Blog – Art in Odd Places

AiOP 2016: RACE Thinker in Residence: T.I. Williams

February 23, 2017 – 12:00 pm

2016 Art in Odd Places Race Banner

Though the 2016 festival may be over, there are still those who have its works and impacts on their minds. Our Thinkers in Residence each went out during the festival days and engaged with the artists, the works, the public, and the street. They had their own reactions and interpretations of what they saw and experienced. As we look forward to this year’s festival, let us take the time to look back on what these Thinkers thought and read their perspectives on the past year.

Thinker in Residence: T.I. Williams

Mother. Advocate. Seminarian. Embodied Black Woman.

T. I. Williams is interested in challenging what it means for black women to define self as sacred, secular and spiritual. Her work centers the production of ancestral wisdom in black women’s mothering, black women’s healing, black women’s movement, and the construction of black women’s beauty. Through classes, lectures and workshops; Ms. Williams supports black women in cultivating personal spiritual practices rooted in self-care using the tools of hatha yoga and food education.

Revelations. Realizations.

Constructing.

14^th Street marks the beginning of Lower Manhattan. Early planners seemed to note this by ending Broadway abruptly at 14^th Street and jaggedly reconnecting it diagonally on the North end of Union Square Park at 16^th street. Broadway is one of the most complicated streets in New York City. Unearthing this important throughway reveals a troubled past buried in its subterranean history.

In the late 1700s the Negro Burial Ground was closed. The area was compacted with landfill and parceled for development. In 1846, America’s first department store opened at 280 Broadway, constructed on land filled with weary black bones.[1]

Excavating.

In 1991, as part of a buildings commission, archaeologists excavated a mass grave beneath 290 Broadway.[2] They unearthed Black bodies at the epicenter of the world’s financial capital.

There are an estimated 20,000 black bodies buried across 6.6 acres underneath the Financial District. 419 bodies were exhumed, interred, and memorialized as the African Burial Ground Monument at 290 Broadway.[3] It is impossible to know how many intact bodies remain since buildings, not headstones, mark the desecrated graves. These bones bore witness to numerous slave-holding Presidents from Washington to Jefferson. These bones are familiar with Presidents ready, willing, and able to rescind the constitutional liberties that were painfully won long after these bones were living bodies.

Reading.

The 2016 Presidential Race exposed a solemn truth about race in America- with all the strides toward diversity, acceptance, and inclusivity, America lacks a unified voice regarding who is worthy of basic humanity. The live poll results read like blood on the screen, confirming that America values narcissism and celebrity more than universal human dignity.

Maybe the answer to problems of the future is in questions we ask of the past.

Building.

In the midst of the turmoil of the appointment of Donald J. Trump as the 45^th President of the Unites States, it is time to cast these bones and divine a different America.

What do these bodies, these Black bones, calcified and brittle, with infinitesimal traces of marrow mixed with dirt and debris to form bedrock that still cry out to be called out through libations and song have to tell us?

That America is more than one story; America is as much the land of the free as it is the land of the oppressed. These bones bear witness to the first nation people who originally shaped the earth into roads. These bones bear witness to the nameless who came here- the ones whose names were taken, and the ones whose names were forsaken. These bones bear witness to inequality, inequity, and injustice, yet these bones, though broken, are still here. Maybe setting and mending these bones will disclose to us how to build something lasting- a true monument that names the unnamed, validates all legacies, and gives dignity to all humanity. In the light of all the things we have done wrong, maybe these bones can show us how to do something right.

[1] Dunlap, D. W. (1997, September 24). Return of a White Marble Palace; Buildings Agency to Occupy Old Home of Stewart’s and The Sun. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/24/nyregion/return-white-marble-palace-buildings-agency-occupy-old-home-stewart-s-sun.html

[2] Moore, C. (n.d.). New York’s Seventeenth-Century African Burial Ground in History. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/Chris-Moore.pdf

[3] Moore, C. (n.d.). New York’s Seventeenth-Century African Burial Ground in History. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/Chris-Moore.pdf

AiOP 2016: RACE Thinker in Residence: John Bethell

December 31, 2016 – 2:00 pm

2016 Art in Odd Places Race Banner

Though this year’s festival may be over, there are still those who have its works and impacts on their minds. Our Thinkers in Residence each went out during the festival days and engaged with the artists, the works, the public, and the street. They had their own reactions and interpretations of what they saw and experienced. As we look forward to 2017, let us take the time to look back on what these Thinkers thought and read their perspectives on this year’s festival.

Thinker in Residence: John Bethell

John Bethell was born and raised on Staten Island. He spent five years as an Arabic translator in the Navy. He earned his Master’s of Divinity from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Manhattan and was the first openly gay priest ordained in South Carolina. He currently serves as the chaplain at a high security Federal prison in West Virginia. He is the son of an Albanian immigrant and a Connecticut Yankee. He gets his eyes from his grandmother.

When someone has been found guilty of committing a crime serious enough to warrant prison time, there are a lot of things lost upon entering our penal system. The government arrests control of so much from inmates that we normally wouldn’t think about. Their right to privacy dissolves, unless it’s a meeting with a lawyer who will, in all likelihood, share no news. A schedule tells them when to eat and breakfast comes before God wakes up. They don’t decide who their cellmate is and the uniform of the day is khakis and sweats, khakis and sweats.

Thanks to that pesky First Amendment, however, there’s one thing they can own: their religious affiliation. For some, the religion they knew on the street is the one they carry into the system. There is a hierarchy of heinousness in here. Those guilty of the more socially-repugnant sexual crimes may find their assumed community will not break bread with them and so form their own, carving out an hour of Sabbath rest for themselves, understanding sanctuary in a whole new way, and learning how to be Buddhist, or practice Santeria, or whatever religion wasn’t well-attended enough to kick them out.

An Albanian, in Federal prison since his homeland was Communist, may boldly check—or have checked for him—the box marked “No Preference” but soon discover Odinism, though he could come to find out that the adherents to this Norse Neopaganism enjoy praying to towheaded, fair-skinned gods for a reason: many of them are suspected of being members of the Aryan Brotherhood. We all want our Jesus to look like us.

Since Native reservations are under Federal jurisdiction, crimes requiring a stint in prison mean Federal prison time. Because of this, there are a decent number of Native Americans in our system. Native American is both a faith and a people. A religion and a race. Like Judaism, the practice forms the culture and shapes the community. It’s here, in the Subset C of Native American that I ran into my first trans-racial inmate. His family is from Vietnam and I forget what he did to get here. I generally avoid looking that up as I feel the chaplain should be dispassionate, but the concern for personal safety sometimes wins out. He has been a recognized member of the Native group, participating in their weekly sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies, learning the old songs and beating the drum. He’s taken such ownership of his relatively new identity that when threatened with a small schedule disruption, he was the most vocal one, upbraiding me for disrespecting his religion and the free exercise thereof. While I was doing no such thing, any whiff of change is met with fierce opposition as a steady schedule helps them mark the passing of time and weeks become mantras that are chanted until it’s time to go home.

There’s a seeming dissonance when you walk out into the yard where the fire is burning and the buffalo skull points the way to the sweat lodge: among the circle of Native Americans you’ll see an Asian. Then you’ll remember that those who were here ab origine (Latin for “from the beginning”) came, for the most part, from Asia. They’re standing next to their cousin. It’s a family reunion, twenty-thousand years in the making.

The Rev. John C. Bethell
Chaplain – FCC Hazelton