Boogie With Patrisse Cullors in a Virtual Electric Slide
“In the Black community we do the electric slide at weddings and funerals to celebrate life and to process grief,” says Patrice Cullors. Last year during the Frieze LA art fair, she led participants in a communal performance of the reggae-influenced disco song. This April, Cullors will be leading a global audience in the dance as a restaging of her original performance, “F*ck White Supremacy, Let’s Get Free.”
"LOS ANGELES — One year ago during the Frieze LA art fair, activist and artist Patrisse Cullors led a crowd of art-goers in a communal performance of the Electric Slide. In the middle of the faux-New York City streetscape of the Paramount Studios backlot where Frieze was held, participants shimmied and side-stepped in unison as Cullors guided them through the movements. The joyful and sometimes goofy dance was a welcome, judgement-free alternative to the commercial art-world intrigues unfolding within the large fair tent. Titled “Fuck White Supremacy, Let’s Get Free,” the performance was an attempt to bring Cullors’s activism — she is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and an advocate for prison abolition — into a space and to an audience that might not be as familiar with it. She viewed it as a way for people to rejuvenate, regenerate, and refocus through movement and community.
“F*ck White Supremacy, Let’s Get Free” at LTD Gallery (2019) (image courtesy Giovanni Solis) “The last four years of this administration has been demoralizing,” she told the Art Newspaper last year. “Part of the response is to not allow them to take away our joy — not allow them to take away our laughter, our creativity.”
Though the work addresses the big umbrella issue of white supremacy, each iteration has a specific motivation. Cullors first performed the piece in 2019 in the parking lot behind ltd gallery in Mid-Wilshire, as a response to the child separations and detentions at the border. The Frieze performance was tied to an LA County prison reform ballot measure she was leading at the time. “Getting to reach a global audience this year is important and necessary,” she told Hyperallergic via email. “We have the opportunity through this piece to focus on challenging white supremacy in all of its forms. The Black Lives Matter movement has grown so much globally since I co-founded it in 2013 and getting to dance with the world in this moment is a celebration of that.”"— Matt Stromberg, Mar. 15, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.
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