Alfred: MLK Week at the School of Art and Design

Alfred University:

MLK Week at the School of Art and Design (January 15-19)

All events are free and open to the public

 

“And so, let me imagine a new country.” Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

Faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to listen to an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates and have a discussion.  You may find it at this link:
https://onbeing.org/programs/ta-nehisi-coates-imagining-a-new-america-nov2017/

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a poetic journalist and a defining voice of our times. He’s with us in a conversation that is joyful and hard and kind, soaring and down-to-earth all at once. He spoke with Krista as part of the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival before an audience of over 1,500 people, black and white, young and old. To a teacher in the audience who asks how to speak to the young now about the complexity of our world, he says, “Give me the tools. Arm me. Allow me to be able to understand why. That’s not hope, but I think that’s the sort of perspective I would’ve come from, at that age.”

 

 

All Week:

“Critical Mass Applied to Black Lives Matter”

Location: Harland Snodgrass Gallery, 3^rd floor public lobby adjacent to Holmes Auditorium

A two-channel video work created by Barbara Lattanzi. 

 

Films listed below are being shown at Holmes Auditorium, 7 pm each night except the Wednesday film is at 7:20

 

Monday

Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (1974)

Directed by John Coney

Introduced by Andrew Deutsch

 

Sun Ra--space-age prophet, Pharaonic jester, shaman-philosopher and avant-jazz keyboardist/bandleader--land his spaceship in Oakland, having been presumed lost in space for a few years. With Black Power on the rise, Ra disembarks and proclaims himself "the alter-destiny." He holds a myth-vs reality rap session with vblack inner-city youth at a rec center, threatening "to chain you up and take you with me, like they did you in Africa" if they resist his mplea to go to outer space. He duels at cards with The Overseer, a satanic overlord, with the fate of the black race at stake. Ra wins the right to a world concert, which features great performance footage of the Arkestra. Agents sent by the Overseer attempt to assassinate Ra, but he vanishes, rescues his people, and departs in his spaceship from the exploding planet Earth.

IMDB website

 

 

Tuesday

Hunger  (2008)

Directed by Steve McQueen

Introduced by Karen Donnellan

 

With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching,

Criterion website

 

Wednesday

I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

Directed by Raoul Peck

Introduced by Joseph Flynn

 

I Am Not Your Negro envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, a radical narration about race in America, using he writer’s original words, as read by Samuel L. Jackson.  Alongside a flood of rich archival material, the film draws upon Baldwin’s notes on the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to explore and bring a resh and radical perspective to the current racial narrative in America.

PBS website

 

Thursday

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Directed by Spike Lee

Introduced by William Contino

 

“The hottest day of the year explodes on-screen in this vibrant look at a day in the life of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Featuring a stellar ensemble cast that includes Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Robin Harris, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Nunn, Rosie Perez, and John Turturro, Spike Lee’s powerful portrait of urban racial tensions sparked controversy while earning popular and critical praise.”

Criterion Collection website

 

Friday

Black Girl (1966)

Directed by Ousmane Sembène

Introduced by Andrew Deutsch

 

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Criterion Collection website