Art & Literary Festival: The Harlem Renaissance

The Joslyn Castle & Gardens and Metropolitan Community College are partnering once again for the Art & Literary Festival. This year will be a celebration and exploration of one of the most electrifying and influential moments in American history, the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920’s, in African American communities in New York City and in cities throughout the North and Midwest, creative and intellectual life thrived.

The main event of the festival is the production of an anthology of dramatized short stories, essays, and poems entitled Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, adapted by Scott Working of MCC and directed by TammyRa’ of Great Plains Theatre Commons. The evening will include selections by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Angela Weld Grimke, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Free lectures on the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Omaha’s role in it, will be offered before each performance.

Flyer features original art by Aaron Douglas.

The Great Plains Black History Museum has generously loaned the Joslyn Castle an exhibit on the history of the Dreamland Ballroom, which will be on display in the Castle Library during the festival.

A Night at the Dreamland Ballroom the History of Jazz in Omaha The Dreamland Ballroom was the heart of Jazz in Omaha, during its hey-day it hosted some of the greatest Jazz acts of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. On any given night you could see Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, The Nat King Cole Trio, Preston Love Sr., The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, and Little Esther Phillips. Red, Perkings, Nat Towles, and many others. They performed at the Carnation Ballroom, Jim Bell’s Club Harlem, Cotton Club, Allen Showcase, The Off Beat, all part of Omaha’s Jazz hub.

Thursday, Nov 13

Poetry Night 6:30-7:45 in the Carriage House, Free

• Noni Williams
• Paula Bell
• “LP”

Friday, Nov 14

Peggy Jones: The Harlem Renaissance and Aaron Douglas, 6pm-7pm, Free

Peggy Jones, M.F.A. (UNL ’93-Painting/Printmaking) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and affiliate faculty in both Women’s and Gender Studies and Medical Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She is an artist and playwright who has won awards for both her visual art and writing. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council for her play, The Journey, about Aaron Douglas, the first black graduate from the art department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922. Her creative and research interests include intersections between race, gender, and language. She wrote a book chapter titled My Mother Tongue: A Linguistic Autoethnography in African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education and Identity. She has six essays on African American artists in a catalog of paintings in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln, NE. Her most recent publication is a book chapter titled It’s All in the Game: How NOT to Teach The Wire in Predominantly White Institutions, which was published in 2016 in the edited volume, Using HBO’s The Wire to Teach Urban Issues. Her most recent play about Black radical feminist Florynce Kennedy was performed in January 2018 at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE. She is also in the Speaker’s Bureau of Humanities Nebraska on the topic, Aaron Douglas, UNL ’22.

Dramatic Performances, doors at 7pm, Production at 7:30pm, $22

Saturday, Nov 15

Public reading of two original one-act plays by local playwrights Kim Louise and Peggy Jones, 2pm, Free

Eric Ewing: Our Role in the Harlem Renaissance, 6pm – 7pm, Free

Eric Ewing is the Executive Director for the Great Plains Black History Museum. His presentation will discuss the local impact the Harlem Reneaissance had in Omaha and the Midwest region. The Dreamland Ballroom was the epicentre of the North Omaha jazz scene hosting touring acts from coast to coast and giving a spotlight to local artists.

Dramatic Performances, Doors at 7pm, Production at 7:30pm $22

Sunday, Nov 16

Ramon Guerra: Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, 6pm-7pm, Free

Dr. Ramon Guerra is a distinguished scholar and educator who has been a vital part of the University of Nebraska at Omaha since 2008. As an Associate Professor in the Department of English and an active member of the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies (OLLAS), Dr. Guerra has made significant contributions to the study of Latinx, postmodern, and ethnic literatures, as well as American Studies. He has researched, published, and taught broadly on multiple topics of the 20th and 21st centuries in American Literature.

“The Harlem Renaissance” was the name given to the explosion in cultural, artistic, and social awareness that was focused on Harlem, an area of New York City, between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. The movement embodied the evolution of Black involvement in all parts of society but also had variations within its elements that invoked issues of class, gender, color, and general sense of purpose, among others. Trying to configure the whole of these aspects into a unifying message is difficult; the essence of a “renaissance” is a renewal or rebirth, and that is the primary characteristic of the cultural production from this time: a renewal of Black identity and experience. The result is a “boom” that shifts the outcomes that follow and informs the subsequent cultural production and civil rights ideologies of Black Americans in later years.

Dramatic Performances, Doors at 7pm, Production at 7:30pm, $22