#sunsetscreenings

Jeffrey Gibson’s She Never Dances Alone celebrates Indigenous women, presenting a performance by Sarah Ortegon, a jingle dress dancer who carries forward the dance’s call for ancestral healing and protection. Jingle dress originated with the Anishinaabe (Ojibwea) people during the 1918 influenza pandemic and is traditionally performed by women. The rhythmic, kaleidoscopic visual impact of the video mirrors and replicates Ortegon’s form. This shimmering mass of movement visually dazzles, but also underscores how Indigenous women today take action to protect their communities, rallying for accountability in the movement for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit across the United States, Canada, and the world. Spend time with #MMIW, #MMIWG2S, #NoMoreStolenSisters for more information about this necessary call to accountability and action.

See She Never Dances Alone in full, as well as Gibson’s first video I Was Here, as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through November 8, starting at 6pm. You can also see more of the artist's work in Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, on view inside the Museum through January 10. 

Speaking directly to the camera, artist Howardena Pindell recounts her experiences of racism and sexism as a Black woman in the United States. At times, she shifts to play the role of a white woman, gaslighting Pindell and clamining she is “paranoid.” This groundbreaking video critiques both institutionalized racism, and the mostly white feminist movement of the time. In 1972, Pindell cofounded A.I.R. Gallery, one of the first artist-run spaces for women in the U.S., and Free, White and 21 was first shown in 1980’s Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, curated by Ana Mendieta. This intensely personal and political film, whose title comes from a rebellious catchphrase often heard in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, was a stark departure from the abstract works on paper for which Pindell was primarily known.

See Free, White and 21 in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through November 8, now starting at 5pm.

A speculative, fantastical vision of historical figures and events, Tourmaline’s Salacia follows Mary Jones, a Black trans woman and sex worker who lived in New York in the 1830s. Jones navigates brutal systems of racism and transphobia, including incarceration at Castle Williams, located on present-day Governors Island. Meditating on the intergenerational trauma of displacement, Tourmaline imagines Jones within the free Black landowning community Seneca Village, and foreshadows the village’s destruction through eminent domain to build Central Park.

Originally commissioned for the Brooklyn Museum’s 2019 exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, Tourmaline’s film connects the past to the present. Footage from 1995 of trans activist Sylvia Rivera decrying the imminent destruction of an encampment housing her and other unhoused LGBTQ+ people along the Hudson River underscores the continued violence of gentrification and displacement.

See Salacia in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through October 11, starting at 6pm.

For more than 30 years, Liz Johnson Artur has been photographing people mainly from the African diaspora as part of her ongoing Black Balloon Archive project. In AfroRussia, which she completed for her solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019, the London-based artist documents the stories of Russians of African and Caribbean descent and explores the complicated nature of identity. Like Johnson Artur, many were born to Russian mothers and African or Caribbean fathers who studied in Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet Union’s efforts to expand its influence during the Cold War as nations gained independence from European colonialism. After meeting and filming numerous subjects, Johnson Artur says, “We all agreed that we felt Russian as well as African.” 

Tune in today at noon on our Instagram Live to get some Screen Time with Artur as she joins curator Drew Sawyer in a chat about this work, and more. 

This is the last weekend to view works by Artur and twelve other artists from our video art collection, as part of the first program in our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series. Stop by the plaza now through Sunday—screenings begin at 6pm.⁠ Next week we’ll announce our second program lineup, featuring a new roster of artists that will be on view October 14–November 8. Stay tuned! 

KNOT combines many of the touchstones of Rashaad Newsome’s multidisciplinary practice: spinning decorative jewelry, lavish Gothic architecture, Black ballroom dancing, mathematical knot theories, and a frenetic energy that emerges from the extraordinary dancers and vocalists, as well as the artist’s surrealistic digital collaging techniques. Commissioned for the Brooklyn Museum’s 2014–15 exhibition Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe, the video heralds the legacy and longevity of Vogue Fem dance’s Black, Latinx, queer, and trans originators and innovators. 

See KNOT in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through October 11, starting at 6pm.

John Edmonds’s video explores a quiet moment of intimacy and vulnerability between two men. Silhouetted in a darkened room, the artist and a friend face each other as they take turns “shotgunning,” or blowing smoke into the other’s mouth. At times, their lips linger, nearly touching, as if in anticipation of a kiss. In both his still photography and video work, Edmonds creates sensitive portraits and still lifes that focus on markers and rituals of Black self-fashioning and community—including hoodies, du-rags, and African sculptures.

See “Shotgun” in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series—showing each Friday and Saturday, through November 8, now starting at 5pm. You can also see more work from our first @UOVO Prize-winning artist on view in John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance, opening today on the Museum’s fourth floor.

And tune in to Screen Time on our Instagram Live, today at noon (ET), where Edmonds will join curator Drew Sawyer for a chat about his work on view in both Brooklyn Museum presentations.

Arthur Jafa’s epic akingdoncomethas (2018) is composed of a series of clips, sourced from the internet, of bishops delivering sermons as well as singers and choirs performing gospel songs for their respective congregations. Through editing, Jafa isolates recurring narratives and performative gestures, and his sequencing gives a sense of the ethics and aesthetics of the Black Christian church. In one extended passage, the video shifts to footage from the 2017 California wildfires, scored with the undulation of voices, slow-build tempo, and wails of gospel and testimonial song. From these devastating fires to the crises of life and faith shared throughout akingdoncomethas, Black Christian belief and its attendant culture swells as a powerful and lyrical form of healing, connection, and perseverance.

Watch Jafa’s full-length video as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Friday and Saturday through October 10, starting at 6pm.

In conjunction with his solo show at the Museum, UOVO Prize-winning artist John Edmonds has organized part of program 2 of Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings. His selection includes videos by Sara Cwynar, Steph Foster, Ja’Tovia Gary, Glenn Ligon, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Ka-Man Tse, which screen Friday and Saturday evenings at 5pm through November 7th.

The three works featured here all explore the reverberations of past cultural artifacts, from early cinema to vintage jewelry boxes. In Soft Film (2016), Sara Cwynar employs plush jewelry boxes, which she sourced from eBay, to explore the cycles of captialism as well as subtle forms of discrimination against women. 

Ja’Tovia Gary’s video An Ecstatic Experience (2015) manipulates historical and contemporary footage—including a 1965 TV show featuring an adaptation of a narrative by a former enslaved woman—to meditate on both the liberating and violent cycles of history. 

For his 2008 video The Death of Tom, Glenn Ligon had originally planned to create a reenactment of the climactic scene of Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film adaptation of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. After learning that the film had not been properly loaded, Ligon decided to still use the abstracted footage, suggesting a history that cannot be fully represented and remains unfinished.