Healing Fire at the Met: Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Rashid Johnson's The Broken Nine

Abstract

Healing Fire at the Met:Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Rashid Johnson's The Broken Nine Irina Sheynfeld (bio) "Tears flowed out of me from a walled-off place, from another time, from a little boy who couldn't cry." 1 —Charles M. Blow After the longest closure in its 138-year history, the Metropolitan Opera opened its 2021 season with its first opera by a Black composer. Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, is based on Charles M. Blow's best-selling 2014 memoir of the same title. This season, the Met is also featuring two new monumental mosaics in its Grand Tier and Dress Circle levels, each titled The Broken Nine (2020), by multidisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson. Although Blanchard's opera and Johnson's murals are independent creations, they are united thematically by the idea of a brokenness that takes a lifetime to repair. Mosaic is an ancient craft that uses broken shards to create a cohesive whole. Johnson's murals are 9-by-25 feet; each depicts a row of nine figures arranged in a horizontal fashion as if they were suspects in a lineup. Their eyes are dark ovals, frozen with fear, composed of black, blue, and orange pieces of glass and tile. Their mouths are sealed shut with patches of reflective black and brown tile that resemble duct tape, adding to the effect of a silent scream that emanates from the work. The mosaics are made from a kaleidoscopic collage of various broken elements: bathroom tiles, punctured mirrors, and smashed panels of textured ceramics, all of which are covered with marks made by oil sticks and splashes of enamel paint that the artist poured directly out of the can. Each figure in Johnson's lineup is comprised of broken pieces brought together by the healing touch of the artist. New beings are pressed flat against the picture plane, which has no depth and no breathing room. The smashed tiles and scratched and punctured surfaces of ceramic elements of The Broken Nine gel into a cohesive whole. The healing that lies on the other [End Page 449] side of the trauma is the promise of Johnson's art. In an interview with New York Times columnist Hilarie M. Sheets, the artist explained that, "The healing process starts with the negotiation of blunt force trauma. It's the story of recovery." 2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rashid Johnson, The Broken Nine, 2020. Ceramic tile, mirror tile, oyster shells, spray enamel, bronze, oil stick, branded red oak, black soap, wax. Photo: Martin Parsekian Johnson's murals are at once at home at the Met and at odds with the opera house's European traditions. The juxtaposition of high and low culture, a recurring theme in Johnson's work, adds to the sense of tension between the mosaics, which evoke the graffiti-covered walls of a New York subway station, and their posh surroundings. The color palette of the murals—mostly orange, black, and white—echoes the colors often used in Vlisco textiles, which have been distributed by a Dutch company to African consumers since 1846 in a symbiotic but problematic exchange. 3 Yet the Vlisco colors in Johnson's interpretation do not clash with the Met's burgundy velvets, gleaming gold balustrades, and sparkling crystal lights—they enrich, elevate, and knit them all together. Nevertheless, the idea of brokenness in Johnson's work remains unresolved and is even accentuated by its surroundings. Johnson's Nine and Blanchard's Fire are monumental in their breadth and scope, which helps to underscore the depth of the trauma they represent: their themes are contradiction, pain, and redemption. The libretto of Blanchard's opera tells the story of a bisexual African American man growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1970s and '80s who is molested by his older cousin at seven years old. The protagonist of Fire, Charles, [End Page 450] appears in two incarnations: Char'es-Baby, sung by Walter Russell III, and his adult self, performed by Will Liverman. This layering of voices and meaning—the past and the present...