The Art of Diversity

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Culture in America is likely to be spelled these days with a hyphen. Watch it on TV. There's Cuban-American singing star Gloria Estefan in a music video on MTV Latino. See it at the cinema. The film version of The Joy Luck Club, based on the popular novel by Chinese-American author Amy Tan, could be playing nearby. Theater? There's the modern-dance show Griot New York, directed by Jamaican-American choreographer Garth Fagan. Poetry? Buy a book of verse by St. Lucian-born, Nobel-prizewinning poet Derek Walcott, who teaches at Boston University. Painting? New York's Asia Society is holding a show that tours the country next year featuring Asian-American visual artists who emigrated from Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia.

And that's just the beginning. "All American art is a function of the hybrid culture that resulted from centuries of immigration to this nation," says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. "We're just more dramatically aware of it today." American culture used to be depicted as a Eurocentric melting pot into which other cultures were stirred and absorbed. The recent waves of newcomers have changed that. Today it seems more like a street fair, with various booths, foods and peoples, all mixing on common sidewalks.

The new cultural carnival is most apparent in music. The New York-based, Irish-American group Black 47, which mixes rap, reggae and traditional Irish melodies, has appeared on both the Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The Los Angeles rap trio Cypress Hill, which includes an Italian American, a Cuban American and a member who is of Cuban and Mexican descent, released a hit album this year that started out at No. 1 on Billboard magazine's album chart. Latin music has become such a significant force in pop music that MTV recently launched MTV Latino as a separate Spanish-language edition.

Cuban-born Estefan, with her dance-floor blend of R. and B. and Cuban polyrhythms, has established herself as the queen of the new Latin sound. Arriving in Miami from Havana when she was two years old, she grew up in a household immersed in traditional Cuban ballads. By the first grade, she was also listening to British-invasion bands. "It was natural to blend both elements," says Estefan. "When immigrants come to America they bring their culture, and that culture becomes part of a new country. It makes everyone stronger."

Her success helped launch other Latin acts. Cuban-born singer Jon Secada, who co-wrote several of Estefan's best-selling songs, has since recorded his own hits, which combine elements of Cuban music, Top 40 and gospel. Says Secada: "Artists who want to experiment find a way of incorporating the things that are worthy from all types of music, like reggae, salsa and African sounds. And it finds a way onto the charts."

The fashion industry has also felt the impact of newcomers. Immigrants from Asia have brought a clean, elegant new look to clothing design. Among them is Han Feng, who left Hangzhou, China, only eight years ago. Now head of her own design company, she sells easy-to-wear, simply shaped clothes to Bloomingdale's and Saks. "Designers have been looking for a style for the '90s," says Kal Ruttenstein, senior vice president for fashion direction at Bloomingdale's. "The simplified Oriental-inspired look might be a major look."

African clothing, filtered through rap culture, influences fashion as well. The L.A.-based firm Threads for Life (also known as Cross Colours) sells hip- hop fashion inspired by urban youth and African designers, such as overalls with colorful kente-cloth patches. "It becomes not just a pair of jeans, but something that means something," says firm co-owner Carl Jones. Company sales rose from $15 million in 1991 to $89 million in 1992.

The Joy Luck Club, born as a best-selling book, leads a recent surge in popular new movies written or directed by Asians. They include M. Butterfly, written by David Henry Hwang, the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants; the comedy Combination Platter, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Tony Chan; and The Wedding Banquet, a comedy directed by Ang Lee, who moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. Asian-style kickboxing movies have found an eager audience in the U.S. Recently one of Hong Kong's best filmmakers, John Woo, relocated to Los Angeles to direct the action movie Hard Target (which stars Belgian-born martial-arts hero Jean-Claude Van Damme).

These Asian films are already spawning would-be imitators. "When something becomes a commercial success," says novelist Tan, "it automatically opens the door, or at least the possibility, for other similar ventures. Already, in Hollywood, I'm hearing about people saying, 'We think this will be another Joy Luck Club,' about films they want to get produced."

Hispanics in Hollywood, despite barriers, have also met with recent success. Latino actors Andy Garcia and Rosie Perez have become sought-after talents; the movie La Bamba grossed more than $50 million and sent the signal that Latino movies can be moneymakers. "In American society, transmitting culture is done in the marketplace," says Gary Puckrein, editor in chief of American Visions, a magazine that covers culture in the U.S. "You see it in food, fashion, music and art."

Other talented Latinos seek the big break. Actress Marga Gomez's one-woman show, Memory Tricks, which deals with her father, a Cuban comic, and her mother, a Puerto Rican dancer, has been praised for its humor and startling candor. Gomez helped found the Latino comedy group Culture Clash (the troupe has a new series airing on Fox TV, where Gomez has made guest appearances), and she is adapting her show into a screenplay. "I think the essence of my $ work is that I come from some very strong backgrounds -- gay, Cuban, Puerto Rican," says Gomez, "and I don't feel like I don't fit into any one of them."

In the visual arts, cultural outsiders often see what insiders miss. Japanese-born painter Masami Teraoka combines elements of European art and Japanese ukiyo-e wood-block imagery. From his unique perspective, he creates gothic halos around the heads of AIDS patients and condoms in the bedrooms of samurai. In his Harlem neighborhood, Jamaican-American artist Nari Wood collects discarded baby carriages and ties them together with fire hoses, making monuments to loss.

Such outsider viewpoints -- from new Americans and even Native Americans -- can influence others to see the world in a different light. To dramatize how the forces that ravaged the buffalo still exist, Native American sculptor Bob Haozous constructed 100 steel buffalo, then videotaped art-gallery patrons fighting to buy the pieces before they were sold out. Korean-American Nam June Paik, whose influential multimedia artworks incorporate TVs and computers, says he was talking about the information superhighway in his own work long before it became a catchword. And architect Maya Ying Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, designed the black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a stark monument that compels visitors not to revel in the glory of war, but to reflect on its sorrows.

Other artists have turned their sights on the nature of the immigrant experience itself. Choreographer Fagan's touring show Griot New York features sets by noted sculptor Martin Puryear and music by trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. Employing a multiethnic troupe, Griot seeks to capture the drama of immigration. Says Fagan: "It's a celebration of New York City, of West Indians, Indians and Africans, of big urban metropolises that are always being dumped on." Fagan also wrote a poem to illustrate the show's theme of diverse peoples traveling difficult routes to come together in one nation:

Ships Hold/ No Class

Reservations & plantations

concentration . . .

You/me/them/us/brethren/we/be

Celebrate

The celebration was a long time coming. To be an immigrant artist is to be a hyphen away from one's roots, and still a thousand miles away. But it is often that link to a foreign land -- another way of seeing things -- that allows such artists to contribute ideas to American culture that are fresh and new. That slim hyphen, that thin line that joins individual Americans to their past, is also what connects all America to its future.

With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Miami and Georgia Harbison/New York