25 min listen
Strange Fruit: "Laocoon" Sculpture Unites Fat Albert, Police Shootings, and Greek Mythology
FromStrange Fruit
Strange Fruit: "Laocoon" Sculpture Unites Fat Albert, Police Shootings, and Greek Mythology
FromStrange Fruit
ratings:
Length:
29 minutes
Released:
May 21, 2016
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
You could be forgiven if your first reaction to "Laocoon" is laughter. Even Dr. Chris Reitz, gallery director of the University of Louisville's Hite Art Institute, admits to laughing when he first saw the piece in Miami. Simply put, it's a 10-foot-tall inflatable Fat Albert laying face down, hooked up to an air pump so it appears to be breathing. But when you learn more about the original Laocoon, and the identity of the artist, there's more to the piece than a pop culture reference. Remember the Trojan horse? A supposed peace offering that was actually stuffed with enemies trying to get inside the gates? In "The Aenid," Laocoon was the only one who smelled a rat — and he was killed for his protests. You might say he was #woke ahead of his time. Who would be Laocoon's modern-day American counterpart? Eric Garner? Mike Brown? Any number of black bodies we've seen in news footage, lying face-down, struggling to breathe? That's what Laocoon asks its viewers to think about. Also, there's no thinking about Fat Albert now without thinking of Bill Cosby — another layer of meaning as the piece evokes fallen idols. This week we're joined by Laocoon's creator, Sanford Biggers, an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and art professor, and Dr. Reitz, who brought the exhibit to Louisville. Laocoon is on exhibit at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts through July 2. And in our Juicy Fruit segment this week, a truly hot topic: Do you stay friends with your exes? A recent study suggests your motivation might be rooted in narcissism.
Released:
May 21, 2016
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Strange Fruit #47: Meet Gert McMullen, Original Seamstress of the AIDS Memorial Quilt: To speak to Gert McMullen about the origins of [the AIDS Memorial Quilt](http://www.aidsquilt.org/) is to go back to a scary, sad time in LGBTQ history: San Francisco in the early 1980s. "People were terrified," she explains, "because they didn't know what was happening. People were just dying. They were trying to figure out, why were these gay men dying?" Gert lost many of her friends in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and thanks to the fear and stigma surrounding the disease, she was often their only visitor. "You would go into the hospitals and there was nobody there and the nurses would put you in a moon suit, basically, to walk in there, because they didn't know what was going to happen," she recalls. No one understood how the disease was transmitted, so many people were afraid to come into close contact with their afflicted loved ones - even during their final days. "I remember a friend of by Strange Fruit