The Port Huron Project is a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the Vietnam era. Each event takes place at the site of the original speech, and is delivered by an actor or performance artist to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. Videos of these performances are screened on campuses, exhibited in art spaces, and distributed online as open-source media. More…

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A 2-screen video installation based on the Cesar Chavez reenactment will be included in ARAC@AAM, a group exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum opening on October 30 and running through December 7, 2008.

Listen to or read the transcript from Siddhartha Mitter’s report on “Convergence Center.” Includes clip of the Port Huron Project Installation. From September 24, 2008.

“With Politics in the Air, a Freedom Free-for-All Comes to Town,” by Holland Cotter

“The exhibition’s best work, though, is film… Most of [the work in the show] goes way beyond party politics. It lives instead in utopian realms where the prospect of radical change is taken as a serious possibility with epoch-altering implications. The artist Mark Tribe finds this potential for change in recent history, which he resurrects in public performances of New Left political speeches from the 1960s and ’70s: Angela Davis’s incendiary Oakland address on political resistance and Stokely Carmichael’s speech at the 1967 ‘Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam’ in New York.”

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“The re-enactments of both speeches, which Mr. Tribe has produced with actors as speakers but with a ‘live’ local audience, appear in the show on film. The panoramic projections make you feel part of the listening crowd. And the speeches, although 40 years old, have a startling pertinence to politics now.” From the New York Times, September 23, 2008.

A video installation based on the last three reenactments of the Port Huron Project (Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael) will premiere at Creative Time’s “Convergence Center” at the Park Avenue Armory.

When: September 21-27, 2008, 12-10pm daily (2-10 pm on Sept. 21 and 12-6:3pm Sept. 23)
Opening Reception: September 21, 2-10pm

After traveling across the country to glean perspectives from artists and activists on the state of democracy, Creative Time’s year-long program Democracy in America: The National Campaign culminates in the “Convergence Center”: a major exhibition, participatory project space, and meeting hall mounted in New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. The Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory will provide an activated space to both reflect on and perform democracy and will be punctuated by speeches by leading political thinkers as well as community leaders and activists throughout the run of its program.

Directions To the Park Avenue Armory | Creative Time

Generous Support provided by Creative Capital and Tekserve.

“Radical Speak: Performance Artist Mark Tribe Breathes New Life Into Old Politics,” by Carla Blumenkranz

“In the Sunday sunshine after Tropical Storm Hanna, about a hundred people—most of them in their twenties, backpacked and sandaled—milled around the northern edge of Tudor City. There was a light police presence nearby, and as the speaker came to the lectern, the audience stood to attention. ‘Only the white powers of the West will deny that this is a racist war,’ the speaker declared. He wore a crisp blue shirt and spoke firmly into the microphone, but he didn’t shout. ‘When the colored peoples of the world look at that war, they see just one thing. For them, the U.S. military represents international white supremacy.’ Cameras snapped. A young woman pumped her fist quickly. ‘Wow,’ someone said.

Meghan McInnis/Creative Time

“This was probably the most controversial major political speech delivered the week of the Republican convention. It was also 41 years old. Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael wrote and gave the speech in 1967, speaking to a crowd of hundreds of thousands of peace protesters gathered outside the U.N. The man who redelivered the speech earlier this month was a well-rehearsed actor playing Carmichael in a performance project by the artist Mark Tribe.” From New York Magazine, September 22, 2008.

A five-minute video based on Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible, is currently showing on MTV’s giant high-definition video screen in Times Square on the East side of Broadway, between 44th and 45th Streets. The video plays at the top of the hour several times each day. Click here for the schedule. Thanks to CREATIVE TIME for setting this up!

Listen to excerpts from Port Huron Project 5: The Liberation of Our People and Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible, along with an interview with Mark Tribe. From NPR’s “The Take Away” with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji, August, 4 2008.

Listen to an August 1, 2008 story about Port Huron Project 5: The Liberation of Our People on KPFA, a Pacifia Radio station in Oakland, CA. Includes a clip of Angela Davis’ original 1969 speech at DeFremery Park, an interview with Mark Tribe and actor Sheilagh Brooks, and an in-studio performance by Sheilagh Brooks of an excerpt of the Angela Davis speech reenacted on August 2.

“Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project via Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,” by Christopher Knight

“The Port Huron Project is a kind of digital samizdat, a technological twist on the distribution of political leaflets that is as American as Tom Paine and as revolutionary as farmers and small-business men toppling the combined power of George III and the East India Co.”

Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times

“Activism seemed futile when, despite the hundreds of thousands of people flooding into city streets around the world in protest before the invasion of Iraq, the ill-fated war went on. Yet there’s a difference between old models based on mass culture, which had their zenith in the 1960s era of these original speeches, and the new “niche culture” of our high-tech present. Mass culture is effectively over. The possibility for closing the contemporary gap between activism and the individual is underway in the netroots — activist blogs and other online communities, including artistic ones.” From the Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2008.