>

By Rebecca Walker

Kara Walker is tall, fashionable and reserved when I meet her in the lobby of the chic Residence Du Parc, a brutalist landmark of poured concrete adorned with iconic examples of modernist and postmodern art. Outside huge windows, Turin is celebrating itself: Italian flags drip from every window, flutter along every boulevard.

Kara wears flat leather oxfords, tights and a paper-thin leather jacket. She eyes me somewhat warily as I extend my arms for an embrace and launch into small talk, which I normally detest. Luckily, my bags have been lost and I indulged in a truly remarkable spa treatment the night before, so I have plenty to talk about.

She's been working on the installation of her show we're both here in Italy to support. The necessary projectors have not arrived. The show is to open in five days, and today we have to teach a class to art students. I sense she'd like to get back to the gallery, and the class is a distraction. She twirls her hair as we wait for the taxi.

At the class, the students are on fire. They've studied our work and want to know about memory and myth, the creative process and its demands. Kara and I sit behind a paint-splattered table and do our best. I'm jet-lagged but exuberant, thanks to a piping-hot cappuccino; Kara is laconic and soft-spoken. But then I see it -- a gentle smile, then a big laugh followed by a series of confident assessments of student work.

As the day wears on, we find a groove. We tag-team it, develop a rapport, give everything we can in the time allotted. Driving back to the Du Parc to recover and prepare for dinner, we talk about our kids. Hers is starting high school, into fashion, gorgeous. Mine is 6, getting ready for soccer camp, and I miss him with an ache I can't begin to put into words.

The next five days are a whirlwind of activity. We teach the students, I present my memoir Baby Love at Il Circolo dei Lettori on the same night that Jonathan Franzen reads from Freedom. I introduce Kara's show, A Negress of Noteworthy Talent, to a full gallery, and Melissa Harris-Perry and Jennifer Richeson follow up with talks about the black body and the neurological workings of prejudice. The press descends and recommends.

MORE 

The Root: How did your collaboration with Jay-Z begin?

Dream Hampton: Jay and I met over the phone. I'd reviewed his debut album, Reasonable Doubt,for the Village Voice and situated the record in what I considered ourgenerational zeitgeist: the billion-dollar crack industry. It was mycontention that back then in the '90s in New York, when everyone wasself-defining around hip-hop, selling crack had been as, or more,definitive: It included intergenerational schism, hyper-capitalism andcartoonish misogyny.

Boys were able to act out a fantasy of being a provider -- first byhelping their single moms with utility bills, later by takinggirlfriends on trips to the mall. I was interested in patriarchalpower, and the setback in intergender dynamics this crack-cash created.

I'd invoked all of that in a Voice review, and Jay, who thought I was a dude, asked to speak to me. He thanked me for the review and toldme he felt understood. I said, "Yeah, I'm from the east side of Detroitin the '80s; if there's one thing I understand, it's drug dealers."

Read More

"In ten years, 50 percent of the world will live in cities. The home is something that becomes an emotional incubator and resuscitator. It is not about tricks but about the way in which you reorient a person’s perceptions by focusing on water or on a tree or on a texture of a wall, making the home a meditative space."

Love, crave, dream of this house by the inspiring architect David Adjaye.  

More from interview with him here, at New York Magazine. 

“Unlike the ideas that we believe, myths are ideas that possess and govern us by means that are not logical, but psychological, and so rooted in the depths of our soul, where even the light of reason struggles toreach.

This is because myths are simple ideas that we have idolised because they are comfortable, they don’t create problems, they facilitate our judgement; in a word, they reassure us, removing any doubts concerning ourworld view, which unstressed by a succession of questions, calms our blessed consciences.

Free of all risk of interrogation, they confuse the sincerity of acceptance with the depth of sleep”.

Umberto Galimberti 

 Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Yale, via Lily Diamond.

I spent many, many hours here. Watching the light shine through the marble walls, and staring at the Isamu Noguchi garden from the downstairs windows. 

Just taught in Holland at the University of Utrecht. Scheduled to speak in Sweden next week.

Amazing.

So happy to see Yoko's Peace Tower in Iceland. Can't wait for Summer 2011 workshop there! Watch the unveiling and send a wish. 

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is an outdoor work of art conceived by Yoko Ono in
memory of John Lennon. It is situated on Viðey Island in Reykjavík, Iceland, and is dedicated to John by Yoko at its unveiling on October 9th 2007, John Lennon’s 67th birthday.

And here is a fascinating article about Yoko's life before John.  

I spent some time today reading Hemingway's gorgeous memoir, A Movable Feast. I breezed through it in college, really appreciating it now.

A particularly lovely paragraph:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.