Harmony Holiday

Inspired by the ways Black music is often born in these ruins and becomes their archive(s)—brought to the stage, the radio, and the album as necessity/commodity—the exhibition comprises a short film, prints of new writing, a sculptural, sound installation, occasional live performances, and a series of public conversations. Installed immersively, the various elements of the exhibition are parts of a whole and transform The Kitchen into a hybrid, liminal space that quotes the pared-down aesthetic of backstage spaces. The environment evokes the practical, immaterial aesthetic of a makeshift storefront church, revival meetings, faith healings, and other underground modes of instilling Black sacred and everyday rituals within the spectacle of performance. BLACK BACKSTAGE therein draws an intentional contradiction between the barren spaces that are left untended, and those that are cared for because they support the sale of Black spectacle.

Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, with Tsige Tafesse, 2023-24 Curatorial Fellow.

Public Programs

In Conversation: Harmony Holiday and Margo Jefferson as part of BLACK BACKSTAGE, March 21, 2024, 7pm at The Kitchen at Westbeth. Tickets $5-15 sliding scale. SOLD OUT.

Roundtable Conversation: Harmony Holiday, Ben Ratliff, Raoul Roach, and Melanie Charles as part of BLACK BACKSTAGE, April 24, 2024, 7pm at The Kitchen at Westbeth. Tickets $5-15 sliding scale.

The Woodshed as part of BLACK BACKSTAGE, May 11, 2024, 12-9pm at The Kitchen at Westbeth. The program will be divided into two parts: 12-4pm and 5-9pm, with an hour break in between. During the hour break, the loft will be cleared so that we can reset the space. There are no advanced ticket reservations; $5-25 sliding scale tickets available at the door for Part One (12-4p) and Part Two (4-9p) of the program.

BIO

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys music, ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including MAAFA (2022), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at LA’s 2220Arts. At the core of her practice is a pursuit of visual and literary vocabularies that might best express the melancholic hope endemic to Black American social life. As Holiday navigates the depths of Black remembrance and loss, she sets her sights on the relationship between “the new”, “the archival,” and the spaces between them that defy linear time. She treats these energies as collectively improvising ensembles in which prose and poetry sit by turns comfortable and chaotic, next to images cribbed from Black artistic and private life. Most recently she has received awards from the Silver’s and Rabkin foundations, and is completing a memoir Love is War for Miles, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and collection of poems.