Followed by a discussion with filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson, Dr. Claudrena N. Harold, and Maya Cade, in person.
This program features a suite of shorts produced over a ten-year period by University of Virginia (UVA) colleagues Everson and Harold. Films include their most recent – Gospel Hill (2022) and Accidental Athlete (2023) – as well as their first collaboration, the award-winning Sugar-Coated Arsenic (2014), which centers Vivian Gordon, the director of UVA’s Black Studies program between 1975 and 1980.
“Though individually distinct in their formal qualities, these films reflect our deep interest in the interiority of Black life, particularly those formal and informal spaces where African Americans communed, hobnobbed, prayed, loved, quarreled, reconciled, and moved on. Within these spaces, our gaze fixates on the epic and the quotidian, the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective” said Dr. Harold. (Total running time of the program approximately 70 minutes)
About Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold
Kevin Jerome Everson’s art practice encompasses printmaking, sculpture, photography, and film, including twelve features and more than 200 shorts. Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Berlin Prize, Heinz Award in Art and Humanities, Alpert Award for Film/Video, and Rome Prize, Everson’s work has been featured in retrospectives at Tate Modern/Film, London; Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; and Cinematek, Brussels; the Whitney Biennial (2008, 2012, 2017); the 2013 Sharjah Biennial; and the 2018 Carnegie International. Everson is Commonwealth Professor of Art and Director of Studio Arts at University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Claudrena N. Harold, Edward Stettinius Professor of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, is the author of many publications inlcuding When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hip Eras (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (University of Georgia Press, October 2016). As a part of her ongoing work on the history of Black student activism at UVA, she has written, produced, and co-directed with Kevin Everson nine short films.