[Image via Facebook]
Update: A gathering to remember Steve Cannon and collectively mourn his loss is set for Sunday, July 14 at the Bowery Poetry Club from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Steve Cannon, a local cultural icon who founded the East Village-based A Gathering of the Tribes, died this past weekend. He was 84. A cause of death was not immediately known.
Cannon, who was born in New Orleans in 1935, had been recovering at the VillageCare Rehabilitation and Nursing Center on West Houston Street for a broken hip, according to The Villager.
In 1991, Cannon founded A Gathering Of The Tribes as an arts and cultural organization "dedicated to excellence in the arts from a diverse perspective." It started as a print magazine at the time that he lost his eyesight to glaucoma. Through the years, A Gathering of the Tribes evolved into a salon of sorts in Cannon's East Third Street apartment for artists to meet and exchange ideas.
As The New York Times Style Magazine described it in a February 2018 feature: "It was a living monument to Lower Manhattan’s lineage of multicultural artists and thinkers — people who often get overlooked in favor of narratives of and by successive generations of self-destructing, gentrifying white bohemians — but it was also an all-hours open house, where all were welcome (even the gentrifying white bohemians) and an essential site of Lower Manhattan’s last gasp as the center of the avant-garde."
Here's more on Cannon from that Times piece:
Cannon ... came to New York in 1962, and even before he founded Tribes, he played such a role in New York’s counterculture that he has become a kind of oracular figure to those who have encountered him. In the early ’60s, he convened informal discussions about music and literature with writers like [writer David] Henderson and [his friend Ishmael] Reed and other members of Umbra.
In the 1970s, Cannon ran a publishing house with Reed and the poet Joe Johnson that was one of the first independent presses to focus on multicultural literature. The painter Gerald Jackson once saved him from drowning in the Hudson River. Sun Ra used to seek him out to tell stories about flying around in space. (“If he says he flew into space, then I guess he flew into space,” Cannon says.) He helped integrate the public university school system in New York by becoming an early faculty member at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, where he taught humanities. The composer Butch Morris refined his ideas of improvised music in his living room.
After a lengthy legal battle with his landlord, Cannon moved out of his longtime Third Street home in 2014, relocating to East Sixth Street.
Cannon's friends and followers have been leaving tributes these past 48 hours...
We'll update the post when more details are available, including news of a memorial.
Previously on EV Grieve:
Musical interludes: Steve Cannon plays piano at Tribes Gallery
A Gathering of Tribes faces an uncertain future on East Third Street
RIP, sweet man :(
ReplyDeleteI am very sorry to see your report that Steve Cannon has passed on. For years I saw him usually multiple times a week and during those times friends of mine lived above him and below him. I went to hundreds of art shows, poetry readings and parties in his apartment and in the back yard. Damn.. he was a certified icon old skool East Village shaman and his sense of humor was unforgettable. The good ones are all moving on and Steve will be missed by many.
ReplyDeletea dear dear friend from way back when in the arts & beyond.
ReplyDeleteLennox Raphael, Copenhagen
Lennox Raphael said ...
ReplyDeleteSteve was a dear friend of mine from way back when in the arts & beyond. We participated also in the UMBRA Workshop; and Steve & I, were 2 of 3 persons, the other being Walter Thompson, who interviewed Ralph Ellison, published in 1965 as a Harper's cover story. Lennox