VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

NOTE:  This event has been postponed due to a blizzard in the Northeast.  Now scheduled for Thursday, April 8.

The Rothko Chapel is delighted to bring a distinguished roster of outstanding intellectuals, poets, musicians, and journalists to speak and perform during its 2009-2010 season of public programs. All programs are free and open to the public. The Rothko Chapel presents Amiri Baraka, Living Legend. Amiri Baraka, (born Everett LeRoi Jones) Poet, Playwright, and Civil Rights Activist,  Thursday, February 11, 7 p.m. A reception for the public follows the performance.

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, NJ. After leaving Howard University and the Air Force, he moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1957 and co-edited the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen and founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. Blues People: Negro Music in White America, still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. He also edited The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America  published in 1963. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film. (The play was revived by the Cherry Lane Theatre in January 2007 and has been reproduced around the world).

In 1965, Jones moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The BARTS lasted only one year but had a lasting influence on the direction of Afro American Arts. Sending five trucks a day into the Harlem community, art show on one, poetry reading from the other, music, another, drama the other, where performances would be given in a changed location each day. Vacant lots, play grounds, housing projects pushing Art that would be Black as Bessie Smith, mass-based and taken to the people and Revolutionary, reflecting the intensity of the entire Black Liberation Movement

In 1966, when the BARTS was dissolved, Baraka returned to Newark, his hometown and set up with his new bride, Amina Baraka, (who was a founder of Newark’s “Loft” a local venue of contemporary art), Spirit House and the Spirit House Movers, which brought drama, music and poetry from across the country.

During this period, the Barakas founded the Committee for Unified Newark and the Congress of Afrikan People which led the election of Ken Gibson as the first Black Mayor of a major northeastern city spearheaded by the 1972 Gary (IN) Convention. In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal.

He and his wife, Amina Baraka, edited The Music (Meditations of Jazz & Blues (Morrow) Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. His recent publications are Y’s/Why’s/Wise (3rd World 1992) Funk Lore (Littoral 1993), Eulogies, (Marsilio, 94,) Transbluesency, (Marsilio 1996), Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems (Nehesi 2002).

Amiri Baraka's numerous literary honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. In 1994, he retired as Professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, and in 2002 was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey and Newark Public Schools. In January 2007, his award-winning, one-act play, Dutchman, was revived at the new Cherry Lane Theatre in New York and received critical acclaim and international attention. His recent book of short stories, Tales of the Out & The Gone (Akashic Books) was published in late 2007. Home, his book of social essays, will be re-released by Akashic Books in early 2009. Digging: The Afro American Soul of Music (Univ. of California) is also due out this year.