On Friday, October 28, Dr. Guy hosted a public performance and conversation with a panel of local artists at the ICA titled “Cross Relations: Experimentation and the Arts. Setting their work in conversation with other artists and each other, Guy and the panel created a fertile space for discourse and learning, connecting across time, space, and medium for a rich evening of discussion and performance in a space that has placed a particular emphasis on the work of artists of the African diaspora this season.
Recent exhibitions “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” and “Endless Shout” have furthered the Institute of Contemporary Art’s longstanding goal of emphasizing the work of under-recognized artists and contributors. MusiQology had a full report on the exhibits as part of our new series, Fresh Wax.
The Artists
Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian-Bahamian poet, scholar and cultural critic who recently performed with Dr. Guy’s MusiQology at the Blue Note in New York. His widely acclaimed first book, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and the Cave Canem Poetry Prize among other awards. His work has been published, featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Small Axe, Callaloo, The Financial Times and elsewhere. He has held faculty and visiting scholar appointments at the University of the West Indies, Franklin & Marshall College, the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania. Campbell’s recent work includes a manuscript on poetry and diaspora and a series of essays on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, for which he was awarded the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is currently at work on a book on Sidney Poitier.
V. Shayne Frederick is a pianist, vocalist and poet who began his formal musical study at Dartmouth College, and then later in a Jazz ensemble in Philadelphia led by organist, pianist, composer, and vocalist Trudy Pitts. His craft has been honed at jam sessions, on bandstands, in concert halls, and behind pianos at a multitude of venues over the last decade, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation, Society Hill Playhouse, Philadelphia Clef Club for Performing Arts, and the African-American Museum in Philadelphia. V.Shayne’s voice has been called “the very sound of remembering” with traces of Nat “King” Cole, Arthur Prysock, Billy Eckstine, Johnny Haruman, but he prides himself on being “the reinvention of everything you forgot you knew.”
James Maurelle‘s work investigates formalism, conceptualism, dreamlike realism, and relational aesthetics. At its nucleus, his artistic foundations come from the things he learned during childhood as a plumber’s assistant. There is what he calls a “correlation shaped between labor and creativity that has formed the basis of the work ethic at the heart of [his] practice, which transcribes a circular discourse or a kind of call-and-response.” Maurelle emphasizes linked dualities such as action and stagnation, heavy and light, political and anarchic, old and new, and video and photography. His intention is to break the cultural rules that separate “work” from “art”, with the hope of ushering in a new esthetic vernacular that draws contemporary path back to “workmanlike” images and remakes them anew as art.
Tiona McClodden is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. She deconstructs narratives within social realism, re-memory, and recently, what Audre Lorde termed biomythography. Her work explores shared ideas, values, and beliefs within the broader African Diaspora through the lens of what she calls “Black mentifact.” She is interested in intersubjectivities within Black communities, traversing nostalgia, and how the past, present, and future can intersect visually and thematically within time-based work.
The Conversation
Later this week, we’ll have a listening guide and curated audio segments, but for now, here’s full audio from the evening’s discussion. For more events like this, check out MusiQology’s new Soundcloud page.
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