Black Arts Consortium Flourishing

The Black Arts Consortium (BAC), Northwestern’s interdisciplinary initiative of artists and art scholars that was founded by Dean E. Patrick Johnson in 2012, has expanded its offerings and events to include a summer institute, collaborations, and high-profile guest speakers.

BAC director and associate professor of English and Communication Studies, Ivy Wilson, moderated a talk in the fall with writer Roxane Gay on art curation and collection in conjunction with the Chicago Humanities Festival. Winter saw a series of engaging faculty talks on topics ranging from choreographies of living in Colombia to Black arts in the apocalypse. In the spring, renowned poet M. NourbeSe Philip staged a reading celebrating the milestone anniversary of her collection Zong!, participating in an enlightening conversation moderated by SoC performance studies student Natalia Molebatsi. For the duration of the year, BAC hosted two artists-in-residence in the downtown Chicago space: multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and poet I.S. Jones, who are in the process of completing a film score and a full-length poetry collection, respectively.

Last year culminated in BAC’s Summer Institute, which brought scholars and practitioners from across the country under the theme “Sonic Frequencies.” Participants presented work on queer gospel, the Black Arts Movement and jazz, the history of house and juke music in Chicago as fugitive culture, and musical representation of the Obeah figure in the Bahamas. Facilitators explored such topics as the clavinet in Black music and the technology of the mixtape.

This year promises to be just as lively. BAC kicked off the Fall Quarter with a collaborative event between Black chamber music ensemble D-Composed and artist Shani Crowe: an assemblage of joyous images of Black women and a real-time performance art piece by Crowe set to live music by the ensemble.

BAC mounted the James Baldwin Centennial Symposium, which took place over three days from November 22 to November 24. This celebration included a screening of the film If Beale Street Could Talk, gospel selections from the Northwestern Community Ensemble, a staging of Les Deux Noir, a new work by playwright and director Psalmayene 24 in collaboration with Congo Square Theatre, and keynote addresses by scholars Robert Reid-Pharr and Magdalena Zaborowska.

Winter will be full of exciting faculty talks, and BAC will usher in spring by welcoming curator Adrienne Edwards as part of EXPO Chicago. BAC will also collaborate with Latin American and Caribbean Studies to present a suite of three performances titled Movement Across the Americas, exploring dance from Peru, Colombia, and Puerto Rico.

The Black Arts Initiative, now Consortium, was founded by Johnson in 2012 after he took stock of the significant scholarship happening at Northwestern around Black art and creative practice. With few pathways to collaboration and community building, Johnson created both a network and a pipeline to unify those voices. Since the founding, BAC has sponsored numerous conferences, showcases, and residencies—raising the profiles of not only the participants but the areas of specialization originating at Northwestern.

By Kameryn Alexa Carter (Assistant Director of the Black Arts Consortium)