May, June, July (2021)
May June July (English)
Kevin Jerome Everson, May, June, July, 2021
16mm film transferred to HD video, color, sound, 8:21 min.
Courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, Charlottesville, Picture Palace Pictures, New York
The camera is pointed down at the floor. We can see black asphalt and a yellow floor marking. The viewpoint is selected so that the two colors divide the frame into two triangles. We can hear street musicians drumming. A roller skater (Jahleel Gardner) repeatedly skims across and into and out of the picture. Then we can hear the noise of crickets, and the camera is now in a garden at night, following a light that first reveals variously colored peonies and then fireflies that light up in the dark of the night. Like an eye searching for something, the camera seems to be exploring the terrain. Just when our eyes have become accustomed to the night-time garden, we are back out on the cordoned-off street. Jahleel Gardner is skating there like a dancer, and now the camera follows him, while we see rows of houses and people walking in the background. On the ground there are slogans drawn in chalk, such as “care not cops,” “abolition is presence not absence,” and “we keep us safe.” The roller skates are again circling on the asphalt, the drums define the rhythm, cyclists pass by, and the camera slowly pans from ground level to a horizontal position, so that Gardner’s body and his surroundings are more clearly visible. From a long way away we hear a singing voice, and a choir of voices in unison that calls out “black lives matter” in the final seconds of the film. Everson made this film during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, filming on Black Lives Matter Plaza, formerly a part of 16th Street NW in downtown Washington D.C., which had been renamed on June 5, 2020.
Kevin Jerome Everson
The work and practice of Kevin Jerome Everson encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film. He studied at the University of Akron as well as at Ohio University and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson has been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alpert Award in Film/Video, the Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome and the Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin. He was awarded various grants, from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and the Ohio Arts Council.
His artwork has been the subject of retrospectives and solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and the Harvard Film Archive. His works were presented at international film festivals and art institutions including the Unknown Pleasures Festival, Berlin; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Images Film Festival Toronto; Venice International Film Festival; BFI/London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; the Viennale, Vienna; BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; MOCA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoMA, New York; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C. His films have been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.
Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures, New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.