Public Programs Calendar

Quilter and scholar, Kyra Hicks will present a lecture which focuses on key quilters, quilts, and quilt developments by decade. She will also include information about local quilting guilds and discuss work by both male and female quilters. Did you know that Geo. Washington Carver was a quilter?

Immediately following the lecture a reception for the African American Quilters Guild of Oakland will be held in the Education Center.

The Museum of the African Diaspora invites teachers to learn about this new museum in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena District conveniently near the Montgomery BART station. Immersive multimedia exhibitions and contemporary art exhibitions explore the African Diaspora through U. S. history, world music, and visual art. MoAD is a great field trip for students K-12 and university levels offering rich connections to social studies, language arts, and visual and performing arts curriculum. Teachers receive special $5 admission to Museum on this day only. For more information call the MoAD 415.318.7150 or email education@moadsf.org.

Co-sponsored by the California Alliance of African American Educators.

Please join MoAD and Shared Interest for a book signing and reception with renowned journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Ms. Hunter-Gault's book New News Out of Africa offers an optimistic view of Africa's future in a context of the continent's media attention obscures important positive developments in Africa including the work of organizations such as Shared Interest.

Co-sponsors: The Vanguard Foundation, The Tides Foundation & MicroCredit Enterprises.

An evening of documentaries exploring Mexico’s African legacy, including Rafael Rebollar’s The Forgotten Roots detailing this history; Roberto Olivares’s African Blood which focuses on Afro-Mestizos of the western Costa Chica region; and Trifari White’s A Tree from Two Separate Seeds.

Notre Dame de Namur University Professor Bobby Vaughn will introduce the films. This series will continue on October 11 and November 15.

Co-presented with The Mexican Museum.

Gee’s Bend was known as a “Movement Town” to the scores of organizers and volunteers who worked to secure the right to vote in Alabama’s Black Belt counties. A panel featuring members of the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement who worked with either SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) or SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council) will speak about their time in Gee’s Bend during the 1960’s. Discussion led by Jean E. Wiley.

Directed by Thomas Allen Harris The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela is a film based on the story of the first wave of South African exiles who left Bloemfontein in 1960 to keep the anti-apartheid movement alive from East Africa, Europe, America and Cuba. In their heroic journey, this group of twelve -- and the thousands of young South African freedom fighters that would follow them - helped to create a global seismic shift that ultimately toppled the apartheid system in South Africa. Co-presented by The San Francisco Black Film Festival and California Newsreel.

Members Free. Non-members $8.00

After a debut collection of short stories made him one of the most highly regarded writers in the country, Edward P. Jones spent 11 years on The Known World , his Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel about black slave owners in the American South. The son of an illiterate dishwasher, Jones celebrates the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.

Co-sponsored by MoAD.

Intersection for the Arts presents Marcus Shelby in a lecture demonstration and small ensemble work-in-progress performance of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, a new secular jazz oratorio for 15-piece jazz orchestra and solo vocals based on a book by historian Kate Clifford Larson. In addition to performing sections of the larger oratorio with a small ensemble, Shelby discusses Tubman’s life, her relationship to the Civil Rights movement, and Tubman’s connection to the history of jazz, including her own use of improvisation and ‘call and response’ techniques in communicating coded messages to escaping slaves in spirituals and work songs.

Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman is made possible in part by the Creative Work Fund and created in partnership with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and the Museum of the African Diaspora. Special thanks to the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University.

For tickets and more information call Intersection for the Arts at 415.626.3311.

Please join us for a book signing with Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Known World Edward P. Jones. In his much anticipated new work, All Aunt Hagar's Children (August 2006), Jones returns to the short story form that served him well in his first book, Lost in the City.

A collection of fourteen stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children offers a prismatic look at life among the denizens of Washington, D.C. both today and in the past. But while they are circumscribed by the same Beltway, Jones's characters are not the wealthy powerbrokers and media hounds who define the most visible aspect of the capital. Instead they inhabit the segregated neighborhoods, often struggling to get by, as they navigate the racially stratified world that life in the city offers.

Participants will view the works of Carrie Mae Weems and several other artists who have used shadows and silhouettes to make beautiful expressions of art.

Create your own shadowplay masterpiece by using cut outs, texture, and color. Featuring Guest Artist: Oliatan Callendar Scott.

(Age 9-14 yrs.) Free with museum admission. Limited Seating.

Join us for a conversation with Carrie Mae Weems as she discusses her recent work, The Louisiana Project - an installation incorporating still photography, narrative, and video projection as part of an examination of the complex history of New Orleans and the resulting "commingling culture."

Carrie Mae Weems: The Louisiana Project and Charles Guice, Charles Guice Fine Art Photography, Berkeley, CA.