• Sermons and Sacred Pictures

Black Interiors: Spirit

In Conversation

  • Headshots of members of the collective, The Black Aesthetic. From left: Ra Malika Imhotep, Leila Weefur, and Jamal Batts.

    The Black Aesthetic is an Oakland-based organization whose mission is to curate a collective understanding of black visual culture. TBA members Jamal Batts, Ra Malika Imhotep, and Leila Weefur guest curated this program.

  • Headshot of Marvin K. White

    Marvin K. White is a poet, artist, teacher, and preacher currently serving as artivist in residence at the Oakland Peace Center.

Black interiors are the life worlds of black peoples often denied them in normative modes of cultural circulation. Spirit is black radical energy. In Lynne Sachs’s Sermons and Sacred Pictures we are introduced to the work of Reverend L. O. Taylor, who captured the essence of the black church in a series of recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. We meet Bessie Jones in Bess Lomax Hawes’s anthropological recording Georgia Sea Island Singers and again in the educational film Yonder Come Day as she corrals students at Yale and youth on St. Simons Island into a chorus of play guided by the games and songs of her ancestors.
—The Black Aesthetic

Films in this Screening

Sermons and Sacred Pictures

Lynne Sachs, United States, 1989

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W/Color
  • 16mm
  • 29 mins
source
  • BAMPFA

Georgia Sea Island Singers

Bess Lomax Hawes, United States, 1963

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 16mm
  • 13 mins
source
  • BAMPFA

Yonder Come Day

Milton Fruchtman, United States, 1976

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • 16mm
  • 28 mins
source
  • BAMPFA

The Black Woman (excerpt)[Black Journal No. 28]

Stan Lathan, United States, 1970

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 16mm transferred to digital
  • 1 mins
source
  • BAMPFA