During the dramatic swirl of last summer, as newborn activists hit the streets to protest the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and scores of other Black Americans, members of Congress (including the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi) were photographed kneeling in Ghanaian kente cloth, and Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben abruptly reached retirement age. Throughout, the twenty-nine-year-old comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, who lives in Brooklyn, interviewed defendants plucked from the court of “cancel culture” on Instagram Live. Her guests included the actress Rose McGowan, the food writer Alison Roman, and the influencer Caroline Calloway. One hardball question: “How many Black friends do you have?” It almost always made her interlocutors stutter and squirm.
Ziwe (she prefers the monomial) spent a recent rainy morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wearing a long pink raincoat, she breezed through galleries of colonial artifacts.“I loved that one of my questions for Alison was ‘Why would you put cashews in collard greens?’ ” she said, laughing at the idea of gentrifying a soul-food staple. She added, “I’ll say this, Alison was one of the guests that didn’t berate me via texts afterwards. She did the interview and left it to God.” Ziwe raised an eyebrow. “I’ve always said the behind the scenes of my interviews are more compelling than the interviews could ever be. You see the racial politics in a way that is not performative.”
This month, Showtime will première “Ziwe,” a satirical variety show inspired in part by last year’s viral interviews. In one episode, Ziwe asks the writer Fran Lebowitz, “What bothers you more, slow walkers or racism?”
Ziwe said that she had recently taken up painting on the advice of her therapist, who’d suggested that she “do a hobby that you don’t make money off of.” On her iPhone, she pulled up a vivid abstract that brought to mind a tie-dyed T-shirt. “I painted this,” she said. “I combined white and then orange and then red.” She is collecting art, as well. One recent acquisition, a gift from executives at A24, the indie studio that is co-producing the television show, is a “kind of Pop-art” portrait of herself, painted by a Brooklyn artist named Ben Evans. “It’s embarrassing,” she said, with a grin. “My roommate calls it a shrine to me.”
Inside the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art wing, Ziwe was drawn to Leon Polk Smith’s “Accent Black,” a formation of rectangles colored black, clay, and rust. “I love the fact that wherever you turn your head, it’s a different composition,” she said. She turned her head. “Now it looks like a person at a checkered table.” Another head swivel: “Oh—a Picasso!”
On to the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas wing, where Ziwe looked at a Mayan column originally found in present-day Mexico. She shook her head.“It’s so wild to me that these are in America,” she said. She mused that, at any second, Killmonger, the revolutionary antihero in Marvel’s “Black Panther,” would burst in and shout, “Mama! The art is coming back home!”
Might the Met be full of ghosts? she wondered. “I believe my ancestors are with me all the time, guiding me through this art,” she said. She stopped and pointed at an equestrian figurine. “Oh, look, Igbo!” she said, reading the label. “Kingdom of Benin. This is Nigeria. Which my father grew up in.”
“It’s a big goal of mine to visit Africa,” she went on. “But my parents have hard feelings about it. They lived through a civil war. One time I went to a doctor, and she asked, ‘Are your grandparents alive?’ I said no, and then she asked, ‘How did they die?’ And I was just, like, ‘War.’ ” She used the same half-serious tone as she had when, on Instagram Live, she asked the Black playwright Jeremy O. Harris, “Why did you move to London for quarantine? Was it to escape Black Americans?” (Harris’s answer: “To escape white Americans, honestly.”)
Back in the museum’s Great Hall, she studied the monumental painting “Resurgence of the People,” the indigenous artist Kent Monkman’s subversive take on Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The work was commissioned by the Met. In it, two dozen waterlogged contemporary subjects of various ethnicities are crowded together in a wooden boat, looking like refugees. Ziwe regarded the exercise with cautious optimism. “If they’re talking about race, where do you begin?” she said, referring to the museum’s newfound wokeness. She stared at the picture, which measures eleven feet by twenty-two feet. “This is dope,” she said. “But they should put it in the actual museum.” She looked around the lobby, perturbed. “This is the coat check.” ♦