Activities for the Living Objects: African American Puppetry Festival and Symposium took place in various venues on UConn’s Storrs campus February 8 to 10, with related festival events with UConn Hartford at the Hartford Public Library on Thursday, February 7, 2019, and at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art on Saturday, February 9, 2019.
These events were part of the Ballard Institute exhibition Living Objects: African American Puppetry, on display October 25, 2018 through April 7, 2019, which for the first time brought together historical and contemporary puppets, masks, and performing objects by African American artists and puppeteers. Many of the exhibition's contributors, as well as scholars from around the United States, came together at the festival and symposium to celebrate the past, present, and future of African American puppetry.
Exhibition co-curator Paulette Richards, a teaching artist and Fulbright Scholar, wrote that “since their arrival in the Americas, African people have animated objects in a rich variety of forms and contexts, animating objects to represent their experiences and identity.” The Living Objects: African American Puppetry Festival and Symposium highlighted such work by contemporary African American artists, while also contextualizing the evolution of African American object performance.
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Performances
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Friday, February 8 8 – 9:30pm Performances by ventriloquists Megan Piphus, David Liebe Hart, and Nate Puppets.
4 – 5:00pm Marionette performance for family audiences celebrating the history and diversity of the world’s most famous Black community.
Featuring A Conversation with Frederick Douglass by Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins, The City that Care Forgot by Pandora Gastelum of The Mudlark Puppeteers, Curled by Isaac Bloodworth, Lovely Day by Brad Brewer, and For the Love of Cats and Dogs by Dirk Joseph and String Theory Theater.
9:30 – 10:30am Featuring The Greatest Love Story Ever Told by Edna Bland, and The Agape Love Train by Rev. Yolanda Sampson. |
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Living Objects: African American Puppetry Festival and Symposium sponsors included: Judith M. Zachs and the Zachs Family Foundation, UConn School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, UConn Africana Studies Institute, the H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center of the University of Connecticut, UConn Hartford, Hartford Public Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, and Maryland Institute College of Art.
