A Quality of Light

Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work.

A dreamy fragment about the end of the world. A black girl wanders into a Hollywood western and mourns for the dead.

In this thought-provoking documentary, filmmaker Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich delves into the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis's monumental sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra (1876).

Leigh’s video work Untitled (M*A*S*H) (2018) imagines a fictive order of black nurses operating on the front of the Korean War, a conflict that began between the United States and North Korea in 1950 and never officially ceased. Like M*A*S*H—the long-running American TV show (1972–83) it parodies—the work directs attention to the overlooked life in the staging grounds. Showcasing the agonizing choices faced by those who staff the tented encampments of war, it perhaps also serves as a reminder that our neighborhoods remain a warfront too. Using only artist’s tools, Leigh asks: How do we transform ourselves and others?

The film explores the history of the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women in the 1840s, during the height of the Underground Railroad (a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada).

Through a collaborative writing process with filmmakers, three women bring to life “The Command Center to Bring Women Home,” an imagined space run by formerly incarcerated women for those with nowhere else to turn but to each other, a place where mothers can reunite and heal with their children, and women are able to hold and comfort one another.

A short film and a spell of protection.

Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts. Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century.