Rashida Bumbray

Last updated

Rashida Bumbray is an American curator, choreographer, author, visual and performing arts critic who lives and works in New York City. [1] Bumbray's choreographic work Run Mary Run was included in The New York Times list of the Best Concerts of 2012. [2] In 2014, she was nominated for the distinguished Bessie Award for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer," and in the same year she was recipient of the Harlem Stage Fund for New Work. [3] Bumbray is currently the Senior Program Manager of the Arts Exchange at The Open Society Foundations the Open Society Foundations. [4]

Contents

Education

Rashida Bumbray earned her Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies and Theater & Dance from Oberlin College in 2000, and completed her Master of Arts in Africana studies at New York University with a focus on Contemporary Art and Performance Studies in 2010. [1]

Work

Rashida Bumbray began her career as a curatorial assistant and exhibition coordinator at Studio Museum in Harlem (2001-2006), where she co-founded the ongoing lobby sound installation StudioSound and Hoofers’ House, a monthly jam session for tap dancers which is now called Shim Sham. She then went on to serve as the Associate Curator at The Kitchen in Chelsea, NY (2006-2012), where she organized several critically acclaimed projects and commissions, including solo exhibitions by Leslie Hewitt, Simone Leigh, Adam Pendleton, and Mai Thu Perret, as well as performances by Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Kalup Linzy, and Mendi & Keith Obadike among others. [1] She most recently served as the guest curator of Creative Time's public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014). [5] Her work has been presented by Columbia University, Caribbean Cultural Center, Dancing While Black, Harlem Stage, Project Row Houses, and Weeksville Heritage Center. Additionally, she has published texts on various topics pertaining to contemporary art, Africana studies and comparative literature. [3]

Run Mary Run

Rashida Bumbray's choreographed performance piece Run Mary Run was performed in collaboration with Dance Diaspora Collective at the Whitney Biennial as part of Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran’s BLEED in May 2012. It was also performed again at Queensbridge Park as part of City Parks Foundation's free outdoor performances in July 2015. The piece references African-American folk forms such as ring shouts and hoofing. [6] The ring shout is a tradition that was developed during slavery in America as an attempt to blend African spirituality with Baptist and Methodist sects of Christianity who censured the Africana dance and drum rituals. In the dance, 12 dancers move in clockwise circles with steady rhythm, singing call-and-response patterns to chants and catchphrases in a manner that almost disguises the remnants of African traditions. [6]

The dancers in Bumbray's piece displayed "variation in their movement," and walked about the stage as if they were just going about their daily rituals in a "dance that pretends to be just walking: people perambulating in a wide circle with a sinking, drumlike tread," [7] as The New York Times critic Brian Seibert described it. Seibert characterized Bumbray as having a "strong grasp of the past and the past in the present". [7] The New York Times critic, Ben Ratlif described the performance as, "motion and music and memory, entwined" in his 2012 review. [2]

Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn

Rashida Bumbray's guest curatorial work entitled, Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, was organized through Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center as a walkable month-long art exhibition. The exhibition launched from the Weeksville site, a Brooklyn community established by free and formerly enslaved Black citizens 11 years after abolition in New York State. [8] The show displayed the work of four artists who through their installations engaged with the communities in and around the Weeksville Heritage Center. [9] The installations focused on Funk by Xenobia Bailey, Medicine by Simone Leigh, Jazz by Otabenga Jones & Associates, and God by Bradford Young. The work drew from stories on how self-determination can be achieved through the claiming and holding of a neighborhood–but also from radical local battles for land and dignity from the 1960s to today. [10] The exhibition explored the implications of gentrification, specifically in the neighborhood of Crown Heights' in Brooklyn which received a 25.2% rent rate increase in 2014. Each installation in the exhibition was located at sites throughout the neighborhood, significant of black radical self-determination, expression, and world building. [9] The sites reflected a history of how Weeksville’s institutional lineage has traversed what Jonathan Tarleton describes in his article Black Radical Weeksville as, "challenges of historic preservation, the pressures of real estate speculation, the complexities of art and culture acting as community catalysts, and the hopes and fears surrounding shifting neighborhood dynamics." [11] The exhibitions focus on local participation was intended to celebrate the neighborhood and its existing members rather than use art as a way to draw the general public toward a community, thus making it desirable to new residents, instead of addressing contemporary realities. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Studio Museum in Harlem</span> Museum in New York, New York

The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorraine O'Grady</span>

Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explores the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at age forty-five. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wangechi Mutu</span> Kenyan sculptor

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Hart</span> American visual artist

Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.

Xenobia Bailey is an American fine artist, designer, Supernaturalist, cultural activist and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats and her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas. She has said that her specialty is crochet and needlecraft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maren Hassinger</span> African-American artist and educator (born 1947)

Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often include interactions with the audience and spontaneity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blondell Cummings</span> American dancer and choreographer (1944–2015)

Blondell Cummings was an American modern dancer and choreographer. She is known for her experimental choreography and was a fixture in the New York and Harlem dance scene for decades.

Erin Christovale is a Los Angeles-based curator and programmer who currently works as a curator at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Hammer Museum Senior Curator Anne Ellegood, Christovale curated the museum's fourth Made in L.A. biennial in June 2018. She also leads Black Radical Imagination, an experimental film program she co-founded with Amir George. Black Radical Imagination tours internationally and has screened at MoMA PS1; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco, among other spaces. Christovale is best known for her work on identity, race and historical legacy. Prior to her appointment at the Hammer Museum, Christovale worked as a curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abigail DeVille</span>

Abigail DeVille is an artist who creates large sculptures and installations, often incorporating found materials from the neighborhoods around the exhibition venues. DeVille's sculptures and installations often focus on themes of the history of racist violence, gentrification, and lost regional history. Her work often involves a performance element that brings the artwork out of its exhibition space and into the streets; DeVille has organized these public events, which she calls "processionals," in several U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York. Deville likes to use her own family as inspiration for her art work. She decided to use her grandmother as inspiration because of her vibrant personality, to help her articulate ideas from the neighborhoods of the Bronx. Deville is pleased that her art works are unique, as many people see trash as useless to them, while DeVille instead sees an opportunity.

Elissa Blount-Moorhead is a Baltimore-based producer, artist, writer, curator and lecturer. Blount-Moorhead is an advocate for social change through her interdisciplinary work in visual art, music, design, and film. She has produced public art events, gallery exhibitions, films screenings, and education programs since the early 90s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aisha Cousins</span>

Aisha Cousins is New York-based artist. Cousins writes performance art scores that encourage black audiences to explore their parallel histories and diverse aesthetics. Her work has been widely performed at art institutions such as Weeksville Heritage Center, BRIC, Project Row Houses, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, MoCADA, and MoMA PS1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kameelah Janan Rasheed</span>

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ming Smith</span> African-American photographer

Ming Smith is an American photographer. She was the first African-American female photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Kia Michelle Benbow is an American fine artist. Her most well known series, 24, is a sociopolitical commentary on the effects of growing up as a young woman of color with HIV. She is a former Mother of the Royal House of LaBeija.

The Frequency Exhibition was a contemporary exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem from November 9, 2005 - March 12, 2006. Curated by Thelma Golden and associate curator Christine Y. Kim, the exhibition featured the works of 35 emerging Black artists. Frequency, following the 2001 exhibition "Freestyle," is one of five "F" themed exhibitions alongside Flow, Fore, and Fictions. While curators Golden and Kim point out that Frequency was not "Freestyle II," the organization of artists under the umbrella of Black identity engages with "Post-Black" art similarly to the Freestyle exhibition.

Ashley James is an American curator. She has worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2019, she became the first full-time black curator at the Guggenheim.

Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">L'Rain</span> American singer and songwriter

Taja Cheek, known professionally as L'Rain, is an American experimentalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator known primarily as the lead vocalist and songwriter of her eponymous band. L'Rain has been recognized for experimental music that draws on a vast number of traditions and genres in a practice and aesthetic Cheek calls "approaching songness".

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Dinner Without an Agenda with Rashida Bumbray (Offsite)". www.queensmuseum.com.
  2. 1 2 Ratliff, Ben (December 26, 2012). "The Best Concerts of 2012, As Seen by Times Critics". The New York Times.
  3. 1 2 "Run Mary Run". cityparksfoundation.com.
  4. ↑ "Open Society Foundations".
  5. ↑ "Creative Time Summit Presenter Bios". Creative Time.
  6. 1 2 "SummerStage: Rashida Bumbray & Dance Diaspora Collective". timeout.com. July 1, 2015.
  7. 1 2 Seibert, Brian (July 20, 2015). "Review Run Mary Run". The New York Times.
  8. ↑ "Black Radical Brooklyn". creativetime.org.
  9. 1 2 3 Osmundson, Joe. "How Many Black Histories We Still Don't Know: An Interview With Simone Leigh". thefeministwire.com.
  10. ↑ "Pan African Space Station". panafricanspacestation.za.
  11. ↑ Tarleton, Jonathan (September 24, 2014). "Black Radical Weeksville". urbanomnibus.net.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.