My characters might seem like they’re coming out of the blue, but they take a long time to develop. I’m constantly adding information. Sometimes the initial impression comes out of another form—a photograph, for instance. And I’ve done a lot of traveling alone, which has made me a real observer, real interested in detail, and in basic but universal things—food and eating styles, friendship, the menstrual cycle. — Blondell Cummings*
BLONDELL CUMMINGS—DANCE AS MOVING PICTURES—the immersive, celebratory survey of the work of the late dance and movement pioneer—is in its final week at Art + Practice in Leimert Park. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Getty Research Institute.
See link below for details.
BLONDELL CUMMINGS—DANCE AS MOVING PICTURES
Through February 19
Art + Practice
3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles
*Pamela Sommers, “Blondell Cummings: Life Dances,” Washington Post, November 30, 1984.
See: Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, edited by Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, and Glenn Phillips (South Pasadena, CA: X Artists’ Books, 2022).
Contributors to the exhibition catalog include Sampada Aranke, Sophia Belsheim, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kristin Juarez, Meredith Monk, Joshua Oduga, Rebecca Peabody, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, Tara Aisha Willis, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
From top: Kei Orihara, Blondell Cummings, “Chicken Soup,” 1985, gelatin silver print, courtest New York Public Library; Blaise Tobia, Blondell Cummings performing for video, August, 1978, image © Blaise Tobia, member of the Documentation Unit of the CCF CETA Artists Project, New York; Cherry Kim, Contact Sheet for Blondell Cummings in “Ms.,”image © Cherry Kim; Blondell Cummings, Dance as Moving Pictures, cover image © X Artists’ Books; Paula Court, Blondell Cummings, “Chicken Soup” at P.S.1 exhibition Spring Dance Series, 1982, Paranarrative Dance Festival, collection of the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, image © Paula Court. Images courtesy Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute.
