Category: Brooks, Womack, and Studio Museum (Page 2 of 2)

Bobby Womack’s “Across from 110th Street” and Andy Robert’s painting at the Studio Museum both portray the physical space in Harlem without sugarcoating it. In the chorus of his song, Bobby Womack describes a series of sketchy occurrences going on on the streets like a pimp trying to recruit a “weak” woman and a drug dealer trying to sell his drugs to an addict. He then says “Harlem is the capital of every ghetto town”, globalizing the environment of Harlem to other cities too. In his painting “Check II Check” (below), Andy Roberts depicts a streetscape of a deli on Malcom X, not very far from the Study Museum.  His painting 

the street is very colorful, and busy like the streets I walked through to get to the museum. Just from the pictures, you can tell the street is loud and hustling and bustling, probably full of both good things and bad things. As we were walking to the museum, Lesly, who lives in Harlem, told me stories of things that had happened to her and her family on the streets we were walking through. Some of the stories were scary, while some were comical. Lesly’s first hand accounts, the song, and the painting all come together to form a multi-faceted depiction of the streets of Harlem. They are filled with good things, bad things, random things, sketchy thing, and everything in between, giving it a distinct personality, which may be similar to other cities, but “the capital” of them.

On the short walk to the Studio Museum from my dorm, I was thinking of physical space. In a crowded city like New York, there isn’t much of it. At about 1 PM on a Friday, 125th street was as busy as could be. Going only two blocks, I may have passed 100 people. Just like in Bobby Womack’s song, “Across 110th Street,” so much is going on at any given moment in New York City. He states in the chorus, “Across 110th Street, pimps trying to catch a woman that’s weak…pushers won’t let the junkie go free…. woman trying to catch a trick on the street.” It is so easy to replace the lyric “Across 110th Street” with “Across 125th Street” and probably every street in Manhattan. While the things Womack is mentioning aren’t exactly positives, it all adds to the charm of Harlem. Going back to last week’s blog post, we love it and we hate it. While all my non-New Yorker family members gasp when I say I live in Harlem, I say it with pride because in a one block radius while there is bad, there is also good. I’ve been catcalled one second and then serenaded by a street performer the next, that’s just what you get in New York.