Événement

Courtesy the Artists presents "Songs of the Civil War"

Join Courtesy the Artists (organized by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade) and collaborators including niv Acosta, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Matana Roberts, Kali Wilder and the New York Regiment United States Colored Troop Reenactors (20th, 26th and 31st) for an afternoon of live performances based Civil War tunes. During a recent residency, Gaines and Segade came upon a book of sheet music that included songs from both the Union and Confederate armies during the American Civil War. Considering the role of nationalism, feeling and music culture across both sides of the deadliest American war and the war that resulted in emancipation, Courtesy the Artists look for new meaning in nineteenth-century martial, sentimental, Abolitionist, minstrel and spiritual songs. This program is organized on the occasion of When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South.

Courtesy the Artists is a collaboration between Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade founded in New York in 2012, that includes a shifting network of writers, performers and visual artists. The project follows years of performances and exhibitions Gaines and Segade has made with collaborator Jade Gordon as the Los Angeles-based group My Barbarian. Gaines and Segade initiated Courtesy the Artists to develop a new model of continued collaboration upon moving to New York. Their first project in 2012, The Meeting at MoMA PS1, invited participants to respond to the 1968 agitprop album by singer and Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown. Their second project, Trad. (2013), was conducted over a two-month residency at Recess in SoHo. The residency included 24-Hour Ballad, in which twenty-four participants interpreted the song "Black Is the Color (Of My True Love's Hair)," which resulted in the video currently on view in the exhibition When the Stars Begin to Fall.