Radio Talk & Listening Session
One Million Roses - Radio Talk & Listening Session

With WPFW DC and WBAI NYC/Pacifica Radio

04/23/21
4:30pm EDT
Online

In the framework of One Million Roses for Angela Davis - U.S. Edition, we are happy to partner up with WPFW DC and WBAI NYC/Pacifica Radio to present a talk with the curator Kathleen Reinhardt, artist Sadie Barnette, and Dr. Clarence Lusane, Director of the International Affairs Program, and former Chair of the Political Science Department at Howard University, followed by a listening session with Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos). This talk and listening session are part of a day-long sonic celebration called Liberated Mind: A Lovesong for Angela Davis, airing from noon to midnight. 
 
The talk will focus on Davis's global influence across fields. Kathleen Reinhardt will be illuminating Angela Davis' relationship with Eastern Germany and taking a closer look at her influence on a younger generation of artists whose works are exhibited in Dresden, and Dr. Clarence Lusane will contextualize Davis's influence from an academic viewpoint in the US. Sadie Barnette will discuss Davis's influence on her multimedia artistic practice, which illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The connections between Davis and her family history are clear in her work DEAR 1968,...., a reclamation of a 500-page FBI surveillance file amassed on her father during his time with the Black Panther Party and her interactive reimagining of his bar — San Francisco's first Black-owned gay bar.
 
The following listening session by Mikrokosmos (Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks) will be based on their object and sound work One Giant Step, an experimental opera, that was performed at Albertinum SKD in December 2020. As the artists state, "Mikrokosmos, like all black music, is a form of speculation. It is “study without end” (Moten and Harney, 2015); blackness is its subject. Anti-languages and alternative literacies have persisted in the African American community since slavery, and Mikrokosmos embraces the spirit of these radical approaches to language and learning. With our collaborators, we derive new proposals for understanding and teaching pitch and rhythm from the black vernacular songbook."
 
Audience participation is encouraged and the event will be followed by a Q&A.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA, and holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in France. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Oakland Museum of California; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She lives and works in Oakland, CA, and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.

Dr. Clarence Lusane is a Professor, Director of the International Affairs Program, and former Chair of the Political Science Department at Howard University. He is an activist and scholar, and a well-respected expert in the areas of human rights, African American politics, global race relations, U.S. elections, and international relations.  He has lectured on these topics in over 70 countries including China, Colombia, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Haiti, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, Russia, Rwanda, S. Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe among others. He is a former Commissioner on the D.C. Commission on African American Affairs. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and eight books on human rights, U.S. and black politics, globalization, and European history. Dr. Lusane’s last book is The Black History of the White House. The book led to two presentations at the White House during the Obama presidency. His next book, $20 and Change: Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson, and the Struggle for a Radical Democracy, is scheduled for release in 2021.

Justin Hicks is a Drama Desk-nominated composer, sound artist, and vocalist who has collaborated with theater makers, musicians, and visual artists such as Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Meshell Ndegeocello, Courtney Bryan, Hilton Als, Cauleen Smith, Breck Omar Brunson, Charlotte Brathwaite, Janani Balasubramanian, Sunder Ganglani, and Lee Mingwei. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Performance Space New York, The Bushwick Starr, Jack, Paisley Park, The Whitney Museum of American Art, BRIC Arts Media House, and The Kennedy Center among others.  Along with his wife Kenita Miller-Hicks and sister Jade Hicks he is a founding member of the group The HawtPlates whose visual EP "Make me Down: Songs For Making It Through Alive" was commissioned by The Public Theater. He was a member of Kara Walker’s 6-8 Months Space and holds a culinary diploma from The Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. 

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkeley, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at LAXART, Los Angeles (2013); RISD Museum, Providence (2015); the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2015); Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA (2016); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2017); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); and the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati (2021), among others. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Since 2016, Jemison has been a part of the musical collaborative Mikrokosmos with Justin Hicks.

Kathleen Reinhardt is an art and cultural historian and, since 2016, curator of contemporary art at the Albertinum in Dresden where she has curated the exhibitions Marlene Dumas: Skulls, Slavs and Tatars: Made in Dschermany, For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz and Demonstration Rooms: Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, Judy Radul (co-curated with Isabelle Busch). She received her doctorate from the Arts of Africa department of the Freie Universität Berlin in 2017 with a dissertation on contemporary African American art, for which she received a scholarship from the Fulbright Commission as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has taught at Freie Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Dresden. Her writing has appeared in art catalogs as well as the magazines African Arts, Art Margins, Contemporary And, and Kaleidoscope, among other publications.

In Partnership with WPFW DC und WBAI NYC/Pacifica Radio.