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 Ulysses Jenkins: Video Griot
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Dream City
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
A video companion to a twenty-four-hour group performance organized by Ulysses Jenkins, DREAM CITY collages live music, poetry, and dance into a pulsating kaleidoscope of color and sound. Frequent Jenkins collaborators Maren Hassinger, Senga Nen...
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Without Your Interpretation
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
Featuring the artist-filmmaker’s regular collaborators Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, this 1983 performance by Ulysses Jenkins issues a forceful condemnation of American indifference to the crises faced by the developing world.
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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...
