Ben Caldwell

TEXT LELA LOIS BEARD

VISUAL GINA CANAVAN

“Always remember the past for therein lies the future. If forgotten… we are destined to repeat it.” – Sankofa African Proverb

As my film professor at CalArts in the late 90s, Ben Caldwell opened up another way of looking at art. His classes always spoke to me in a way that seemed to say, you’re fine. You are an African-American woman filmmaker bent more towards the experimental than the commercial. When Ben presented his own work in class, it was always vibrant and deeply rooted. You were forced to recognize Afrorealism in all of its manifold splendor.

It’s a typical day on planet earth, and Ben and I are “chewing the rag” on the phone. Back home in Texas, this phrase means kickin’ back with an old friend and having a spirited conversation about whatever comes to mind. In this particular moment, we’re catching up on all of our favorite topics – our children, art happenings, the forever evolving art community of Leimert Park, CalArts updates, black film and other more visceral things that affect our lives. As the conversation continues, we diverge a bit to discuss our very present thoughts about the current state of Afrofuturism after it received a major push from the blockbuster film Black Panther.

Ben talks about how Afrorealism transcends the concept of Afrofuturism, a point he has always infused in his art. Ben is right again, I think. He is once again on point about something that I struggled to articulate within my own thoughts… visually realizing that there will be black folks in future worlds. We have always seen ourselves as such, but others have not.

Ben Caldwell is one of the longest-working artists in the Leimert Park community, where he continues to stretch, twist and tip the whole idea of what art is and can be in the future at his studio, KAOS Network. During his early years in New Mexico, Ben watched his grandfather, a film projectionist, change the reels at a local movie theater. This prompted inner conversations about the power of storytelling through images. It is no surprise that he became a student at the Phoenix School of Arts, ultimately making his way to UCLA’s Animation and Motion Picture School. In the transition between schools, Ben was drafted to fight in the Vietnam war, where he picked up a camera and began to document what he saw. The hunger to use art to prompt intimate conversations about life grew, and after Vietnam Ben knew that the calling was real. He enrolled at UCLA’s film school in the 70s.

At UCLA, Ben became a founding member of the LA Rebellion, a collective of African-American film students that had had enough of listening to white professors teach film from their lens and their own perspectives in a racist gaze. Ben and others like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Jamaa Fanaka, and Barbara McCullough knew this was not their reality. Armed with this fight, they set out to create their own language, telling their stories through visual art, live action, and animation. This collective of artists started a movement that will never be forgotten.

Clicking forward to a new frame: the sun shines bright in Leimert Park. Whenever you visit Ben at his studio, KAOS Network, you quickly understand that he was way ahead of his time. Here, Ben has mentored such iconic artists as Mark Bradford, Macy Gray, and Kendrick Lamar. The space, which acts as a creative incubator, is world-renowned.

You will notice different African icons scattered around the exterior of his studio. One iconic symbol, which greets you from the street before you even set foot in KAOS, is the Asante Adinkra Sankofa bird. It represents the idea that it’s okay to look to the past to bring things that you need into the future. The Sankofa bird is usually seen with its head turned backwards and its feet facing forward. This iconic bird and other African symbols serve to bless a place that artists, filmmakers, musicians, yogis, healers, dancers and designers call a think-tank collective in action. The connection between Ben, artmaking and Sankofa brings his life’s work full circle.

Over the years, KAOS Network has birthed art-based programs such as iFresh, Electronic Cafe, Project Blowed, the Digital Playground, JUJU, Bananas, Leimert Park Art Walk and Mask Festival, and now the Leimert Phone Company. Under Ben’s direction, the Leimert Phone Company, which is comprised of artists, professors, students and community leaders, spawned a documentary project, called Sankofa City, which re-envisions the community of Leimert and its artistic history. It answers the question: how will global visitors to Leimert Park engage and learn about the complex history of one of the United States’ most vibrant African-American arts communities? Sankofa City, completed in 2017, has screened in the Black Portraiture Show in Johannesburg, at the Pan-African Film Festival, CHI Conference 2018, Getty Museum, Sankofa City – Project Chicago, and the Tate Modern Museum. It also won the prestigious CHI award for Best Design Study. In Ben’s catalogue, Sankofa City is the best present day example of Afrorealism in its most tangible sense: it looks to the past for the inspiration and knowledge to transform the future.

Click forward to the past: Ben and I are again chewing the rag, when he tells me more about his childhood than I had ever heard before. Ben always starts with, “Did I ever tell you the story about…” He goes on to pay tribute to a Mexican-American medicine woman who was one of his childhood babysitters, and taught him about the cycles of nature in the deserts of New Mexico. He describes how he grew up to respect the desert and its open skies in the Land Of Enchantment. Ben closes the story with a moment when he was home in New Mexico as a young man, surveying a 180-degree view of the desert. This vivid memory was the first time Ben had an awakening in the midst of nature’s elements, inspiring a magic realism within him. I can’t help but think that in that pivotal moment, a Sankofa bird was flying high above.