The Show: Doug E Fresh and Mark Anthony Neal in Conversation

The Apollo Legacy: Hip Hop!

Doug E. Fresh and Mark Anthony Neal host an evening of performance and conversation about the relationship between hip hop and the Apollo.

Monday, April 25 at 7:00 pm
The Apollo Legacy: Hip Hop!
Performance Series

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10029

In the late 1980s, the television series It's Showtime at the Apollo was one of the first national platforms for local hip hop artists. Join legendary hip hop performer and one of the originators of the human beat box Doug E. Fresh, former host of It's Showtime at the Apollo, for an evening of performance and conversation about the relationship between hip hop and the Apollo Theater, with Mark Anthony Neal, co-editor of That's the Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader (Routledge, 2011). Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment and in collaboration with the Apollo Theater and the Hip Hop Culture Center in Harlem.

Reception to follow.

Reservations recommended; $5 general admission.

For more information please call 917-492-3395.

'Left of Black': Episode #25 featuring Guy Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem

Left of Black #25
w/Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem
March 14, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by musician, author, professor and curator Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.. Later Black indie digital media pioneer and SeeingBlack.com founder Esther Iverem, joins Neal, also via Skype.

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→Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and co-curator of Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, currently exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop ( University of California Press, 2003) and the forthcoming In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud ” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge.

→Esther Iverem is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. A journalist, poet and author, Iverem’s most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: The Smithsonian Does The Apollo

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Exhibition on Apollo Theater Coming to Smithsonian

by Lee Mergner

Guthrie Ramsey can’t wait for the exhibition on the Apollo Theater to open at the Smithsonian. The musicologist has been working for almost two years on the exhibit that eventually will tour the U.S.. The moment he’s waiting for is when he walks through the show with the general public and sees their reaction to the sights and sounds that he and his co-curator Tuliza Fleming organized for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “That is going to be so special,” says Ramsey. “I can’t wait.”

The first exhibition to explore the Apollo Theater’s seminal impact on American popular culture, Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment examines the rich history and cultural significance of the legendary Harlem theater, tracing the story from its origins as a segregated burlesque hall to its starring role at the epicenter of African American entertainment and American popular culture.

Organized by NMAAHC in association with the Apollo and in celebration of the Apollo's 75th Anniversary, Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing will be on view in the new museum's gallery in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History from April 23, 2010 until August 29, 2010.

Following its premiere in Washington D.C., the exhibition will be presented at Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History from October 1, 2010 - January 2, 2011, at the Museum of the City of New York from January 30, 2011 - May 1, 2011, and in four additional U.S. cities to be announced. The tour is being presented in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

This was Ramsey’s first exhibition, but as a professor of musicology at University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of African-American culture (and a part-time musician), he managed to debut with a dream project: presenting the incredible history of perhaps America’s most famous performing arts theater. “The Apollo is so familiar and ubiquitous that you take it for granted, but it’s really a storied place,” explains Ramsey. “The challenge for me was to switch to focus on an object rather than music. Tuliza [Fleming] had done a lot of museum curating before, so I think we made a great team.”

Read the Full Essay @ JazzTimes