A few months ago I wrote about Jacqueline Orange’s Taste of Harlem Tour. It was the most read article I have done in the past 10 years and appeared in 8 other outlets. When I received an invitation to her Art Crawl Harlem I signed up immediately. On a beautiful late October Saturday afternoon our group of 25 met at The Sol Studio at 123rd & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. This was a walking tour. When the group is larger they use a trolley bus.
Our 2nd stop was La Maison D’Art B&B & its art gallery & garden (259 West 132nd St). The world famous
Shomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (part of the New York Public Library system) was our final stop (Malcom X Boulevard & 135th St). The exhibition is a visual arts celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls. The 20 commissioned pieces correspond to the 20 poems (from) for colored girls. Our walking guide for this tour was John Reddick. The curator for the 3 gallery exhibition -which runs September 19, 2014 through January 3, 2015- was Souleo.
ArtCrawl Harlem Inc. was established in 2008 and incorporated as an educational not-for-profit art gallery tour in 2010. The organization was designed to educate participants while supporting and promoting the rich visual arts in Harlem. It was created by two community entrepreneurs, Jacqueline Orange of Taste Harlem Tours and Averlyn Archer of Canvas, Paper and Stone Art Gallery. Their combined backgrounds in tourism and art provided the foundation for ArtCrawl Harlem™. Their mission is to support Harlem's rich art, cultural institutions and experts, including individual professional artists.
i found god in myself
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF NTOZAKE SHANGE’S
for colored girls...
i found god in myself is a multimedia and multigallery exhibition celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
Since its debut performance in 1974 just outside Berkeley, California at a bar named the Bacchanal, Shange’s work has captivated, provoked, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the world. On display at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture are 20 specially commissioned pieces in honor of the individual poems and archival material that traces the journey of Shange’s text from that bar in California to its critically acclaimed run on Broadway.
The multigallery exhibition extends beyond the walls of the Schomburg to include additional noncommissioned artworks on display at two satellite locations, The Sol Studio and La Maison d’Art. These multimedia works portray women at the life stages of youth, adulthood, and late adulthood. Thereby each work gives tangible life-form to Shange’s words and women’s contemporary experiences with issues such as class, body image, gender identity, immigration, politics, war, love, sexuality, racial identity, sisterhood, and ultimately self-love. i found god in myself is curated and organized by Souleo of Souleo Enterprises, LLC.
(212) 866-7427 or artcrawlharlem@gmail.com - $55 per person. $25 pp for two people.
Sister company- www.tasteharlem.com
All photos by Ron Kapon