“Here/Away” Issue Launch with 400 Exhibit

Thursday, January 23
7:00–8:30 PM

Join us at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina, to kick off our “Here/Away” Issue. Guest editor Karida Brown will join Malinda Maynor Lowery (Director, Center for the Study of the American South) to discuss blackness and indigeneity along with artists from 400: A Collective Flight of Memory and curator Jamaal Barber. Select pieces from the 400 exhibit will be on display for the evening before moving to the Center for the Study of the American South for a larger exhibit this Spring.

In an essay about the 400 exhibit (featured in the “Here/Away” Issue), Barber writes, “In a 1619 letter to the treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, Jamestown colonist John Rolfe recorded the arrival of ’20. and odd negroes’ off the coast of Virginia. You can go to the beach where the ships arrived and stand in the same sand under the same sky and look at the same ocean that those enslaved Africans witnessed. There is a timelessness to that moment. There is a connection to a cultural memory that has been passed down. Now it is 2019. I want to discuss the black American experience, but it is not my story to tell alone.”

The exhibition 400: A Collective Flight of Memory was first shown in Atlanta, Georgia, and created in collaboration with black artists of the diaspora. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South.

FREE | NorthStar Church of the Arts | 220 W Geer St, Durham, NC

Image: Charly Palmer, 400 Years, mixed media, 55″ × 36″, 2019. 
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