Wednesday 9 May, 18.30-20.30
Starr Cinema Cauleen Smith Black Utopia
£10 (concessions available)
Journey through artist Cauleen Smith’s live audio-visual collage, which she uses the methods of musician Sun Ra to speculate on history, music, outer space and African divination. This ‘film without film’ combines an audio compilation played on vinyl records with the projection of a growing archive of 35mm slides responding to the local history of Afrofuturism in each city in which it’s performed
Artist’s Talk: Faith Ringgold
Thursday 19 April, 18.30 – 20.00
Starr Cinema
£9 (concessions available)
Join legendary American artist Faith Ringgold for a special talk. Ringgold has been a pioneering figure for six decades, developing a wide-range practice that includes painting, sculpture, quilt-making, writing and performance. Her poetic and politically nagged work is part of museum collections across the United States, and featured in the 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Hear her discuss her career from the 1960’s to present day. The evening will be introduced by Francis Morris, Director of Tate Modern and will also include an audience Q&A.
About Ringgold
Faith Ringgold was born the youngest of three children on October 8, 1930, in Harlem Hospital, New York City, she descended from parents who were from working-class families displaced by the Great Migration. her mother was a fashion designer and father a known storyteller. Ringgold was raised in an environment that encouraged creativity and after receiving her degree she began a painting career in 1950, her inspiration for the works she created in the 1960s was the writings of Baldwin and Baraka, African Art, Cubism and Impressionism. With her early pieces using flat figures and shapes. Although she merited and got attention, with her work focusing on underlying racism in everyday activities collectors and galleries were apprehensive and she sold very little. Her work was politically based maturing around the time of the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. Later work included her first political collection with paintings inspired by artist Jacob Lawrence, naming the collection American People (1963). The paintings explored racial interaction from a female viewpoint, asking the question “why” about some of the racial issues in American Society. In 1972 she was sponsored by the Creative Artists Public Service Program, Ringgold installed For the Women’s House in the Women’s Facility on Rikers Island. Producing a large-scale mural that composed of depictions of women in professional and civil servant roles, presenting positive alternatives to incarceration. As her first public commission this was widely seen as her first feminist work.
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