Note: This post has been updated. Some December treats from Georgia and South Carolina are coming to DC this month. David Pleasant’s “Drum Folk” at the Anacostia Community Museum” Since August, Word, Shout, Song:Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language has been on exhibit at the Anacostia Community Museum. The exhibit has been extended through [...]
Eventually, the embargo walls between the U.S. and Cuba will come tumbling down. Iowa farmers are pushing it. Folks with family on the island are now back on the island since the Obama administration lifted the Bush administration’s restrictions on travel for Cuban Americans. Artists, journalists, religious institutions, students and academics still have a shot [...]
Just scratching the surface… American Public Television (APT) is streaming episodes of the series “Voces” including the documentary Celia: The Queen about the one and only la reina of salsa. Catch it through October 31st at www.voces.tv. Lois Malou Jones: A Life In Vibrant Color Opening October 9 at the National Museum of Women in [...]
Inside the Beltway is quite exciting this time of year for all the best reasons…and this just scratches the surface. Sunday, September 5, 6 PM Graywolf Press and CAS/51 celebrates the publication of SKIN, INC. – Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis (see the eclectique interview with Ellis) CAS/51 510 Randolph Street, Washington, DC [...]
Yesterday, the NAACP passed a resolution condemning the racist acts of Tea Party protesters. The backlash from the Tea Party has been furious. But we are not an organization that shies away from controversy. The NAACP was founded on hope, not hate — and we will not stand idly by as racists work to divide [...]
It’s festival summer time in DC. Hip Hop Theater Festival starts today. It’s hot-hot-hot. The Capital Fringe Festival opens Thursday, July 8 — “where everyone’s story has value!” Screen on the Green is back! I’ve heard rumblings that this free outdoor film festival on the National Mall (between the Lincoln Memorial and US Capitol) was [...]
In John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” song he writes “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Or lately, the adage resembles the Frank Sinatra tune “That’s Life.” One life lesson is there’s really no excuse for not practicing your art if that’s what you want or love even in a environment [...]
The first time I heard Horace Silver‘s “Song for My Father,” it was in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College. Wendell Logan, the jazz professor of a renegade jazz studies program at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, assigned it to my BFF Dawn E. Robinson to sing as a duet with our fellow Duke Ellington School [...]
Years and years ago, I told the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, (before she became a star) that I couldn’t sit through an opera performance. That I couldn’t listen to opera unless I was doing something at the same time…like frying chicken. Well, that’s what I’m doing today. I’m frying chicken. And I’m going to select a [...]
“My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort [...]
