Arts maven Bitsie Clark welcomed her virtual audience to her 89th birthday party on Friday evening with a cheeky rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” But there was a serious intent behind the festivities: to check in with the 2019 recipients of the Bitsie Clark Fund’s annual $5,000 grants, and to award another $5,000 grant to a new artist for 2020.
Last year the Bitsie Clark Fund gave out awards to photographer Harold Shapiro and composer Adam Matlock. Shapiro’s photography project, entitled “Luminous Instruments,” “brings to life Leonard Bernstein’s idea that music is movement,” Shapiro explained. The project was born of two of Shapiro’s lifelong passions. He’s a professional photographer and photography teacher, and many years ago cultivated a love of experimenting with the artistic possibilities of taking photographs with long exposures. He’s also a lifelong musician. With his kinetic photographs of instruments, he said, “my goal is to have the long exposures give the viewer the feeling of seeing the music.”
Shapiro reported that thanks to the grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund, he was able to mount two shows of his photographs at Creative Arts Workshop and at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. The show garnered press from several local and regional news outlets (read the Independent’s article here). He did several talks as well, to audiences ranging from elementary school students to senior citizens. The Covid-19 pandemic may have slowed Shapiro’s plans to exhibit them more widely, but he said that “the photographs are at the beginning of their journey.” He hopes to find more exhibit spaces, as far afield as possible, for his dynamic images.
“I will always remember and credit the Bitsie Clark Fund,” Shapiro said, for giving his photographs a jump start. In commemoration of the occasion, Shapiro played “Happy Birthday” to Clark on the flute in the vivacious style of Mozart, elaborating on the melody until it was steered in the direction of The Marriage of Figaro.
Accompanying himself on piano, Matlock talked about what it is to work on an opera about the Greenwood Massacre — the destruction of the Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by a white mob in 1921 — in the midst of present-day civil unrest. “You’re constantly rocking back on your heels” from the headlines, he said. We’re told that “we’re living through history…. It starts to sound glib fairly quickly.”
“We’ve seen protests and resilience at a huge scale…. it’s easy to look at these and think, ‘this is unprecedented.” Surrounding himself with the details of the Greenwood Massacre, the scale of its destruction and the refusal of authorities for decades to acknowledge it, gave him a sense of perspective.
“We see similarities in 2020,” he said. “What is the difference between a massacre and an uprising? Between a riot and a revolution?… It depends on who is reporting.”
Like Shapiro, Matlock had to change his plans for the opera in response to the pandemic. The original idea had been to use the grant to write the first act of the opera and perform it with area singers and musicians. Social distancing restrictions made that impossible. So Matlock is instead planning on making a recording and hosting an online listening party. “Stay tuned,” he said.
Civic activist John Motley, who served as emcee for the evening’s proceedings, thanked the artists for their work thus far. “We need the inspiration and the hope that you bring more than ever,” he said. He said that working artists need support, especially during the pandemic, with clubs, theaters, galleries, and rehearsal spaces all needing to stay closed. “This would be a good time to buy art directly from the artists,” he said. He explained that he had recently bought a piece from nationally known artist Kadir Nelson; he had framed a magazine cover Nelson had done, and purchased the original.
“I love the power of that work,” he said.
Four of the self-styled Bitsie Chicks — Mimsie Coleman, Robin Golden, Barbara Lamb, and Maryann Ott — explained that “The Bitsie Clark Fund award is intended to support an artist’s development…. There is no requirement to give back to the community, although we support an artists’ efforts to do so…. We’re proud to provide funding that uniquely supports them in this way.”
With fewer funds available this year — the fund didn’t conduct an aggressive fundraising campaign in light of the pandemic — the Bitsie Clark Fund could only give out one grant this year, a difficult choice given the strength of the finalists. Allan Appel (who is also a reporter for the Independent) was looking to put on a play called My Liberia, about Black entrepreneur William Lanson. Filmmaker Stephen Dest was writing an adaptation to I Am Shakespeare, about the double life of Henry Green; Shortly after the film’s release, Green died of complications from his gunshot wounds, and Dest wants to finish his story. Author Rebekah Fraser was writing “climate-smart romance novels,” the first of which is set in New Haven. Singer and teacher Dana Fripp was “creating a scripted program for herself” designed to challenge stereotypes of who can sing what in the musical canon. Dr. Tiffany Jackson was looking for support for her own one-woman show, From the Hood to the Ivy League. Artist Martha Lewis sought to make a printed catalog of her ongoing art project, “Quarantine Cinegram,” projected from her apartment window since the start of the pandemic.
But in the end, the judges for the award — Mimsie Coleman, Kim Futrell, Betty Monz, Raphael Ramos, and Aleta Staton, facilitated by Maryann Ott — gave the 2020 grant to playwright and poet Aaron Jafferis, to complete Smooth Criminal, a play that “explores the issues of race and class in deeply personal, powerful, and meaningful ways.”
As Jafferis himself explained, hip hop and theater were the art forms that he grew up with, as the only white kid in his class at Hillhouse High and a student at ECA. He has performed at the Kennedy Center and Madison Square Garden and has been a slam poetry champion. He has worked with Collective Consciousness Theater, A collaboration with composer Byron Au Yong was a part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas,
“As a White dude, is it criminal, or simply smooth, for a white playwright to use a Black-Latinx art form to try to undo White supremacy?” Smooth Criminal is “an autobiographical play about a nerdy, urban kid desperate to liberate his people, once he figures out who they are.” It’s also a play about two sides of his family — one financially successful and socially powerful, another engaged in criminal activity. “Their ghosts mud wrestle in my body.”
In his presentation, Jafferis invited people to close their eyes. “I can’t see you, but God can, and she will know if you’re cheating,” he said. He instructed viewers to think of one person they were afraid to talk to about race or money — a long-gone ancestor or young child, or anyone in between — and to say their name aloud. Then he asked the audience to think of another person in their family who was an inspiration in fighting for equity. “I invite you to speak their name aloud,” he said.
Jafferis then revealed that the answer to both of those questions, for him, was his mother. She was the inspiration for Smooth Criminal. She died shortly after he started writing the play. “I was devastated and stopped writing,” he said. But then he realized that “my mother is still living in me even more than Whiteness is, so I can continue to have these conversations with her.”
He then performed an excerpt from the first act of the play, which found him riffing on the idea of the sanctuary city. “This is what I and my angsty mind need: a sanctuary city,” he said. But then he realized that for White people, pretty much every city is a sanctuary, in or out of the United States. It was proof that he could find a way to finish his play. The other proof, of course, was in the talent on screen.
Harold Shapiro and composer Adam Matlock. Shapiro's photography project, entitled "Luminous Instruments," "brings to life Leonard Bernstein's idea that music is movement," Shapiro explained. The project was born of two of Shapiro's lifelong passions. He's a professional photographer and photography teacher, and many years ago cultivated a love of experimenting with the artistic possibilities of taking photographs with long exposures. He's also a lifelong musician.
He looks like Herbie Mann.
Herbie Mann - Memphis Underground (1969)
https://youtu.be/BO_Lfk-8P5c