“…Supermarkets, assembly-lines, teen-posts firmly shuttered, one after another. Old structures stand and rot in the sun….decrepit schools, poorly funded community services, inadequate health services, jammed low-income housing. It is the fallout that has firmly secured the media’s eye, not the abundant reasons for it.” — Lynell George, 1992*

To mark the 25 years since the uprising in April and May, 1992, the Hammer Museum and Roger Guenveur Smith present Spike Lee’s new Netflix film of Smith’s performance piece RODNEY KING. This is the ninth Smith–Lee collaboration, and is co-presented with the UCLA Department of History, and the UCLA Interdepartmental Program in Afro-American Studies.

Following the screening, there will be a Q & A with Smith—who wrote a performance piece in 1991 that predicted the events of the following year—and UC Santa Barbara Professor Stephanie Batiste. Join them afterwards for a reception in the Hammer’s courtyard, featuring a live DJ set by the film’s composer Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius).

 

RODNEY KING, Tuesday, May 2, at 7:30 pm. Free.

HAMMER MUSEUM, Westwood, Los Angeles.

hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2017/05/rodney-king/

*Lynell George, No Crystal Stair: African–Americans in the City of Angels (New York: Verso, 1992), 4.

Roger Guenveur Smith in his one-man show Rodney King.
Image credit: Craig Schwartz, Star-Tribune