Celebrating in these difficult times is hard. We’re still in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic. Thankfully, vaccines are being approved and the beginning of the end of the devastation of Covid may be in sight. Coincidentally, we are also just now being delivered from the most backward-leaning presidency in our history. Celebrating our emergence from a dark place is not only essential but necessary.

How do we do that? How about with a joyful hand-clapping gospel song from South Africa? As somebody on YouTube wrote, “The only good thing to remember in 2020 is this song.”

Jerusalema is a phenomenon: More than 266 million people have viewed the video. This exuberant song, sung in Zulu, is the brainchild of South African DJ and record producer Kgaogelo Moagi, better known as Master KG. The vocalist who powers the song is Nomcebo. When the song was released in late 2019, it was an immediate success in South Africa.

However, it was a video uploaded to YouTube by Fenómenos do Semba, an Angolan dance troupe, in February 2020 that gave impetus to the worldwide embrace of Jerusalema, the dance. That video pushed Jerusalema to unprecedented international success. The Angolan dance video set in motion something called the #jerusalemachallenge on YouTube, followed by the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge on TikTok. Groups of people from all over the world began to upload videos emulating the Fenómenos do Semba dance moves. This music has brought people together in celebration during a pandemic. No easy feat.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, this irrepressible track has captivated audiences all over. Jerusalema has been the number one song in Belgium, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland. Frontline workers especially seem to relate to the song’s exuberance. For many, it’s been a moment of reprieve from the virus.

The song has roots in a much older gospel hymn, “Jerusalem Ikhaya Lami (Jerusalem My Home.)” The original hymn celebrates a longing for a New Jerusalem, a hope for a better place where suffering will end. Jerusalema echoes those same desires. Here are the words and the English translation:

Of course, it’s not the words that have captivated millions around the world. (How many of us understand Zulu?) it’s the animated and infectious rhythm of Master KG’s genius and Nomcebo’s voice that make us feel that we should just get up and dance.

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Entering the contemporary art space located just a few minutes’ walk from my home in the Hudson Valley last fall, I had no idea what to expect. Gallerist Jack Shainman had just opened an exhibition by the Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi. Entitled “Democratic Intuition,” Mokgosi’s opus fills all three floors of the stunning 30,000-square-foot building called The School. The artist’s massive paintings feature jarring mash-ups of people, places, objects, and animals that draw from the lives of the people of southern Africa. To write that the exhibition fills the space barely captures how the paintings burst off of the walls, confronting viewers with image overload and leaving the visitor with the challenge of coping with the unexpected discomfort the images conjure.

Mokgosi’s paintings are gorgeous, with saturated colors that sting the eyes. At least one of the pictorial pieces is paired with a canvas covered with dense, hand-written verbiage that maps the artist’s philosophical explorations. In that piece and others, Mokgosi makes visible his desire to reveal in painstaking detail his underlying thought process. But unlike the work of many other contemporary artists, Mokgosi’s powerful imagery requires no verbal explanation. In truth, Mokgosi gives the game away in a modestly scaled, straight-on self-portrait that the gallery’s curators had the wisdom to hang in a light-filled back-hall space that allows the achingly honest and unsparing self-image to stand on its own.

It is there, in the quiet of that space, that Mokgosi’s intention is laid bare. The artist’s eyes, staring straight ahead, burn into the viewers’ eyes with unblinking confrontation. Mokgosi’s expression seems to hide a complex mixture of tightly held messages. A polite invitation is not one of them. Instead, his expression signals a demand to those of us who take for granted our place in a predominantly white, privileged, first-world society to step outside our self-imposed indifference to the lives of minorities, people of color, the poor, and the disadvantaged. Mokgosi implores us to open our eyes. “We are here,” he demands. “Look at us. See us.”

Mokgosi’s paintings were still churning around in my brain when I happened upon reporting and devastating video footage from ProPublica about the tragic death of Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez. Carlos, a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan taken into custody by ICE, died of flu-related complications in the bathroom of a quarantine cell at a border station in Weslaco, Texas, in the early hours of May 20, 2019. The crime — and the shame — is that Carlos didn’t die because he was ill with a 103-degree fever. He died because he was denied proper care. He died because the guards at the facility acted as if his life was of so little value that they ignored instructions to check on his condition every few hours. He died because the border-patrol station lacked the proper facilities, personnel, and adequate funds to care for sick, quarantined children. He died because the Trump administration made the cynical and cruel decision to punish children like Carlos whose parents’ only crime was to make the heart-rending decision to send their loved ones alone on a dangerous journey to the U.S. border in a desperate bid to find a safer life.

Carlos is one of twenty-three immigrants – including two children under the age of ten — who have died in custody since the Trump administration came into office. In the end, the sad truth is that Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez and the others died because we just didn’t bother to see them.

Meleko Mokgosi’s “Democratic Intuition.” Saturdays, 11am to 6pm, until Spring 2020 at The School I Jack Shainman Gallery, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, New York.

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Donald Trump’s embrace of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups has alienated yet another of his showpiece “advisory” councils. All 17 members of the President’s Council on the  Arts & Humanities [PCAH] resigned on August 18, 2017, leaving a harshly worded break-up note. Their letter of resignation is the latest in an accumulating file of written protests by knowledge experts,  industry luminaries and military leaders, whose moral compasses are guiding them away from a president whose policies and actions they feel they can no longer implicitly endorse.

Below is the full text of their letter. It’s worth noting that the Honorary Chairperson of this group is none other than Melania Trump, who must be mightily embarrassed by this move [and by having been suckered into putting her name on the letterhead]. Also, sharp observers have noticed that the first letters of each paragraph combine to spell the hidden message, “RESIST.”

Dear Mr. President:

Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville. The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions. We are members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The Committee was created in 1982under President Reagan to advise the White House on cultural issues. We were hopeful that continuing to serve in the PCAH would allow us to focus on the important work the committee does with your federal partners and the private sector to address, initiate, and support key policies and programs in the arts and humanities for all Americans. Effective immediately, please accept our resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Elevating any group that threatens and discriminates on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, orientation, background, or identity is un-American. We have fought slavery, segregation, and internment. We must learn from our rich and often painful history. The unified fabric of America is made by patriotic individuals from backgrounds as vast as the nation is strong. In our service to the American people, we have experienced this first-hand as we traveled and built the Turnaround Arts education program, now in many urban and rural schools across the country from Florida to Wisconsin.

Speaking truth to power is never easy, Mr. President. But it is our role as commissioners on the PCAH to do so. Art is about inclusion. The Humanities include a vibrant free press. You have attacked both. You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding. The Administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act, and attacked our brave trans service members. You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country. This does not unify the nation we all love. We know the importance of open and free dialogue through our work in the cultural diplomacy realm, most recently with the first-ever US Government arts and culture delegation to Cuba, a country without the same First Amendment protections we enjoy here. Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.

Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions. We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic

Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.

Thank you.

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