A 2017 Academy Award® nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro knits together fragments from James Baldwin’s unfinished novel Remember This House to fashion a powerful, elegant, and timely chronicle of Black American history. Building his narrative around the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, Baldwin hoped that when taken together, their stories would resonate against one another, revealing buried truths about the past, present, and future of African-American life. Adopting a similar rhetorical strategy, Peck juxtaposes Baldwin’s lyrical prose – read by Samuel L. Jackson – against archival footage and photographs drawn from the Civil Rights era, Classical Hollywood films, and recent marches and protests. Grounded in Baldwin’s singular voice and Peck’s assured direction, the picture that emerges is at once prophetic and personal, radical and introspective, resigned and hopeful – a vision of a country that has come a long way and has a long way left to go.
View our open exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. From delicate glass pieces to painted portraits, we have everything you are interested in.
