Remembering and Re-envisioning Black Queer Creative Expression – Film Screening and Discussion

Chronicling Resistance: The Exhibition asserts that “what was lost can be found again in new poems, stories, songs, and dances.” Like the Black queer Philadelphia creatives whose work is presented in the exhibition, Vernon Jordan, III’s varied forms of creative expression offer ways to remember, re-envision, and amplify our stories. In the short narrative, afroqueer jazz film, One Magenta Afternoon, a young African American boy, Les, and his Pop Pop use jazz music as a bridge into the world of the dead. Les tumbles through the visions and memories of six queer spirits from different times, learning love in one of his first music lessons. This film is for African American magic: for Hoodoo, Rootwork.  Join writer and director Vernon Jordan, III for a film screening of several shorts, talkback, and participatory activities that explore Black youth connection to analog technology, love for ingenuity, and practical divinity. Teens, adults, and seniors welcome!

Friday, Jan. 27

3:30 pm

Parkway Central Library, Room 25 (Ground Floor)

Vernon Jordan, III – Writer and Director: I’m a Philly born and raised artist/storyteller. My priority is to merge the visual and the poetic/lyrical; I’m a Visual Lyricist. Philadelphia is everything to me, where I cut my artistic teeth, training at the historic New Freedom Theatre and Jared Martin’s Big Picture Alliance. As a director, writer, and artist who is black, bisexual, and gender variant, I see the world with afrofuturist eyes: I hope my films leave a kind of blueprint to remember the pasts and build the futures. In all of my films, I aim to tell the intimate stories of Black Philadelphia across the times.