Question Bridge: Black Males – Project Trailer from Question Bridge on Vimeo.

“Question Bridge: Black Males” is a new video installation currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum that consists of a series of interviews with Black men in the United States today. The exhibit will also travel to the Oakland Museum of California (Jan 21 – July 8), the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Jan 20- May 19), at Atlanta’s Chastain Art Gallery (Jan 27 – March 17) and the Sundance Film Festival (Jan 19 – 29th).

Huffington Post Interview with Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, two of the collaborators about their project, which originally began as a response to the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego:

HuffPost Arts: What are some stereotypes of black men that really irk you?

Question Bridge Team: Black men are angry, obdurate, lazy and thuggish beings who don’t care for their families and resist attempts to educate and inspire them.

To some extent we’ve all internalize these impressions but we on the QB team have discovered that it only takes the process of asking them a meaningful question for these impressions to be exploded! A black man you might identify as the most belligerent will come forth with a poignant and probing question and/or answer when given the proper opportunity. How this process works is something worth exploring.

HuffPost Arts: What has changed for black men since you began the project in 1996?

Question Bridge Team: At that time the class and opportunity-based divisions within the black community were far less visible and acute than they are now. Now we have a black male President while at the same time approximately 62% of incarcerated men are black, even though we only comprise about 6% of our population.

Also, since then the cultural commodity of black male media images has become just as dichotomized. On the one hand you have Jesse Williams, one of our Executive Producers appearing as a brilliant and charismatic doctor on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ and on the other thug rappers appearing as role models for an enormous percentage of inner city young boys.

Question Bridge is ripe for this time in our cultural history.

HuffPost Arts: What do you hope will happen with the user-generated website? How important is participation to the piece?

Question Bridge Team: The website became a practical necessity once our team discovered that we had far more content than could possibly be contained in a conventional documentary or museum installation. The user-generated element of the website was conceptualized by our collaborator Kamal Sinclair as a way to accomplish a number of key goals for the overall project:

It provides a way for people everywhere to become “privileged witnesses” of the Question Bridge process. We know that once people see and hear what these men have to say, it will affect their ability to treat black men as a homogenous group [and] it provides us with a way to invite black men from all parts of our culture to participate in this process of with their own questions and answers. Once those men join the process, their presence will create a self-defining Identity Map that will function as a unique database of how black men view and define themselves… as opposed to the prevalent images that are routinely projected onto them. There is also a strong community outreach element of the overall project that includes smart posters at what we’re calling Hot Spots that contain QR codes and NFC tags that will allow people out in the world to connect to QB content via the website.

Here’s how I would assess the importance of the many components of the overall Question Bridge project:

The installations are important because they strongly present the unscripted voices and views of black males to American culture in a unique form.

The community outreach projects bring regional attention to the museum installations and also promote a much-needed dialog across generations on themes inherent to the Question Bridge mission.

The Question Bridge Curriculum, which is currently being piloted at schools in New York and Oakland with plans for wider distribution, is vital because it brings the messages, meanings and implications of the Question Bridge project into the lives of young people who desperately need alternative representations of cultural difference.

Read the Full Huffington Post Interview

More on Question Bridge Project

1 Comment

Iwona February 19, 2012 at 12:32 am29

there is a sathorge of them. Is that education or income? Is it being a man how doesn’t have other children from a previous marriage? I just wish that would have been spelled out more clearly.