Artmaking and Liberation

The Spring 2023 iteration of our paid art commissioning program, Armory Art Together, took inspiration from the Public Programs event Hapo Na Zamani (Black Arts Movement Past and Present), in collaboration with Harlem Stage’s series Black Arts Movement: Examined. Youth Corps endeavored in paid creative cultivation for four weeks exploring various artists from the Black Arts Movement, highlighted at Harlem Stage, as well as focusing on the idea of artmaking as a tool for liberation.

In this semester of AAT, Youth Corps interrogated the guiding question,

What does it mean to create art that liberates?

Every week Youth Corps was asked to creatively explore the same prompt in a different modality for six hours. These different forms of artmaking included visual art, writing, sound, and performance. They were asked to create a piece of art that either:

1. 1. Expresses what liberation means to them, OR

2. 2. They feel incites the audience to act towards liberation.

In these 6 weekly paid hours of creative exploration, Youth Corps members were also asked spend some time researching the inspiring artist of the week, who was generally an artist spotlighted in the Harlem Stage series. Youth Corps had the opportunity to explore the work of Kay Brown, Benny Andrews, Thulani Davis, Max Roach, and Adrienne Kennedy.

Every Wednesday, Youth Corps also had the opportunity to attend a paid zoom salon. In these zoom salons we delved deeper into the works of the inspiring artists, the Black Arts Movement, and how our definitions of liberation may have shifted during our creative explorations.

Additionally, over the four week period Youth Corps had the option of attending two Harlem Stage events within the Black Arts Movement: Examined series. The first event was Black Arts Movement: Examined - Visual Art discussion, where Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Michael Sawyer and Harlem Stage Creative Director and CEO, Pat Cruz, took part in a dialogue over zoom that examined the impact and legacy of the visual arts during Black Arts Movement and the resonant responses to the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements. The second event was the Black Arts Movement: Examined Film Screening of “Jason and Shirley,” a reimagining of the moment when Jason Holliday (played by Jack Waters) competed with Shirley Clarke (played by Sarah Schulman) over the documentary film, “A Portrait of Jason,” which she made about his life during a marathon 12-hour shoot in her apartment at the legendary Chelsea Hotel.