A free outdoor screening of the Academy Award winning film Summer of Soul in the center of Nyack, projected against a 4-story windowless wall, preceded by a Community Soul Music Sing-A-Long, with an outdoors multi-media gallery exhibiting images and sounds of the pre-urban renewal largely Black community that once stood in the same spot.
Soul & History: A Tale of Two Communities
8:30/8:45
Summer of Soul
Artopee Way Drive-In
The Artopee Way Municipal Parking Lot will be converted into a pop-up drive-in theater for a free outdoor screening of Summer of Soul – the Academy Award winning music documentary featuring previously unseen footage celebrating the Black music, art and culture of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Performances include Stevie Wonder, Gladys Night and the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, B.B. King, The Fifth Dimension, Mahalia Jackson and more. The movie will be projected onto a building across from the parking lot. Sit in your car and tune into a radio station for the audio, or bring lawn chairs, watch from a viewing area and listen to audio from surrounding speakers.
7:30
Community Soul Sing-a-Long
Municipal Lot behind Hezekiah Easter Square
A DJ will get everyone in the mood for Summer of Soul by leading the first of a series of Community Sing-a-Longs organized by Mary White and the non-profit mentoring program Diamonds & Pearls Inc.
6:30
My House Once Stood Here
Opening reception
Hezekiah Easter Square gazebo
A multimedia exhibit by Kris Burns featuring archival images of the Black neighborhood that once flourished behind Hezekiah Easter Square. QR codes on each image will be linked to video and audio excerpts from the documentary “What Happened to Jackson Avenue: A story of Urban Renewal” by Hakia Alem and Rudi Gohl, produced by Nyack’s Phoenix Theatre Ensemble.
About Soul & History: A Tale of Two Communities
On the surface, Summer of Soul is an exuberant, Academy Award-winning concert film (by some accounts “the best ever made”) inspiring audiences and critics around the country to quite literally dance in the aisles. At its heart, it is a history lesson and a testament to the responsibility of art to share forgotten stories, make noise and heal. It shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest.
“History isn’t just what we know. It’s also what we don’t know. The more generations that were born and schooled without this festival on their radar, the more people would be operating with only a partial field of vision. An obstructed view is not a clear one,” says the director of the film, Questlove.
A few years after Summer of Soul captivated its audiences, 23 miles north of Harlem, a film called What Happened to Jackson Avenue emerged, telling the little known story of how an entire black neighborhood was demolished in the heart of downtown Nyack. Through archival photographs and emotional testimony from survivors, the film chronicles how the demolition of 125 predominantly black-owned homes destroyed a community. Screenings of this film led to long overdue conversations about “revisionist history”, the loss of generational wealth and the erasure of Black culture, community and history.
