FILM FESTIVAL: "Real to Reel: Documenting Empowerment, Equality, Inclusion" (The Ross Theater, Lincoln, NE, April 16-20, 2009 - FREE/open to public)

The African and African American Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is sponsoring our second "Blacks In Film Festival" in mid-April. This time around we are focusing on documentary films and asking some broad questions...

• How has documentary film been used to tell meaningful stories about black people in Africa and the United States?  What is the process of putting these stories together on film?  What makes a compelling documentary film?  

•  What kinds of (intellectual, cultural, social, etc.) spaces do these films open up for audiences to consider race relations and black experience in new or meaningful ways?

• Can documentary film play a role in political struggle?  Can documentary film be a "weapon of the oppressed," an agent of change?  If so, how? If not, why not?

• And does the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject matter in documentary films matter?  Explain.

Here is the poster for the film festival (click image to enlarge)

Here are the films we are screening at The Ross FREE and open to the public...

-  "What We Want, What We Believe... the Black Panthers" (on the Black Panther Party)

-  "Mo & Me" (filmmakers exploration of his father's - Mo Amin - life)

-  "God Grew Tired of Us" (on Sudan's "Lost Boys")

-  "Wattstax" (the 1973 "Black Woodstock" concert in Los Angeles, featuring Staxx Records musicians and Richard Pryor interludes)

-  "When We Were Kings" (on famed "Rumble in the Jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire)

-  "Amandla:  A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony" (on role of music in South African freedom movement)

-  "Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes" (on sexism and homophobia in hip hop)

-  "Hip Hop Colony" (on hip hop in Africa)

For full film festival information (including brief bios of our two keynote filmmakers, a detailed schedule of all events, and synopses of each film) click here.

Please spread the word...

Writing Art

The Sheldon Museum of Art, which sits on UNL's campus, recently acquired 7 or 8 new pieces by well-known African American artists like Aaron Douglas, Charles White, Lois Mailou Jones and others. The director of the museum asked me to write two short entries for a catalog they are doing on the new work. Here are the works and the words I came up with:

• Charles White, "Frederick Douglass Lives Again (The Ghost of Frederick Douglass)"; pen & ink (1949):

Charles White was born in 1918 on the south side of Chicago, at the epicenter of the “great migration.” White’s maternal grandfather was a slave in Mississippi, his father a rail, steel and construction worker and his mother a domestic. Throughout his career, White’s art consistently emphasized the contributions of working-class African Americans and heroicized their struggles for freedom and equality.

From a young age, White displayed artistic talent and a voracious reading appetite. He was particularly influenced by Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology, The New Negro, which encouraged a younger generation of self-confident and politically aware African American artists to redefine blackness and push for racial change. The onslaught of the Great Depression furthered White’s commitment to social realism and politically relevant art.

During the 1930s, White became interested in the controversial murals of Diego Rivera. "I found a strong affinity in terms of my goals as an artist and what [Mexican muralists like Rivera] represented," White later recalled. Like many artists and writers of his generation, White worked for the Works Progress Administration and, in 1940, was commissioned to create a large mural celebrating the black press. The following year, White toured the American South, an experience he credited with pushing “racial forms and subjects” to the “foreground” in his work. After a series of health challenges and a divorce from sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett, White settled in New York City, where he participated in the city’s thriving black intellectual community, showed his work with other socially conscious artists and published in progressive and left periodicals.

In 1949, White completed “Frederick Douglass Lives Again (the Ghost of Frederick Douglass),” one of a number of powerfully expressive pen and ink drawings from this period that depict black experience under Jim Crow and the burgeoning post-war civil rights movement. The work emphasizes the inter-generational nature of the struggle for racial justice and testifies to both the strength and suffering of black Americans, what one critic called “the throbbing emotion of Negro spirituals.”

• Aaron Douglas, "Emperor Jones" series; woodcut print on Japanese paper (1929)

"Flight"

"Surrender"

"Defiance"

"Bravado"

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) is the best-known visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1899, Douglas was nurtured by a strong, progressive black community and influenced early by the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner. Like thousands of other African Americans, Douglas migrated North, graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922 and then moving to Harlem in 1924, where he studied under German-born artist, Winold Reiss. Douglas’s work included paintings, illustrations and murals and combined elements of West African and Egyptian art, impressionism, cubism, art deco, and Mexican muralism into a unique visual style rooted in race pride. “I refuse to compromise,” he explained, “and see blacks as anything less than a proud majestic people.”

While Douglas is most famous for a series of large murals he completed during the depression-era, he first gained notoriety as an illustrator during the 1920s. Throughout the renaissance period, Douglas designed covers and illustrations for The Crisis (NAACP) and Opportunity (Urban League), as well as for literary works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. In 1925, Alain Locke hired Douglas to illustrate his groundbreaking anthology, The New Negro. The following year, Douglass, Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman and Bruce Nugent published FIRE!!, a controversial magazine that featured poems, stories and illustrations on jazz, blues, poverty, religion, prostitution and homosexuality. Embracing the ideology of the “New Negro,” Douglas strove to create an African American aesthetic that was both political and spiritual. “Let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected,” he wrote. “Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic."

In 1926, Theater Arts Monthly commissioned Douglas to illustrate scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s racially charged play, “Emperor Jones.” The play helped launch the career of Paul Robeson and is credited as the first Broadway show to feature a racially integrated cast and black lead. The hard, flat contrasts of these energetic, monochromatic woodcuts, the repetitive use of geometric forms and the assertive, assured tone are typical of Douglas’s print work.

Nebraskans for Peace - Lincoln: The Revival

Another brilliant poster by Justin Kemerling...
(click poster to enlarge)

☮ Demonstrating for Peace in Lincoln ☮

About 200 people came out this morning for a peace march and demonstration in the mall by the state capitol. It was a tough sell today, in part, because the Husker football team is playing #1 ranked USC tonight. Thousands of people have poured into our city to be a part of the "game of the week." Will Ferrell, Keanu Reeves, Rush Limbaugh and Larry the Cable Guy are all in the house to see the game. As we walked through the city with our banners and signs, chanting slogans of peace and justice, one football fan, decked out in red from head to toe shouted, "This is a football day. Nobody cares about that stuff." Sadly, that about sums it up...




Here are some shots I took (click any photo to enlarge):

"Die-In" at UNL

Yesterday, about 15-20 people participated in a symbolic "die-in" on the University of Nebraska campus to dramatize the human toll of the war in Iraq and challenge the link between Iraq and 9/11. Most of the folks were members of the Lincoln Coalition for Peace. A few local media outlets turned out to film the protest and a couple dozen students milled around commenting on the scene. In a moment of candor, one pro-war student blurted out to Sarah McCammon, our friendly NPR reporter, something to the effect: "We're going to need their oil sooner or later anyhow, so we might as well go in now and take it." Well, at least she is straight-up about it...

Members of the UNL chapter of Nebraskans for Peace plan a similar, but larger, protest before the much-hyped primetime USC-Nebraska football game here in Lincoln this Saturday night. ESPN will even be in town...

This event was also a precursor to a city-wide rally/protest to be held earlier on Saturday in conjunction with the national day of action. The demonstration begins at 11am in front of the Federal Building in downtown Lincoln and will feature music by RC Dub, our favorite local reggae band! (RC Dub website)

Here are some photos I took at the "die-in" (click any photo to enlarge):

Jake Gillespie

This is Jake Gillespie standing in front of one of his canvases. Jake is a friend here in Lincoln who is also a really great artist. He has had shows in Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago and Lincoln.

Below I've posted a few examples of Jake's work from 2003-2007. Recently, he has been doing video and animation work, in addition to painting. Jake is one of the co-founders of "Tugboat Gallery" in Lincoln, which focuses on younger and emerging artists.

These canvases, done at the beginning of this period, are much more abstract than Jake's later work:








A lot of Jake's work comments on or references popular culture and mass media...






This is a drawing from one of Jake's animated shorts...


Here is a more recent painting, "Alphabet 2, torture and interrogation"...


This one hangs on my wall...


For more information and many more examples of Jake's work, go here...
Jake Gillespie website