Part VII: Black Arts Movement: Then and Now CONFERENCE Day 2

10 – 11:30AM
Black Masculinity featuring Felipe Luciano & Brent Hayes Edwards, moderated by Jonathan McCrory

Felipe Luciano, poet, activist, journalist, former member of The Last Poets and founding chairman of the Young Lords Party, and Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, in conversation with moderator Jonathan McCrory, Obie Award-winning, Harlem-based artist and Artistic Director of Dr. Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre, examine the anxiety-ridden discourse of racial authenticity and the articulation of misogyny and homophobia often deployed by the Black Arts Movement in service to a masculinist vision of Black liberation principles and its constitution of “real” Blackness. Delving deeper into the rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement’s most bombastic heteronormative assertions of Black masculinity and its more subtle black female subjugation, the panel interrogates the semiotics of Black authenticity and the Movement’s relationship to a new wave of social activism, thus creating emergent Gay Liberation and Women’s Rights movements.

12 – 1:30PM
Music & Struggle with Angela Davis, Nona Hendryx, & Toshi Reagon

Legendary activist, scholar, and writer Angela Y. Davis joins revolutionary activist and iconic art-rock, new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx (Joe’s Pub Vanguard Award recipient, GRAMMY/Emmy-nominated vocalist, record producer, songwriter, musician, author, and Ambassador of Artistry in Music for Berkelee College of Music) and award-winning singer/songwriter/composer/activist Toshi Reagon (Alpert Award Fellow 2022), to discuss the radical power of music in the lives and work of Black women and music's contribution to the Black Arts Movement from a feminist perspective.

Tackling social issues, love, and politics, these groundbreaking musicians discuss how music influenced their lives and helped them address urgent social issues as well as helped shape their collective modes of political Black consciousness, artistic production, and feminism. From blues, jazz, soul, funk, and R&B to hard rock, new wave, and new age music, they take a critical look at how Black women have historically negotiated intersectionality, feminism, activism, and critical thinking as well as maintained agency against male dominant power structures (including that of the Black Arts Movement), in order to contribute a socially conscious womanist perspective to its to long-lasting legacy. 

1:30PM: Lunch (First Come, First Served)

3 – 4:30PM
In Conversation: Sonia Sanchez & Carl Hancock Rux

Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director/Curator-in-Residence Carl Hancock Rux interviews Sonia Sanchez: distinguished Academy of American Poets multi-award winning poet, playwright, journalist, activist, seminal Black Arts Movement figure, first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, and former Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. Sanchez offers insight into her role as an artist, activist, and educator who became prominent during the Black Arts Movement, raising her voice in the name of Black culture, civil rights, equity, inclusion, women's liberation, and restorative justice.

7:30PM
Henry Threadgill + Craig Taborn + Dafnis Prieto (The Gatehouse)

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill’s music and his many ensembles are always unexpected. In 2014 Harlem Stage presented a marathon retrospective of Threadgill’s music and groups, curated by Jason Moran, entitled “Very Very Threadgill,” which sold out in two days after it was announced. Once a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Threadgill has lived at the cutting-edge of jazz and improvised music his whole career. For the second evening of the Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference, Threadgill brings an explosive trio featuring acclaimed pianist and composer Craig Taborn, and MacArthur Fellow drummer and composer Dafnis Prieto. Harlem Stage Artistic Director and CEO Pat Cruz dubs the trio, “Angels of Angularity”: swinging and oblique, dense and loose. Get your tickets now for a rare and unforgettable evening of music featuring music by each of the composers.

Funded in part by a grant from the New York City Tourism Foundation.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

Inspired, imagined, and curated by Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director/Artist-in-Residence, Carl Hancock Rux, the Black Arts Movement Conference is a three-day event featuring a keynote address by poet, music critic, and arts administrator A.B. Spellman. The conference includes panels, discussions, essays, and performances, featuring pioneers and visionary artists including Angela Davis, Nona Hendryx, Sonia Sanchez, Henry Threadgill, Toshi Reagon, and more, as well as a closing-night concert co-presented with Park Avenue Armory, curated by Carl Hancock Rux, Tavia Nyong’o, and Vernon Reid, with contributions by Carrie Mae Weems, Stefanie Batten Bland, and Dianne Smith.

Employing roundtables, public dialogues, and screenings, the convening will explore controversial areas of tension between the intellectual, ethical, and commercial imperatives of the Black Arts Movement. In conversations between pioneers of the Black Arts Movement and a contemporary generation of artists and scholars, the Black Arts Movement Conference centers itself within a dialogue that is both historically and culturally relevant in our ever-changing world.