Join the hosts of WDNA Radio’s Brainville crew as they present a special site-specific live transmission into Brainville from Gary Simmons’s sculptural installation, Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark. Enjoy a series of activations with a special live performance “conduction” piece composed and arranged in real-time by Professor Nicole Yarling and the Brainville High School Jazz Band.

Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark consists of a stage and speakers that, when activated, serve as a venue for live performances. The speakers are encased with wood salvaged from the streets of New Orleans’s Tremé neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The objects bear the spray-painted traces of that history, just as they hold the memory of past performance activations. 

About the Black Ark 
Gary Simmons’s sculptural installation Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark consists of a stage and speakers that, when activated, serve as a venue for live performances. The speakers are encased with wood salvaged from the streets of New Orleans’s Tremé neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The objects bear the spray-painted traces of that history, just as they hold the memory of past performance activations.

The title of the work references Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legendary Kingston studio, the Black Ark, while the black star motif on the stage gestures toward the Black Star Line, a passenger vessel route launched in 1919 by the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey as a way to facilitate personal and economic ties between Africa and Black people throughout the world. 

These connections across time and space imbue Simmons’s platform with the suggestion of Black diasporic unity. Like Perry’s studio, much of which was constructed using repurposed materials and DIY fabrication, Simmons’s installation provides a platform for artists to come together and forge new sound out of reclaimed parts, symbolically actualizing Garvey’s dream of solidarity. The important role of music and dance in fulfilling this dream is further underscored by the motif’s allusion to the hip-hop duo Black Star, a collaboration between Mos Def and Talib Kweli. 

Each time the work is installed, Simmons invites the exhibiting venue to program a performance series inspired by local performance histories. As Simmons explains, “At the end of [each] performance the speakers are left in place as a kind of ghost of that performance.”