Object Description
From: Joachim Homann
Date: Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 3:26 PM
To: "Laura J. Latman"
Subject: FW: notes for Embark, 2011.69.262
Please see below, Laura. Hope you are safe and cozy!
Thanks,
Joachim
Joachim Homann, Ph.D.
Curator
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
207-725-3064
jhomann@bowdoin.edu
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From: Ellen Tani
Date: Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 2:39 PM
To: Joachim Homann
Subject: notes for Embark, 2011.69.262
Hi Joachim,
I have a few notes I’d like to keep on the object record for 2011.69.262. If you approve, could you pass on to Laura?
Untitled (Crowd/The Fire Next Time) takes its title from James Baldwin’s essay The Fire Next Time, which was published in 1963. The quote “something in me wondered ‘what will happen to all that beauty’” is from a lengthier passage:
“When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah's table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God's – or Allah's – vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable – a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, "Whatever goes up must come down." And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
The background image is from the Million Man March in 1995 in Washington DC.
Best,
Ellen
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Ellen Y. Tani, Ph.D.
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/
(o) 207.725.3743
(c) 651.249.6867