Far too often, political considerations are kept separate from spiritual matters, and the role that spirituality plays in creativity is cloaked or undervalued. — Akasha Gloria Hull, Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women (2001)

Soul Talk by Akasha Gloria Hull considers how, amidst the 1980’s, a critical mass of Black women in the United States began to embody a vivifying mode of being, which gathered itself around three key pillars: Heightened political awareness as induced by the Civil Rights and feminist movements, spiritual consciousness that fused Black American traditions with new age modalities, and “enhanced” creativity, “especially as represented by the outburst of literature by Black women writers that “foreground[ed] supernatural material.” While Hull’s text focuses on the literary “outburst,” we wondered how this collective shift was enacted across media and, namely, by Black women filmmakers in the 80s and 90s. Thus, our first three screenings illuminated Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins, Daughters of the Dust (1991) by Julie Dash, and Eve’s Bayou (1997) by Kasi Lemmons.

To elucidate the modes through which Hull’s theory as well as Collins’, Dash’s and Lemmons’ contributions are reincarnated and amplified in the contemporary moment, we present short films by Chicago-based filmmakers including kelechi agwuncha, Jada-Amina Harvey, and Paige Taul, followed by a talk back guided by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal. The program will be followed by time to muse and mingle with the artists and fellow attendees.

kelechi agwuncha is an Igbo-American multimedia artist who reanimates archival material, self-documentation, and moving images by using percussive force as connective tissue. As a former athlete, their work also explores athletic gestures & spatialities as a rehearsal of play. Their approach to visual media & soundmaking often prioritizes live manipulations of the image and incorporates outdoor, public sites and the people occupying that site directly into the work in real-time. This practice reaches into our inextricable relationship to our environments and memories, so as to attune us to each other and create a new set of possible relations. They often use drum machines, 35 mm slide projectors, and various 1990s Panasonic video mixers to contemplate the image. kelechi has done live audio-visual performances through spaces including the Chicago Architectural Biennial, Currents New Media Festival, Santa Fe Noise Ordinance, and Black Harvest Film Festival.

Jada Amina-Harvey is a Black Indigenous American new genres artist, curator, and cultural worker born and based on the South Side of Chicago. Their practice, encompassing sound, writing, video, and collage, takes instruction from the ancestral, the current, and the unsung, archiving, excavating, and exalting the nuances of Black life across space and time. Guided by Zora Neale Hurston’s proverbial wisdom, Jada-Amina ‘does not weep at the world’, building altars and resurrecting the relics of collective memory by sampling cultural data and interrogating the socio-emotional economics of material, attuned to their racial, class, gender, and erotic dimensions. Recalling in the tradition of Black feminist thought and the Black maternal labor of care Jada-Amina seeks to tender a melody through the drone of the postcolonial landscape.

As an independent scholar and psalmist their work is deeply rooted in a spirit led line of inquiry. In their work as a Programmer at Old Town School of Folk Music they bring interdisciplinary folk art and cultural enrichment to Chicago Public Schools and neighborhoods on the South and West Side. Housed by The Gene Siskel Film Center, a public program of The Art Institute, they serve as Curator of Black Harvest Film Festival, exhibiting contemporary, emerging, and reparatory Black Cinema.

They are a co-founder of Rise High, a holistic integrated High School centered on meeting the unique needs of youth navigating foster care and housing instability. They are the former curator of the touring film program Loved Ones: Not Far From Here and programmer of Passion to Profession, a space for youth and professional artists to imagine sustainable pathways in the arts. Their work and projects have been mounted at ACRE Projects, UChicago’s Doc Films, South Side Community Art Center, The Music Box, OTIS College of Art and Design, Echo Park Film Center, Roots & Culture and The Gene Siskel Film Center.

Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an instructor and educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal makes work to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects there’s an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and who she belongs to.

she has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, and South Bend Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department and Washington Park Arts Incubator. She is a recipient of Chicago Artist Coalition’s SPARK Grant and Artist Run Chicago Fund Grant. She has also been an Artist in Residence at Hyde Park Art Center (2019), Artist in Residence at University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life (2021), and a Visiting Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN (2021) and 3Arts Gary and Denise Gardner fund Awardee (2022). She is currently a FACE Foundation Laureate Awardee, in collaboration with Villa Albertine (2023).

zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.

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Tags: Black Film Club Chicago, Blanc Gallery, bronzeville, Chicago, Jada Amina Harvey, Jupiter, Kelechi Agwuncha, No One Is Going To Mythologize My Life, No One Is Going To Mythologize My Life: Films by Chicago-based Artists, Paige Taul, Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’Neal