Trying to Grow Wings
From 28th April to 30th July 2022
OPENArchival Platform
Kevin Jerome Everson
Black History Month Florence | VII edizione
The solo project Hazel by Kevin Jerome Everson is born from misremembered or misinterpreted memories in relation to the iconic song and album Maggot Brain. The work draws upon the artist’s memory of what inspired the guitar solo that is the song’s focus, the skewed remembering of a lie designed to inspire passionate and mournful playing. The actuality of the tracks history and what was exchanged between bandleader George Clinton and the guitar player become alternative perceptions, insight and imaginings in this work dedicated to guitarist Eddie Hazel and the sonic realm functions as an element that is familiar yet dissonant, remembered but hauntingly distant.
The solo project Hazel by Kevin Jerome Everson is born from misremembered or misinterpreted memories in relation to the iconic song and album Maggot Brain. The work draws upon the artist’s memory of what inspired the guitar solo that is the song’s focus, the skewed remembering of a lie designed to inspire passionate and mournful playing. The actuality of the tracks history and what was exchanged between bandleader George Clinton and the guitar player become alternative perceptions, insight and imaginings in this work dedicated to guitarist Eddie Hazel and the sonic realm functions as an element that is familiar yet dissonant, remembered but hauntingly distant.
Black History Month Florence | VII edizione
The seventh edition of Black History Month Florence has arrived bringing with it a new cultural center The Recovery Plan at SRISA functioning as a hub for information, dialogues, research and exchange throughout the month. This edition also represents an expansion of the program shifting into Black History Fuori le Mura. Extending the reach of the program to collectivize the incredible organizational efforts being carried out in the cities of Bologna, Torino, Roma and Milano, but also pointing towards newly formed collaborations in Paris, Black History Fuori le Mura is the fruit of collective organization that brings together a range of associations, individuals and institutions and is a shared space for the co-promotion of Black History Month events. This platform intends to be generative of a template for a national and international reflection on the recovery of Black History.
This edition is framed through the thematic title FUGA. FUGA is a meditation on the fugitivity of
The seventh edition of Black History Month Florence has arrived bringing with it a new cultural center The Recovery Plan at SRISA functioning as a hub for information, dialogues, research and exchange throughout the month. This edition also represents an expansion of the program shifting into Black History Fuori le Mura. Extending the reach of the program to collectivize the incredible organizational efforts being carried out in the cities of Bologna, Torino, Roma and Milano, but also pointing towards newly formed collaborations in Paris, Black History Fuori le Mura is the fruit of collective organization that brings together a range of associations, individuals and institutions and is a shared space for the co-promotion of Black History Month events. This platform intends to be generative of a template for a national and international reflection on the recovery of Black History.
This edition is framed through the thematic title FUGA. FUGA is a meditation on the fugitivity of Blackness (Moten, Harney 2013) and its non-fixity permeating geo-cultural realities and blurring the lines between the local and the transnational. It is also a reflection on the push back that continues to persist in the Italian context in relation to discourse around peoples and cultures of African descent prompting many towards flight. FUGA in music is a compositional element where a melodic theme is introduced by one voice only to be taken up successively by others. This edition wants to provide the call and response necessary to collectively engage in the work that needs to be done in order to move beyond the conceptions that are too often restricted by the flatness and limited frame of Blackness as reflected in mass media, institutional structures and academic discourse in Italy and beyond. Shifting from BHMF to BHFM is about engaging in a form of frequency modulation needed to listen and be heard.
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Artist-filmmaker
Kevin Jerome Everson (born 1965) is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Everson’s films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work.[1] “Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.”[2]
Everson frequently empl
Kevin Jerome Everson (born 1965) is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Everson’s films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work.[1] “Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.”[2]
Everson frequently employs hand-held camerawork and uses 16mm to create many of his films. His work has been the subject of retrospective screenings at Media City Film Festival (2011), Tate Modern (2017), online at Mubi (2018), and Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou (2019)
Everson has directed nearly a dozen feature-length films and over 100 short films.
Exhibitions
Everson’s films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea (February 2017); Viennale (2014); Visions du Reel, Nyon, Switzerland (2012), The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and Media City Film Festival (2011) and Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2009. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Media City Film Festivals, and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.
