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X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Express Newark
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DTSTART:20230101T000000
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240220
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240720
DTSTAMP:20240310T000613Z
CREATED:20240220T010209Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240310T000613Z
UID:10000007-1708387200-1721433599@expressnewark.org
SUMMARY:The Holdout II
DESCRIPTION:The Holdout II\nDerrick Adams\nWith “The Holdout II\,” Adams revisits a social sculpture that he initially debuted at Alijira: A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark in 2015. Now\, using a house-like structure and the format of a pirate radio station\, “The Holdout II” is hosted by Sister From Another Planet (Andrea Rose Clarke\, SFAP) and welcomes creatives and cultural practitioners to engage in conversation about gentrification\, economic development\, and land ownership\, set to the curated sounds of SFAP. \n“Holdout” is a real estate term for an owner of property in a row of acquired buildings who refuses to sell. Adams’s sculpture poetically references individuals within communities united as a wall of resistance and support. The installation and performative work acknowledges what is priceless and important to preserve in one’s own culture. It highlights a value system that appreciates these ideals. \nThe sculpture and custom furniture was designed and created by L. Dawn Designs\, Jahmir Duran Abreu\, Rich Dubois and Ziello Frames. \nListen now to The Holdout II live\, hosted by Sister From Another Planet! \n \n  \nAbout Derrick Adams\nDerrick Adams (b. 1970\, Baltimore\, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn\, New York. He received his BFA from Pratt University\, New York\, in 1996 and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University\, New York\, in 2003. Adams has held numerous teaching positions and is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual\, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art. Adams celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. He has developed an iconography of joy\, leisure\, and the pursuit of happiness within a practice that encompasses paintings\, sculptures\, collages\, performances\, videos\, and public projects. Adams synthesizes representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to produce multifaceted figures and faces that address the richness of the Black experience. \nIn 2022\, Adams established Charm City Cultural Cultivation\, an organization to support and encourage underserved communities in the city of Baltimore through events conducted by three entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat\, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database\, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting\, storing\, and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den\, an online community of Black women writers started in January 2017\, which has since expanded into in-person writing workshops\, a writers’ circle\, and a monthly reading series that strive to promote instruction\, support\, and social engagement. \nAdams has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Cleveland Museum of Art\, Cleveland (2022); The Momentary\, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art\, Bentonville (2021); Hudson River Museum\, Yonkers (2020); and the Museum of Arts and Design\, New York (2018). The artist has mounted public installations commissioned through Art at Amtrak at NYC Penn Station\, New York (2023); MTA Arts & Design at the Nostrand Avenue LIRR Station\, Brooklyn (2020–ongoing); and RxART at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem (2019–ongoing). His work has been featured in notable group exhibitions including The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century\, Baltimore Museum of Art\, Baltimore (2023); Packaged Black: Derrick Adams & Barbara Earl Thomas\, Henry Art Gallery\, Seattle (2022); Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair\, Kent State University Museum (2021–2022); and Performa\, New York (2015\, 2013\, 2005). His art resides in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum\, The Metropolitan Museum of Art\, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art\, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts\, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art\, among many others. \nAbout Sister from Another Planet\nAndrea Rose Clarke began building her music library in the 5th grade. Her Guyanese father\, an audiophile and computer programmer\, encouraged her to set up his then state-of-the-art Fisher Tune-o-Matic 500TX stereo system\, which later was conducive in her feeling at ease in settings like a master control room or DJ booth. \nHer journey continued through classical violin study and art school\, which immersed her in the vibrant culture of downtown Manhattan during the 1970s and 80s. A regular in celebrated clubs like Danceteria\, Area and Mudd Club\, and at the Soul Boys and 12 Tribes gatherings in Brooklyn\, her musical horizons expanded across many genres including rare soul\, 70s/80s reggae and golden age hip hop\, African\, new wave\, and rock. \nBy creating Sister From Another Planet (SFAP)\, Andrea found a platform to share her music discoveries. DJing at venues like the World\, MK’s\, Pyramid\, Wetlands\, Madam Rosa’s and Mars\, she later extended her listenership through a 14-year stint producing and hosting a radio show for WBAI 99.5 FM that connected with a diverse audience spanning age\, race and gender. \nCollaborations with icons like Chuck D resulted in the production a second show for WBAI\, “...ANDYOUDONTSTOP!“\, that focused on social commentary and the impact of independent and golden-age hip hop on global culture. \nNotable interviews include such luminaries as Octavia Butler\, Avery Brooks\, Nikki Giovanni\, Gil Scott Heron\, Kanye West\, Nona Hendrix\, and Sananda Maitreya/Terrence Trent D’Arby. \n 
URL:https://expressnewark.org/event/the-holdout/
LOCATION:Express Newark\, 54 Halsey Street\, Newark\, NJ\, 07102
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://expressnewark.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/240217_ExpressNewark_BluesPeople_0177.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240220
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240720
DTSTAMP:20240220T201459Z
CREATED:20240109T235134Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T201459Z
UID:10000003-1708387200-1721433599@expressnewark.org
SUMMARY:Blues People
DESCRIPTION:“Blues People has always meant a great deal to me. It was a dramatic self-confirmation\, as a personal intellectual and artistic ‘presence\,’ but also as the expression of a set of ideas and measures that I have carried with me for many years. Most\, even until today.”  —Amiri Baraka \nInspired by the 60th anniversary of “Blues People: Negro Music in White America”\,—the acclaimed book by writer\, poet\, political activist and Newark native LeRoi Jones\, who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka—visual artists Derrick Adams\, Adama Delphine Fawundu\, Adebunmi Gbadebo\, Cesar Melgar\, and Accra Shepp have reimagined pivotal works of theirs to create five newly commissioned art installations at Express Newark that explore what it means to be a “Blues People” in the twenty-first century.  \nAccra Shepp’s “Occupying Wall Street” and “Covid Journals” feature black-and-white portraits of protesters during New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and the global Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Installed on the main floor of the building and incorporating Baraka’s poetry and the music of Shepp’s father\, the avant-garde jazz musician Archie Shepp—a good friend of Baraka’s—Shepp’s work dissolves the boundaries between the individual and the collective\, reminding us that those who participated in the demonstrations played an essential role in the safeguarding of American democracy and achieving radical forms of justice. \nIn the Window Gallery\, multimedia artist Adebunmi Gbadebo features two new handmade\, site-specific paper textiles inspired by her work “At the Bottom of the Atlantic Ocean There is a Railroad Made of Human Bones.” Taking its title from a line in Baraka’s poem “Wise\, why’s\, y’s\,” her pieces are made from Black hair\, cotton\, and indigo dye and meditate on labor\, land\, and familial legacy at True Blue Plantation\, the rice and indigo plantation where her ancestors were enslaved in Fort Motte\, South Carolina.  \nAcross from these textiles\, in the Box Gallery\, photographer and visual artist Adama Delphine Fawundu revisits her experimental short film\, “Who We Be”\, which explicitly takes up Baraka’s emphasis on Black music by exploring hip-hop\, social language\, and activism in Freetown\, Sierra Leone\, in West Africa. Serving as a backdrop to the film\, “Who We Be II” is a wallpaper designed using Fawundu’s technique\, kpoto patchwok\, in which she blends photographic transfers of Black crowds throughout the African diaspora\, further expanding the musically immersive experience of her installation. In the Mende and Krío cultures of Sierra Leone\, the term kpoto loosely translates to “gathering.”  \nIn the Paul Robeson Gallery\, multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams plays with the real estate term protesting gentrification\, by reimagining “The Holdout\,” a house-like social sculpture with a curated radio station that he initially exhibited at Alijira: A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark in 2015. Experimenting with the format of a pirate radio station and live guest DJ sets\, Adams highlights conversations with renowned artists and local activists about displacement\, economic development\, and land ownership. \nSurrounding Adams’s sculpture is street photographer Cesar Melgar’s “Newark Master Plan\,” a debut series of black-and-white images of Newark properties from 2019 to 2022 that bear “Notice of Public Hearing on Proposed Development” banners.  Exhibited alongside his photos from his 2018 “Street Views” series\, set in the Ironbound and Downtown Newark\, Melgar’s romantic images remind us of the vitality and vibrancy of Newark communities and the increasing threats posed by higher living costs\, corporate home purchases\, and the enduring wealth gap. \nThe “Sounds of Newark” installation displays five works from Express Newark’s Community Media Center residents Laïssa C. Alexia\, Kendra Brandon\, Gary Campbell\, Celli Pitt\, and Chris Simmons on the fourth floor. Considering silence as a marker of gentrification\, the installation presents a soundscape in which these five artists remember the value of their community as the city changes around them. Working with artist Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare\, these CMC residents use sound as a sonic space of refusal and a creative way to rescue an archive. Taken together\, the installation asks: What sounds shall we save? \n“Blues People” is curated by Alliyah Allen\, Express Newark’s associate curator and program coordinator. Additional support is provided by executive director Salamishah Tillet; creative director Nick Kline; Anonda Bell\, director of the Paul Robeson Galleries; Brooke Finister\, program coordinator of New Arts Justice; and Anthony Alvarez\, assistant director of Shine Portrait Studio and coordinator of the Free School at Express Newark. \nRutgers University-Newark\, the Ford Foundation\, the Andy Warhol Foundation\, the HarbourView Equity Foundation\, the Devils Youth Foundation\, and Duggal Visual Solutions provide generous funding for this exhibition. Additional support is from New Arts Justice\, Shine Portrait Studio\, Paul Robeson Galleries\, and Harmony Lab.
URL:https://expressnewark.org/event/blues-people/
LOCATION:Express Newark\, 54 Halsey Street\, Newark\, NJ\, 07102
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://expressnewark.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-3.33.46-PM.png
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