on. These points were important to me to emphasize, for instance, in thinking about a similar sense of exclusion from French citizenship and opportunities that many minority youth feel in the suburbs of Paris, frustrations that were highlighted on a global scale during the unrest in 2005. Anne Crémieux provided a simultaneous translation during my talk. This event was also significant in that it marked the first time that all involved in the film attended a screening of it together, including the filmmakers Géraldine Chouard and Anne Crémieux, Patricia A. Turner, who provided scholarly commentary in the film, and Diane de Obaldia, a former Chanel model and owner of Le Rouvray, a quilting store in Paris. I enjoyed seeing more of the beauty of the Ambassador’s Residence on the brief tour that those in our core group were given shortly after arriving, along with a book on the residence. Over 120 guests attended this event.

12Anne also coordinated one of the events for me the following day, a visit to Université Paris 10, Nanterre where I gave a brief talk on quilt work, appliqué, and the process of making the film prior to a film screening and q&a with her students in African American history and a U.S. politics research group. Here, we also discussed the role of art in teaching and issues such as balancing artistic and academic life. This session was also attended by Patricia A. Turner, who discusses my quilt work in her book Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters. Later that evening, I met with the Société d’Etudes Nord-Américaines (SENA) for a dialogue based on my book, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta and a talk entitled “Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From the Myth of Uncle Tom and the ‘Bad Negro’ to the Jena Six.” My talk situated my project in relation to contemporary issues such as the Jena Six and the continuing phenomenon of nationalizing and globalizing Southern ideologies as well as the region’s major movements. It was wonderful that a dialogue continued over dinner with a range of French scholars who work on the United States, including the phenomenal Catherine Pouzoulet. We mainly discussed academic labor issues in France.

13The last full day of my trip began with a meeting with Pont-Blanc Raconte and France Patchwork Paris where I offered remarks on quilts to a group of women present for a workshop on quilt-making.

14Afterwards, Cultural Affairs Officer Lora Berg worked around our tight schedule and arranged for me to attend the gallery talk by Cedric Smith for the opening of his exhibition at a new gallery focusing on African American artists in the city, for she wanted me to meet him and see his work. Later that afternoon at Suger High School in Saint-Denis, I discussed the history of Rosa Parks and my encounter with civil rights history at St. Jude Educational Institute. When I emphasized the utility of placing Barack Obama in the larger continuum of black American leadership, spanning from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and back to figures such as Frederick Douglass, students—in this case black males—asked who Frederick Douglass was; they had never heard of him. This was a reminder that we cannot take for granted that students, including those of African and Caribbean descent, will have a sense of history in the United States. The course instructor, Aurélie Gigot, made extensive notes on the board as I lectured and the session was rich and engaging. I found the session to be so absorbing and my passions as a teacher so intensified that I lost all sense of time as one question and one topic led to another, but I finally had to end it because the Embassy driver was waiting to take me on to Bondy. This encounter has inspired me to do a black history art quilt series and has also made me all the more determined to do more teaching at the grassroots level.

15My final event was a trip to Bondy to the office of the Bondy Blog. I was interviewed on site in juxtaposition with the Obama quilt and asked numerous questions, including whether Obama would be able to live up to his campaign promises, whether he would be seriously committed to issues of foreign policy, how Americans were responding to the election, whether I thought Obama’s popularity mainly had to do with disappointment with the administration of President George W. Bush, and whether Obama and Hillary Clinton would be able to put aside their old rivalries and effectively work together. My responses were translated by Randiane Peccoud from the U.S. Embassy. Later, nineteen bloggers from Bondy arrived to screen “A Portrait of the Artist” and asked me questions of their own for several hours, including whether I thought an Obama was possible in France given the nation’s specific issues related to race and identity. My comments were translated by Randiane Peccoud and Sophie Nadeau from the Cultural Affairs Office at the U.S. Embassy, who coordinated the event.

16I had so much savored my first trip to Paris in 2007, including the experience of working with Géraldine and Anne Cremieux, and the adventures we’d had in the city in places such as Montmartre, the Simone de Beauvoir bridge, and the St. Germain-des-Prés area as they made a short film to accompany my upcoming art quilt exhibition at Montgomery’s Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library entitled “A Portrait of the Artist.” I could not have ever imagined that some works from it would intersect with a project as phenomenal as “Un Patchwork de Cultures,” and, for a few days, become a part of such an important and rich national exhibition of quilts. From beginning to end, my two trips have fulfilled so many of the dreams I’d long had about Paris, dreams that had kept me motivated and inspired as I lived in California and worked as a university professor and also made art.

Exhibition Opening and Reception in Paris for National Touring Quilt Exhibition "Un Patchwork De Cultures" at Mairie du 5e, January 2009

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Not Dr. King’s Promised Land

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Advertising raid data recovery

"The Ties That Bind: JFK, MLK, RFK," 2004

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. Psalm 1

I made the art quilt above to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement so identified with my hometown, Montgomery, Alabama. I made it to honor him alongside the other leaders in the nation such as President John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy with whom he is often identified, who also had great vision on issues related to social justice and made sacrifices. It reflects my belief in the potential use of art to help promote democracy and civic engagement. In so much of the iconography of the 1960s, they emerged as a symbolic brotherhood. The 2008 film about my art, A Portrait of the Artist, also spends some time meditating on the important legacies of these unforgettable men, and the image of my art quilt that features them is positioned at the forefront of my first two print card series.

It is astonishing that the Tea Party movement would attempt to hijack and appropriate the message of the March on Washington led by Dr. King in 1963 claiming concern for civil rights. That this movement, under the leadership of Glenn Beck, would promote this message on a day like today-exactly forty-seven years after Dr. King led his historic March on Washington; exactly two years after Barack Obama received the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency; exactly five years after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf area; and exactly fifty-five years after the brutal murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi-is deeply unsettling. The platform for today’s march seems especially ironic when considering that many conservative agendas have helped to weaken or reverse the major civil rights gains that were achieved through legislation such as the ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and have attacked affirmative action and promoted other reactionary policies that have led to widespread black economic and social dispossession.

All the talk in the Tea Party about taking back “their country” and turning this nation back to God, as if He would ever leave or forsake it or anyone, reflects a nativist ideology and an unsettling if unspoken belief that Obama’s election and presidency do not reflect the character of this nation or the will of God. These views are rooted in the view of citizenship, presidentialism and America itself as being definitionally "white," a view that goes back to the founding days of this nation as a republic in the late 18th century. And yet, one must ask some of the members of this self-righteous movement who spew this talk if God is at all present at their demonstrations in the racist posters that depict this president as Hitler, naked, and with bones through his nose? Is God present in Glenn Beck's remark that being under this president's administration is like being under the kind in the film "Planet of the Apes?" Let me guess. In this fantasy, he is made over and reborn in the warrior role of Charlton Heston. Olaudah Equiano is a man who has also been subjected to his share of discrediting in our time. (I stand firm in believing that this campaign that argues that he was born in South Carolina and not West Africa, would also of necessity make him a liar, even about his dear mother, and a blasphemer, if we consider the heartfelt and deeply moving passages of his narrative that relate to her in a later chapter). Equiano referred to such types as “nominal Christians.“

The efforts of the Tea Party to discredit the president and portray him as incompetent remind me of the ideological investments of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman and the 1915 film based on it by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which portrayed whites in the Reconstruction era as being tyrannized by a black majority that had gained voting rights, seized control of Congress in South Carolina, and threatened the nation with the possibility of what they feared most: “Negro rule.” The black politicians in this film are portrayed as incompetent, unscrupulous, and inept, and as lustful and rapacious. The film romanticizes the Klan and this organization becomes the answer to preventing the development of an interracial democracy in Dixon’s version of the post-bellum U.S. and helps to restore national unity and the division between North and South brought on by the Civil War.

Elements of the Tea Party movement are disturbing on some levels to the extent that aspects of its ideology recast the panic about black leadership in this nation that has long existed, and that is evident in these popular works. America is still America and even the Tea Party members are safe with a black man, Barack Obama, as president. It is sad that some of them refuse to believe that he is capable of working in their interests or capable of representing them, no matter what he says or does, because of the color of his skin. One would think that the earth had floated off its axis or that the sky was falling from the panic that some people are revealing because he is in office. And there are far too many Chicken Littles out there all too willing to help fan the flames of propaganda these days. This kind of intolerance and hatred will not help this nation. If we are truly in any danger, this movement, at least so far, has lacked the vision to help save it and if anything, has perpetuated divisions.

The black participation is not alone evidence that the movement opposes racism. Blacks internalize racism, and sometimes take sides against themselves. The Tea Party’s invocation of the belief in a “colorblind” and “postracial” America to attempt to claim commonality with Dr. King also rings hollow. These concepts have most frequently been mobilized to obstruct the recognition of persisting racism in this nation and have worked against the interests of people of color. The Tea Party investment in them suggests all the more that its view of Dr. King is superficial. Dr. King's movement on the capitol was about tackling persisting poverty. Dr. King believed in social justice. To oppose the concept of "social justice," to the point of not even wanting to hear the word mentioned, is to reject one of the basic values in which Dr. King believed. It was bad enough to have neoconservatives trope his words and his message so banally in the attacks on affirmative action, and to see it casually mentioned in the titles of books with reactionary messages that were in clear opposition to the legacy of civil rights. I never imagined that the distortions would go as far as what happened today. This really takes the cake. Today, if anyone feels like the sky is falling or like the planet is rotating off its axis, it's certainly not Glenn Beck. It's me, and other people like me. It is crucial to have space for dissent in the U.S. public sphere, and to protect First Amendment rights. Glenn Beck’s promised land is not King’s promised land. Let freedom ring, but ring true.

Feature in Photograph Exhibition on Black Debutantes at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama, May 2009

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"I like a debutante, who comes across
Now that's what I call class."
Louis, "Prowlin'," from Grease 2 (1982)

Photos taken by Keri Smith and Megan Smith on the afternoon of "Talk and Tea" at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, including images of our debutante photos and the quilt of Keri featured in the display

Vanity table featuring debutante and other cotillion and formal portraits of women in family spanning over decades

Riche' Deianne Richardson, Age 17, Debutante presentation at the Montgomery Civic Center in Cotillion of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter, Montgomery, AL, April 1989

Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17, Debutante presentation at the Montgomery Civic Center in Cotillion of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter, Montgomery, AL, April 2004

Megan Cheree Smith, Age 17, Debutante presentation at the Joe L. Reed Acadome in Cotillion of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter, Montgomery, AL, April
2006

Art quilt featuring Keri Diamond Smith that reproduces debutante program portrait

It was an honor that the original debutante photographs of my cousin Megan Smith and me (above) were selected and featured in an exhibition of 20 enlarged photographs at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on May 15, 2009 and throughout the weekend as part of the Southern Writers' Project Festival of Plays, along with the art quilt from my debutante series (within my family series) that reproduces the debutante program portrait of her sister and my cousin, Keri Smith. This photographic exhibition, which also incorporated some art pieces, was put together in tandem with an event entitled “Tea and Talk” for the debut reading of acclaimed author/playwright Pearl Cleage's "The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years." The goal was to highlight images of black debutantes in Montgomery, Alabama across several decades, beginning in the 1940s. The featuring of several vintage debutante dresses helped to make the exhibition more dynamic. My family attended this reading at ASF, along with many others in the Montgomery community. This powerful exhibition was curated by Soyia Ellison. It also came together with the assistance of Johnson Chong. It is exciting that this much-anticipated play is being staged in Montgomery this fall, whose description is copied below.

The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years

by Pearl Cleage

In the 1960s, burning issues dominated the news; however in Montgomery, Alabama the Black debutante society was alive. Pearl Cleage’s production starring Jasmine Guy gives well and worthy comedic treatment to the timeless clash of youthful generations.

The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is excited to open its Silver Anniversary Season with the world premiere of renowned playwright Pearl Cleage's comedy The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years. With the world's eyes on Montgomery, Alabama during the turbulent 1960s there were those in Black debutante society who had eyes only on beautiful dresses, balls, parties -- and the young ladies about to be introduced to the upper crust of African-American society.

The Nacirema Society boasts an incredible cast of actors including Tony Award-winning Trazana Beverly and television, film and Broadway star Jasmine Guy.

I was also presented at several other major social events during my junior and senior years of high school, including the Coronation Ball at my school, the historic St. Jude Educational Institute, but the debutante cotillion was for me the culminating event. When she was interviewing me for her book "Crafted Lives," Patricia A. Turner had me count the number of formal events I attended and for which I needed formal attire in high school and they totaled fifteen from 9th to 12th grades. I think that this background informs what I do now as an artist in the sense that one reason I can do the costuming for the gowns on my quilts (i.e. Scarlett O'Hara, Michelle Obama, the debutante quilts) is that I actually wore so many growing up. We shopped for debutante dresses in a range of places, including Atlanta and Birmingham, and in the months leading up to the ball, I tried on forty gowns. We finally found the right one two weeks before the event at Gayfers Department Store in Montgomery, which got many compliments the night of the ball and was talked about for days thereafter.

At the party later that night, I heard a guy refer to me as “the girl that was wearing that dress.” One of my classmates at school excitedly described it to someone by saying that “it had layers and layers and layers of rufffles!” I'd been a bit sleepy late that Friday night that I tried it on in the fitting room and was just pleased and relieved that we'd finally found a dress as I vaguely heard my mother talk to the sales person about how stunning it was and the seamstress began to pin it for alterations. My escort's reaction to it when he picked me up and his excitement about it in the car as we drove down to the Civic Center was when the dress began to become real for me, and I began to sense the impact that it was making, a feeling only escalated as the night went on. One of my other male friends who was an escort in the ball joked that he didn't see me when I was presented because some escorts who were at the backstage curtain were blocking his way and trying to get a look as I went up on the platform. The dress seems positively Victorian by today's standards when spaghetti straps and even strapless styles predominate in the styling of formal gowns for teens, but back then, the dress pushed the envelope a little with its neckline. The most interesting thing about it was the homemade touch, for my mom took some scraps from the bottom and made matching edging to trim my gloves, which I now display in my art studio. (Always, the debutante dresses in my family have been given a special touch; Megan had also worn her dress as first attendant to Miss Senior in St. Jude's Coronation ball, and so made straps out of mesh to make it interesting for her debut a few months later). Some people who had been at the ball talked about my dress, or described it to the people who were not there, to the point that I got tired of hearing about it eventually. I finally escaped from it all though my trip away to Hampton a few days later to see the campus.

In Hampton, Virginia a week after Debutante Cotillion

Sixty debutantes were presented the night I came out, and my escort and I led the minuet, which was choreographed by Sheyann Webb-Christburg, author of the book "Selma Lord Selma" highlighting her childhood encounter with Martin Luther King, which was also made into a Disney Film. She has done amazing choreography annually for this cotillion in Montgomery, as well as others. I most recently saw her work at the Miss Fashionetta contest prior to Ebony Fashion Fair in 2009. Incidentally, my escort was the very friend and classmate whom I pictured as my escort someday when I attended the ball at age 11. I first attended the Phi Delta Kappa debutante cotillion at age 5 when my aunt came out, and also as a participant as a sophomore and junior debutante. I made the court the night that I came out and was honored and surprised to be showered with so many gifts, piled literally up to my chin, from my official "little sisters," and even from people who were not. To this day, this has been one of the happiest days of my life. One thing about that night is that almost everybody that I loved in the world was there.

Finally, I have to mention the scene from the film "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," which shows the crashing of Natalie's cotillion at the country club as the song "Wake Up the Neighborhood" plays, and after her invitation is photocopied and distributed to the public.

Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters by Patricia A. Turner

2010-08-16T22:15:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7 of this remarkable nine-chapter study of African American quilters by Patricia A. Turner, "The Ties That Bind," offers biographical material on Riche Richardson as an artist, focusing mainly on critical discussion of the art quilt featuring John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. This book features an excellent foreword by noted African American quilter and quilting archivist and historian Kyra Hicks. See her excellent blog on African American quilting http://www.blackthreads.blogspot.com/. Professor Turner also offers the scholarly commentary for the short film "A Portrait of the Artist" and an introductory essay entitled "Home to Montgomery: Riche Richardson's Portraits," for the catalog accompanying the "Portraits From Montgomery to Paris" exhibition in 2008 at Troy University's Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library

Portrait of the Artist Part 1, by Anne Cremieux and Geraldine Chouard

2010-08-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Short film (22 min.), which was made in Paris in 2007 and released in 2008, highlights the art quilts of Riche Richardson and features interview with the artist, an interview with the noted folklorist Patricia A. Turner who offers scholarly commentary, and the acclaimed Paris quilter Diane De Obaldia

Riche Richardson Art Prints Photographed by Keith Stevenson and Film Poster by Anne Cremieux and Geraldine Chouard for "A Portrait of the Artist"

2010-08-16T18:46:00.001-07:00

Image of art quilt featuring Barack Obama, which was also part of the "Quilts for Obama" exhibition at the Washington DC Historical Society curated by Roland Freeman that ran through September 2009; companion of art quilt entitled "The Magnificient Michelle Obama"

"Obama Time: Always (Congratulations, Mr. President!)"
Political Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Special Edition Print Card
Released on occasion of talk and reception at the Ambassador's Residence arranged by the U.S. Embassy in Paris, France, January 14, 2008
For "Un Patchwork de Cultures"
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"
Family Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 2 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"Riche' Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude'(The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965)"
Self-Portrait
Print Card 8 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"The Ties That Bind: JFK,MLK,RFK"
Politcal Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 1 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"A Tie, Too?: Malcolm X"
Political Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 7 0f 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"Playing Venus Hot to Trot?": Josephine Baker"
(Commemorating 100 Years, 1906-2006)
Paris Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 4 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir"
(Commemorating 100 Years, 1908-2008)
Paris Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 3 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!"
Hollywood Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 6 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

"Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle"
Hollywood Series
By Riche' Deianne Richardson
Print Card 5 of 8
Photography by Keith Stevenson

The twenty-two minute short film "A Portrait of the Artist" on the art quilts of Riche' Richardson was taped on location in Paris in June of 2007, released in 2008, and can be viewed in three sections on YouTube. It premiered in May of 2008 at a conference on the U.S. South in Montpellier, France. It has been screened in a number of locations in Paris, including le musee de la toile de Jouy, the Mairie du 5e in tandem with the national touring exhibition "Un Patchwork de Cultures," the U.S. Ambassador's Residence, the Southern Studies Forum Meeting (Versailles/Paris): The Sense(s) of the South," and several universities. In the U.S., the film was premiered at the Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library at the opening reception of "Portraits from Montgomery to Paris" held on August 21, 2008. The film was completed with support from the U.S. Embassy in Paris and all participants attended the formal screening at the U.S. Ambassador's Residence, including the filmmakers Geraldine Chouard and Anne Cremieux, Riche' Richardson, Patricia A. Turner, who offered scholarly commentary, and Diane De Obaldia, a former Chanel fashion model and owner of the famed Le Rouvray quilting shop and gallery in Paris near Notre Dame.

Art Print cards have included images of print card set of 4 released in 2007 with 400cards in circulation distinguished by the artist's name banners on front and back, all complimentary, and now discontinued. The print card set of 8 was released in 2008 and totaled 1200 cards available. The third, a Special Print Card Edition of 250 featuring President Obama, was released in 2009 in tandem with the trip to Paris as a Cultural Envoy of the U.S. Embassy and participation in the Paris opening of the "Un Patchwork de Cultures" national exhibition. Some Obama print cards were donated to the guidance cousnelor for distribution to students at E.D. Nixon Elementary School in Montgomery who had attended the field trip to the Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library in 2008 to see "Portraits From Montgomery to Paris." No more of the original Obama print cards are available. The number of print cards produced so far totals 1850.

The card sets have been fun to produce. Photo shoots were set up on the balcony at my high rise apartment in downtown Sacramento, California or in Berkeley at Keith's, where my quilts were always shot against the amazing backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge! We also did one public photo shoot on the UC Davis campus during Black Family Weekend in 2007, which students enjoyed. This photo shoot was also filmed by student filmmaker Jamon Larry and an assistant. The 5x7 cards are designed in postcard format with information about the title, series, artist and photographer on the back. The print card sets are composed very carefully and balanced and modeled on a "call and response" format that juxtaposes images that are in ideological tension in some way. The evening of the reception at the Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library was very busy with the gallery talk, attending the debut of the film "A Portrait of the Artist" and mingling with guests, and since the catalog for the show was on hand, we suspended sales and very few of these print card sets were sold that night. Of the 150 full sets, 50 complimentary sets were originally distributed nationally in tandem with the exhibition. Though one or two print cards and perhaps a poster will continue to be released with each show, along with small sets featuring special series, a print card set of this size and scope will not accompany future art quilt exhibitions, so this one is destined to be rare as well.

This set of eight "postcard" prints produced in tandem with "Portraits: From Montgomery to Paris" is still available at its original price for $10, plus $3.00 for shipping and handling, and can be purchased by forwarding a request to joanne_kenmore@hotmail.com and mailing a check for $13.00 to the following address:

The Wagon Wheel
c/o The Flare Exchange
P.O. Box 6463
Montgomery, AL 36106

Cards are not sold or available separately. Checks should be made payable to Riche Richardson. Please allow three weeks for delivery after payment is received and processed. A more comprehensive selection of cards featuring my quilts will be produced and marketed at some point, along with some other items. Also, once this enterprise is developed fully and recovers the orignal investments related to production overhead for these sets, for which the photographer also receives a share, it will be one that "tithes double" on any profits, or 20% of the earnings, and contribute them to community and education initiatives. The same holds true for all art quilts sold.

"Portraits: From Montgomery to Paris," Debut Art Quilt Exhibition, July-September, 2008, Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library, Montgomery, AL

2010-08-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

Exhibition catalog

Museum gallery sign describing exhibition

DVD cover design and copy of poster art advertisement for "A Portrait of the Artist"

Photographs of Art Quilts Installed in Gallery Room at Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library Taken Night of Reception, August 21, 2008 by Cyrinthia Walker (Missing Image of Simone de Beauvoir Quilt)

Art Quilt Exhibition Preliminary Overview: "Portraits from Montgomery to Paris"
Artist: Riché Deianne Richardson

from Family Series #1, Including Wedding, Graduation/Education, and Debutante Series, Three Installations, and Artist Self Portraits

1. "Sunday Afternoon on Palafax Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Joe Richardson"
2. "Sunday Afternoon on Palafax Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Emma Lue
Jenkins Richardson"
3. "JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"(Installation)
4. "Pam's Graduation from First Grade at Mrs. Drake's"(Installation)
5. " JoAnn Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"
6. "Joseph Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"
7. "Pamela Richardson: Graduation Picture at Jefferson Davis High School"
8. "The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Emma Richardson"
9. "The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Joe Richardson"
10. "Riché Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude' (The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965)" Self-Portrait
11. Riché Deianne Richardson, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 1989" Self-Portrait
12 "'Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes!': Keri and Megan-School Days at St. John-Resurrection"(Installation)
13. "Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2004"
14. "Megan Chereé Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2006"

from Paris Series #1

15. "Playing Venus Hot to Trot?: Josephine Baker"(Commemorating 100 years, 1906-2006)
16. "Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir" (Commemorating 100 years, 1908-2008)

from Political Series #1

17. "The Ties that Bind: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy"
18. "A Tie, Too?": Malcolm X"

from Hollywood Series # 1

19. "Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!"
20. "Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle"

Highlights from Art Reception, "Portraits from Montgomery to Paris," Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library, August 21, 2008

2010-08-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

Reception was dedicated to my grandmother, Emma Jenkins Richardson. It was dedicated to the memory of Johnnie Rebecca Carr, my great aunt and the best friend of Rosa Parks, and to Pat McClammy, the wife of Alabama State Representative Thad McClammy. My cousin, Keri Diamond Smith, who has, along with her sister Megan Smith served as a liturgical dancer over the years at Catholic masses and retreats in range of cities, did a dance that she developed entitled "The Debutante's Dance" in light of the debutante series in my family series, to open the reception in the exhibition gallery and prior to my remarks. She ended the dance with a curtsy that evoked the famous Texas debutante bow known as the "Texas Dip," but instead of extending her arms outward as she bent down, pulled her hands together in front of her face in the shape of a prayer. That night, I even carried the Paris theme through in styling by wearing the black sundress, the thin black scarf and the decorative black Malina fabric purse with its rich fabric and decorative design that I'd bought while shopping in the city in 2007. (Malina purses purchased in Montmartre were the main gifts that I brought back for the women in my family). About 100 family members, friends, community members and leaders in the community Montgomery attended this reception, whose distinguished guests also included the scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr., and his wife, the scholar Charlotte Pierce-Baker. This event was documented by Megan Smith and also by Cyrinthia Walker (whose images were shared with the assistance of Travis Armstrong).

Dialogue with Fourth and Fifth Graders from E.D. Nixon Elementary School, Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library, Montgomery, AL, August 22, 2008

2010-08-16T12:50:00.001-07:00

Art, Education, and Community Outreach

Field Trip for Children Sponsored by the E.D. Nixon Foundation and Alabama State Representative Thad McClammy in Conjunction with Art Quilt Exhibition "Portraits: From Montgomery to Paris"

This dialogue on art quilts with fourth and fifth graders in the exhibition room at the Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library in Montgomery, Alabama was held in conjunction with the ED Nixon Foundation and Alabama State Representative Thad McClammy. All of this in some ways brings my life full circle. For in high school as a junior and senior and student council vice-president and then president at the historic St. Jude Educational Institute, which is best historically known as the final camping place for Selma-to-Montgmery Marchers in 1965, I coordinated a weekly program at the Cleveland Avenue Branch YMCA in Montgomery (on what is now Rosa Parks Avenue) for children and teens to promote academic achievement and social graces. This dialogue with E.D. Nixon Elementary school children in every way took me back to the earliest community base with which I interacted as a teen volunteer, and this is, incidentally, part of the district area that Representative McClammy represents. To further attest to the difference that a commitment to community service early in life can make, in retrospect, I am amazed that I actually first met Georgette Norman, the curator for this art exhibition, when I was volunteering for a week at the Girl Scout Camp-Camp Sunshine-in Montgomery after I graduated from college at Spelman in 1993. The dialogue with these smart students for two full hours went well and I so much enjoyed the conversation with them. They were absolutely brilliant and asked so many interesting, useful and challenging questions. I am glad that we were able to use the art quilts featuring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X to teach about aspects of Civil Rights Movement history and U.S. politics. In general, it is important to me as an artist that my exhibitions incorporate educational outreach and that they relate to my continuing commitment to helping to make a difference. (The art quilts featuring figures such as President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and series on black history and Alabama women such as my great aunt, civil rights leader Johnnie Rebecca Carr, will help serve that purpose in the new exhibition). I was also inspired that there were some artists among the students in this group! I am thankful that being an artist allows me to have exchanges that take me far beyond the classroom at the university. Thanks so much to Deborah Garrison for the excellent photography on the morning of this exchange with the students, and for returning a few weeks later to photograph Representative Thad McClammy with the political quilt series. This event was also documented from beginning to end by a photographer from the Montgomery Advertiser.

After this busy morning, Deborah, my mother Joanne Richardson-who worked with Alma Johnson and other members of the E.D. Nixon Foundation, her club member Anne Eutsey from the Continental Societies, Inc., also a Partner in Education with E.D. Nixon Elementary School, and the school's administrators to help coordinate this event-went to pick up lunch at a popular Cloverdale restaurant in Montgomery. A final thing that I remember about this day is that the cashier checking us out at the restaurant at the end of the cafeteria-style line, a young white woman who may have been in her early twenties, quietly commented to me in the midst of all the noise and lunch-hour frenzy and her busy work on the cash register, and in a way that I almost didn't even hear, that "I like everything that you have on," which she must have noticed as I was coming down the line. She just said it out of the blue. That day, "everything" included a black Calvin Klein dress and the same black Prevata sandals that I'd worn to the exhibition's opening reception at the museum the night before, and everyday accessories such as black Ralph Lauren sunglasses and a black and silver Movado watch. This quiet and shy compliment was sweet to hear and shows that artists can inspire people in minor and unexpected ways wherever we go.

Artist's Home and Art Studio

2010-08-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

My Former "Paris Apartment in Sacramento with a Southern Folk and Vintage Twist"

My key chain, which says it all.

The foyer; I loved using a door knocker as a mail holder, and on top of the antique singer sewing machine, one of a few that I've collected, but the door knocker is not on display in my apartment this time around. The sewing machines, the remaining two that I kept of the four that I had originally before making donations of them to charity, are now in my art studio. I bought that ashtray in North Carolina at an antique store for $1.50 and used to use it as a plant stand. Now, it's just put away. This is the foyer literally the night before I started dismantling everything to pack and move, and ship all the art off to be exhibited in Montgomery. The cross is from a great Catholic store in Sacramento that I liked to visit. It has personal meaning. But it is also my way of acknowledging how much religious art is a genre unto itself and how it has been cherished in lots of homes; mine was no exception growing up.

One of my favorite pieces, a French pie cabinet, which I use for some of my Haviland china collection. Also displays my F&F Mold and Die collection; still need the cookie jar and spice collection, but the cookie jar costs $400 and the spice collection is pretty pricey, too. One also needs to find a very good one. Not that into Ebay anymore, which is where I found most of these. Also, my Kitchen Aid mixer, hands down, is my favorite appliance.

Close-up of some of the Haviland china. I still need another full set and more individual plates, but will save that for marriage. I love the way that a beautiful set of Haviland will always get the attention in any antique store. Once saw a vintage place setting on display at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, which highlighted some of the more political implications of this lavish design. All of the serving pieces, including tiny butter dishes for individual place settings, indicated that someone must have been serving from them and doing the labor to wash them. This is one of my favorite things to collect, in addition to the basic silver elements. In general, the Grand Baroque is something else I need to commit myself to collecting. The flatware set "Michaelangelo" made by Oneida is what I use now.

Enjoy her stuff but never got Nigella's recipe for a madeira cake to work! If I could cook like anyone on earth, it would be Patti Labelle. I've used her cookbooks to at least give it a try!

Part of my cookbook collection here, as well as various books on home making, including studies by Carol Mendelson on Laundry and keeping a home. I love studying all the work in these areas, and implementing or experimenting with different ideas. Keeping the traditional Monday wash day, as much as I can, helps a lot. Glad to have found that All-Clad pot at Macy's in Sacramento, for the prices for all cookware in Ithaca are astronomical. Will get the whole set in the near future, a definite a must-have after marriage.

Always kept a well-stocked pantry for baking when I was home afternoons, during the siesta that I always took, especially during my annual research quarter. Tend not to do academic work on days at home between 3 and 7. Grocery deliveries of the big items and bottled water always made stocking it easy. Like the pantry, I enjoyed keeping a linen closet, with a preference for all white towels and washcloths. Macy's, two blocks away, was my Kmart and I left California with far more linens, feather beds and pillows than anyone should have. It was definitely addictive and I've since downsized. The other major zone along this axis for me were the buffet drawers in the dining room, with collections ranging from antique Quaker lace table cloths to cloth napkins and various sets of crocheted napkins and place mats. Still need an oversize table cloth. Never liked the ones at Macy's because they were never cotton but were all polyester, and so bought none there. Don't like the small American ones. I kept one drawer for candles, to always have a fresh supply for dinner parties. One drawer was purely for gift wrap, tape and boxes.

My collection of French cookbooks, including many by Julia Child

The core of my collection of Southern folk art, which is grounded by artists such as Mose T, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Bernice Sims and others. Alabama art is the foundation and highlight of my collection. I am inspired by them, for I also very much identify as an Alabama artist. I met Mose T in 1999 and was photographed with him. I also keep photos of Southern folk artists on my refrigerator door at home and on my office door on campus. I love the remarkable quilt collections that some people I know have, but I only make quilts and have never collected them, for I don't have the means to store them properly or a lot of space to display them at this point; this is what I collect!

The dining table. As a Southerner, not having a formal dining room is unthinkable to me. It took two years in California to find the harp-back chairs, which are all hand-needlepointed with flowers in different designs. My grandmother explained that women would work together in groups and do these projects to support one another. I also have a large rug that matches, which is also hand-made and needlepointed. The candle holders mainly help to create the French vibe that I like. The French tend to keep tall ones so that the face is lit from above instead of below. I literally ordered off to a special company and had all of mine changed at one point, for they were low initially. In general, I really got into mastering the art of "illumination" back then from room to room and for me, this is where it reached its pinnacle. The large mirror was positioned over the buffet just at the height to reflect and double the light from the candles on the table, and it made for very elegant dinners. I believe that fine linens and textiles are the clothing for any home, candle-holders and other items function as its jewelry. My Jimmy Lee Sudduth paintings are in the background. The sofa is a gift from my grandmother from the famous Martha House furniture company in Montgomery, which she bought for me when I completed my Ph.D. at Duke. The large foldout French mirror in the background was my gift to myself when I got tenure in the UC system back in 2005. I've re-purposed it for the bedroom this time around. Just must say, also, that one night, I was sitting on that sofa watching TV, and saw the mirror start to move, and reflect the F&F collectibles on top of the cabinet in the kitchen. it was weird. I was thinking, "have I seen this before?" I looked and looked again. I wondered if the heater was causing some kind of vibration and doing it, and got up and checked. It turned out to be an earthquake, a rare occurrence in the Central Valley area in California.

Took a break from Southern folk art for about a year and started collecting ornate antique French mirrors. Have seven large ones now. Too many people only get a good look at themselves in department stores, but good mirrors are helpful to have around.

One of my favorites

My study in Sacramento. And when not working, a perfect napping sofa. Also shows all of my books related to art and interior design. Would love to relax in this cozy spot, look through my books, and dream, especially of Paris. In general, the spot reflected my belief that we rarely sit all over our home. We usually have special spots in different places where we spend the vast majority of the time when we are at home reading, watching TV, etc. Even if there's a whole room, most of us will probably always sit in the same places without even thinking about it. In that apartment, I had exactly seven. My bed, this spot, my dining room table, the sofa in the living room, my desk, baths, and the balcony. Everyone can probably count up their intimate home spaces in a similar way. I thought it made sense to nurture the basic and specific spaces at home where we actually spend time. Another thing about that sofa is that I got trapped in the elevator for two hours accidentally, up on the 15th floor of the building, on the day it was moved in. Assistance was called and I waited calmly until help arrived. It was kind that a few residents waited outside the elevator the whole time until I was freed. To them, I'm sure I was always thought of from that point on as "the woman who got trapped in the elevator."

Too many magazines. Recycled most before I left California

In background, poster from French Film Festival of the Alliance Francaise, which I attended annually from its inception in 2002 for six years. I also eventually joined the organization

Some of my home decor books and books on France. I just began to crave this knowledge a few years ago and read everything I could on the subject. One of my favorite subgenres is all the books on French femininity. I read them as quickly as they are published. Like, I've already finished the new followup to Entre Nous by Debra Ollivier. They are beginning to quote one another too much for me now, though, for I've also read the books being quoted and so seeing material rehashed is no fun. In general, I've read these books over and over and savor them. In my office on campus, tthere's the equivalent of about 10 tall book shelves of books, but those are all academic. I love them and have read a good many of them, and am a restless bibliophile and researcher. But outside of academia I also approach everything in life with the curiosity that a researcher would. My books at home are all geared toward this ongoing process of personal development and are concentrated in a few distinct, genres (spirituality and self-help, relationships, art, fashion and beauty, cooking and homemaking, interior design, travel, and whatever stacks I'm actively reading as an academic). I read and reread my personal books to the point that they are virtually memorized and especially love the how-to genre.

The very last version of my home art studio in Sacramento in May, 2008 before art was taken down and shipped to Montgomery for my exhibition at the Rosa Parks Museum Gallery and Library.

As an adult and single woman, have always preferred only white bedroom decor and never any art in that room. It took several years to find that long bolster pillow, a rare thing in the U.S., though at this point I don't use it anymore. But it was too hard to find to even think of getting rid of. The main art piece on the wall is the sepia-colored photo from my debutante program book, my version of the "lady of the house picture," which reminds me of the large one of my grandmother in the front room at home. For marriage, this definitely has to go. I think a simple French platform California King bed would be nice.

My fun book collection on Southern femininity. Don't use these for research, but they are fun to read and have. Scarlett O'Hara music box, from my GWTW collection.

Took two years to find this art deco vanity. I saw many, but preferred one with a mirror trimmed in wood, which was harder to find. It was also important to me to have one with glove drawers. Like the vanity, which was found separately, the chest has a waterfall front.

Found this chair at one of my favorite antique stores in Sacramento, which was dedicated to all French antiques. I bought it because I like Louis XV furniture and also because I loved the color. Now in my art studio with another chair similar in design. French chair and one of the dolls from my porcelain doll collection. The others are boxed and in a closet. Trying to save for my future daughter if I have one.

Debutante and other formal photos of women in my family. Over time, I framed all of these, including my own, at Grebitus and Sons (a fine jewelry store two blocks away) in silver frames, where Macy's suggested I go to find the frames I wanted after what they had did not seem to satisfy me. G&S packaged everything beautifully and would call and update me on their store regularly in light of this project. The photos are another very different kind of art collection. I need to do a similar thing for my main family photos. The debutante pictures of Megan and me and the debutante quilt of Keri were all featured in spring 2009 in an exhibition on black debutantes at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. This vanity recasts and revises a basic design that I saw in Claudia Strasser's gorgeous book "The Paris Apartment." She's a wonderful person and we had several exchanges when I was in California and I look forward to meeting her at some point when I visit her store, which will be easier to do now since I'm so much closer to the city. Loved Child perfume, which smells great and is so beloved by Madonna and others. I went through vial after vial; they are all filled and packaged by hand. I enjoyed ordering it and wearing it; by then, I had bought the bath gel to reinforce the scent. The rose flower pin collection has been removed now and is stored in a closet. I am slowly redoing the rose pin collection with handmade roses at this point. I also have a display of Mac makeup brushes and the makeups I use. Flesh stuff like powders and concealers are in one container and colors like blushes, lipsticks and nail polishes are on the other. Indeed, I regard the makeup brushes and cosmetics on this vanity as a kind of art studio for fashioning myself as a woman.

Master bathroom. Had large gilded (and very heavy) mirror here. Takes a lot of strength and time just to push it, which I learned that it was delivered and left in my hallway and I needed to get it in here. Used milk maid statue theme here. The large one is inscribed and looks like it may be one by one of the famed brothers Mareaux.

Had many great parties in this apartment over the years, including an event in honor of the scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr., when I worked with the Davis Humanities Institute to bring him to campus in May of 2003. This final party was held in May of 2008 for my graduate students at the culimination of my course on the "Global South." I had it catered by Raja's, my favorite Indian restaurant in Davis, but designed all the fruit, vegetable and dessert trays on the table myself.

The spread from Raja's. The food was delicious. The samosas were a big hit. No leftovers.

Could see horses and carriages plodding by on N street daily coming through from Old Sacramento. Always intended to go one one of these rides someday while living downtown in Sacramento but never did. School children would sometimes be taken on tours in large horse-drawn wagons, and they would always wave to me if I was downstairs. It was just sweet. Another charming thing was hearing the light rail and church bells, or the train a few blocks away. This street was taken over by cyclists or protesters periodically, too.

A segment of my balcony, which was a long as a bowling lane, maybe longer. I also maintained a potted garden of pink miniature roses. They are not in bloom in this picture. The table and chair set took a long time to find in Sacramento, and I found them when I moved to Capitol Towers. I refused to ever put a plastic set on my balcony, like most people in my building, but left it empty, until I found the right vintage one. One incentive was that my cousins, Keri and Megan, then 11 and 14, were scheduled to visit me for two weeks. I wanted them to be able to have an outlet during the day and to be able to sit on the balcony instead of being holed up inside all day. They spent hours out there on the visit. They had the best instincts for great photos and in the final days, we took some pictures. I'd been keeping the bone china in the dish washer. Before I took the picture, they asked me to wait, ran to the dishwasher and got the tea cups and saucers, and then took them out on the balcony, sat in the chairs and posed with them. Once on the way out for an excursion with my aunt, who came to take them back to Montgomery, they waved up at the security camera downstairs because they knew I would be watching to see them out. At both Capitol Towers and Bridgeway, I regret that I never lit up the balcony at night. Some neighbors would burn lights nightly, which felt like Christmas. Enjoyed seeing it, especially looking up from the street at the balconies on the way in, but could not bring myself to use energy in that way.

The view from my bedroom and balcony by day. Wells Fargo towered in the other direction. My mom asked me about what the new building looked like from my balcony and I said, "Like the Iceberg from Titanic." I was like, "It's time for me to go!" For years, my building, Bridgeway Towers, like Capitol Towers where I also lived for two years, set the standard in downtown Sacramento for luxury living; its penthouse apartments were the top rent ceiling in the Sacramento region and we had a doorman and other amenities, like free cable with many channels. Months before the ground broke on this new building, which went up on the site of the parking lot I used to cross when living at Capitol Towers, all of the condos were guaranteed through $60,000 downpayments.

The view from my bedroom and balcony by night, including the gorgeous weekly fireworks display. Could see fireworks from my balcony in Sacramento every Saturday night from April to August when I lived here. Could also see them when I lived at Capitol Towers. Was a great backdrop every spring and summer when I entertained and had friends over. This was a way to entertain the Sacramento Ravens baseball crowds, for whom there would be special buses. Neighbors and I always applauded after the show, and they really bring it. Loved this. Just the best entertainment in Sacramento. Also, I must say, that my favorite spot of all in Sacramento was the huge, beautiful and colorful "Peace Garden" when it was in bloom at the edge of the Capitol Building grounds. I'd go there many Saturdays and sit for a bit. The trees that cover the capitol grounds in Sacramento are labeled with a range of varieties, like a tree library. Many Saturdays, brides and grooms and their wedding parties would go to the garden to be photographed, and on the days that they were there, I'd pass on. But otherwise, it was almost vacant and one could spend time there alone. When I visited Paris, I went to the Luxembourg Gardens, which was covered with chairs and full of people of many generations, and felt as crowded as the mall. Once I was back at home and so often found myself alone on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon after walking from midtown toward home nad soaking up the beauty of this gorgeous rose garden on our capitol grounds, I'd think, this would never happen in Paris.

"The Peace Garden," Gorgeous Rose Garden on Capitol Grounds in Sacramento, CA

Images of the Sacramento apartment at Bridgeway Towers are also featured in Geraldine Chouard and Anne Cremieux's short film "A Portrait of the Artist." I posted the comment below about Bridgeway Towers, for a long time, the premier luxury highrise building in downtown Sacramento and the only one with a doorman, at Apartmentratings.com about my Sacramento apartments on a review blog in July 2007 and updated it in August 2008 and thought it would be useful to share. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner share valuable insights in their study of the studio, the primary space for artists. As always, as an artist, it is necessary to find the best possible climates for art production and studio space. I was tremedously blessed in that respect in California where I lived in two popular and very different high rise condominiums downtown in Sacramento and developed my first art studios. Artistic expression permeates the lives of artists above and beyond the art that they make, and gives their environments (and sometimes the artists themselves) a profound and natural sensuality. Commercial items bought simply for practicality just won't do for me; even my bathroom garbage can is hand-painted. One thing that I loved about Paris when I first visited was that even sponges and regular house-hold items that I saw looked interesting and beautiful. For many artists, everything is done with a special flair, care and precision, and home is one of the places, beyond the art itself, where all of this is most evident. For the artist, even the body is a canvas for fashion, makeup, and expressing style and creativity. The images below in the photoalbum, for which there is a link from Facebook, shows how this kind of expression comes out for me. The review follows.

I moved out of this building in June 2008 after having lived in it for 6 years as a renter. It is a good environment with many nice longterm residents. The building is conveniently located, which was good for me because I didn't own a car. I was comfortable living there and loved that I could see the downtown firework shows from my balcony every Saturday in the spring and summer. I loved seeing the horses and carriages plod by from Old Sacramento; when I'd have parties for my graduate students, guests thought it was interesting to have a "New York apartment" in Sacramento, though I always gave mine a Paris and Southern touch. This building has a rich history and Jerry Brown once lived in it (when he was Governor). I appreciated the building's commitment to keeping a doorman or concierge on staff, which makes things more convenient. I ordered groceries sometimes from Safeway.com. I had a two-bedroom with two baths and it was far more space than I needed, as big as a house, with closets for days! The feel was luxurious with the views and the sliding doors in every room that led out onto the balcony, which was as long as a bowling lane. Because of this, I saw it as an urban beach house; but instead of looking out on the ocean, one looked out on the city. I am also an artist, and photo sessions were frequently taped on my balcony or in the living room; some footage is visible in the film about my art entitled "A Portrait of the Artist," which was shown at the Ambassador's Residence in Paris when I visited under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy as a "Cultural Envoy" in 2009. They had just started showing the lights on top of a new condominium building nearby and I had the perfect view of it, especially from my bedroom (photo included). I never had a washer and dryer and would use the laundry room downstairs; but even some residents who had them did that in the summer, too, b/c dryer blowback made their apartments too hot. I savored day to day living there. I have so much missed my apartment since leaving California, and even finally moved into one that reminded me of it in New York, at least in terms of the floorplan. I urge residents to never take Bridgeway Towers for granted, for such spaces can be hard to come by in some areas. My experience was good at Capitol Towers, too, where I lived for two years. I had regular housekeeping since the building made it available for a fee. The staff back then was phenomenal and took lots of pride in the apartments. Like, when I filled out the forms on the condition of the apartment, which had been newly renovated, after moving in in 1999, I noted a little rust on the racks in the refrigerator. A day later, I thought something was different when I looked at the food inside. I was shocked that they had literally put another one in there while I was at work. It's under new management now, so I can't speak to how it is there now. Overall, I loved downtown Sacramento living and did it for nine years, which gave me good access to the downtown plaza, free park concerts, farmer's markets, etc. I highly recommend it.

Some Views of Current Art Studio in New York, which is highlighted in Lauren Cross's film "The Skin Quilt Project"

On Michelle Obama's Portrayal as a "Marie Antoinette" and the Vacation to Spain

2010-08-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

I saw the financial breakdown on the NBC Nightly News last night and can't believe the high level of scrutiny that Michelle Obama is getting about her trip to Spain. There have been allusions to French history in some of these reports, which mention the lavish spending of leaders like Barack and Michelle Obama who are portrayed as being indifferent to the lingering impact of the budget crisis; comparisons have even been made between the First Lady and the Queen of France in the late 18th century, Marie Antoinette, who was frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. The infamous phrase associated with her that Marie Antoinette is reported to have never made, "let them eat cake," has been linked to the First Lady. I understand people's very real and legitimate concerns about limiting financial spending during these difficult times. But a balanced perspective on this matter is so important. I think that it is unfair, for instance, to expect the First Lady to use her official trips abroad as opportunities for vacations in the way that some of her critics have suggested.

Speaking of France, I served as a "Cultural Envoy" to the U.S. Embassy in France last year as an artist and as part of the opening in Paris of a national touring quilt exhibition called "Un Patchwork de Cultures," which was designed to celebrate the shared histories of the U.S. and France, and to reflect on Louisiana and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina; the highlight of this visit was being honored with a talk, film screening, exhibition and reception at the U.S. Ambassador's Residence, a gala event, which is documented elsewhere in photographs on this art blog. I was brought to the city under a grant from the U.S. Department of State and within the Embassy's "Speaker Series." On this week-long trip packed with activities, I got a little taste of the busy kind of schedule under which diplomats typically work. Every day had three or four activities to which I had to be transported in Paris and around the suburbs by an Embassy car. The scheduling and activities for such major trips can be extensive and exhausting, take a lot of people to put together, and often leave no room for down time or touring. And after one day is over, one is up half the night editing multiple lectures and speeches and gearing up for the next day of events.

My main mission that week was to do educational outreach to youth. And in my lecture at the Ambassador's, I underscored how much it helps and advances democracy when youth who have been excluded, such as black youth in the Jim Crow South were in the past, are let into the system and given jobs and other opportunities. I drew on civil rights history in Montgomery, AL, and my own family backgroud there, and mentioned the opportunities opened up to my grandmother when she got training and jobs working on the NYA. They helped to open doors in the Jim Crow South that had been previously closed and were also the foundation for her to later go work at the Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida during World War II doing things like filling in ledgers and passing out uniforms to the soldiers (as my grandfather and other contractors in construction helped to build barracks). I mentioned this example to underscore the difference for democracy that it makes when minority youth are let into the system to speak to the needs and concerns of the youth in the banlieues who continue to feel excluded, youth whose protests garnered global attention in the fall of 2005. By mentioning the examples on which I drew, I framed the issues globally in relation to the history and experiences of black Southerners, and also drew on the Civil Rights Movement. I did outreach through art and spoke to multiple groups, including three groups of high school students and three groups of college students. Furthermore, I was interviewed by the editors and nineteen youth at the Bondy Blog, the first news outlet to report the unrest in the suburbs in 2005 (they mainly asked me questions about the Obamas since I was there the week before the historic inauguration), gave the address at the Ambassador's Residence, did multiple gallery talks at Mairie du 5e where the "Un Patchwork de Cultures" exhibition was held, and was also the featured speaker at a lunch workshop in the dining room at the U.S. Embassy put together by their new diversity group, which is designed to think about ideas for dealing with diversity and 1000 Embassy employees.

My goal was to do work all that week and to, in whatever ways I could, help make a difference. That's what my mind was on, not vacationing. I'd had time to do that some in Paris in 2007, when I was in the city for a little over two weeks. Even then, I had "official" things to do like taking a language course and being interviewed for a film about my art quilts. My one wish that week when I was in the city in 2009 was to see the Christmas lights and huge tree still up at the Galleries Lafayette. I never did; there wasn't time. Maybe I'll catch them when I am in Paris again later this fall.

To hear her critics suggest that Michelle Obama should have used an official visit abroad for vacation purposes is so unfair and short-sighted. I can imagine the fun that a little girl like Sasha might have on such a busy trip. The First Lady knew what she was doing when she scheduled her vacation the way she did. People with true alpha personalities and work habits, including alpha females, tend to work hard and to play hard and be quite adventuresome, but keep work and play in very separate compartments because focus on their goals and missions is always so important.

Also, some of her critics are forgetting that there are real reasons, like repeated threats, that the Obamas need such tight and extensive security. I would compare living under the tight security and "bubble" of the White House for four years in some ways to living in the famous Biosphere project for two years, where people stayed in that greenhouse-like structure and grew all their own food and had no outside contact, which didn't go too well. The Obamas and all who agree to life in the White House make an extreme sacrifice that most people can't begin to understand. The jealousy over her travels is unsettling. Last year critics were griping about the shorts she wore to the Grand Canyon! Now this!

I was actually very impressed by the independence that she showed in being away from the country during her husband's birthday celebration last week, and letting him share the celebration with friends in Chicago like Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, and Valerie Jarrett; she is cool and confident and not too clingy as a wife and as a woman, and is a true femme fatale, and that says a lot. That's the shared quality with many French women on which it might be better to focus, and that her superficial comparison with the nation's former queen based on a false sound bite can easily obscure. Drawing on the words of Edith Wharton's classic book "French Ways and their Meaning," Michelle Obama is truly "grown up." In general, it's important to focus on the shared histories that can help us to make a difference.

The two Tweets I made on the controversy are below:

Twindynasty The intense security isolates one in a "bubble" not entirely unlike the famous 2-yr Biosphere project. Enough lip on the Spain trip!

Twindynasty Michelle Obama is not the new Marie Antoinette. The criticism about her summer vacation to Spain is very unfair.

Scrapbook

2010-06-28T11:50:00.001-07:00

From group picture at dinner for newly tenured Cornell professors, a very special celebration, May 29, 2010

Picnic at William Faulkner home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, MS; delivered one of the keynote papers earlier that day at the time-honored Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference on the theme of "Faulkner and Film" entitled "Oprah's Faulkner," July 21, 2010

Preparing to confer degrees as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Africana Center at Cornell, May 30, 2010

Photo at my Aunt's beautiful and elegant wedding, June 19, 2010

Photo at the fun bachelorette dinner (with 20 other female family members and friends) for my Aunt, June 18, 2010

Hanging out in Times Square with my cousin LaTongia and her mom Shirley, who was in NYC for a Mother's Day Vacay, after a lovely family dinner that included the three of us, our cousin Darryl who was trained at Yale and runs a law practice in the city, and his wife and three sons, May 14, 2010