With the new spring season, I am always interested in what books come with it. Here are five books I am looking forward to reading this spring season:
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal. Professor Kathleen DuVal teaches early American and American Indian history at North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is her second book, and this new book discusses how Indigenous Americans made multiple cities way before North America was founded.
Bugsey and Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin. This collection of five stories brings funny and creative tales that break away from your regular reading material.
The Swans of Harlem by Katen Valby concerns five ballerinas from the Dance Theatre of Harlem during the Civil Rights movement. This absorbing book finally tells the stories of endurance, dance, and friendship.
Husbands by Holly Gramazio. Lauren goes to her house one night and sees a lovely, fully decorated home. She is greeted by her fantastic husband. The only problem is that she is not married!
Spring always feels like a new opportunity and a new beginning for me. I guess it is because winter has always been so bitterly cold. When warmer weather comes around, I feel like it’s a new chance to look at things and people differently. This winter was a bunch of twists and turns regarding challenging my personality and limits. I was also able to expand my frame of mind and have met many new people in the process. What does spring mean to you? Comment below!
One of my favorite Sesame Street songs ( mind you, I have tons of them!) is “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon,” sung by Ernie and written by Jeff Moss.
This song was originally part of the “The People in Your Neighborhood ” album from 1980. However, it was part of Sesame Street season 15 on November 28, 1983. We find Ernie expressing his total interest in visiting the moon but not wanting to live there. He also discusses other places he would love to visit, like the ocean, to see all of the fishes of the sea. However, Ernie prefers to just visit those places because he would rather stay with his friends and loved ones and return home.
There are many different versions and interpretations of the song, including a book of the same name released in 2001. Even different languages sing this song, like the one from Plaza Sesamo.
What is your favorite Sesame Street song? Comment below!
“Throughout Simone Leigh’s 2023 exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, several visual motifs and themes within her works kept reappearing. These themes suggested the idea of the black woman as an intertemporal sempiternal being. Leigh created several forms of the black woman that were visually monumental, almost to the point of a commemorative statue that is somewhat modernist in concept. These works visually were heavily inspired by cultural African forms such as the D’mba Headdress, or West African bust (Figure 1). One of the main themes displayed in the exhibition was the idea of the black woman as a nurturing and intellectual vessel or an architectural being through a skeuomorphic lens, with other objects to support this idea. The exhibit had a contemplative atmosphere that helped produce a meditative frame of mind while viewing the works. Many of the works instead of being close to each other, or in a sequential row to be viewed, were instead spaced out, often occupying their own sections of the rooms placed in. This spacing helped give the viewer time to deeply think on what lay in front of them without being overwhelmed, or uninterested because the work in front of them was substantial enough to view on its own (Figure 2).
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The placement of lighting within the exhibit also greatly accentuated the colors and primary features within the works. It helped add to the harmony of the spacing of all the pieces displayed. Leigh presented African sculpture inspired Afrocentric depictions of black women as shelter-like objects, or symbols to be engulfed in or protected by.
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The first piece featured in the beginning of the exhibit titled Cupboard (Figure 3) emulated a voluminous women’s dress. It was massive in stature with a chalk white cowrie shell, a common motif in Leigh’s work, on the top and light brown raffia palms ballooning from below the shell. The physical structure of the sculpture created an image that resembled a shell sitting upon a bell shaped haystack, or even a head peeking out of one.
According to the work’s plaque description (Figure 4),
Leigh “pointed to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which established the hut within a colonial iconography” when creating this piece. Within this exposition, France mounted the hut along with other significant cultural items from different colonized countries to display the vast expanse of cultures France’s imperialism had reached and was then in control of as a form of shared culture immersion and assimilation. In the context of this work by Leigh, she utilized the imagery of the hut to create a sense of “gathering places or dwellings” according to Figure 3. The work signifies a divine energy, which the cowrie shell is often representative of, while also giving a sense of shelter for one to reside in, like a cupboard for a small child or a hut for communal gathering.
The series of three bronze works in the third room of the exhibit titled Vessel (Figure 5), Bisi (Figure 6), and Herm (Figure 7), all continued the idea of the black woman as a structural being.
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All three had a structured architectural elements to them, with Vessel having an Afrocentric asphalt black eyeless female figure with a permed hairstyle similar to that of a stereotypical 1960s housewife, and an exaggeratedly elongated concave torso standing on one right foot. Bisi featured another eyeless female figure in asphalt black, but as an armless bust, cut off at the shoulder with close cut hair. The half below the torso of this work had a semi cylinder shaped like a skirt that is said to be able to enclose “Leigh’s own body” (Hampton, 2023) within it. The last work featured in this series Herm (Figure 7) displays another figure asphalt black female figure, eyeless as well, with their armless torso attached to a pedestal, a small almost scar like slit in the middle, and one slightly bent leg perched out behind them. Of all the three Bisi was the most visually striking of them all however, and resonated with the concept of the black woman as a shelter. The structure of the skirt was built wide and long enough to shelter over a small human being, as if being engulfed in one’s womb. Through this exhibit the idea of intertemporality within art and overall the black woman, and how a modernist view of certain cultural views in art can be translated in a contemporary way was expressed. The architectural formatting of the works evoked a sense of meditation on how in the outside world the black woman should be perceived by those who are not, and highlighted the structural imagery of the essence of a black woman.”
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