New Works by John Sims and James E. Reynolds to Debut at La MaMa in December

New, provocative works by John Sims and James E. Reynolds will debut at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 E. 4 St.) in December:

2020: (Di) Visions of America by the multi-media concept artist, writer and activist John Sims December 1 to 5. Based on Mr. Sims' 20-year project, RECOLORATION PROCLAMATION that confronts Confederate iconography and the associated state of mind, this trilogy explores themes of white power and symbols, the coronavirus and police brutality. New York premiere.

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History/Ourstory: The Trail to Tulsa, conceived, written and directed by James E. Reynolds December 9-12. In this year marking a full century since the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre took place, The Trail to Tulsa is a town-hall style event that revisits the history that led to the violent destruction of the all-Black Greenwood section of that city in Oklahoma Oklahoma and its thriving business district known as the "Black Wall Street." World premiere.

FOR PERFORMANCE AND TICKET INFO TO THESE PRODUCTIONS, VISIT www.lamama.org

ABOUT John Sims - 2020 (Di)Visions of America

La Mama Artist in Resident John Sims will be presenting a series of three multimedia performances, that combines performative letter writing, installation art, film, music, dance and video gaming by way of speaking to some of the fears, asymmetry and historical fault lines that divide America. Based on the themes of the Covid-19 pandemic, American policing, and his Recoloration Proclamation, a 20 year project that confronts, and confiscates Confederacy iconography and symbols and spaces of American slavery, this series is a cry for help, hope and healing.

For the past 6 years, Mr. Sims has participated in events during which he has publicly burned and buried the Confederate flag in states that were part of the Confederacy. In May 2021 in Columbia, South Carolina, Sims was held at gunpoint, detained and handcuffed in his own gallery apartment by police who claimed they thought he was an intruder.

The trilogy begins with AFRODIXIESREMIX: A Listening Session, a collection of 14 tracks of the song DIXIE in the many genres of Black music: spiritual, blues, gospel, jazz, funk, calypso, samba, soul, R&B, house and hip-hop. This audio-visual work was recently installed at the Confederate Chapel as part of the recent exhibition DIRTY SOUTH at the Virginia Museum of Arts. About AFRODIXIESREMIX, The New York Times wrote, "Composed for minstrel shows, and meant to mock cliches of 'happy' Black slave life, Sims doesn't rewrite the song, but simply records it being sung in a wide range of Black music styles, undercutting, through genius appropriation, its white supremacist punch."

The series also features the experimental animation film that tells the story of Recoloration Proclamation by collaging space and time, art and activism and text and visuals to redress one of the most controversial and problematic American symbols - the Confederate flag. This film spans a period of 20 years from Harlem to Gettysburg to galleries to streets to a fantasy post Civil War slave plantation in search of redemption, healing and justice. For the trailer see here.

The title entry of 2020: (Di)Visions of America is a multimedia performance, first created by the artist as a part of his residence at Ringling Museum of Art and is shaped by the fear, protest and division caused by the central events of 2020: COVID 19 pandemic, police murder of George Floyd and the pushback on Confederate iconography, memorial and monument spaces.

Inspired by his responding Op-Eds and an evolving self-portrait, this show confronts these main themes of 2020 with his KoronaKilla video game, Dear Police audio/visual piece, and a re-imagined animation of the Gamble Plantation in Florida as a Slave Memorial along with a performance of letters by Dr. Lisa Merritt, Chandra Carty and John Sims performed by award winning theater. Also John Sims will perform his Dear Police letter along with a re-enactment of his recent police detainment at art residency in Columbia South Carolina.

John Sims, Detroit native, is a Sarasota-based conceptual/multimedia artist, writer, and activist who creates art and curatorial projects spanning the areas of installation, performance, text, music, film, and large-scale activism, informed by mathematics, design, the politics of white supremacy, sacred symbols/anniversaries, and poetic/political text. For 20 years he has been working on the forefront of contemporary mathematical art and leading the national pushback on Confederate iconography. His performance work has been featured across the country at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of African American Culture, Ringling Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Currently, he is Artist in Residency at La Mama Experimental Theater Club.

Currently he is completing his two-decade national art-activism project, Recoloration Proclamation, which features recolored Confederate flags; a hanging installation in Gettysburg; a 13 southern states Confederate flag funeral; videos; site-specific performances; a play; a collection of experimental films; the music project, "AfroDixieRemixes," the annual "Burn and Bury Confederate Flag Memorial"; and the outside performance and Kennedy Museum exhibition of "The Proper Way to Hang to a Confederate Flag" at Ohio University. Over the years, this work has incorporated more than 150 collaborators including poets, musicians, and artists throughout the country.

His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC News, USA Today, NPR, The Guardian, ThinkProgress, Al Jazeera, Art in America, Sculpture, Science News, Nature, and Scientific American. He has written for CNN, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, Tampa Bay Times, Detroit Metro Times, Guernica Magazine, The Rumpus, and TheGrio.

ABOUT James E. Reynolds AND THE TRAIL TO TULSA

In this centennial year of the Tulsa Race Massacre, James E. Reynolds's HISTORY/OURSTORY: The Trail to Tulsa dives into history from mid-18th Century to the 20th Century, the founding of the Colony of Georgia to the introduction of Blacks into what was then the Indian Territory, to the Civil War and Reconstruction to the establishment of Oklahoma as the nation's 46th state, to the destruction of the Greenwood section, nicknamed "The Black Wall Street," that is the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Conceived, written and directed by James E. Reynolds, a town-hall-type gathering is the setting for HISTORY/OURSTORY: The Trail to Tulsa scheduled for the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa from Dec. 9 - 12. The production weaves primary-source documents and other historical texts with responses to those materials by artists in a variety of media to resuscitate a long-buried and disturbing history that culminated in the appalling destruction of Black Tulsa.

Participating artists in HISTORY/OURSTORY include Will Bellamy, Leland Gantt, Charley Heyward, Justin Hicks, Isabel Leight, Ashton Muniz, Maya Sharpe and Henu Josephine Tarrant. Truth Bachman is music director.

This theatrical documentary endeavors to breach the narrow parameters of what is traditionally considered "American history" and to elevate the voices and illuminate the experiences of those who are seldom welcomed to the table of historic significance.

James E. Reynolds, a Brooklyn-based emerging theater artist, was the lead researcher on the HBO Sports Peabody Award-winning documentary series, Journey of the African American Athlete, which explored the intersection of athletic accomplishment and social change. In 2019, Reynolds created for La MaMa HISTORY/OURSTORY: Four Hundred Years of Inequity, as part of the theater's 1619 observances.