Hello from Black Life,
We’ve been busy working towards a sweet summer these past few weeks and we’re thrilled to share a couple of the fruits of our collaborations this month.
First up, are excerpts from a video work from Nan Collymore. She is a mother, an inter-disciplinary artist and an independent scholar. Her recent projects are Founder of L’habillement, Dress I and II, publishing There Are Black People In The Future with Alisha B. Wormsley, Editor of The Black Aesthetic Series III, and Contributing Editor of both Contemporary and, and The September Issues. For more about her work follow here.
Nan’s work is a gilded cloak that you wear, sometimes you’re reading an essay, or hanging a garment, sometimes you’re listening to a conversation. Her work is about the labor of love and the touch and the meaning that we move through when we are posing a question or troubling an idea. She uses her hands to compose thoughts through words/pictures and objects. She believes in magic and the sacred and conjures from the heart. She is often working by re making or re-forming materiality into visual projects or palimpsests to re-frame a conversation on the intricacies of subjectivity.
Click here to read the full piece.
Project you should know about:
Artist As First Responder (AAFR) is a 6-point philanthropic and interactive arts platform that acknowledges, engages, and financially supports Black, Indigenous, and other Artists of Color whose creative practices heal communities and save lives.
Founder Ashara Ekundayo is a Black feminist, independent curator, artist, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces.
Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building.
Her philanthropic platform Artist As First Responder serves as a portal for her recent initiatives The Reflection Fund for Artists and Black [Space] Residency both of which provide a container for imagination, inquiry, activity and rest.
Ashara is also a forum curator at the Museum of The African Diaspora and hosts a monthly online, live, zine called “BLATANT” where she moderates discussions on art, joy and rage. More at Ashara.io
BAMPFA Recommendation:
Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground at BAMPFA
In collaboration with BAMPFA and the Oakland Theater Project, we invite you to watch for the very first time or revisit fo Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground via BAMPFA free of cost from May 28 until July 3. And there’s more, Black Life, as co-sponsors of this program, is also pleased to share a conversation between Seret Scott, whose fantastic performance of Sara Rogers in Losing Ground straddled ennui and ambition, surety and caprice remarkably, and Dawn L. Troupe, the co-director and star of Collins’s Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts for the Oakland Theater Project running from May 28 until July 3 moderated by writer and friend of Black Life Neyat Yohannes.
Finally, we also welcome you to join us for a live conversation on June 1 at 6pm Pacific between Nina Collins, writer, entrepreneur, and manager of Kathleen Collins’s literary estate; Dawn L. Troupe; multidisciplinary artist Eisa Davis, co-director of Begin the Beguine at Performance Space New York; Geetha Ramanathan, professor of comparative literature at Westchester University; and John Wilkins, literary manager, Oakland Theater Project.
You can sign up here for tickets and reminders.
Programs you might’ve missed:
Black Life: Seret Scott, Dawn L. Troupe, and Neyat Yohannes in Conversation
On the occasion of BAMPFA’s presentation of Kathleen Collins’s LOSING GROUND and the Oakland Theater Project’s production of her BEGIN THE BEGUINE: A QUARTET OF ONE ACTS, and in collaboration with BAMPFA’s Black Life series, we have invited writer Neyat Yohannes to speak with actor/directors Seret Scott and Dawn L. Troupe about their work and Collins’s influence.
Black Life: Adrian Octavius Walker
Black Life co-curator Ryanaustin Dennis interviews mixed-media artist Adrian Octavius Walker at Pt. 2 Gallery in Downtown Oakland a day before the opening of the Represented Group Exhibition where Walker will be exhibiting new print work. Thinking about what it means to “get what you need” as an artist during our time, Walker discusses his transition to freelance work, how his creative practice has evolved working in a new photographic form, and how he places himself within the canon of art.
BLACK ART MIXTAPE: #10
1. George Walker: Sonata No. 2 for Piano
2. Apologies to All the People in Lebanon by June Jordan
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.
3. Fred Moten on Palestine, Black solidarity
original source: Fred Moten & Robin D. G. Kelley in conversation