What'cha looking for?
Navigation
-
May 31 2015 | 7:00 pm
The Spacesuits Presents: Ytasha Womack and Cauleen Smith
FreeThe Spacesuits is a series of immersive and multimedia installations featuring work by an international collective of over fifty musicians. The collective is curated by artists Anaïs Duplan and Winston Scarlett, who will host eight shows across North America during The Spacesuits summer tour. This event will feature an artist led conversation with Ytasha Womack and Cauleen Smith
This event will feature a conversation with:
Ytasha Womack
Ytasha L. Womack is an award-winning filmmaker/author/journalist and choreographer. She is author/creator of the popfuturist/afrofuturist novel 2212:Book of Rayla, first of the groundbreaking Rayla 2212 series. Her other books include the critically acclaimed Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity, a popular cultural studies text universities across the US, and her most recent work Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture. She also co-edited the anthology Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip Hop.
A Chicago native, her film projects include The Engagement (director) and Love Shorts (producer/writer). A social media and pop culture expert, she frequently consults and guest lectures for corporations and universities across the world. She received her B.A in Mass Media Arts from Clark Atlanta University and studied Arts, Entertainment and Media Management at Columbia College in Chicago.
and
Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith is an American born filmmaker and professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is best known for her experimental works that address the African American identity, specifically the issues facing black women today. Her rise into the spotlight first occurred with her much acclaimed feature film Drylongso earning her national recognition as a filmmaker. Her film style reflects the influence of her college mentors Angela Davis, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Cauleen currently resides in Chicago and is working multiple projects that explore the life of renowned jazz musician Sun Ra.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Anaïs Duplan
Anaïs Duplan is the author of a forthcoming chapbook, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Birdfeast, Phantom Limb, PANK, The Conversant, The Quietus, No Fear of Pop, amongst other journals. Past projects include a temporary manifesto-writing service at Flux Factory in Queens, NY as well as a performance event titled Communitas/structure on anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of ‘communitas,’ the peak of communal feeling reached in ritual.
Winston Scarlett
Winston Scarlett is an independent music and art curator from Brooklyn, NY. His events and exhibitions have been featured in such publications such as Brooklyn Vegan, Impose, No Fear of Pop, Dingus, and PopMatters. Within the last year he has opened and managed the programming of two independent art spaces in New York City, executed a three-day interactive music and art festival called Slackfest, and published an underground music mixtape through the Chicago cassette label Air Balloon Tapes.
About The Spacesuits:
Each musician in The Spacesuits collective has received five calls to action, which ask for the artist to produce some combination of photographs, videotaped performances pieces, soundscapes, and physical objects (e.g. a miniature spaceship, a shrine for an invented deity, a letter addressed to a past incarnation, a book on space-travel).
The Spacesuits explores the concepts of apocalypse, the afterlife, invented creation mythology, and the re-writing of history, taking the work of the jazz musician and Afrofuturist, Sun Ra, as its launch point. Each Spacesuits exhibition combines installation with live performance.
The Spacesuits is sponsored by The AfroFuturist Affair, Pushdot Studio, and Philadelphia Printworks.
Related Links: