In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "Self-Divination" speaks poetically...
This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which developed...
Writes director Ulysses Jenkins: "This video takes the 'Planet X' myth and interfaces it with the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, LA, based upon their similar natural disaster principles. With a proclamation of prophecy spoken by avant garde jazz musician, Sun Ra, predicting a coming disaster to...
In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "The Nomadics" takes a sweeping overview...
Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and...
In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "Mutual Native Duplex" is a video essay...
Initially created as an editing exercise for his students at UCSD, Jenkins’ Inconsequential Doggereal mixes poetic narrative fragments of self-shot footage with moments ripped from the unending flow of TV news, advertising, and entertainment. The images and sounds of mainstream television are...
This composition provides a tribute to the world's most formidable peace activist, Anwar Sadat. The video paints visions of issues concerning Earth's flirtation with the apocalypse. Composed in four movements, featuring images and text interwoven with contemplations for inner and world peace.
This is a documentary of David Hammons prior to his leaving the Los Angeles arts community. This video covers the artist's creative strategies at that time. It served as both an interview and video performance by David Hammons.
This performance took place in 1983 at the Art Dock on Center Street in Los Angeles. Like much of Jenkins's other work, it involved multiple performers, including Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi. Here Jenkins addresses social and geopolitical issues—specifically the "insensitivity of...
Director Ulysses Jenkins calls his film a "dreamscape in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the development of African American stereotypes in the American entertainment industry."
The Watts Summer Festival is one of the oldest African American cultural festivals in the United States. The Watts community founded the event in 1966, one year after the Watts uprising. Ulysses Jenkins's film captures moments from the festival, including footage from a performance by the band War....
A neo noir, explores the psychological conditioning of ethnic profiling and stereotypical assumptions of an African American male and a Caucasian male. Located on the MTA subway in metropolitan Los Angeles. A day in the life of suspicious day dreaming characterized by post colonial paranoia and...
Ulysses Jenkins charts the history of jazz—what he calls “the first true American art form"—from its beginnings in New Orleans and the American South to the classic work of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and through the major innovations of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis. Also...
Experiemental video using Datamax graphics software. This piece is a very early example of the use of computer animation in video art. ZGrass refers to the programming language used to create the images.
An investigation of the American media portrayal of black men as misunderstood tragic figures throughout recent history. Secrecy is an African concept which is a ritual element of understanding. The art that conceals and reveals. Which defines an individuals perception of recognition. Therefore, if...
