Celebrate the release BLK MKT Vintage with Jannah Handy & Kiyanna Stewart!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, October 24 @ 7 PM 

Where: Eldorado Ballroom (2310 Elgin Street, HTX, 77004)

How:  RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming.

This event is in partnership with Project Row Houses!

ABOUT THE BOOK

This one-of-a-kind treasure trove of Black cultural ephemera, from the entrepreneurs behind the vintage shop BLK MKT Vintage, expands on their mission to curate vintage objects that tell Black stories and celebrate the contributions Black people have made to our American consciousness.
 
Jannah Handy and Kiyanna Stewart have spent years scouring piles, stacks, bookshelves, and dilapidated boxes in search of themselves and their history, Black history. Through their Brooklyn brick-and-mortar BLK MKT Vintage and online shop, they have uncovered tens of thousands of items including vintage literature, vinyl records, clothing, art, decor, furniture and more.
 
BLK MKT Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories invites readers into Handy and Stewart’s work and partnership as they pick, collect, curate, design, and reimagine futures for the objects of the past. Brimming with more than 300 photographs of vintage pieces of ephemera, the book is a beautiful, ephemeral object itself calling to mind a scrapbook or family album that has a surprise on every page whether that’s 1972 celluloid pins from Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign, early 1800’s hand-drawn maps of the African continent, or 1920’s bound yearbooks from various HBCUs. The book also explores the various concepts that ground Handy and Stewart’s work; interviews with Black archivists, artists, memory workers and collectors – including a foreword from Spike Lee; a look into their private collection of thousands of items they have discovered over the years; an explanation of the different players in the antiques and vintage world; and tips and tricks on how to begin your own collection and curate physical spaces that reflect your identity and experience. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jannah Handy and Kiyanna Stewart are the co-founders of BLK MKT Vintage, an online vintage/antique concept shop that specializes in collectibles and curiosities, representing the richness of black history and lived experience. Their passion for material culture and found objects has led them to interior design projects, personal sourcing, set design, prop rental, museum loans and other curatorial projects in media/entertainment, education, the arts & philanthropy. Jannah has a background in business and education, with a B.A. in Economics from Smith College, and a M.Ed. in Higher Education from UMASS, Amherst. Kiyanna has a background in fashion & education, with a B.A. in Journalism & Africana Studies and a M.A. in Women's Studies, all from Rutgers University

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Amarie Gipson is a Houston-born writer, cultural worker and founder of The Reading Room HTX. She has held curatorial positions at various art institutions, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Independently, her writing has been published in ARTS.BLACK, Artforum, ArtNews, ESSENCE, Oxford American and many others. As a DJ, Gipson has made a significant impact on her hometown through PHYSICAL THERAPY, a dance party and 7,000+ person community founded to foreground safety and togetherness in Houston's underground music/nightlife scene. She is the former Arts & Culture editor of Houstonia Magazine and currently the Houston Editor-At-Large for Burnaway, an Atlanta-based arts criticism publication focusing on the American South and the Caribbean. Advancing a new model for librarianship and public institution building, The Reading Room is increasing access to cultural history through literature and programming. It is a community-centered tribute to Black genius in the South and beyond.

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.

The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists

This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.

Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today,” Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself.

Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted and Black in contemporary art.

Artists include: Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sadie Barnette, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Bethany Collins, Noah Davis, Cy Gavin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Samuel Levi Jones, Deana Lawson, Norman Lewis, Eric N. Mack, Arcmanoro Niles, Jennifer Packer, Christina Quarles, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Chanel Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Brenna Youngblood, and more.

The New Negro (1925) is an anthology by Alain Locke. Expanded from a March issue of Survey Graphic magazine, The New Negro compiles writing from such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Locke himself. Recognized as a foundational text of the Harlem Renaissance, the collection is organized around Locke’s writing on the function of art in reorganizing the conception of African American life and culture. Through self-understanding, creation, and independence, Locke’s New Negro came to represent a break from an inhumane past, a means toward meaningful change for a people held down for far too long.

“[F]or generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” Identifying the representation of black Americans in the national imaginary as oppressive in nature, Locke suggests a way forward through his theory of the New Negro, who “wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not.” Throughout The New Negro, leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance offer their unique visions of who and what they are; voicing their concerns, portraying injustice, and illuminating the black experience, they provide a holistic vision of self-expression in all of its colors and forms.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Alain Locke’s The New Negro is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

In this classic work—a blend of memoir social criticism, and political analysis that remains relevant today—the first Black Congresswoman to serve in American history, New York’s dynamic representative Shirley Chisholm, traces her extensive political struggle and examines the problems that have long plagued the American system of government.

“A tremendously impressive book.”—Washington Post

“Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrates her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.”—National Women’s History Museum

“I want to be remembered as a woman . . . who dared to be a catalyst of change.”

Political pioneer Shirley Chisholm—activist, member of the House of Representatives and former presidential candidate—was a woman who consistently broke barriers and inspired generations of American women, and especially women of color. Unbossed and Unbought is her story, told in her own words—a thoughtful and informed look at her rise from the streets of Brooklyn to the halls of Congress. Chisholm speaks out on her life in politics while illuminating the events, personalities, and issues of her time, including the schism in the Democratic party in the 1960s and ’70s—all which speak to us today.

In this frank assessment, “Fighting Shirley” recalls how she took on an entrenched system, gave a public voice to millions, and embarked on a trailblazing bid to be the first woman and first African American President of the United States. By daring to be herself, Shirley Chisholm shows how one person forever changed the status quo.

EVENT DEETS:

When: Thursday, January 9 at 7 PM CST

Where: Hogan Brown Community (2310 Elgin Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP WITH BOOK to support our programming and store or grab a free ticket. 

ABOUT THE BOOK:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Irvin is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His writing has been featured in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNERS

Texas native Anthony Suber is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in SouthEast Texas. He received a BFA from the University of Houston and completed his MFA at Houston Christian University. Throughout his career, Suber has exhibited work and produced multi-tiered activations both nationally and abroad. Suber is a professor of art with the Katherine G. McGovern College at University Houston’s School of Art and an artist-in-residence with Project Row Houses in Houston’s historic Third Ward community. He also serves as the Creative Director for the arts and mental health nonprofit, The Blackman Project. 

Suber’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, Project Row Houses, Houston, Tinney Contemporary in Nashville, University Museum at Texas Southern University, Houston, Art is Bond Gallery, Houston, John B. Coleman Gallery at Prairie View A&M University, Houston Museum of African American Culture, with solo exhibitions at Red Bud Arts Center in Houston, LRT Gallery, Houston and Cindy Lisica Gallery, Houston. His work has been featured in publications such as Arts and Culture Texas, Glass Tire, The Houston Chronicle, and Free Press Houston. Suber was the recipient of the Artadia Art Prize in 2022. 

Wale is a licensed mental health therapist and a passionate reader who uses her platform (@theehottgirlbooks) to dive deep into powerfully emotional stories written by BIPOC authors. Her love for reading and mental health fosters a passionate approach to her work both online and in the therapy room. When she is not immersed in the literary world, you can find her watching the real housewives or building an elaborate Lego set.

A Note From Chanecka 

In April 1983, Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple won National Book Awards, one of America's most prestigious literary prizes.  Naylor’s debut novel won the award for First Novel while Walker’s novel  won the prize for overall Fiction. This was a historical moment in Black literature history that has mostly gone unnoticed. As we finish reading the works of Gloria Naylor, it feels necessary to honor these two women’s achievements as well as examine their work in context.

Meeting Details

When: August 21, 2022 at 2PM-4PM

Where: This meeting will be held online with the virtual conferencing platform, Zoom. 

How:  Be sure to register for this month's bonus meeting.

About Project Row Houses

Project Row Houses is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. We engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities. 

Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. PRH programs touch the lives of under-resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The Project Row Houses model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world.

The long-awaited first major monograph on the iconic portraitist of Black Americans

This is the first comprehensive monograph on acclaimed painter Amy Sherald, whose distinctive style of simplified realist portraiture features African American subjects rendered against colorful monochrome backdrops or in everyday settings. Sherald rose to fame after being chosen by former first lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2018, becoming the first African American woman to receive this honor. In addition to reproductions of Sherald’s recent works, the book—published to accompany her solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London in fall 2022—includes illustrations of earlier paintings, as well as an intimate glimpse into Sherald’s process and practice through a series of in-studio photographs. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of the artist’s work by Jenni Sorkin; a meditation on the politics and aesthetics of Sherald's portraiture by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie; and a conversation between Sherald and acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Amy Sherald was born in Georgia in 1973 and received her MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. She has been included in countless group shows at galleries and museums worldwide as well as the subject of solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, among others. Sherald lives in Baltimore and New Jersey.

Celebrate the release of Positive Obsession with Susana M. Morris!

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, February 27 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004).

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming.

Please note outside copies of the book will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories or purchase the RSVP (BUT I HAVE THE BOOK) ticket. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. 

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. 

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. 

Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susana M. Morris is a Black feminist scholar and a cultural critic who has dedicated her career to studying the interior lives of Black women. She is an associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective. A former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, she is the author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. Her other works include Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature, the co-edited collection The Crunk Feminist Collection, and the co-authored young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. Her writing has appeared in Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony, and she has been featured in venues such as NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, and Essence magazine. 

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Melanye Price is the inaugural Director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Price is an Endowed Professor of Political Science and served as the Principal Investigator for the African American Studies Initiative and the HBCU Student Voting Rights Lab. She has secured grants for the Simmons Center and her own research from various foundations including Mellon, Ford, LUMINA, and others. Price is the author of two books: The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) and Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009). She is currently working on her third book project on the five decade history of voting rights activism at Prairie View. She also served as a Special Assistant to Ruth J. Simmons in her last year as President of Prairie View.

Dr. Price completed her B.A. magna cum laude in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her MA and PhD in political science at The Ohio State University. Dr. Price was recently named the 2024 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Price has been a Black History Month lecturer for the US Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations across the country. Professor Price was one of the contributors to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET. She has been a regular contributor for The New York Times Opinion section and also done political commentary for various local and national outlets. Dr. Price has also served as a consultant and commenter for the audio tour of two major exhibits at the Museum Fine Arts Houston—Philip Guston Now and Kehinde Wiley’s Archaeology of Silence.

In her free time, Melanye is an avid watcher of television, supporter of all things Black and Houston, and intrepid gardener!