PUT ON YOUR RED DRESS!
About
SHOTGUN! PUT ON YOUR RED DRESS! is a project about lives evolving through periods of social unrest.
I was born in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. My family lived at 2342 North 22nd Street in Philadelphia, Until 2 weeks before the outbreak of the Columbia Street Riots in late August of 1964. I lived in NYC when New York exploded during the 1977 blackout and lootings happened across the city; I was working in City government when riots occurred in 1991, in Crown Heights, the neighborhood where I lived for the last 15 years. My apartment on Eastern Parkway was blocks away from the site of many BLACK LIVES MATTER demonstrations in 2020. Now, as a recent transplant to Detroit, I am reminded, daily, of the impact of that city’s uprisings in 1967 and 1968.
I am arrested by the extinct to which my life has been lived in communities that we knew riotous turmoil, but in the age of George Floyd, are better understood as uprisings in a landscape of resistance.
SHOTGUN! is about bringing into focus much of my life that happened in the periphery, transformational events in black American life that I experienced in my backyard, not as blunt force impacts but as aftershocks and reverberations that periodically shake my foundation to this day.
For the most part, my family was not made up of activists, but the black folks on the frontlines were shaping and protecting our lives. My life was framed by their blood and words and wounds. Up close, my memories have similar characteristics but are shaped by complex relationships with real people in landscapes of love and aspirations, successes and troubles.
This project is creating a space in which I can gain very specific understandings of how I came to be who I am as a figure in that terrain, in consort with my closest male cousins, Wink and Peter, who evolved from the same roots.
The three of us grew up in households of very strong women. There are and have always been more of them than men in my family; they have been our keepers and protectors, with the major exception of Uncle Hunkie who, over time assumed the role of a patriarch.
Wink, Peter and I all had intimate relationships with 2342 N. 22nd Street. Their fathers, Jack and Pete, and my mother were Owens and they grew up there. Our grandmother lived there until she died in 1972 so that house was part of the Owen family story. Peter and I lived the early years of our lives there and Wink visited often. Much of our adult lives have been spent coming to understand our Owen pasts. Our parents were profoundly connected and often embattled until their deaths when they were younger than their children are now. Their relationships shaped the ways Wink, Peter and I remained in one another’s peripheral vision as we grew older and apart.
Connected by bonds we are learning about now, living lives full of echoes; all struggling through what we knew about and did not know about ourselves; all connected to bigger worlds, managing the specters of addiction and abuse; all carving out relationships that employ our gifts with family, with women, with men, with younger generations. This is the place from which we are all stepping into the world of SHOTGUN! PUT ON YOUR RED DRESS!
The whole project is set in the terrain of Black Lives, full of ghosts and memories that are real and suspect, factual and contested, blurred and frozen in documents and images, history and fiction, personal and essential, public and fleeting.
Tony Whitfield
Project Background
Tony Whitfield - Artistic Director
About Tony
Tony Whitfield is a multi-media artist, designer, writer and educator whose theater work has been shown by La MaMa, ETC. His artworks have been shown in solo shows at HOWL! Happening in NYC, the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Centre LGBTQ and NUIT BLANCHE 2017 in Paris, and group exhibitions in galleries and museums including Village in Berlin, NYC’s Museum of Art and Design, Leslie Lohman Museum, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History. and published in the US and abroad. His video installation, Paris, 1938, was featured in Paris’ NUIT BLANCHE 2017. Whitfield also writes about art, new media, film, performance and design, and is an Emeritus Professor at The New School where he taught at Parsons School of Design between 1993 and 2020. Since 1976 he has also been an influential member of the public and non-profit sectors in NYC’s arts community.
Quotes from Tony Whitfield
“SHOTGUN! SHOOT HIM BEFORE HE RUNS….” I feel like I am both the shooter and the target. This project is about bringing down the story of the man I am before he runs…before he is gone to me.
“PUT ON YOUR RED DRESS…” Is about embracing the lives and influences of women in my life, in me, who taught me how to survive and resolve to prevail. I know that by embracing them, my heart remains open and engaged in a struggle for what I care about.
About Whitfield Co Labs
Whitfield CoLabs (WCL) creates contexts that present and interpret aspect of urban experience to illuminates social change, particularly in the lives of underrepresented populations. Through collaboration with artists, designers, technicians and organizations that serve WCL's subject populations, Tony Whitfield develops and presents works in multiple media to engender greater understanding of the histories that underpin current cultural phenomena. Through the application of transmedia storytelling strategies, audiences for WCL's works range from general urban populations in public spaces to product consumers to participants in social media.
Related Works
Andrew Alden - Multimedia Director
About Andrew
Andrew Alden is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Obscura Broadcasting Company from New England. He studied film scoring and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he received a bachelor’s degree in composition. Andrew's work has been shown nationally and internationally, on NBC, at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Greentopia Film Festival, Illinois Music Educators Conference, and as part of Nuit Blanche in Paris. He has twice been an Artist in Residence at the University of Illinois, Champaign.
Related Work
About OBC
Obscura Broadcasting Company (OBC) is a multimedia collective examining what it means to create for social change. OBC embraces the creativity of the collaborative process to bring diverse stories to online and live audiences.
Tony Whitfields' Considering Evidence
