This event is sold out. Thank you.

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bone black is a ritual performance reading for the late black feminist writer and theorist, bell hooks/Gloria Jean Watkins(1952-2021). The performance will feature 69 Black women, transgender, and non-binary performers who will serve as live and virtual ritual readers reciting hooks’ prolific body of work. The ritual gathers artists, scholars, activists, workers, spiritual leaders, and everyday people to engage in this work and create collective spaces for grieving, reflection and ancestral veneration. The public is invited to bear witness – a concept/practice that hooks theorized extensively in her work – to this practice of embodied ancestral veneration and to engage with the readers through deep listening, stillness, and call-and-response. Audience members are invited to wear red to the performance and to bring offerings for an altar for bell hooks.

This event will be conducted by Courtney Desiree Morris, a visual/conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. As an artist, her work examines the complexities of place, ecology, memory, and the constant search for “home.” She works primarily in the fields of photography, experimental video, installation, and performance art.

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MoAD is an ADA compliant facility and seating will be provided for people with disabilities as needed. Admission to MoAD is $12 for adults, $6 for students,seniors, and educators, and free for youth under 12 and members. Admission to this event is “pay what you can”, and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

This is an in-person event that will take place onsite at MoAD. You are required to show proof of full vaccination or a negative Covid test within 72 hours of entry. Masks are required throughout the museum. These requirements are subject to change; please check www.moadsf.org for the most up to date information.  

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This event is co-sponsored by the Museum of the African Diaspora, the UC Berkeley Gender and Women’s Studies Department, the UC Berkeley African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies Department, the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, and Bluma.

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