My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Página 102

I have to concur with Brenda Marie
Osbey’s observation that much
like babes-in arms, “we are tertiary
consumers of a product cultivated
for profit elsewher… we are witness
to an art economy not only controlled
by, but marketed and pitched by, to,
and for white consumption… the fact
that we visit gallery spaces, convene
panels on, discuss, critique, and write
about such work may well give the
semblance and allure of critical insight
and creative intellectual engagement.
Somehow, it smacks to me of a lot of
tette-a-suc (Sugar Tit).”

I wonder what story would be invented
for the American public if a favorite
icon like the Statute of Liberty were
replicated as a nude, 2-Story sensuous
Siren of the Sea, coated like a Tar Baby,
triumphantly holding up a male organ
by the testicles, her legs spread open
seductively, inviting the hungry masses
of the world to enter a cavernous vulva
that appears like a mysterious Venus
Fly Trap.
End of story!

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

And, yet, on this final weekend, an
aging docent for the exhibit who had
spent 20 years toiling in the char house
where mounds of unbleached sugar
crystals burned in kilns at 140 degree
temperatures, regrets that the factory
will soon be razed to build luxury
houses, demolishing even the curious
installation, its place in the history
of Sugar lost forever. The aging black
docent, redolent of the plantation
Slave’s remorse when the Master’s
house was under siege, laments that
if he were a rich man, he’d “put it
downtown in a climate-controlled
greenhouse… donate it to the city” as
a monument to the story of “Sugar.”

101

When Norman Reid approached three
white women engrossed in the Sugar
Baby and asked what they thought
was its significance, they summarily,
without missing a beat, observed that
the work was about the exploitation
of women… (read white women).
While the visitors to the exhibit seem
completely in the dark about the
significance of the iconography beyond
their personal history or novelty of
a cultural event, Clyde insists that the
artist is well aware of the 130 year
history of the slaves that produced the
sugar from cane plantations
throughout the diaspora to the sweat
labor of the Domino Sugar refinery
(and that the work has a peculiar
resonance at least for the black viewers).
But, then, how could the visitors
know when the sign painted near
the entrance — and obscured by the
anticipated excitement of entering
the mysterious inner-chamber — to
the refinery reads: “Subtlety — or the
Marvelous Sugar Baby, an homage to
the unpaid and over-worked Artisans
who have refined our Sweet tastes
from the Cane fields to the Kitchens
of the New World on the occasion of
the demolition of the Domino Sugar
Refining Plant.”