This page contains links to articles, interviews, and videos that can be incorporated into course syllabi or used for individual student research. For detailed event information, visit saic.edu/cate.
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold: Black Fire
Thursday, March 13, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Faculty can reserve tickets for their classes here.
Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank (VDB) in conjunction with the release of VDB’s box set Can You Move Like This: Black Fire, and SAIC’s Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Please note that All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). Hearing loops, wheelchair seating, and companion seating are also available at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
For more than a decade, filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and historian Claudrena N. Harold have collaborated on a series of poetic films that examine Black life at the University of Virginia (UVA) while also echoing the experiences of Black students and faculty across the United States. Bringing together Everson’s reflexive approach with Harold’s historical scholarship, the films explore both interior life and collective action in higher education, highlighting figures like Vivian Gordon, who led UVA's Black Studies program in the 1970s, and Kent Merritt, one of UVA’s first four Black scholarship athletes, as well as the formal and informal spaces where Black students have gathered through the years. Through performance, interviews, and reenactment, Everson and Harold bring this history into a resonant conversation with the present.
Kevin Jerome Everson's practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture, and film, including 12 award-winning features and more than 250 solo and collaborative short form works. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Heinz Award in Art and Humanities, Berlin Prize, Alpert Award for Film/Video, and Rome Prize. His work has been the subject of retrospectives and solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate Modern, London; Cinema du Reel/Centre Pompidou, Paris; Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Austria; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, Canada (in association with Media City Film Festival), among others. His films regularly screen at international film festivals like Black Star, Sundance, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Cinema du Reel, European Media Art Festival, Courtisane, Locarno Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Doc Lisboa, Media City, and cinemas, galleries, and museums like Whitechapel, London; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Reina Sofia, Madrid; LUMA Foundation, Switzerland; National Museum of African American History, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and REDCAT, LA. Everson lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art and director of Studio Arts at the University of Virginia.
Artist page on Video Data Bank
Claudrena N. Harold is an award-winning historian whose work examines African American history, labor, and Black cultural politics. Harold is the author of three books, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942 (2007), New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2013), and When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (2020). She is the co-editor, with Louis Nelson, of Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity (2018). She has also produced, with Kevin Jerome Everson, 11 short films under the collective title Black Fire. An extension of her ongoing research into the history of Black student activism at the University of Virginia, these films have screened at numerous international film festivals and art institutions, including Black Star, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, IKFF Hamburg, Cinema du Reel, Doc Lisboa, BFI London Film Festival, and Edinburgh International Film Festival, among many others. She is currently the associate dean for Social Sciences and Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Black Fire: Power in Play [Article]
Alonso Aguilar | Talking Shorts | August 6, 2023
The Art of Peer Pressure: Black Fire UVA! [Book Chapter]
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold | Future/Present, Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno and Elizabeth M. Webb, eds. | Duke University Press | 2024
"Of the Wings of Atalanta": The Struggle for African American Studies at the University of Virginia, 1969-1995 [Article]
Claudrena N. Harold | Journal of African American studies, vol.16 (1) | March 2012
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson [Interview]
Claudrena N. Harold | Callaloo, vol.37 (4) | September 2014
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Abstraction Through Representation: Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson [Interview]
Meagan Ratner | Film Quarterly, vol. 71 (3) | March 2018
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
B.A.D. (Black Abstraction Dreaming): A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson [Interview]
Michael Boyce Gillespie | Black Camera, vol. 8 (1) | October 2016
Getting it Done [Article]
Elena Gorfinkel | Sight and Sound (London), vol. 27 (10) | October 2017
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Charlottesville 2017 by Kevin Jerome Everson works on Video Data Bank’s Educational Streaming Platform
Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.
