In Conversation with Art History
Filmmakers in Conversation with Roy DeCarava | Kahlil Joseph | Bradford Young | GSU Students’ Work | Solange’s Recent Music Videos
Fly Paper, Kahlil Joseph, 2017. Storyboard P and Ben Vereen
Case Study: Filmmakers in Conversation with Roy DeCarava
Introduction
DeCarava is one of the artists that other contemporary image-makers such as Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young and Barry Jenkins have rediscovered as inspiration in their own work because of his investment in the resonance and vibratory potential of darkness within the frame, whether it is the darkness of a shadow, of a poorly lit environment, or of a subject that emerges from it as if from a whole world of possibilities. For DeCarava, the shadow held the possibility of rendering sound through images and duration through a still medium: photography.
DeCarava practiced seeing as a type of listening, a search for a vibration within, and of, blackness and explored the possibility that, as Richard Ings put it, “photography might take the shape of improvisatory music.” He turned photography’s supposed “technical deficits” into the stuff of community, transforming the black “negative space” of the image into a connective tissue. Young describes DeCarava’s inspirational practice as an exercise in patience and refrain, perhaps a laying in wait to “shroud the moment.”[1]
[1] Bradford Young, Masterclass at Georgia State University, April 15, 2018.
from, Alessandra Raengo, “The Scope and Method of liquid blackness: A Reading of Kahlil Joseph.” Keynote address at 1:54, Contemporary African Art Fair, Somerset House, London, October 4, 2018; and Alessandra Raengo, ““Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph’: Author and Research Method,” Colorado College, December 5, 2018.
Kahlil Joseph’s Black Mary was commissioned by the Tate Modern to accompany Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power on view in London during the summer 2017. It is a companion piece to Fly Paper, commissioned by the Vinyl Factory in Berlin and first shown at the New Museum in New York City in late 2016 and 2017. Joseph has said that Black Mary and Fly Paper belong to the same narrative universe: “outtakes,” locations, characters and even sounds from one appear in the other and the two films complement each other in important ways. Both follow the same logic of subtraction that has characterized Joseph’s work since Wildcat (2013), the black and white rodeo film he directed (shot by Malik Sayeed), with score by Flying Lotus elaborated from Alice Coltrane’s music.
Since then, Joseph has added another piece of this same puzzle: his video Alice (You Don’t Have to Think About it) for the New Museum exhibition, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America designed by the late Okwui Enzeavor and executed with curatorial support of Naomi Bekwith, Glenn Ligon, Massimiliano Gioni, and Mark Nash, on view in the Spring 2021 in New York City. Alice has been described as the prelude to Black Mary.
Black Mary’s and Fly Paper’s strongest visual influence comes from the work of African American photographer Roy DeCarava, best known for his collaboration with Langston Hughes in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), and the equal caring gaze he directed to musicians and everyday people in Harlem. Inspired by DeCarava’s soundful photography, Black Mary, begins with a delayed synchronization. The screen is black before Alice Smith’s wrenching rendition of Screamin' Jay Hawkins’ “I put the spell on you”. It continues by overlaying sounds of a recording session over images of a live session – a view of the ensemble producing its aesthetic and political work – and shots of NYC streets and Harlem lofts pierced by a collage of voices indicating someone has died.
“Ensemble” is the way Fred Moten theorizes a relationship between the part and the whole, the soloist and the group, whose model is the cooperative and improvisational relationship between musicians in the jazz ensemble which he sees as constantly experimenting with forms of sociality as well as law-making and law-breaking at the level of music form. In the 2013 book co-written with Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, he describes this as a type of “black study.”
Joseph has followed deCarava’s suggestion that, “photography might take the shape of improvisatory music” (Richard Ings), and further amplified the shadow’s ability to channel the unregulated vibrational force of black aurality, to render, as deCarava put it, “the sound I saw.”
In Black Mary blackness is “held in suspension” in a number of ways, beginning with the way the musicians featured in the film “lift each other up” as they practice “black study” in an ensemble; in the poetic use of synchronization and its withholding, the strategic use of slow motion and stillness and the deliberate insertion of segments that feel like “outtakes.” Suspension here works in at least two directions: sound to image – and therefore durational to stillness, and then back to durational while maintaining the memory of that previous passage.
Black Mary, Kahlil Joseph, 2017
“Kahlil Joseph & Arthur Jafa: In Conversation | Tate Talks.” Youtube, uploaded by Tate Talks, August 10, 2017.
Sources:
“Inventory: A Conversation between Roy DeCarava and Ron Carter,” edited by Sherry Turner DeCarava,” MoMa, no. 21 (Winter-Spring 1996): 2-7.
Richard Ings, “And You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around’: Jazz and Everyday Life in the Photographs of Roy DeCarava.” In Lock, Graham, and David Murray, eds. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), 303-332.
Teju Cole, “A True Picture of Black Skin.” The New York Times, February 18, 2015
Hilton Als, “The Black Excellence of Kahlil Joseph.” The New Yorker, November 6, 2017
Peter Galassi, “Roy DeCarava: a retrospective, with an essay by Sherry Turner DeCarava” (The Museum of Modern Art, 2017)
Chris May, “How Roy DeCarava’s Photographs Captured the Soul of Harlem and Influenced a Generation,” Vinyl Factory, November 9, 2017
Antwaun Sargent. “At Least They’ll See the Black.” Aperture 231, June 19, 2018.
Alessandra Raengo, “Sounding out a Stumble: Melancholic Loops in Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper,” liquid blackness art reviews, October 29, 2018
Colony Little, “Barry Jenkins and Kahlil Joseph Reimagine Roy DeCarava’s Adoring Vision of Harlem,” Hyperallergic, December 28, 2018.
Hilton Als, "Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness,” The New Yorker, September 16, 2019
DeCarava is a pivotal influence in the short film Bradford Young directed to accompany Common’s 11th studio album Black America Again (2016). Young has often talked about his decision to underexpose: “We cinematographers are trained that black is a deficit, that it eats light. But black skin has a very particular level of reflectance and specularity.”[1] “When you underexpose [dark brown skin tones], they pop and resonate and shine in a particular way that you’re not going to see when a face is lit in a conventional way.”[2]
[1] Patricia Thompson, “Bradford Young discusses the cinematography of Ava DuVernay's Selma and J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year.” American Cinematographer 96 (2) (February 2015).
[2] Jamilah King, “Cinematographer Bradford Young on Lighting Dark Skin and the ‘Subversive’ Power of the Black Church.” Color Lines, October 10, 2014.
Black America Again, Bradford Young with Common, 2017
Black America Again
from Raengo, “Black America Again,” Black One Shot 9.4, edited by Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie, June 18, 2020. ASAP/J
“There is a note Coltrane heard in his head but could never play on the horn. What does that look like? How does that torment a man’s soul?” asks Bradford Young.[3] Young knows it’s not a question of where this note might be, but when.[4] Not a question of finding it, but of being found.[5]
In his short film, Black America Again (2016), Young interprets the “again” it inherits from the title track of Common’s 11th studio album as that missing note.[6] In the film, this “again” is not solely the marker for an interminable cycle of violence and foreclosed future (“Here we go, here, here we go again, Trayvon Martin will never get to be an older man” raps Common), but it also sets in motion what Moten calls the endless chant of blackness’s open set, a defense of the irregular, a wounding and rewinding of the given.[7] “We are rewriting the black American story,” sings Steve Wonder in the song’s bridge.
Young’s Black America Again rewinds the given history of antiblack violence to chant the possibilities of this open set, i.e., the endless predication—blackness is x, ad infinitum—which both engenders and is engendered by an open film set. For Young, image-making matters as a making with his “echo chambers”: his collaborators and the community that sends it and within which it takes place.[8]
Shot on location in Baltimore, the city Young has chosen as his home, the film moves along the route of Freddie Gray’s rough ride. The film adopts an ensemblic process rooted in the communities it features—teenagers, a mother with child, a whole family, children from an Afrocentric daycare, a center of intergenerational pedagogy, an excited gathering around a turtle, the holding ground on Baltimore’s infamous “corners.”[9] The film eschews the fourth wall; its borders efface themselves as they are smudged, like the flare on the upper frame of the opening closeup of a caterpillar on a tree trunk over barely perceptible outdoors sounds. It is followed by a single note ushered in by a stilt-walker in a Baltimore alley which signals the start of the film.
More than opening or closing, the film arrives and departs with two series of frontal and eye-level, black and white closeups of faces bathed in light, each looking intensely at the camera.[10] The faces emerge from a deeply black background, which brings forth the natural radiance of their complexion. Blackness is their everywhere and everything, their origin and destination, their ensemble and its music.
Black America Again, Bradford Young with Common, 2017
Since the ensemble rejects individuation, the “sitters” do not stand out from what they are “with.”[11] Nor does dancer, choreographer and performance artist Rashida Bumbray, whose voice acts as a sound bridge between this “assemblage of community” and graffiti marking the site of Freddie Gray’s abduction.[12] As she slowly walks through the Gilmor Homes followed by the camera, she nods to residents who reciprocate while she marks tempo on her tambourine. Throughout the three and a half minute-long take, her white dress and headdress are held in sharp focus, while her surroundings are slightly blurred, warped, as if wrapping around her as a visual modulation of her entanglement with the community. Nor does Common, when, later in the film, he raps in call and response with a djembe player while standing on an empty crossroad. The camera circles around them, keeping them in focus, but still catches passersby crossing the street.[13]
Here, as in his memorial video for Nipsey Hussle (Untitled, 2019), Young channels the missing, the dead, through a floating square Bynum, adjacent to the locations of the bumps and sharp turns that fatally injured Freddie Gray on his rough ride.[14] A marker for (the ship’s) “hold,” the Bynum is also a portal, an escape hatch.[15] Its twofold temporality—repetition and renewal—coalesces as Young’s double aesthetic move. There is the saturation of Roy DeCarava’s blacks, and the stripping down and unspooling of Common’s original song into samples separated by acapella breaks. The Bynum both holds and dissipates, contains and sends off.[16]
The chant continues. First it’s just a beat, and then a communal ritual. It becomes a (ring) shout, performed following the drawing of a Kongo cosmogram with white chalk on a West Baltimore intersection by white-clad women from Bumbray’s ensemble. A piano playing on location and the diegetic chatter of onlookers grounds the scene in time and place. But the women foreshadow another temporality by moving in slow motion until the circle is completed and sound is re-synchronized to the beat set by the ring shout Sticker. Then the Shouters, almost imperceptibly out of sync, perform a version of Parliament’s “Swing Down Sweet Chariot,” a rewinding of a funked-up version of this pre-diasporic ritual.[17] Suddenly, one of the Shouters begins to twirl in slow motion and seemingly takes off from the ground. When the sequence is brought to an end by the Sticker who re-synchronizes sound, the film transitions to Stevie Wonder’s bridge while the Bynum floats in the center of the frame. The woman’s flight recasts the Bynum as a vessel, the chant’s endless predication resumes and delivers the film to its “black futures” with a second series of black and white closeups, primarily of children.[18] This open set is a repetition with a difference, a regenerative reverb. Blackness is x, endlessly. Again and again.
[1] Patricia Thompson, “Bradford Young discusses the cinematography of Ava DuVernay's Selma and J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year.” American Cinematographer 96 (2) (February 2015).
[2] Jamilah King, “Cinematographer Bradford Young on Lighting Dark Skin and the ‘Subversive’ Power of the Black Church.” Color Lines, October 10, 2014.
[3] Bradford Young, Masterclass at Georgia State University, April 15, 2018. I am grateful to Michele Prettyman for her always thoughtful and inspiring comments to the first draft of this essay. Thank you also to Michael Gillespie and Lisa Uddin for their careful editing.
[4] 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): 565-582.
[5] Bearing out Coltrane’s same torment, Roy DeCarava’s practice of letting a photographic image go black was often a consequence of attending to its sound. Young describes DeCarava’s work as an exercise in patience and restraint, a lying in wait to “shroud the moment” when, like Coltrane, he might his note. Young, Masterclass. Richard Ings, “And You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around’: Jazz and Everyday Life in the Photographs of Roy DeCarava.” In Lock, Graham, and David Murray, eds. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), 303-332.
[6] The film was shot by Shawn Peters, Jrr-Kwesi Fanti, and Maceo Bishop. It was edited by Marc Thomas.
[7] Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), viii.
[8] In Corine Dhondee’s short film, Bradford Young: Cinema is the Weapon (2019), Young describes as “echo chambers” the lineage of filmmakers and visual artists with whom his work is in conversation (Haile Gerima, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, John Akomfrah, Chris Ophili, among others). On the idea of “being sent,” which inspires this essay, see Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) and particularly the chapter “Erotics of Fugitivity” where he discusses Betty’s case as a “nonperformance,” an improvisation against the very terms of contract law, “fugitivity’s irreducible futurity,” “the promise that we never promised.” As he notes, the Latin promittere mobilizes the idea of sending forth: “to have been sent forth: to have been sent […] by history. We are sent in history, pour out of its confinements. We send history. History comes for us, to send us to history and to ourselves” (259-260).
[9] Specifically, Young pays homage to the family of collaborator Elissa Blount Moorhead, who was responsible for gathering some of the ensembles that, in turn, engendered the film. Moorhead played a similar role in As Told to G/D Thyself (2018, by the Umma Chroma group, comprising Kamasi Washington, Terence Nance, Bradford Young, Jenn Nkiru, and Marc Thomas). She is one of the three partners in the TNEG production company, alongside Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed and recently co-directed with Young the two-channel installation Back and Song (2019).
[10] To be sure, the majority of the film is in black and white and the rare color sequences act as what Larry Clark called “accent marks” when describing the complex temporal layering of his own jazz film, Passing Through (1977), obtained by the interweaving of newsreel footage (of the Attica prison rebellion, for example) within the film’s fiction. See “Interview with Larry Clark” https://vimeo.com/139241288.
[11] I am paraphrasing Moten’s comments on the entanglements between artistic achievements and individuation made during his talk, “Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin” keynote address for “In a Speculative Light: The Arts of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville, February 21, 2020.
[12] Michael Anthony Farley, “The New Day Again,” Bmore Art, December 26, 2016.
[13] Jabari Exum is the djembe player.
[14] The Bynum is a very rich and always evolving form in Young’s oeuvre, which is likely in dialog with what Arthur Jafa has described as the function of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in “My Black Death,” Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003, 244-257. For Jafa, 2001’s monolith is a manifestation of black sentience, disguised under what Anne Cheng would describe as a modernist surface. He credits the Kubrick film with allowing him to recognize the “dark matter of black being.” Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The Bynum also references the racially entangled history of the black monochrome, from Kasimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square to Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. See at least Adrienne Edwards, Blackness in Abstraction (Pace Gallery, 2016), and Moten’s chapter “Chromatic Saturation” in The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018), 140-246.
[15] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Farley, “The New Day Again.”
[16] The Bynum can also be regarded in relation to the black “negative space” of DeCarava’s photographs, as a holding ground for the missing: the dead, the unaccounted for, the “nonperformants.”
[17] “Imagine church folks singing Biblically inspired funk in broad daylight in West Baltimore with no ‘fourth wall.’ It’s no wonder you can see bystanders surround the circle, clearly as captivated by the spectacle of the ring shout itself as they are of the Common making a video on their block. This is Black America... healing itself with a melange of cultural technology: funk, latter day hieroglyphics and community.” Farley, “The New Day Again.”
[18] Like Coltrane’s note, and as Kara Keeling describes it, with Marx’s turn of phrase, this is “poetry from the future,” a type of “wealth held in escrow,” which though it might be unimaginable now, does not mean that it is foreclosed. Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 63.
Black America Again, Bradford Young, 2017
Sources:
Richard Ings, “And You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around’: Jazz and Everyday Life in the Photographs of Roy DeCarava.” In Lock, Graham, and David Murray, eds. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), 303-332.
Jamilla King, “Cinematographer Bradford Young on Lighting Dark Skin..." Color Lines, October 10, 2014
Teju Cole, “A True Picture of Black Skin.” The New York Times, February 18, 2015
Patricia Thompson, “Bradford Young discusses the cinematography of Ava DuVernay's Selma and J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year.” American Cinematographer 96 (2) (February 2015)
Anthony Farley, “The New Day Again.” Bmore Art, December 26, 2016
Hilton Als, “Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness,” New York Times, February 18, 2015
Chris May, “How Roy DeCarava’s Photographs Captured the Soul of Harlem and Influenced a Generation,” The Vinyl Factory, November 9, 2017
Georgia State University Students’ Work on Bradford Young and Kahlil Joseph
Kia Pooler - Artist Statement: Black Mirror is an experimental short documentary that delves into the identity of black youth in America and what it means. This film attempts to explore this by looking at black bodies in relation to black voices, viewing the black body as an instrument, and emphasizing the themes of black youth, social injustice, memory, and ignored historical tragedies.
Kia Pooler is a filmmaker and photographer based in Atlanta, GA. She has shot and directed several short films, I am, Freedom Time, The Angry Black Woman,Vulnerability,I Am Not What You Think, and Black Mirror which has been showcased at several film festivals.
Black Mirror, Kia Pooler, 2019
Markita Hunt, Black Iris (2021)
Markita Huntt - Artist Statement: Black Iris is an experimental short that highlights some of the lessons from my Senior Seminar: Music Video as Black Art. This film is influenced by artist and writers that we've studied such as, Arthur Jafa, Bradford Young, Roy DeCarava, Teju Cole, Black America Again (Bradford Young, with Common), and Lauren Cramer. I also used an outside source from Dr. Jawanza, titled "Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys (1987)". This film attempts to deliver a message about black life, and the historical and contemporary social injustices, in America. My goal was to focus on the subjects in their natural states and environments. I used black bodies as an instrument to visually capture the beauty in various forms of blackness in its purest form.
Markita Huntt was born and raised in Chicago Illinois. She studied Film and Sociology at Georgia State University. Growing up she has always been captivated by visual arts that reflected her experience as a person raised in an underrepresented community. She always knew she wanted to have a voice for these types of communities. She remembers watching the realism in Spike Lee's and John Singleton's films as a teen: the way that they entertained and delivered social messages was alluring and a big part of her motivation to pursue storytelling. Throughout her life she found herself vividly imagining scenes, while awake or asleep. The urge to see her visions come to life were so strong, that she knew having an artistic outlet was the perfect way to express her thoughts, creativity, imagination, while being a voice for the voiceless. She quickly fell in love with filmmaking and hasn’t looked back since. The liquid blackness Project has provided her insight into how to go about bringing substance into her future projects.
Watch:
When They See Us, Ava DuVernay, 2019, cinematography by Bradford Young
Solange’s Recent Music Videos
Tish Wrigley, “Solange Dances atop Roberto Bruno’s ‘spaceship house’.”
From: Lauren Cramer, “Improper Blackness: An Aesthetic for Nothing.” Paper presented at the World Picture Conference, Toronto, ON, November 8, 2019.
Thirty years ago, artist/theorist Arthur Jafa started clipping images from magazines and advertisements and, in the process, formalized a counter-authorial Black filmmaking praxis that is equally dedicated to experimentation and preservation. Jafa’s Untitled Notebook attempts to articulate a black visual aesthetic that matches the scale and mutability of Black music by producing images of blackness in motion and out of context. Ironically, the artist’s “unoriginal” style has inspired a younger generation of music video directors including Alan Ferguson, the director of Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair.” These videos, released to promote her 2016 album Seat at the Table, help define Solange’s visual aesthetic around a few key details—long and extreme long shots; languid pacing; a sparse combination of organic and inorganic exteriors; art historical references; and strategically placed wind machines. Combining popular culture and fine art, including recreations of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s monochromatic paintings, into densely referential videos is a part of black music’s characteristic impropriety. These videos are stark contrasts to the characteristic wide-angle shots that defined hip-hop and R&B in the 1990s and early 2000s. Outside the previous generation’s hermetically sealed music video settings, the singer seem to relish having more space and more time. Yet, at these distances, the image has also divested itself from the politics of recognition that value screen space/time. In this way, “Cranes in the Sky” is a rendering of what Sarah Jane Cervenak and J. Kameron Carter theorize as “the black outdoors,” the potential for “an outness that discloses freedom’s inherent impropriety.”[1] Despite the quiet, inward sound of Solange’s music, these videos are not about black interiority—certainly not the kind formed through the liberal conflation of personality and property. The film that accompanies Knowles’s most recent album, When I Get Home (2019) was directed by the singer but continue to focus on the outdoors, this time by paying homage to Houston as a city of cement. Solange gathers references to black visual culture beneath the sprawling freeways that expand the city and its geographical value that will also eventually cause the city’s collapse (the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Harvey is actually a result of the concrete that makes it impossible for flood water to drain). In this work, the aesthetics of black impropriety recklessly borrow images in response to a predatory system that values those who cannot pay and will, somehow, always be at fault for their own predation.[2]
[1] Sarah Jane Cervenak and J. Kameron Carter, “Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 27, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 46, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2017.1282116.
[2] Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2012.0033.
Sources:
Cassie Da Costa, “The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,” The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2016
Jenny Gunn’s Letter to the Editor Re: “The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,” by Cassie Da Costa, The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2016
Scruggs, “We Are in the Golden Age of the Black Music Video,” Artsy, August 8, 2017
Georgia State University Student Work on Solange:
The Phenomenology of the Black Experience: Solange’s When I Get Home, Yvette Reese Pines
Yvette Reese Pines - Artist Statement
Through this video essay I analyzed the visual album, When I Get Home (2019), by Solange Knowles. I focused on the strategic use choreography that flowed seamlessly with the settings. After listening closely to the lyrics, it is apparent that Knowles was aiming to embrace the wonders of her enchanting black skin while also displaying the difficulty and ruggedness of enduring black womanhood. Throughout my work, I examined how Knowles uses color, movement, and structures to demonstrate the reality of enduring black womanhood while exhibiting the idea of triple consciousness, a term coined by Franz Fanon.
When I Get Home displays a juxtaposition of several black, white, and brown objects which then act as a central visual symbol. It was essential that I read into the use of these colors as race relations were concerned. Living as a black woman in the United States can be grueling at times and many women choose to create art to express their pain and desires. Knowles expressed her experience of feeling restricted, while also having a strong desire to be set free and move how she desired. It was directly represented through a dynamic between limited and confined motion and the use of free, effortless motion.
Yvette Pines is a recent graduate of Georgia State University with a bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Arts. Throughout her undergraduate career she has focused her studies on artistic material from black visual artists. The way in which black artists use their creations in order to express not only their narrative but the experiences of those who are often silenced has been the foundation of her research and analysis. Her essays aim to focus on how black artists use elements of mise-en-scène to illustrate racial tension and their difficulty to directly use their voice in a society that has placed strongholds over their freedom of expression. Musical and visual artists such as Solange Knowles, Hank Willis Thomas, Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler and Khalil Joseph have been a great inspiration for her as she continues to analyze new and existing films on a personal level while establishing her cinematic voice.
Solange: Expanding Blackness, Nisa Brooks
Nisa Brooks - Artist Statement
“Expanding Blackness: Solange” explores how Solange’s work utilizes techniques within the Black archive in continuation of expanding the perception of Blackness in our current world. Within four parts, this piece represents the structure and unification of Black art throughout history.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nisa Brooks is a visual artist with a focus on videography and painting. As a woman of color, her mission is to utilize a variety of medias to highlight the beauty of POC and immortalize their stories.