Travel with the “giants” of the Harlem Renaissance

PurposeHarlem Renaissance Party by Faith Ringgold follows a young boy and his uncle as they visit the “giants” of the Harlem Renaissance. Lonnie and Uncle Bates travel through Harlem to meet historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Madam CJ Walker and others. They also visit historical venues where Black artists performed. Such venues included the Cotton Club, the Harlem Opera House and the Schomburg Library.Design/methodology/approachAs students study the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s, they should learn about the causes of the Great Migration that led Black artists to flee from the south to larger cities in the north. In addition, Jim Crow Laws and other discriminatory practices prevented Black artists from performing their crafts. The Harlem Renaissance has had lasting effects on arts, music, literature and dance. In addition, students should use credible sources to gather information and documents about historical events and people.FindingsThese inquiry-based activities also integrate arts education and history to reach diverse student populations as they gain meaningful experiences interacting with authentic documents.Originality/valueAs students study the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s, they should learn about the causes of the Great Migration that led Black artists to flee the south to larger cities in the north. In addition, Jim Crow Laws and other discriminatory practices prevented Black artists from performing their crafts.

CONSELHOS PARA UM JOVEM ARTISTA NEGRO / Advices to a young black artist

Nesse ensaio confessional, a artista afro-americana Howardena Pindell rememora alguns epis�dios de racismo em sua trajet�ria profissional como artista e curadora, al�m de oferecer alguns conselhos profissionais para jovens artistas negros, a fim de escapar de rela��es abusivas de trabalho, golpes e demais�problemas existentes no sistema das artes.Palavras-chave:Ensaio de artista. Sistema das artes. Conselhos.�AbstractIn this confessional essay, the African-American artist Howardena Pindell recalls�some episodes of racism in her professional trajectory as an artist and curator, as well as offering some professional advice to young black artists, in order to escape from abusive work relationships, scams and other problems existing in the arts system.Keywords:Artist essay. Art system. Advice.

Educating from Difference: Perspectives on Black Cultural Art Educators’ Experiences with Culturally Responsive Teaching

Since the 2009 Ontario Ministry’s Equity and Inclusive Education strategy called for the implementation of culturally responsive pedagogy across the board, the voice of the Black creative and content in arts curriculum remains invisible. This primary research centers on the perspectives of African, Caribbean, and Black artists called on for the first time to discuss the successes and challenges of teaching culturally responsive arts in diverse Ontario classrooms. This qualitative study uses critical race theory to examine their experiences of working in Greater Toronto schools and surrounding areas in Ontario, Canada. Using cultural arts from across the African diaspora as a tool, their artistic work is situated within culturally relevant pedagogy, which is an alternative approach to centering on identity, cultural frames of reference, and critical student learning. Yet, as these Black Canadian artists garner successful impacts from culturally responsive teaching in classroom space, they identify simultaneous challenges of institutional unpreparedness, anti-Black racism, cultural appropriation, and legitimizing their cultural artistry to school administration. Semi-structured interviews include rich narratives from artists specializing in contemporary and traditional expressions of orality, visual arts, dance, and drumming/percussion from the African diaspora. While navigating instances of unbelonging, recommendations are proposed to improve the understanding of the artists’ role and improve Canadian educational institutions’ relationship with Black creatives in inclusive education.

“We Don’t Have Those American Problems”: Anti-Black Practices in Canada’s Rap Music Marketplace, 1985–2020

Beginning in the early to mid 1980s, Hip Hop culture appeared on Canadian stages and in homes, even as it was limited in supply on commercial radio and television. Unlike their American counterparts, mainstream Canadian emcees (many of whom were racialized as Black and identified with the city of Toronto) were notably dependent upon personal finances, under-resourced independent record labels, distribution deals, and state and not-for-profit grant monies to subsidize the conceptualization, production, and promotion of their art. Labelled “urban music” in an attempt to spatialize and covertly reference Blackness, Hip Hop in Canada, from the outset, was mapped against, in conflict with, and outside of the national imaginary. While building local scenes, an independent label system, and a cross-Canada college radio, television, and live music infrastructure and audience, Hip Hop artists developed spaces of resistance, circumvented industry-generated obstacles, and defined success on their own terms — all of which suggested that they were not solely at the will of the dominant white music industry. And yet artists simultaneously encountered anti-Black practices that constrained the creation and sustenance of a nationwide Hip Hop infrastructure and denoted an inequitable structuring of support for the arts in Canada. By examining the interface of Blackness, art, and the racial economy of Canada’s creative industries, this article will outline instances of Canada’s anti-Black racism as well as the challenges Hip Hop artists and industry professionals have faced in the areas of recording and label relations, music sales, broadcasting regulations, and the accolade system. These social relations — many of which are rooted in longer histories of race relations and anti-Blackness in Canada — resulted in industry-wide policies, practices, norms, and ideologies that unfairly disadvantaged Black artists and undermined the realization and marketplace potential of a Hip Hop infrastructure within and beyond Canada.

Race, Self-Invention, and Dusty Springfield’s Voice

In the 1960s, Dusty Springfield’s voice earned her frequent comparisons to African American vocalists. This chapter argues that Springfield’s vocal sound reveals how racialized listening processes operate. It shows how the historical reception of Black singers in Britain, assumptions about how white women sounded, and a pop music scene that cultivated excitement through engagement with racial otherness moved listeners to hear her voice in racialized terms. The chapter begins with discussion of how Springfield’s story of vocal transformation has been told by her biographers. Then, it consider two key collaborations between Springfield and Black artists: the “Sound of Motown,” a special episode of the TV program Ready Steady Go!, and her 1969 album, Dusty in Memphis. Although separated only by five years, the two performances in question construct Springfield’s relationship to race and identity much differently, responding, in part, to political, cultural, and musical changes that occurred during the intervening years.

The Artist's Hand

This paper explores the power of portraits and their ability to redefine race and identity in time. In times of exploitation and disregard, black culture has been defined by the lends and hands of others. However, the emergence of black artists is now bringing light to a more personal perspective of their identity and culture. Artists such as Gayl Jones in her book Corregidora, Oneika Russell's new Olympia 7, and John B. Martin's Portrait of James Armistead Lafayette create and redefine a people who tried to be erased. Through these self-portraits, the importance of art and its creator are brought to life.

The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions

This chapter responds to Sara Ahmed’s powerful assertion that ‘to account for racism is to offer a different account of the world’ (Ahmed, 2012). Its premise is that artists of colour have been largely neglected within existing accounts of sound art, and that sound art discourses would change substantially if they accounted for the work of such artists as Terry Adkins, Charles Gaines, Jennie C. Jones, George Lewis, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, and Adrian Piper, among many others. Focusing in particular on the sound works of African American artists, this article investigates what Lock and Murray (2009) have described as a racially biased ‘selective hearing’ in relation to emerging canons of sound art. It puts under pressure sound art histories—purported traditions, genres, aesthetic lineages, genealogies—and, equally, confronts the philosophical and intellectual paucity that has resulted from the lack of critical and scholarly attention to the work of black artists. What is missing from ‘whiteness-imbued histories’ (Lewis, 2012) of sound art? How does selective hearing limit what we know and understand about sound art, and how we come to know it?

Performing while Black: Disrupting Gender and Sexuality from Trinidad to Norway—The Artivism of Thomas Prestø

In this interview, artistic director and choreographer Thomas Prestø speaks with cultural studies scholar Dr. Gladys M. Francis about his personal journey as a hyper visible Black boy growing up in a Norwegian region known as a hub for neo-Nazi groups. Subjected to various forms of torture, Prestø discusses how his experiences shaped his politics of arts when he founded the Tabanka Dance Company to promote “a sustainable Black identity” that converges both Caribbean and African movement esthetics to tell the stories of Blacks in Norway. Prestø presents how his body of work informs Black diaspora studies in terms of art and culture through issues of minority identities, body-memory, body-politics, and political and cultural agency relating to Black performances and cultures in Norway. He discusses principles on “Caribfuturism” and corporealities within what he calls “the uniqueness of the Afropean, the Afro-Scandinavian and the poly-Diasporan.” His insights on the prejudiced mechanisms of representation and segmentation of cultures visible in Norway also convey how his artistic productions offer challenging esthetics and representations of gender and sexuality for performing Brown and Black artists. The following segments were gathered during his 2018 dance fellowship in Dakar, Senegal, my scholar appointment in Norway in 2019, and follow up discussions in spring 2021.

Black Gathering

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

Renegades

Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. It explores why Generation Z—so-called Zoomers—use social media dance apps to connect, how they use them to build relationships, how race and other factors of identity play out through these apps, how social media dance shapes a wider cultural context, and how community is formed in the same way that it might be in a club. These Zoomer artists—namely D1 Nayah, Jalaiah Harmon, TisaKorean, Brooklyn Queen, Kayla Nicole Jones, and Dr. Boffone’s high school students—have become key agents in culture creation and dissemination in the age of social media dance and music. These Black artists are some of today’s most influential content creators, even if they lack widespread name recognition. Their artistic contributions have come to define a generation. And yet, up until this point, the majority of influential Dubsmashers have not been recognized for their influence on US popular culture. This book tells their stories.