11:30 Noon Registration
NOON- 1:30 Panel 1:
Historic Overview of Arts Movements: From Harlem Renaissance to the New
Melanian:
Kwame Brathwaite,
NCA Pres.,(AJASS); Abdullah Aziz, (Weusi Nyumba Ya Sanaa); Akili
Ron Anderson (AFRICOBRA); Dindga McCannon (Where We At Black
Women Artists); Otto Neals, (Fulton Art Fair);
Charlotte Ka
(Entitled Black Women Artists)
1:45 - 3:15 Panel
2: Art As An Instrument for Social Change:
Dr. Rosalind Jeffries,NCA
Board member/ SVA, Jersey City College; Elombe Brath, AJASS/Afrikaliedoscope;
Adger Cowans, AFRICOBRA; Ademola Olugebefola, Grinnell
Gallery; Danny Simmons, Rush Arts Foundation
3:15 -:3;30
Break
3:30 - 5:00 Panel
3: Art & Technology: Bringing the Artist Out of the Dark Ages
Use of technology to: find
funding, create work, market work and self promotion
Lansana Coundoul, photographer; Jim Belfon/ Photographic Center of
Harlem; Cecil Lee, CeeLee.com; David Terry, New York
Foundation for the Arts
5:15 - 6:45: Panel
4: Masters of the Arts: David C. Driskell, Ed Clark,
Benny Andrews, Howardina Pindell; Emma Amos
6:45-
8:00 GATHERING OF CREATIVE ARTIST RECEPTION & EXHIBITION
Reception:
light refreshments, networking. Video playing of NCA activities.
Video and still "Memories of Conferences Past"
Video tapes of Ghana
Conference, Clips from other conferences
In 1956 a group of young artists and jazz lovers, formed The Jazz-Art
Society (soon to be renamed The African Jazz-Art Society & Studios – AJASS)
and began producing jazz concerts coupled with art exhibitions and African
cultural presentations. Influenced by Carlos A. Cooks and the African
Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM), an off-shoot of Garvey’s UNIA, AJASS
began incorporating African Nationalist themes into their productions. After
witnessing the 1961 “Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest” hosted each
Garvey Day, August 17, in which girls competed without straightening their
hair, AJASS organizers Elombe Brath, Kwame Brathwaite, Robert Gumbs, Frank
Adu, Chris Asmandeces Hall, Leroy “Satch” Giles, Ernest Baxter, David Ward
and Gus Williams launched the Grandassa Models and the theme “Black Is
Beautiful”
In 1959, The
National Conference of Artists (NCA) was founded as The National Conference
of Negro Artists at a gathering on March 28-29 in Dean Sage Hall of Atlanta
university. The meeting was initiated by a group of Chicago artists and
educators led by Margaret Burroughs. They had been regular participants in
the annual exhibitions organized by Hale Woodruff. Sixty-one artists,
including Burroughs, James D. Parks, Eugenia V. Dunn, Jewel W. Simon, Helen
Coulborn, William V. Harper, Allan G. Junier, Virginia Kiah, Dr. R.E.
Clement, Jack Jordan, Bernard Goss, Delbert Lovelady, Estelle Johnson and
Arthus Rose among others launched what has become the longest continuously
operating Black artist-educators group in existence.
In
1967 a group of Black artists laid claim to a wall at 43rd and
Langley on Chicago’s South Side and painted a mural featuring Malcolm X,
Thelonius Monk, W.E.B. DuBois, Muhammad Ali and Billie Holiday. That wall
became known as “The Wall of Respect”. Some of these artists later formed
AfriCobra – the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. “It was art for the
people” says Michael Harris, Assistant professor of African and African
American art, one of the AfriCobra members in 1979. “It wasn’t art for art’s
sake; it was art for people’s sake.”
NCA was founded
in 1959 for the preservation, promotion and furtherance of African American
Art and Culture, through exhibitions, conferences and cultural programs.
It's membership includes visual artists (painters, sculptures,
photographers, etc.), art educators, art scholars, curators, gallery owners,
collectors, performing artists, students and other supporters of the arts.
NCA hosted its 2002 and 2003 conferences in Washington, DC in
conjunction with the James A. Porter Colloquium at Howard University, and
also hosted our 4th international conference, "Renewing Our Spiritual
Connection" in 2002, in Ghana, West Africa in collaboration with our Ghana
Chapter and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Kumasi.
The NCA 2001 conference was held in New York, where we partnered with The
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Bedford Stuyvesant
Restoration Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NCA has also
partnered with the Adorno Sound Project at Teacher’s College, Columbia
University, and along with the Alliance for African American Artists & Art
Forms, partnered with the New York Foundation for the Arts. NCA was also
instrumental in planning and creating the new International Arts Business
School, a New Visions high school funded by the Bill and Melinda Gate
Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation and the New York City Department of
Education. The school, located in Brooklyn, open September 2003.
NCA has working relationships with the Association of African American
Museums, a national organization of museums, curators and museum personnel
with similar vision and goals for promoting the arts (we held joint
conferences in with them in '95 Kansas City, '96 Birmingham, and '97
Baltimore); the Smithsonian Institute Center for Folklife Studies; Maryland
Institute College of Art; the Anacostia Museum, the James E. Lewis Gallery
of Morgan State University; Great Blacks In Wax Museum; the Eubie Blake
National Museum and Cultural Center; the Consortium Association of African
American Museums; the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum; the Amistad Museum in
New Orleans; Detroit's Charles Wright Museum; the Detroit Museum of Art; the
National Museum of Art in Accra, Ghana and other national and international
institutions. NCA’s “Gathering of Creative Forces” has previously been held
at the Schomburg Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
