Shifting Landscapes

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Los Angeles has been a major center of the movie industry since the first decades of the twentieth century. Artists marginalized from mainstream cinema production or otherwise engaged in experimental practices have also found community and inspiration there. In the late 1960s, a critical gathering of African and African American students formed at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Loosely grouped together under the moniker L.A. Rebellion, these filmmakers—including Melvonna Ballenger, whose 1978 narrative short Rain (Nyesha) is screening here—centered Black stories and experiences in their moving-image works. Made five years later, Ulysses Jenkins’s Without Your Interpretation (1983) documents a performance staged along the Los Angeles River that used movement to critique American obliviousness to global societal ills. In these works, Ballenger and Jenkins aim to depict complex representations of Black life in counterpoint to the film industry’s ongoing, detrimental stereotypes.

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Man in a checkered suit and American flag scarf sings into a microphone. Band with saxophonist and drummer plays in the background.

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Shifting Landscapes

Los Angeles in Film and Video

6

Ulysses Jenkins
Without Your Interpretation, 1983

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On the Hour

Shifting Landscapes

Los Angeles in Film and Video

6

Ulysses JenkinsWithout Your Interpretation, 1983

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Ulysses Jenkins
Without Your Interpretation, 1983

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection