Bev Grant | |
|---|---|
 Bev Grant at a Poor People's Campaign music event at Interference Archive in 2019 | |
| Born | 22 March 1942 |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, activist, photographer, and filmmaker |
Bev Grant (born 22 March 1942) is an American musician, photographer, filmmaker, and activist based in New York City. [1]
Grant grew up in Portland, Oregon, and moved to New York with her husband in the 1960s. [2] [1] [3] She later separated from her husband, was radicalized through the Anti-War Movement, and became involved in the Women's Movement as an activist, musician, and photographer. [3]
During her childhood in Portland, Grant sang and performed with her two older sisters. After moving to New York City in the 1960s, Grant began performing and writing music in social movements, composing her first parody song for the 1968 Miss America protests in Atlantic City. [4] She was involved throughout the 1970s and 1980s with the band Human Condition, which she helped create in 1972. [4] They performed folk, rock, and world music and played a key role in New York City's underground music scene. [5] [6] Their first album, The Working People Gonna Rise!, was recorded in 1974 with Barbara Dane at Paredon Records. [4] Much of Grant's music writing has focused on the lives and labor conditions of the working poor. [4] [7]
In 1991, Grant joined the United Association of Labor Education Northeast Union Women’s Summer School as cultural director. [4] She is founder and director of the Brooklyn Women's Chorus. [5] [8] From 2006 to 2008, Grant performed with other female musicians as part of a group called Bev Grant and the Dissident Daughters which included singers Angela Lockhart and Carolynn Murphy. [9] After that, she performed with Ina May Wool as WOOL&GRANT until 2015. [4] She released the solo album, It's Personal, in 2017. [6]
Much of Grant's alternative-press photography documents political organizing events Grant attended, and occasionally participated in, from approximately 1968 until 1972, after which point she focused more extensively on her music career. [3] Included in her documentary photographs are images of the Black Panther Free Breakfast Program, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade March on Washington, the 1968 Filmore East Takeover, and of Fidel Castro speaking on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Some of her early photographs were published in underground newspapers and distributed through Liberation News Service; [15] many have been distributed by Getty Images [16] and were featured in a solo exhibition in 2018 at Osmos Gallery in New York City. [17] [18]
Grant's photography depicts her own activism and her involvement with New York Radical Women. [19] Her documentation of the 1968 Miss America Protests was featured in her 2018 solo exhibition at Osmos; these photographs have become widely popular and are Grant's best known work. [20] [21] Her press pass allowed her to take photographs inside the pageant itself, where protesters unfurled banners and released stink bombs. [2] [1] Grant's photography was used in making the film She's Beautiful When She's Angry, [22] released in 2015. [23]
As a member of Newsreel, Grant caught several important events on film, including the 1968 Miss America pageant for the Newsreel film Up Against the Wall Ms. America. [24] Her work as an activist and filmmaker gave her contacts within, and filming access to, groups including the Young Lords, the Black Panther Party, and the Poor People's Campaign. [25] She contributed the theme song to the1971 film, Janie's Janie, which is considered "an important early film of the women's movement." [26]
As an activist, Grant attended her first anti-war demonstrations in New York City and was radicalized at a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society at Princeton in 1967. [1] Grant was a member of New York Radical Women, and she participated in and photographed a wide range of related political events including the 1968 demonstrations against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City and the October 31, 1968 hex on Wall Street by Florika Remetier, Peggy Dobbins, Susan Silverman, Judith Duffett, Ros Baxandall, and Cynthia Funk of W.I.T.C.H., the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. [25]
Grant has articulated the important connection between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement she took part in, noting that many women's liberation organizers had participated in Civil Rights organizing and brought valuable skills and knowledge from that work. [2] Her conceptualization of the way women's oppression as a result of larger oppressions led to her later activism as an anti-imperialist. [2]
Bernice Johnson Reagon was an American song leader, composer, professor of American history, curator at the Smithsonian, and social activist. In the early 1960s, she was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, organized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Albany Movement for civil rights in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.
"After a song", Reagon recalled, "the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all.... This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand."
Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was an American folk musician and musicologist. He served as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.
Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.
Hazel Jane Dickens was an American bluegrass singer, songwriter, double bassist and guitarist. Her music was characterized not only by her high, lonesome singing style, but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs. Cultural blogger John Pietaro noted that "Dickens didn’t just sing the anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads, embedded her into the cause." The New York Times extolled her as "a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people and a pioneer among women in bluegrass music." With Alice Gerrard, Dickens was one of the first women to record a bluegrass album. She was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame alongside Gerrard in 2017.
Ella Jenkins is an American singer-songwriter. Called "The First Lady of the Children's Folk Song", she has been a leading performer of folk and children's music. Her album, Multicultural Children's Songs (1995), has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She has appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. According to culture writer Mark Guarino, "across her 67-year career, Jenkins firmly established the genre of children’s music as a serious endeavor — not just for artists to pursue but also for the recording industry to embrace and promote."
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters.
Ruby Dee was an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and civil rights activist. Dee was married to Ossie Davis, with whom she frequently performed until his death in 2005. She received numerous accolades, including a Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Obie Award, and a Drama Desk Award, as well as a nomination for an Academy Award. She was honored with the National Medal of Arts in 1995, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2000, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
Malvina Reynolds was an American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist, best known for her songwriting, particularly the songs "Little Boxes", "What Have They Done to the Rain" and "Morningtown Ride".
Broadside magazine was a small mimeographed publication founded in 1962 by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen. Hugely influential in the folk-revival, it was often controversial. Issues of what is folk music, what is folk rock, and who is folk were roundly discussed and debated. At the same time, Broadside nurtured and promoted important singers of the era.
Alice Gerrard is an American bluegrass and old-time music performer, writer, editor and teacher. As a singer who plays guitar, fiddle and banjo, she performed and recorded solo and in ensembles, notably in a duo with Hazel Dickens, in the Strange Creek Singers, and as the Back Creek Buddies.
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Her work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Joseph Glazer was an American folk musician who recorded more than thirty albums over the course of his career. He was closely associated with labor unions and often referred to as "labor's troubadour".
The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items. The protesters also unfurled a large banner emblazoned with "Women's Liberation" inside the contest hall, drawing worldwide media attention to the Women's Liberation Movement.
Suni Paz is an Argentinian singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet, folklorist, translator, and teacher, who has recorded and has been published extensively. Paz is part of the progressive Latin American music movement known as nueva canción.
Bettye Lane was an American photojournalist known for documenting major events within the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay rights movement in the United States. She joined CBS television in 1960, and from 1962 to 1964 she was with the Saturday Evening Post. Her work has been published in the National Observer, Time, Life, and the Associated Press.
Jane "Janie" Allan was a Scottish activist and fundraiser for the suffragette movement of the early 20th century.
Mary Josephine Walters (1837–1883), also known as Josephine Walters or M.J. Walters, was part of the 19th century American landscape painting movement known as the Hudson River School. She studied under Asher Durand and specialized in oil and watercolor painting. Though there is not much information about her life, her paintings exhibited much of the immense detail and precision that her mentor’s work did. Much of Walter's painting was done in the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains, though most of her currently known works are of the Hudson River.
Paredon Records was a record label founded in 1969 by Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber to publish recordings of cultural expressions, especially protests, in order to preserve them. Paredon wanted to spread awareness of multiple movements and topics. Dane and Silber were both connected with politically engaged artists and musicians, as well as progressive groups, through their work. Dane formed friendships with artists she met while protesting the Vietnam War and other current events. Her active participation in these movements provided her with the inside knowledge and ear to recognize whose voices would be historically significant. Part of the era's social activism and movements for economic, racial and social justice, as well as national liberation, the label released 50 titles between 1970 and 1985 including songs, poetry and oratory. The label's founders were inspired by Cuba and recorded a lot of protest music, including The People Gonna Rise! with Bev Grant's band Human Condition.
The Newsreel, most frequently called Newsreel, was an American filmmaking collective founded in New York City in late 1967. In keeping with the radical student/youth, antiwar and Black power movements of the time, the group explicitly described its purpose as using "films and other propaganda in aiding the revolutionary movement." The organization quickly established other chapters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Puerto Rico, and soon claimed "150 full time activists in its 9 regional offices." Co-founder Robert Kramer called for "films that unnerve, that shake people's assumptions…[that] explode like grenades in people’s faces, or open minds like a good can opener." Their film's production logo was a flashing graphic of The Newsreel moving in and out violently in cadence with the staccato sounds of a machine gun. A contemporary issue of Film Quarterly described it as "the cinematic equivalent of Leroi Jones's line 'I want poems that can shoot bullets.'" The films produced by Newsreel soon became regular viewing at leftwing political gatherings during the late 1960s and early 1970s; seen in "parks, church basements, on the walls of buildings, in union halls, even at Woodstock." This history has been largely ignored by film and academic historians causing the academic Nathan Rosenberger to remark: "it is curious that Newsreel only occasionally shows up in historical studies of the decade."
Florika Remetier was a Romanian-American musician and socialist feminist political activist. A child prodigy violinist, she would later join the New York Radical Women (NYRW) and co-founded the feminist guerrilla theater group W.I.T.C.H.