In a year marked by lethargy, THR’s arts and culture critic was drawn to energizing work, including a poignant voting rights documentary, an introspective comedy special and a legendary Broadway revival.
A few weeks ago, during a reflective conversation, a friend described 2020 as a fever dream. The uncertainty provoked by the pandemic and the potential of that summer’s uprisings brought many people closer to understanding the demands they could make of themselves and each other to create a safer world. It was a year of answering calls to action, of protesting and demonstrating, of helping neighbors, of corporate promises to listen and learn, of checking in emotionally and checking out of the death-making capitalist machine. An intoxicating energy coursed through those days — no wonder it felt unreal.
If 2020 was marked by promises, then 2022 was defined by their ghosts. How many of those pledges went unfulfilled? How many commitments were quietly abandoned? Lethargy settled in as we continued to live in unprecedented times: Corporate profits increased while individual pockets and sanities contracted, scientists and activists rang even louder alarms about our current climate emergency, police budgets ballooned while those for public services shrank.
Amid these multiple crises, the art that seized my attention this year celebrated community and reminded me of humanity’s strengths more than its failures. I took comfort in films, television shows, albums and exhibitions that glorified love and imagination, that embraced the difficult work of honest self-expression and highlighted the uplifting ways people come together to build both what they need and what they want. Here they are, in alphabetical order.
For Colored Girls
Ntozake Shange’s genre-defying work returned to Broadway in April under the energizing guidance of choreographer Camille A. Brown. Brown tends to the production as one would an inherited garden, remixing the choreopoem (a term coined by Shange to describe the piece’s combination of poetry, narrative, dance and music) with her electric dances and the addition of American Sign Language. Her rendition transforms For Colored Girls into an invitation, a thrilling call to embrace the expansive nature of Shange’s work and the experiences of the Black women — past, present and future — at its core.
Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces
Activist and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant (Flag Wars) founded Just Above Midtown in 1974, when she was just 25 years old. The gallery incubated and showed the work of Lorraine O’Grady, Senga Nengudi and other Black experimental artists when the overwhelming white art world refused to. Thirty-six years after its closure in 1986, the Museum of Modern Art commemorates JAM’s legacy with a bustling retrospective and a generous exhibition catalog. Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, on through February 2023, features the paintings, performance videos and sculptures of JAM artists as well as archival ephemera — late pay notices, exhibition invitations — that construct a clear picture of this visionary project.
Love Letter (on shuffle)
Solange Knowles’ original score for the New York City Ballet drew this dance neophyte to Lincoln Center in October, but it’s choreographer Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) that will bring me back. Assisted by James Blake’s haunting music, Giles Deacon’s elegant costumes and Dan Scully’s precise lighting, the 16 dancers in this deeply affecting work roll, shuffle, stretch and contort their bodies in the name of love. The 38-minute piece melds traditional ballet with more contemporary moves to tell transfixing stories of desire, courtship and separation. This is Abraham’s fourth work for NYCB and lucky for us there will be another chance to see it in May 2023.
Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary about how the Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama, organized to secure their right to vote is an inspiring testament to the power of community. Guided by the activist Ella Baker’s philosophies, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power chronicles the innovative methods residents, with the help of some SNCC members, used to bolster voter registration and enact change within their racist district. Recent interviews with surviving white and Black residents of the area, coupled with archival footage and a coda about the ongoing fight against white supremacy in the U.S., make this intimate doc, streaming on Apple TV+, a must see.
Mother Country Radicals
After publicly declaring war on the United States in 1970, the members of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-Vietnam-War group, spent the next decade on the run. Mother Country Radicals, a podcast created and hosted by Zayd Dohrn (the son of Bernardine Dohrn, one of the group’s most prominent members), reports on the group’s formation, their years underground and their collaboration with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation movements. This compelling 10-episode journey is more than just an oral history; it’s a guide to acting on your beliefs, an appraisal of radical movements and a complicated intergenerational conversation between the Weather Underground members and their heirs.
Neptune Frost
Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Afrofuturist musical is a tale of love and revolution. The arresting, narratively free-flowing film (streaming on the Criterion Channel and available to rent on Prime Video) chronicles the fateful meeting of Neptune, an intersex hacker (played by both Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), and Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse), a coltan mine worker in another dimension. With its dreamy, hallucinatory visual landscape and striking costume design, Neptune Frost is a mind-bending experience, a story of queer love, of obliterating binaries, of the labor behind technology and of escaping the extractive nature of the world as we know it.
Normal Gossip
Every episode of Kelsey McKinney and Alex Sujong Laughlin’s hilarious Defector Media podcast begins with the same question: “What is your relationship to gossip?” The answers reveal a lot about the guests — an eclectic group of writers, comedians and fellow podcasters — and how they will react to the anonymized user-submitted morsels of gossip. McKinney, the host, spins these tales about barista feuds, group travel trips gone awry and the hostile factionalism of bachelorette parties into edge-of-your-seat stories.
Rothaniel
Jerrod Carmichael’s intimate HBO comedy special is a delicate movement between different forms of storytelling, from confessional comedy to memoir and prayer. Carmichael uses humor to access a more honest register, allowing him to untangle threads of his knotty relationship with his mother and come out as gay. The special, directed by friend and fellow comedian Bo Burnham, plays like a communion, a spiritual meeting between Carmichael, his family’s past and the unknown terrain of their future.
Sault
I started following Sault, the anonymous British collective, in 2020, when they released their albums Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) — records that culled sounds from decades of Black music to capture the robustness of that summer’s revolutionary spirit. This year, the group — rumored to include the producer Inflo and the singer Cleo Sol — released five new albums, initially in a password-protected folder and now available to stream: 11, Aiir, Earth, Today & Tomorrow and (Untitled) God. The bountiful crop of songs displays the breadth of Sault’s talent and curiosity, their ability to pull inspiration from across the Black diaspora (from South America to the African continent) and curate sharp, eclectic offerings.
Skeleton Crew
Set in the break room of a Detroit auto factory on the brink of closure, Dominique Morisseau’s play is a sober, warm and profoundly affecting look at economic precarity and class loyalty. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directed this brisk and pulsating production, which starred Phylicia Rashad and Chanté Adams (in her Broadway debut). Skeleton Crew tracks the tumultuous conversations that take place among the characters embodied by this stellar ensemble as they try to protect themselves and each other. It’s the kind of show that leaves you with a deep sense of humanity’s interdependency; I hope we won’t have to wait too long to see it again.