This weekend, I was thumbing through ‘Three Pieces’ by Ntozake Shange and decided to focus on a play I have been half-halfheartedly reading for the past couple of months– “a photograph: lovers in motion.” This post is not meant to be a full grasp of the work, but simply a meditation on some of the themes that have resonated with me as a student in this class.
At its core, the work tackles what it means to make art, what it means to survive, and the intersections of these processes. The lives, love, and art of Sean, Michael, Nevada, Earl, and Claire intermingle in this play set in San Francisco, California in presumably the late 1970s. Sean, a budding and brooding photographer and artists, is at the heart of the love and the art in this piece. He’s fawned over by strong, beautiful, floating, dancing black women Michael, Nevada, and Claire. Read More
I really enjoyed this short multi-media piece from filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris. The story blends audio, photography and text, creating an innovative, reflective experience of an otherwise dated image. Read More
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My archive find is from Pacifica Radio Archives. Joan Thornell interviews Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis for her “Another Perspective” series about the development of black music. Shange and Davis talk about Stevie Wonder, jazz, the differences between poetry and music and how each exists within a gendered space. The interview was produced at WPFW, Washington, DC in 1977. Read More
Kabul Portraits is an interactive multimedia website that serves to spotlight Afghan cultural producers. The brainchild of Ariel Nasr and Jeremy Mendes, the Kabul Portraits project takes viewers on a photographic and audio journey to tell abbreviated stories about six artists from Kabul, Afghanistan. Read More
In 2005, The New-York Historical Society created an exhibit called Slavery in New York. The exhibit existed on site at the museum for a period of time, but an online version of the exhibit was also created to last permanently on their website.
The online exhibit was created based off of a physical exhibit at therefore its elements seem to be a re-imagination of what the physical exhibit looked like. I am sure this affected the feel of the exhibit because it was not originally created for an online platform. Our projects differ because our platform is solely digital and has framed how we think about the telling of our individual stories.
This semester, I’ve been a frequent commuter for work, and have often felt myself at a loss for focus, struggling to let go of frenzied thoughts between where I’ve been and where I’m going. Spying Shange’s poem, “What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?,” as a part of the MTA’s Arts for Transit collection hit me like a wave of present. It, quite literally, ‘stopped me in my tracks.’ Seeing, reading and experiencing the poem in transit reminded me of the beauty in mundane rituals, like travel and movement. To me, the poem seems to celebrate leaning in to the challenge of letting go of haphazard thoughts and committing to the experience and gestures of the present moment. Read More
While talking to Professor Glover in my vision for my digital project, she gave me the term “interactive poetry book” as a descriptor. This helped me to conceptualize a digital space that pairs image and poetry in the same way that The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Sweet Breath of Life does.
I did some browsing on the internet for sites that replicate the kind of effect I would like my digital space to have and I came across http://whiteboard.is/work/. I think this site works because it is user friendly and the transitions between images as I scroll are very smooth. Read More
I’ve been getting very caught up in so much academic jargon, so for my archive task I wanted to go back to the original roots of my interest — Shange herself.
I had seen this journal entry earlier last fall, but at that point I quickly moved on because I was searching for a piece of Shange within the archive that resonated with my project. Stumbling upon this journal entry again reminds me that within all our projects and all our research the chief task we carry is to fulfill the occupation of storyteller. We must weave together distant echoes, pure evidence, slang from generations back, and art from magazines present to create a narrative we can visually depict. Read More
From the Schomburg archives, I was able to find a letter addressed to Alexis De Veaux from Ellen Jaffe. And in that letter, there were two photos of De Veaux and two other women in front of the home of Harriet Tubman’s home. The letter is very beautiful and there is sense of familiarity as well as formality as to jaffe addresses De Veaux. The heading of the letter has tells DeVeauz the constitution of the letter and a poem at end. The letter speaks of Jaffe’s encounter with the waitress who was a bit discouraged about her writing. As well as a “pantoum” The verses are potent and are reflective of the process of self care, self-acceptance and growth. Read More