ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

Inspired, imagined, and curated by Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director/Artist-in-Residence, Carl Hancock Rux, the Black Arts Movement: Then and Now 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 Y. 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.

Black Arts Movement: Examined is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

The Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference opens with a Keynote presentation delivered by poet, writer, arts administrator, and activist, A.B. Spellman, who was a college friend of Amiri Baraka and an important member of the Black Arts Movement. His book, Four Lives In The Bebop Business, has been a standard text on jazz since it was published in 1966. Spellman went on to serve as Director of The Expansion Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded arts organizations that were in and of inner-city, rural, and tribal communities; he retired as Deputy Chairman in 2004 to return to poetry. Spellman’s address at Harlem Stage will examine and focus on the Black Arts Movement, its development, and impact on today’s cultural climate and conversations.

Noted poet, essayist, journalist, and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe; David Henderson, writer, poet, acclaimed biographer of Jimi Hendrix, and participant in the Black Arts Movement; and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Margo Crawford, whose scholarship encompasses the Black Arts Movement and exploring new ways of understanding Black radical imaginations, respond to A.B. Spellman’s Black Arts Movement overview, giving further elucidation to the movement’s aesthetic, development, internal and external tensions, and critique of cultural industry. In a response moderated by Harlem Stage Artistic Director and CEO Pat Cruz, the authors also explore the movement’s relationship to the larger Black Power Movement, the AfriCOBRA movement, and Black cultural abstraction as resistance, while offering a fundamental re-evaluation of its complicated relationship with political insurgency and the larger Black community.

Felipe Luciano, poet, activist, journalist, former member of The Last Poets and founding chairman of the Young Lords Party; Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University Professor of English and Comparative Literature; and Lois Elaine Griffith, artist, writer, longtime professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), and one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café, 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.

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 activists 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 a 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 long-lasting legacy. 

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.

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.

In this discussion, Felipe Luciano, poet, activist, journalist, a former member of The Last Poets, and founding chairman of the Young Lords Party; and Lois Elaine Griffith, artist and writer whose work is grounded in her Afro-Caribbean roots, longtime professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), and one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café, explore the Afro-Latinx cross-cultural influence on the intersection of European colonialism and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the complexities of the Afro-Latinx relationship to the Black Arts Movement.

In Collaboration with Maysles Documentary Center

Described by Ingmar Bergman as “the most fascinating film (he) had ever seen in (his) life),” Portrait of Jason is an experimental documentary by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Filmed in one night over 12 consecutive hours on December 2, 1966, in the Chelsea Hotel apartment of its director, the cinema vérité film's sole subject, Jason Holliday né Aaron Payne (b. 1924-1998), is a self-described black cabaret performer, houseboy, and gay sex worker who seamlessly weaves together tales about the highs and lows of his life while becoming increasingly inebriated. What begins as a fascinating and often times hilarious performative documentary results in a heartbreaking portrait of a tortured soul, berated and provoked to despair off-screen with increasing hostility by the film's director and her then partner, actor Carl Lee.  

Portrait of Jason was first screened in 1967 — its audience included Tennessee Williams, Robert Frank, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol, Terry Southern, Elia Kazan, Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee, Rip Torn, and Geraldine Page. Clarke’s film has since been praised as a brilliant experimental documentary about a marginalized subject and a ruthless exploitation of a Black man rarely given a platform to articulate himself in a racist and homophobic world.

Historian Harold Cruse's controversial book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published in 1967, has been praised as a groundbreaking intellectual history of Black radicalism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement, as well as a monument of historical-critical analysis of the Black intellectual tradition and its many schools of critical thought and scholarly perspectives. The work has also been dismissed by some as a flawed and ruthless attack on Black intellectuals, artists, civil rights liberals, Communists, and Black Nationalists (Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, and Lorraine Hansberry, among others) and what he deemed to be their inherently doomed integrationist approach towards American pluralism.

This panel, including writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker, Harmony Holiday; Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Michael Sawyer; and Professor of African American Studies and Theater at UCLA, as well as scholar of African-American theater and writer-director, Dominic Taylor; moderated by Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Margo Crawford, whose scholarship encompasses the Black Arts Movement and exploring new ways of understanding Black radical imaginations; looks at Cruse’s critique of inclusive Black radicalism, then and now, and his prescriptive theorem that Black nationalism should be rooted in a Marxist approach to Black liberation principles.

Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director/Curator-in-Residence Carl Hancock Rux offers closing thoughts at the conclusion of the Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference, reflecting on the conversations held during the convening, the impact of the Black Arts Movement and the seminal role played by Amiri Baraka, and how the Black Arts Movement will continue to influence current and future movements around Black culture and arts.

HAPO NA ZAMANI

Join us at Park Avenue Armory for Hapo Na Zamani (translated from Swahili as “once upon a time”), the star-studded culminating event of Harlem Stage's yearlong Black Arts Movement: Examined series and its Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference. This co-presentation with the Armory is an immersive transmedia installation event, fusing video, vocal performance, sculpture, sound installation, fashion, and movement as a radical reimagining of Black Art and Culture, Past, Present, and Future. Curated by Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director/Curator-in-Residence Carl Hancock Rux, Park Avenue Armory curator Tavia Nyong'o, and GRAMMY Award-winning musician Vernon Reid, with contributions from celebrated artists Carrie Mae Weems, Stefanie Batten Bland, Dianne Smith, Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson, Nona Hendryx, Somi, Wunmi, Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber honoring the musical legacy of Greg Tate, among others, this mega “happening” explores the contribution of Black art and culture in conversation with light, sound, and multimedia.

Day 1 Thu, May 18, 2023

Day 1 Pass: $20 (Keynote + Reception)

Day 2: Fri, May 19, 2023

• Day 2 Pass: $50 (3 Panels + Show)

• Per Panel (3 total): $10 each

• Evening performance only (Henry Threadgill + Craig Taborn + Dafnis Prieto at Gatehouse): $35/$25

• Lunch provided to all attendees on Friday

Day 3: Sat, May 20, 2023

• Day 3 Pass: $25 (3 Panels)

• Per Panel (3 total): $10 each 

• Lunch provided to all attendees on Saturday

• Tickets for the evening performance at Park Avenue Armory must be bought separately*

Day 3: Sat, May 20, 2023, 7:00PM
Performance AT The Armory

A culminating concert curated by Carl Hancock Rux, Tavia Nyong’o, and Vernon Reid, with contributions from Carrie Mae Weems and More!

Evening performance only (Park Avenue Armory): $35* (ticketed by the Armory box office)

3-Day Conference Pass: $75

• Thursday Keynote + Reception

• Friday panels (3) + Evening performance at Gatehouse

• Saturday panels (3) + Discount code to evening performance at Park Avenue Armory

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