An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.
Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and an exhibition on backstage culture for The Kitchen in New York, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.
Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.
Author
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and an exhibition on backstage culture for The Kitchen in New York, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
