Art Metropole

#01323

Jazz Slave Ships Witness

Artist

Jan Wade

Price

$30.00

Date

1996

Publisher

Locus+

Format

Audio

Details

CD

Jazz Slave Ships, Witness, I Burn was a site-specific performance collaboration between Vancouver artist Jan Wade and London-based performer Vanessa Richards that involved the creation of an ancestral altar. It took place in two U.K. ports in October 1996: on the West Coast in Whitehaven, Cumbria (the last English slaving port). Wade’s work focused on altars as vehicles for worship, vessels of African spirituality and for reconciling the painful past of the African Diaspora. Vanessa Richards, a performance poet originally from Vancouver, acted as Wade’s griot (storyteller). Jazz Slave Ships was presented in conjunction with the “Year of Visual Art in the North of England” – a series of international exhibitions from March to November 1996, and Black History Month in the U.K.