• Charlotte Brathwaite

  • 2020

Artist's Website

Grant Summary
Fellowship.
Keywords
Artist Statement
As an artist, my goal is to create works that provide a lens for that which is not easily seen, a voice for that not easily articulated through words. As a director, my work tackles the intersection of women’s issues, poverty, war, race and the complexities of the human condition. I work between forms including plays, opera, dance, procession, site-specific performance, performance art, installation, concert, film and more recently telephone and print. I am on a continual search for new methods of expressing the images, feelings, impulses and dreams I have dreamt. I am drawn to characters that exist on the margins of society, who have no choice but to forge their own paths and create their own alternative futures. I am drawn to transformation—both personal and spiritual. In many ways these stories reflect and refract my own lived experience existing in a world that has never felt settled and is forever changing.

  • No More Water/The Fire Next Time: The Gospel of James Baldwin, 2018. Da Ping Luo Co-created + Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite Conceived by Meshell Ndegeocello. Feb. 2018 Live Performance, music, poetry. With: Meshell Ndegeocello, Staceyann Chin, LaToya Ruby Fraizer, Justin Hicks, Jadele McPherson, Paul J. Thompson. Photographs: LaToya Ruby Fraizer. Courtesy of the artist .

  • Only When It’s Dark Enough You Can See The Stars, 2017., Charlotte Brathwaite Video still. Installation/Costume/Production Design Abigail DeVille. Courtesy of the artist.

  • Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin, 2020., Charlotte Brathwaite Music, text, poetry, video, phone line, broadsheet video still. Inspired by the writing of James Baldwin. Imagined by Meshell Ndegeocello and Charlotte Brathwaite. Animation Adebukola Bodunrin. Courtesy of the artist.

  • Souvenirs d'autres mondes [Memories of other worlds], 2020 Video still of video meditation inspired by and text from Octavia Butler directed by Charlotte Brathwaite; sound Tareke Ortiz; editing Clara Soria and Hugo Resende. Courtesy of the artist.