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.

BIO

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including MAAFA (2020), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at LA’s MOCA. 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” and “the archival.” She treats both entities 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. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, and a research fellowship from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She’s currently working on a play commissioned for LA’s 2020 biennial, and a collection of essays entitled Love is War for Miles in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.