Oral History Interview with Kazembe Balagun by Samantha Fox Samantha Fox, M. Arch student at Spitzer School of Architecture, interviews Kazembe Balagun, Executive Director of Maysles Documentary Center, on November 8, 2024.
The image paired with this interview is a 2022 illustration (color pencil on paper) titled "Kazembe Balagun, Black Militant Study" by Shellyne Rodriguez. Shellyne Rodriguez is a Bronx-based artist, educator, historian, writer, and community organizer who works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Rodriguez stewards the histories and stories of people that have shaped her lived experience, describing her practice as “the depiction and archiving of spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.” Through her multidisciplinary practice, Rodriguez documents the ways in which the diverse social fabric of the South Bronx is rewoven as the people and cultures coexist. Rodriguez utilizes language as well as cultural and sociopolitical references to create unified portraits of individuals from various communities formed in what she describes as the “periphery of empire.” Engaging with the legacy of the Ashcan School, who bore witness to the rise of the modern metropolis and depicted how the poor and working class in New York enclaves were transformed by this, Rodriguez views figures such as Alice Neel, Jane Dickson, and Martin Wong as an extension of this tradition and situates her practice alongside them.
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