#native thinghood

[nativethinghood-blog]

Artist Eden Jeffries released another epic mashup video featuring dancer Storyboard P for the Rise of the Dandelions art show. This collective of artist in conjunction with The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails is a group working to end brutality inside L.A. jails, and re imagining a different alternative to the police state.

For information click here

For more information: http://nationinside.org/campaign/coalition-to-end-sheriff-violence-in-l.a.-jails/

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With its deep intuitive rhythms and basslines, check out Delroy Edwards Deep House Mix, a sure favorite of Native Thinghood.

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"Afronaunts" by Cristina De Middel is an afro futurist glance into the exploration of space and time. Check out write up by Scrambler.

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Thoughts on Process From One of Our Founding Members

THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012

Dawn | A Note on Process

By A-lan Holt, member of the 2013 Emerging Writers Group These mornings I wake up at Dawn. A ritual I began in January but am just starting to fall into. I am finding the dawn to be a healthy space to wake. The new air is cold and sharp. Some mornings the furnace in our apartment works and the chilled hardwood is warmed and gracious to bare feet. Most days it is still dark and wet outside: too cold for these California bones to shake themselves awake; and so I lay. Try to remember easy things like the time, where I am now, like, right now- easy things… The Milky Way… Third Planet from the Sun…Earth… North America…United States of America… New York State… New York City… Brooklyn… Greenpoint… Sutton Street… the top floor of a three story walk up we have just started to move into.. the center of three rooms.. my bed..my head..my body. I am finding it important to always start the day by reminding myself of where I am; further, by marking a transition between passively experiencing my dreams and the waking activation of them.

The mornings, I am finding, are peace: are these quiet pockets of time when most of the inhabitants of my world sleep. They are these small spaces that span a couple of hours all my own. This time to write (or dance) or be alone, by myself, as I need to be to create these small universes, these intricate new worlds. Indeed, these days I am learning the mechanics of carving out space for this type of work. And O, what a gift the morning has been.

As an emerging writer I am learning everyday what true commitment feels like. What it means to inspire yourself in a tangible way, to write. Write despite the rent, or the lover sleeping beautifully beside you, or the heartbreak, or the days when the work does not slip into poetry as easily as it ought. Write. Write. And be in love with that thing, writing. Be an active lover in a practice that requires you to bend, and respond, and nourish, and live with, and sustain, and protect these glimpses of scenes, these visions of possibility, until they suddenly break into play. Then guide that play back until it again breaks into something bigger than itself: transcendence, acts of kindness, communion.

As an emerging playwright, I am learning the daily intricacies of a practice that yields this kind of art; the kind, like commitment, that loves despite it all.

And love, I am finding, continues to be it all: continues to align, most prominently, the infrastructure of my work. These days, I am learning how best to love; how best to create the healthiest space to work and continue writing plays with a rigor and kindness that comes from having a strong foundation. I am learning what it really means to live sustainably. And for me, these days, sustainability comes from the dawn. Comes from making the decision to sleep the night before, and eat better, and intake less toxins. To break-fast with poetry, and water, and all these gentle things we sometimes forget. These small rituals of health that make waking something more than simply tumbling into and out of another day. I am learning that nourishing my art means nourishing myself.

A poem:

Never been a morning person

but these days tryna change all that

Cause the morning / my friend / is peace

tucked away from it all / Peace

The holy spirit, for sure, and for the artist

who does not yet art full time

the morning reminds them that dreaming is important work too

That dreaming means putting hands to canvas, fingers to keys

means carving out a space

despite it all.

A-lan is a recent graduate from Stanford University. She is currently developing a new play entitled THE BOTTOM. She wrote this peace (piece) at dawn. 

This post is part of a weekly series from the Emerging Writers Group community of playwrights. The EWG is two-year playwriting fellowship at The Public Theater seeking to target playwrights at the earliest stages of their careers. In so doing, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights.

[nativethinghood-blog]

last night was dope as fuck.  thank you so much to all of the artists who showed work, to the djs who performed, and to everyone who came out to support!  this is only the beginning (like, literally, our first show...)

look out for more photos coming soon.

NT

[nativethinghood-blog]

TONIGHT!

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yes yes, y'all.  native thinghood show coming to you soon.  feb 17, 2012.  8:30-2.  minimum $3 donation.  byob. click here fore more info.

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CALL TO ARTISTS, please forward and reblog

Artists! 

Native Thinghood would like to invite you to submit work for an art show that will take place on Friday, February 17, 2012.  The show will be at The Cube, an art space near downtown Los Angeles, and will be followed by live musical performances and DJ sets.

Native Thinghood is an art collective comprised of emerging filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, and creative writers whose inspirations arise from the legacies of black artistic expression. The group arose out of a desire to create art that is representative yet not limiting of the diversity housed within the black aesthetic.  Through this show, we want to engage with and showcase other Los Angeles-based artists who explore and create radical redefinitions of their mental spaces and environments, and who are immersed in the colors of global collectivity.

Both the collective and our winter exhibition are called Native Thinghood, a term coined by Aldous Huxley in his book Doors of Perception.  The quote from which we borrowed this term reads:

   …Our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

  In your work, and in our own, we are looking for a particular energy, potency and power—can we feel it?  We are interested in the balanced union of concept and aesthetic, and your process of achieving that; we are inspired by work that transports us to unexpected emotion-states and challenges assumed norms; we are invested in personal and artistic evolution—in pushing our own boundaries as we expand into a new year.  We are excited to see what you submit.

 Please send an email to [email protected] by Tuesday, January 31, 2012 with as many details as possible about what work you would like to include in this show.   If the work is already made, please send jpeg images or a link to a video along with the artwork’s dimensions and any technical requirements.  If you are proposing to make a new piece for this show, please send as much descriptive information as possible, jpeg images of your previous work, proposed dimensions, and a proposed timeline for the completion of your project.  The more details you include, the better our show will be. 

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Native Thinghood