The 'Soul of A Nation' Listening Sessions: Mark Anthony Neal @ Crystal Bridges

BARBARA JONES-HOGU, UNITE, 1971. © THE ARTIST. 
Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal will curate a series of Listening Sessions in support of the US debut of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Crystal Bridges: Museum of American Art (February 3 - April 23, 2018).
Developed by the Tate Modern in London, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power examines the influences, including the civil rights movement, Minimalism, and abstraction, on artists such as Romare Bearden, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams.


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Motown and “High Negro Style”Thursday, March 15, 2018 7pm
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art600 Museum Way             Bentonville, AR  72712    
Neal discusses how the Motown sound became a template for style and Black middle class aspiration. Artists include: The Supremes, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Ashford + Simpson, The Four Tops
$15 ($12/members), register online or with Guest Services.

Love in the Stax: Death + Resurrection in MemphisThursday, March 22, 2018 7pm
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art600 Museum Way             Bentonville, AR 72712    
Neal discusses how Stax, a Memphis-based white-owned label became the sound of Southern Soul, and how it rebuilt after the death of its signature artist Otis Redding, creating the template for Soul in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Artists include: Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, The Staple Singers, David Porter, The Soul Children, Rance Allen, Shirley Brown
$15 ($12/members), register online or with Guest Services.

A Love Supreme: Jazz and the Pursuit of Black ExcellenceThursday, March 22, 2018 7pm
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art600 Museum Way             Bentonville, AR  72712   
Neal discusses how the jazz scene of the 1960s coalesced around music, self-determination, and the pursuit of excellence as embodied in the music of John Coltrane.
Artists include: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Doug Carn, Pharoah Sanders, Abbey Lincoln, Gil Scott-Heron
$15 ($12/members), register online or with Guest Services.                            +++
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies,  and the founding Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture, and Entrepreneurship (CADCE) at Duke University. He offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson and the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy-award-winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).
Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013).  The 10th anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally, Neal hosts the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke.