Be Black Baby: A House Party In Response to Brian De Palma’s 1970 film “Hi Mom!”

SATURDAY MARCH 13 2010

Performances begin at 7pm followed by a dance party 9pm until 12am, with DJ Khary Polk.

Organized by Simone Leigh with Sarina Basta and Karin Schneider as a part of CoBraClass, at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University

Participants include: Dean Daderko, David Edelstein, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tyehimba Jess, Charl Landvreugd, Liz Magic Laser with Max Woertendyke, Nomaduma Masilela with Charl Landvreugd and Diane Wah, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Khary Polk and Kenya (Robinson)

@ RECESS, 41 GRAND STREET

BYOB AND RSVP @ BBBatRECESS@gmail.com

Dean Daderko is a curator based in New York.  His most recent exhibition Pièce de Résistance at Larissa Goldston Gallery, featured artists whose work “fluidly engages form and subjectivity, within an economy of means.”  His exhibition Liberty & The Land: Benny Andrews and William Villalongo was recently on view at Cuchifritos Gallery.  Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times that “the exhibition brings together work by two artists of different generations with an interest in the fracturing politics of race and the piecing together technique of collage.”  And as a guest curator for the organization Visual AIDS, Daderko curated SIDE X SIDE at La MaMa La Galleria.  This exhibition considered the career trajectories of 5 artists whose work was affected by the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. He has also curated exhibitions for Art in General, Artists’ Space and The Kitchen in New York, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania.  His writing has appeared in publications for The Studio Museum in Harlem, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, and El Museo del Barrio.  His writing will also be included in the Queer Voice Compendium, a catalogue being produced in conjunction with the exhibition The Queer Voice by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.  His upcoming exhibition In Place Of Process opens at the Rockland Center for the Arts in West Nyack, New York on March 21 and runs through April 25, 2010.

David Edelstein is the chief film critic for New York Magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning. He lives in Brooklyn, New York He has previously been a film critic for Slate, the Village Voice and the Boston Pheonix. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair the New York Times Magazine, Variety and Esquire and elsewhere. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics. He is the author, with independent film producer Christine Vachon of Killer Films of Shooting to Kill (Avon Books, 1998)l. He is also the author of two plays, Feed the Monkey (Loeb Experimental Theater, Harvard College, 1993) and Blaming Mom (Watermark Theater, New York City, 1994).

LaToya Ruby Frazier born in Pittsburgh PA in 1982 received her BFA in Photography and Graphic Design in 2004 at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Art Photography from the School of Visual Performing Arts in 2007 at Syracuse University. She has been an artist in resident at Art Omi in 2009, Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2008 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She is currently an artist and resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York University in New York City.

Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, Leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-5 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship.

Charl Landvreugd was born in Paramaribo, Suriname and grew up in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He studied Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths University in London. Charl is a Fulbright Fellow in his final year at the Modern Art; Critical Studies program at Columbia University and has a studio in Harlem with Chashama. In his practice and research he explores issues of heritage, belonging, diaspora and Black-European identity through sculpture, video and photography.

Liz Magic Laser lives and works in New York City where she is currently an LMCC artist-in-residence. She recently attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency program. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2008 and a BA from Wesleyan University in 2003. Laser’s work uses video, photographs, installation, and live performance. Her work has been shown at galleries in New York including Derek Eller, Southfirst, Sue Scott, Smack Mellon, and The Art Production Fund. Laser has also exhibited internationally at NT art gallery (Bologna, Italy), Karlin Hall for the Prague Biennale 4 (Czech Republic) and the Georgian National Museum for Artisterium 2009 (Tbilisi, Georgia). Laser’s video work has been screened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; White Box, New York; and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Nomaduma Masilela is a Ph.D candidate at Columbia University, where she is a Ford and Mellon Mays Fellow. Her research focuses on contemporary African Art, specifically Senegal and South Africa.

Elvira Dyangani Ose is an Independent Curator and Graduate Student in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York. Elvira has a DEA in Theory and History of Architecture by the ETSAB, at Universtat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. She is a founding member of the Laboratory for Oral Resources in Equatorial Guinea, an independent research group on Equatorial Guinea oral tradition studies and also member of the research group Afroeuropeans at the University of León, Spain. As a freelance curator she developed several interdisciplinary projects, focusing on recovering collective memories, interventions in public space or urban ethnography, most significantly, Memoria i Desconcert: Art a Guinea Ecuatorial, Urban Emotion o Authentic Fiction. In the last two years she curated an exhibition of contemporary South African artists called Olvida quién soy / Erase me from who I am in collaboration with Tracy Murinik, Khwezi Gule and Gabi Ngcobo and Tres scenarios/Three scenarios, both of which took place while she was curator at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Recently, she worked as Curator at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain.

DJ Khary Polk is a Ph.D. candidate in New York University’s Program in American Studies. An avid record collector and beat curator, his musical selections have been heard at house parties and art galleries in New York, Berlin, and Amman. He has published widely and is currently finishing a dissertation on race, sexuality and diaspora in the U.S. military abroad.

Kenya (Robinson) is a self-taught artist from Gainesville, Florida. Inspired by a rich social community, her work is influenced by the use of mass consumer items and technologies as art material. A resident of New York City, she is expanding her studio practice to include site-specific installation, printmaking, and sound-performance art. Her debut exhibition, HAIRPOLITIC: The Pursuit of Nappiness, was at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in 2008. A past recipient of a Brooklyn Arts Council Re-Grant, her performance work ‘Black Trash: Sacred Melodramas’ was recently featured during a Saturday Session at P.S.1. Currently a resident of The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s WorkSpace program, she continues to explore various modes of creativity.

Diane Wah is Haitian-American artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s been living in New York City since 1986.  Drawing from the topical and the profane, her work incorporates elements of photography, sculpture, performance, graphic design and humor.In 2005 Diane received her B.A. in Culture and Media Studies from Eugene Lang College at the New School University and in the spring of 2008 she received her M.F.A. in Studio Art/Photography from Columbia University. She has been exhibited in various galleries including the Fisher Landau Center, Rush Arts Gallery, and the Number 35 Gallery. Her vagina was reviewed by the NY Times.  Wah teaches photography at Owens Community College and currently measures her time between Brooklyn and Toledo, OH.