On one of the small displays scattered around the Watson Library on the ground floor sits a quaint and labyrinthine recent acquisition: Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.’s “Riddle ma riddle as I suppose” (2002). Unfurled haphazardly, some pages lying flat on the display and others erected vertically, the light blue pages are watermarked with multicolored translucent block letters and question marks. Composed of “riddles from the Sea Islands, South Carolina,” the book resembles a toy more than it does a book. And that was Kennedy’s intention.
Kennedy’s book is one of a group of recent acquisitions the Met’s research library has made since July 2020, when it embarked on an initiative to assess its holdings and expand its representation of African American artists and authors. In parallel with the project, the Watson Library also sought to improve the visibility of artists within its existing collections.
“There was nothing within the library catalog that really specified or indicated an artist’s ethnicity, cultural heritage, race, or anything,” Jared Ash, associate museum librarian at the Watson, told Hyperallergic. Without such labeling, works by Black artists flew under the radar and went undiscovered by researchers more frequently than they should have.
This realization marked the beginnings of a project to develop a research catalog identifying publications in the library’s holdings “by and about artists of African descent who have lived, worked, or studied in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.” The result is the Index of African American Artists, which logs all artists who appear at least once in Watsonline (the Met Library’s digital catalog), and which was “soft launched” last year. It allows visitors to learn about Black artists in their collections working in certain mediums or in certain years, for instance, facilitating the research and book request process ahead of their in-person visit.
“We do hope that it will encourage and make this material accessible, and expand people’s awareness that this exists,” Ash says. The Index hasn’t been widely publicized for pandemic-related reasons, but Ash expects for more people to utilize the tool in coming months as restrictions relax.
When Kennedy’s riddle book rotates off its display and returns as one of many works of book art in the Watson Library, visitors can request it for their own visits. Its unconventional form — which upends our expectations of publications, such as that they be sequential and not require rotating or other bodily gymnastics — originated as a graduate school project to make a book on one sheet of paper. Inspired by a title Kennedy found on unusual book bindings at his local bookstore, he came up with this “solution.”
“It’s not a traditional codex. It’s a riddle — something you have to think about and manipulate. A riddle spreads your mental imagination,” Kennedy said in an interview with Hyperallergic. “That’s what I was doing: poking at tradition.”
As for the source text — the riddles that fill the pocket-sized book — Kennedy found them in a book on Sea Island traditions on a typical Saturday while doing research at one of Northwestern University’s libraries. Kennedy discovered that in certain African cultures, solving a riddle is not about reaching the right conclusion but about debating the merits of three possibilities that are proffered alongside the riddle itself.
Meanwhile, Kennedy liked how universal riddles were as a cultural form. “I consider myself a printer whose first responsibility is the preservation of Negro culture,” Kennedy said. “I was born colored but raised Negro. There’s a cultural difference between being a Negro and being African-American.”
What’s the difference for him? “This is just me — and I’m a crazy old man, and maybe this is idealized,” Kennedy began, “but a Negro is someone interested in the race as included in the larger civilization of this nation. A Negro seeks citizenship; an African-American seeks consumerism.” Having spent his teenage years witnessing the interplay between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism, he is dismayed by what he sees from Black leadership today, which he calls “subdued.”
“We have lost something in this nation, because we have massive protests but we have no change,” he said. “In the ’60s, massive protests led to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Now we can have a march with a million people, and it’s just this sort of flash mob.”
He caveats everything he says by stressing again that he’s old — “for the old person, life was always better when you were young,” he chuckles — but is aggrieved that “we have become a nation of consumers, not a nation of producers.”
“We want immediate gratification,” Kennedy added. That’s where his artistic practice represents a radical intervention in a society that he sees as obscenely hooked on newness. Letterpress printing, which is how he makes his books and posters, is slower than digital and offset printing. In the case of this particular riddle book, for instance, it took him one month to produce 25 copies — whereas nowadays it is completely feasible “to crank out 2,500 in one or two hours” with available machinery.
“I see the benefit of it taking longer than most people expect,” Kennedy said.
As for those 25 copies, most of them initially went out to friends, with three sold to libraries. “I print because that’s the thing I do the best — and I don’t even print that well. But that’s as good as it gets with me,” Kennedy says with some false modesty. “It gives me satisfaction, so when I gift it, I gift the satisfaction I receive.”
Watson Library visitors will now be able to partake in some of that satisfaction, along with that which comes with discovering hundreds of other Black artists in the Library’s catalog.
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