The Speculative Archive: Kevin Jerome Everson and Ephraim Asili

Presented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Kevin Jerome Everson and Ephraim Asili in conversation with Michael Gillespie, Christopher Harris, and Allyson Nadia Field. 

Emergency Needs (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2007, 7’, digital) 

In 1967, the respected lawyer Carl Stokes (1927-1996) became the first black mayor of a large American city, Cleveland, Ohio. On found-footage of press conferences, we see how he coped with the uprising that hit the city in July 1968.

Something Else (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2007, 2’, digital) 

Something Else is a film about found footage as subject matter and Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia 1971 expressing her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia 1971 Pageant.

The Citizens (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2009, 6’, digital) 

The film includes Mohammad Ali talking about life, Althea Gibson returning home as a champion, Fidel Castro playing baseball and three gentlemen being escorted into court all under the watchful eye of the media. A film made of found footage that shows how memory can be manufactured and therefore deconstructed.

Sugarcoated Arsenic (Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, 2013, 21’, digital) 

The genesis of Sugarcoated Arsenic can be traced to Everson's discovery of rare archival materials at the University of Virginia that revealed the institution’s deep though largely undocumented connection to the cultural and political revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Glenville (Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai, 2020, 2’, digital) 

Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai update the 1898 film SOMETHING GOOD – NEGRO KISS, which features the first representation of African American intimacy in cinema history.

American Hunger (Ephraim Asili, 2013, 19’, digital) 

Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities, and vice versa. 

Fluid Frontiers (Ephraim Asili, 2017, 23’, digital) 

Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists. All of the poems are read from original copies of Broadside Press publications by natives of the Detroit/Windsor region, and were shot without rehearsal.

Kevin Jerome Everson was born and raised in the working-class community of Mansfield, Ohio. His expansive oeuvre attends to the lives of people living and working in similar American communities in the aftermath of the Great Migration to the present day. Some of Everson’s films are constructed from archival footage, uncovering forgotten details of African American life in the 1960s and 70s, such as the news coverage of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes’s response to the Glenville Uprising of 1968 in Emergency Needs (2007), a local media report on a Black pageant contestant in Something Else (2007), and media depiction of heroes and antiheroes in The Citizens (2009). Made with Everson’s long-term collaborator and colleague, Dr. Claudrena N. Harold, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) is a cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s. Glenville (2020), an homage to the recently rediscovered Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898), was made with another longtime collaborator, Kahlil Pedizisai, and reimagines the first known film depicting African American affection in the East Cleveland neighborhood of Glenville. 

Ephraim Asili is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates films, books, cassettes, records, collage, and installation works that cohere as a series of meditations on the everyday in relation to local and global politics. Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capital city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger (2013) explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories where American fantasies confront African realities and vice versa. Fluid Frontiers (2017) is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, which includes American Hunger, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists. Shot without rehearsal, people native to the Detroit/Windsor region read poems from original copies of Broadside Press publications. 

Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.