JUST MASK

THE WOOSTER GROUP IS FAMOUS for an asymmetrical avant-garde theater in which three points make a balance. Director Elizabeth LeCompte, set designer Jim Clayburgh, and the performers—Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Peyton Smith, Ron Vawter, and Kate Valk, along with associates—have been working out of the Performing Garage on Wooster Street since 1975, creating formally spectacular work that’s disorienting yet somehow intimately familiar. In the past few years the Woosters have grown shady and sexy in cult standing, a tantalizing combination of recognizable Hollywood faces and downtown art hardcores.

books January 1993

bell hooks' Black Looks

Black Looks: race and representation, by bell hooks. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

We have to change our own mind. . . . We’ve got to change our own minds about each other. We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to come together with warmth.
—Malcolm X

Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.
—bell hooks

A CALL TO ACTION is different in 1992: the tactic is a privately owned liberation theology, the faith Blackness, the patron