On March 1st, 2011 the Armory Show and Harlem Biennale invited Armory Arts Week visitors to experience Harlem’s art and culinary delights. Guests met at founder Edward Hillel’s artist studio to mingle with the HB team. Harlem personality and author Michael Henry Adams led the group on a guided tour of the historic Mount Morris Park neighborhood. Along the way, they visited Casa Frela, Heath and Renaissance Fine Art Galleries. The evening ended at the renowned Settepani Restaurant with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres with Harlem artists and cultural leaders– and some guests decided to stay for dinner.

Click here to watch Nina Simone’s 1969 performance.

Stephanie Dinkins is an interdisciplinary artist who merges video, sound, and object. Her work has been featured in “This Land Is My Land” a solo exhibition at the University Art Gallery, Stony Brook University, as well as “She’s So Articulate,” Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA; “Aurora Borialis,” Spedition Bremen, Güterbahnhof, Bremen, Germany; and in “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970
at Spellman College Museum of Fine Art. Her community based public
projects include “Book Give Away”, “Performance for The Laundromat Project” for The Laundromat Project and “OneOneFullBasket” at the North Fork Bank for Jamaica Flux Biennial 2007, Queens, NY.

Stephanie Dinkins

The video “Mim andar Avenida Canadá” was created while in residency in Belo Horizonte.

In a statement submitted with “Mim Andar” Zachary writes:

“As a starting point in my work, I often appropriate recognizable systems and tropes, which are then reshaped and problematized, providing a conceptual foundation for framing the work. An example is performance and its cultural histories, which are examined and employed as strategic devices. I use my politicized physical body, in live performance and video, as a major component in the work, where race becomes an obvious factor. An example is the complex relationship between black contemporary performance and historical racist minstrel shows. Context becomes a crucial factor—whether it is a specific country, or a local community—the work is contingent upon this environment. Similarly, many images and actions are dislocated and recontextualized for greater critical impact. Works occasionally result in semi-autobiographical themes, which offer better understanding of myself, but also seek to create a broader discourse. My photos allow me to document things which I cannot explain or interpret.”

His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in such venues as Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; Nordic Biennale: Momentum, Moss, Norway; NabLab, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York. He has performed at Real Art Ways, Hartford; Jersey City Museum; English Kills Gallery, Brooklyn; and Winkleman Gallery, New York. Recent residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council WorkSpace residency; the Jardim Canadá Art and Technology Center residency in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and the HomeBase V Project in Berlin, Germany.

The talks were conceived as part of an ongoing conversation with the myriad communities navigating shifting economies and demographic politics in twenty-first century Harlem. After his opening lecture at the Museum of African Art on the role of Africans in the foundation and development of the village of Harlem, Gill was joined by authors Humberto Clintron and Christopher Bell at Taller Boricua to discuss the history and legacy of Latinos in East Harlem’s ”El Barrio”. Each event was opened by a performance from Harlem Biennale’s “Our Better Angels”– ongoing residency and teen artist exchange program with artist Monte Laster. The talks continued at the Tenement Museum where Gill was joined by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown and Company, 2011). The next day Gill focused on 20th-century Black Harlem in dialogue with a live performance by students at the venerable Harlem School of the Arts. Finally Gill elucidated more lighthearted topics, as he sat down with a smaller audience at the Harlem Aloft Hotel to talk about some of the neighborhood’s most unusual and eccentric characters, whom he called “Saints and Sinners.”

From the Museum of African Art Lecture:

On June 4th 2011, Harlem Biennale performance artist Zachary Fabri presented A Movement in Time to explore the physical movement of pedestrians and the layered architectural history of El Barrio. In a response to El Barrio’s cultural traditions, political history and social environment, Zachary performed a sequence of body movements, exercises, gestures, and poses derived from rote daily activities that seem inconsequential, but when isolated and repeated, inspire us to read a hidden narrative. Referencing rich histories of African and Latin dance, the work uses the body to conjure abstract and intimate images. Each gesture was repeated for different lengths of time, for a total duration of 2 hours. A text serving as a blueprint for Fabri’s movements was photocopied and offered to members of the public.