Cake Walk
Leaving January 31
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26m
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
This video documents “Cake Walk,” an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant’s pioneering New York gallery Just Above Midtown. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance that developed in the eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in “Cake Walk” move amid Conwill’s sculptures and paintings, with one of the artist’s cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.
Up Next in Leaving January 31
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Self Divination
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1989 • United States
The first part of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “other” hist...
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Sound That
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson • 2014 • United States
Employees of the Cleveland Water Department hunt for leaks in the infrastructure of Cuyahoga County.
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Notions of Freedom
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 2007 • United States
In NOTIONS OF FREEDOM, Ulysses Jenkins charts the history of jazz—what he calls “the first true American art form”—from its beginnings in New Orleans and the American South to the classic work of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and through th...
