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Performances: Words / Light / Sound

Sunday October 29, 7:30pm$10 advance tix / $15 door

Come out to Rhizome on October 29th and experience this gumbo of creative expression.

>>  Poetry by Tongo Eisen Martin
>>  Music by Suns of Ra (Jamal Moore and Dr. Thomas Stanley)
>> Video Projections by Ada Pinkston


TONGO EISEN MARTIN (born in San Francisco) is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has educated in detention centers from New York's Rikers Island to California's San Quentin State Prison. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times . He was also adjunct faculty at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. Subscribing to the Freirian model of education, he designed curricula for oppressed people's education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again , has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.

ADA PINKSTON is a multimedia artist, educator, and organizer living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Born in New York, her art explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies using mono-print, performance, experimental video, and collage techniques. Inter-subjective exchange is also the primary substrate of her work. Her work has been featured in Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, and the streets of Berlin. A recipient of a Mississippi State Arts Council Grant, Blaunstein Scholarship, and Michael Mazur Printmaking Scholarship, her most recent collaborative project includes founding the LabBodies Performance Art Laboratory in Baltimore Maryland.

JAMAL MOORE (Balt) whom is a multi-instrumentalist, composer/performer and educator. His background include California Institute of The Arts (M.F.A. 2012), Berklee College of Music (B.M 2005), Eubie Blake Jazz Orchestra (2000) under the direction of Christopher Calloway Brooks and historical acclaimed Frederick Douglass Sr. High whom notable alumni Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Ennis graduated from.

Some notable luminaries Jamal has worked with are Wadada Leo Smith (2013 Pulitzer finalist) whom he studied with at California Institute of The Arts, Nicole Mitchell, Sabir Mateen, Roscoe Mitchell, David Ornette Cherry (Organic Roots Nation), Dr. Bill Cole, DJ Lou Gorbea the late George Duke, Sheila E and David Murray.

He is a long-term member of KREation and Conference of The Birds ensembles directed by Kevin Robinson. A member of The Pan African Peoples Arkestra of the late Horace Tapscott, Calvin Gant ensemble directed by Calvin Gant and Nicole Mitchell; Joyful Noise Band , and Ancestral Duo in collaboration with Luke Stewart. Jamal currently leads his own groups, Akebulan Arkestra, Napata Ensemble, Black Elements Quartet, Organix Trio, and Interstellar Duo.

DR THOMAS STANLEY (a/k/a Bushmeat Sound) is an author, artist, scholar, and activist deeply committed to audio culture in the service of personal growth and social change. He teaches sound art, sound studies, consciousness, and cultural theory at George Mason University. He received his doctoral degree in music for research on Butch Morris' unique compositional system. He is a founding member of Transparent Productions through which he has helped to present 100s of creative improvised concerts since 1997. In 2004, he launched MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND (MOM²) as an electrophonic improvising ensemble and has since considered his artistic contributions as macrotemporal interventions (rends in the fabric of history). He is the co-author of an oral history of George Clinton and P-Funk (1998, Avon paperback) and in 2014 released a new book on the teachings of astro-kemetic jazz iconoclast Sun Ra. He is the host of Bushmeat's Jam Session, a weekly excursion into sonic impossibility heard every Thursday on WPFW-FM.