Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill: Photographs by Jerry Dantzic is jointly curated by his son Grayson Dantzic, an archivist, author and musician; Robert O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University, and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies; and Shannon Perich, a curator in the Photographic History Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. While independent curators, each brings a unique scholarship to this exhibition allowing for the breadth of Dantzic’s work and this important era in jazz history to be demonstrated with accuracy and sincerity.
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The exhibition was originally curated by Diedra Harris-Kelley, C. Daniel Dawson, and Robert G. O’Meally, as “Artist as Activist” (NYC 2011) and has been revised and updated for the present tour. Organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation, with generous loans from the Estate of Nanette Bearden; the exhibition was also supported by the DC Moore Gallery, New York; and Exhibition Management by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. The traveling exhibition was presented prior to its arrival at the David C. Driskell Center at the Black History Museum, Richmond, VA; Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; Reginald Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD; and the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN. |
Inspired by the High’s recent acquisition of a key work from the series, “Something Over Something Else” was the first exhibition to reassemble more than 30 collages from the series. The exhibition design referenced the experience of the series’ original gallery presentations by incorporating their handwritten captions into the accompanying wall texts. The project was co-curated by Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art, and Bearden scholar Robert G. O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. |
Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, a new SITES exhibition of intellectual and artistic heft, further expands DC Moore Gallery’s 2007-08 presentation. More emphatically than either earlier exhibition, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey underscores the fact that this tale of the dislocated but heroic traveler’s search for a way home is Bearden’s own most pervasive and important artistic theme. Serving as curator of this powerful new show is Robert G. O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The latest publication of this prolific author, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, will be available for purchase by museum venues. |
As described by co-curator Robert G. O’Meally, “This exhibition presents original album covers along with beautiful reproductions, surveying the history of jazz music as part of an ongoing struggle for justice in the United States and beyond. From Louis Armstrong’s ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue’ and Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ to John Coltrane’s ‘Africa/Brass,’ this music, with its emphasis on individual freedom and improvisation, is deeply political.” |
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