You are cordially invited to join the Human Rights Project on Thursday evening, May 17th—HRP is partnering with Angela’s Pulse and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance to present Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush. This event is a fusion of dance and dialogue. It will feature an amazing show introducing new work from the most recent generation of choreographers to emerge from the acclaimed Urban Bush Women dance company. In addition, I will be moderating a pre-performance panel that will contextualize the work of the choreographers in a human rights frame.

I am very excited about this event, it promises to be a very special evening. If you are able to join us it would be lovely to see you there!

As per the Queens College site, here are the details:

An Evening of Poetry, Spoken Word, and Socially Conscience Reggae Music-VS-A Killer Disease, Malaria

In addition to the featured artists, there will be an open mic for faculty and students. All proceeds will be donated to the Malaria No More Organization for the purchase of insecticide treated bed nets.

Date:
May 8, 2012

Time:
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Address:
Queens College
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, Queens

Building:
The Patio Room

Phone:
718-997-7156

Admission:
Free

Hear ye, hear ye… I have some artwork in this show:

The Rising Arts Gallery presents the 2012 Represent Brooklyn Art Exhibition. The exhibit features jury selected painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media art by artists who work live in and are inspired by Brooklyn.

Please swing through and check it out!

DIRECTIONS: C or S Train to Franklin Ave.
35 Claver Place #1, Brooklyn NY, 11238 (Between Fulton St. & Jefferson Ave)
Gallery Hours: Sun-Wed (By Appointment)
Thur & Fri- 4-7pm, Sat- 1-5pm

Up until May 19th.

Hope this note finds you well. I wanted to be sure to invite each of you to the exciting NYC happenings that are coming up as we step into spring… If you are free it would be great to see your smiling faces at any or all of these events!

Tomorrow evening I am moderating an all star, not to be missed panel in conjunction with the National Black Writers Conference and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn’s stunning Her Word as Witness exhibit. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Joan Morgan, Akiba Solomon, Jill Nelson and Pamela Newkirk will be discussing how pop culture shapes Black women’s images in literature and the media. I’m really looking forward to hosting this discussion. 3/24, 5-7pm, at the Skylight Gallery. More details on the flyer below…

Earlier that same day (3.24, 12-1:30), I will be speaking at the Dwyer Center along with Joan Morgan, Hillary Crosley, Brittney Cooper, Yaba Blay, Shannon Washington, Shantrelle P. Lewis, Marta Moreno Vega, etc etc for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute/Parlour Magazine Women of Power conference. Plenty panels, brilliant minds exploring Black and Latina feminisms at the Dwyer Center in Harlem… oh it’s going down.

The weekend is already off to a fantastic start. I am honored to have some poetry included in the upcoming Spring 2012 issue of Black Renaissance Noire. Today I joined Quincy Troupe, Earl Lovelace, one of my favorite poets in life Patricia Smith and more for a reading & reception at NYU’s Institute of African American Affairs to launch the issue. We had a full house and the energy was fantastic! Please pick up the issue, it is a fabulous publication. Submission requests can be addressed to Black.renaissance@nyu.edu.

It’s been really amazing to participate in forums like this. Over the past couple of months, I facilitated a discussion at the Brooklyn Public Library, “Drum Major for Justice” and hosted a panel at NYU called Dilemmas Within the Black Mosaic.

Most recently, I moderated a discussion on Global Women’s Empowerment at the Brecht Forum:

The panelists included Paloma McGregor, Aimee Cox, Anusha Mehar, Dayanara Marte, Farah Tanis and Kayhan Irani. There was also a special performance by Dominique Morisseau. The best way to give you a flavor of that event is to share the “The Naked Manifesta,” written by Nina Angela Mercer and Ebony Golden:

“Naked … ain’t wearing the politically correct armor of hush yo mouth and sorry. Naked… ain’t swallowing the recycled backwash of glass ceilings or yo half-truths. Naked… bearing every weapon our bones can bare. Each scar, a memory. Each memory, a memorial. Each memorial, a living truth, untethered, unbound. We naked in our dream songs. Somebody tell somebody. This freedom is too urgent for the narrow space of closets and windows dressed in iron bars. We naked and naming our own selves in our own shrines, re-membering our own bodies, sanctified by birth right and every rebellious breath taken since we stepped on the scene. We naked, growing more wild from the root. We will not be tamed.

WoW [Women on Wednesdays, the series this event was a part of] proclaims an end to the lies, the shadows, the myriad ways in which black girls and women hide ourselves.

WoW proclaims an end to the legacy of silence, regret, disease, self-sabotage and injustice assaulting our lives.

WoW proclaims our greatest strength is our very existence. We are creators. We honor our voices, our movements, our conjure and love, our recipes for how to get over in this world of illusion and fear. We are the very antidote we seek.”

Dopeness, right?

The last thing I need to share with y’all is that the main events for the National Black Writer’s Conference are happening next week: 3/29 – 4/1. If you are able to make it on Friday 3/30 I’m the mistress of ceremonies so I will definitely see you there! For more details, check out http://www.nationalblackwritersconference.org/home.html

I hope you’ll join me in supporting this work. I will look for you in the whirlwind!

On December 20, 2011 I offered commentary along with Dr. Salamishah Tillet and April Silver of Akila Worksongs. We talked about Dr. Maya Angelou and Common’s collaboration that sparked a community conversation about the creation of controversial art and the use of the “N word.” We also weighed in on a new survey released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention about the horrific number of rapes and the culture of violence we find ourselves in. Missed it? Catch up now.

December 27, 2011: Doubling down! For our 2011 Year in review listeners were treated to an hour long special of The Spin. This one featured writer Joan Morgan, PR guru April Silver & me. More details about this piece may be found in my blog entry below.

On January 10, 2012 I was invited back to the The Spin along with writer and filmmaker dream hampton; Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost and professor Bhakti Shringarpure. As always, we got into a thoughtful and provocative discussion about the week’s headlines. To start, in the first change since 1927, the legal definition of rape has been expanded to include assaults on men. Next, a Georgia school’s faulty attempt at “cross curricular education” results in math questions like: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?” Finally, with the birth of baby Blue Ivy Carter and the release of the new track Glory by her father Jay Z we got into a fascinating conversation about the perspectives emerging from the blogosphere… Is Beyonce the new face of feminism? Listen in by following this link.

During the January 24, 2012 edition of The Spin we discussed the move to eradicate slavery from the school books, courtesy of the Tennessee Tea Party. We also covered the 39th anniversary of Roe v Wade and the current state of reproductive rights. The convo concludes with a discussion of Black images in film. As host Esther Armah phrased it, “Red Tails, Pariah, Spike Lee, Sundance, the state of black film. When it comes to mainstream money & black folks on film: is George Lucas right about Red Tail’s failure equaling black films’ future at risk? Or are we accepting mediocrity & calling it revolutionary? & are we ignoring the revolution being cinematized via film-makers like Ava DuVernay & the work of ImageNation?” If you missed the show when it aired on New York’s WBAI 99.5FM with commentators Dream Hampton, Aletha Maybank & me clickety click right here to hear it all go down.

With the exception of the hour long special, each of the all women’s media panels begin about 25 minutes in! Enjoy…

To begin, I’ve been a guest commentator on The Spin, an all women’s panel on WBAI 99.5FM’s Wake Up Call. In my most recent appearance I was invited to participate in an hour long special covering everything from a recently released study about our current incarceration rates to language and power in the global Black community. It was my privilege to join Esther Armah (program host and playwright), Joan Morgan (author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost) and April Silver (media maven and PR guru who runs Akila Worksongs) in a really fascinating discussion.

In addition to the above topics, we also talked about our picks for news highlights from the year. As Esther generously tweeted: “What’s your story of 2011? On this am’s All Women Media Panel, the brilliant Shani Jamila picked Time magazine’s ‘Protester as Person of the Year’ article which celebrated the global social protest movements from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Occupy Wall Street and the resurrection of people power with social media as a powerful tool to bring images & stories & to make citizen journalists into storytellers. What a year? Check out Shani’s choice on this am’s The Spin.”

If you have the chance to listen I think you’d enjoy. Here is the link (the panel begins after the headlines, approximately ten minutes in).

In other news, earlier this month I headed down to Miami to check out Art Basel– one of the most amazing gathering of art, artists, collectors and gallerists I have ever participated in. For several days large swaths of the city are inundated with visual and performative displays from some of the art world’s most talented. I’ve posted a few pics from our time down there below:

Miami Beach

Manolo Valdes

In front of Faith Ringgold's quilt

Kito Mbiango

Natalie Hopkinson, Adrian Loving, guest, Jamil Hamilton

Takashi Iwasaki

Max Weidemann

Jason Green, guest, Duhirwe Rushemeze, Brandon Coley Cox

Joyce J Scott

Renee Cox, Charlotte Mouquin + guests

Shani Jamila & Danny Simmons

For many years I danced and did performance art in Washington DC with a powerful group of sisters, in celebration of the lives and beauty of Fela Kuti’s wives… This was well before the Broadway play, which I loved. Artist Holly Bass and I revisited that aesthetic a bit during our time at Basel this year…

Shani Jamila + Holly Bass

Lastly, in November I was part of a group of quilters who displayed and discussed our work at the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. We’d all had the good fortune to participate in a workshop series by master artist Dindga McCannon, a Harlem based fabric artist who is also an extremely generous and gifted teacher. A full house came out to view the work and listen to the stories that emerged from our time together. A picture of the group is below:

Display and Discussion at the Dwyer with Dindga

Alright lovelies, thank you for walking this road with me. I do wish you all the best for this upcoming year. Light!

I’m so happy to be able to share some super exciting news… I have a piece of my art work included in an exhibit celebrating of one of our living legends, Faith Ringgold! Ms. Ringgold is an accomplished artist and author whose work has been displayed on six continents and whose 75+ awards include 22 honorary doctorates. You can see why she was recently selected as the inaugural recipient of the City College of New York’s Cultural Arts Award! Part of her tribute included a commemorative exhibit featuring some of the top quilting artists from around the country, curated by Dr. Myrah Brown Green.

My quilt is titled “Ring Shout.” It takes its name from the holy African American tradition of forming a circle of praise, a ritual our ancestors created that carries through to today. Also, as a child of the hip-hop generation, this quilt is my dedication, my “shout out” to Ms. Ringgold—an artist who has inspired me deeply.

It’s important to me to draw the connections from the past to the present in my work as a fabric artist, especially given the role quilting has played in the lives of African American women. My Grandma was a quilter. It is a special thing to be able to take scraps and cast offs and create a thing of beauty. It’s representative to me of what we as a people have always been able to do.

The vivid colors were chosen to reflect the abundance of life and spirit that has allowed our community to survive conditions we were never meant to come through. The appliqué is done entirely by hand. I stitched a raw edge finish in a ring of gold in homage to the incredible artist we are all honoring in this exhibit.

See below for pics from our opening reception in the Aaron Davis Hall gallery– the address is West 135th Street at Convent Avenue in Harlem. If you’d like to see the exhibit in person, it will stay open until December 1st. Also, I’ll have a second piece shown at the Dwyer Cultural Center during an evening reception at the end of the month.

It’s a new day! I’m so honored to be in the company of such amazing visual artists and I’m deeply thankful to have your support as I walk this path.

Opening Reception

Ring Shout

Ring Shout close up

The Exhibit

Faith Ringgold + Shani Jamila

I am honored to have been featured in the amazing Of Note magazine. “Of Note celebrates people of color in the arts. It is a space where art meets activism, empowerment, and social responsibility. The artists and artistic works featured by of note demonstrate a commitment to global citizenship and social change.”

This was a great opportunity to share about the work I did with Justice for DC Youth. Big shout out to the young people who are continuing to walk so strongly within our Prison to College Pipeline program and whose leadership humbles me.

Check it out!

Washington, D.C: Shani Jamila on Arts Activism

“Artists are the only people in a society who can tell that society the truth about itself.”
~ James Baldwin

By Shani Jamila

Our challenge as arts activism facilitators is to create moments wherein the community with whom we work feels compelled, inspired, or otherwise motivated to believe bigger than they see. This is the groundwork that must be laid in encouraging and empowering people to understand and explore their political imagination—a fundamentally undervalued part of creating social change.

My own life’s work has been dedicated to this end. As a recent example, I directed the Washington, D.C. based organization, Justice for DC Youth that worked to shift the city’s priorities from an over-reliance on incarceration to a focus on education. One of the major issues we confronted was how to subvert the school to prison pipeline.

Clearly, schools are centers for formal education…but they also serve as institutions where children are implicitly and explicitly taught their place in contemporary society. Whether it be via the exclusion of culturally relevant history in the curriculum, the decrepit state of the textbooks and school facilities, or metal detectors and guards policing the hallways, many schools in economically impoverished communities have the atmosphere of a prison. Conversely, economically privileged schools may have the overt look of a college campus. In either case, young people learn early what society expects of them.

These dynamics are further exacerbated by the fact that, given the inextricable ties between class and race in this country, the overwhelming majority of schools that funnel youth into prison rather than college are primarily serving populations of color. The crisis has reached epidemic proportions, yet because the brown and black faces that characterize it have been criminalized and shuttered behind jailhouse walls, it is largely overlooked or written off in the public eye.

“It was young people—collegiate volunteers who joined with their incarcerated peers—who were the lifeblood of this political education and arts activism project.”

Our program was designed to work with the young people others had thrown away. We did this via an initiative we called “The Prison to College Pipeline”— a culturally grounded tutoring and mentorship program that utilized the arts to reach and teach incarcerated teens.

We used a wide variety of artistic approaches within our work. To introduce ourselves, we would collectively create collages that depicted what was important to us. Important figures in Black and Latino history were introduced via photography and Jeopardy games. The teens were tasked with performing skits that allowed them to act out different scenarios young people face, and explain why they chose to make the decisions they did. We wrote and shared poetry that discussed what it means to be free.

Through this work, I was reminded how cultural expression allows for a safe space to challenge our assumptions and imagine things that may seem otherwise inconceivable or irrational. In addition, art helps level the power dynamics that are present in the privileges that age, education, or other social markers may confer. It also opens a window into the trust that is the core of any successful mentor-mentee relationship. If both parties can allow themselves vulnerability, or if one can model it for the other, that’s where it starts.

Each one of us is in possession of a political imagination that should order our steps as assuredly as moss on the north side of the trees signaled the way forward for our ancestors. It should dictate our movements in the same fashion that a strong beat demands rhythm from our hips.

Once it is sparked, we become unstoppable. This program was for me a case study in how that works. It is important to note that it was young people—collegiate volunteers who joined with their incarcerated peers—who were the lifeblood of this political education and arts activism project. I’m so proud that we reached hundreds of youth during my tenure. However, I consider one of the project’s greatest successes to be that it continues now as an exclusively youth-led initiative.

The gritty grassroots work we do in opposition to the prison industrial complex, in support of a feminist lens, in affirmation of human rights… all of it is rooted in an ethic of transformation. If we can harness the power of inspired creativity, in the immortal words of Sam Cooke, “a change is gonna come.”

For more information on Justice for DC Youth visit www.jdcy.org.

Shani Jamila [www.shanijamila.com] is committed to using the power of arts activism to create global social change. Her work has taken her to more than thirty countries over five continents, a journey she chronicles in her journalism, cultural work and writings on race, gender, justice and diaspora.