Welcome back to Black Life ~ we’re grateful you’ve invited us in. We’re in a reflective mood at Black Life, we being Ryanaustin Dennis and Ruth Gebreyesus, the program’s co-curators currently in different time zones some 9 hours apart.
At the start of the year, when we were both in the Bay Area encountering a novel virus and the equally novel experience of a pandemic, we felt it was time for introspection and preservation. For a couple of months, we stayed low until we found our bearings and set out to program an entirely new sort of Black Life than we had previously imagined. Those new circumstances gave way to this newsletter, a podcast, and three digital programs in collaboration with two artists that were sealed with prints in collaboration with David Wilson and the Art Lab at BAMPFA.
Some many months into this pandemic which continues to affect those whose basic needs and pleasures are least prioritized by social and economic structures, we find ourselves wondering again how to be what we want to be to the Black art community in the Bay Area and beyond. How can we be more a site of care? How can we be a site for more questions, more provocations? As we contemplate these propositions and our positions in them, we offer you the work we were very proud to have produced in this strange year whose strangeness was really a brash revelation of what which always lived just below the superficial surface.
Black Life Podcast Archive
Black Life Newsletter Archive featuring Black Life Mixtapes
newsletter one
newsletter two
newsletter three
newsletter four
newsletter five
Black Life Presents: Claudrena N. Harold’s The Art of Peer Pressure: Black Fire at UVA!
Revisit this guest entry from professor Claudrena N. Harold. Professor Harold’s ongoing work on the history of Black student activism at UVA includes writing, producing and co-directing with Kevin Everson eight short films: Sugarcoated Arsenic, Fastest Man in the State, 70 kg, U. Of Virginia, 1976, How Can We Ever Be Late, Black Bus Stop, Hampton, and We Demand. Her Black Life contribution points to these works. Read it here.
Black Life Presents: Mandy Harris Williams
We had the pleasure of hosting critical pop sensation, thought leader, and artist Mandy Harris Williams in September. Over their residency, Mandy treated the Black Life audience to a digital performance which came complete with a poster to commemorate the event designed by Saish Kotecha. You can keep up with Mandy at @idealblackfemale and on NTS Radio where they host a monthly radio show, The Brown Up Your Feed Radio Hour.
Black Life Presents: Darol Olu Kae
Thank you for those who were able to join us for filmmaker Darol Olu Kae’s duo of events this past month! You can access the archive of Darol’s audio mix on Lower Grand Radio featuring Jamire Williams and Mekela Session along with sounds and stories from the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra here. Darol’s conversation with Black Life co-curator Ruth Gebreyesus which followed his visual mix on Locally Grown’s The Shed, can be found here.
Those of you who signed up for posters from both the events will be getting them in the mail very soon. Many thanks to Justin Sloane who designed the artwork for A Prelude To Keeping Time and Jordan Curry who created the artwork for the visual mix.
Follow along Darol’s work at @darolkae and on his website.