The year is 1925. In the late Senator Simon Guggenheim’s first gift letter to the Board of Trustees of the newly established John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he wrote, “the purpose is to give ‘blocks of time’ in which Fellows can work with as much creative freedom as possible.” The foundation was established by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their departed 17-year-old promising young scholar son.
Almost 100 years later, the Guggenheim story continues to be told and so many Guggenheim Fellows continue to touch so many other lives in an effort towards making our world a better place, one contribution at a time. The memorial foundation’s gifts are awarded to talented and deserving mid-career individuals who have a history of demonstrating great promise for future endeavors. “These individuals have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Our organization’s aim is to add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country and in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation of any art form under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, and creed.”
As a retired educator harboring pivotal concerns pertaining to the future of education, teacher training, and career development especially in the advanced field of technology, I thought about GMF’s mission. Wouldn’t it be ‘a good thing’ if their mission could be adopted as a similar mantra of a newly re-organized education system? Is this not what we want for our children, grandchildren, and the next generations to come?
A painting entitled “Forever Saint Paul’ is permanently located in the St. Paul Union Depot. The artist is Twin Cities’ Ta-Coumba Tyrone Aiken, child prodigy, artist extraordinaire, who has recently been appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow. Aiken is recognized in the Fine Arts category after competing in a rigorous process of nearly 2,500 applicants for 2022.
“I create my art to heal the hearts and souls of people and their communities by evoking a positive spirit,” he said.
In our children and their families, should not those of us who can and are willing ‘to do’ want to evoke a ‘positive spirit’? Congratulations, Gentleman of Distinction!!
In 2013, Aiken created a 12 feet tall by 24 feet long Lite Brite mural to reflect St. Paul’s nature at the Union Depot as part of the kick-off of the Minnesota Idea Open Forever St. Paul Challenge. Guinness World Record Book named the Lite Brite mural the largest Lite Brite picture ever.
“There are St Paul icons, like Sparky in there — people are still looking for that one. They can keep looking till they find it,” Aiken said. “The State Capitol, the First Bank, the Indian Mounds are in the mural. And people have been seeing things that I didn’t put in there, but that’s OK.”
The mural is made of more than 596,000 Lite Brite pegs, and more than 600 volunteers helped put it together.
It earned a Guinness Book Record for the most Lite-Brite pegs ever used, approximately, 596,000, to create a painting.
There are an additional 300 or more murals and public art sculptures with themes ranging from local history to the artist’s own style of rhythmic pattern and spirit writing displayed in private and public collections, including the McKnight Foundation, Walker Art Center, General Mills, and the Marcus Garvey House.
In a deeply moving and inspiring Conversations with Al McFarlane interview, Aiken remembered his first art exhibit. A six-year-old wunderkind, Aiken mounted a three-day art exhibit in the basement of his childhood home. That weekend, Aiken sold over $600 of his work. I imagine that was quite an event!
“Let’s begin with the house where Ta-Coumba T. Aiken grew up, and visit the stories of your ancestors who shaped your paths positioning you to be in this moment,” Al McFarlane said to Aiken, in the KFAI FM 90.3 interview.
“My father, Ulysses, was a garbage man. My mother, Janet, was a house cleaner. When I came to Minnesota, I had no problem teaching in rural communities. It was interesting growing up with a psychologist and a psychiatrist in the same house. My father watched what people threw away ascertaining if they were good people or not. My mother would listen to conversations going on in the houses where she cleaned.
We lived on the corner of Florence and Greenwood in a two-story house with a wraparound porch. When we first moved in, we only had one bed and we all slept in front of the bed and a big picture window. A lot of interesting and challenging things came out of living in that house,” Aiken said.
Traveling to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC’77 – The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, Nigeria, 1977, he learned the meaning of his name, Ta-Coumba, which had been revealed to him by his grandmother. The name foretold that he would be the first in his family to journey across the river and the ocean to return to the Motherland – Africa.
In addition to the Guggenheim fellowship, Aiken is the recipient of numerous other awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Bush Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Knight Arts Challenge, St. Paul. “They have a collection in Stockholm, Sweden. called ‘Absolute Aiken’. That’s a lot,” the artist Aiken said. “But I also know that when you do something this big, it’s for a moment. If you linger, you become a target. That’s why my art moves and sometimes there are ‘no words’”, he said homage to a triptych of that name on display in Walker Art Center’s collection.
“I wrote that I call my works ‘superlative realism’. The superlative is as far as I can go, as deep as I can get. The deepest thing I can get in realism is spirit. You can get scientific about all this if you choose, but I say there’s still something unexplainably explainable in each of my creations. That spirit makes all the other stuff work,” he said.
The formal Guggenheim Fellow event will be held June 7th in New York City. It will be interesting in that the honorees cannot have guests because of COVID restrictions on crowds. “I don’t know what will happen, but from the 6th to the 13th, this once ‘poor country boy’ will enjoy the big time in the Big Apple, and at the gathering of the Whitney Biennial Fearless Artists Group. After those memories are shaped, I’ll step forward continuing doing the work my ancestors put me down here to do. And I will do that until the day I die and beyond. We must create institutions and have things my kids and your kids can inherit. They then can take these things and share with other people. I believe they’re working in that direction already.”
Aikens upcoming exhibit, Awakening, opens Friday, May 13th at Dream Song, 1237 4th Street NE Minneapolis. The exhibit is based on the painting, “The Awakening”, a real life still life. “Real life moves,” Aiken explained. “You think we’re standing still, but we’re never standing. Things are moving. The woman’s head dress turns into faces and profiles. Just like when you twist fabric and you do the head dress, how do we know those aren’t ancestors being twisted to keep us protected, covering our heads to keep all the negative things outside.”
