FACING THE BAND: ELISSA BLOUNT MOORHEAD AND THE (ANA)ARCHITECTURES OF COMMUNITY TIES (2019-20)
Introduction | About the Artist | liquid blackness in Conversation with EBM | Research Project | Facing the Band Event (2020)
Introduction
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an award-winning artist, curator, writer, and producer, who explores “the poetics of quotidian Black life” by looking at the vestiges of private lived experiences. She creates artifacts that counter cultural erasure and “emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building.”
Research Project
Blount Moorhead is committed to collaborative creative processes that implement an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist view of filmmaking, and are instead propelled by what she describes as a “feminine energy.” As partner in the production company, TNEG, alongside Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed, her goal has been to capture the intensities of black lives, the rhythms of lineages of knowledge and self-determination, as they are passed on and passed through, and in this way, effect the very evolution of cinema.
While she is involved in projects ranging from public events, gallery exhibits, screenings, and educational programs, Blount Moorhead centers community and activism across all her works. In channeling her focus towards the projects and people involved, Blount Moorhead fashions her stance and groundedness after the position Miles Davis assumed when, playing with his back to the audience, he “faced his band,” instead. In her chapter “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” for How we Fight White Supremacy, she interprets Miles’s stance as “Don’t look over your shoulder. Let the world come find you—you don’t have to go to it. When they do find you, be totally into and enjoying your own bag.” She writes, “I’ve had a few bags throughout my life—career, crews, cities—but the bag for which I have always had an unwavering love is Blackness. I never tire of pondering who we are and what we do.” That is, rather than focusing on audience expectations or demands, she turns her attention towards the people and processes of creation that are central to her community, the lineages that have produced her, as well as lineages “to come.” Conceptually “facing the band” allows Blount Moorhead to emphasize process over product, personal relations over commercial outcomes, and select people and ideas based on what needs attention in each moment. As she has stated, “we… don’t want to be producers of masterpieces, but producers of conversation pieces.” (Creative Time Summit, “A Case for Nonsense, 2016) In extrapolating “facing the band” from its more literal context, then, Blount Moorhead explores forms of “curation” that transcend their traditional sense and refer instead to a more careful gathering of people, communities, and ideas, around the making of art.
liquid blackness has also lifted the term “anarchitecture” from the artist’s description of a recent project, As of A Now, an x-ray film projection showing now vacant row houses in Baltimore full of the audiovisual stories of their former Black denizens, using oral histories and augmented reality (“As of a Now,” Creative Capital). Derived from Gordon Matta-Clark’s radical practice, Blount Moorhead deploys the idea of anarchitecture both as a way of upending the prescribed functionality of architectural structures and to think of buildings as connective tissues, capable of acting as repositories of lived histories that urban renewal makes otherwise disappear.
For these reasons, the liquid blackness research project on Elissa Blount Moorhead’s work and philosophy of artistic practice is titled, Facing the Band: The (Ana)Architectures of Communities Ties.
Some of the theoretical frameworks it will explore:
• Curation as CAREful Gathering and Community-Building
• Black Radical Feminist Aesthetics
• Raced and Gendered Notion of Care
• Art as Process/Author as Ensemble
• Black Spaces and Histories: Geographies, Architectures, Communities
• Black Ancestry and Futurity: Past Lineages and Lineages “to come”
liquid blackness in Conversation with Elissa Blount Moorhead
October 23 Teach-In
November 19 Keynote
THEORETICAL CONTEXTS
1. CURATION AS CAREFUL GATHERING AND COMMUNITY-BUILDING
Cachia, Amanda. “Curating New Openings: Rethinking Diversity in the Gallery.” Art Journal, 76 (Fall-Winter 2017): 48-50.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Identifying the Endgame.” Theater 47, no. 1 (2017): 3-15.
Lepecki, André. “Decolonizing the Curatorial,” Theater 47, no. 1 (2017): 101-115.
Cervenak, Sarah Jane. “Black Gathering: ‘The Weight of Being’ in Leonardo Drew’s Sculpture,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 26, no. 1 (2016): 1–16.
Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Roshanravan, Shireen. “Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience.” Hypatia 29.1 (2014): 41-58.
Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance of Black Culture. Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “The New Politics of Community.” American Sociological Review 75.1 (2010): 7-30.
Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218.
Hooks, Bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press. 2000.
Hooks, Bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. 1990.
2. BLACK RADICAL FEMINIST AESTHETICS
Campt, Tina Marie. “Black visuality and the practice of refusal.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29.1 (2019): 79-87.
Farmer, Ashley D. “‘All the Progress to Be Made Will Be Made by Maladjusted Negroes’: Mae Mallory, Black Women’s Activism, and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition.”Journal of Social History vol. 53, no. 2 (2019): 508–30.
Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Zellars. Rachel B. “As if we were all struggling together”: Black intellectual traditions and legacies of gendered violence.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 7. 2019.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Theorizing in a Void: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in a Black Feminist Poetics,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 117(3) (2018): 617-648.
Morris, Catherine, and Rujeko Hockley, eds. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85: New Perspectives. Brooklyn Museum, 2018.
Morris, Catherine, and Rujeko Hockley, eds. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85: A Sourcebook. Brooklyn Museum, 2017.
Combahee River Collective. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. Oxford University Press, 2016: 272-82.
Murray, Derek Conrad. Queering Post-Black Art Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights. I.B. Tauris, 2016.
McMillan, Uri. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. NYU Press, 2015.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014):16-28.
Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Duke University Press, 2012.
Hemmings, Claire. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press, 2011.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008):1-4.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press, 1995.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Crossing Press, 1984.
Some frequent collaborators:
a. Xenobia Bailey (in Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine)
i. Gaskins, Nettrice R. “The African Cosmogram Matrix in Contemporary Art and Culture.” black theology 14, no. 1 (2016): 28-42.
ii. Scott, Jennifer. “Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century at a Post-Emancipation Site.” The Public Historian 37, no. 2 (2015): 73-88.
b. Simone Leigh (in Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine + Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter)
i. Leigh, Simone; Chitra Ganesh, and Uri McMillan, “Alternative Structures: Aesthetics, Imagination, and Radical Reciprocity: An Interview with GIRL.” ASAP Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017): 241-252.
ii. Davis, Samara. “Room for Care: Simone Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic.” TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (2015): 169-176.
c. Rashida Bumbray (in Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine… also collaborated with Bradford Young in Black America Again). Independent curator and choreographer of Run Mary Run, part of Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran’s BLEED at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. https://vimeo.com/61112888
Reviews
Seibert, Brian. ‘Run Mary Run’. Features Rashida Bumbray at SummerStage. New York Times, July 20, 2015.
Ratliff, Ben. Art, Ancestry, Africa: Letting it All Bleed. New York Times, May 14, 2012.
3. RACED AND GENDERED NOTION OF CARE
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
Bradley, Rizvana. “Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema,” Film Quarterly 71(2) (2017): 46-52.
Brown, Kimberly Juanita. The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Collins, Patricia Hills. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edition. Routledge, 2000.
Crawford, Margo Natalie. “Must Revolution Be a Family Affair: Revisiting the Black Woman.”
Dayo, F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard. Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York University Press, 2009. 185-204.
Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” Black Scholar 3.4 (December 1971): 2-15.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Johnson, E. Patrick, “’Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Duke University Press, 2005.
Pena, Mary. “Black Public Art: On the Socially Engaged Work of Black Women Artist-Activists.” Open Cultural Studies 3.1 (2019): 604-614.
McKittrick, Katherine, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians 11.2 (2011): 1-24.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical bondage: race, gender, and the origins of American gynecology. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Threadcraft, Shatema Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Warren, Calvin. “Black Care.” liquid blackness 3, no. 6 (2016): 34 37.
4. ART AS PROCESS/AUTHOR AS ENSEMBLE
Apostol, Corina and Nato Thompson, eds. Making Another World Possible. Routledge, 2020
Gunn, Jenny. “Intergenerational Pedagogy in Jenn Nkiru’s REBIRTH IS NECESSARY,” In Focus, “Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (Winter 2020).
Eburne, Jonathan P., Amy J. Elias, and Melissa Karmen Lee, eds. “Rules of Engagement: Art, Process, Protest.” Special Issue. ASAP Journal 3, no. 2 (May 2018).
Moten, Fred. The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Field, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. La Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Univ of California Press, 2015.
Copeland, Huey, and Naomi Beckwith. “Black Collectivities” Special Issue. NKA: Journal Of Contemporary African Art 2014, no. 34, 2014.
Harney Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
5. BLACK SPACES AND HISTORIES: GEOGRAPHIES, ARCHITECTURES, COMMUNITIES
Summers, Brandi Thompson. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-chocolate City. University of North Carolina Press Books, 2019.
Allen, Douglas, Mary Lawhon, and Joseph Pierce. “Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies.” Progress in human geography 43.6 (2019): 1001-1019.
Bledsoe, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright. “The Pluralities of Black Geographies.” Antipode 51.2 (2019): 419-437.
Brown, Adrienne. The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Hawthorne, Camilla. “Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century.” Geography Compass (2019): 1-13.
Nyong’o, Tavia. Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York University Press, 2019.
Fleetwood, Nicole. Prison Nation. Aperture Magazine #230 (Spring 2018).
Alliez, Éric. “Gordon Matta-Clarkk: ‘Somewhere Outside the Law.’” Journal of Visual Culture 15.3 (2016): 317-333.
McGlotten, Shaka, “Black Data,” No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Duke University Press, 2016.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
6. BLACK ANCESTRY AND FUTURITY: PAST LINEAGES AND LINEAGES “TO COME”
Raengo, Alessandra and Lauren McLeod Cramer, eds. “Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art,” In Focus Dossier, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Carrington, André. “Mike Brown’s Body: New Materialism and Black Form.” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017): 276-283.
Gaines, Malik. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York University Press, 2017.
Roberts, Neil. “Theorizing Freedom, Radicalizing the Black Radical Tradition: On Freedom as Marronage Between Past and Future.” Theory & Event, 20, no. 1 (2017): 212-230.
Cramer, Lauren. “The Black (Universal) Archive and the Architecture of Black Cinema.” Black Camera 8, no. 1 (Fall 2016).
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Keeling, Kara. “LOOKING FOR M— Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 565–82.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Crossing Press, 1984.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Page compiled with contributions from Corey Couch, Daren Fowler, and Alessandra Raengo.
Still, (TNEG is Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, and Malik Sayeed)
Still, Lauryn Hill (TNEG is Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, and Malik Sayeed)
Still, Jay Z’s 4:44 (TNEG is Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, and Malik Sayeed)