Emmanuel Massillon
Drill Music.
Emmanuel Massillon’s trumpet doesn’t have a mouthpiece. It can’t play. That’s the first hint that there’s a problem. Linger and look a little more, and you see that the misshapen bell of the horn is actually made from bullet casings. The title of the piece, Drill Music, suggests the indictment the artist is handing to that particular form of music. But something bigger and deeper is afoot as well.
Massillon’s piece “highlights what is problematic in the drill music genre, specifically its use of lyrics and imagery which glorify gang crime and violence,” an accompanying note explains. Drill grew out of Chicago in the previous decade and “is defined by its dark, violent, nihilistic lyrical content and ominous trap-influenced beats. The trumpet also makes historical reference to jazz as the foundation of Black urban musical forms.”
That’s where it’s possible to understand the title of the piece as a pun. It encompasses the way the first jazz musicians took the instruments of military marching bands and turned them to other uses. It also takes in how music and violence seem all too intertwined in the United States, and how they always have been. And there’s no value you can place on those sounds that really takes it all in.
Drill Music is part of “Not for Sale,” running now at NXTHVN on Henry Street through May 1. Featuring work by Anthony Akinbola, LaKela Brown, David Hammons, Lucia Hierro, Arthur Jafa, Massillon, and Sable Elyse Smith, and curated by NXTHVN curatorial fellows Cornelia Stokes and Kiara Cristina Ventura, the show “explores the relationship between culture, consumerism, and community and how these connections inform which objects and materials are collectively held as valuable.” It “celebrates the shared realities and high cultural value found in Black and Brown communities through familiar street and domestic objects, sounds, and images — while emphasizing that inherent ways of being, energy and culture are Not For Sale.”
Sable Elyse Smith
Spread.
A theme running through most of the pieces is the artists’ use of cheap materials to make their invaluable points. Anthony Akinbola fashions a piece out of du rags to address his experience as a West African integrating into Black American culture. Celebrated artist David Hammons uses found objects to slyly comment on alcohol consumption. But the piece that effectively greets you as you walk into the gallery is Sable Elyse Smith’s Spread. Viewers might be forgiven for catching Warholian vibes off of the piece, but Smith is getting at something more serious than consumerism and celebrity. The ramen packs and bricks that make up the piece are “a reminder of our proximity to mass incarceration, namely the New Haven Correctional Center on Whalley Ave.” Spread is “inspired by police ‘trophy pics’ with stacked confiscated items” and “defines points of relation between a low-cost food product, currency, and contraband within the prison industrial complex.”
LaKela Brown
Composition with Nine Gold Impressions (Large).
Other artists explore the ways everyday objects, easily acquired, have taken on great significance. Lucia Hierro’s piece evokes the way a simple bag of rice, or a particular brand of coffee, looms large in the mind when it’s a reminder of culture and home. Meanwhile, with her piece, LaKela Brown “creates rhythmic patterns in plaster from gold door-knocker earrings.” The note explains that the earrings themselves cost $2 to $5 a pack and “became popularized by female rappers in the 80s and 90s, and have become a prominent fashion statement for women of color.” As such, they’ve gained cultural value far beyond how much they cost at the store. Brown thus gives them their due. “Utilizing a technique resembling ancient Egyptian tablets, Brown presents these earrings as seemingly fossilized records documenting beauty, style, and Black femininity.”
Arthur Jafa
Still from Love is the Message, the Message is Death.
Nearly half of NXTHVN’s gallery space, however, has been transformed into a darkened viewing space for Arthur Jafa’s short movie Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Jafa “reworks found scenes showing athletes, musicians, dancers, celebrities, and everyday African Americans. By incorporating historical footage and archival images of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Jafa shines a light on the achievements and beauty of Black life even when set against the systemic racism that plagues America.” With Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” as the soundtrack, the film “captures the spirit, struggle, and joy that is often experienced in Black and Brown communities across the United States.
In a way, this description is selling the film short. In its collapsing of past and present, its creation of strong echoes over time — from tap dancers to breakdancers, from people being lynched by the Klan to being shot in the back by police, from footage of protests from seemingly every decade — Jafa allows us, in a few minutes, to take in the work of the past century, to see how much and how little has changed, to catch a glimpse of the ways the arc of the moral universe has and has not bent toward justice. He shows us joy, yes, but also the desperation behind the perseverance, how those in the struggle must go on because they come to realize they have no other choice. Black artists have pulled beauty from necessity, maybe just to make the hard things a little easier. The value of what they’ve made cannot be calculated. Maybe neither can the price they have paid to make it.
“Not for Sale” runs at NXTHVN, 169 Henry St., through May 1. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
ARTISTS HAVE REALLY LOST THEIR WAY IN THIS TOWN!!!!
Stop with this exclusivity, high concept nonsense...
It winds up being about nothing more than RESUME BUILDING in the PURSUIT of WEALTH
(you can dress that pig up any way you want, and you know what -- you are still going to get poked!)
IN THE END, EFFORTS LIKE THIS ARE ON THE BACKS OF COMMUNITY!!!!!
THE VALUE OF CULTURE EXISTS EVERYDAY ON THE STREET!!!!!
(if you don't know how to DIRECTLY interact with TRUTH, I don't have much more advice for you...)
My ARTISTIC RESUME is my REPUTATION and HOW I INTERACT to INCLUDE PEOPLE...
The RESULTS are always SURPRISING...
I could really care less about bolstering these ARTISTS CAREERS,
but I AM INTERESTED in OPENING THEIR EYES!
It is TIME for THIS CONVERSATION to CONTINUE!!!!!