This Juneteenth celebrate Black Art and Culture with CultuteSpotMC.com. We’ve rounded up our favorite stories highlighting the richness of black art in culture in Montgomery County!
Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of slaves in the US on June 19, 1865 — two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln delivered the emancipation proclamation of 1863.
Music Center at Strathmore Welcomes Back Step Afrika!
“Atten – shun!” “Brothers and sisters!”
With the precision of a military drill team, the performers from Step Afrika! come to order with a grunt — backs ironing board straight, arms stiff, faces serious. Then they unleash a barrage of pounding beats: pinpoint stomps, claps, slaps and semaphoric arm gestures, as if they’re landing an airplane without the requisite flags and lights.
Step Afrika! changes the thermometer in any room where it performs, raising heart rates and temperatures merely by the driving forces of rhythmic stomps, claps and slaps. In tight succession, these well-honed dancers can take an audience from zero to 60 in a minute, max.
AMP by Strathmore Salutes the Queen of Soul
Icon, activist, natural woman. In her life, Aretha Louise Franklin played many roles. But the gospel singer from Detroit, who went from singing praise at her father’s Baptist church to churning out hits like “Respect,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools,” “I Never Loved a Man” and more, was known in this country and around the world as the Queen of Soul.
And when Strathmore wanted to pay tribute to the queen, whose decades-long work in the civil rights and women’s rights movements proved to be as much of a legacy as her dozens of studio albums, they chose three young women to sing her songs and honor her memory at AMP.
City of Gaithersburg’s Multicultural Affairs Committee Recognizes African American History Month
Visual artist Sandra Davis finds beauty in the discarded: the small circles from paper hole punchers; the patterns inside envelopes delivering bills; the tissue paper concealing gifts. These items and more get incorporated into her mixed media pieces.
“In the African American community, especially during slavery and even after slavery, part of being resourceful is using what you have on hand,” Davis observed, noting that slaves often received leftovers or scraps of food and clothing. “The rule is when you are given materials or given resources, you make something out of those resources. …I take the concept of using leftovers or using discarded materials to create something. For me, it is (art) I am hoping somebody views as beautiful and very intense work.”
Sandy Spring Slave Museum Presents ‘The Living Museum: Civil Rights Era’
As our nation celebrates Black History Month, the Sandy Spring Slave Museum will offer an opportunity to “meet” some of the most courageous Americans who have fought for civil rights. Fourteen actors will take on characters who will “come to life” and talk about their inspiration during the second iteration of “The Living Museum” during three approximately 90-minute shows on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 23 and 24.
The idea for the original program came out of the museum’s “mission to bridge the communication gap and enhance cross-cultural communication,” explained Joy Turner, who directs the museum and the production. During museum tours, she and other staff members became “aware that many young people did not know who many of the people were who helped shape our country.”
More Than Mick’s Main Squeeze
There is a moment during Rolling Stones concerts in the song “Gimme Shelter” when one of the backup singers walks to the front of the stage and starts belting: “It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away.”
For the time that she’s up there, it’s all but impossible to not be completely mesmerized by her voice, her energy, her aura.
For over 25 years, that has been Lisa Fischer momentarily stealing the show from Mick Jagger and company—in her mind, it was never about the chance to be the center of attention, but rather the joy of performing.
National Philharmonic Orchestra Pays Tribute to Louis Armstrong
The Music Center at Strathmore, the National Philharmonic Orchestra, Maestro Piotr Gajewski conducting and jazz musician Byron Stripling playing the trumpet in a tribute to Louis Armstrong and his beloved New Orleans. What could be more perfect?
Not Armstrong. Stripling, whose humor, swagger and insight match his internationally renowned musical talents, pays tribute to Louis Daniel Armstrong — also known as Satchmo, or “Pops” to his friends — as “the imperfect person who was perfect.
Montgomery Parks Celebrates the Life and Legacy of the Rev. Josiah Henson
The Rev. Josiah Henson is coming into his own – albeit more than a century posthumously. Montgomery Parks (MP) is honoring the memory of the preacher, author and abolitionist by publishing a comprehensive biography and planning a brand-new museum scheduled to open in the summer of 2020.
The local tie to the man whose autobiography allegedly inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is substantial. Rev. Henson was a slave on a plantation just off Old Georgetown Road at what is now Josiah Henson Park before he escaped to Canada and founded a settlement and school for fugitive slaves.
Music Center Welcomes Senegalese Grammy-winning Singer-Songwriter
Senegalese singer-songwriter Youssou N’Dour, who turns 60 this fall, has been a central figure in contemporary African music for decades. Maybe it’s time someone wrote his history.
That’s just what N’Dour himself does on his new album, “History,” which revisits his own music along with that of other African and Africa-rooted musicians. The album was released May 17, near the start of a world tour that brings him to the Music Center at Strathmore on Wednesday, May 29.
Sandy Spring Museum Exhibits Works by and in the Style of Normon Greene
Artist Normon Greene celebrates that people come in all colors and sizes, with more similarities than differences, in, “Colored Folk: We Come in Every Shade,” an exhibition on view through July 28 at the Sandy Spring Museum.
Greene considers white and black “power colors” that do not accurately describe people. “It’s all about the shades,” he said. “We’re all the same color, just different shades. We got bamboozled with the terms white and black. That stuff just messed us up.”
New Katzen Arts Center Exhibit Focuses on Montgomery County’s Historic African American Communities
Wrinkled, sepia-toned photographs depicting church socials, one-room schoolhouses and children at play outdoors; a small shovel that broke new ground; and a 65-year-old baseball uniform from the Scotland Eagles, the all-African-American team from the Scotland neighborhood in Potomac. These are tangible artifacts of three once-vibrant African-American communities in Montgomery County dating to the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. It’s a history that’s more often ignored than celebrated or put on display.
Silver Spring Stage Presents Rarely-Staged Award-Winning Play
Silver Spring Stage (SSS) has secured a reputation for presenting plays other area theater companies rarely – if ever – produce. Its current production, “Intimate Apparel,” which won 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle awards, is one such work. Its playwright Lynn Nottage is the only woman who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
The play centers on Esther, an African American woman in 1905 New York who is lonely and looking for love — which eludes her. Despite the segregated world, Esther has some degree of success because she is a capable seamstress, but she dreams of opening her own beauty parlor.
Silver Spring’s Black Box Theater Presents Watatah’s FitXperience
Reydi Kineli Russo, aka Watatah, is on a mission. The singer-dancer-composer wants “to make the world dance, to make the world happy through the power of music, to inspire people to live their lives to the fullest.”
To that end, he will bring The FitXperience, a fitness concert and dance extravaganza, to Silver Spring’s Black Box Theater on the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 3. The Hyattsville-based native of the Dominican Republic will sing his original songs, accompanied by a troop of singers and dancers who will lead the audience in moving their bodies to world rhythms including merengue, bachata, soca, reggaeton, salsa, dancehall, cumbia, house and Afro pop.
Round House Theatre Stages ‘School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play’
In 2004, Tina Fey wrote a movie called “Mean Girls” about Queen Bees and wannabes at a typical American high school. Funny, smart and original, “Mean Girls” launched a handful of catchphrases and a Broadway musical. It also inspired Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh to create an award-winning Off-Broadway comedy, taking the universal experience of female friendships threatened by competing teen cliques and slippery standards of beauty and setting its inside a boarding school in Ghana.
Now Bioh’s “School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play” has leapt from Off-Broadway to Round House Theatre in Bethesda. Directed by Nicole A. Watson, Round House’s associate artistic director, “School Girls” features a cast of female-identifying actors who are African and African American, an all-woman creative team and a close examination of issues like colorism, colonialism and absurd beauty standards that give depth and truth to its comedy.
Olney Theatre Center Puts ‘The Royale’ in the Boxing Ring
“The Royale” is not about boxing.
Sure, the flexible black box that is the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab has been transformed into a boxing ring circa 1905, and actors Jaysen Wright and Clayton Pelham Jr. are on hand with boxing gloves while Jay Frisby and Chris Genebach play a manager and promoter, respectively.
But “The Royale” is about America. Its history, its audacity; the courage — and the ugliness — of its people. “The Royale” (the name comes from the barbaric Jim Crow era fairground practice that pitted blindfolded black men and boys against each other to fight for thrown coins) is a story set firmly in its time and place, but it’s still unfolding today. The story resonates, regardless of how one might feel about boxing.
Wheaton’s FAs Marketplace Helps Independent Artists Grow their Businesses
Business incubators most often serve as a catalyst to help start-ups in technology, bio-tech, cybersecurity and other lucrative fields gain a foothold in competitive markets. There’s a new business incubator in Montgomery County, on Elkins Street in downtown Wheaton, that’s supporting an entirely different clientele. FAs Marketplace aims to help independent artists and other creatives begin, maintain and grow their arts businesses.
The brainchild of Fata Antoinette Togba-Mensah, FAsMarketplace is a third space, where people with varying interests, ages, economic and cultural backgrounds can find each other, and build a community of creatives and arts entrepreneurs.