In Conversation:
The Black Aesthetic 1971-2019
COMMUNITY FORUM
Featuring Aleshea Harris
As part of The Black Aesthetic Interview Series, Rebecka Jackson will interview Harris on the challenges of creating work for and by Black folx under white supremacy and rampant fascism. As Black artists struggle to contend with the political implications of their practices, self care and connection with their communities we strive to uncover, “What, if anything, is the black aesthetic of 2019?”The Black Aesthetic, first released in 1971, was a seminal text composed of a series of essays from the most prominent black writers, musicians, artists and poets. Edited by Addison Gayle, it remains a staple of the black literary oeuvre.
Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended un-and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. It will be produced at the Royal Court in London in the summer of 2020 and has been published by 3Hole Press and Concord Theatricals (formerly Samuel French). What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine and was nominated for a Drama Desk award. WTSU will tour to Woolly Mammoth and A.R.T. this fall. WTSU has been published by Concord Theatricals. Harris is a MacDowell Fellow.
The Harriet Tubman Center is an organizing space committed to fighting racism, organizing for immigrants rights, LGBTQ rights, fighting against U.S. endless war and for workers’ rights.
This forum was made possible through a grant from The Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
