2021 saw many folks who made incredible contributions to the arts and culture leave us, among them, the actor Michael K. Williams, scholar bell hooks, and most shockingly for me, artist and cultural critic Greg Tate. The best way for me to describe my relationship with Greg is to quote poet Elizabeth Alexander who said of her own relationship with the cultural critic, “We weren’t intimates, but we were fellow travelers.” Yeah, that. We ran in a lot of the same arts and culture circles, especially after I got involved in the Black Rock Coalition in 1992.
Like so many people, I remember Greg posted up along Astor Place in the East Village, holding court. It was the early 90s. I was in PR then, so I considered Greg’s Village Voice columns required reading. And when I started Bold As Love Magazine over a decade later, I know part of the inspiration was because of the example Greg had set in writing: He made it clear that you could write about the things you cared about (Black rock) and draw on all kinds of connections–the scholarly and the popular– to make your case. He was a true public intellectual precisely because his writing was based tons of voracious reading and study, yet it was accessible (the late music PR man Tom Terrell would debate that!). Seriously, compare any piece of Greg’s writing to, for example, the great cultural theorist Fred Moten’s In The Break, and you’ll see what dense really looks like.
A decade ago, Greg supported my New Black Imagination Festival by lending his name as an advisor and moderating a great conversation between the artists Sanford Biggers and Wangechi Mutu. All the while, he was writing, making his forays into music, first, with Women In Love and later with Burnt Sugar.
Now that I was uptown at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, we’d made plans for lunch. Unfortunately, the next week, he passed away two days before we were supposed to get together. For someone who’s had a presence on the cultural scene for my entire time in New York City, it’s impossible to overstate what a vacuum his death leaves. No doubt, he inspired other, more influential cultural critics, so the ripple effect of his presence will continue to be felt. But it is odd, after nearly three decades, to know that I won’t be showing up somewhere and run into Greg Tate.
There was a lot written on Greg upon his passing. Here are some curated links:
- “Afrodisiac: A Textual Meditation on Greg Tate” by Michael Gonzales (Lithub)
- “Stonecoldboldness: A many-sided memorial to the writing of Greg Tate” by Robert Christgau (NPR)
- “The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art” by Hua Hsu (The New Yorker)
- “The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate” by Jon Caramanica (New York Times)
- The obituary from ArtForum “Flying High: Remembering Greg Tate” by various Village Voice colleagues
- “Flyboy Forever: Greg Tate Was a Titan in Black Arts Criticism and Visual Culture” by Liz Munsell & J. Faith Almiron (ArtNews)
- “Greg Tate, Groundbreaking Cultural Critic and Black Rock Coalition Founder” by Hank Shteamer (Rolling Stone)
Love to his family, especially his brother Brian, sister Geri, daughter Chinara and GrandSun (as Greg would always write) Nile. Salute, GT! You are missed, and I thank you for the rich, textured, vigorously intellectual and aggressively humane body of work you left behind.
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