Black Speculative Arts Movement Festival 2017

Black Speculative Arts Movement, aka BsaM, is an annual festival highlighting expressions of Afrofuturism, and showcasing the creativity of black comic book/graphic novel publishers, musicians, poets, painters, mixed media artists, crafts people, playwrights and scholars. This gumbo mix of African diaspora culture tours multiple colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Co-founded by associate professor and chair of the Humanities department at Harris-Stowe State University, Reynaldo Anderson, and founder of Midwest Ethnic Convention for Comics and Arts - MECCA, Maia Crown Williams, BsaM  features an exciting array  of live performances, a full international film festival via MECCAcon, seminars, classes, hand on workshops, plays, and much more. Students are also welcome to submit proposals to participate as well.

In addition to a unique art installation, a play, a filmfest, a poetry reading and a concert, there will be multiple panels, workshops, seminars, and lectures book signings and a Cosmic COSPLAY Jam. Our official program is in its final stages. If you are interested in moderating a panel, workshop, and/or lecture, please contact us today.

Afrofuturism and astro blackness are the logical extensiosn of the Black Arts Movement which gained its fullest expression during the Black Power and Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 1970s.  The vehicles for this expression have primarily been theater, dance, film, literature, visual arts, and music. Artists like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Basquiat, Fela Kuti, George Clinton, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Samuel Delaney, Jimi Hendrix, Paschal B. Randolph, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Tananarive Due, and the ZULU NATION are excellent examples.

Black Speculative Arts Movement is a loose umbrella term representing  a variety of positions or basis of inquiry: Afrofuturism, Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African Centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric. Although these positions may seem incongruous in some instances they overlap around the term speculative and by design; interacting in association with the nexus of technology and ethics.

  BsaM is a continuation of the ideas of W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, Richard Wright, Marimba Ani, Frances Cress Welsing and others to pierce the Color Line, the Color Curtain, and understand the Digital Divide in the face of the challenges of the 21st century.

Links:

http://BSAMstl2017.eventbrite.com/

http://blackspeculativeartsmovement.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/blackspeculativeartsmovement

http://MECCAcon.wordpress.com/

If interested in performing, exhibiting, paneling, holding a workshop, volunteering, serving as press, etc, please contact 

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., 314-333-9562.