MOCA Artist Film Series: Harmony Holiday
MOCA Grand Ave
Saturday, May 24th, 2025
3 pm
Free with RSVP

Abide With Me (2024) is a short film that meditates on Black artistic identity before fame through a close look at the life of Thelonious Monk. At the age of seventeen, already serious about composing and playing piano, Monk left his home in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill to tour with an evangelist. From 1934–37 he played piano accompaniment to her faith healings. No one heard from him for three years. Found video recordings layered beneath Fred Moten’s voice-over of a text written by Holiday piece together these three years in the groundbreaking musician’s life prior to becoming a signed artist. The film opens outward from collaged archival material depicting the specificities of Monk’s life in less visible spaces. Holiday intersperses other clips of renowned artists like John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Lauryn Hill, Sun Ra, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, and Azealia Banks, not only on stage, but elsewhere in moments before and between performances when personality might slip a persona’s grip—or, as Holiday’s film narrates, ”where the white gaze does not know how to look.” Her conception of the “backstage” in this work materializes with a close look of a soon-legendary Monk in a nascent space of discovery, reinstating, as Holiday explains, “the hero’s journey of the Black performer as one that is defined by unseen glories, not spectacularized ones.”

Holiday will be present for a post-screening conversation with moderator Robin D.G. Kelley.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys music, ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Maafa (2022), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at LA’s 2220 Arts + Archives. At the core of her practice is a pursuit of visual and literary vocabularies that might best express the melancholic hope endemic to Black American social life. As Holiday navigates the depths of Black remembrance and loss, she sets her sights on the relationship between “the new”, “the archival,” and the spaces between them that defy linear time. She treats these energies as collectively improvising ensembles in which prose and poetry sit by turns comfortable and chaotic, next to images cribbed from Black artistic and private life. Most recently she has received awards from the Silver and Rabkin Foundations, and is completing a memoir Love is War for Miles, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a collection of poems.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Chair of US History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.