Tag: kunsthal kade

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I enjoyed this enormous fantastic mural by Gijs Frieling (and team), exploring human nature in an ever more technological environment.

E and I visited the Kade museum’s exhibit ‘Abrasive Paradise’ yesterday. 150 years ago Mondriaan was born in Amersfoort, and this exhibit is part of the program celebrating that anniversary. As part of this exhibition a number of artists has been asked to create work envisioning earthly paradise (which Mondrian searched for in his abstract structures) starting from this quote:

And the human being? He should not be on his own and also only a part of the whole. When he, thus, no longer feels his individuality, he will be happy in the earthly paradise created by himself. (Piet Mondrian, Paris, 1926)

The Frieling mural was created in a separate building from the Kade museum, the Elleboogkerk (‘Elbow church’).

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Y taking in an enormous BLM themed work

The local museum Kunsthal Kade for the past 6 months had an exhibit of some 150 works by almost 50 African American artists spanning from the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance to today, titled TELL ME YOUR STORY. 100 years of storytelling in African American art.

Beautiful, compelling, and sometimes confronting works. All the more so given the renewed civil rights struggle in the USA in the past months.

The 1920’s/30’s gouaches by Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) I found very beautiful.

The collages by Romare Bearden (1911-1988) jumped out at me. Apparently he created them in 1960’s and 70’s while listening to jazz and blues, “My hands sing the blues.”

The Kitchen Table series by Carrie Mae Weems I thought striking photography. Her 1990’s round red images from From here I saw what happened and I cried tells of so much pain, dehumanisation, cruelty, slavery, and injustice, tying it to the faces of individual humans, looking them into their eyes.

E looking at Carrie Mae Weem’s work

In the section on the civil rights struggle in the 1960’s the last few minutes of author James Baldwin‘s conversation from “The Negro and the American Promise” was shown on video.

The powerful fragment shown in the exhibit comes from the end of that video, and started with a statement that, while not the key message, rings as personally true for me since my mid-twenties “I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. […] So I’m forced to be an optimist.”

…Why storytelling matters.