The 44 Percent: Black teachers, Liberty City housing, Mia Love and more
When's the last time you thanked a teacher? I thought about that when I saw Academy- and Grammy-award winning performer Will Smith at his street-naming ceremony in Philadelphia this week, where he thanked his 10th grade teacher Ms. Brown, who played a part in giving him his 'Fresh Prince' moniker.
Teachers have a way of seeing things in us we hadn't recognized, or reaffirming what we already knew was there. In some cases, like my late physics teacher Mr. Sanders, they instill discipline (or occasionally fear). Mr. Sanders' reputation at Benjamin E. Mays High School in Atlanta preceded him. As a child, I knew of him when my best friend's siblings took his classes but didn't grasp his firmness until I was in his ninth grade physics class. He was tough and stood on business when he failed a student (and many failed), but he was honest and found the wittiest ways to tell you that you were going to summer school.
But that strictness built character and resilience for a post-graduate career. Black teachers like Mr. Sanders or a Ms. Brown help mold young Black minds into the people they're meant to become, even if they can't visualize their future yet. They prepare you for a world that isn't quite ready for your greatness and success.
School may be out for spring break this week for Miami-Dade and Broward counties, but I hope a young Black mind reading this remembers to thank a Black teacher who saw them when it felt like no one else did.
INSIDE THE 305:
Affordable homes hang in the balance as Miami-Dade commissioner, nonprofits squabble
Liberty City residents who are waiting on affordable homes to be built are caught in the crosshairs of a feud between nonprofit Neighbors and Neighbors Association Executive Director Leroy Jones and Miami-Dade Commissioner Keon Hardemon.
South Florida congressional reps react to Trump ending humanitarian parole program
South Florida's congressional members are concerned about the threat of deportation for their residents now that the Trump administration is ending a program that gave more than 500,000 immigrants a temporary legal pathway into the United States, Miami Herald state government and politics reporter Ana Ceballos reported.
Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who represents residents in Little River, North Miami Beach, North Miami and Miami Gardens, expressed her concern. As she told Ceballos: 'For many, being sent back isn't just about crossing a border — it's a death sentence. It means living under brutal dictatorships like in Cuba or facing life-threatening violence like in Haiti. Ending parole overnight isn't just heartless — it's dangerous. It will rip families apart, shatter livelihoods and change the very fabric of South Florida.'
OUTSIDE THE 305:
Mia Love, child of immigrants and first Haitian American in Congress, has died
Mia Love died after a long battle with cancer earlier this week. She was 49. Love was a rising star in politics, becoming the first Haitian American in Congress. The daughter of immigrants, Love represented Utah as a two-term Republican lawmaker.
Federal workers fired in anti-DEI purge say it was because they're not white men
Federal employees at several government agencies who were fired amid anti-DEI efforts have filed a complaint alleging they were fired because they were not white men, NBC BLK reported.
According to the complaint, the Trump administration 'fired employees it perceived as being associated with DEI, including those who were not involved in any DEI-related activities or whose only DEI-related activity was involvement in a training or employee resource group,' the outlet reported.
HIGH CULTURE: Youth Film Program offered in Fort Lauderdale
The 1st Take Youth Film Program is offering a chance for young filmmakers to get mentorship from seasoned filmmakers and actors Allen Maldonado (of 'The Last O.G.' and 'Wonder Years') and Kamal Ani-Bello (of 'Moonlight'). Aspiring filmmakers ages 13 to 18 can get hands-on learning experience in writing, producing, editing and marketing. The program takes place from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center at 2650 Sistrunk Blvd.
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Los Angeles Times
43 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Noah Davis' at the UCLA Hammer Museum reveals the brilliant early work of a life cut tragically short
The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32. The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter's painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis' accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show's three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed. That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, '40 Acres and a Unicorn,' which hangs alone in the show's entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.'s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell. In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting's otherwise neutral palette. It's easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich. The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn't last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn's back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he's going to ride it forward. Perhaps the canvas' most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace. Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis' lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in '40 Acres and a Unicorn' recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London's Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis' unusual exploratory strategies. Titled 'Nobody,' a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich's radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915. The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich's art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of 'the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,' most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy. 'Nobody' weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It's one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis' choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker's often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg's hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis' torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip. That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. ('Nobody' almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — 'somebody' — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind 'Mary Jane,' a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet's 'The Railway,' is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms. So is the forest of 'The Missing Link 6,' where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis' intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise. Art history is threaded throughout Davis' work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran's celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA's Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout '1975 (8),' where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool. The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, 'The Missing Link 4,' has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise. For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction. Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, 'The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.' People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In '1975 (8),' the title's date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court's appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled. The 2013 painting's composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis' mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in. Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist's metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we're left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna's Italian Renaissance painting of a 'Dead Christ' or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha. The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, 'Imitation of Life.' The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s. Not all of Davis' paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of 'Maury' with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art's messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving. Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist's reputation. At any rate it's just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis' abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show's reality is better.
Los Angeles Times
43 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Rhiannon Giddens is ready to meet a major moment of revival in Black music history, with banjo in hand
Rhiannon Giddens is down at the river, carrying a flame of heritage, and she's inviting anyone who wants to join her to come down and light their own wicks. Rivers are traditionally sites of salvation, as well as play. Last summer, Giddens was making her new album of traditional banjo and fiddle tunes with Justin Robinson, 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow,' and they were recording a few songs at Mill Prong House in Red Springs, N.C. Stepping inside the house, built on a plantation in 1795, Giddens recoiled at the intensity she felt. 'I knew who was working these fields,' she says. 'I knew who was serving in this house — and it was people who looked like me. And then seeing up on the wall, like, a reunion photo of these old white dudes who went to Chapel Hill, at the end of the Civil War, and one of them had my Black family's last name from Mebane [N.C.] ... I was just like: I can't right now. I had to run out to the river.' In a moment captured by a photographer, she was crouching by the water just before it started to rain, 'and I'm thinking: how many people have come down to this river for respite? How many people in the history of this plantation — turned manor house, turned private property — have come to exactly this spot, distressed over whatever reason?' Giddens carries the weight of this on her shoulders — of the distress, but also of the joyful culture and music-making of her ancestors — and she extends an open invitation to audiences to share and learn their stories and their culture. She did so at her inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival in her native North Carolina, and she's doing it in her current Old-Time Revue tour — which will make a special blockbuster stop at the Hollywood Bowl [on June 18]. The program will feature Giddens playing with Hollywood banjoists Steve Martin and Ed Helms, along with a reunion of the all-female banjo supergroup Our Native Daughters. 'So many banjos,' she says. 'This evening is going to be amazing. I wanted to call it a 'Banjo Jamboree,' but they wouldn't let me,' she laughs, speaking to The Times via Zoom. Balancing laughter and sorrow seems to come easily to Giddens, 48, who has been on a serious mission to rekindle the legacy of the banjo and string band traditions as authentically Black creations ever since she met fiddle player Joe Thompson in 2004 and became a disciple. She's referred to as an 'elder' in the 'Blackbird' liner notes, which doesn't bother her: 'To an 18-year-old, I am an elder,' she says. 'I'm almost 50, and we are the half generation. We're the point five, because our parents didn't pick this up.' From the Carolina Chocolate Drops to her solo music, from composing the Pulitzer-winning opera 'Omar' to helming the Silkroad Ensemble, Giddens is at the fore of a movement of Black artists — including Beyoncé, whose country album 'Cowboy Carter' features Giddens on banjo — reclaiming their cultural heritage and making it sing again. A river (of sorts) played a role in another piece of Black Southern iconography this year — in the climax of 'Sinners.' Giddens was a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler's blockbuster film and contributed her banjo to the song 'Old Corn Liquor' on its soundtrack. She was also meant to appear onscreen in the central juke joint — her Chocolate Drops bandmate, Justin Robinson, does — but she couldn't make it work with her busy schedule. She admittedly hasn't seen the film ('I don't like horror movies, so I actually don't want to see it') but she's still a fan. 'I think what they've opened up with the whole conceit behind it is super important,' Giddens says. In a way, 'Sinners' is a vampiric, IMAX-sized version of her own project, in that it's about how so much of our popular musical culture was invented by Black folks in the South and co-opted by white performers (whether Elvis, the Rolling Stones or the country and folk music industries) — but also about how music can be a time machine, a way to seance with people up the river of history. 'Beyoncé, 'Sinners,' and then, in its own small way, Biscuits & Banjos is like this little triangle of a cultural movement,' Giddens says, 'which I didn't see coming, and I'm just super grateful. Because it's been a desert. ... We're all toiling in our corners, on our own, and it kind of feels like we're carrying all of this on our own.' Her Durham festival, which took place in April, drew musical legends — Taj Mahal, Christian McBride, the Legendary Ingramettes — and basically 'most of my favorite people making music right now,' says Giddens. She also judged a biscuit competition and participated in contra dances, which is what got her into this music in the first place. 'People were just really ready,' she says, 'ready to come and feel good, and to celebrate our humanity together.' For Giddens, the stakes couldn't be higher. She and Robinson learned their tunes and their art directly from Thompson, who died in 2012; they were playing his music together in Ojai recently 'when it just hit me how important it was what we were doing,' she says, 'like how complete the sound was together. I said: 'If one of us gets hit by a bus, this tradition is dead.' ' That's why she wanted to record the tunes they inherited from Thompson, as well as from Etta Baker and other North Carolina string band players — hence the 'Blackbird' album. But she also insists that the only way to truly pass the flame is through playing together in person. 'I know that learning from Joe forms the center of my character as a musician,' she says. 'I learned stuff off of recordings, fine, but I have something to go back to that was a living transmission. And I just think you should have something of that, especially in this day and age.' Giddens has passed her tradition down to many students in the past 20 years, including her nephew Justin 'Demeanor' Harrington — who plays banjo and the bones, and also raps, and who is traveling with her Old-Time Revue. This will be Giddens' first time at the Bowl; likewise for Amythyst Kiah, a banjo player from Johnson City, Tenn., and one of Our Native Daughters. That project began in 2019 as a one-off album recorded in a small Louisiana studio, of songs inspired by the transatlantic slave trade and the suffering and often unheard voices of Black women. 'Music has a way of disarming,' says Kiah, 'so it allows for people to be able to engage with the subject matter in an easier way than just talking about it.' The fierce foursome — which also includes Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla — toured with their songs before the pandemic, and later brought their banjos to Carnegie Hall in 2022. 'Now we're playing in a stadium,' says Kiah, 'which is insane.' The star-studded Bowl show is 'not what I usually do,' says Giddens. 'It's stepping out a little bit for me, not to mention the size of the place, which is kind of freaking me out.' But really it's just another river — or rather, the same river Giddens has been inviting folks to join her at for the last 20 years.
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Cher's son Elijah Allman hospitalized after erratic behavior, officials say
Elijah Allman, son of pop icon Cher and songwriter Gregg Allman, landed in the hospital this weekend after law enforcement responded to a report of a man 'acting erratically' in a home in the Mojave Desert. Deputies with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department on Saturday responded to the residence in the unincorporated community of Landers where Allman, 48, 'was being evaluated by emergency medical personnel,' officials said in a statement shared with People. Deputies also 'located drugs inside the home' and the musicians' son was transported to a hospital. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which did not immediately respond on Monday to The Times' request for comment and additional information, said it is investigating the incident. The statement did not reveal whether drug use led to Allman's hospitalization but TMZ, which broke the news, reported he overdosed earlier Saturday morning. A source told the outlet Allman is 'receiving the best care possible' and 'lucky to have survived.' A representative for Cher did not immediately respond to The Times' request for comment and an inquiry about Allman's condition. Marieangela King, Allman's estranged wife, expressed support for her husband and spoke about his 'unwavering commitment to sobriety and his loyalty to those he loves' in a statement to People. She acknowledged that her spouse has 'faced personal challenges in the past.' 'Like many, he continues to confront his inner struggles — but it is important to recognize that he does so from a place of strength, not defeat,' she added. 'Despite the assumptions that often color how his journey is portrayed, the reality is that Elijah remains grounded, focused and deeply committed to living with integrity and purpose.' Allman has been open about his struggles with sobriety in the past, telling Entertainment Tonight in a 2014 interview that his drug addiction began before he was even a teenager. 'I mean it's just what you did, it's just what everyone did,' he told Rob Marciano at the time. 'I [was] just looking to escape all the things in my past and that's when you turn to those kind of drugs, you know heroin and opiates,' he said in 2014. He also recalled 'some close calls and some moments of really feeling at the edge of mortality.' Details of his alleged drug use also surfaced in December 2023 when his mother filed her bid for conservatorship to take over his finances. The Grammy-winning 'Believe' singer alleged at the time that her son was 'substantially unable to manage his own financial resources due to severe mental health and substance abuse issues.' Cher ended her conservatorship bid less than a year later, dismissing her petition in September 2024. King filed a petition to divorce Allman in Los Angeles in April, citing 'irreconcilable differences.' The couple, who married in December 2013, was previously headed for divorce when Allman filed a petition in 2021. In January 2024, he filed to dismiss that case without prejudice. Amid their ongoing relationship tensions, King underscored in her weekend statement, 'I will always root for him. 'My support is steadfast and comes from a place of deep respect for the person he is and the resilience he continues to show,' King said.
