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An Arts Collaboration on Apartheid, Civil Rights and Race to get CNY Talking and Thinking

Ellen Blalock, artist

  It’s never easy to talk about race in our community.  Several Syracuse arts organizations are collaborating to bring together exhibits and performances about Apartheid, civil rights and identity to help that conversation.

The Tyler Art Gallery exhibition in the SUNY Metro Center in Downtown Syracuse is filled with photos, quilts, personal collages and other work from local artists who express viewpoints on race and identity.  Apartheid and Identity: Race, Place, Being is meant to open lines of communication about the difficult topics. 

  Assistant Gallery Director Amy Bartell jumped at the chance to link history to the present.

Credit Ellen Blalock, artist
"Now I Am A Man" quilt by Ellen Blalock. The frames of the quilt tell family history of incarceration, identity, opportunity and choices.

  “What I like about it is it both sheds a light on the historical importance and components of apartheid and civil rights work, but also clearly sows it to our present tense.  These are artists who are currently working in our culture, currently addressing topics that are relevant and necessary to be addressed, as only the arts can do.  I think the arts leads the way in many of these conversations because it simply invites people to the bigger stage.”

Bartell opened the exhibit this past weekend, after forging the collaboration with the Selma to Montgomery at 50 exhibit at Art Rage Gallery and the Syracuse Stage Play about apartheid, Sizwe Banzi is Dead.

EXHIBIT AND PERFORMANCE DETAILS BELOW, ALONG WITH RELATED EVENTS

The play takes place in Apartheid era South Africa…actor MncedisiShabangu says the audience might get a sense of those struggles through the main character and his government paperwork.

“So the identity number is asked in the play and he (Banzi) tells it.  But when the audiences, especially white people, are asked ‘what is your identity number’, they can’t say because they don’t have.  So you realize this passbook is developed in a way that is only one problematic page.  It’s got so many pages and all of them are problematic for the black man.  It’s designed so you are at fault with the law constantly”

Shabangu sees relevant connections to racism today.  Atandwa Kani says the end of Apartheid didn’t solve the problems – especially for those who were on the front lines of fighting for its removal.

"As much as I can say, yes we can walk in the streets and you can converse with a white person, and you can have opportunities to go to school and jobs and all this, from the perspective of the person who was fighting initially, there still in that shack; they still can’t read; they still can’t afford education for their children.  So those now spark up issues today, because until those issues are tended to there’s no progression.”

Kani says the end of Apartheid in South Africa created a class system with a huge divide between the haves and have-nots.  People might make the same assessment of civil rights struggles here.   Art Rage’s Selma to Montgomery shows photos of the voting rights march of 50 years ago – but begs the question of just how much progress has a change in laws afforded people at the center of the struggle.  Nancy Rhodes co-curated Apartheid and Identity…and was excited to point out those comparisons.

Credit Vanessa Johnson, artist
One of a series by Vanessa Johnson, who connects family experiences with those of people who suffered under Apartheid.

  “…to make the statement that things in the past are not over.  Struggles we had in the past are not done.  We’re not memorializing them and saying, that’s long ago and far away.  These struggles continue and they speak to one another, just as the art works in this exhibition speak to one another in a way that’s very moving.  It tells you something about that old saying, ‘you view art best in person.’”

Rhodes co-curator Amy Bartell hopes people make it personal on a different level.  She has two goals for the exhibits and events over the next month.

“People have really seen the need for this conversation, so as a community I’m proud of Syracuse; I’m proud of Oswego and proud of our collaboration.  That’s first and foremost.  Second of all, I hope people feel introduced and perhaps educated.  What I didn’t ever want to be was the person to say I have the answer.  What I want to be is the person to say I’m posing the question:  Here’s the conversation we’re having and how can you jump in?  How does this map onto your life?”

OTHER ACTIVITIES: FILM SCREENINGS, POETRY, PHOTOGRAPHY 

  • Thursday, March 5, 7 pm
    Screening: Robert Bilheimer’s Oscar-nominated Cry of Reason (1988)
    Tyler Gallery @ Metro Center Syracuse
    Q&A with photojournalist Mike Greenlar
  • Tuesday, March 10, 7 pm
    Screening: Thomas Allen Harris’ Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2006)
    @ Morano Campus Center • SUNY Oswego main campus
    Film maker Q&A
  • Thursday, March 12: 7pm
    Poetry and Performance:
    Tyler Gallery @ Metro Center, Syracuse
    Vanessa Johnson, Georgia Popoff, Jackie Warren Moore
  • Tuesday, March 24, 7 pm
    Talk with Photographer Matt Herron
    @ Morano Campus Center, main campus

Apartheid and Identity can be viewed in the SUNY Oswego Metro Center, 2 Clinton Square, Syracuse, through March 28th;   

Sizwe Banzi is Dead opens Friday at Syracuse Stage, 820 E. Genesee Street, Syracuse;  

Art Rage Gallery, 505 Hawley Ave, Syracuse, currently displays the Selma to Montgomery at 50 exhibit thru March 28.

Chris Bolt, Ed.D. has proudly been covering the Central New York community and mentoring students for more than 30 years. His career in public media started as a student volunteer, then as a reporter/producer. He has been the news director for WAER since 1995. Dedicated to keeping local news coverage alive, Chris also has a passion for education, having trained, mentored and provided a platform for growth to more than a thousand students. Career highlights include having work appear on NPR, CBS, ABC and other news networks, winning numerous local and state journalism awards.