The Department of African American & African Studies is co-sponsoring Question Bridge: Black Males Exhibition and The Question Bridge: Black Males Blueprint Roundtable at Juxtaposition Arts. The Exhibition runs from May 15th - June 10th on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10am-5pm. The Blueprint Roundtable will be May 17th from 6pm - 8pm.
Question Bridge: Black Males Exhibition is a transmedia art project that seeks to represent and redefine Black male identity in America. Through video mediated question and answer exchange, diverse members of this "demographic" bridge economic, political, geographic, and generational divisions.
Project collaborators Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, BayeteÃÅ Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair, traveled the nation collecting questions and answers from over 150 Black men in 12 cities including: New York, Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. The resulting video project contains of over 1,500 exchanges. Their words were woven together to simulate a stream-of-consciousness dialogue, through which important themes and issues emerge, including family, love, interracial relationships, community, education, violence, and the past, present, and future of Black men in American society.
The exhibition includes one screen playing videos of the interviews, edited so that it appears as if the men are having a conversation. The artists hope that the Question Bridge project will be a catalyst for constructive dialogue that will help deconstruct stereotypes about Black male identity in our collective consciousness. To learn more about the Question Bridge visit www.questionbridge.com
The Question Bridge: Black Males Blueprint Roundtable will feature a live multigenerational discussion with Question Bridge co-creator Chris Johnson and Black men from the Twin Cities. The Blueprint Roundtable invites Black males representing a broad spectrum of ages to talk about barriers to intergenerational communication in their personal lives and local communities. These locally based conversations begin in a panel format and open up to include self­identified Black males from the audience. In creating these spaces as an extension of the project, we hope to start healing dialogues that lead to actionable strategies for overcoming social issues that have emerged to plague Black males over the past 40 years.
Project Sponsors
The Office of Equity & Diversity at Minneapolis Public Schools, the Department of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota and Juxtaposition Arts are co-sponsors of the exhibition and roundtable in the Twin Cities.
Juxtaposition Arts, 1108 West Broadway, Minneapolis, MN 55411. Phone: 612-588-1148, Email: info@juxtaposition.org, Website: http://www.juxtapositionarts.org
