by Sandy | May 2, 2009 | Arts, Entertainment and Music, Creativity, Culture, Dancers, Events, music
Summer is almost here – time to make plans.
Atlanta is hosting its National Black Arts Festival again this year. Starting 7/29, music, dance, film, theater, poetry, literature – the Conga Kings, “Growing the Dream” at the Children’s Education Village, “Brazilian Cool” Gala – all presented courtesy of the NBAF. Their aim is to celebrate the vibrant life and art of people of color.
NBAF *Atlanta
July 29 – August 2, 2009
Woodruff Arts Center * Atlanta
1280 Peachtree St., NE, Atlanta, GA
“The mission of NBAF is to engage, cultivate and educate diverse audiences about the arts and culture of the African Diaspora and provide opportunities for artistic and creative expression.”
by Sandy | Apr 23, 2009 | Arts, Entertainment and Music, Creativity, Culture, Theater, Writers
Brooklyn playwright Lynn Nottage has won the 2009 Drama Pulitzer Prize for “Ruined” – a powerful play set in the African Congo at the height of its civil war. It follows the plight of a group of women amidst the brutality and the chaos – a celebration of endurance.
Ruined – Manhattan Theater Club, 131 West 55th Street, NYC
Other plays by Ms Nottage:
Crumbs from the Table of Joy
Mud, River, Stone
Poof
Por’Knockers
Las Meninas
Fabulation
Intimate Apparel
Ruined
by Bob Martin | Apr 20, 2009 | Art, Culture, Film, Movies
Recently it had been suggested that HBO was off it’s game once the Sopranos and the Wire finished there runs. And yes it took some time to come up with a series that satisfied my taste, but The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency has been well worth the wait. The series is adapted from the books of Alexander McCall Smith, about the adventures of Mma Ramotswe
Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe
Botswana’s only female private investigator. The story lines avoid the high tech and sci fi babble of CSI or Numbers, rather the deduction work done by Precious Ramotswe reminds me more of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. No special effects and gun battles, just good old common sense.
Anika Noni Rose as Grace Makutsi
The charm of the series is how cleverly the complicity of Africa and Africans are revealed in each episode. How Beautiful the land, the people and their customs are, while still exploring and exposing some of the problems that much of the continent still needs to overcome, like Aids, Poverty and Education.
The cast and the stories are delightful, with plenty of humor and information about a culture many of us know little about. This a wonderful hour well spent.
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Art can be such a history lesson sometimes. So often it represents what is most important to a people during specific periods of their time.
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by Sandy | Mar 23, 2009 | Blogroll, Books, Culture
Zora Neale Hurston, 1891 – 1960, started to publish right after the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The ability to support oneself with art that explored the African-American experience waned with the onset of the depression and she fell into obscurity until re discovered by Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”).
Her work gained attention with the introduction of college Black literature classes during the 70”s. She was found and embraced by a whole new generation (including me). Her novels, short stories and poetry are now also taught in women’s studies and general literature courses.
She studied cultural anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. As a “folklorist”, she wrote and sang in the rural style and dialect of the people she remembered from the all black town of Eaton, FL where she was born and of the folks she met while traveling across the south.
Perhaps her most famous book, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, 1937, is about “Janie”, who managed to make her way thru life and find love during a time and in a place very difficult for a woman’s survival. (The was made into a TV movie a few years ago with Halle Berry)
Zora Neale Hurston – Great story teller!
Bibliography (from Wikipedia)
- Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine
- Sweat (1926)
- How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
- The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
- Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
- Mules and Men (1935)
- Tell My Horse (1937)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
- Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
- Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
- I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
- Sanctified Church (1981)
- Spunk: Selected Stories (1985)
- Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play, with Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
- The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (1995)
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by Sandy | Mar 16, 2009 | Blogroll, Culture, Exhibits, Photograhy
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits”, April 4 – June 14 *The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco presents an exhibit of 70 prints which “explores photography’s role in shaping public identity and individual concepts of race and socioeconomic status over the past 150 years.”
Represented are those men and women who have “resisted” in assorted ways, from activist Angela Davis to singer Jessye Norman, from labor leader A. Philip Randolph to boxer Joe Louis.
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits”
MoAD – The Museum of the African Diaspora, 4/4 – 6/14/09
685 Mission Street San Francisco, CA
“Let your Motto be resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No opposed people have ever secured Liberty without resistance” – abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, 1843
Images: Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963
