Elissa Blount Moorhead & Bradford Young: Back And Song

October 5-27, 2019, Girard College, Philadelphia

March 1, 2020-January 3, 2021, Baltimore Museum of Art

Two prominent filmmakers have filled the Girard College chapel with images of Black people healing themselves, across time and around the globe by Valerie Russ, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 2019.

Back and Song is a meditative four-channel film and art installation by filmmakers Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, produced by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. This kaleidoscopic installation reflected on the manner in which health and wellness are part and parcel of the Black American experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considered the labor and care provided by generations of Black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides—and their histories of contribution to, and resistance toward, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine.   

I worked with Nato Thompson and Kerry Bickford (and others) of Philadelphia Contemporary as the original curatorial team and co-commissioners of Back and Song.

Read more at Philadelphia Contemporary.