One Book One Bronx - Everything But the Burden by Greg Tate

Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture by Greg Tate

White kids from the ’burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for Best Rap Artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that’s giving our nation a racial-identity crisis?

Saturdays, 12-1:30pm
December 16, 23, 30, January 6, & 13
BronxArtSpace, 700 Manida St.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Wednesday, 7-8:30pm
December 20, 27, January 10, & 17
on Zoom
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

CHAPTERS
Introduction: Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects / Greg Tate
1. "Eminem: The New White Negro" / Carl Hancock Rux
2. Scenes from Umkovu / Eisa Davis
3. "Reds, Whites, and Blues People" / Robin Kelley
4. "Pimp Notes on Autonomy" / Beth Coleman
5. "ThugGods: Spiritual Darkness and Hip-Hop" / Melvin Gibbs
6. "Yoked in Gowanus" / Jonathan Lethem
7. "The New Mythology Began Without Me" / Michael C. Ladd
8. "Steely Dan: Understood as the Redemption of the White Negro" / Greg Tate and Vernon Reid
9. "A Pryor Love: The Life and Times of America's Comic Prophet of Race" / Hilton Als
10. "The Beautiful Ones" / Michaela Angela Davis
11. "Skinned" / Cassandra Lane
12. "Ali, Foreman, Mailer, and Me" / Tony Green
13. "The 1960s in Bamako: Malick Sidibe and James Brown" / Manthia Diawara
14. "The Black Asianphile" / Latasha Natasha Diggs
15. "Afro-Kinky Human Hair" / Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
16. "Captive Herstories" / Danzy Senna
17. "Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self or More 'Reading at Work'" / Renee Green
18. "My Black Death" / Arthur Jafa

Mapping Our Identity - Art Workshop

December 16, 2023

Three Animated Short Films by Hugo Covarrubias, with post-screening Q+A

Saturday, December 9, 2023

The 2nd Annual South Bronx Student Art Competition

On view: December 14th - 29th, 2023
Winning Artists announced: Thursday, December 21st, 4-7pm

College Level Black History Classes

Free college level Black History classes will be held at BAS every Tuesday & Thursday, September 26th - December 21st, 7-8pm.
Classes are open to all, ages 16 and up!

Synthetic Zero Open Call for Artists

SUBMISSION DEADLINE - Monday, November 20, 2023

The theme for the next Synthetic Zero art event at BronxArtSpace will be the virtual, online, internet and artificially intelligent futures now and in the future intersect with life and the world in hopeful, imaginative, and/or pernicious ways. We are looking for visual art, performance pieces, interactive work, multimedia, video, sound work, poetry, and/or installations for the event which will be held on Saturday, January 6, 2024 from 6pm - 9pm.

The Synthetic Zero events are a series of art events focusing on high quality experimental and contemporary work in different media. We particularly encourage artists from the Bronx and Harlem areas to apply, but artists from anywhere in the city or the world are welcome to submit work.

In the past, a diverse set of curators has chosen work by artists from around the world, including Young Joo Lee, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Hector Canonge, Zoe Leonard, and many others.

To be considered, send the following to events@syntheticzero.com:

Link to artist website AND/OR Artist Statement / Brief description of work
Still Images (if work is visual), up to 5
If submitting video: Links to video on Vimeo, YouTube, or downloadable video files 

This event is curated by Mitsu Hadeishi.

Mitsu Hadeishi has been staging art events in the New York City area since 2003, including work from artists both local to the city and from around the world. These events have featured experimental video, performance, visual art, dance, music, poetry, interactive work, and installations.

DIRECTIONS:

BronxArtSpace is at 700 Manida St, The Bronx, NY 10474. Please see our calendar for a complete schedule of events.

We're about 35 minutes from Grand Central Station. From Manhattan, 4-5 train to 125th, transfer to 6 express (diamond shaped 6), three stops to Hunts Point, about a 10 minute walk from there.

Please share with friends and fellow artists!

The Literary Freedom Project present upcoming
One Book One Bronx events at BAS

Award-winning journalist Joan Morgan offers a provocative and powerful look into the life of the modern Black woman: a complex world in which feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men, where women who treasure their independence frequently prefer men who pick up the tab, where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds Black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than forty percent of the population, and where Black women are forced to make sense of a world where truth is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE DETAILS

In person:
Saturdays, 12-1:30pm, October 28, November 4, 11, 18, and 25
BronxArtSpace, 700 Manida St.

On Zoom:
Tuesdays, 7-8:30pm, October 31, November 7, 14, and 21

Open Studios (Season 2) on Governors Island

A Focus on the Human Condition: The Bronx Arts Ensemble

BODIES

Curated by Amanda Johnson

September 8 - October 7, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, Sept. 9, 5:30-8pm

The exhibition features the work of six female artists; Bianca Abdi-Borangi, Tasha Dougé, Isadora Frost, Tania Balance-Gaubert, Tere Garcia, and Anjelic Owens. The artists draw influence from racial, gender, and cultural identities. Promoting conversations and art making referencing politicized bodies, sex, education, land/borders, advocacy, and mental health.

2023 House Fest at Governors Island

Join us on Governors Island for a weekend of art activities, September 1-3!

Action Lab presents LIBERATION SUMMER at BronxArtSpace

Join us at BAS July 8 - August 26 for a summer of art, music, workshops and more!
All events will be free and open to the public.

Graffiti Lettering Class with KAYLOVE BX

Monday, August 21, 4-5pm

OPEN STUDIOS on Governors Island

Join us July 28, 29, and 30 12-5pm daily for a weekend of Open Studios with our current Artists in Residence!

Our 2023 Season 1 Residents include Eugene Bluford, Alexander Rubildo Fernandez, Andrea A. Resendiz Gomez, Dauris Martinez, Alexis Montoya and Deborah Yasinsky.

Our artists can be found in Colonels Row, building 407B

Our Season 2 Artists in Residence include Eugene Bluford, Cait Campbell, Katherine Miranda, Heriberto Sanchez, Stanley Steel and Natalie Wood, who will open their studios the weekend of October 27, 28 and 29.

Giving Light / Bidding for Change

Curated by Beverly Emers and Caitlyn Campbell

May 25 - July 1, 2023
Opening Reception: Sat., May 27, 3-8pm

Gigi Blanchard - Jordan Cruz - Nicky Enright - Rocky Fujimura - Wilhelmina Grant - Cooper - Derrick Grantley - Jose Gonzalez - Elias Hernandez - Carol Jacobs - Esteban Jimenez - Julia Justo - Aurash Khawarzad - John Koldstitch - Katarra Peterson - Nelson Santiago - Mellisa Severino

The curators' vision seeks an interdisciplinary exhibit that confronts and exposes how slavery has been reenacted in America as mass incarceration through the hypocrisy of the 13th Amendment, impacting generations of local communities through various systems of containment, oppression and different forms of direct and indirect systemic violence.

The work sheds light on the experiences of the Bronx community in the wake of centuries of forced labor, confinement and subjugation, tracing its legacies from the transatlantic slave trade to The Hunts Point Slave Burial Ground, Spofford Detention Center, Vernon C. Bain 'The Boat', and Rikers Island.

This collaborative meditation will be an opportunity to both pause and respond to the historical underpinnings related to the interlocking of colonialism and racism in the Bronx.

Exhibition programming:

Saturday, June 10, 4-7:30pm: Open Mic with Santana Sankofa (LGBTQI event)

Thursday, June 15, 6:30pm: Jesse Krimes documentary film screening, followed by a post-screening Q&A with featured artists Jared Owens, Gilberto Rivera and Russell Craig

Saturday, June 17, 6:30pm: Poetry night

Thursday, June 22, 7pm: Pride recognition & letter writing

Saturday, June 24, 4-8pm: Artist spotlight workshop

Saturday, July 1, 6-9pm: CLOSING / Curating carcerality conversation with Escaping Time

Programación de la exposición:

Sábado, 10 de junio , 3:30-7:30pm: Open Mic con Santana Sankofa (evento LGBTQI)

Jueves, 15 de junio, 6:30pm: Proyección del documental de Jesse Krimes, seguida de una sesión de preguntas y respuestas con los artistas Jesse Krimes, Jared Owens, Gilberto Rivera y Russell Craig

Sábado 17 de junio, 6:30pm: Noche de poesía

Jueves, 22 de junio, 7pm: Reconocimiento del Orgullo y redacción de cartas

Sábado, 24 de junio, 4-8pm: Taller para artistas destacados

Sábado, 1 de julio, 6-9pm: CIERRE / Conversación sobre la curaduría de la caridad con Escaping Time

An evening of original jazz composition by saxophonist Alfredo Colón.

Friday, April 7, 2023

Queer Nature

March 2 - April 1, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday March 2, 5:30 - 8pm

Curated by Lizzy Alejandro

Exhibiting artists include: Carecuca, Deep Pool, Isabella Balbi, Monica Flores, Andrea A. Reséndiz Gómez, Dauris Martinez, Xiomara Malpica-Martinez, Katherine Miranda, Néstor Daniel Pérez Moliére

QUEER NATURE presents works by New York City-based LGBTQIA+ artists who challenge the hetero- normative discourse around sex and gender, while re-imagining nature through the queer experience. One of the primary arguments against homosexuality is the belief that it is not deemed as "natural", therefore cannot be considered normal. Nature is often weaponized to justify homophobia and transphobia, falsely using biology as a means to enforce social constructs. Some cells reproduce asexually, same-sex behaviors occur in hundreds of species of animals, numerous plants and animals are hermaphroditic; many of them switching genders. How can one consider homosexuality unnatural when it is evident in nature?

Participating artists in Queer Nature disrupt the idealistic concepts of "nature" or "natural" that have been constructed through a Western, heteronormative lens. Encompassing photography, installation, video, mixed media and more, viewers are immersed in a space that reveals how nature defies being categorized and placed into the binary model. Rather, we see nature's true form reflected in these artworks- complex and diverse. Some of the artists use nature as a means to escape prescriptive identities and codes of conduct, creating spaces or narratives of belonging; others reveal how nature itself is queer.

Programs:
Thursday, March 2nd, 7pm: Performance by Carecuca

Thursday March 9th, 6:30-8:00pm: Artist Panel in collaboration with Queer Love artists Moderated by Bart Bland

Friday, March 17th, 3-5pm: Sculpture workshop with Andrea A. Reséndiz Gómez. RSVP and read more about the workshop here!

Saturday, April 1st, 5-7pm: Closing Party

Carecuca's film employs stop motion, sound, and voice over, probing the link between space and the subconscious. Symbolizing metamorphosis, Deep Pool's Chimera Butterfly acts as a conduit of their recent gender transition, exploring the myriad complexities of their experience. Isabella Balbi's paintings seek to transcribe the feeling of tranquility through abstracted details of nature; holding space to re-think the relationship of their queerness to the natural world. Using self-portraiture, Monica Flores' cyanotypes are woven with words of affirmation, acting as an intimate and cathartic expression of healing for queer bodies.

Andrea A. Reséndiz Gómez's bronze sculpture celebrates the human body while exploring the relationship of itself to its surroundings; emphasizing the symbiotic relationship of nature and human. Dauris Martinez builds assemblages that confront his identity through constructing and reconstructing images of the body and landscape. In his video, Martinez plays with and reclaims derogatory Spanish terms used to insult gay men through capturing intimate shots of birds in natural environments. In Xiomara Malpica-Martinez's self-portrait, the artist merges with nature, prompting us to contemplate our own connection to the natural world. Created during lock down, Katherine Miranda's digital collages unveil intimate moments surrounded by nature, beginning their journey into self discovery. Néstor Daniel Pérez Moliére's photographs invite us into a queer utopia full of possibility while concurrently crafting a space that accounts for depression, loneliness, and shame as an entry point into a larger discussion around issues within the queer community.

Lizzy Alejandro is a visual artist and curator. Alejandro’s work has been exhibited at Fordham University, Taller Boricua Gallery, Lehman College Art Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Andrew Freedman Home, Lincoln Hospital, the Galleries at Krasdale Foods, the Bronx Latin American Art Biennial, Empty Set Gallery, Longwood Art Gallery, El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, River Front Art Gallery, Bethany Arts Community, the Photoville 11th Annual Festival, Hopkinton Center for the Arts, and Piano Craft Gallery. She holds an MFA in digital media from Lehman College.

#queernature

What on Earth have you done?

January 10 - February 25, 2023
Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 10, 5:30-8pm

Linda Cunningham and Nicky Enright
Curated by Manon Slome

The exhibition, What on Earth have you done? is in title, content and form a reflection and a challenge about our joint complicity in environmental degradation.

As reflected in Nicky Enright’s rendering of the text (below), echoed again in the windows of the gallery space, not one fragment of the sentence, as it repeats with different emphasis, allows for any evasion from this complicity. 

Linda Cunningham, SouthBronx Waterfront Sagas detail right side,  pastel, acrylic, collage, photo transfers, 2017

Nicky Enright, What on Earth (have you done)?, 2012, vinyl on plexiglass, 24" x 36"

This is a two-person exhibition with Linda Cunningham and Nicky Enright, both long term Bronx residents, who respond with powerful works that foster an imaginative interaction with this environmental crisis and the complex feelings engendered by the fraught relationship between humans and other living species on the planet, and between humans and our rapidly-changing environment.  

As Nicky Enright comments: The juxtapositions in my work reflect the anger, hope, disbelief, and grief about the destruction of our natural habitat due to irresponsible, short-sighted human behavior. 

Linda Cunningham, in her monumental mixed-media installation South Bronx Waterfront Sagas, 2016-22, evokes the deterioration of the banks of the East River in the South Bronx.  Residents have long been barred from enjoying this local resource by a pattern of local government neglect, dumping and vandalism.  The detritus figured in the work, which escapes the boundaries of the canvas to flow into an installation on the gallery floor, evokes a sadness for a natural beauty and a community resource that has been lost or could be imagined if there was civic will and funding to turn the river banks into places of restful leisure or recreation. But as new developments and high rises start to occupy these neighboring sections of the Bronx, there are signs of cleanup of the water’s edge that will profit these new buildings, while leaving the remaining waterfront unchanged, filled with rusting machinery, power stations or waterfront transfer sites.  Shown alongside the work is a 2016 film by French filmmaker Judith Du Pasquier documenting Cunningham’s process in creating the mixed- media wall canvas, which was originally made for the lobby of the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

The ominous sound of relentless development is captured in Nicky Enright’s video installation Between a Rock, (2007 & 2022) where the sound of hammers breaking rock dominates a landscape of broken shards. His monumental drawing, FRACKments 01, 2023, created specifically for this exhibition, combines in its title the concepts of Fracking and Fragments to construct a new layer of meaning.  A drawn collage of images, based mostly on his own photographs, and made using basic drawing materials on multiple sheets of paper, the work explores the fragile ecosystem that is Nature and creates a dreamlike meditation on climate change.

Completing this multi-sensory evocation of environmental collapse is Enright’s Eco-Urgency Mixtape (2023) by aka DJ Lightbolt. The mixtape is a 45-minute DJ mix created for this exhibition, to help process the climate crisis through music.

Synthetic Zero

Curated by Mitsu Hadeishi

December 21, 2022 - January 5, 2023
Opening Reception: Wed., Dec. 21, 5:30-8pm

Participating artists include Blanka Amezkua | Brandon Ballengée | BRAC Teen Project Studio+2.0 (Ukari Bakosi, Mykerine Vincent, Katherine Miranda, GeAnn Stephan, Fernanda Carvalho Santos, and Chuxi Guo) | Lynn Cazabon | Elders from Pio Mendez under the direction of Blanka Amezkua | Girls Write Too! (Karen (Kay Love) Pedrosa, Carolina (Erotica 67) Diaz, Scratch (Creative Firecracker) and Shiro) | Alicia Grullon | Minds Empowered under the direction of Tiffany Williams | Eric Orr with Sally Mann, Electra Weston and Outlaw Ocean Mural Project | Danny R. Peralta | Plotzing Press | Hatuey Ramos Fermin, with community | Rudlings Collective (Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Kaleb Hunkele, and Richard Zimmerman) | Roy Secord | Summer Youth Employment Program under the direction of Rodrick (Strong Warrior) Bell | Alberto Villalobos | Harry Whitney