Nina Angela Mercer, a Bronx-based writer and performer who helped stage the event, says that performance connects quite viscerally with the political issues at hand. The piece included a public prayer, titled “A Litany,” composed of bits speech from victims of police violence, and a procession that featured women carrying banners that bore the words “joy” and “grief.” The performance offered the memorable sight of clutches of black women, all dressed in red, parading around the streets of Lower Manhattan. In early September, a group called Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter staged a daylong intervention and performance at the New Museum in New York City as part of a project orchestrated by installation artist Simone Leigh, who was then the museum’s artist in residence. Black Lives Matter has understood how to be received on the Internet, on social media.”Īnd it has done so through physical actions that play with performance, with theatricality and rite. Act Up street activism was designed to be caught on a camera. “And they understand that to occupy the public space isn’t to only occupy the street - it’s to occupy the Internet, the meme, the hashtag. “They are both organizations that include the participation of a lot of artists,” she says. On another occasion, they dumped human ashes on the White House lawn.) (Members of the group once created a concentration-camp-themed float for New York’s gay pride parade as a way of making a statement about government inaction on AIDS. Molesworth likens Black Lives Matter’s tactics to Act Up, the AIDS advocacy organization, founded in the 1980s, which was known for its operatic acts of protest. It is now so ingrained in the popular consciousness that it has made its way into art and onto red carpets and, quite famously, the video for Beyoncé’s “Formation.” This summer, a single human chain, fists raised, blocked traffic on the 405 Freeway as an act of protest.Īnd there is “Hands up, don’t shoot!” - the plaintive pose of surrender that emerged in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson - which has become a national symbol of police shootings. In its short, three-year lifespan, Black Lives Matter has helped transform small gestures into indelible political acts: There have been choreographed die-ins at crowded train stations and piano concerts. Naima Keith, deputy director California African American Museum to see and interact with the black body in a way that is very powerful. Performance allows for a level of direct intervention.
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