Black Life: Newsletter Twenty-Three
A special performance from India Davis and recommendations as usual
welcome back to Black Life ~
thank you to all who joined us for our screening and conversation in collaboration with Nolly Babes at the theatre last month. Next month, we’re returning to the museum for what promises to be a special evening featuring a performance and a film screening. More below along with a digital event recommendation and our mixtape as usual.
India Davis: The Life Cycle of Rainbows
Friday, December 9, 2022
5:30 pm
at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
Join us for an album release celebration and musical performance by vocalist and multidisciplinary artist India Davis, followed by a screening of her film, The Life Cycle of Rainbows. India has been honing her craft as a music producer for the past several years, performing her original songs often interwoven with dance, theatrics, and video projections. Her creative process is guided by an intimate tuning into, and conversation with, ancestry, legacy, power, spirit, intuition, and emotion. Through her work, she seeks to illustrate “the invisible worlds” that shape her lived experience. As a seasoned artist and director, she has a track record of creating elaborate, imaginative large-scale ensemble productions, as well as intimate smaller-scale performances, film, and installations. In her music, she channels her passion for world making, crafting a sound that combines evocative lyrics; layered synths; lush, carefully cultivated vocals; and storylines that often spiral into the mystical.
India’s interdisciplinary art practice of film, dance, acrobatics, music, writing, and storytelling investigates the invisible forces of power, ancestry, and spirit that shape her experience and engages radical imagination as a source for transformation, communion, homecoming, liberation, and survival. Her work as a stage and film director, producer, choreographer, and performer is guided by her passion for world making and her practice of creating and contributing to platforms that uplift Black, queer, and femme voices. She received an MA in artist film and moving image from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2020, and in 2021, she completed her solo international exhibition The Life Cycle of Rainbows at EMBASSY Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland.
BLACK LIFE Recommends Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: A Fiftieth Anniversary Close-Up
Thursday December 8, 2022
4:00 pm (Pacific)
This event will be presented as a Zoom webinar. Register here.
In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, created in 1972 and a highlight of the BAMPFA collection, artists and scholars explore the evolving significance of this iconic work.
Dr. Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Endowed Professor in African American Studies and Chair of the department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will frame and moderate the conversation.
Ra Malika Imhotep, writer, performance artist, and Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at UC Riverside, presents a performance meditating on the legacy of storyteller, cook and activist Nancy Green, hired to embody Aunt Jemima at the 1890 World’s Fair.
Dr. Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, an art historian and curator who has done seminal work on Betye Sarr, addresses The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in terms of the assemblage medium and what is missing from its characterization as a black-Black mammy.
Anjuli Lebowitz, Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Photography at the Portland Museum of Art, considers the influence of Betye Saar throughout photographic production from the 1970s forward.
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE #19: I’m Pretty, But Gorgeous If I Spruce It Up (#fyp)
i. Khae Not Bae on confidence
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ii. Sage the Haus on time’s passing
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iii. HoneyChante on the wrong kind of affirmation
Until next time, take good care ~
Ruth & Ryanaustin