We are thrilled to announce that we’re hosting multidisciplinary artist Sasha Kelley as a Black Life resident this summer. In her artistic practice Kelley uses photography, place making & social practice to examine the topics of Black identity, the creative practice of women of color, cooperative communities and divine archetypes. Kelley understands her creative practice as a tool to connect her personal, social and political experiences with that of the larger collective. She produces Club Proxii, an immersive music and interview show streaming out of Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio. For her residency with Black Life, Kelley will be presenting digital and physical articulations of Club Proxii’s community through artwork, film clippings and sounds across Black Life’s digital and physical channels and spaces.
During her summer as a Black Life resident, Kelley: asks how can a contemporary archive be experienced and felt?
As a social practice practitioner, Sasha Kelley (she/they), has a history of building & bridging communities to produce works centered in political, spiritual & communal care. Kelley is the cofounder of Malidoma Collective & The House of Malico, two groups centered in the cultivating the brilliance within black/brown/femme/&queer creatives through public programming. Sasha Kelley has exhibited at Siete Potencias Gallery, Krowswork and Somarts. Her work is featured in the permanent collection at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Kelley has been published in the Fader, Umber Magazine and Black Futures by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham.
Starting today, Friday June 3, 2022, Kelley will be taking over BAMPFA’s instagram account for digital missives as part of her residency. You can tune here. She’ll also reach your inboxes to contemplate and present contemporary archives via this very newsletter later this month, as well as in July and August.
On the afternoon of Saturday August 27, we welcome you to join us for this residency’s in-person presentation including a screening and a discussion with Kelley at the museum from 12pm until 4pm. Mark your calendars and we’ll remind you again of this date in upcoming newsletters.
Until then, you can get a taste of Kelley’s digital archiving practice via her instagram @on.mommas and her blooming garden of a website featuring vlogs, music videos and episodes of Club Proxii.
One More Thing…
Next month, Black Life is excited to introduce a new 35mm restoration of Charles Burnett’s iconic film Killer of Sheep screening at the museum as a part of Indelible Moments: May I Have This Dance, a series curated by former director of the Pacific Film Archive Edith Kramer. We’ll be glad to see you at the theater on Thursday July 7, at 7pm.
If you’d like to join us for this screening but cannot because of the prohibitive cost of tickets (among other things in the Bay Area), please do write us at blackblacklifelife@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to accommodate you!
“A great—the greatest—cinematic tone poem of American urban life” (David Edelstein, New York Magazine), Burnett’s Killer of Sheep evokes the everyday trials, fragile pleasures, and tenacious humor of blue-collar African Americans in 1970s Watts. Burnett made the film on a minuscule budget, with a mostly nonprofessional cast, combining keen on-the-street observation with a carefully crafted script. The episodic plot centers on the character of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker mired in exhaustion and disconnected from his wife, his children, and himself. Stan and his neighbors struggle just to get by, let alone get ahead; as befits a Los Angeles movie, vehicular metaphors of breakdown abound. Only the kids, leaping from roof to roof, seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders. “More than anything, Burnett grasps the task of the director as one of inventing surprising, eloquent, forceful gestures—which is why the slow-dance scene between the bare-chested but strangely alienated Stan and his wife, trembling with amorous emotion, is the single most-recalled moment from Killer of Sheep, or indeed Burnett’s entire, prodigious, multi-faceted career to date” (Adrian Martin). —Juliet Clark
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE #16 - No Mama, We Don’t Slay. It’s Just 100% Pure Cunt.
This is what we call LEGENDARY.
This is what we call ICONIC.
This is what we call PERFORMANCE.
Take good care.