16 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
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EXTRA!EXTRA!
COLORINGTHEG R AY LADY
T
he artist Fred Tomaselli turned off
a radio blasting NPR in his East
Village studio the other day, settled into
a creaky swivel chair, and described where
he’d spent his early-pandemic, after his
studio assistant “fled to Vermont.” “My
work’s usually really heavy—I can’t lift
it myself,” he said. “So I was, like, fuck
it, I’m going to take my studio and put
it in my guest bedroom in Williams-
burg and just make little drawings that
are sort of a deep dive into the emer-
gency of COVID, because every day was
a banner headline. In March it was, like,
BOOM BOOM BOOM—every day was
just an earthquake.”
In that bedroom, he scanned front
pages of the Times, printed them on
watercolor paper, and painted and col-
laged over them, creating bright-colored
patterns often reminiscent of groovy
stained-glass windows. Eventually, he
began to move components around, mis-
matching headlines and photographs. A
number of these works are being shown
by the London-based gallery White Cube,
in a digital exhibition that runs through
December 26th.
Holed up in Williamsburg, Tomaselli,
who is sixty-five, tinkered, gardened,
biked, boogie-boarded, fly-fished, and
birded. “It was like being back in high
school,” he said. (He grew up in Cali-
fornia, “in the shadow of Disneyland—I
had Tinker Bell flying in the night sky
outside my house, amid the fireworks.”)
He went on, “I’m a big birder, and I
never really had a chance to focus on
my back yard before. But I think I got
seven new back-yard birds during the
pandemic. I had a Nashville warbler and
a Wilson’s warbler in my plum tree—
like, on the same tree, at the same time!”
Prints of the newspaper works hung
behind Tomaselli, who wore a checked
flannel over a gray T-shirt, black jeans,
and sneakers. One, from September 29,2021, featured a photo of a yellow bird,
onto which he had affixed yellow flow-
ers, and around which he’d added a leafy
pattern, all under the headline “COVID
Misinformation Creates Run on
Animal Medicine.”
He asked his new assistant, Ryan, to
dig up the actual paper from that day—
“He knows where shit is.” The top head-
line read “Military Advised Biden to
Extend Afghan Presence” and was
paired with a photo of a scowling General
Mark A. Milley. Beneath the fold was
the bird, captioned “The Maui nukupu‘u,
last seen in 1996, is one of 22 animals
joining the list of lost species. Page A17.”
Tomaselli’s birding-life list, which
he’s kept since the nineties, has about
four hundred species. He wandered over
to stacks of boxes and flat-file drawers,
and began pulling out other collections.
“I have every New York Times since
2005,” he said. “This file is ‘collage ma-
terial, humans,’ so this is like plastic de-
tritus and eyeballs and noses and lips and
hands and feet and mouths.” All of these
had been scanned, reprinted, cut out, and
arranged by color and size, for ease of
collaging. Other drawers and boxes were
labelled “Map Prints,” “pads o’ paper,” and
“POT” (as in the leaves, which he presses
and uses in his work).
“Hey, Ryan,” he called. “Do you know
where my insects are?”
“Like, real insects?” Ryan asked, while
continuing to excise scanned images of
bird feet with an X-Acto knife.
“Wait, look, here’s some monarch-
butterfly wings,” Tomaselli said. “There
was a big praying mantis in my butter-
fly bush, and it would kill butterflies and
you would find the wings. And I thought,
Well, the mantis is giving me a present.”
He paused. “On the other hand, mon-
arch-butterfly populations are crashing,
so that bums me out.”
Near the flat files hung a centuries-old
Tibetan thangka (depicting, per To-
maselli, “the union of compassion and
wisdom on this sundial dancing on ig-
norance”), slightly damaged by yak-oil
smoke. Allen Ginsberg—another thangka
collector—died upstairs. “Two floors, but,
like, directly,” Tomaselli noted.
He pointed to a foam-board maquette
of a building, the U.S. Embassy in Bang-
kok, for which he’s designing an ellip-
tical mosaic. Beside it was a reject, fea-
turing a mosaic owl. “I was gonna doArab house and is driven to market be-
hind a team of spanking bays, but her
life is quiet and simple, friends say.” In
fact, she had been setting up a liaison
center for the French Resistance.)
As the car neared the Panthéon,
Bouillon-Baker gazed down Rue Souf-
flot, where a coffin—filled with soil from
St. Louis, Paris, Milandes, and Monaco,
where Baker is buried—would be borne
along a red carpet. Bouillon-Baker said
that he was “excited, joyous, proud.” He
only wished that the public, gathering
in freezing mist, could get closer. “The
most beautiful homage she could have
had was that of the street,” Akio Bouil-
lon, another of Baker’s sons, said later.
Inside the Panthéon, rustles of excite-
ment. Practically the entire government
was in attendance, as were eight of Ba-
ker’s children: a generation of stolid French
people dressed in warm scarves and puffer
jackets, the fruit of an American in a ba-
nana skirt. “Stereotypes, Joséphine Baker
takes them on,” Macron said, in the eulogy
that he delivered from the monument’s
nave. “But she shakes them up, digs at
them, turns them into sublime burlesque.
A spirit of the Enlightenment ridicul-
ing colonialist prejudices to music by Sid-
ney Bechet.”
The occasion was political, of course,
coming in an election season and at a
moment when French people of color
are questioning the disjuncture between
the national creed of universalism and
their experiences of racial discrimina-
tion. “Yesterday as today, France cher-
ishes Black Americans while subjecting
its own nationals to twenty times more
police checks when they are perceived
as Arab or Black,” the journalist Rokhaya
Diallo wrote, in a Baker-themed edition
of L’Obs, pointing out that, while France
was swooning over Baker, it was exhib-
iting her own colonized ancestors in hu-
man zoos. At the podium, Macron held
Baker up as a fighter for “the equality
of all before the identity of each.” It was
possible to interpret his emphasis on her
embrace of universalism as a rebuke of
the “wokisme” that some members of the
government believe is eroding national
cohesion. “Ma France, c’est Joséphine, ” h e
concluded, playing on the lyrics of Ba-
ker’s hit “J’Ai Deux Amours.”
When the sun set in New York, the
Empire State Building glowed bleu, blanc,
rouge in Baker’s honor. Bouillon-Baker
went to sleep happy: “Her native coun-
try was remembering her at last.”
—Lauren Collins