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Central to liquid blackness’s panel “The Polit

Central to liquid blackness’s panel “The Political Reach of Form: Music Video as Black Art” was the work of @jennnkiru, who liquid blackness brought to GSU in April 2019 (link in bio). Nkiru’s work demonstrates the ways Blackness and its aesthetic forms, as Derrick Jones discussed, “remixes, rewrites, rewinds, reiterates, reforms and reshapes in its liquidity.” That is, “Blackness resists.” In this resistance, we see the music video as Black art, and the emergence of “the popular to come.” Thanks to GSU’s African American Studies Department for inviting us to participate in their conference: Beyond the Culture: Black Popular Culture and Social Justice.
To learn more about our work with Jenn Nkiru, check out our research project: Jenn Nkiru’s Panafrican Imagination: Black Study as Aesthetic Practice (link in bio). And visit our video archive to watch our conversation with Nkiru and past artists: https://vimeo.com/liquidblackness

On February 7th, liquid blackness presented “The

On February 7th, liquid blackness presented “The Political Reach of Form: Music Video as Black Art” at Beyond the Culture: Black Popular Culture and Social Justice. The panel, which included Dr. Alessandra Raengo, Dr. Jenny Gunn, Derrick Jones, and Jazmine Hudson, outlined the genealogy of what we term the Howard Pedagogy Lab and the political and formal intimacy of high and low culture, the essay film and music video, and the sonic and visual labor of Black music. A special thanks to GSU’s Department of African-American Studies for hosting the conference and inviting us to participate.

As an installation capable of evoking a fraught re

As an installation capable of evoking a fraught reconsideration of the space it inhabits—as made apparent from its residency at the Girard College Chapel in Philadelphia last month—Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young’s “Back and Song” intentionally brings into relief the inequities experienced by Black individuals and communities, especially as they interface health care systems that are structurally antagonistic to the practice of black care.
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“This work is essentially site-specific, as the emotional labor that it does, and in turn asks us to do, is made more powerful by its location,” Natalie Sandstrom writes in her review of “Back and Song” in Artblog. “To witness this work in a spiritual space of a historically white and male institution is to make steps toward healing a historical injustice. When we, the viewers, exit the space, our location changes, but we bring the work with us, continuing the work that this art asks us to do.”
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Concerned with “the complex and profound connections between health, wellness, and the Black experience in America,” the installation raises tensions between challenge and comfort, the historical legacies of race of health, and “beg[s] us to think about our positionality as viewers, and as humans, and to remain open and empathetic to the experiences of others…By watching, our own backs are made heavier by the weight of knowledge” (Sandstrom, Artblog).
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Photo: “Back and Song,” by Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young. Girard College Chapel. Charles Fox, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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#BackAndSong #ElissaBlountMoorhead #BradfordYoung #VideoInstallation #ArtInstallation #GirardCollege #BlackLineage #liquidblackness #VisualActOfBlackCare #Research #Scholarship @ebmoorhead

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