Black Old Town

March 13th, 2014 begins our 7th Metro Journey. Another short one, but the places were spread out.

 Our first stop was the Torpedo Factory.  According to the Torpedo Factory website, this art center is the highlight of Alexandria's Potomac River waterfront, attracting approximately 500,000 visitors a year. You can visit 82  artists' studios, six galleries, two workshops, and the Alexandria Archaeology Museum inside of the Torpedo Factory.  You can sign up for an art class with The Art League School. The Torpedo Factory Art Center houses more than 165 visual artists with a variety of medias including painting, ceramics, photography, jewelry, stained glass, fiber, printmaking, and sculpture.

Green Mark XIV Torpedo on display at The Torpedo Factory

On November 12, 1918, the U.S. Navy began constructing a torpedo factory in Alexandria, named the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station. Over the next five years it was responsible for the manufacture and maintenance of torpedoes and also served as a munitions storage area until World War II. As the demand for weapons dramatically increased during the war it resumed production activity and the factory was substantially expanded with ten new buildings. A green Mark XIV torpedo was manufactured in the factory in 1945, which is still on display.

While at the Torpedo Factory, we stopped to interview an artist in residence.  Her name is Poppi.  A self-taught artist for more than 22 years, she was inspired by her grandmother who used to sew and do pottery.  Health problems did not stop her from becoming an artist.  "If you really have a passion for art, this is what you do in your spare time.  I still do like to go to the movies and go to the park, but I really enjoy doing my art," said Poppi.

Here is an example of Poppi's art work.

The Alexandria Waterfront is truly as beautiful as this original oil painting by Paul McGehee.
The painting is titled Waterfront by Moonlight

 We visited the famous Alexandria Waterfront.  I had been here many times before with my family, but this was the first time on an academic journey.

 

Chipotle, Chipotle, I told you I was coming back.  I really did miss you, but your chips are a little crunchier and not as salty. You need to fix that! But, besides that lunch was good.

 

A lot of brown rice, black beans, no meat, tomatoes, sour cream, cheese, and last but not least, lettuce. That completes my deliciousness.

 

Our next stop was the Freedom House, where we looked for the connections between the film 12 Years  A Slave and the historic site of the ironically named Freedom House.

But now on a more serious note, the connection was  the horrifying  story of a free Black man Solomon Northrup who was abducted  from his home in New York in 1841 and sold into slavery.  The film 12 Years a Slave is connected to the Freedom House, a slave site that is still standing today near the Nation’s Capital. I didn't know every time I went to my grandmother’s house that I was passing "the epicenter of the domestic slave trade." The last slave trader at the site of the Freedom House, James H. Birch, was the same dealer who paid kidnappers $250 for Solomon Northrup (pictured) of Sara-toga Springs, N.Y., and sold him into slavery in Louisiana!

 It was difficult to stand in the doorway where many of my enslaved ancestors had passed through.  “What’s very unique about this building is it’s one of the few remaining buildings that the slave trade actually took place in,” said curator Julian Kiganda, who designed the exhibits. “Everyone who’s come through there, they feel moved." Northup’s story is among several narratives illustrating the slave trade at the time. Exhibits in the brick basement that once served as slave quarters include artifacts found there, along with the original bars and door of this slave jail. According to http://newsone.com/2758120/freedom-house-museum-alexandria-va/ 


 

This painting is called Style and Identity: Black Alexandria in the 1970s by Horace Day.
It was on display at the Alexandria Black History Museum in 2011.

To find out more about Black History in Alexandria, Virginia, you can visit the Alexandria Black History Museum.  I sure plan to!

 

Last but not least on our way home. Besides the really cold weather and having to walk a lot, it was a good metro journey.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

This is our sixth Metro Journey, short and sweet.

Our first stop was the Town Hall Education Recreation Campus (THEARC).  Not only is THEARC a theater, but it also houses the Children's National Medical Center Clinic, the Levine school of Music,where I have been taking piano lessons for 6 years, Corcoran ArtReach, where I take art lessons, The Washington Charter School for Girls, and the FBR Branch of the Boys and Girls Club.  That's not all, but I didn't want to list everything.  It's about time they put an uplifting place like this in Southeast, DC.

Here we saw a play called When People Fly: Modern-Day Folk Tales of African American Heroes. Now I think this play was not age appropriate for us, but it was a good performance and another story I could share with my family.




The next stop was the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here we were looking for art by Henry Ossawa Tanner.  When we arrived, the woman at the front desk did not even know his art was on display at the museum.  But when she pulled out her guide, she saw that it was actually thousands of pieces of his art there.  According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum website, "their collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection."

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 1859, and unfortunately passed away May 25, 1937 in Paris, France. If you didn't know, Tanner's work was generally divided into two major periods: his Black genre period (up until about 1895), which addressed African-American themes, particularly teaching themes, and his biblical period themes, which dominated the rest of his professional life. Did you know that Ossawa, stems from Osawatomie, Kansas, where the abolitionist John Brown murdered five slave sympathizers in 1856? His father gave him that name.

This piece, called Head of the Jew in Palestine, was one of his pieces from the biblical period theme that we found at the museum.  Most of the artwork at the museum was from the teaching and biblical theme.  Unfortunately, the museum did not have any of his Black period theme of art.

My favorite piece from Tanner's collection was The Banjo Lesson. Tanner painted this in Philadelphia while he was recovering from typhoid fever that he had contracted in France. It was during this convalescence that Tanner decided to address African-American themes in his paintings. The Banjo lesson was purchased in 1894 by Hampton Institute, a historically Black college, after being shown at Earle's Gallery in my dad's home town "Philly." I liked this specific painting because it shows how we always helped family no matter what.  It showed a sense of love, respect, and care. Tanner attended Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, beginning in 1880.

Another one of his pieces "Christ Walking on Water," is also from the biblical theme.  Tanner's biblical themed-work was greatly influenced by his father.  His parents were cultured and educated, and they owned property. His father also was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry Ossawa Tanner decided he wanted to be a painter around the age of 12. Tanner started out to be a marine painter, painting various seascapes, harbor scenes, and ships in storms before being accepted at the Pennsylvania Academy in "Philly." Tanner was also interested in painting animals and made paintings and clay models of the animals at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Tanner painted The Thankful Poor in 1894.  It was his last painting in the Black period.  It is based on a similar painting called Le repas en famille, painted in 1891 by Elizabeth Nourse, a painter who was born in Cincinnati and also studied in France. "Both pictures quietly reassure the viewer that the souls of the exploited are perhaps the purest and their faith in God the strongest," according to the Contemporary Black Biography. The painting was exhibited for eleven years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then sold to the one and only Bill Cosby and his wife Camille Cosby in 1981 for $250,000.

 

Sorry, I had to take a detour with Mr. Tanner. It's so much information on him, it's crazy. So I stopped here at Fuddruckers. Chipotle, I hope we don't have any hard feelings. It's just that your line was too long so you know, A brotha gotta do, what a brotha gotta do. So I ended up getting a chicken sandwich with french fries. It was good though.

  Our last stop, now we are off to go home. Thanks Mrs. Anna for another short and really sweet MJ.