Kemper Live featuring Candice Ivory
Inspired by the exhibition African Modernism in America, Kemper Live explores African and African Diasporic arts past and present. Performances by Black Anthology and Candice Ivory, Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, and local dancers and poets will occur simultaneously throughout the Museum. This event is free and open to the public.
Kemper Live is an ongoing performance series that brings artists across disciplines to connect sound, movement, and visual arts, transforming galleries into a multimedia sound installation.
Support for this program is provided by Women and the Kemper and the Department of Music, Arts & Sciences.
Listen to a playlist inspired by the exhibition and curated by Candice Ivory >>
Biographies:
Emanuel Harrold continues to raise the bar with gracing the stage, recording, and collaborating with the likes of Damon Alburn, Gregory Porter, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, De La Soul, & Keyon Harrold. When you think of the word forward, Emanuel Harrold's name comes to mind. Fashion, community, music, and love... Emanuel's family music legacy stands for over 3 generations of musicians. If you enjoy artists such as Gregory Porter, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and soulful motivational music, Harrold likes it too.
Born into the artistry of music by way of St. Louis, MO. Harrold is no stranger to being a part of projects receiving Grammy awards and selling millions of records and digital streams. Emanuel's father was a pastor whilst growing up, the appetite for singing & playing instruments grew. There were many musical outlets such as his grandfather's Memorial Lancers Drum and Bugle Corp, church gatherings, & family reunions. Harrold did not seriously pursue drumming until after high school. In St. Louis, Emanuel was involved with Off Broadway musicals with The Black Repertory Theater and traditional jazz & local Gospel scenes. Harrold is a self taught musician and inspired by many great people on his musical journey to date. He is a graduate of The New School, in New York. Harrold has performed or recorded in no specific order with Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper, Ronnie Mathews, Keyon Harrold, Damon Auburn, John Hicks, James Spaulding, Shedrick Mitchell, Marcus Strickland, Stevie Wonder, Kidz in The Hall, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Ben L'Oncle Soul, Gregory Porter,Ambrose Akinmusire, Revive The Live Big Band, Jonathan Baptiste, Keyon Harrold, Laura Mvula, and many other amazing musicians. Emanuel is currently involved in community www.mySAH.org in his hometown of St. Louis in Ferguson. Emanuel has created jobs through a commercial cleaning company hiring, influencing and teaching skills needed in his own community. You can hear Harrold's most recent drumming contribution on Gregory Porters All Rise, Still Rising and soon to come his own soon to be released album titled We Da People ft. many notable artist such as Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Gregory Porter, Saunders Sermons II (Tedeschi Trucks Band), Jermaine Holmes ( D’Angelo), Shereef Keys, & Chrystal & Charles Ransom II. His EP Funk La Soul released in August 2022 in conjunction with Gear Box Records UK.
Candice Ivory is an internationally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and recording artist. After being selected for Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center, she studied voice and composition at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Since then, she has performed across the United States and Europe as well as in Cuba. At Rhodes College in Memphis, she created the Unscripted symposium series and the King Biscuit research fellowship in partnership with the Mike Curb Institute for Music and the King Biscuit Blues Festival. Ivory, a member of the Recording Academy, has recorded three albums and appeared as a guest artist on many others, most recently on Kenneth Brown's Love People. In 2021, she was named a Featured Artist of Missouri in recognition of her work as a musician and visual artist. She is currently working on a new album as well as multiple projects that merge music and visual art.
Adam Maness is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and composer. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Maness has performed around the globe with award-winning artists from a plethora of musical genres. His songs and compositions have been featured on several national and international recordings, television shows, and films. The Adam Maness Trio formed in early 2017 around a mutual love of melody, and joyful improvisation. Featuring Adam Maness on piano, Bob DeBoo on bass, and Montez Coleman on drums, the trio is continually adding new compositions and arranging popular songs in the tradition of the modern piano trio.
With 20 years of experience, Jahmal Nichols has shared the stage with artists from all over the world, including Gregory Porter, Fontella Bass, Jon Faddis, Sean Jones, Terrell Stafford, Houston Person, Eric Roberson, Matt Wilson, Anat Cohen, Frank Foster, Julie Dexter, Anthony David, and many more.
His second solo album Black Frequencies is out now and features guest appearances from Marcus Anderson, Lil’ John Roberts, Montez Coleman, Cory James, Eric Roberson, Federico Pena, Darryl McCoy Jr., Andre Boyd, Carlos Brown, Jr., Kyle Bolden, Tivon Pennicott, Chip Crawford, Emanuel Harrold, Mavis Swan Poole, Adam Maness, Ondre J, Keyon Harrold, Mike Pugh, Phillip Graves, Andrew Exum, Philip Lassiter, Zida Lioness, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
Joel Vanderheyden holds a D.M.A. in Saxophone Performance and Pedagogy (University of Iowa – with Kenneth Tse), a M.M. in Jazz Studies (University of Maryland – with Chris Vadala), and a B.A. in Music Education and Performance (University of Minnesota-Morris). Joel endorses D'Addario reeds and Selmer saxophones, and performs regularly with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Jazz St. Louis Big Band, and the electro-jazz ensembles, Koplant No and Vehachi. He is Professor of Music and Director of Jazz at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, Missouri. He has previously served as Director of Jazz and Woodwinds at Oakton Community College in the Chicago area, and Director of Jazz at the University of Minnesota-Morris.
AFRICAN MODERNISM IN AMERICA
March 10, 2023 - August 6, 2023
Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery + Saligman Family Atrium
Organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Fisk University Galleries, African Modernism in America is the first major traveling exhibition to examine the complex connections among African artists and patrons, artists, and cultural organizations in the United States, amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War. During these years, such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and Historically Black Colleges and Universities collected and exhibited works by many of the most important African artists of the mid-twentieth century, including Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria), Gerard Sekoto (South Africa), Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), and Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia). The inventive and irrefutably contemporary nature of these artists’ paintings, sculptures, and works on paper defy typical Western narratives about African art being isolated to a “primitive past”; their presentation in the US rooted these vital works firmly in the present for American audiences. This exhibition draws primarily from Fisk University’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation, a leading American organization devoted to the support and promotion of African and African American artists and to forging links between transatlantic artists and audiences. It features more than seventy artworks by fifty artists that exemplify the relationships between the new art that emerged in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s and the art and cultural politics of the US.
In 1961 the Harmon Foundation organized the landmark exhibition Art from Africa of Our Time. The same year the Museum of Modern Art exhibited its first acquisition of contemporary African art, Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956) by Sam Ntiro (Tanzania). The simultaneity of the Harmon Foundation’s exhibition and MoMA’s purchase was crucially important in drawing attention to African artists’ modernity in a moment of shifting relationships between the US and African nations. By then many African nations had gained independence from colonial rule. Also in 1961 the Freedom Riders protested segregation in the American South; Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was killed in a CIA-supported assassination plot; and eminent Pan-Africanist W. E. B. DuBois emigrated to Ghana. Within the changing social and political contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and independence in Africa, artists developed new visual languages, and such exhibitions as Art from Africa of Our Time enabled US audiences to recognize their shared aesthetic and political concerns.
African Modernism in America is presented in four sections. The first, “Art from Africa of Our Time: The Modern African Artist,” foregrounds the places and people who supported the Harmon Foundation exhibition and promoted modern African artists in the United States. The second section, “Mapping Modernist Networks in Africa,” highlights the continent-wide networks of artists, galleries, literary journals, and art education programs instrumental in the development of these new, forward-thinking venues for the display and discussion of postcolonial art. The third section of the exhibition, “African Modernists in America,” highlights the establishment of meaningful connections between African and African American artists in the US. The exhibition concludes with “The Politics of Selection,” a new commission of the same name by the Nigeria-based sculptor Ndidi Dike that interrogates the collecting histories in the Cold War as presented throughout the exhibition, including those of the Harmon Foundation. Dike’s immersive, multimedia installation examines the multiplicity of viewpoints, biases, prejudices, allegiances, and omissions she uncovered in her research in the archives at the Harmon Foundation and Fisk University.
Image credit
Uche Okeke (Nigerian, 1933–2016), detail of Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961. Oil on board, 36 1/16 x 48 in. National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Joanne B. Eicher and Cynthia, Carolyn Ngozi, and Diana Eicher. © 1961 Uche Okeke. Courtesy of Professor Uche Okeke Legacy Limited and American Federation of Arts.