With WPFW/Pacifica Rado and WBAI - 99.5FM NYC
In the framework of
One Million Roses for Angela Davis - U.S. Edition, we are happy to partner up with WPFW/Pacifica Radio in Washington D.C. and WBAI Radio NYC to present a talk with the curator
Kathleen Reinhardt, artist
Sadie Barnette, and
Dr. Greg Carr, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies 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. Greg Carr 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. Greg Carr is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and Adjunct Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law. The School District of Philadelphia’s First Resident Scholar on Race and Culture (1999-2000), Dr. Carr led a team of academics and educators in the design of the curriculum framework for Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course. These materials are the first to approach African American History using an Africana Studies methodology. He is a co-founder of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement, a community-based academic initiative that has involved over 13,000 elementary, high school, and college students. Dr. Carr has presented his curriculum work for the Board of Public Education in Salvador, Bahia, and has lectured across the U.S. and in Ghana, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, France, and England, among other places. His publications have appeared in, among other places,
The African American Studies Reader,
Socialism and Democracy,
Africana Studies,
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
The National Urban League’s 2012 State of Black America, and
Malcolm X: A Historical Reader.
Justin Hicks is a multidisciplinary artist and performer who uses music and sound to investigate themes of presence, identity, and value.
His work has been featured at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Performance Space New York, The Public Theater, JACK, National Black Theatre, MoMA, Dixon Place, festival Steirischer Herbst (Graz, Austria), Western Front Society (Vancouver, BC), MASS MoCA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, UK), The Highline, The Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts among others.
Hicks has collaborated with notable visual artists, musicians, and theater-makers including Abigail DeVille, Charlotte Brathwaite, Kaneza Schaal, Meshell Ndegeocello, Cauleen Smith, Helga Davis, and Ayesha Jordan. Hicks was the Drama Desk-nominated composer for Mlima’s Tale by Lynn Nottage (The Public Theater 2018 dir. Jo Bonney). His practice with artist Steffani Jemison, Mikrokosmos, has deployed commissioned performances and exhibitions internationally.
Steffani Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine "progress" and its alternatives. Jemison's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions and performance commissions include the Stedelijk Museum, MASS MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, Nottingham Contemporary, LAXART, and the RISD Museum. Collaborative and group presentations include the Whitney Biennial 2019, MCA Chicago, CAC Geneva, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, New Museum, and others. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Kadist Foundation.
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.
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