MCA Live:
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Pot Liquor Medicine Women–
- Edlis Neeson TheaterFirst Floor, Accessible via the Griffin Entrance on Pearson Street220 E Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60611map
Featured image
Photo: Courtney Jasmine Murrell
About
Though trauma, subjugation, and historical erasure have created deep cultural wounds, there remains, without fail, an irrepressible urge for transformation, evolution, and ascension. Building on the success of their ground-breaking opera, Good Stock on the Dimension Floor, some of the female members of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? present a multimedia performative experience utilizing film, dance, and music. Pot Liquor Medicine Women uses the contemporary performative experience as a cathartic platform for restorative healing and curative empowerment though the black female gaze. This program includes work and curation by Sienna Shields, Jasmine Murrell, Christa Bell, Tiana Marenah, Beatrice Anderson, Candice Williams, Dachi Cole, Kelsey Lu, Hera Ford, Mayfield Brooks, and J. M. Conway.
About the Artist
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? is a collective of artists, writers, composers, academics, filmmakers, and performers from around the world who collaborate across disciplines and cities.
Funding
This program has been made possible by the generous contributors to the Allen M. Turner Tribute Fund, honoring his past leadership as Chairman of the MCA Board of Trustees.
Related content
Exhibitions
- Kerry James Marshall: Mastry–
- Long This painted portrait depicts a young woman with jet-black skin holding a long, thin paintbrush up to a colorful, messy painter’s palette. She is shown in a three-quarter pose, gazing directly at the viewer. Her face, which is central to the square composition, stands out against a large, white, canvas, almost blending into the pitch-black background to her right. Closer inspection reveals, however, that her skin is subtly rendered, with various shades of contours and highlights. She wears two large hoop earrings, three small hoop earrings, and an oversized, boxy, high-collared jacket made of stiff fabric. Her voluminous hair—black with an ochre sheen—rises in thick coils on top of her head. The canvas to her left shows a partly finished paint-by-number self-portrait; in it, her likeness is broken up into smaller segments with pale-blue outlines and numbers. She has outlined many of the segments and filled them in with colors from her palette: orange, blue, yellow, pink, brown, and a few shades of green. The paint-by-number canvas does not accurately represent the color and pattern of the jacket she wears, which features mustard yellow sleeves and collar and deep blue and maroon and light yellow stripes.
