Part VII: Black Arts Movement: Then and Now CONFERENCE Day 1

5 – 5:20PM
Keynote Address: A.B. Spellman

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.

5:30PM
In Response featuring Quincy Troupe & David Henderson, moderated by Pat Cruz

Noted poet, essayist, journalist, and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe, and David Henderson, writer, poet, acclaimed biographer of Jimi Hendrix, and participant in the Black Arts Movement, 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.

6PM
Q&A / Open Discussion

7PM
Reception

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, Stew, 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.