Howard Fishman and the Biting Fish Brass Band will kick off SummerNights at the Jewish Museum on July 12 (photo by Nisha Sondhe)
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, July 12, 19, 26, $15, 7:30
212-423-3337
www.thejewishmuseum.org/summernights
“Performance is a religious activity to me,” Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and composer Howard Fishman wrote in March on the Huffington Post. “I don’t proselytize. The faith that I have is personal. I don’t believe that there is one right way to live, or that any group of people that has organized themselves under the name of a particular brand of religion has all the answers. But my experience tells me that we can make ourselves available to many of life’s mysteries by listening to a sort of inner voice, whatever we want to call it.” Fishman will share his inner voice and more as he opens the Jewish Museum’s SummerNights 2012 series on July 12, backed by his Biting Fish Brass Band, which includes trombone, trumpet, tuba, and drums. SummerNights continues on July 19 with local Balkan soul gypsy funk favorites Slavic Soul Party! and concludes on July 26 with One Ring Zero, the Brooklyn experimental klezmer outfit whose Author Project consists of songs with lyrics by such writers as Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Dave Eggers, and Paul Auster. There will also be free Chozen ice cream available and an open bar, and the galleries will remain open until 8:00 so you can check out such exhibitions as Kehinde Wiley’s “The World Stage: Israel” and “Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940.”
Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. The film was previously shown at the Maysles Institute this past January, but it’s now back for a return engagement July 11, with Rembert and Ducat participating in a Q&A following the screening of this extraordinary story.
