Watch Night: To Linger in the Ordinary

Weeksville Heritage Center, in partnership with Rada Collaborative, presents To Linger in the Ordinary, a film program curated by Gervais Marsh, Rada’s 2026 Criticism and Curatorial Fellow.

Location: Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Admission: Free and open to the public

Consider the expanse, tensions, and intimacies of ordinary life. Life lived beyond the moments it is framed as spectacular, both in its beauty and its violence. Meaning is made through the exhale and the simple actions of daily life. The entirety of any life, the fullness of Black life, cannot be captured.

Architectures of exceeding harm are carved into the landscape, ingrained in the everyday. Anti-Black realities necessitate a constant negotiation of both the mundane and extravagant scales of injury. Amidst these constraints, the ordinary conjures the complexities of Black life.

The film program thinks alongside scholar Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, which asks us to consider how Black people are known to themselves and to each other beyond the terms of violence and vulnerability. Sharpe writes:

“[We, Black people,] are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force. That other knowing, that other note, is one that we might call regard.“

Through short films by Kevin Jerome Everson, Kahlil I. Pedizisai, and Fronza Woods, To Linger in the Ordinary considers Black life beyond what can be captured by spectacle or injury.

The evening will conclude with a performance by poet sadé powell and a talkback with Gervais Marsh.

Program:

Glenville (2020)
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai

Boyd v Denton (2023)
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson

According To… (2007)
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson

Second and Lee (2008)
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson

Fannie’s Film (1981)
Dir. Fronza Woods

About Our CollaboratOrs

Dr. Gervais Marsh — Curator

Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator, scholar and teacher from Kingston, Jamaica, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the difficulties of reconciliation. An Associate Curator at Creative Time, they are guided by a desire to foster emotional resonances through public art and programming, exhibition making, and essays, while thinking alongside artists across all mediums. With a grounding in Black Feminism, they believe that knowledge is created collectively, and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty, recognizing that not everything can be known. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and are an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

sadé powell — Performer

sadé powell is a Staten Island-based concrete poet whose work explores black vernacularity, orthographic disruption, witnessing, and the poetics of concealment. Working with a 1930s Royal typewriter, her poems often extend beyond the page. She is the author of dontbeabitterbtch (Selva Oscura Press), wordtomydead (Ugly Duckling Presse), periodluv (Belladonna*), and the forthcoming collection goodmuddy (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Rada Collaborative

Rada Collaborative is a self-sustaining network of BIPOC artists, founded by filmmakers Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, that uses cinema, visual art, and compelling visual storytelling to build narrative agency for creators of color. For more info about Rada Collaborative, visit https://radastudio.squarespace.com/rada-collaborative

This program is supported through public funding from Governor Kathy Hochul; the New York State Senate, including Senator Kevin S. Parker and Senator Zellnor Y. Myrie; Assemblymember Latrice M. Walker; Mayor Zohran K. Mamdani; Speaker of the New York City Council Julie Menin; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, and through generous support from the Altschul Foundation, Brooklyn Org, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, the Scherman Foundation, The Robert M. Schiffman Foundation, and the William C. Bullitt Foundation.

Cover Image: Still from Glenville: ©Kevin Jerome Everson & Kahlil I. Pedizisai; courtesy the artists; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Picture
Clip from Glenville, Kevin Jerome Everson & Kahlil I. Pedizisai; courtesy the artist(s); trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures