Art & Music as Identity
Gregory dives into the Black arts movement in Chicago in the 60’s and 70’s and how it shaped the Black identity and birthed a new age in music and art.
Lesson Plan
An understanding of the Black music and visual arts movements during the civil rights era and their quest for Black identity beyond the concept of double consciousness as exemplified by W.E.B. DuBois . The class will utilize the strategies of experimentation, improvisation, and collective involvement as employed by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the African Commune of Bad Revelant Artists (AfriCOBRA), to engage students with issues of the past, present, and future.
LEARNING GOALS
Contextualize the Great Migration
Recognize issues of Black Identity
Identify Black Collectives in Music and Art
SUBJECTS
Black American Migration History and Issues
Double Consciousness and Black Identity
Collective Improvisation through Music and Art
MATERIAL
Smartphone
Drawing Pad
Color Drawing Media
TEACHER BIO:
Gregory Allen Waits
Waits Studio Works employs a multimedia practice interconnecting Architecture, Art, Fashion, and the Environment to create performance objects and spaces.
The studio aligns with design strategies that enhance and engage a dialogue of private and public space within the social fabric. Patterns of movement in our daily life rituals are investigated from an interdisciplinary perspective, creating a cross-pollination that produces deeper meaning in the design of objects and spaces.
How these patterns might proceed to develop more sustainable architecture, art products, and lifestyles and how these patterns are markings of a historical process lend integrity to the development of broader, more cooperative places for the individual and community.
Resources and Links
BOOKS
The Promised Land : The Great Black Migration… by Nicholas Lemann (1991)
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
The Freedom Principle : Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete (2015)
VIDEOS
Many videos on YouTube on:
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)
African Commune of Bad Revelant Artists (AfriCOBRA)