Performances, Acknowledgments, and Dinner: Closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration

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Performances, Acknowledgments, and DinnerClosing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), Charles Henry Rowell, Rizvana Bradley (bio), Nathaniel Mackey (bio), Joshua Bennett (bio), Howard Dodson (bio), and Ben Okri (bio) The closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration included the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Awards, closing remarks by Howard Dodson and Ben Okri, and musical performances by Carole Strong Thompson, Robert Reid, Hermine Pinson, and Harris Simon. WOUBSHET: I conducted an interview with Dr. Rowell at the Goethe-Institut in Addis Abba back in 2009, a year before the Callaloo Conference in Addis in 2010. I asked him, foolishly, “Dr. Rowell, how do you keep up with the literary trends of the day so that the journal keeps current?” Without skipping a beat, he replied, “We don’t have to keep up since we set the trend.” [Laughter] Foolish question, wise answer. Callaloo has been setting the standard for the past forty years, and in the process has forever changed the American and English literary canon. It has done so by prizing rigor, experimentation, what Greg Pardlo calls “radical individuality,” and also our collective ideals of justice, of freedom, and of beauty. Dr. Rowell, we treasure you, we love you, and we thank you for being our standard-bearer. Please, I was going to say “raise your glass” but raise your hand to Charles Rowell. I’d like to invite to the podium the Editor of Callaloo, Dr. Charles Henry Rowell. [Applause] ROWELL: We also honor the people who have been setting trends in various forms of art in literature, in literary criticism, in fiction writing, and in visual art. That’s what we’re going to do tonight. First, we will honor Frank Bowling for his lifetime achievement in visual art. Rizvana will not only speak about him, but she will accept his award. He is not able to be with us this evening. BRADLEY: Thank you so much, Dr. Rowell. It is a great honor to speak about Frank Bowling’s work, as I’ve also had the honor of teaching his work in many of my courses in art history and visual studies. Frank Bowling’s paintings have been exhibited widely and internationally. His selected solo shows have included the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and a touring retrospective in the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It’s worth noting as well that in 2017 the Haus der Kunst in Munich will present Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi, a comprehensive survey of large-scale paintings. Frank Bowling, Order of the British Empire, was born in 1936 in Guiana and moved to London in 1953, where his artistic career began shortly after his arrival at the Royal College of Art. He started his career as a figurative painter and then moved to abstraction and became involved in the British pop movement in the 1950s and [End Page 197] 1960s. His first solo exhibition, Image in Revolt, was hosted the year Bowling graduated at the Grabowski Gallery in London, and he decided to move to New York in 1966, as Stuart Hall noted in a very well-known essay about Black British artists published in the 1980s. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. Bowling’s paintings began to turn to abstraction, the field in which his contributions were to be most significant, and he was frequently visited by the art critic, Clement Greenberg. His series of quasi-abstract color fields, overlaid with stenciled images of maps of Australia, South America, and Africa, are his best known works, in which he experimented with the possibilities of paint. It has been noted that Bowling’s legacy concerns his innovations with new process within his paintings. It should also be noted that he developed a special mechanical apparatus, which tilted the canvas so he could pour paint on it, and that allowed him to create what we now know as his famous and iconic poured paintings. I’m very happy today to be able to speak about his work very briefly and his contribution to contemporary art, and I’m honored to accept this award on his...