BAMAA EP 4 Scholar & Activist Abdul Alkalimat
03/03/19 • 68 min
Welcome to Contemporary Black Canvas, I am your host, Dr. Pia Deas. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with scholar and activist, Abdul Alkalimat. In our conversation today, he begins by discussing how influential his family of activists and scholars were on his early development and his lifelong commitment to the freedom struggle. Our discussion focuses how he, together with Conrad Kent Rivers and Hoyt Fuller, founded the artist’s collective, OBAC, the Organization of Black American Culture in Chicago in 1967. We discuss OBAC’s role in Black Arts Movement and in creating the Wall of Respect mural. The Wall of Respect, a mural of black leaders, changed the tone of Chicago, strengthened its Black community, and inspired a thousands of artists across the country to not only embrace the Black Arts movement but to also create cultural murals in other neighborhoods. The story of OBAC and the Wall of Respect was captured through a combination of essays, and artifacts in his book The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago edited by him Robin Crawford and Rebecca Zorach. Dr.Abdul Alkalimat has been and continues to be a substantial force in the black community. Currently, outside of his long career in academia, he is maintains a variety of digital archives, including one focused a collection of his work and pertinent information related to liberation movements since the 1960’s and the other is a dedication to Malcolm X. Throughout his career, Alkalimat demonstrates the importance of knowledge to freedom and survival. He urges listeners to keep generational records as they are an “important part of our DNA”. To find his work, please check out his website: www.alkimat.org.
http://brothermalcolm.net Malcolm X dedication Site
http://alkalimat.org Abdul Alkalimat archive
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wall-respect Wall of Respect Book
https://interactive.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/africobra Africobra Information
http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/stories-freedom/henry-box-brown/ Henry Box Brown’s Bio
https://interactive.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/dawsons-black-machine William Dawson’s bio
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/jackson-joseph-harrison Rev. J. H. Jackson’s bio
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/24/jeff-donaldson-art-kravets-wehby-gallery Artist Jeff Donaldson & Africobra
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/margaret-burroughs Margaret Taylor-Burroughs’ bio
The post BAMAA EP 4 Scholar & Activist Abdul Alkalimat appeared first on Contemporary Black Canvas.
Welcome to Contemporary Black Canvas, I am your host, Dr. Pia Deas. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with scholar and activist, Abdul Alkalimat. In our conversation today, he begins by discussing how influential his family of activists and scholars were on his early development and his lifelong commitment to the freedom struggle. Our discussion focuses how he, together with Conrad Kent Rivers and Hoyt Fuller, founded the artist’s collective, OBAC, the Organization of Black American Culture in Chicago in 1967. We discuss OBAC’s role in Black Arts Movement and in creating the Wall of Respect mural. The Wall of Respect, a mural of black leaders, changed the tone of Chicago, strengthened its Black community, and inspired a thousands of artists across the country to not only embrace the Black Arts movement but to also create cultural murals in other neighborhoods. The story of OBAC and the Wall of Respect was captured through a combination of essays, and artifacts in his book The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago edited by him Robin Crawford and Rebecca Zorach. Dr.Abdul Alkalimat has been and continues to be a substantial force in the black community. Currently, outside of his long career in academia, he is maintains a variety of digital archives, including one focused a collection of his work and pertinent information related to liberation movements since the 1960’s and the other is a dedication to Malcolm X. Throughout his career, Alkalimat demonstrates the importance of knowledge to freedom and survival. He urges listeners to keep generational records as they are an “important part of our DNA”. To find his work, please check out his website: www.alkimat.org.
http://brothermalcolm.net Malcolm X dedication Site
http://alkalimat.org Abdul Alkalimat archive
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wall-respect Wall of Respect Book
https://interactive.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/africobra Africobra Information
http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/stories-freedom/henry-box-brown/ Henry Box Brown’s Bio
https://interactive.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/dawsons-black-machine William Dawson’s bio
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/jackson-joseph-harrison Rev. J. H. Jackson’s bio
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/24/jeff-donaldson-art-kravets-wehby-gallery Artist Jeff Donaldson & Africobra
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/margaret-burroughs Margaret Taylor-Burroughs’ bio
The post BAMAA EP 4 Scholar & Activist Abdul Alkalimat appeared first on Contemporary Black Canvas.
Previous Episode
EP 24 Curator Meg Onli
Welcome to Contemporary Black Canvas. I am your host, Dr. Pia Deas. This week we had the pleasure of speaking with Meg Onli, the current Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Please join us for this two-part series. In this episode, we speak to Meg Onli about her life and work as a curator. In part two, we speak to Meg Onli and a guest artist about Onli’s latest exhibition, Colored People Time, an exhibit in three chapters that opens in February 2019 and closes in December of this year. Please see our shownotes for the link to this exhibition. In this episode, I talk to Meg Onli about her move to Chicago in 2005 to pursue graduate school and a career as a conceptual artist and how she realized that she was better suited to be a curator. Before she joined the ICA as an Assistant Curator, Onli was the Program Coordinator at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She was also the recipient of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the creator of the website The Black Visual Archive. Meg Onli’s first exhibition Speech/Acts at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2017) focused on Black poetry in order to explore how the social constructs of language have shaped the black American experience. To find out more about the current exhibit please visit www.icaphila.org.
For more information & exhibition dates and times visit
For more on Meg Onli’s new exhibit (February 2019) visit :
Colored People Time: Mundane Futures
Artists Meg Onli mentioned on this episode:
Up and coming artists: Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rollin, Aria Dean Matthew Angelo Harrison
Resource she relies on: Other artists
Words you live by: To find happiness in my own labor
Where can we find your work: Institute of Contemporary Art
The post EP 24 Curator Meg Onli appeared first on Contemporary Black Canvas.
Next Episode
EP 25 Scholar Rashad Shabazz
Welcome to Contemporary Black Canvas where we celebrate the depth and breadth of Black artistic and intellectual traditions. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Rashad Shabazz, an Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry within School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University and an affiliate faculty member at the Lincoln Center of Applied Ethics. Dr. Shabazz’ research interests are in human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. He joined us on our show to discuss his book, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Join us and hear how Dr. Shabazz’s growing up in Chicago shaped him as a person and a scholar. Hear how Chicago police, law enforcement, and city officials responded to the influx of Blacks into Chicago during the great migration. Hear Dr. Shabazz explain, in depth, what “prisonize” is and how it shaped the Black experience in Chicago during the 20th century. Join us for a deeply moving and transformative conversation about how the structures of prisons are replicated in the everyday living spaces and living environments of Black Americans. To learn more about Dr. Shabazz and his work, please check out his book Spatializing Blackness and keep an eye out for his future work on the development of the Minneapolis Sound.
The post EP 25 Scholar Rashad Shabazz appeared first on Contemporary Black Canvas.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/contemporary-black-canvas-608/bamaa-ep-4-scholar-and-activist-abdul-alkalimat-62841"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to bamaa ep 4 scholar & activist abdul alkalimat on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy