To support the sustained growth of our intellectual community Alumni of IRAAS have established several working groups.
Contact us if you are interested in supporting a Working Group
Dear Friends,
I am pleased to invite you to the next Columbia Inside event, “Black Art in the Moment: A Response to Crisis.” Join me for a discussion of how Black artists have responded to moments of racial, economic, and ecological crisis with Farah Jasmine Griffin, Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies; Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies; and Kellie Jones, Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art. They will provide historical context for understanding the role of the arts in addressing periods of chaos and catastrophe and shed light on the current moment, particularly the devastation of COVID-19 and the emergence of a new period of protest and activism.
Monday, June 22, 2020
4:00 p.m. EDT
How to Join
Please register here.
I hope you will join us on June 22 for this timely Columbia Inside program.
If you would like to submit a question in advance, please email Jacqueline
Lerescu at jl2502@columbia.edu or 212-851-7854.
Sincerely,
Wanda Holland Greene ’89CC, ’91TC
University Trustee
Head of School, The Hamlin School
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the inaugural Chair of the African American and
African Diaspora Studies Department and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Professor Griffin received her B.A. from Harvard and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013). She is also co-author, with Salim Washington, of Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). Griffin collaborated with composer and pianist Geri Allen and director and actor S. Epatha Merkerson on two theatrical projects, for which she wrote the book: The first, “Geri Allen and Friends Celebrate the Great Jazz Women of the Apollo,” with Lizz Wright, Dianne Reeves, Teri Lyne Carrington, and others, premiered on the main stage of the Apollo Theater in May of 2013. The second, “A Conversation with Mary Lou,” featuring vocalist Carmen Lundy, premiered at Harlem Stage in March 2014 and was performed at The John F. Kennedy Center in May of 2016.
Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, Professor O’Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award. O’Meally has co-curated exhibitions for The Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center and The High Museum of Art (Atlanta). He has held Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships, and was a recent fellow at Columbia’s new Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Global Center/Paris.
His new books are The Romare Bearden Reader (edited for Duke University
Press, 2019) and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American
Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020)
Kellie Jones is the Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Professor Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Book of the Decade in 2019 by ArtNews, Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.
Congratulations Columbia University
African American and African Diaspora Studies Department Class of 2020
https://afamstudies.columbia.edu
Learn more online at https://alumni.columbia.edu
In an exclusive talk with students and faculty that ended with a standing ovation, Carter spoke to Jelani Cobb, Columbia’s Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism, staff writer for The New Yorker, historian and author of several books, including “To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic.” The event was held at The Forum, located at Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. The program covered a number of themes in African American life and culture, including Carter’s career in music, his legacy as an artist, activism and philanthropy.
In addressing Cobb’s question about what he hoped would come from the lecture series, Carter emphasized open dialogue and real honest conversations. “We can all dazzle each other with language,” he said. But we need to “get down to the honesty of what’s happening.”
Drawing inspiration from Carter’s multimedia success, the series will spotlight public intellectuals, artists, musicians, dancers, writers and activists, as well as scholars and other noteworthy people who have made a major contribution to our understanding of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
A recent grant to the African American and African Diaspora Studies department will support new arts-based programming.
This past December, the African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) department received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to elevate and enhance its arts programming. It will include funds for an artist-in-residence, a lecture series, a new master’s degree, a postdoctoral fellow and a visiting professor.
Columbia News spoke with Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, chair of AAADS and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies, and Josef Sorett, associate professor of Religion and of African American and African Diaspora Studies, to learn more about the grant and their vision of how the arts are at the core of the department’s academic and community-based work.
Q. How do you envision the arts as central to the work of AAADS?
FJG: Through our teaching and scholarship we realize the arts have long been central to the intellectual project of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Long before Black Studies formally entered the academy, the thinkers who helped to give shape and vision to the field included creative artists such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Katherine Dunham, Romare Bearden and others. These artists have provided complex creative works and they have been important theorists of aesthetics and politics.
The poets Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka have taught classes at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), a research hub that enriches AAADS’s work on the diversity of black experiences in the global diaspora. The late composer/pianist Geri Allen conducted a week-long residency and partnered with us in conceiving of and presenting symposia and performances. Choreographer Camille Brown was an important member of the planning committee for the Institute’s historic Black Girl Movement Conference. More recently, in celebration of IRAAS’s 25th anniversary in April 2019, we featured South African contemporary artist Mary Sibande. It was her first solo exhibition in New York, held at Columbia’s Leroy Neiman Gallery. The Mellon Funded Arts Initiative will allow us to institutionalize these kinds of partnerships through long-term support that helps sustain the centrality of the arts to our curriculum and our broader intellectual community.
Q. What are the components of the grant?
FJG: There are five areas that the grant will focus on. For each year of the grant we will host an artist-in-residence, a highly respected, prominent artist or an emerging artist of demonstrated promise. The artist-in-residence will interact with our students and faculty through a series of seminars, studio visits and/or workshops. It will support a year-long masters of arts program geared toward contemporary art in the urban context within local community-based arts and social justice non-profits. The grant will also allow for a post-doctoral fellow to teach students and help integrate the arts into the AAADS curriculum. Finally, the department will host the “Arts Conversation Series” curated by prize-winning novelist Ayana Mathis.
Q. This is an arts-based grant, but will AAADS reach across disciplines to do this work? If so, how?
JS: The way this initiative prioritizes the arts is deeply informed by the influence of other disciplines, both historically and in the contemporary moment. And the kinds of work that this grant will foster—both in the classroom and in public programming—will be attuned to the kind of generative possibilities that emerge when the arts and the full range of academic disciplines that comprise African American and Africa Diaspora Studies are kept in active conversation.
For instance, how does one think about the artistic craft of Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Primus or Katherine Dunham without an understanding in anthropology? Or how was sociology important to writers like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Ann Petry? It’s hard to imagine the history of the arts in African American life without the influence of the social sciences, even in accounting for a range of black writers—such as Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison or Albert Murray—who argued against the imposition of social scientific categories on their artistic practices.
Q. What is the significance of this grant at Columbia?
FJG: The Mellon Foundation’s support of our department in the form of this grant is especially significant. The grant signals a new way of conceptualizing the relationship of the arts to both our research and teaching in that it values artists and their work not only as subjects of analysis, but also as central to helping shape our understanding of history, society and culture. We train our students to be creative and critical thinkers who have strong analytical skills; we also hope to help them acquire a creative, imaginative intelligence as well. These skills are necessary to confront the ever complicated cultural, political and ecological problems and issues that we face. The grant provides us the resources to more fully partner with other centers, departments and schools at Columbia and as well as institutions in the surrounding community and city.
Source: ©2020 Columbia University
Cameron Rowland is an artist making visible the institutions, systems, and policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. Rowland’s research-intensive work centers around the display of objects and documents whose provenance and operations expose the legacies of racial capitalism and underscore the forms of exploitation that permeate many aspects of our daily lives.
Cameron Rowland received a BA (2011) from Wesleyan University. Rowland’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the São Paulo Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Vienna Secession, Artists Space, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Rowland’s work is represented in public collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Location:
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium
1172 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, 10027
Co-Sponsored by:
African American and African Diaspora Studies Department
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
The Institute for Research in African-American Studies
The Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
A Discussion of Afro-Latinida
A first generation Dominican Latinx Studies scholar from Trenton, NJ. Professor Lorgia García-Peña research include blackness, colonialism and diaspora with a special focus on dominicanidades. Professor García-Peña study literary and cultural texts in conversation with historical processes and following a methodology for archiving in justice that challenges the heteronormative, Eurocentric production of knowledge that has persistently excluded and silenced the lives, histories and epistemeology of black and brown people from traditional archives, libraries and books. Her work is grounded on social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme. Professor García-Peña has a strong commitment to undocumented students, students of color, and first generation students. Professor García-Peña follows a model of engaged scholarship that bridges gaps between university and community both in her research and teaching.
Location: 754 Schermerhorn Extension
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Living to see tomorrow is the first step to happiness
Project type: Narrative Short
Project status: Post-Production
Director/Writer: Elegance Bratton
Director/Writer: Jovan James
Producer: Chester Algernal Gordon
Director of Photography: Zamarin Wahdat
Editor: Kristan Williams Sprague
Email: chester.algernal@gmail.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Buckshortmovie
Help independent filmmakers tell their stories.
Make a donation to Buck today.
Film Independent’s Fiscal Sponsorship program opens the door to nonprofit funding for independent filmmakers and media artists. Donate today and help bring Buck to life.
Caught in the throes of a depressive fugue, young Lynn resorts to debauchery to find joy — only to discover that happiness is a much more complicated proposition.
Young Lynn opens the filmed with his mother nagging him to take his depression meds. He heads out expecting to have some fun with Richard his white lover. When he arrives to his boat he discovers that Richard’s invited a group of black men to join him. He invites Lynn into the bedroom with some of the other men at the party and offers him his first hit of a meth pipe, and places it to Lynn’s lips. The party’s doorman tosses a plastic trash bag and Lynn gets dressed outside in the cold on the pier. High out of his mind Lynn passes out on the street to be discovered by Harris. Harris without saying a word shovels him into the back of his vehicle. Lynn looks up out of his stupor and exclaims “I’m not going to f@&k you.” Lynn sleeps in the bed while Harris smokes a cigarette and keeps a watchful eye over the young man. In the morning Lynn still doesn’t want to take his depression meds. Harris makes them each some breakfast and reveals that he has to take six times the medication everyday to avoid coming down with full blown AIDS. In that moment, Lynn realizes he isn’t alone and takes his medication. On the Baltimore pier Lynn takes in the sounds of the waking city extending his arms to the heavens.
Elegance Bratton — Director/Writer
Elegance Bratton began making films as a US Marine. He holds a BS from Columbia University and an MFA from NYU Tisch Graduate Film. His documentary Pier Kids follows queer and trans homeless on NYC’s iconic Christopher Street Pier to unpack the legacy of Stonewall for queer people of color. He is the executive producer/creator of Viceland’s GLAAD-nominated series, My House, and a Tribeca All Access and a Film Independent Fast Track fellow (2019)
Jovan James — Director/Writer
Jovan James holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and an MFA from Tisch Graduate Film. His first film,The Jump Off had its film festival debut at UrbanWorld in New York City and played 23 festivals. His next short Tadpole won Best Student film at New Hampshire Film Festival 2018. He is currently an intern at Bad Robot Productions.
Chester Algernal Gordon — Producer
Producer and costume designer Chester Algernal Gordon was the first male African-American costume designer to compete in competition at Cannes Film Festival with Danielle Lessovitz’s Port Authority, produced by Martin Scorsese. Gordon was also a winner of the Tribeca Film Institute’s 2019, TFI All Access Grant. Gordon was also a Film Independent 2019 Producing Lab & Fast Track Lab fellow. Gordon’s films have played in over 200 festivals combined including Cannes, Sundance, SXSW, BFI, Outfest, and the American Black Film Festival. He is also a producer for the GLAAD nominated, documentary TV series My House, which is currently airing on Viceland.
Zamarin Wahdat — Director of Photography
Born in Afghanistan and raised in Germany, Zamarin Wahdat has been granted a Dean’s fellowship at the Tisch School of the Arts where she studied film and cinematography. With a deep interest in expanding the boundaries of how to tell stories visually, she is drawn to tell stories that let us not only see but feel communities and characters from the inside out. Her films have been screened at numerous film festivals, including Berlin Film Festival, SXSW, BFI Film Festival and Tribeca. Along with these honors, she is the recipient of the Nestor Almendros Award for outstanding Cinematography in 2018, an Arri Volker Bahnemann Finalist and a Film Independent Project Involve Fellow in cinematography.
Malik Shakur — Lead Actor
Raised in a family of activists and artists, the stage was a natural evolution for him when he started in musicals at the age of 8. With his uncle Tupac as an example, Malik pursued a career in recorded music. 15 years later, it’s led him to promising careers in both film and music. He was the band leader for Columbia recording artist Raury. With this outfit he toured the better parts of both hemispheres including Coachella, 02 Arena in London, and most of the major stadiums in Europe. Now with his focus on acting Malik hopes to use the talents he’s been blessed with to bring to life the stories of those who rarely get to have a voice. He is also a philanthropist committed to ensuring that his family’s iconic legacy helps those less fortunate. Through Tupac Omaru Shakur Foundation Malik and his family oversee community outreach programs meant to uplift young people the world over with educational support.
For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.
Source: © 2019 Film Independent.
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So many Dominican-Americans are student leaders early in their life, either at their schools or in their neighborhood communities. Yet, what happens after graduation? This week, we talk to Sanctuary for Families’ Lucero Jorge about being a leader after college, (re)defining Latinidad and what she has learned working with families dealing with gender-based violence. It’s our way of leaning into this holiday season of thanks, paying attention to our younger generation and starting a discussion around gender violence on the heels of the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
MORE ABOUT LUCERO JORGE Lucero Jorge is currently the Senior Project Assistant and Outreach Coordinator for Sanctuary for Families, one of NY’s leading service provider and advocate for survivors of Domestic Violence and other forms of gender-based violence. There, she helps manage cases and the organization’s helpline. She is only three years removed from graduating from Columbia University, where she was an active student leader, including being President of El Grupo Quisqueya no, the school’s Dominican student organization and one of the founders of the school’s First Generation, Low-Income Partnership (2014). WHERE TO FIND LUCERO @beinglucyj (IG & Twitter)
“Architectures of Permanence: Brutalism and the South African University”
Hlonipha Mokoena received her Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2005. She is currently an associate professor and researcher at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her articles have been published in: Journal of African History; Journal of Natal and Zulu History; Journal of Religion in Africa; Journal of Southern African Studies; Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Image & Text and Critical Arts.
