KITCHEN AND HEARTH Descencants of the gardeners, herbalists, and experimentalists of Seneca Village, the imagined residents of this home used their knowledge of technology, science, and magic to develop a means of time travel, which has allowed them to gather works of art from across time and space. This kitchen is the locus of these activities, centered around a large brick hearth that operates as the portal through which these objects enter the home. Inside the fireplace is Roberto Lug’s Digable Underground. Lugo is renowned for his vibrant reinterpretations of eighteenth century European porcelain forms, which he reimagines through the lens of contemporary hip-hop culture and embellishes with graffiti and kente prestige cloth patterns. His works center the portraits of heroes whose visages do not often adorn fine porcelain or whose stories are too often absent from such luxurious wares. Here, nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Tubman faces the kitchen and contemporary singer-songwriter Erykah Bad looks into the living room; together, they reflect the ways that the kitchen acts as a site of temporal confluence–a merging of past and present into future possibilities. Roberto Lugo, American, b. 1931. D GABLE UNDERGROUND 2021 undaton Gin. 20)
Last Thursday we explored Schomburg, Harlem at the Met Museum. What caught our group’s eye was the TV in the center of the Schomburg exhibit. The ideas that our groups expressed was the idea of the play on words on the saying “the revolution will not be televised’. The term was coined by musician Gil Scott Heron in 1971. The saying means in order to move forward, you need to understand the past that was uncaptured. The design of the TV had five sides televising the same thing, which perhaps is meant to represent seeing the situation at every different angle. To add on to that, we could relate this to the trope of the New Negro article that emphasizes the importance of black representation in the media. What the room represents is preserving one’s self despite being in a changing environment.
