February 18 — Cultural Content
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Dear Friends,
We were delighted to see many of you at the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading on February 5 — if you missed it, be sure to keep reading. We have a little recap below, along with some wonderful photos by Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor (@arewefreelance), plus a link to some of the robust media coverage of the event.
Several attendees at the Reading described it as “the event that says it’s now Black History Month,” and in today’s issue of Cultural Content, we wanted to alert you to another event celebrating Black history, and introduce you to artist Ryan Cardoso, whose new film, A Different Kind of Church, will premiere at PPL on February 24. PPL’s Community Partnerships Facilitator Sophia Ellis had a chance to talk with Ryan about his work, and she fills us in here:
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Welcome to the Stage: an introduction to artist Ryan Cardoso
Y’all remember the age of MTV and BET music videos? Those that would be playing when you got home from school, in the middle of the night, and in the morning? For Ryan Cardoso, they set the stage for multisensorial dance sessions around the house. When chatting with Ryan, he described a time when the resonance of these videos took place in a homegrown fashion show, where he was dancing in the latest fashions from Old Navy and Gap, and his mom was holding the camera for hours, capturing these moments of joy and magic.
Ryan is a photographer/filmmaker interested in the nonsensical magic, mysticism, and decadence woven into the fabric of mundane and ordinary Black life. He grew up on the South Side of Providence in a family where archiving was a collective effort. He talks about the intimacy of his work and its relation to his family and kinship, where much inspiration comes from the collection of photo albums in his grandparents’ homes. While the albums bring imaginative possibilities, he also draws from dichotomies with site-specificity in the familial places he grew up in. Places untouched like that one living room, the plastic-lined couch, or the china cabinet which you were never to be found going through. This reflection has quite literally pulled back the curtains of witnessing what has always been — but in ways that haven’t been seen.
Ryan’s work has been featured in the RISD Museum and The New Yorker magazine, and he recently completed a public art work with the Providence Public Arts Commission. Through his photography and visual design, he’s collaborated with author Saidyia Hartman and artist Theophilus London on projects that are available for viewing on his website. These works and more give breadth to the multiple threads and delights in Ryan’s practice, a practice entangled with light, motion, music, and vantage point — tools that foreground unobservable ways of being and thinking. He notes the emphasis of gaze when capturing the intimacy in the quotidian, and what subjectivity means through the process:
“Now that I’ve done more, I realize it’s not about being objective; it’s actually very subjective what I’m doing. It’s my perspective and my point of view, specifically. I collaborate with the subjects in the photo, but it’s me that’s taking the photo. And I kind of have the control and being aware of that, and using that, not in an exploitative way or anything, but just being honest about that, I think that’s important. It’s mandatory to have a subjective gaze and be very specific, and I guess it’s Black, but it’s also a lot of other things. It’s gay, it’s fashion, it’s pop culture, it’s social media, it’s everything. And all those things come from how I see it. So like, if everyone is focused on their subjective storytelling, it all comes together to tell the collective Black story.”
Since November, Ryan has been working in the Workshop at PPL as an artist-in-residence. Along with his personal project, he has been facilitating workshops on video editing and working with youth to foster various audio and visual skills. The culmination of his work here will be showcased on February 24 with his new feature film, A Different Type of Church. It is “a visual mixtape exploring style and dance as a religious practice, and documenting how spirituality has evolved in the 21st century.”
Check out the video below to hear Ryan talk more about his film and process, and we hope to see you on February 24 — register here!
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Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading: a celebration!
In case you missed it, or would like to revisit the magic, check out these highlights from the 28th Annual Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading (LHCPR), which was savored and celebrated by an audience of more than 400 people in our Donald J. Farish Auditorium on Sunday, February 5, starting with the Mixed Magic Theatre Exult Choir delivering an utterly exultant opening song. Readers of all ages then performed a rich variety of Hughes’s poems, highlighting the breadth of this iconic artist’s attention, ideas, insights, and modes of expression, with musicians Mike Rollins and Jhony Keys supporting and amplifying each reader’s performance, and capturing every nuance of that Hughesian breadth. Providence’s newly appointed Director of Art, Culture + Tourism, Joe Wilson, Jr., evoking the recent brutal murder by police of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, exhorted listeners to deeply consider and understand the prescience and enduring, powerful relevance of Hughes’s work, even these many decades after his death, and Co-Directors April Brown and Kai Cameron affirmed the healing power of gathering in Hughes’s name to read and celebrate his poetry in community. As Brown put it, “The Reading is medicine for the community. It is an exchange in which we celebrate a great artist who loved the community. He was a salve for the world and we are, in turn, a salve for each other. We need to do this. It’s a divine process. And we want everyone to get some of this medicine.”
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For more on this beneficial and healing event, check out these features in the Providence Journal and Brown Daily Herald, and stay tuned in coming weeks for a link to the full recording of the event. Learn more about the LHCPR here, and we look forward to gathering with you again at PPL next year!
Above (l to r) Joe Wilson, Jr., LHCPR Co-Directors Kai Cameron and April Brown
Below (l to r) Iyana Bass and Ramona Bass Kolobe, Mixed Magic Theatre Exult Choir
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Closing next week!
In recognition of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this month we are featuring a small exhibition by Ukranian photographer Ksenia Lisna. Lisnia’s photographs feature Ukranian women and children who are now living as refugees in Germany, where they have formed a choir. In the exhibition’s images, the women and children hold traditional instruments and wear garments intricately embellished with a distinct style of dazzlingly colorful embroidery long practiced in Ukraine. The photographs reflect the life-affirming role that the arts — such as music, performance, decoration, and textiles — can play in times of war and conflict. Demonstrating their refusal to be defined by war’s horrors, the Ukrainian people, even in exile, show the world their resolve by continuing to celebrate their language, culture, and heritage.
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Thank you again for your interest in PPL’s cultural programming — we’ll be back next week with more information about events and exhibitions coming soon in this very busy spring season!
In gratitude,
Christina Bevilacqua xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSophia Ellis
Programs & Exhibitions Director xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxCommunity Partnerships Facilitator
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