My name's Franklin Kelly.
I'm deputy director
and chief curator
here at the National Gallery.
And it's a pleasure to welcome
you to today's program, which
will be presented by Elizabeth
Alexander who
is the author of six
books of poetry,
including American
Sublime, which was
a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer
Prize,
two collections of essays,
and The Light of the World,
her critically-acclaimed memoir
on love and loss.
Her writing explores
such subjects as race, gender,
politics art and history.
Among her acclaimed essays,
"Can You be Black and Look
at This: Reading the Rodney King
Videos," and "Meditations
on Mecca: Gwendolyn Brooks
and the Responsibilities
of the Black Poet,"
have enlivened debate
on the role of art
and social justice
and addressed issues of race,
representation, violence,
and the black body.
In 2009 she wrote and delivered
the poem, "Praise Song
for the Day,"
for President Barack Obama's
first inauguration.
She earned her bachelor's degree
in English from Yale University
in 1984.
Her master's in English/creative
writing from Boston University
in 1997,
and her doctorate in English
from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1992.
Dr. Alexander has received
many awards, fellowships,
and honorary degrees.
Among them grants
from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment
for the Arts.
She received
the Anisfield-Wolf Award
for Lifetime Achievement
in Poetry
and is the inaugural recipient
of the Jackson Poetry Prize.
She's a Chancellor
of the Academy
of American Poets.
Dr. Alexander was on the faculty
of Yale University for 15 years
and served as chair of Yale's
African American Studies
department.
She was recently named the Wun
Tsum Tam Mellon professor
in the Humanities
at Columbia University.
In 2015, Dr. Alexander joined
the Ford Foundation
as a director of creativity
and free expression.
She shapes and directs
Ford's grant making in arts,
media and culture.
She guides the foundation's
efforts to examine how
cultural narratives affect
and shape social movements
and how media and the arts,
including film
and visual storytelling,
can contribute to a fairer
and more just society.
In The Light of the World,
Dr. Alexander finds herself
at an existential crossroads
after the sudden death
of her husband, Ficre
Ghebreyesus.
Channeling
her poetic sensibilities
into rich, lucid prose,
Dr. Alexander tells a love story
that is itself a story of loss.
The Light of the World
is at once an endlessly
compelling memoir
and a deeply-felt meditation
on the blessings of love,
family, art, and community.
It is also a lyrical celebration
of a life well lived
and a tribute to the enduring
gift of human companionship.
This program is generously
supported by Dr. Darryl Atwell.
Dr. Atwell has sponsored gallery
programming since 2014
when he initiated a lecture
and film series to honor
the 90th anniversary
of the birth of James Baldwin,
American essayist, novelist,
playwright, poet, and activist.
That series featured poets
Carolyn Forche and E. Ethelbert
Miller.
As we celebrate the National
Gallery's 75th anniversary
this year,
it is wonderful to reflect
on the ways that patrons
such as Dr. Atwell
have strengthened the museum's
achievements.
We thank him for his dedication
to this institution.
I would like to welcome Dr.
Atwell to the podium
for a few remarks.
I'm very happy to be in concert
with the National Gallery
and the third iteration
of this lecture series
with the wonderful poet
laureate, scholar,
and cultural icon, Elizabeth
Alexander.
I just wanted to say briefly,
I was thinking
about the whole lecture series,
and this morning, the word
diversity came in my head.
So I looked up the definition
of the word, and it's defined
as a state of being diverse
or a variety of a range
of things.
In the practical application
of that word, it's like you're
talking about flowers,
or shoes, or lipstick,
or Jolly Ranchers.
[LAUGHTER]
But we know in today's society
and in our institutions,
that this practical application
is not what is actually meant
by the word diversity.
It almost feels
like an obligatory, or kind
of really forced kind
of concept.
So it was my hope with creating
and formulating this lecture
series that we can help to move
institutions and us together
as art patrons, and just
our whole community,
toward losing
this forced obligatory feeling
of it, and more of an inclusion
or an acceptance
of other communities,
in particular with my community,
those of the African diaspora,
to be included
in the fabric of this thing
that we call America.
And with that, I'd
like to introduce--
or have Dr. Alexander take
the stage.
Thank you so
much for the introduction
and for the wonderful framing
words for what we're all here
to think about today.
It's a great honor for me
to be here.
It's a special treat for me
to be able to do a combination
of things
today, which is to read
from my memoir, The Light
of the World,
and to intersperse it
with a lecture
appropriate to a museum
format in which I will share
with you some of the work
and influences
upon my late husband,
the painter, Ficre Ghebreyesus.
It's also wonderful, always,
to be in the town
where I grew up.
So is there anybody here who
knew me when I was
a little girl?
[LAUGHTER]
Who is that?
I can't-- I can't see who it is.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh my goodness.
Hi.
[LAUGHTER]
Wow.
Amazing.
All right.
So there are
many wonderful things
about coming home.
So I'm glad to have this time.
I'm glad to have you here.
I'm really really honored
for this occasion and at a place
in the whole world of museums--
we were talking about this
at lunch today, that
among the many great things
about growing up in Washington
DC,
is that you could come see
great art for free.
So to have a growing-up practice
of going to visit a painting,
a sculpture, seeing something
for a few minutes
because you could come back
any time because it was
accessible was a very, very
great and formative thing for me
and for so many people.
So it's very wonderful
to be here.
So we're interspersing.
And this is a painting called
Bottle Tree,
and we'll be talking about it
later.
From The Light of the World,"
"The story seems to begin
with catastrophe,
but in fact began earlier and is
not a tragedy, but rather a love
story.
Perhaps tragedies are
only tragedies in the presence
of love, which confers meaning
to loss.
Loss is not felt in the absence
of love. 'The queen died
and then the king died
is a plot' wrote E.M.
Forster in The Art of the Novel,
'but the queen died and then
the king died of grief
is a story'
It begins on a beautiful April
morning when a man wakes
exhausted and returns to sleep
in his beloved
13-year-old son's trundle bed,
declaring this is the most
comfortable bed I have ever
slept in.
Or it begins when the wife says
goodbye to the man a few hours
later,
walking in front of his car,
swishing her hips a bit,
a blown kiss as she heads
to his office and he continues
on to his painting studio.
Or the story begins as he packs
a tote bag
with the usual slim thermos
of strong coffee
made
in an Italian stove-top moka
pot, a larger thermos
of cold water, two tangerines,
a plastic sack of raw almonds.
The tote is astral blue
and painted with Giotto angels.
Off to his studio for a day
of painting, then home- as
if nothing extraordinary has
happened, when in fact,
he has been envisioning worlds-
hanging the Giotto bag on a hook
in the mud room
and changing out
of his paint-splattered jeans
into gym shorts and a t-shirt
for yoga in the family room
or a run on the treadmill
in the basement.
Soon the two children will walk
down Edgehill Road from the bus
stop
like burros
under their knapsacks,
and his wife will prepare dinner
while listening to Thelonious
Monk's evocative open intervals
and sipping from a glass
of white wine
that he's opened and poured
for her.
'My frosty white?' She'd ask
a few times a week,
and he'd chuckle and say,
'Right away, my love.
Chop chop.'
They enjoyed playing and acting
out boy-girl courtliness.
The 13-year-old does
his homework,
and the 12-year-old practices
his drumming.
The man's home life
is the unchanging beautiful
same, so anything could occur
in the painting studio each day.
I am the wife.
I am the wife of 15 years.
I am the plumpish wife,
the pretty wife,
the loving wife, the smart wife,
the American wife.
I am eternally his wife.
Perhaps the story begins
with the three dozen lottery
tickets he bought two days
before he died,
which I discovered weeks later
when they came fluttering out
of the pages of one
of the many books
he was reading.
Or it begins
with his surprise 50th birthday
party, four days before he died,
and the spoken tributes
from his loved ones,
and strawberries and pancakes
and music the next morning.
Or it began when I met him
16 years before.
That was always a good story:
an actual coup de foudre, a bolt
of lightning,
love at first sight.
I felt a visceral torque,
I would tell people,
a literal churn of my organs:
not butterflies, not arousal;
rather,
a not-unpleasant rotation
of my innards, as never before.
Lightning struck and did not
curdle the cream
but instead turned it
to sweet, silken butter.
Lightning turned sand
into glass.
The story began in the winter
of 1961, when two
quietly mighty women were
each pregnant,
one in Asmara, Eritrea,
the other in Harlem, USA;
one with her sixth child,
one with her first.
The East African son would
arrive on March 21, 1962,
the most hallowed day
of the zodiac.
It is the beginning and the end
of the astrological calendar,
and so it is said that children
born on March 21st
are ancient souls who possess
the wonder and innocence
of newborns.
The American child, a girl,
would come on May 30th,
into the chatter and buzz
of Gemini, in Gotham.
The story begins on a Thursday
night.
I bring an unexpected guest home
to stay with us, an artist
friend who'd spoken on campus
that afternoon.
When I take her to her hotel
after dinner, we find that it is
in a deserted corner of town,
far off the beaten track,
so I offer to bring her to sleep
in our guest room.
She accepts with relief,
and I call Ficre to let him know
company is coming.
When Lorna and I arrive 10
minutes later the house is lit
and glowing.
The kettle is hot
and tea is brewing
in the black Japanese cast-iron
pot.
Ficre has put raw almonds
in a small, celadon bowl.
It is late; the boys are
sleeping.
We are so pleased to live
like this,
organized and open and welcome
when friends pass through,
and we can bring them to Hamden,
the hamlet
adjacent to New Haven, where we
recently moved to live
in a tan stucco Arts
and Crafts-style house
surrounded by a magic garden.
Hamden, my first suburb,
albeit a very urban one.
Hamden, where Ficre fell in love
with property that reminded him
of the African compound
where he grew up amidst flowers,
inside walls his painted
apricot, spring-sky blue,
rose violet, and butter yellow.
The next morning, I organize
the children for school
and send them off,
and Ficre makes coffee when
our friend rises shortly after.
We three drink our cappuccinos
under the gazebo, which he
painted in the delicate colors
of the remembered borders
of his mother's gauzy dresses
and shawls.
Some might take the colors
for straightforward pastels
or Monet water lilies,
but they came from Africa,
and from his mother.
Hanging inside the gazebo
is a mobile he fashioned
from some slender,
twisty branches that blew down
in the yard after the storm.
The mobile turns gently
in the breeze.
The morning is gray and the yard
smells of the fresh, damp earth
of early spring.
As we walk toward the house,
something makes us look back
into the yard
over our shoulders.
There is a giant hawk sitting
on the branch
of our 100-year-old oak tree,
eviscerating and devouring
a squirrel.
We freeze to watch.
The raptor is utterly focused
on its task.
I watch Ficre and Lorna
scrutinizing, their artist's
eyes recording what they see.
The hawk attends to its business
undisturbed.
It is rapacious.
It takes what it wants.
The bloody ribbons
of the squirrel's entrails
hang off the branch as the hawk
eats the entire remains
of the hapless rodent in about
five minutes.
Ficre tells us he has seen
the bird the day
before, with the children,
and shows us a short video
he took on his phone
of the creature
on the same branch eating
another squirrel.
I have seen a hawk a few times
but never one so
intent on its survival,
never seen predation itself
up close and in action.
It is pure
and elemental, necessarily
violent, riveting,
nature itself.
We watch for as long as we can
before we have to go off
to the duties of our days.
Some weeks later, on his bureau,
I find an acrostic Ficre made
which exhausted variations
on the word hawk.
He'd assigned numbers
to the letters and then assigned
those numbers to lottery
tickets, which I later discover
he bought by the dozen
and secreted in the pages
of the books
that he was reading."
And now we'll talk a little bit
about paintings.
And you'll just have to trust me
when I take off the wife hat
and put on the cultural critic
hat
for this portion of my remarks
to say that what you're
about to see
is a major body of mostly
unknown work by a painter who
makes an extremely
significant contribution
to contemporary art,
simultaneously expanding
the conversation about what
is African art today
and what is exciting in African
American and American art.
And so I'll refer to him
as Ficre, not just because
of my own intimacy with him
but rather because that is how
he wished to be known.
He signed the paintings, when he
signed them, Ficre G.
His first name,
full name, Ficremariam
Ghebreyesus,
means lover of Mary, servant
of Jesus.
And in its shortened version
means love, something that
was not lost on him in his day
to day life
and is an apt artistic moniker
for someone whose avid love
ethic motivated
him to pull in everything
around him
to create a fresh and exciting
visual perspective on the world.
He was born in Asmara, East
Africa, as you've heard,
and was a refugee in Sudan,
Italy, and Germany,
came to the United States
at the age of 19
and lived almost 30 years
of his life
in the perhaps unlikely place
of New Haven, Connecticut.
So resolutely
an Eritrean artist, an East
African artist,
and an African artist, and at
the same time, unambiguous
about being a black artist
and an African American.
Before he came to this country
he was exposed to US
and global black power
rhetorics.
An early visual icon for him
was Angela Davis' luminous Afro
and thinkers
such as Martiniquean Frantz
Fanon; black soul music from Sam
Cooke to James Brown,
feeding that into a conversation
in his head
with Fela's music from Nigeria,
Jamaican music by Bob Marley,
and so forth, and so
on in the words
that he would use to describe
himself a global syncretist
consciously,
a diasporist whose rich
background enriches
our understanding of what
contemporary art and blackness
is all about.
We are fortunate to have
a rich statement for him
that he wrote on the occasion
of his application
to the Yale School of Art.
And I'll read from a little bit
of it as we look through some
of the very, very early work.
He wrote, "I started painting 10
years ago-- this is in 2000--
but I suspect I have been
metaphorically doing so all
my life.
When I started painting,
I just did it.
I had never felt a stronger
urge.
The pieces that flowed out of me
then were very direct.
They had to do
with the suffering, persecution,
and subsequent psychological
dilemmas
I endured
before and after becoming
a young refugee
from the Independence War, which
ran from 1961 to 1991
in my natal home of Eritrea.
Painting was the miracle,
the final act of defiance
through which I exercised
the pain and reclaimed my sense
of self, my moral compass,
and my love for life.
From Eritrea I found myself
in New York City
where my tiny kitchen table
became instantly the studio
table."
And so what we see in the very
early paintings are mostly
large, dark canvases
lit with brilliant corners
of insistent life, which give us
a sense of places and spaces
during that Independence
War infused with the light
of determined humanity
that would not be deferred
or extinguished.
In New York he worked at the Art
Students League
with Joe Stapleton, one
of the last of the New York
abstract expressionists,
as well as with Bob Brown--
Bob Blackburn, excuse me--
at the Printmaking Workshop.
And in that period he was
bringing together--
here, some paintings again,
referencing pockets of light
in the early days.
There he had worked in a school
teaching young people math
and film and literature
in a school that was
an air-raid shelter.
So you see a lot of these kind
of people staying dark
for protection,
but these kind of glowing areas
of light in the very early work.
And then he comes to New York
and is very, very influenced
by a lot of the suffering
that he sees around him.
There are a lot of subway
paintings.
And you can see-- and this is
a painting that's a sketch
for later work--
some of his influences when he's
studying at the Art Students
League.
He's looking at Ben Shahn's work
and finding that to be very
influential, if you look back
to the bench ladies.
And is also thinking
about the large heavy body
shapes in Romare Bearden's work,
on the earlier side, as well as
Leon Golub.
So here we have more subway
paintings in the early years.
OK.
So now we're moving forward.
"Asmara"-- this from his artist
statement-- "is a beautiful city
at 8,000 feet above sea level,
planned and designed by Italian
colonialists at the turn
of the century.
In addition to the collision
of architectures, iconographies,
and propaganda art,
there was
the unique and palpable
visual aesthetic of death:
Soviet tanks rumbled
through the streets,
fighter planes strafed
the skies,
and deadly uniformed soldiers
rummaged through the streets.
A medieval version of hell
incarnate.
Government-sponsored death
squads had powers of emergency
over any Eritrean citizen.
I suspect I have carried
this angst and fear within me
to this day.
For when I paint,
I am accompanied by dissonance,
syncopation,
and the ultimate will
for life and moral order
of goodness."
And so to that last point, what
he found when he came
into the New York context,
in addition to the artists
that he was studying while also
doing activist work,
organizing Eritrean students
in North America,
was
the great African-American art
tradition, which first became
known to him.
Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston,
Romare Bearden, thinking
about different ways of thinking
about what a social practice
art might be,
what public art might look like.
Those are the artists who helped
him do that.
And he also becomes much more
influenced by jazz music
and by the power of abstraction
in jazz music which he tries
to translate
into a color-driven abstraction
that has
a kind of mirrored relationship
in the rhythmic drive of jazz.
And so we begin to see that
there.
What we also see,
he comes to New Haven,
he becomes a chef.
He builds a restaurant in New
Haven called Caffe Adulis, which
is sort
of a legendary, beautiful place.
He talks about cheffing
and cooking as being at one
with his painting.
He thinks of it all as being
artistic practice.
And when he lands into family
life, that is when you see
the color palette changes,
and he has sort of landed
someplace where there's
a different sort of energy
and felicity in the work.
So you see this really big
transformation.
There's a whole series also
of these very, very big
ambitious map paintings.
And Julie Mehretu's work comes
later, but what I think
the conversation that both
of those artists of the East
African diaspora
are thinking about
is the idea of vectors and maps
spinning around the world,
this sense of diaspora
as a very, very active process.
And that's what I see
in this painting.
Here we have Skunder Boghossian,
just to kind of intersperse
some influences.
And then moving forward
into another period of abstract
work.
Whoop.
There we go.
This is called, I Believe We Are
Lost.
OK.
So I want to talk
about the language a little bit
here.
When he was a child,
one of his nicknames
was mangia libro, book eater.
And indeed,
his hungry lifelong love
of reading and language
is everywhere in his work.
Connected to his love for books
and his insatiable curiosity
of mind was his relationship
to languages.
He spoke seven living languages
well, Tigrinya, Amharic,
Italian, English, Arabic,
German, Spanish.
Could say hello and thank you
in literally dozens of other
languages because as he said,
"what could be more important
to know in a language besides
'thank you'?"
And was teaching himself
Mandarin and French.
His language acquisition was
an emblem of the politics
of colonialism in exile.
When he left Eritrea
as a teenager
in the midst of the Red Terror
and Derg regime,
his life as a refugee
took him to Sudan, Italy,
Germany, and then to the United
States.
Eritrea, as many of you know,
was for some time
an Italian colony.
He received a very beautiful
early education
from Italian nuns and priests,
and that was the language
of extensive book study for him.
Amharic also was
a colonial tongue
for a long-fraught period.
Spanish came from years
of restaurant work,
communicating intimately
with the people
he worked with in his kitchens.
But his relationship to language
also said everything
about his respect for others,
his sense of us
all as potentially connected
global citizens,
and his constant curiosity
to learn and then amalgamate
different ways of thinking
and being in the world.
There is so much language
in the paintings.
I think of them as kind
of an Esperantist paintings,
someone who understood
profoundly that languages are
epistemologies,
as well as human bridges.
And I've loved-- when we've
shown some of this work seeing
Tigrinya speakers go up and try
to read them, but they're not
in any language actually.
They just look like they are.
I mean, there are Tigrinya
letters in there,
but there are also other letters
in there, so I think that it has
this wonderful effect of being
brought into something that you
think you should be
able to decipher, but actually
no person on earth
can decipher it.
So therefore everybody
is on an equal plane
in this kind of fabulous babel.
And here's a Hale Woodruff.
So again, you can just see some
of the things he's interpolating
and listening to.
And then here are some small--
that was a Langston Hughes poem,
an Auden poem, "For the error
bred in the bone of each woman
and each man, craves what it
cannot have, not universal love
but to be loved alone."
From Auden's September 1, 1939.
This is a Zora Neale Hurston
painting.
That was what spoke to him when
he was about to become a father.
Those are the language pictures.
There's a keen sense of story
and narrative in the work.
He worked
in different dimensions
and configurations,
but the narrative drive
for the long horizontal painting
is when he returned to telling
us that, "Storytelling comes
naturally in East Africa where
the mainstay of culture
is orally transmitted
from generation to generation.
Many Eritreans are still
illiterate, and the cultural
of visual communication
is relegated to Coptic Orthodox
Church facades and interiors.
Murals and mosaics of saints
and angels abound.
There is an equally strong
presence of Islamic iconography
on the exteriors and interiors
of mosques.
Concomitant to those two
ancient presences in my growing
up years in the capital city
were
war-time mural-sized portraits
of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin,
and depending if he was
in favor, Chairman Mao,
as well as Ethiopian dictator
Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam."
And it's interesting to think
about and talk about what does
it mean to come out
of a kind of every day art
tradition and a didactic art
tradition,
and again, to sort of bring
that all together
with other influences
into your work.
So we're going to look at this
for a minute as we move into--
we're going to move back
to book.
"We courted over six weeks
in the summer of 1996.
At the end of the first week,
we decided to marry
but told no one.
They'll think we're crazy,
we'd say.
It's our secret.
We were certain.
We ate little,
drank sweet cafecitos,
listened to Ahmed Jamal, Betty
Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Randy
Weston, and Don Pullen,
geniuses of the African diaspora
we both celebrated.
We wrote dozens of haikus back
and forth in a shared notebook
and he nicknamed himself "Basho
in Africa."
Basho wrote in the 17th century
in Japan's Edo period
and was thought to be
the greatest practitioner
of haiku, but he is even more
renowned for leading others
in Renku,
a collaborative, linked-verse
poetry.
No one had ever asked me
to write poems together.
How I researched tiny
Eritrea when I first met him.
How I practiced saying his name
correctly--
Ficre Ghebreyesus, Ficre
Ghebreyesus--
playing his first answering
machine message over and over
again to get it right.
How I opened myself to learning
this brand new person
from a brand new fascinating
place.
I came from the pig people
and he came from the cow
and the sheep people.
Some of my people were midland
slaves who made something
from nothing and masses leaving.
Some of my people
were fancy and free.
He came from forever free
Christian Coptic highlanders who
alternate seasons of harvest
bounty and Lenten veganism.
That was the interesting idea
of us.
East and West Africa married,
descendents of slaves who
survived,
descendants of free people
of color, descendants of freedom
fighters never enslaved,
the strongest of all
to be conjoined in our children.
Sometimes we talked about this,
but mostly we just talked,
the deepest thoughts,
the sweetest thoughts,
the questions we had waited
forever to ask.
He was a bottomless boat,
and the boat that would always
hold me."
To another section
after his sudden passing.
Our sons at the time
were 12 and 13.
So one of them, Simon,
is in here.
We love Jimmy Scott's version
of the David Byrne song,
"Heaven".
"Heaven is a place where nothing
ever happens."
These days, I picture heaven
populated by the umber
angels Ficre painted
in abundance,
but that seems too fanciful.
I never truly believed in heaven
and cannot manufacture it.
Little Jimmy Scott's
plaintiveness seems right when
he sings, "Nothing ever
happens."
How better to describe
the infinite solitude
of the afterlife.
"When this kiss is over,
it will start again.
It will not be any different.
It will be exactly the same,"
he sings.
Each kiss is fixed.
It is the same long kiss,
but it will never change.
That is the comfort,
and that is the heartbreak.
One night at bedtime, Simon asks
if I want to come with him
to visit Ficre in heaven.
Yes, I say, and lie down
on the bed.
"First you close your eyes,"
he says,
"and ride the clear glass
elevator.
Up we go."
What do you see baby?
I ask.
"God is sitting at the gate,"
he answers.
What does God look like, baby?
I ask.
"Like God, Mama," he says.
"Now we go to where daddy is.
He has two rooms," Simon says.
One room with a single bed
and his books and another where
he paints.
The painting room is vast.
He can look out any window
he wants and paint.
That room has four views,
our backyard, the doc he painted
in Maine, Asmara,
and New Mexico.
New Mexico?
I ask.
"Yes," Simon says.
"The volcano crater
with the magic grass."
Ah, yes, I say.
The caldera where we saw
the gophers, and the jack
rabbits, and the elk running
across, and Daddy called it
the veldt.
"Yes.
Do you see it?"
And I do see it.
The light
is perfect for painting.
His bed in heaven
is a single bed.
"OK, it's time to go now,"
Simon says.
So down we go.
"You can come with me any time,"
he says.
Thank you, my darling.
"I don't think you can find it
by yourself yet," he says,
"but one day you will."
So here we start moving
into more mature work that
happens before and then
through his time at the Yale
School of Art.
His time in art school
was a mixed bag.
He was a grown up, extremely
open to learning, as he always
was, but certainly not
a malleable kid.
He was a respected town
professional by then, a father
of two.
His particular African diaspora
aesthetics were sometimes
misread by teachers.
But he had good experiences,
made some fascinating work
of different kinds, and there's
more to say about that,
but let me just take you
through some
of those later paintings.
This is in the Yale Art Gallery.
So again, just kind of looking
at some of the influences.
He loved Matisse actually lived
with this poster for a long time
before he knew me.
So it was a wonderful kind
of detective's trail
for me to start thinking
as a cultural critic
about influences
and finding things.
And then these, to give you
a sense of some
of the different landscapes,
some of these are Italian,
some of these are East African,
and some of these are New Haven.
These are just little sketches.
That's Lalibella.
That's an Italian chapel.
These are New Haven.
So these are little, teeny,
teeny, tiny paintings.
And this is where we also start
to see an obsession
with horizon.
These are sketches that make
their way into the work
and culminate
in this solitary boat
beneath a bridge.
And this is also where we start
to see the emergence
of the mysterious uninhabited
vessels.
There's a little ladder there
that's climbing out
of the vessel.
And those continue
throughout the week.
These very, very interesting
solitary boats.
And that's on the first cover
of The Light of the World.
We also continue to see
a re-figuring of colors
of his childhood.
He described his mother
as a great colorist whose
influence was felt in her
choosing border colors
for embroidery, vegetable
dyes for baskets,
and mixing
the vibrantly-hued dried
and ground spices that went
into berbere, the local spice
blend of which
each respectable home had
its own blend.
So that's part of what we see
going on in the colors.
Coptic iconography making
its way through.
And again, I'm zipping you
through 882 paintings.
That's a lot of paintings.
So just giving you a taste.
That's one I particularly like.
And this too, the very, very
small portraits.
And this is a self-portrait
of himself at an early age.
So as I said, he was raised
in the powerful world
of Coptic orthodox rituals
with all
of its iconography community
force
and multi-sensory experience
with smoldering frankincense
combined
with mammoth African drums
and the haunting
eyes of frescoed Coptic angels.
The Coptic church was a site
for biblical storytelling
and also community continuity
and family storytelling that
goes back for centuries
and has special valence
in the face of ongoing war
and subsequent diaspora.
When he came to painting,
there was also the influence
of the Scrovegni Chapel
and Giotto's influence
as the great colorist
of European church painting
from his time living in Italy.
And by the way, I should say,
when he lived as a refugee
in Italy,
he worked as a dishwasher,
but he went to museums and such.
So just to kind of disrupt
the idea that he's gone off
to the continent to study.
You know, he is a refugee.
He's working in 100
different kitchens
but still finding different ways
to bring art into his eyes.
So this sense of portraiture,
I think, comes out of a lot
of the church imagery, I think.
That's a really beautiful one.
And these are kind of smallish.
That's a Nolde.
Just again, looking at kind
of some interesting influences.
The influence of Bob Thompson.
I think this painting is owned
by the Smithsonian.
I'm pretty positive.
Does anyone know?
I am almost positive it is.
I love this painting.
And here we can look at some
of the Thompson influences.
Those are little, tiny sketches.
And here's the painting
Mangia Libro.
So these are larger, later
works.
A Hundred Years.
You see A Hundred Years
of Solitude right there,
and then the one
we started with.
And I mentioned some
of these baskets
where his mother would
commission a weaver
and very, very carefully choose
the colors.
So these are not actually
her baskets,
but this is something that he--
you know, domestic objects that
were very much a part
of his growing up.
Living with these kind-- just
really master colorists.
So then
with a big, long painting
like this here, also trying
to work out some of these ideas
about narrative
and to bring New York City
into the work.
City with a River Running
Through It,
which owes a great deal
to Bearden's The Block,
work that was very
important to him.
That's not really an influence,
but it's just a Bearden that I
love,
so I want to put it up there.
[LAUGHTER]
And then a little study for some
of the gates to the compound.
And so I think interestingly,
this idea
of magical and impossible spaces
that are kept
safe from within compound doors,
but as you can see a whole very
dangerous and militarized life
outside.
And that inside outside is very
important.
Zememesh Berhe, his mother.
He titled this Zememesh Berhe's
Magic Garden, in the spirit
of Maudell Sleet's Magic Garden
and all of those paintings.
And then you're about to see
where the Giotto kind
of explodes in this work.
The Sardine's Fisherman's
Funeral, which I'll say
a little bit about.
This painting, I think of it
as, I call it
a pan-African fantasia that
calls to mind the phrase that's
associated with Romare Bearden's
work, the prevalence of ritual.
We see jazz funeral umbrellas,
new-world rituals, as West
African is the recurrent bottle
trees we see in his work.
We see Ghanaian fantasia funeral
columns, coffins, excuse me.
Obviously a whole different part
of the continent, but there's
this whole amazing Ghanaian
tradition of making coffins
in which you bury people
according to what they did
in their earthly life.
[CHUCKLING]
They're amazing, really.
So back to the--
Sardine, Ficre's painting,
The Sardine Fisherman's Funeral.
That tradition of coffin making
began with the Ga people
of southern Ghana,
continues to the present,
and reflects the belief
that there is another form
of life after death
and that the revered deceased
must be properly ushered
into death
where they will become
ancestors, far more
powerful than those who walk
on Earth
and able to influence
the living.
These coffins are only seen
on the day of burial
and reflect sometimes
the occupation, but also
the status of the deceased.
They are referred to as custom,
fantastic,
or proverbial coffins, made
by specialized crafts people
and were shown
in a Western context
in the landmark exhibition
of African Art in Paris
in 1989, Magiciens de la Terre,
which was at the Musee d'Art
Moderne and was a very, very
influential show and a book
with which Ficre was quite
familiar.
I think also what you see
that's very
interesting in this painting,
amongst the mourners,
an outlined figure in the lower
left corner, which is echoing
an angel
at the other outer diagonal
of the page.
Ghosts, absent presences,
the recurrent shape
of the compound gate
is in the painting.
The gate between worlds,
the portal through which we pass
back and forth.
The ritual of dying
is a pan-African hybrid.
The fabric ladder hangs
over the side of the boat,
but upon which premise would
anyone have to climb in or out
of a coffin.
The Coptic angels are sentries
across the top of the page,
near ancestors present, guarding
the community
and ready to usher
the exited body
into the ancestral domain.
But another outlined figure
that's very mysterious here
at the bottom of the canvas,
that outlined figure right
there, Ficre wondered out
loud to me on numerous occasions
why he couldn't paint out
that sinister figure.
He couldn't.
He kept trying to take that out,
and he couldn't take it out.
Why it persisted?
Why this face was so familiar?
Why he couldn't put a finger
on it.
Why it had to remain
in the frame.
A half million people were
killed on Mengistu Haile
Mariam's watch during the Red
Terror.
It's Mengistu, but he didn't
even realize that when he was
making it and when he couldn't
get it out during the Red Terror
of 1977 to 1978, the period
in which Ficre left the country
and began his extended period
as a refugee.
The angels ultimately have more
heft and weight
in the composition
than the sinister figure,
but the figure remains.
Every morning and every night,
I open and close my eyes
to this painting, Visitation.
It allegorizes our first meeting
in his studio
when I walked through a door
that said "Foster kindness"
written on it
in graffiti, into my future.
In the painting,
a man and a woman
meet with offerings.
From the woman,
scarlet red tomatoes,
her own fecundity held
in cupped hands at her womb.
She is wearing all white,
the white of the Yoruba goddess,
Yemaya,
with her blue nearby
in the background,
and the white of Obatala,
the creator of all human bodies.
The solemn brown man humbly
offers an eye on a plate.
That is what Ficre gave to all
of us, his eyes on the world.
We stand inside of him
and have the privilege of seeing
out as he did in his paintings.
The eye is also an icon,
a protective evil eye,
that a caretaker offers
his coming and imagined family.
As in so many of the paintings,
he has created a spirit house.
Though the pair is meeting
for the first time,
they are surrounded
by the images of the children
they will soon have
and their sons are painted
as angels.
For in his work,
there are angels everywhere
in landscapes where ancestors
are conjured and present.
A curtain of flowers rains down
over the woman's space,
illuminating her.
Visitation, this painting,
has Ficre's characteristic sense
of what Amy Cappellazzo called
in his work,
"tutti," the unshakable belief
in beauty, in overflow,
in everythingness,
in the bursting, indelible
beauty in a world where there is
also so much suffering
and wounding and pain, as he
well knew.
A world in which he walked close
to death from birth,
ancestors at his side.
And if we could play
the first music, "Cradle Song,"
please.
That is Ficre Ghebreyesus
in his own magic garden
in Hamden, Connecticut.
It's a garden that he planted.
To say he had a green thumb kind
of doesn't begin to describe it.
It was like a wild, wild garden,
with huge oversized vegetables,
honestly.
And it was magic.
So if we could play the Jason
Moran.
Oh.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING - JASON MORAN,
"CRADLE SONG"]
So let me say a few words,
because--
and I want us to think about,
and what this book, The Light
of the World, is all about
is, what does it mean to live
with the people we have lost
in our lives with us?
What does it mean, in the face
of tremendous grief and loss
and suffering,
to realize that we always carry
each other with us?
What does it mean to have
that deep understanding
that every shut eye ain't sleep,
every goodbye ain't gone,
and to walk with our ancestors
with us at all times?
That has been the meditation
that I've been given
to understand in the last four
years since his sudden loss,
and that is what I have
channeled into my writing,
and my thinking and my teaching
at every level.
And it's actually
the profoundest gift
of exploration and artistic
trying to know that I could
possibly have received.
This music, "Cradle Song,"
appears on Jason Moran's album,
Artist in Residence,
which was recorded shortly
after the pianist's
dear and influential mother died
of cancer.
"Cradle Song," as you hear,
is a simple, elemental solo that
sounds something
like a mature student's
variation on a simple piano
exercise.
Perhaps a variation on a Chopin
etude before the student has
learned it well enough to play
it fluently.
It includes-- that curious sound
is the recorded sound
of intense pencil writing.
According to Moran, this was
meant to represent his--
and to remember--
his mother's writing and taking
copious notes during his music
lessons when he was a child.
She would sit in the room
and take notes that she would
then share with him
on his playing.
This very, very small quotidian
sound, the presence
of his mother's hand,
is called back into the music,
called across the line
between life and death.
And in that sound,
she is present.
The sound of the writing
is the second instrument
on the recording.
The piano solo is then a duet
with the mother who was
by her son's side
as he learned to become a piano
player.
If the presence of the mother
taking notes by her young son
side is what moved him forward
and accompanied him
as an apprentice,
it's sound on the recording
is what enables him to make art
after she has died.
And so thank you.
If you could turn it off.
Please.
I'm sorry to do this, to Mr.
Jason Moran.
Thank you.
And so back to The Light
of the World,
as we come towards a conclusion.
"The language of flowers
is not a language I grew up
knowing.
I grew up in Washington DC,
the child of transplanted New
York Harlem apartment people
who did not know how to grow
anything.
There were
crocuses in springtime
that my mother planted along
the walkway of our townhouse.
And I remember my grandmother-
born in Selma, Alabama, reared
in Birmingham, then Washington
DC- advocating that we plant
hearty pachysandra, which
her sister in Durham
used as ground cover.
As a little girl in Washington,
I liked to sit on the ground
beneath the dogwood tree
in our tiny front yard at 1819 C
Street Southeast
and search for fourleaf clovers.
Clover was all I knew
of "flower."
That was the time I spent
in "nature."
[LAUGHTER]
A family joke was, they say
I bawled when first placed
on grass to crawl.
At my elementary school,
honeysuckle vines and mulberry
trees grew surrounding
the parking lot.
My best friend and I would gorge
at recess in springtime
and imagine ourselves foragers
in the wilderness.
Rain puddles seemed as
significant as lakes or ponds.
In our neighborhood in the '60s
when I was growing up,
country people still lived
on Capitol Hill.
I'd see them
in their front yards catching
a breeze when our family would
go out for slow walks on weekend
summer evenings.
In their yards grew geraniums
and others that I thought
of as the province
of black people.
Negro flowers.
Though as an adult,
I have rarely been
without fresh, cut flowers
in my home-
even a fistful of dandelions
in a water glass- I did not
begin to know flowers until I
knew Ficre and we moved
into our home.
Now-- we're in the time
of the book, the first full
spring after his death--
the still lives he set
in the garden emerge.
A small composition rises up
in a corner by the driveway.
A stalk of grape hyacinth:
scientific name muscari derived
from "musk" referring
to the intoxicating scent which
Ficre knew
was
my favorite olfactory harbinger
of spring.
A rare, almost cocoa-colored
tulip, which I now learn
was originally planted
in the Arts and Crafts era
to match those houses
in the style of ours.
A shiny, frilled, purple-black
parrot tulip that feels as late
Victorian as the time period
of the house.
The whole cluster forms
a dark, strange, gorgeous little
still life, as carefully made
as Ficre's paintings,
with histories and etymologies
and referents that continue
to unfold.
With each community of flowers
in the garden, a story.
White and pink streaked peonies,
which always, always blossomed
on my birthday, May 30th.
His birthday gift to me
each year.
There was never not a peony
clipped and in a short drinking
glass to greet me on my birthday
morning, its head heavy
with morning dew
and often a small beetle.
This spring, I learn our peonies
are double blooming, the rarest
and most revered by gardeners.
Ficre did not see them achieve
this status, but he was more
patient than any one I ever knew
by far
and knew they would come up
in the future.
This year, the peonies are
magenta and white,
and they blow open as big
as toddler's heads,
and soon they are spent
and rotten, their petals brown
and withered in the ground.
Over and done until next year.
I look along the corner
of the house
and see
the purple and white climbing
clematis.
If stars could be violet,
these would be violet stars,
climbing across the side gate.
Once our friends Cindy and Dick
came for dinner and Cindy walked
through the garden
and oohed and aahed
at the clematis.
How did he make them grow so
abundantly?
That was in the days
when my sons called
each other brother
as their names and Bob Marley's
gospel of diasporic love
and righteousness
played in their young ears
each day.
And then this morning,
out the back:
huge, ruffled cream
and apricot colored iris.
I have never seen these before.
I bring the boys to the window,
one at a time.
Look, I say.
Daddy is saying hello to us.
And he surely is.
Through the stalks
and the blooms come the touch
of his hands on the bulbs.
Hi, honey, I say.
And I hear him say, Hi, sweetie,
and the hurt is completely
fresh, the missing, the where
have you gone.
I do not feel comforted.
And I am still bewildered,
from the archaic, "wilder":
to be lured into the woods,
into some wildness of mind.
Will I really never speak to him
again?
I look again at the color
of the iris.
It appears in many
of his abstract paintings.
The New Haven Italian printers
who manufactured a catalog
of reproductions of his work
kept coming to the studio
to make color corrections
because they said "this color
doesn't exist."
It only existed
in his paintings.
Ficre did not paint what he saw.
He saw in his mind, and then he
painted, and then he found
the flowers that were what he
painted.
He painted what he wanted
to continue to see.
He painted how he wanted
the world to look.
He painted to fix something
in place.
And so I write to fix him
in place, to pass time
in his company,
to make sure I remember,
even though I know I will never
forget.
"This is a compound like the one
I grew up in," he said when we
first visited the house.
He squatted in the yard
like it was land to be farmed.
Compound: where families were
safe, even when they were
unsafe.
Where families were families.
Flowers live, and they are
perfect, and they affect us;
they are God's glory,
they make us know why we are
alive and human, that we behold.
They are beautiful, and then
they die and rot and go back
to the earth that gave birth
to them."
I want to conclude,
if we could play the Shirley
Horn, please.
[MUSIC PLAYING - SHIRLEY HORN,
"YOU WON'T FORGET ME"]
So this is Shirley Horn
and her recorded version
of the song, "You Won't Forget
Me."
And you know, we're thinking
about this idea of what's
with us after the people we love
cross over to the other side
and what does art make
indelible.
Horn recorded this song in 1991
when the tune was all but
forgotten.
She saw it in a rerun of a 1953
movie called Torch Song starring
Joan Crawford, wherein the song
was subbed by a singer named
India Adams.
Horn's recording of this song
and the eponymous 1991 album it
appears on brought the singer
piano player into full flower
of her comeback.
I loved this song to no end
when it first came out in 1991,
so much that it eventually
inspired me to write
a play in 1995
about a black woman
artist, a dancer,
facing
the failure of her dancing body
and the end of her life
with sorrow and regret,
and the cavalcade of ancestors
who came to do
the crucial work of taking her
across the water,
taking her to the other side.
Miles Davis was a mentor to Horn
in the early days of her career.
She's from Washington DC, as you
probably know,
which is why I also wanted
to close with her.
Following her study as a child
from the age of 12, piano
and composition
at Howard University--
she went to Howard when she was
12.
People used to be smarter.
[LAUGHTER]
She received admission
to Juilliard, but her family
could not afford to send her.
She said, "Oscar Peterson became
my Rachmaninoff and Ahmad Jamal
became my Debussy."
She would sneak
into the famous jazz club clubs
in the U Street corridor
as a minor
and formed her first jazz trio
when she was 20, and Miles Davis
helped her get a recording
contract.
Her career had, I don't know
if we'd call it a detour,
but it's road went this way when
she raised her family
in Washington
and confined her playing
to mostly local clubs.
She reemerged and developed
her new fan base
in the late 1990s.
So just to listen for a minute.
When she recorded this,
she asked Davis, who at that
point
had had as many lives as a cat,
to play on the record.
By the time the record was
released in 1991, Miles Davis
was dead.
So this became his last studio
recording as a sideman.
And what I think we hear here
emphasized is the always
already-ness of Miles'
ghostly sound.
The horn, moving over the words,
"You won't forget me.
No matter who you are,
with whom you are, you'll think
of me."
I think the presence of Davis
as recent ancestor
on this recording
moves the song away
from a lover's lament
that she will never
be forgotten,
to a lover speaking
across the line between life
and death.
The four main musical lines
of the song are all notably
delicate and spare.
Horn's voice, the piano, Miles'
horn, and that steady drum line
that you hear.
Right there.
I think that sparseness mimics
the spare and coded
communication of a long life
together,
the shorthand
of intimate communication
of old marrieds
finishing
each other's musical sentences
knowing what the other is
thinking, stepping in with what
the other needs to complete
a thought.
The drum, quite notably
to my mind, is like a metronome,
a ticking clock.
Indeed by the end of the song,
it is even more pronounced,
as though time for the couple
has run out, but the clock ticks
on.
You won't forget me
and the expressive presence
of the horn make this a song,
to me, about eternal love,
and that which remains when
bodies are no longer
co-terminal.
You won't forget me is not
a wish, not a command,
but rather a statement of how
people remain with each other
even after they have left us.
And so the black artist
in some way, spoken or not,
contends here with death, races
against it, writes and creates
amidst the ghosts we might call
ancestors.
We listen for the silences.
We make that art.
We honor our ancestors,
leaving a little water and food
at the altars
we've made for them,
and we let them guide our work,
the survivors that we are,
standing startled in the glaring
light of loss.
I'll read from the book
over this.
"The last music Ficre listened
to at home was Yusef Lateef's
"The Plum Blossom."
It filled our home beginning
the Sunday morning
after his birthday.
Even after he died,
there were birthday
present ribbons left
in the living room.
The music was a gift,
and Ficre played it
over and over that sweet Sunday.
The sound was
delicate and essential.
A single pipe note, a blue note,
something impending, and then
sudden, like spring rain.
It took its time.
And then in came the piano, ever
so slightly percussive.
The sounds layered and built
into a quiet mighty sound.
Lateef played varied instruments
from different global music
traditions,
strands of a unified sound.
You hear him actually breathe
into the bamboo flute.
You hear his palm on the drum.
The music repeated
in the warm and human breath
of our house that Sunday.
For many years, Ficre tended,
in the house, a Natal plum
bonsai.
We bought it in a shop
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
on the way home
from a happy trip to Maine.
It was a South African variety,
which amused us when we happened
upon it in New Hampshire.
Africa is everywhere, baby,
he said with a smile.
It was spiky and flowerless
for two years.
Two years Ficre nipped it
and shaped it, watered it.
No flower.
Talked to it-- no flower--
to coax it into health
and bloom.
He insisted it live
with its ugly no flower self
on the kitchen table
in the center of our lives.
And one morning we came
downstairs
and the whole first floor
was suffused
with a rare and lovely smell.
The bonsai had burst
its first small, waxy pink
blossom.
It scented our home.
It bloomed for weeks.
Orchids would die,
and I'd throw them away.
But he'd set them
in the basement to patiently
wait for a blossom.
Africans are patient, Lizzie,
he'd say with a chuckle.
But he meant it.
Ficre's books.
Chinese philosophy,
organic gardening,
Roman antiquity, Paul Cezanne,
Hadrian's Wall, African
alphabets.
When I was with him,
I felt that there was suddenly
enough time to talk,
to read, to think, to sleep,
to make love,
to drink coffee or tea,
to practice yoga, to walk.
I think that everyone felt there
was all the time in the world
when they were with him.
We shared days I can only call
divine.
I don't want to fix that last
Sunday as the most significant
Sunday, though one cannot help
but do so.
I think of my friend
Melvin Dixon, also gone too soon
from AIDS at 42,
and his poem, "Fingering
the Jagged Grains,"
a call and response that I took
into my body.
"What did I do?"
I called to my village.
The answer came.
"You lived.
You lived."
And the jagged grains,
so black and blue,
opened like lips about to sing.
And so in thanking you
for your time, the thing that I
wanted to leave you with,
that is something that I learned
in getting myself together
for this occasion,
is that we made a life in art
because we knew even if we never
once spoke the sentence
in our years
together, that human beings need
art to live.
Living a life in art
was a healing for us both.
For Ficre, a healing of a life
in war an exile.
A way to process that violence,
but also to remember
the magic garden
of his childhood and bring forth
its powers and fortifications
in order that he might share it.
For me, as for all of us,
for none of us outruns death,
none of us outruns sorrow,
none of us will escape loss.
That is the sad truth.
We are all healing
from the fissures and challenges
of the overgrown field
that all of our lives
at some point are.
We venture out into the field,
if we have courage.
There in the field
are the most beautiful flowers
imaginable.
There are snakes we see
and snakes we cannot see,
and snakes we hear hissing.
There are sinkholes.
This is all of our lives.
Art exalts and amplifies
and exemplifies and idealizes
and makes bigger and clearer
the beauty in this life,
and is a noble attempt
to distill a moment of living
and bring it forth in order
to share it.
So every day I realize now
we tried to make
a new black art.
I did not know, of course,
how much
and how I would need
the companion of this art moving
forward.
And life is full of mysteries
that way.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
