Rhiannon Giddens: A global voice that resonates with curiosity and purpose in these troubled times

Rhiannon Giddens / there is no Other

When Rhiannon Giddens released her latest album, the intense and sparsely-arranged there is no Other – recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi – earlier this year, it “at once was a condemnation of ‘othering’ as well as a celebration of the spreading of ideas and connectivity and of a shared experience.”

Together, Giddens and Turrisi traced an overlooked movement of sounds originating from Africa and the Arabic world and found common ground in how those sounds influenced European and American music. The original songs which Giddens penned for there is no Other as well as interpretations of others such as Ola Belle Reed’s “I’m Gonna Write Me a Letter,” Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby” and the Italian traditional “Pizzica di San Vito,” collectively illustrate both her adoration of Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, opera and traditional Italian music and the commonality it brings to the human experience. Her interpretation of the gospel standard “Wayfaring Stranger” ranks up there with those of Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.

It was in this spirit that I saw Giddens and Turrisi perform selections from there is no Other last week in the 450-seat Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It was the first time I had seen Giddens in concert. I hope it’s not the last.

Giddens, 42, is a celebrated Grammy Award-winning artist and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, who loves to dig through the past to reveal bold and candid truths about our present. The messages in her songs have drawn upon slave narratives as well as African American experiences, including the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and are often told from the point of view of black women’s suffering and resilience. In concert, Giddens painstakingly takes the time to weave her excellent storytelling skills to put each song into an historical context.

Giddens recently was featured in the Ken Burns Country Music documentary film series. In an interview with the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, she said, “I have played country, I have sung country. I’ve listened to country or what we say is country. I’ve played a lot of music that has been funneled into what became country. I play music that country has been borrowed from.

“But it’s just a strand of what I do. You can’t box the music that I do. People ask me all the time, ‘What do you play?’ Well, I play American music. That includes what we would call country.”

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi

During her performance with Turrisi, the North Carolina-born Giddens sang in a beautiful contralto voice – she’s a conservatory-trained opera singer – and played a 1858 replica of a minstrel banjo as well as octave violin. Meanwhile, the jazz-inspired Turrisi performed on piano, accordion, frame drum, tamburello, banjo and colascione among many instruments.

Over the course of their two-hour show that was full of interplay between these two gifted musicians, Giddens and Turrisi criss-crossed cultures – African, Arabic, European and American – that reflected a wide global sensibility and brought together old and familiar – and new – stories. It was as if a music appreciation master class broke out extemporaneously. There’s a sense of curiosity and purpose in Giddens’ music that is both thoughtful and reflective – and, on this night last week, it was refreshing to hear it resonate clearly during these troubled times we live in.

Credits: Cover photo – courtesy of Google Images. Story photo – courtesy of rhiannongiddens.com. Video – courtesy of NPR Music.

Thoughts on David Hockney’s “The Queen’s Window” – A country scene to honor a lover of the countryside

Last week, Westminster Abbey commemorated the 65th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign with a dedication ceremony of “The Queen’s Window,” created by British pop art icon David Hockney. Measuring 28 feet by 12 feet, “The Queen’s Window” represents what the New York Times described as “a hawthorn, a thorny floral shrub, blooming in a joyous profusion of reds, blues, greens and yellows.”

In a video interview posted by the Abbey, Hockney said of the newly revealed window, “It’s celebratory.” He revealed that he crafted the trees to look as though “Champagne had been poured over bushes.”

What is remarkable is that Hockney reworked the design for the Abbey window from an earlier painting using a iPad, which has become one of his favorite tools for creating art in recent years. At age 81, he’s been known to use new technology quite extensively – such as cameras, photo copiers and fax machines – throughout his remarkable and colorful career. It has liberated Hockney as an artist and set him apart from others who rely solely on the use of traditional materials.

“For many years, I pondered how we should celebrate The Queen’s reign in the Abbey,” the Very Rev. Dr. John Hall, dean of the church, said, during the dedication of “The Queen’s Window” on Oct. 2, inside London’s Westminster Abbey. “A statue seemed wrong, though there are many from earlier centuries. We already have a portrait of Her Majesty in the Diamond Jubilee Galleries. A stained glass window seemed the obvious thing, and a great window was available, a double lancet surmounted by a circular oculus containing sexfoil tracery, on the west side of the North Transept, the only window there without stained glass.”

Hockney, whom I learned had never before designed stained glass, came to see the window and the next day sent Hall a draft design. The dean responded to Hockney in kind: “As I wished not herald or representational, but a country scene to honor someone we know to be a lover of the countryside, a design evocative of his work in East Yorkshire.”

As the “most celebrated living artist,” in the words of Hall, Hockney seemed a natural fit for creating “The Queen’s Window.” After all, his fame coincided with the queen’s reign. The dean has called Hockney’s work, “absolutely vibrant.” He was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “It’s very legible, so in that sense it’s very accessible, and I think people will be very excited by it.”

Hockney collaborated on “The Queen’s Window” with stained glass experts at Barley Studio in northern England. He’s happy with the final outcome.

Said Hockney: “I think it’s looking marvelous!”

Photograph: Courtesy of Google Images. 
Videos: Courtesy of Westminster Abbey.

David Hockney: A feeling of liberation in his art

David Hockney / Self portrait with red braces.
Watercolor on paper, 2003.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, assembled exclusively for the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is both expansive in its scope and monumental in its scale. Think big and you get the picture.

It's the first comprehensive exhibition of David Hockney's 21st-century artwork -- featuring more than 300 works of this celebrated 76-year-old British artist's work shown utilizing 18,000 square feet of gallery space and spread over two floors -- and it includes not only watercolor on paper and oil on canvas, but also iPad drawings and digital movies.

My wife and I happened upon David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition on a recent Friday evening about three weeks after its opening and we were both impressed by how Hockney's work, which surveys the artist's work from 2002 to present, incorporates both the use of traditional materials and also evolving technologies.

"This exhibition illustrates Hockney's concentration during this period on two genres, portraits and landscapes, in media ranging from the complex technologies used to make the movies to simple pencil and paper," wrote Richard Benefield in the museum's Fine Arts magazine. "Like an artist alchemist, Hockney in one minute uses a modern digital device to make a colorful iPad drawing; in the next he shows us that he is one of our greatest draftsmen by rendering an exactingly detailed charcoal drawing of a forest scene in East Yorkshire."

David Hockney / Yosemite I
iPad drawing printed on paper (6 sheets)
and mounted on Dibond (6 sheets),  2011.

One can't help notice some very larger-than-life paintings -- big picture en plein air landscapes -- assembled on many of the walls throughout the Herbst Exhibition Galleries that were assembled by Hockney's longtime friend and colleague Gregory Evans. Many of these landscapes are grand in their size and include multi-canvas oil paintings and large-scale digital movies that were shot using multiple cameras, some which utilized as many as 18 monitors for their display.

"Not only does he make vivid a startling range of green hues in landscape paintings, but his drawings -- even those made on an iPad -- continually probe for marks, textures and patterns to register nature's details," wrote San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker in his review of the Hockney exhibition.

David Hockney/ Woldgate Woods, 26, 27, & 30 July 2006.
Oil on canvas (6 panels).

There's a little something of everything for everyone and a lot of Hockney goes a long way. It's the largest exhibition ever mounted by the de Young -- much of it is shown chronologically -- and it includes still lifes, portraits and photographic collages. Throughout, Hockney makes use of a wonderful sense of color -- he stirs our emotions through his exuberance for beauty and nature -- and he's a master of modern digital technology.

"Hockney might seem an odd choice for the largest exhibition ever in San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums," wrote Baker. "But on at least two grounds it makes sense: The Bay Area has a deep history of interest in and production of figurative art, and Hockney's work has much to teach us about observation and depiction that links to the long history of art."

David Hockney / Self-portrait with Charlie, 2005. Oil on canvas.
• • •
A Bigger Exhibition / Paintings, works on paper and video.

At the de Young, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 2013-Jan. 20, 2014.

All photographs courtesy of Google images, 2013.