Park update: From 7am – 3:30pm on Monday, March 18 and Tuesday, March 19, the High Line will be partially closed between 23rd and 30th Streets due to construction. Visitors can enter and exit at the 23rd Street stair/elevator and the 30th/10th Street stair. The entrances from Hudson Yards, the Connector, and the Spur remain open.

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Photo by Jibade-Khalil Huffman. Installation view, Verse Chorus Verse, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi Gallery
Arts & Cultural Events

C.R.E.A.M.

Curated by Sable Elyse Smith

Saturday, January 26, 2019
4 – 6pm
Location
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St.

Pre-registration for this event is now closed. An in-person wait list will begin 1 hour prior to the event start time. All guests should arrive at least 15 minutes prior to the event.

C.R.E.A.M. is a multidisciplinary event featuring music, performances, and readings inspired by Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 song “C.R.E.A.M” (Cash Rules Everything Around Me). The event features newly commissioned performances by Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Simone WhiteDevin Kenny, and Bonita Oliver, poetry readings by A. H. Jerriod Avant and Sable Elyse Smith, and a musical performance by Darius Christian & C.R.E.A.M. BRASS: Travis Antoine, Chanell Chrichlow, Nathan Ellman, Benjamin Katz, and Michael King. The event coincides with the publication of C.R.E.A.M., a book containing writing by Smith, poetry by Avant, and an essay by Jessica Lynne. The book will be available to event attendees and for purchase from publisher Wendy’s Subway.

C.R.E.A.M., curated by artist Sable Elyse Smith, is an extension of Smith’s sculpture of the same name, exhibited on the High Line at 20th St. through March 2019 as part of the group exhibition Agora. The sculpture takes the shape of an altered replica of the Hollywood Sign. In her version, the sign reads “IRONWOODLAND”—a reference to the Ironwood State Prison and to “Hollywoodland,” the segregated real estate development advertised in the original sign. The piece draws attention to the fraught connections between institutions that develop real estate and those that fund and support prisons.

By titling her work after Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.”, a song on what is widely recognized as one of the most important albums in hip-hop (Enter The Wu-Tang [36 Chambers]), Smith offers a pop culture entry point to considering the financial links between real estate and prisons. The song explicates the struggle of navigating New York City as a young Black male. The lyrics describe the ways in which racist economic systems in the US act upon and through Black bodies:

A man with a dream with plans to make cream
Which failed; I went to jail at the age of fifteen
A young buck sellin’ drugs and such, who never had much
Tryin’ to get a clutch at what I could not
The court played me short, now I face incarceration
Pacin’, goin’ upstate’s my destination
Handcuffed in the back of a bus, forty of us
Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough
But as the world turned I learned life is hell
Livin’ in the world no different from a cell.

Mirroring her embrace of the varying creative and structural capacities of language, music, and sculpture, Smith invited a group of artists, poets, and musicians to present new or existing work that dismantles and reimagines “C.R.E.A.M.” as a song and as a larger cultural moment. The contributors thus interrogate mass incarceration but resist the simplistic narratives of statistics, criminality, and race. Instead, they attend to the complexities of the carceral state and the specificities of its effects on our individual lives and our culture at large.

Devin Kenny opens the event with a musical performance that looks at the history of influences that led to “C.R.E.A.M.” and those that came after; Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Simone White present a new, multimedia collaborative performance; Bonita Oliver realizes a new vocal performance; A. H. Jerriod Avant reads new and existing poems that connect to the larger themes at hand; and Smith reads some of her own writing.

As with all of Smith’s work, in her interpretation and investigation of “C.R.E.A.M.” she implicates language as much as the built environment as a system of power we inhabit every day. Each contributor in C.R.E.A.M. shares Smith’s interest in destabilizing the strict authorities of language that mirror and prop up the systems of power that only exist through maintaining racialized violence. Through their work, the artists explore an embodied knowledge that goes deeper than a superficial accumulation of information. Instead, they work to shed light on the interrelationship between violence, intimacy, and trauma, and to pursue what exists through, beyond, and in spite of the broken narratives of incarceration.

Support

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support for High Line Art is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund. High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Corey Johnson.

Agora is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

C.R.E.A.M. is supported by the Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.