A Permanent Accusation: Art Confronts Lynching and Other Acts of Inhumanity

Wednesday January 30, 7pm

A Permanent Accusation: Art Confronts Lynching and Other Acts of Inhumanity

Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, 215-735-9600

Art, in all its forms, is powerful. Poems and music, paintings and dance make us feel as well as think. Art produces the “affect,” the internalized feeling and emotional understanding that goes beyond cognition. Human beings have done terrible things to each other but the purpose of this program is not to beat anyone up or bemoan the ills done to us. Our purpose is to acknowledge and to remember that we human beings need to be vigilant and to respond when things go astray. We need to remember that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” and “The only necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I thank the artists in this program for being vigilant and for acting and for producing wonderful art on terrible subjects. As Botero says in his video, “Nobody would remember Guernica if not for the painting.”

Visual Art:

World Artists Against Apartheid (13 prints)

Permanent Accusation: Botero on Abu Ghraib (Video)

Collage and Conflict: The Anti-Imperialist Art of Theodore A. Harris

 

Music: Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday; The Death of Emmett Till, Bob Dylan

End this War… After Shirley Chisholm – triptych by Theodore A. Harris

Poetry: Marjorie Agosin (Torture in Chile – The most unbelievable part); Gregory Djanikian (Armenian genocide – So I will till the Ground); Hanoch Guy Kaner (Jewish Holocaust – Terra Treblinka. Holocaust Poems); Lynn Levin (Sexual Violence); Ewuare X. Osayande (on White Supremacy – Whose America?); Aaren Yeats Perry (history – Ariku: A Re-Membering); Lamont B. Steptoe (African American experience – Meditations on Congo Square); Robert Zaller (War – Dresden Zoo poem)

Dance: Lela Aisha Jones (Native Portals of Lynching and Love, The profound imagery of the noose becomes a portal towards understanding the past and future of the African/Afro/Black experience. Inspired by their personal stories, memories, and dreams, six dancers explore their exposure to this country’s traumatic history of lynching and ask the question: what would it take for me to fall in love with someone different?)

Part of the Ida B. Wells, Lynching & Trayvon Martin project – February 22 to March 3, 2013 produced by Moonstone Arts Center

for information www.moonstoneartscenter.org/idabwells or 215-735-9600