'The Sugar Shack,' painting from 'Good Times' and Marvin Gaye cover sells for $15.2M

Saleen Martin, USA TODAY
Wed, May 18, 2022,

Some recognize the painting from "Good Times," the 1970s sitcom about a Black Chicago family. Others who see it think of Marvin Gaye's 14th studio album, "I Want You."

It's "The Sugar Shack," a 1976 painting by former professional football player Ernie Barnes. On May 12, Christie's auction house sold it for $15.2 million – 76 times its high estimate.

The sale set a new record, and it's also the first time Barnes' work made an appearance at the evening sale, the company said on its website.

Hedge fund manager and poker player Bill Perkins bought the piece after more than 10½ minutes of bidding, the company said.

Last November, a similar piece from Barnes, "Ballroom Soul," was sold at Christie’s from the collection of Danny and Donna Arnold for $550,000. That was the record price until Perkins' purchase, a spokeswoman for Christie's said. The estimated going price was $80,000 to $120,000.

The company wanted to make sure this year's estimate was higher than any previous one, but not too high, said Emily Kaplan, co-head of the 20th century evening sale at Christie's New York.

The "Sugar Shack" painting features Black men and women swinging, singing and getting down at a club; it was estimated to sell for $150,000 to $200,000. Kaplan said the auction house had an idea that it would "smash through the estimates," but they guessed it might go for $2 million or $3 million.

Ernie Barnes (1938 - 2009). The Sugar Shack signed ‘ERNIE BARNES’ (lower right); signed again, inscribed and dated 9⁄27/76 Ernie Barnes' (on the reverse). Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm.). Painted in 1976.

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Kaplan said the company knew it was an "extremely special painting" and they were aware of its inclusion on Marvin Gaye's album and the sitcom. The market for Barnes' pieces has been on an upward trajectory, she said.

The day after Perkins bought "The Sugar Shack," Christie's sold another Ernie Barnes piece called "Storm Dance," a Christie's spokesperson said. It went for $2.34 million but was estimated to sell for $100,000 to 150,000.

"Ballroom Soul" is a piece by Ernie Barnes, painted in 1978. It recently sold at Christie's.

Barnes' paintings have been recognized "in a new light" recently, Kaplan said, noting that there was an exhibition at the California African American Museum that featured "The Sugar Shack" and others.

"It was really part of the cultural consciousness in a way that no other Ernie Barnes painting was," she said. "We certainly didn't know until that moment that it was going to sell at the level that it did. That is extremely rare and very, very special."

The night of the Sugar Shack purchase, Perkins posted about it on Instagram, calling it "a childhood dream come true." He told a social media user on Twitter that he plans to put it in his house.

The auction house has online, day and evening sales, Kaplan said. Day sales and online sales are typically higher volume but lower value, while their highest-value works are typically sold at evening sales.

Marvin Gaye's album and "Good Times" contributed to piece's value of "Sugar Shack."

"It is definitely safe to say that added to the cultural recognition and resonance of this image," she said.

Kaplan said the sale included a diverse set of artists, including Claude Monet. She made an effort to include more female artists and artists of color because for so long, they were overlooked for older, white artists. There was a resistance, she said, to include them in the canon of art history.

"The fact that we included this and it has such a remarkable price was, I think, a real validation. The market is strong for works of art by artists of color. That was really an important thing for me and shining light on incredible and undervalued artists."

Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia and loves all things horror, witches, Christmas and food.

Saleen Martin, sdmartin@usatoday.com, Twitter: @Saleen_Martin

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Sugar Shack' by Ernie Barnes sold for $15.2M – 76 times its estimate

$15M sale of iconic ‘Sugar Shack’ painting shines light on Durham artist Ernie Barnes


Clyde McPhatter
Josh Shaffer
Thu, May 19, 2022

Sometime in the early 1950s, a teenage boy snuck into a segregated dance at the Durham Armory, hoping to get a glimpse of a crooning Clyde McPhatter and his doo-wop Dominos.

He later described the scene he saw on the dance floor, so bold for the era it seemed sinful, but not so audacious he didn’t move along.

“What I observed was the no inhibition, no self-consciousness or rigidity, just fluid movement while the music punctuated every bump and grind,” said the young Ernie Barnes, according to a 2018 story in The News & Observer. “I stood among the dancing with my mouth dropped.”

The scene that burned into the teenager’s mind that day would become “The Sugar Shack,” a 1976 painting known for its appearance first on a Marvin Gaye album and then accompanying the closing credits to the 1970s TV show, “Good Times.”

And it just sold at auction in New York for $15.3 million.

The whopping price tag, a record for Barnes’ work, not only brings new attention to a masterpiece conceived in Durham, it highlights the collection and worldview from a late, local hero gone worldwide.

“He would have said that it’s underpriced,” said Luz Rodriguez, his longtime personal assistant and trustee of his estate. “He would have given his trademark, ‘Bless his heart.’”

Artist Ernie Barnes in 2001.

Still, Rodriguez told The N&O, the painting has landed in the right home.

Bill Perkins, the Texas energy trader who bought it, told The New York Times he worried Oprah Winfrey would show up and outbid him for it, and that he considered the eight-figure price a steal.

“You never saw paintings of Black people by Black artists,” he told The Times. “This introduced not just me, but all of America, to Barnes’ work. It’s the only artwork that has ever done that. And these were firsts. So this is never going to happen again. Ever. The cultural importance of this piece is just crazy.”
‘An honor’

The sale turns fresh eyes to Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, but also to Durham, where he grew up in a neighborhood called The Bottoms — son of a shipping clerk for Liggett Myers tobacco.

Three years ago, the N.C. Museum of History showed a collection of his work for its African-American Celebration, featuring the same dancers and marching bands that moved with almost liquid nonchalance.

That it showed in the state’s history museum, rather than one dedicated to art, demonstrates its impact.

“We thought it was so wonderful that Ernie and his art are getting the recognition they deserve,” said Katie Edwards, the history museum’s curator of popular culture. “It was an honor to be able to display such an iconic painting like ‘The Sugar Shack.’”

But even though Barnes carried a sketchbook as a child, it was football, not art, that pulled him out of the Bottoms.

Ernie Barnes with paintings on movie set “Number One” starring Charlton Heston in 1969.

Always big for his age, he played for Hillside High School, excelling enough to earn a scholarship to what is now called N.C. Central University in Durham, turning down many other offers.

Then in 1959, the artistic kid from Durham got drafted into the pros as a lineman, playing for the New York Titans, Baltimore Colts, San Diego Chargers and Denver Broncos. Even on the sidelines, sketching his opponents, teammates called him “Big Rembrandt.”

In all his paintings, especially whether the figures are dancing or crashing into each other on the football field, their eyes are closed.

“Friendly Friendship Baptist Church,” by Ernie Barnes, 1994, will be included in “The North Carolina Roots of Artist Ernie Barnes” exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of History, which opens June 29 and runs through March 3.

Zacki Murphy, Barnes’ friend and a Hillsborough native, wrote in the N&O in 2018 that Barnes was disturbed about the violence on the field, even as a player, and he sought to elevate the players in his art.

On their eyes being closed, “It represents our blindness to another’s humanity,” he said, according to Murphy’s story. “We don’t see into the depths of our interconnection; the gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. Racism has taught many of us ‘what’ to think about each other, but not ‘how’ to think about one another.”

“Hallelujah,” Murphy said Thursday, responding to news of the sale. “About time. To me, he’s still alive.”

How ‘The Sugar Shack’ went worldwide

“The Sugar Shack,” painted long after Barnes left football, caught Gaye’s attention after the two played pickup basketball in Los Angeles, Rodriguez said. The soul star borrowed it, and the next thing Barnes knew, Motown records wanted it for the cover of the 1976 album, “I Want You.”

Around the same time, Norman Lear approached Barnes about using the same image for “Good Times,” featuring a Black family struggling on the south side of Chicago, including eldest son J.J. Evans, an aspiring painter.

But Gaye never returned the original “Sugar Shack,” so Barnes produced a second with only slight differences — the main one being removing a fifth banner that spelled out the album’s title “I Want You.” Years later, Eddie Murphy bought the first.

Widely acclaimed before his death in 2009, Barnes’ art so often featured athletes and dancers moving with almost liquid ease, whether they were drum majors or basketball players reaching for a rebound.

But “Sugar Shack” — which the Times reported may go on public display before gracing its new owner’s home — is as burned on the nation’s conscience as the dancers that first inspired a young boy to move his feet.

“I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve gotten from people about seeing ‘Sugar Shack,’” Rodriguez said. “People tell me it comforts them. They swear some of the characters in there are their cousins. But it’s always positive. It’s always inspiring.”

“The Drum Major” by Ernie Barnes, 2003, will be included in “The North Carolina Roots of Artist Ernie Barnes” exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of History, which opens June 29 and runs through March 3.

Art Review: ‘Witness to Wartime’ documents Japanese-born US painter's life, especially his forced incarceration during World War II


Anderson Turner
Thu, May 19, 2022

The individual drive to make visual art and to do creative research is born out of deep desire for a person to express themselves and to share important ideas. Art is truly something “in” a person that needs to find a way to come out into the world. How this desire comes about is unique to the human condition, and history has shown us that no matter the conditions a person or group of people find themselves living in, the power of artistic expression finds a way to materialize.

"Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii" is an exhibition of the work of a Japanese-born modernist painter who documented his life in America after immigrating at age 15. This exhibition features 82 objects (oil paintings, watercolors, ink drawings, books, sculpture). It documents many aspects of the artist's life, but most especially his experience of being forced into an incarceration camp during World War II.

“Minidoka, doctor treating Fujii for tick (another incident).” Watercolor on paper.

Fujii was 50 years old when war broke out between the United States and Japan. He was one of over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast forced to leave their homes and live in geographically isolated incarceration camps.

He and his family, together with most ethnic Japanese from Seattle, were sent first to the Puyallup temporary detention camp on the Washington State Fairgrounds, and in August 1942 were transferred to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in southern Idaho.

Fujii documented the experience by starting a visual diary that spans the years from his forced removal in May 1942 to the closing of Minidoka in October 1945.


Certainly, what first stands out when you view the work is the skill of the artist and the interesting details of everyday life he picked up on. Fujii would often depict himself drawing or painting what he was witnessing. This act is more than just including himself in the form of a portrait; rather it shows the artist as an active participant in the documentation as well as the daily life of the world he was seeing during his forced incarceration.

“Train to Minidoka.” Watercolor on paper.

"Train to Minidoka" is a watercolor on paper that depicts the conditions and the people who are traveling to the place they would be incarcerated for three years. Dark lines outline people as they travel on the train. The artist shared this in his diary of the event: “A hot, hot August day. The inside of the coach was so hot, we were all running around naked. Feeling anxious, we rode the train, going east, ever east.” Part of the passengers' anxiety was because they had very little information about where they were going, and many thought they were going to be killed, a reality that Fujii details in his diary.

"Minidoka, Blocks 19 and 21" is a watercolor on paper that features a mountain scene with row upon row of housing in the foreground. Despite the formal documentation of this piece, it also retains the expressiveness of the artist's hand in the variety of brushstrokes and marks.

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What stands out the more you look at the paintings is the clear vision of Fujii to highlight his joy of making. Also apparent is his ability to express his own artistic passions and interests, while at the same time offering us truly unique insights into his personal experiences.

“Minidoka, birds and snake.” Watercolor on paper.

"Minidoka, Montage With Fence and Landmarks" is also a watercolor on paper, an expressive visual collage of what the camp looked like. In this piece he chose more than a representational path, creating a composition more akin to what was being done by German Expressionists like Max Beckmann prior to World War II.

In this painting you certainly can pick up on Fujii's emotions by the way the different compositional elements come together. The buildings, the electrical wire and the barbed wire all angle off each other in ways that force your eye to move around the picture's surface. The artist remains true to himself here, though, by creating thoughtful lines and shapes, not ones that feel solely spontaneous or expressive, despite the “abstract” way the visual elements are put together.

“Minidoka, grieving women.” Ink on paper.

There is a sadness that comes through in these works. This is important to note and to understand. Fujii’s vision offers us a window and a way to connect with this time in our history more effectively than any photo ever could. Still, there is also a joy being expressed here. A joy in making and a joy in documenting the daily life of what was certainly a nearly impossible situation to live through.

Anderson Turner is director of the Kent State University School of Art collection and galleries. Contact him at haturner3@gmail.com.

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“Seattle, King Street -- Victory over Japan Day celebration.” Watercolor and ink on paper.

Details

Exhibit: “Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii”

Place: Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave N., Canton

Dates: Through July 24

Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday.

More information: 330-453-7666 or cantonart.org

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: ‘Witness to Wartime’ documents Japan-born US painter's life, including incarceration during WWII

‘She’s badass’: how brick-throwing suffragette Ethel Smyth composed an opera to shake up Britain

A feminist opera … Karis Tucker, centre, as Thurza in The Wreckers.

 Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

She was bisexual, served a prison sentence and was so outraged by cuts to her opera The Wreckers that she stormed the orchestra pit. Finally, this summer, it will be heard as its extraordinary composer intended

Imogen Tilden
Thu 19 May 2022 

‘She was a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature. Nothing could tame her, nothing could daunt her,” said conductor Thomas Beecham, speaking in 1958 about the composer Ethel Smyth. “She is of the race of pioneers, of path-makers,” agreed her friend Virginia Woolf. “She has gone before and felled trees and blasted rocks and built bridges and thus made a way for those who come after her.”

“She’s badass. I’d love to have met her,” says Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts. The tenor sings in a new production of Smyth’s 1906 opera The Wreckers, which makes its debut at Glyndebourne on 21 May, and will be performed at the Proms this summer. Her music is “incredible”, the conductor Robin Ticciati says. “She uses the brass and the timps as weapons, blades!”

A passionate activist … Ethel Smyth at a 1912 meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union in London. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Smyth wrote six operas, a mass, countless chamber works and even a ballet, but she is best known today for her 1910 song The March of the Women, which became the official anthem of the suffragette movement. She was a passionate activist, throwing bricks through the windows of the homes of cabinet ministers – which led to a two-month jail sentence. Beecham recalled visiting her in Holloway prison: “On this particular occasion, the warden said: ‘Come into the quadrangle.’ There were a dozen ladies, marching up and down, singing hard. He pointed up to a window where Ethel was leaning out, conducting with a toothbrush, also with immense vigour and joining in the chorus of her own song The March of the Women.”

The Wreckers is set in a remote corner of 18th-century Cornwall where villagers live a precarious existence plundering ships lured on to the rocks, and invoking ancient salvage rights that allow them to murder shipwrecked crew for profit. But when two of the community resist this and the strictures of their own roles, tragedy ensues.
She subverts operatic tropes. She made the moral heart of the opera a mezzo – normally consigned to witches, bitches or breeches roles, and the soprano is outspoken and feisty

Lauren Fagan sings the role of Avis, one of the two central female characters. “She’s a really awesome and exciting person to sing,” Fagan says. “She makes bold decisions. I’m feeling quite empowered and strong, even if at the end Avis too is cast out of the community.”

For the director, Melly Still, the work reflects the defiant, unorthodox views of its creator. “Librettist Henry Brewster and Smyth were clear that they weren’t making this a piece about the Cornish people and wrecking specifically,” Still says. “For them it was a symbol of Britain and its insularity.”

Little about Smyth was ordinary, from her bisexuality to her determination to compose on her terms, and refusal to accept that her voice was any less important than that of her male counterparts. “I would certainly call The Wreckers a feminist opera,” Still says. “It’s about the women in it finding their voice. Its central character, Thurza, tries to break free from the restricted world she is forced to live in. And Smyth subverts all the operatic tropes. She made the moral heart of the opera a mezzo, a voice type normally consigned to the witches/bitches/breeches roles; and the soprano, Avis, is a really feisty character – not the classic transgressor saved by a prince charming.”

Rehearsals with director Melly Still (centre) with Karis Tucker (Thurza), Lauren Fagan (Avis), Rodrigo Porras Garulo (Marc) and company members. 

Photograph: Glyndebourne Productions Ltd/Richard Hubert Smith

As much as it’s about defiance and individual freedoms, Ticciati adds, the opera is about how a community turns into a mob. With its dark narrative of scapegoats and violence and its remote coastal setting, the work has parallels with Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, although Britten said he did not know Smyth’s work. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t come across bits of it at the Proms: in the 35 years between 1913 and 1947, 27 separate Prom seasons featured either The Wreckers’ Overture or its Prelude to act 2. Productions and complete recordings, however, were few and far between even during Smyth’s lifetime, and Glyndebourne’s staging is the first professional one done in French, the language in which the opera was originally written.

The history of Smyth’s opera is as dramatic as the Cornish coast where it is set. Smyth’s librettist, Brewster (her lover and lifelong friend), was a bilingual French/English speaker. Smyth, who studied in Leipzig, was steeped in European musical traditions and spoke German and French fluently. Their decision to write the libretto in French is likely to have been a pragmatic one. “The conductor at the time at Covent Garden was the French-born André Messager. Perhaps she thought ‘a French conductor is bound to put this on,’” Still says. Smyth also hoped that a French-language opera would find a more receptive audience over the Channel where she felt there wasn’t the same divide between “composers” and “female composers”. She was, however, wrong on both counts, and it was in German, not French or even English, that the Wreckers was premiered, in Leipzig in 1906.

‘We’re sharpening, varnishing everything to make it have the wings to fly’: Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director.

The performance was well received, but Smyth was horrified by cuts made to the third act and, when the conductor refused to reinstate the missing passages, she marched into the orchestra pit herself and removed the musicians’ parts and the full score, and took them on a train to Prague. An under-rehearsed performance there was a disaster and although her work had found a fan in Gustav Mahler, his hopes to put her opera on in Vienna in 1907 came to nothing.

Back in England the indomitable Smyth persuaded Beecham to listen to her work, as he recollected. “She came to me in a very excited state. She said, ‘You have got to conduct my opera The Wreckers … Will you come and see me, and I will go through it with you?’ She played the whole piece through, mostly the wrong notes, but with a vigour and elan that was really very inspiriting.”

And so 1909 saw six performances at Her Majesty’s theatre, and then, the following year, at Covent Garden – the first opera by a woman to be produced there. “Smyth and a poet friend of hers translated the French into a very kind of baroque Edwardian ladies’ poetry, and there were cuts to shorten the work. But as soon as you start cutting, the character and all the complexity vanishes and it all becomes quite two-dimensional,” Still says.

Even so, Smyth’s opera was a success – even King Edward VII came to see it – but then her work all but disappeared from opera houses. A semi-staging at the Proms in 1994 brought her back to the Royal Albert Hall, and in 2006 Cornwall’s Duchy Opera staged a reduced and newly translated English version of The Wreckers in its centenary year.
At the same time as thinking: ‘What did Ethel want?’, we’ve also been asking ourselves: ‘What can we do to make this piece live at its best?’Conductor Robin Ticciati

The opera has however, never been performed as Smyth originally wrote it. “We wanted to go right back to the source” says Ticciati.

“Opera in its original language flows better,” says James Rutherford, singing Laurent. “The minute you change something there’s always a compromise. Going back to the original makes you think: ‘OK, this is obviously what was intended.’”

“We’re all still waiting to hear what it sounds like,” laughs Ticciati. The London Philharmonic Orchestra are yet to join rehearsals at Glyndebourne to bring Smyth’s passionate and rich score to life; up to this point, he, Still and the cast have had only fragments of recordings; rehearsals have been with a pianist repetiteur rather than the full orchestra. And what will it sound like?

“When you don’t know a composer and their language, you start by comparing their music to others,” says tenor Rodrigo Porras Garulo, who sings Marc. “She has such a big vocabulary that sometimes you think you’re singing Cavalleria Rusticana, sometimes you think you’re singing Debussy, sometimes a Schubert song, other times Irish folk songs. It’s very mixed, and that’s the beauty of it.”

“My role starts with light French melodies, then there’s a dramatic duet, then I have a crazy full-on aria where I have to murder a rat, and by the final act I’m doing my best Wagnerian dramatic soprano interpretation, high and loud,” Fagan says.

Much of Ticciati and the music team’s work these past two years has been detail-focused as they sought to create the Ur-score. “We’re sharpening, chamfering, varnishing everything to make it have the wings so that it can fly,” Ticciati says. Smyth never even got to hear her opera as she had first written it. “At the same time as thinking: ‘What did Ethel want?’, we’ve also been asking ourselves: ‘What can we do to make this piece live at its best?’”

‘A stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature’ … Ethel Smyth pictured c1925. Photograph: Sasha/Getty Images

For everyone involved, the freedom of not having previous recordings or productions to refer to is exhilarating – and scary. “Actually that’s made me a bit nervy … that every person who comes to see this will never have heard it in this way,” says Lloyd-Roberts. “That gives us a different kind of responsibility and obviously we want this opera to be a huge success.”

“I hope it’s a beautiful assault on our senses – and on our expectations,” Still says. Ticciati is confident the drama and power of the music will speak for itself. “I hope that it’s going to be tidal and it’s going to hit audiences in the face – whhhooomph!”

​​The Wreckers is at Glyndebourne festival from 21 May to 24 June, and at the BBC Proms on 24 July. The production will be available to watch later in the summer on Glyndebourne Encore.

RIP

Bob Neuwirth, Folk Singer-Songwriter Who Had Profound Impact on Bob Dylan, Dead at 82

David Browne
Thu, May 19, 2022,

Bob Neuwirth (right) performs with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue at a benefit concert for boxer Rubin Hurricane Carter, January 1976. - Credit: AP

One day in 1970, a young Patti Smith was sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, working on her poetry, when a familiar-looking figure approached her. “He came up to me and asked me if I was a poet,” she tells Rolling Stone of the figure in trademark dark glasses she immediately recognized from a Bob Dylan documentary. “I knew exactly who he was. He looked like he’d stepped out of Don’t Look Back, which I’d seen about 100 times. He said, ‘Let me see what you’re writing.’ He started reading and he was one of the first people who looked at my work and took it seriously. He said, ‘You should be writing songs.’”

The figure was Bob Neuwirth, the folk singer-songwriter and painter who influenced or impacted on a wide range of artists, including Smith, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin. Neuwirth died Wednesday at age 82 in Santa Monica, California, according to his partner, Paula Batson, who confirmed the death to Rolling Stone.

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“On Wednesday evening in Santa Monica, Bob Neuwirth’s big heart gave out,” Neuwirth’s family said in a statement. “Bob was an artist throughout every cell of his body and he loved to encourage others to make art themselves. He was a painter, songwriter, producer and recording artist whose body of work is loved and respected. For over 60 years, Bob was at the epicenter of cultural moments from Woodstock, to Paris, Don’t Look Back to Monterey Pop, Rolling Thunder to Nashville and Havana. He was a generous instigator who often produced and made things happen anonymously. The art is what mattered to him, not the credit. He was an artist, a mentor and a supporter to many. He will be missed by all who love him.”

Throughout his multi-decade career, Neuwirth moved back and forth between the worlds of music and art, largely and happily under the radar, although his connections with classic rock made him a legend. Dylan fans remember him for his caustic cameos in Don’t Look Back, director D.A. Pennebaker’s movie of Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour, as well as Neuwirth’s appearances in the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Joplin fans recognize him by way of her a cappella classic “Mercedes Benz,” which the two co-wrote with poet Michael McClure. In the private-collector art world, Neuwirth was renowned for exhibitions of his paintings, and Velvet Underground diehards recall his Nineties work with John Cale. Neuwirth also introduced Joplin to “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by his friend Kris Kristofferson; Joplin recorded the song just days before her 1970 death.

“When you’re around people like that, you’re not driven to be a musician,” Neuwirth said in 1989 of his collaborations. “I had other outlets. I was a painter, so it never occurred to me to do any of those other things.”

“He was good at everything,” says Smith. “He was a great songwriter. A moving singer. A really fine painter. He had so much magnetism; you couldn’t not be drawn to him. But it wasn’t because he was aggressive. He just wasn’t the kind of person who pushed own agenda on a situation.”

Born in Akron, Ohio, on June 20, 1939, Neuwirth first attended Ohio University before moving to Boston in 1959 to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Art on an arts scholarship. After a side trip to Paris, he returned to Boston, working in an art supply store and learning to play banjo and guitar, which led him to become part of the early Sixties Cambridge folk scene. “Painting is how I got into folk music, in a way,” he said in 1989. “I sort of put myself through art school as a folk singer. It was always my secondary art, and my part-time job.”

Neuwirth began visiting the similar scene developing in New York’s Greenwich Village (partly, he once joked, because the weed was more readily available). At one point in a club there, he met Dylan, with whom he shared a caustic, cutting sense of humor and hipster persona. “Right from the start, you could tell that Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles Volume 1. “He was in a mad revolt against something. You had to brace yourself when you talked to him.” Dylan also referred to Neuwirth as “a bulldog.”

Eventually, Neuwirth became part of Dylan’s tight inner circle, hanging out at bars like the Kettle of Fish in the Village and trading barbs with whoever was in sight. As one singer who played with Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1972, “Neuwirth was a scene maker, a very strong cat. When he got to New York in 1964, he started hanging around Dylan. And Dylan started to change at that time. Part of it was Neuwirth, he was a real strong influence on Dylan. Neuwirth had a negative attitude, stressing pride and ego, sort of saying, ‘Hold your head high, man, don’t take shit, just take over the scene.’ He was the kind of cat who could influence others, work on their egos and support those egos. His whole negative attitude fell in perfectly with what Dylan was feeling.”

Neuwirth moved to L.A. soon after, where he remained for most of his life afterwards. In 1974, after years playing clubs, he finally released a record of his own, Bob Neuwirth, on David Geffen’s Asylum label. The album – which set Neuwirth’s craggy voice to freewheeling, sometimes boozy honky-tonk – wasn’t a commercial hit. But it was a cult favorite, and plans to reissue it were in the works when Neuwirth died. (The project is currently scheduled for release next year.)

In addition to Don’t Look Back, Neuwrith also co-starred in Dylan’s experimental 1978 film Renaldo and Clara. That film also featured many of the artists in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, an ensemble Neuwirth is credited with helping to assemble. (Neuwirth’s 1975 shows at the Other End in the Village became a gathering point for many of the participants on that tour.)

For Joan Baez, who met Neuwirth on the Cambridge folk scene, Neuwirth could be a stabilizing figure when she found herself out of sorts in Dylan’s world, starting with the tour immortalized in Don’t Look Back. “When we were on that tour, I was feeling horrible and Bob [Neuwirth] wanted me to go home,” he says. “He said, ‘It’s not going to get any better.’ And it didn’t. But Neuwirth was right.” A decade later, during the Dylan-led Rolling Thunder shows, Baez was feeling similarly out of sorts. “I felt slighted again, which is how I spent much of my time with Dylan,” she says. “I had taken to my bed in my hotel and Neuwirth came in and started acting silly and opened the window and shouted, ‘She’s going to live!’ He was just one of those people who could make you laugh.”

The painting work he had started in the early Sixties continued. Early in his career, he produced what were called “quirky hybrids of Cubism and Surrealism.” Later, he concentrated on wall works that incorporated painting and sculpture. A major exhibit of his work, Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth: 1964 – 2009, took place in Los Angeles in 2011.

Although his music career was never his priority, Neuwirth dipped back into that part of his life intermittently. Starting with 1989’s beautifully spare Back to the Front, he resumed making occasional, wry and often stark country-folk records. With John Cale, whom he’d met during their time hanging out at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the Sixties, he made 1994’s Last Day on Earth, which Neuwirth described as “an abstract Prairie Home Companion.” In 1995, Mercedes Benz licensed Joplin’s song for a high-profile commercial. “I wonder what took them so long,” Neuwirth cracked at the time. (Of the song, which was quickly written between sets of a Joplin show, he said, “It was a throwaway, a fluke. I wouldn’t call it songwriting.”) Neuwirth also produced two albums for Texas singer-songwriter Vince Bell.

In 2004, Neuwirth served as emcee of Great High Mountain, a bluegrass and Americana tour inspired by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and featuring Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley and others. In recent years, he also participated in tribute concerts to Randy Newman and the late folklorist Harry Smith, as well as a 2018 New York concert recreating Dylan’s 1963 show at Town Hall. The latter was especially noteworthy since Neuwirth normally distanced himself from his Dylan associations, rarely giving interviews about that period in his life.

“Like Keruoac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, someone should have immortalized Neuwrith,” Dylan wrote. “He was that kind of character … With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him. If there was ever a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.”

For Smith, the cover of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited — which shows Neuwirth, but only as a pants-wearer standing behind Dylan — spoke to his understated but important role in the culture. “That’s him in a nutshell,” she says. “He stays in the background. But he’s there, and his presence is always strong.”

Additional reporting by Daniel Kreps

Bob Neuwirth, Folk Figure of 1960s and Beyond, Influence on Bob Dylan and Co-Writer of ‘Mercedes Benz,’ Dies at 82

Chris Willman
Thu, May 19, 2022

Neuwirth is seen above in a photo taken just two weeks ago by Larry Bercow.

Bob Neuwirth, a recording artist, painter, mainstay of the New York City folk scene in the 1960s, and a collaborator with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, John Cale and T Bone Burnett, among others, died in Santa Monica Wednesday night at age 82. The cause of death was heart failure.

“On Wednesday evening in Santa Monica, Bob Neuwirth’s big heart gave out,” said his longtime partner, entertainment executive Paula Batson, in a statement. “He was 82 years old and would have been 83 in June. Bob was an artist throughout every cell of his body and he loved to encourage others to make art themselves. He was a painter, songwriter, producer and recording artist whose body of work is loved and respected.

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“For over 60 years, Bob was at the epicenter of cultural moments from Woodstock, to Paris, ‘Don’t Look Back’ to Monterey Pop, ‘Rolling Thunder’ to Nashville and Havana. He was a generous instigator who often produced and made things happen anonymously. The art is what mattered to him, not the credit. He was an artist, a mentor and a supporter to many. He will be missed by all who love him.”

Neuwirth took on many roles in his career in the arts, in and out of music, but Patti Smith may have encapsulated it best when, in her memoir, she described him as “a catalyst for action.”

In his memoir, “Chronicle: Volume 1,” Dylan wrote, “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. If ever there was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.”

In 1988, writing the liner notes for a Neuwirth album, T Bone Burnett took stock of Neuwirth’s place in the scene and called him “the best pure songwriter of us all.”

Neuwirth was not prolific in the albums he released over a 60-year career, often preferring work as a painter or supporting other artists’ visions as a producer, writer or bandleader, although he had resumed concert performances in recent years. In 1994, he and John Cale collaborated on the experimental album “Last Day on Earth,” on MCA. His series of solo albums began with a self-titled 1974 effort on Asylum.

He did not record a sophomore album for another 14 years, finally reemerging with “Back to the Front,” the 1988 album that included the aforementioned Burnett liner notes, made with Steven Soles, another veteran of the Rolling Thunder Revue. In the late ’90s, Neuwirth went to Havana and worked with famed Cuban musician Jose Maria Vitier on their album “Havana Midnight.”

Bob Neuwirth - Credit: John Byrne Cooke

Being part of Bob Dylan’s circle led to a certain kind of fame among that artist’s vast army of fans. Neuwirth is seen in the film “Don’t Look Back,” standing alongside Allen Ginsberg in the background of the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” proto-music-video. And he helped assembled the band for — and performed on — the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the mid-’70s, which led to his also being featured in Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clara” film. In-between, he had toured with his close friend Kris Kristofferson.

Neuwirth was interviewed for both of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentaries. “Back then it wasn’t money-driven,” Neuwirth says in the 2005 film “No Direction Home.” “It was about if an artist had something to say. Whether it was Bob Dylan or Ornette Coleman, what people would ask was, ‘Does he have anything to say?'

Among the things that help make up Neuwirth’s legend is that he co-wrote one of Janis Joplin’s most iconic songs, “Mercedes Benz,” for the singer shortly before her 1970 death. It became a posthumous hit and one of the songs she is most identified with – as well as a shower song for millions in her wake. “It’s a campfire song, isn’t it?” Neuwirth told this writer in a 2013 interview. “You don’t need any particular musical skill to sing it, and because it’s a cappella, everybody can tackle it in their own way. But I’m sure Janis would be shocked at the attention that that song has gotten over the years. She’d just be shaking her head in disbelief at it.”

In another unpublished interview, Neuwirth said, “Mercedes Benz’ came when Janis and I were both drunk between shows, and she just played it and people loved it. It was put onto her ‘Pearl’ album. They needed a filler because she hadn’t recorded enough for the album before she died.” Neuwirth was also responsible for introducing Joplin to the signature song “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kristofferson.

As the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” took off and generated a wave of enthusiasm for early 20th century roots music, Neuwirth rejoined D.A. Pennebaker, the director of “Don’t Look Back,” to co-produce the documentary “Down From the Mountain” filmed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville with the artists who made the music for the “O Brother” soundtrack. Neuwirth was the musical director on the concert tour that followed.

As his work continuing the impact of the “O Brother” music on the road and on film would indicate, Neuwirth was a close associate of T Bone Burnett from the Rolling Thunder Revue period onward. He co-wrote songs on the early albums of Peter Case, which Burnett produced.

In the late ’90s Neuwirth worked with the late Hal Wilner on the Harry Smith Anthology all-star concerts that were documented as they took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London, St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn and UCLA’s Royce Hall. He also contributed a song to Wilner’s all-star 2006 compilation “Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys.”

In 2014-16, Neuwirth had developed a “Stories and Songs” show that he took to New York, Los Angeles and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. When Neuwirth went to the latter museum in 2018 for “Music Masters: A Conversation with Bob Neuwirth,” museum editor Peter Cooper wrote, “Neuwirth’s path has been less a line than a hodgepodge of glorious zig-zags, all existing within a giant circle of song…Whether in spite of or because of the hijinks, hokum and hell, Neuwirth’s music stands as a testament to a marvelous, rollicking life.”

Of the wide range of forms his work took, Neuwirth said, “It’s all about the same to me, whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”

Neuwirth was born in the Akron, Ohio area and began painting as a teenager, which eventually led him to the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. After spending time living in Paris and soaking up classical art there, he returned to Boston and worked in an art supply store while learning how to play guitar and banjo. He became part of the Cambridge folk scene that included Joan Baez, Geoff Muldaur and others, soon performing in New York, Berkeley and San Francisco as well. He joined Dylan for the tour captured in “Don’t Look Back.” But he continued to keep his focus largely on visual art, moving to New York and becoming part of the scene that would convene at Max’s Kansas City, a group that included Andy Warhol, Larry Poons, Robert Smithson and Robert Raushenberg.

In 2011, his artwork, which had long been solely the province of private collectors, was exhibited at the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica in a show curated by Kristine McKenna titled “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.” The notes for that exhibition said that in the early ’60s, “he was producing quirky hybrids of Cubism and Surrealism. The ’70s found him exploring various experimental materials, and he went on to produce a series of wall works that straddled the zone between painting and sculpture, and a cycle of haunted landscapes that are poised between abstraction and figuration. Neuwirth’s work has grown increasingly lyrical and fluid over the course of his career, and in recent years he’s been producing exuberant, expansive pictures filled with space, light, and blazing color.”

In an interview with the Paris Review, Neuwirth said, “I know how people can get famous. They have to tickle the G-spot of their minds. But being anonymous is so much more powerful. You can get so much more done if you’re not worried about fame and fortune. You can get a lot done.”

Neuwirth is survived by Batson and his niece, Cassie Dubicki, and her family.

RIP

Vangelis, composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner soundtracks, dies aged 79

Greek composer topped US charts and won an Oscar with Chariots of Fire’s uplifting piano-led theme

Vangelis pictured in 1976. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

Ben Beaumont-Thomas
@ben_bt

Thu 19 May 2022 

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. His representatives said he died in hospital in France where he was being treated.

Born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album.

Mostly self-taught in music, Vangelis grew up in Athens and formed his first band in 1963, called the Forminx, playing the pop music of the time: uptempo rock’n’roll, sweeping ballads and Beatles cover versions, with Vangelis supplying organ lines.

They split in 1966, and Vangelis became a writer and producer for hire, working for other musicians and contributing scores for Greek films. Two years later, he struck out for Paris to further his career, where he formed the prog rock quartet Aphrodite’s Child with Greek expats including Demis Roussos. Their single Rain and Tears was a hit across Europe, topping the French, Belgian and Italian charts and reaching the UK Top 30.

Commercial heights … Vangelis at his home in London, 1982. Photograph: Martyn Goddard/Alamy

After they split – Vangelis deeming the world of commercial pop “very boring” – he returned to scoring film and TV. Turning down an invitation to replace Rick Wakeman on keyboards in Yes, he moved to London and signed a solo deal with RCA Records: his LPs Heaven and Hell (1975) and Albedo 0.39 (1976) each reached the UK Top 40, the former also used to soundtrack Carl Sagan’s popular TV series Cosmos. The connection with Yes was finally completed later in the decade, when he teamed with the band’s Jon Anderson for the duo Jon and Vangelis, whose debut album went Top 5.

Vangelis had continued his film score work throughout the 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that this reached its commercial heights. Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis’s timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. “My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment,” he later explained.

His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film’s romantic and poignant moments. “It has turned out to be a very prophetic film – we’re living in a kind of Blade Runner world now,” he said in 2005.

Later in the decade he scored the Palme d’Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau.

A fascination with outer space … Vangelis in 2001. Photograph: Simela Pantzartzi/EPA
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Vangelis drew on Greek instrumentation alongside the typical orchestras used in film scoring on Oliver Stone’s 2004 classical epic, Alexander.


From ET to The Wicker Man: 10 of the best film soundtracks

His most recent score is for El Greco, a 2007 Greek biopic of the Renaissance painter. The Greek artist, who moved to Spain and acquired his nickname there, was much admired by Vangelis, who composed albums in 1995 and 1998 that were inspired by and named after him.

Continually celebrated for his evocative Chariots of Fire theme, Vangelis was also commissioned by sporting bodies to soundtrack major events, including the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, and the 2004 Olympics in Athens. He also wrote ballet scores and music for stage productions of Medea, The Tempest and other plays.

Solo releases remained steady alongside his commissioned work, and occasionally included collaborations with vocalists such as Paul Young.

A fascination with outer space found voice in 2016’s Rosetta, dedicated to the space probe of the same name, and Nasa appointed his 1993 piece Mythodea (which he claimed to have written in an hour) as the official music of the Mars Odyssey mission of 2001. His final album, 2021’s Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.

Among those paying tribute to Vangelis was Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who hailed “a pioneer of electronic sound”.

After Roe, can states stop abortions on Native American lands?

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Thu, May 19, 2022,

Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Sunday hinted at retribution for Indigenous Oklahomans should doctors readily perform abortions on tribal lands if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

But he was stepping outside the boundaries of state authority, according to Indigenous legal experts.

“The tribes in Oklahoma are super-liberal,” Stitt said on “Fox News Sunday,” as he discussed the implications of the leaked Supreme Court majority draft opinion, which indicated that the court is soon likely to revoke the constitutional right to an abortion. “We think that there’s a possibility that some tribes may try to set up abortion on demand. They think that you can be the 1/1,000th tribal member and not have to follow the state law. And so that’s something that we’re watching.

“Oklahomans will not think very well of that, if tribes try to set up abortion clinics,” he added.

Stitt signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country this month. Experts in tribal sovereignty law, however, say that the legality of abortion on reservations probably won’t be up to the state government. While Oklahoma would criminalize abortion procedures if Roe v. Wade is overturned, as is widely anticipated, recognized tribes have considerable autonomy under federal law.

“Tribal nations existed before Oklahoma, and have a long history of women making health decisions for themselves,” Angelique EagleWoman, director of the Native American Law and Sovereignty Institute at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, told Yahoo News.

“Tribal nations, including the ones in Oklahoma, often entered in treaties — legal documents — with the United States. And, generally, treaties guarantee health services. Native Americans are the only people in the United States guaranteed public health services, and that’s administered through the federal agency called the Indian Health Service. There’s nowhere along the line of health care where the state attaches, or its laws come into play, for tribal members.”


Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt addresses a roundtable at the White House in June 2020.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Many Native American women already lack direct access to abortions. Most pregnant women cannot obtain abortions from the Indian Health Service because of a 1976 law, known as the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother. Those exceptions can be hard to prove. As a result, a 2002 study by the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center found that only 25 abortions had been performed in the Indian Health Service system since the law was passed.

Rachael Lorenzo, executive director for Indigenous Women Rising, an Indigenous abortion fund, recently told Indian Country Today that local Indian Health Service officials in Oklahoma and New Mexico don’t always offer abortion services even to women who qualify for one of the exceptions.

“Even though they are legally allowed to provide that care, they still don't, and every medical director has a different policy that guides their providers when they have a patient who is expressing they want to terminate their pregnancy,” Lorenzo said. “We have been told by providers ourselves that their medical directors tell them that they're not allowed to even mention abortion.”

Most Native American women who get abortions go to abortion clinics outside tribal land, which has already become increasingly difficult in more conservative states. Stitt recently signed a strict anti-abortion law, vowing that he wants his state to be “the most pro-life state in the country.” The Oklahoma law does not have an exception for victims of rape or incest.


Advocates for abortion rights march on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., to the Supreme Court on May 14. (Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)

If the Supreme Court strikes down Roe next month, states would have even more leeway to enact strict abortion bans.

But state criminal law does not apply on reservations. “States are ousted from criminal jurisdiction on reservations,” EagleWoman said. “An understanding of tribal sovereignty and tribal jurisdiction would lead to the conclusion that there would be no engagement with state law whatsoever on tribal health care decisions or services.”

Oklahoma has the largest Native American population of any state, at more than 526,000, accounting for 13% of the state’s population. Oklahoma is home to 39 Indigenous nations and 19 million acres of reservation land, accounting for more than 40% of the state’s total.

Under a 1953 federal law, there are six states — Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon and Wisconsin — that have jurisdiction over criminal law on reservations. Some other states, including Florida, Idaho, Montana and Washington, later obtained criminal law jurisdiction on reservations, but a 1968 law prevented any more states from doing so without tribal permission.

That is precisely why Stitt is concerned about Indigenous tribes setting up abortion clinics on reservations, once the facilities have been shuttered in the rest of his state. (Stitt’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The specific limits of tribal authority on the issue, however, have yet to be adjudicated by the courts. While a Native American provider of abortions on tribal land would be exempt from the Oklahoma law making it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to perform the procedure, that exception to state criminal law does not necessarily apply to interactions between non-Indigenous people, even on a reservation. If a non-Native doctor performed an abortion on a non-Native woman, Oklahoma might be able to prosecute a case, even if the clinic was on a reservation.

Under 19th century Supreme Court rulings, “white on white” crime on Native American land is still subject to state law. Oklahoma could argue that a non-Native doctor performing an abortion on a non-Native patient falls into this category, although it’s unclear whether a court would agree. (As a practical matter, experts say, state investigators would lack the legal authority to gather evidence on a reservation, making it difficult to prosecute.)


A nurse checks the vitals of a Navajo woman at a COVID-19 testing center at the Navajo Nation town of Monument Valley, Ariz., in May 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

Then there’s the possibility that federal prosecutors could enforce state laws against abortion under federal laws that allow the federal government to prosecute under state law “major crimes” such as murder on reservations.

“Let’s say you are not an Indian, and you’re on Indian lands, and you engage in some acts related to abortion that is criminalized in the state. Here’s how you are federally prosecuted: The federal government will assert that it has exclusive jurisdiction over that crime,” Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University and chief justice of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians Supreme Court, told Yahoo News. “So, if it is a crime in the state and the federal crime doesn’t prohibit it, what the United States attorney can do is bring a federal prosecution by assimilating state law. They borrow the state criminal law and apply it in federal court.

“That’s a choice that likely will not occur in the event of a Democratic administration,” Fletcher added. “But in a Republican administration, you could totally see it happening.”

Taken as a whole, law professors say, the laws governing state crimes on Indigenous land amount to a “jurisdictional maze.”

“It’s a gray area,” Fletcher said. “It’s messy.”

Contemporary African art festival returns to Senegal


Ethiopian painter Tegene Kunbi Senbeto was awarded for three of his large compositions of brightly coloured geometrical blocks on canvas (AFP/SEYLLOU) (SEYLLOU)


Thu, May 19, 2022, 1:01 PM·2 min read


The 14th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, the continent's largest contemporary art event, opened Thursday in Senegal's capital with the top prize awarded to an Ethiopian painter.

After a two-year delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the event will until June 21 showcase works by the continent's top names in photography, sculpture, textiles and performance art.

"It's a celebration of the visual arts, of human genius and spirit, an event that has resisted the vagaries of time for over 30 years," said Moustapha Ndiaye, chairman of the exhibition's steering committee.

President Macky Sall attended the opening ceremony at Dakar's Grand Theatre, which featured musical performances from the Senegalese group Orchestra Baobab and the Malian singer and kora player Sidiki Diabate.

Diabate, who comes from a long line of traditional storytellers, poets and musicians known as griots, interspersed his electrifying show with spoken messages directed to Sall, who is currently the chair of the African Union.

West African states including Senegal slapped economic and diplomatic sanctions on Mali in January after the ruling junta proposed staying in power for up to five years.

"The African griot is here this morning to entertain you here in Dakar, and to tell you that Mali and Senegal are the same country," he said in French, to applause.

"Mr. President, I'm here to show Mali's love for you and to make you change your mind," he said, in an apparent reference to the sanctions.

"Yes, we love you, Mr. President, and we also express our grievances so that the situation can change for my country, Mali," he pleaded.

The international event includes nearly 300 exhibitions in Dakar and the nearby islands of Ngor and Goree. Exhibitions are also being held in other cities around Senegal.

The last biennale, in 2018, generated more than 8 billion CFA francs ($12.9 million at current rates) in transactions, according to Ndiaye.

Sall presented the grand prize to Ethiopian painter Tegene Kunbi Senbeto for three of his large compositions of brightly coloured geometrical blocks on canvas.

Several other prizes were awarded to artists from Benin, Tunisia and Senegal.

lp/prc/lal/ah

Nobel winner Jose Ramos-Horta sworn in as East Timor president


Former independence fighter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta was sworn in as president of East Timor ahead of celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of independence for Asia’s youngest country.


© Provided by Al JazeeraJose Ramos-Horta smiles during a press conference in Dili on March 22, 2022 [Valentino Dariel Sousa/AFP]

Crowds cheered late Thursday night as Ramos-Horta travelled by motorcade to parliament, where a ceremony kicked off nationwide festivities commemorating East Timor’s 2002 independence from Indonesia, which invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975.

Ramos-Horta, 72, who led the resistance during Indonesia’s occupation, called for national reconciliation and unity as he took the oath of office shortly before midnight local time the time that the country declared independence 20 years ago.

“Today more than ever, we must be fully aware that only in unity will be able to achieve the development goals that we propose,” Ramos-Horta said.

The new president pledged to reduce poverty, improve health services for mothers and children, and promote a dialogue to restore political stability. He said he expects East Timor to become the 11th member of the regional bloc the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the next two years.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Indonesian Coordinating Minister of Political, Law and Security Affairs Mohammad Mahfud were among those who attended the inauguration.

Ramos-Horta defeated incumbent Francisco “Lu Olo” Guterres, his fellow independence fighter, in an April 19 election runoff. Ramos-Horta, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and president from 2007 to 2012, and Guterres have blamed each other for years of political paralysis in East Timor.

Living in exile for almost three decades and returning to East Timor at the end of 1999, Ramos-Horta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, along with Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo, in recognition of their work “toward a just and peaceful solution to the conflict” in the country.

“He is a great hero in the era of our struggle for independence,” Aderito Herin Martins, a resident of the capital, Dili, said of Ramos-Horta.

“Now it’s time for him to work on the critical issues of poverty and unemployment that still face our country as he promised in his campaign.”

East Timor’s transition to a democracy has been rocky, with leaders battling massive poverty, unemployment and corruption as the country continues to struggle with the legacy of its bloody independence battle and bitter factional politics that have occasionally erupted into violence.

The country’s economy is reliant on dwindling offshore oil revenues.

The United Nations estimates that nearly half of East Timor’s population lives below the extreme poverty line of $1.90 a day, and for every 1,000 babies born in the country, 42 die before their fifth birthday because of malnutrition.

Residents voted overwhelmingly for independence in a 1999 referendum held under UN auspices, despite widespread Indonesian intimidation and violence.

The vote had been unexpectedly offered by an overconfident Indonesian government following a long-running but largely fruitless resistance struggle. Indonesia’s military responded to the referendum results with a scorched-earth campaign that left East Timor devastated. Australia spearheaded a UN military mission to restore order from the chaos as the Indonesian forces left.

It took almost three more years for the half-island nation of just over one million people to become an independent and sovereign country on May 20, 2002.

Cannes war films delve into France’s painful colonial legacies

Benjamin DODMAN

The Cannes Film Festival explored the devastating human cost of war and colonisation in Philippe Faucon’s Algerian War film “Les Harkis” and the Omar Sy-starring “Father and Soldier”, whose director Mathieu Vadepied sat down for an interview with FRANCE 24.

© Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

In November 1998, just months after France’s multi-racial football team lifted its first World Cup title, another legacy of the country’s colonial history passed away quietly in a faraway village north of Dakar, in Senegal.

Abdoulaye Ndiaye, who died aged 104, was the last of the Tirailleurs, the Senegalese riflemen who fought for their colonial masters in the trenches of northern France during World War I. He died just one day before France’s then-president, Jacques Chirac, was due to decorate him with the Legion of Honour in belated recognition of his services.

The failure to acknowledge Ndiaye’s sacrifice during his lifetime has stuck with French director Mathieu Vadepied ever since, inspiring the long-gestating project that has finally come to completion at the Cannes Film Festival.

“It felt like a symbol of France’s failure to recognise the Tirailleurs and tell their story,” said the director, a day after his film opened the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar to hearty applause.

Vadepied, who has travelled and worked in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, said he felt a duty to exhume the history of the Tirailleurs. His film is a tribute to the young men of Senegal and other French colonies who were snatched from their homes and forced to fight in a war that meant nothing to them, for a “motherland” whose language most didn’t speak.

While the film’s original title, “Tirailleurs”, has evocative power in French, its English version highlights the director’s concern to approach war through an intimate focus on a father’s relationship with the son he is desperate to protect. “Lupin” star Omar Sy, the son of Senegalese immigrants, plays a weary village farmer who enrols in the army to watch over his son after he is forcefully conscripted by the French.

Vadepied stressed the importance of rooting his story in Senegal and keeping an intimate gaze on the film’s protagonists while giving war itself a distinctly unspectacular treatment.

“I needed to start my story in Africa, to give a flavour of the protagonists’ lives before war and how the colonial experience came to shatter their world. I wanted the beauty and musicality of the Peul language to give a specific texture to the characters,” he said.

“We know the history of the war, but not that of the Tirailleurs,” Vadepied said, highlighting cinema’s “mission to educate, to pass on stories and historical memories, while also interrogating the society we live in.” He added: “The story of France’s colonial troops needs to be recognised and told, to allow subsequent generations to identify with this history too.”

As Sy, the son of Senegalese immigrants, told the audience at the Cannes premiere, “We don’t have the same (historical) memory, but we share the same history.”

The abandonment of Algeria's Harkis

“After this battle, you will no longer be indigenous, you will be French!” yells an officer in one of the film’s rare battle scenes, moments before the Tirailleurs leap out of the trenches and charge into muddy no-man’s land, soon to be mowed down by enemy fire. Similar empty promises were at the heart of Philippe Faucon’s “Les Harkis”, which screened in Cannes on Thursday, part of the Directors’ Fortnight running parallel with the festival.

The veteran French director, who was born to a French-Algerian pied-noir mother, has focused his latest work on the Algerian Muslims – known as Harkis – who served as auxiliaries in the French army during the country’s gruesome war of independence between 1954 and 1962.

The movie’s Cannes premiere coincides with the 60th anniversary of the end of a conflict that left open wounds on either side of the Mediterranean, and comes just months after President Emmanuel Macron asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of France for the abandonment of the Harkis.

>> Read more: Algerians and French share their stories of the Algerian War

“Join France, she will not betray you,” says an officer early in the film as reluctant recruits line up to enrol in the Harki units – some to feed their families, others out of loyalty to France or to avenge a family member killed by independence fighters. Little do they know that the government in Paris is about to negotiate a way out of the bloody conflict, leaving them behind.

When the French government eventually pulled its forces out, it left a majority of the Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier assurances that it would look after them. Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the country's new rulers took brutal revenge. Thousands of others were placed in camps in France, often with their families, in degrading and traumatising conditions.

Like Vadepied’s film, “Les Harkis” is not a conventional war film. It is less interested in the battle scenes than in the physical and emotional impact of war on its characters, and the heart-wrenching decisions they are compelled to make in the hope of preserving their livelihoods and those of their loved ones.

The movies talk about different wars, different epochs, and two countries with very different experiences of French rule. But they share a common concern for the human cost of war and colonisation, and for the need to confront troubled histories that continue to poison both France’s politics and its relations with its former colonies.

Sandstorms pose serious risk to human health


A satellite image provided by NASA Earth Observatory taken on May 5, 2022, shows a dust storm engulfing parts of Iraq and neighbouring countries (AFP/-)

Isabelle CORTES
Thu, May 19, 2022

Sandstorms have engulfed the Middle East in recent days, in a phenomenon experts warn could proliferate because of climate change, putting human health at grave risk.

At least 4,000 people went to hospital Monday for respiratory issues in Iraq where eight sandstorms have blanketed the country since mid-April.

That was on top of the more than 5,000 treated in Iraqi hospitals for similar respiratory ailments earlier this month.

The phenomenon has also smothered Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with more feared in the coming days.

Strong winds lift large amounts of sand and dust into the atmosphere, that can then travel hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres (miles).

Sandstorms have affected a total of 150 countries and regions, adversely impacting on the environment, health and the economy, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

"It's a phenomenon that is both local and global, with a stronger intensity in areas of origin," said Carlos Perez Garcia-Pando, a sand and dust storm expert at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.

The storms originate in dry or semi-dry regions of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia and China.

Other less affected areas include Australia, the Americas and South Africa.

The UN agency WMO has warned of the "serious risks" posed by airborne dust.

The fine dust particles can cause health problems such as asthma and cardiovascular ailments, and also spread bacteria and viruses as well as pesticides and other toxins.

"Dust particle size is a key determinant of potential hazard to human health," the WMO said.

Small particles that can be smaller than 10 micrometres can often become trapped in the nose, mouth and upper respiratory tract, and as a result it is associated with respiratory disorders such as asthma and pneumonia.

- 'Unbreathable' -

The most at-risk are the oldest and youngest as well as those struggling with respiratory and cardiac problems.

And the most affected are residents in countries regularly battered by sandstorms, unlike in Europe where dust coming from the Sahara is rare, like the incident in March.

Depending on the weather and climate conditions, sand dust can remain in the atmosphere for several days and travel great distances, at times picking up bacteria, pollen, fungi and viruses.

"However, the seriousness is less than with ultrafine particles, for example from road traffic, which can penetrate the brain or the blood system," says Thomas Bourdrel, a radiologist, researcher at the University of Strasbourg and a member of Air Health Climate collective.

Even if the sand particles are less toxic than particles produced by combustion, their "extreme density during storms causes a fairly significant increase in cardio-respiratory mortality, especially among the most vulnerable," he said.

With "a concentration of thousands of cubic micrometres in the air, it's almost unbreathable", said Garcia-Pando.

The sandstorms' frequency and intensity could worsen because of climate change, say some scientists.

But the complex phenomenon is "full of uncertainties" and is affected by a cocktail of factors like heat, wind and agricultural practices, Garcia-Pando told AFP.

"In some areas, climate change could reduce the winds that cause storms, but extreme events could persist, even rise," he said.

With global temperatures rising, it is very likely that more and more parts of the Earth will become drier.

"This year, a significant temperature anomaly was observed in East Africa, in the Middle East, in East Asia, and this drought affects plants, a factor that can increase sandstorms," the Spanish researcher said.

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