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GREG TATE: THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS IN CONTEMPORARY
BLACK ART, POLITICS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
MAY 4, 2010 | 8:30 PM
presented by
REDCAT
Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
California Institute of the Arts
GREG TATE: THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS IN CONTEMPORARY
BLACK ART, POLITICS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2010 | 8:30 PM
Co-presented with the CalArts graduate Aesthetics and Politics Program
The longtime Village Voice cultural critic, pioneer of hip-hop journalism and adventurous music
director is on hand for an illuminating talk that locates a crisis today in black creative self-conception and representation—an exigency now being countered by new black theater, Afropunk and
young black visual artists. Tracing a history of the recent past, Tate’s incisive analysis connects
the depoliticization and disenchantment of black performative expression to the hypercapitalist
mass-marketing of black cultural output that boomed in the 1990s. Tate has contributed to numerous magazines, journals and museum catalogues; his books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk
and Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. He is currently
working on a new book about the Godfather of Soul, provisionally entitled James Brown’s Body
and the Revolution of the Mind. Tate is introduced by award-winning poet and performer Douglas
Kearney, who also leads the post-lecture Q&A.
ABOUT GREG TATE
Greg Tate was a Staff Writer at The Village Voice from 1987-2005. His writings on culture and
politics have also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, Rolling
Stone, VIBE, Premiere, Essence, Suede, The Wire, One World, Downbeat, and JazzTimes. He was
recently acknowledged by The Source magazine as one of the ‘Godfathers of Hiphop Journalism’
for his groundbreaking work on the genre’s social, political, economic and cultural implications in
the period when most pundits considered it a fad.
His published interviews include dialogues with Miles Davis, George Clinton, Richard Pryor,
Carlos Santana, Lenny Kravitz, Sade, Erykah Badu, Wayne Shorter, Joni Mitchell, Lisa Bonet,
Samuel R Delany, Ice Cube, Dexter Gordon, Betty Carter, King Sunny Ade, Chuck D of Public
Enemy, Cassandra Wilson, Jill Scott, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman,
Henry Threadgill and Vernon Reid of Living Colour. Tate has also written for the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, ICA Boston, ICA
London, Museum of Contemporary Art Houston, The Studio Museum In Harlem, The Gagosian
Gallery, Deitch Projects and the Tate Museums London and Liverpool. His writing about visual art
includes monographs and essays about Chris Ofili, Wengechi Mutu, Jean Michel Basquiat,
Ellen Gallagher, Kehinde Wiley and Ramm El Zee. His books include Everything But The Burden, What White People Are Taking From Black
Culture (Harlem Moon/Random House, 2003), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and The Black
Experience (Acapella/Lawrence Hill, 2003); Flyboy In The Buttermilk, Essays on American Culture (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Duke University Press will publish Flyboy 2:The Greg Tate Reader.
He is now working on a book about the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, for Riverhead Press. Working title: James Brown’s Body and the Revolution of the Mind.
His play My Darling Gremlin (with live music score by Lawrence Butch Morris) was produced at
Aaron Davis Hall in 1993 and at The Kitchen in 1995. His short feature sci-fi film Black Body
Radiation was produced in 2006. He also once collaborated on the librettos for Juluis Hemphill’s opera Long Tongues (Apollo
Theatre Production) and for Leroy Jenkins’ Fresh Faust (Boston ICA Production).
Tate is musical director for the 13 to 35-plus member conducted-improvisation ensemble Burnt
Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber. The band regularly performs in Europe, Canada and the United
States. Burnt Sugar has released fifteen albums on their own TruGROID imprint since 1999. Their
recordings and live performances have won them enthusiastic acclaim from Rolling Stone,
Downbeat, The Wire, The Village Voice, Straight No Chaser, Signal To Noise and The New York
Times. They can be reached via myspace.com and www.burntsugarindex.com.
In February 2010, Burnt Sugar appeared in Paris as the pit band for Melvin Van Peeble’s operatic
restaging of his film Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song.
ABOUT DOUGLAS KEARNEY
Douglas Kearney’s first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 by
Red Hen Press. His second manuscript, The Black Automaton (Fence, 2009), was chosen by
Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers
Award. Also a librettist, he has collaborated with the composer Anne LeBaron on the opera
Sucktion, which received a MAP Fund grant and premiered at the New Original Works Festival in
Los Angeles in 2008 and has since been staged in Europe. His one man opera, Mordake with
composer Erling Wold, premiered in 2008 at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
Crescent City, another collaboration with LeBaron, was featured in the 2009 New York City
Opera’s VOX program.
An Idyllwild and Cave Canem fellow, Kearney has performed his poetry
across the country. His poems have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, jubilat, nocturnes,
Ninth Letter, Washington Square and Gulf Coast. Born in Brooklyn, now living in California’s San
Fernando Valley with his family, he has a BA from Howard University and an MFA in Writing from
the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches courses in African American poetry, myth,
hip hop and opera.
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES AT REDCAT
May 5
Party for Betty!
May 6–8
CalArts Film/Video Showcase
May 10
Starting to Go Bad: New Narratives by Pat O’Neill
May 14–15
The Next Dance Company
May 15
Teen Animation, Photography, Puppetry and Video Screening
May 16
Ring Festival LA: Considering Wagner featuring Villa Aurora Composers-in-Residence
May 20–23
Lionel Popkin: There is An Elephant in This Dance
June 2–3
Partch: Even Wild Horses
June 4–5
Dance Camera West
June 5
CAP/Sony Pictures Media Arts Program Screening
June 13–14
Studio: Summer 2010
For more information visit redcat.org