On Buried Ground
2024

Shayla-Vie Jenkins

Choreographer

Shayla-Vie Jenkins is a performer, maker, educator, poetry lover, writer, and mama based in Philadelphia, PA. She is grateful for a life in dance, having performed for a decade with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and in inspiring projects with Susan Marshall, Moriah Evans, David Gordon, James Allister Sprang, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Merce Cunningham Trust’s Night of 100 Solos, Yvonne Rainer, Yanira Castro, Yara Travieso, and Yaa Samar! Dance Theater, among others. She is currently touring Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. Jenkins’ creative research explores blackness within somatic presence. Her last three choreographic works – a forgotten elegy, the feels, and hand in mine – reclaim performance as ritual, mourning, and catharsis. Jenkins was an Assistant Professor in the School of Dance at the recently shuttered University of the Arts. She hopes On Buried Ground serves the Philly community well by bringing continued conversation and reflection on this city’s historic grounds.

Rayne (Angela Bey)

Playwright

Rayne (Angela Bey) is an artist from Southwest Philadelphia. They champion liberated futures for un(likely) outsiders. Rayne is the founder of Upstream Performance Collaborative. Affiliations: Ring of Keys and New Pages (Azuka); [former] Rising Writers (Azuka Theatre), Playwrights Cohort (PlayPenn), Echoes (Primary Stages), Emerging Playwrights (Strides Collective), Directors Gathering, and Jouska PlayWorks (Simpatico). Selected Credits: [awards/exhibitions] F. Otto Haas Finalist (Theatre Philadelphia) and #blackgirlquarantine (University of California, Berkeley); [design] sandblasted (Theatre Horizon) and A Hit Dog Will Holler (Azuka); [roles] Ensemble at Sundance Directors Lab (Sundance Institute) and “Genesis” in The Light (Theatre Exile); [words] COMET (UPC) and Finding Freedom (Museum of the American Revolution); [direction] The Taming! (Shakespeare in Clark Park) and Water By the Spoonful (Eagle Theatre). Upcoming: [direction] Judy’s Life’s Work (Naptown African American Theatre Collective); [words & lyrics] Ever (Azuka & SCP). raynebey.com and(or) angelabey.com “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” -James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name”

Nia Benjamin

Director

Nia Benjamin is an agender, queer, Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, set/projection designer, video-synth artist and director of experimental theatre. Their work uses the synthesis of dance, poetry, live music, theatre and video arts to create live performances about the sovereignty, liberation and interiority of Black and Brown, queer and trans* people. Nia is the Co-Artistic Director of Ninth Planet, a Philadelphia based experimental dance-theatre company that makes original works of performance that centers people of color, women, queer and trans* people. Their most recent full-length work, high noon was the winner of a 2022 Fringies Award.

Misty Sol

Misty Sol’s interdisciplinary practice is like a sepia-toned family photo album remastered in technicolor. Misty explores Black people’s connections to nature, wellness, and speculation. Her figurative paintings and portraits, stories, and eco practice are heavily influenced by the common histories, everyday stories, and culture of Black people, particularly, her grandmother’s history as a migrant farmworker, midwife, and gifted storyteller in early 20th century America. Misty’s work inherits a sense of narrative, sensuality, magic, timelessness, hope, the bucolic and fecund. But also contained are senseless abstractions, images of stark violence, and the weight of oppression. Ultimately she uses these elements to distill elements of dignity, legacy, humor, and connection. With acrylic colors as vibrant as her gardens, the gurgle of a stream, a hymn her grandmother used to sing, the smell of sauteed onions, and the coolness of garden soil, she creates a body of work that explores and affirms the nuanced experiences of Black people. 

Misty Sol serves as the director of Tiny Farm Wagon, a fiscally sponsored project dedicated to public art and wellness. She is also in training for the art and medicine program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where she leads workshops for med students to improve their observational skills. 

Her paintings have been exhibited at Burlington College, Headlong Theatre, The Moore College of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi, Bartram’s Gardens, the Philadelphia Airport, Widener University, and Ultrasilk Gallery. In 2021, her paintings made their international debut on the set of the NBC sitcom Grand Crew now streaming on HULU. And in 2022 her work appeared on the Oprah Network show, “All Rise”, now streaming on Amazon. You can view 2 of her paintings at the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia.

Destiny Crockett

Destiny Crockett considers archival reading methods such as Hartman’s critical fabulation, and seeing the “wayward,” as Hartman would later put it, in the creation of a triptych collage (18×24 inch all-paper collages, framed) to ask about the lives of the four enslaved children. The first child on the far left is Charles Merchant, who died in 1743. The child in the middle died in 1734, and their record keepers listed them as “Negroe child from the Strangers ground” instead of by name. Crockett named this child Mercy for the purposes of referring to them in this work, after the titles of Toni Morrison’s novel set in the 18th century. The third figure is inspired by William Richards, who died in 1742. The final child, Violet Plumstead, was buried in 1744 at age eight. This collage is made entirely of paper, some of which includes copies of pages from the archives in which the children are listed. Their clothes are temporally mismatched from their lives: they are modeled after late 1890s attire with the bright colors and bold patterns of the 21st century. These enslaved children would never have been dressed this way, and Crockett’s clothing choices signify care against a backdrop of disregard.

Misty Sol serves as the director of Tiny Farm Wagon, a fiscally sponsored project dedicated to public art and wellness. She is also in training for the art and medicine program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where she leads workshops for med students to improve their observational skills.

Her paintings have been exhibited at Burlington College, Headlong Theatre, The Moore College of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi, Bartram’s Gardens, the Philadelphia Airport, Widener University, and Ultrasilk Gallery. In 2021, her paintings made their international debut on the set of the NBC sitcom Grand Crew now streaming on HULU. And in 2022 her work appeared on the Oprah Network show, “All Rise”, now streaming on Amazon. You can view 2 of her paintings at the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia.

Theodore A. Harris

Theodore A. Harris is a Philadelphia-based visual artist and poet. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in private and public collections such as Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Saint Louis University Museum of Art, La Salle University Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, McGill University Visual Arts Collection, Center for Africana Studies; University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center Rare Books and Manuscript Library; University of Pennsylvania, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and the Winston and Carolyn Lowe Collection. Harris is the co-founder of the Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Harris has also co-authored and authored books including Our Flesh of Flames (2019), Malcolm X as Ideology (2008) with Amiri Baraka, TRIPTYCH with Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (2011), I ran from it and was still in it with Fred Moten (2007), and Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism (2017). He is the Founding Artistic Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics. He is a 2022 Visual Artist Fellow CFEVA (Center For Emerging Visual Artists).

Intisar Williams Hamilton

Intisar Williams Hamilton is a Black, Indigenous, born and based Philadelphian. Her art practice probes the fundamental question of what it means to be female, free, and Black in this contemporary American context. Using every medium at her disposal, Hamilton builds upon the expansive vernacular, intersection, and anthropological universe of biology, race, geography, and time.