Sarahfest: D.I.Y. Style

It’s fall and time for Sarahfest!

With this year’s festival, the Isom Center wants to draw attention to the do-it-yourself spirit that is so central feminist, queer, and avante-garde world making. The very first women’s music festivals emerged in the early 1970s, out of the second wave of feminism. They were organized by women who recognized a need and worked to create spaces for female artists to be seen and heard. This Sarahfest, we want to celebrate that DIY ethos and the artists who embody it. Our festival features independent film, indie booking making, graffiti art, and conversations about punk rock, the Riot grrrl movement, and much more. We are proud to showcase marginalized creative trailblazers, whose craft and vision invite us to imagine new ways of being in the world; while envisioning new ones.

Sarahfest kicks off on September 9th with a Sarahtalk by Dr. Cookie Woolner, assistant professor of History at the University of Memphis. Her lecture will focus on 1990’s queer culture, feminism, and the underground feminist punk movement, Riot grrrl.

UM archivist Greg Johnson keeps the focus on the 1990s and queer culture with his curated exhibit of the vinyl collection of DJ “Prince” Charles Smith. Spinning records for several gay bars in North Mississippi, Smith helped shape the soundtrack for queer life in the region during the last two decades of the 20th century. Notable among these was Rumors, one of the first openly gay bars in the state. Rumors was also this subject of the documentary Small Town Gay Bar directed by Malcolm Ingram and released in 2006. The records are part of the Invisible Histories Project Archives. The display will feature a selection of the 864 vinyl dance records donated to Archives & Special Collections and run from September to the end of November on the second floor of JD Williams Library.

The formation of two new Sarahfest partnerships has led to the creation of a very special pop-up art exhibit at the Powerhouse Community Arts Center on Wednesday, September 29th. Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library is sharing pieces from their Common Good Atlanta archive collection which features the creative works and writings by Common Good Atlanta (CGA) alums. CGA is a nonprofit that takes the humanities into the prison system by providing college courses to the incarcerated (and formerly incarcerated).

Bill Taft, the academic director of CGA, is busy curating the special pop-up exhibit for Sarahfest entitled See Us Differently. Taft explains how See Us Differently is part of an on-going series of presentations and pop-up exhibitions of work produced by CGA students and alumni. The project creates opportunities for CGA alumni to develop and foster relationships in the community in order to break the stigmas surrounding incarceration. The first “See Us Differently” exhibition occurred at the Atlanta gallery Eyedrum in 2013. The title came from a thank you note students gave to Sarah Higginbotham (CGA co-founder) after she taught one of her first courses at Phillips State Prison in 2009. The students’ note was an original work of art on a piece of fabric from a torn pillow case. One of the students wrote:

We appreciate you so much for not buying into the usual stereotype that we are not worth educating. We thank you for realizing we were human beings before we came to prison. Through your efforts, the world will now see us a little differently

Randy Gue, the assistant director of collection development at the Rose Library, states, "I can’t think of a better way for Sarahfest to expose students and the community to the power of the arts and writing than through the work created by the Phillips State Prison Book Project. These artists, authors, and their works smash stereotypes, exhibit striking ingenuity, and reveals the common ground we all stand on."

We can’t wait for you to see the archive pieces, to watch a graffiti art installation piece be created in the moment by Noe Martinez, and to meet and talk with CGA alumni, who are graciously traveling to Oxford for this one time event at Powerhouse Community Arts Center.

The MFA in Creative Writing Program in the Department of English and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council are co-hosting this event with us and it (like all our Sarahfest events) are free and open to the public. We hope to see you at the Powerhouse on Wednesday, September 29th.

Thanks to the efforts of the Lyric Oxford, one of our longtime community partners and a strong supporter of the Sarah Isom Center, we are able to launch LGBTQ+ History Month with a special concert by the iconic Indigo Girls on Friday, October 1st. It has been five years since Amy Ray performed at Rowan Oak and the Powerhouse as part of our Sarahfest reboot extravaganza. We can’t wait to welcome her back and we are so glad Emily Sailers is coming too. To purchase tickets, visit https://thelyricoxford.com.

The Isom Center’s Queer Studies Lecture is scheduled for Thursday, October 14 at 4 PM and will feature a lecture by the multitalented Dr. Karen Tongson, chair of the Gender Studies Program, and professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English and American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. Her talk, titled "Notes on Reading Errantly," takes us back to the 1970s and into the pop culture zeitgeist with her layered exploration of singing sensation Karen Carpenter. See article on next page for details.

On Friday, October 15th, it’s time for cabaret. Sarahfest and Living Music Resource is celebrating LGBTQ History Month by hosting “The Ladies I Love” an evening with Blake McIver Ewing on Friday, October 15th at 7:30 PM in the UM Band Hall. His creative oeuvre spans film, television, live theatre, and the recording studio. He will be accompanied by Amanda Johnston, professor of Music, on piano.

According to Ewing, “The Ladies I Love (show is) an evening of songs from some of my favorite female voices from Barbra Streisand and Carole King to Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys.”

The last week of October features our first ever Sarahfest artist-in-residence. We are excited to welcome back the talented singer Kelly Hogan, who is taking time from touring with Mavis Staples, to fulfill this inaugural role. She will be joined by musician Jenny Conlee from the Decemberist who will accompany her during her performances. The duo’s residency provides our UM students with a unique opportunity for professional development: UM students will audition to be members of Kelly Hogan’s band, hold rehearsals with the artists, and participate in an artist craft talks with the two.

While in residence, Kelly Hogan and Jenny Conlee will perform on a special Sarahfest edition of Thacker Mountain Radio (TMR) Show on Thursday, October 28th. We thank TMR for being such steadfast supporters of our fall festival. We look forward to sharing their Sarahfest inspired line-up with you.

Kelly Hogan and her band will perform on October 29th in the UM Band Hall. On Saturday 30th, Nancy Maria Balach, chair of the UM Department of Music and creator of Living Music Resource, will host a special LMR Live event with Kelly Hogan and Jenny Conlee, as they reflect on their residency and life as full time artists.

In November, we finish Sarahfest 2021 with a special two-day event featuring filmmaker Kate Tsang. We are partnering with the Department of Theater and Film and OxFilm (formerly known as the Oxford Film Festival) to screen her film Marvelous and the Black Hole during the evening of Wednesday November 3 and to offer a craft talk on Thursday at 4 PM.

Tsang is an Emmy nominated writer and the recipient of the AT&T/Tribeca Film Institute’s Untold Stories million dollar grant, which funded the production of her film. Her film premiered at Sundance in 2021 to rave reviews. We can’t think of a better way to close-out this year’s festival than with this amazing independent director whose DIY ethos and film about girlhood, rebellion, and the magic of unexpected friendships captures the spirit of Sarahfest.

For complete details on all of our Sarahfest events, please visit sarahfest.rocks.