Back and Song is a meditative four-channel film and art installation by filmmakers Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, produced by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. This kaleidoscopic installation reflects on the manner in which health and wellness are part and parcel of the American black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considers the labor and care provided by generations of black healers--doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides--and their histories of contribution to, and resistance of, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine.
As Of A Now (AOAN) is an “x-ray” film projection installation which is 3-D mapped onto a vacant row house, using audio visual narratives, augmented reality, and artifacts which reference its former Black denizens.
How can stories that are attached to objects and now vacant buildings live beyond the loss of their material vessels? AOAN counters these attempted physical erasures and explores both immutable Black culture and the impermanence of its physical manifestations. I am moving augmented “atoms” from then to now. From canvas to film. What happens when the canvas (a building, neighborhood or people) is gone? AOAN is the connective immersion, leveraging people in place with story and history.
AOAN completed production in March of 2018 and launched its scaled version at Light City. It was 3-D Mapped it onto a scale model of the West Baltimore building it is depicting. It’s now time to bring it home to its North Avenue site and the community that inspired it! Check out our Kickstarter Campaign!
As of A Now was made thanks to the generosity of: The Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Film and Media at Johns Hopkins University; Light City Festival /BOPA; Robert W. Deutsch Foundation; The Aaron and Lillie Straus Foundation; The Ruby Award Artist Project Grants, a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance; and T. Rowe Price Foundation.
14:45 3-D mapped projection project
DIRECTOR
A glimpse into the ethos and work of lauded contemporary artist Valerie Maynard.
16mm film. 12 min.
Director
TNEG, a motion picture studio with the principal aim to create a black cinema “capable of matching the power, beauty and alienation of black music.” TNEG’s theoretical propositions concerning black cinema imagine “Not just new narratives but new aesthetics, new technical parameters, new intensities” all in the service of an emergent “black cinema as central (culturally, socially, and economically) to the 21st century as was black music to the 20th century”. TNEG is Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, and Malik Sayeed
Flux Night 2015: Dream in Atlanta
Flux Projects, the Atlanta-based public art organization, presented Flux Night 2015: Dream, a one-night event of site-specific visual and performance art in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward
INSTALLATION
From September 20 to October 12, 2014, Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center presented Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, a walkable month-long art exhibition of four community-based art commissions by Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young.
CO-CURATOR
“This year’s [2016] curators, Elissa Blount-Moorhead, Rylee Eterginoso, Tumelo Mosaka, and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, asked artists to engage race according to: Who? What? Where? When? How? ‘Race’ carries many meanings, such as the socially-constructed categories attached to skin colors, the presidential race of election season, and a foot race. Yet none of these are mutually exclusive. In addition to the ongoing strength of AiOP’s ability to generate conversations between strangers, projects in the 2016 festival demonstrated how the intertwining meanings of race can give form to new artistic projects and means of protest.” Corey Dzenko, A Review of Art in Odd Places 2016: RACE
CO-CURATOR
This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice-and ideas for how each of us can contribute. by Akiba Solomon and Kenyra Rankin. Buy here
CONTRIBUTOR
“The freedom to create one’s own definition of physical, and abstract beauty based on reflections of self, is a foundation for healthy self-esteem and positive cultural identity formation.” - Elissa Blount Moorhead in Freedom is Taken Not Granted, The Radical Museum: Democracy, Dialogue & Debate
CONTRIBUTOR