Hi folks,
We’re thrilled to return to you this month with recommendations from BAMPFA where things are blooming. Thank you for all those who were able to join us for the Souleymane Cissé series. We’ll be announcing a new slate of Black Life programming for the summer season and until then, we welcome you to please do enjoy these recommendations from the theaters and galleries at the museum.
Black Life Recommends~
Neptune Frost
Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams
Rwanda, United States, 2021Wednesday, Apr 27, 2022
7 PM (105 mins)
BAMPFAReplete with mind-altering visual and sonic imagery, this Afrofuturist mélange of music, poetry, and resistance is hypnotic and visionary. Set in Rwanda, the film depicts a genderqueer community of hackers and techno poets. Though plot is secondary to style and rhythm, there is a young man named Matalusa who mines coltan, an essential ingredient of cell phones. He meets Neptune, a messianic figure able to change genders. Other characters offer bits of wisdom or a simple invitation to put on headphones and join their dance. As one of them observes, “The war forced us into other dimensions,” and Neptune Frost brings a few of those dimensions to vivid life, carving out a bold new vision for Black cinema as it does so.
The Artist’s Eye
Curated by established Bay Area artists Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, and John Zurier, this exhibition centers the artistic vision of each artist and engages the space where the artist—as curator, collector, and maker—meets the museum. For The Artist’s Eye, each artist was invited to organize a section of the exhibition, using artworks and archival material from BAMPFA’s collection, as well as select works from their own collections, that range across diverse media, approaches to making, and historical time periods. On May 1, David Huffman will lead a gallery talk at the museum and on May 22, Lava Thomas will speak about her selections for this exhibit.
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE #15 - She Came This Way Not An Hour Ago
In the mid-1960s, Lee composed music for the “sound-poetry” of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, among others, first at the Open Theater in Berkeley, California, as part of a multi-disciplinary company of artists, then in concert at Town Hall in New York. Lee was invited by John Cage to be one of four vocal soloists in his bicentennial work Renga and Apartment Building 1776, which she performed with several major American and European orchestras. —Newmusic USA
“Widely praised as an heir to Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln, she seemed destined to follow in their footsteps. But Lee didn’t see herself as strictly a jazz singer, or even merely as a singer. She came to think of herself as a “voice environmentalist,” and gravitated to the most adventurous musical environments, from the Fluxus movement to the free-jazz avant-garde, which recognized her not simply as a kindred spirit but as an environment in her own right. Lee fearlessly explored the continent of her own voice—vocalise, breathing, sighs, cries and whispers, giggles and laughter, even saliva—and revealed a new, enchanting, and profoundly corporeal world of sound. “Her body is song,” the playwright and poet Ntozake Shange wrote of her. “We got a woman among us who isn’t afraid of the sound of her own voice.”” — An Invitation from Jeanne Lee