Cake Walk
Movie DetailsMultiple player options are available. If one player doesn't work, try another. We do not host any content. If no players load, the movie might not be available. You can switch the language from the player dropdown menu.
Overview
This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which developed in the mid-eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in Cake Walk move amid Conwill's sculptures and paintings, one of Conwill's cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.