BLACK IN THE MIDDLE -- PANELS
HOMEExplored various meanings and transformative possibilities of home in the Black Midwest. As a space of movement and transition (The Great Migration and automotive industry), we ask how our work, thought, and collectivity redefine, remap, and reimagine homeplace(s). We demonstrate how the alternative ways of knowing and being rooted in our homes (kitchen tables, porches, churches, etc.) resist dominant structures such as automation, disinvestment, and dispossession. We aim to articulate, through words and art, the task of making and designating home as a space of resistance, futurity, and social transformation. 
Photo: Adja Gildersleve
TWIN CITIESMinnesota prides itself on its niceness wrapped into an American heartland mythology around hard work and morality that conceals its pernicious disparities in health, education and housing for Black residents. This panel will be a conversation examining what the state of Minnesota often (necessarily?) conceals in its representation of itself and how Black life in the Twin Cities is substantively more than its opposition to an anti-Black state. |
Photo: Adja Gildersleve
JUSTICEFocused on the importance of art, activism, and scholarship as transformative strategies for realizing a more just world. Our esteemed panelists each have strong reputations for speaking truth to power and demanding justice. We will discuss how the Black Midwest has nurtured their talents and crafts, while also acting as an impetus for remaining connected to struggles in the Midwest and beyond. SPACEExamined the idea of space, a boundless material and discursive plane in which the Black body situates itself in relation to other bodies, practices, and ideas. In this panel we look at Black life as it is lived in the Midwest, a place thought to be lacking or wholly absent of Blackness. We talk through a range of Black spatial politics, as produced and performed across different spaces. We examine the when and where of Blackness, and how artists, scholars, and activists are inventing new spaces of imagination outside of, but in between, East and West Coast metropoles. |
FREEDOMAt the heart of the Black experience in the US is the demand for Freedom. To be free has been at the heart of the Black Freedom Movement in the US in the Midwest, across the nation, Africa, and the African diaspora. Given the current moment in Black life, what does it mean to “Get Free”? A cross section of activists, artists, and academics on this panel take on the question of what freedom means, what it means to get free, and what it means to be a freedom fighter today in the Black Midwest and beyond. 
Photo: Adja Gildersleve
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BLACK IN THE MIDDLE -- FILM SCREENINGS
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Songs For My Right Side (2019)Director and Producer Q&A: Jeffrey C. Wray & Tama Hamilton-Wray
Rodger Smith is in pain. The fate of two recently encountered young black people occupy his thoughts. An undocumented West African longing for home crosses his path. Most of all, he wants his estranged wife Josephine back. All the while, a mysterious pain takes over the right side of his body. Only music can soothe his troubled soul. |
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Thee Debauchery Ball (2019)Director Q&A David Weathersby
The story of Chicago’s Afro-Futuristic, BDSM, fetish themed House music party and how it has reshaped the Black social scene and challenged the narratives of Black sexuality. |