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(NEWARK, NJ) — Legendary author and activist Amiri Baraka wrote more than 50 books before his death in 2014. His son, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, will be celebrating one of them, along with his sister, art historian Kellie Jones, at Express Newark on April 3, 2024.
That book is “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,’’ written in 1963 when Amiri Baraka, who later changed his name, was LeRoi Jones, a Beat Generation poet from a literary scene that included Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac.
Now regarded as a boundary-breaking classic, “Blues People” used the evolution of Black music in the U.S. to trace how enslaved Africans became African Americans, creating a cultural identity that changed the nation and the world.
Express Newark, a socially engaged center for art and design supported by Rutgers-Newark, has been celebrating the book and the issues it explores–Black culture and history, music, displacement and resistance–with an exhibition by five artists and a series of events centered around the theme “Blues People.’’
The April 3 event, titled “Children of the Cosmos,” will feature a conversation between the mayor and Jones, a Columbia University professor, MacArthur “Genius” fellow and curator, and moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Salamishah Tillet, Executive Director of Express Newark.
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According to Tillet, the dialogue will focus on art and activism and explore the legacy of Jones’s book, as well as the evolving significance of blues as music and as a metaphor for how we think about class, race, and politics today. The event is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation and Harborview Foundation.
“Mayor Ras Baraka and Dr. Kellie Jones are two of the most important and incisive voices on the role that art plays in making our society more equitable and our world more just,” says Tillet, who is the Henry Rutgers professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. “In their respective fields of politics and academia and their shared practice of writing and activating art in public spaces, they have kept the extraordinary vision of “Blues People” alive. We have much to learn from their brilliance, and I am honored to be in a conversation with them both.”
At the event, the multidisciplinary “Blues People” exhibition, which opened last month and runs through July, will be on display. Curated by Alliyah Allen, Express Newark’s associate curator and program coordinator, it features work by some of the nation’s leading artists, who were asked to reimagine one of their own pieces in conversation with Jones’ text and vanguard ideas. Artists include Derrick Adams, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Cesar Melgar, and Accra Shepp.
Inside the Paul Robeson Gallery, multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams reimagines “The Holdout,” a 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 features conversations with renowned artists and local activists about gentrification, economic development, and land ownership.
Surrounding Adams’s sculpture is street photographer Cesar Melgar’s “Newark Master Plan,” a series of black and white images of homes in Newark from 2019 to 2022 that bear “Notice of Public Hearing on Proposed Development” banners now being shown for the first time. Exhibiting alongside his photos from his 2018 “Street Views” series set in the Ironbound and Downtown Newark, Melgar’s poignant work captures how increased living costs, residential displacement, and rapid redevelopment actively threaten the vitality of Newark today.
Multimedia artist Adebunmi Gbadebo features two newly hand-made site-specific paper textiles inspired by her work “At the Bottom of the Atlantic Ocean There is a Railroad Made of Human Bones” in the Window Gallery. Taking its title from a line in Baraka’s poem “Wise, why’s, y’s” and made up of Black hair, cotton, rice paper, and indigo dye, her piece explores labor, land, and familial legacy at “True Blue Plantation,” the rice and indigo plantation where her ancestors were enslaved in Fort Motte, South Carolina. Across in the Box Gallery, photographer and visual artist Adama Delphine Fawundu’s revisit of her experimental short film, “Who We Be”
(2017) explicitly takes up Jones’s emphasis on Black music by exploring hip hop, social language, and activism in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Fawundu’s wallpaper comprises photographic transfers of Black hand gestures throughout the African diaspora, which will serve as the backdrop to the room.
Exhibited on the first floor of Express Newark are photographer Accra Shepp’s “Occupying Wall Street” and “Covid-19 Journals,” a series of black-and-white portraits of the protestors of New York City’s 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement and their counterparts in the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020. Installed on the main floor of the building and incorporating Baraka’s poetry and the music of his father, avant-garde jazz musician, and Baraka’s good friend Archie Shepp, Accra Shepp’s installation dissolves the boundaries between the individual and the collective, reminding us that each person present at these marches plays an essential role in the safeguarding of American democracy and achieving radical forms of justice.
Bridging last year’s topic of “Aliveness” and this year’s theme is a public conversation by our foremost contemporary Black poets and scholars. On March 7, 2024, Rutgers Professor John Keene will moderate the public conversation “Aliveness and The Black Poem” that features Nikky Finney, Kevin Quashie, Evie Shockley, and Tracy K. Smith on the making and meaning of contemporary African American poetry. Later that spring, Jasmine Mans, the inaugural poet-in-residence at New Arts Justice, will do the public activation “Nana’s Kitchen” based on her book BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME.
“Blues People” is organized 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, the Director of the Paul Robeson Galleries, Brooke Finister, the program coordinator of New Arts Justice, and Anthony Alvarez, the assistant director of Shine Portrait Studio and the coordinator of the Free School at Express Newark.
Rutgers University – Newark, the Ford Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, The HarbourView Equity 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.
Express Newark is a center for socially engaged art and design where people can create art together, learn collaboratively, and build coalitions to advocate for change. Express Newark honors our city’s historical legacy as an epicenter of art and activism by being a third space that bridges the campus and community and supports contemporary artists dedicated to social justice in Newark and beyond.
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