We open our fall season with Performing an Afro Future–an in-depth conversation featuring a panel of renowned artists and theater-makers examining the creative cartography involved in imagining Afro futures. We invite the audience to consider and imagine the future of Black arts with us.
Join multi-award-winning musician Martha Redbone, singer-songwriter and educator Nicholas Ryan Gant (Ghetto Falsetto), multimedia performance artist MX OOPs, and interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer Alisha B. Wormsley as together we conceive, refine, and define how Black art can chart a path toward liberation.
Did you miss the panel? Watch it here!
Did you miss the panel? Watch it here!
About the Panelists – Nicholas Ryan Gant
Nicholas Ryan Gant is a New York-based artist and educator, from Phoenix, AZ. NRG studied classical vocal performance at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and holds a Master of Art in Music Education from Hunter College, as a participant in The Lincoln Center Scholars program. NRG has been a worship leader at his local church in Brooklyn for more that 12 years. There, at his church, NRG discovered a gift for connecting with youth. This passion for youth development has led him to build a career as a music educator with the New York City public school system for the past 6 years. NRG is a recipient of the 2020 Paul Simon Music Fellowship. In addition to the classroom, NRG is also an accomplished vocal coach for several artists and record labels as well as a sought-after workshop and masterclass facilitator. NRG is the vice-president of the board of directors for Decolonizing the Music Room. As a vocal composer NRG has collaborated with choreographers Malik Washington, Francine E. Ott and Kyle Abraham. He’s been a featured vocalist on several projects internationally and has recorded 7 independent projects of his own. NRG has also had the opportunity to sing support vocals for artists such as Michael McDonald, Mariah Carey, Jon Batiste, Miri Ben-Ari, Zo!, Carmen Rodgers, Sy Smith, Run the Jewels, and Childish Gambino.
MX OOPs
MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their vision is of a world where we can each be held in the fullness of our complexity. The party is the point of departure, a queer site of transnational Afro-diasporic imagining. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media studies, and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming.
A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College, City University of New York, USA. [www.mxoops.com]
Martha Redbone
Martha Redbone is a vocalist/songwriter/composer/educator. She is known for her music gumbo of folk, blues and gospel from her childhood in coal country Harlan County, Kentucky infused with the eclectic grit of pre-gentrified New York City. Inheriting the powerful vocal range of her gospel-singing African American father and the resilient spirit of her mother’s southeastern Cherokee/Choctaw culture and heritage, Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music. With songs and storytelling that share her life experience as an Afro/Native American woman and mother navigating in the new millennium, Redbone gives voice to issues of social justice, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. Her latest album “The Garden of Love-Songs of William Blake” is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (New Yorker). Redbone’s works are under her own indie label, a partnership she shares with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Recent composer commissions include “Belonging”–commissioned by the 2022 Moab Music festival, “A Mother’s Love”–2021 Freshgrass Music Festival Bluegrass Concerto, “Black Mountain Calling”–a chamber music piece for cello and bass clarinet with Dave Eggars and Tasha Warren for University of Michigan “Jazz meets Classical” 2022 concert series, and composers, arrangers and orchestrators for the Broadway revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuff by the late Ntozake Shange. The Redbone/Whitby team won the 2020 Drama Desk Award and 2020 Audelco Award recipients for Outstanding Composers in a Play for the Off-Broadway revival at the Public Theater. Martha is also a 2022 United States Artist Fellow and a resident of Brooklyn, NY. Visit martharedbone.com for more info.
Alisha B. Wormsley
Alisha B. Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the black womxn lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression, creating an object, a sculpture, a billboard, performance, or film and thrives in collaboration. Her work has been exhibited widely. Most recently, the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Artpace, Times Square Arts and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Over the last few years, Wormsley has designed several public art initiatives including Streaming Space, a 24-foot pyramid with video and sound installed in Pittsburgh’s downtown and several park designs. Wormsley created a public program out of her work, There Are Black People In the Future, which gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification and was also awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab and the Goethe Institute. In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black creative mothers called Sibyls Shrine, which has received two years of support from the Heinz Endowments. Wormsley’s newest project with longtime collaborator Li Harris, was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Awardee of the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant, Carol Brown Achievement award among others. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and currently is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.