Amiri Baraka: Black Spring Screening
250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Oct 7, 2020
Black Spring: Return from Exile Organized by Harmony Holiday RSVP here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fdyyGrEwScinOSnpHN6q8g Poet, playwright, and revolutionary Black thinker Amiri Baraka understood that there will be no liberation without the commitment of Black artists. He also understood the importance of unapologetic militancy in the pursuit of creative freedom, and he understood the value of the moving image, how film penetrates the subconscious and how important it is that the images of Black people being ourselves and loving it, captured by Black people, proliferate and save us from being programmed by the ideals coming out of Hollywood. Black Spring is a short, formerly missing document of Amiri's time in the Bay Area working with the Black Panthers and San Francisco State University's Black Student Union. The film oozes Black revolutionary love and commitment. We are in urgent need of our own Black Spring, of poets and artists fearless enough to gather without instructions or institutions and sing and shout and dance and resist together. Hopefully this film reminds us that part of our work is creating a way of life so fulfilling we forget to politicize our involvement in revolutionary communities and focus on one another as human beings who come together out of a love for beauty and truth. The screening of Black Spring will be held on the date of Baraka's 86th birthday. Following the screening, Holiday will lead a virtual discussion of Baraka's life and work featuring Ashley James, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Yasmina Price, PhD candidate at Yale University in the department of African-American Studies and Film/Media Studies