Good morning everyone,

How are you! Well, I hope. I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God this week so this newsletter takes Harlem as its starting point.

We start, though, not with the Harlem Renaissance but with the modern day, and the figurative painting of Jordan Casteel. I love her depictions of the everyday and, in her own words, "behind the scenes":

I took art classes in college, but my major wasn’t studio art until my junior year, when I studied abroad in Italy and took my first painting class. It was kind of like, “Here’s a palette knife. Make some colors and throw it on there. Drink cappuccinos and have the wind blowing in your hair. Paint portraits or whatever you want.” And I did. I painted portraits of a lot of the grounds-keeping staff, which isn’t far from my practice as it stands right now. I was very interested in trying to capture the people behind the scenes. Those were the relationships that I found to be the most intimate and important to me.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jordan-casteel-interview-1781658

Okay now let's talk about Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance. Apparently she was a celebrity and a known… what is the word for when you invite someone to a party despite your fears that/in the hope that they'll do or say something controversial? That was apparently Hurston in Harlem in the 1920s. She also did some incredible and important anthropological work:

One of the most important stories she shared was of the man many called Cudjo Lewis, but whom she called by his African name, Kossola. Lewis was kidnapped from his home of Dahomey, Africa, and enslaved in Mobil, Alabama in 1860, 50 years after the American Slave Trade was deemed illegal. After he was emancipated, he and a group of freedmen bought land to live out their freedom days in a settlement they called Africatown. In 1928, Hurston was sent to interview Lewis at his Africatown home. Many months of meetings led to the eventual 2018 publication of Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, written by Zora Neale Hurston and edited by historian Deborah G. Plant. It took 80 years for Hurston's vision of Cudjo Lewis to be seen.

https://blackandbookish.com/blog/the-beauty-of-being-seen-bringing-zoras-barracoon-to-life

Moving away from Harlem, did you know that Dahomey had a highly regarded female army? I've had this saved in my links for ages and this feels like a decent time to bring it up:

Historians disagree about when the women’s palace guard expanded into an army. But by the 19th century witnesses regarded the women’s army, though smaller than its male counterpart, to be superior. Where the men shot muskets from the hip, the women took aim and fired from the shoulder. They were ‘the mainstay of the kingdom’.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/last-stand-dahomeys-female-army

Love,

Alex.