Art on the Island

Movie Nights

April 27th and May 1st @ 8:30 PM

***and by request!***

Join us to celebrate the birthdays of artists George Thomas and lydia marie hicks before the banners begin their tour around Idlewild.

The films projected at the historic Flamingo Club will feature Clifford Fears. Clifford performed at the Flamingo as a teenager in the 1950s. Openly gay, he may have inspired Idlewild’s iconic “show burial” tradition—a celebratory act of solidarity in which performers dressed in drag for the final show of each season. Clifford even appeared in drag on the cover of one of the Idlewilder magazines, which you can see at the turnstile display near the Chamber of Commerce.

Clifford later became a dancer with both Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham, touring Europe before returning to Detroit for his boyfriend’s funeral. He stayed in Detroit and opened his own dance studio, continuing to inspire future generations.

The film screening at the Flamingo features rare footage of Clifford performing in Europe at a 1966 benefit for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Beyond its beauty, this footage acts as a beacon—a lighthouse calling artists home to Idlewild.

Underlaying the footage is a quote from Langston Hughes, found in one of George’s notebooks from the 1990s. George believed that people wouldn't appreciate his handwriting or what he wrote, but as the quote reminds us: that doesn’t matter. We are building our temples.

While I haven’t found direct evidence that Hughes visited Idlewild, thanks to Cauleen Carrington, I know he was a student of Helen Chestnutt (daughter of Charles Chesnutt). Hughes is also widely understood to have been gay, though he never stated it publicly.

Black queer artists have long found refuge and power in creative circles and mobile traditions like the Chitlin' Circuit, which offered both opportunity and a sense of belonging amidst the risks they faced.

As the banner exhibition travels through Idlewild this summer, I’ll be sharing short films tied to each location’s history.

I was first introduced to George Thomas by Betty Foote in the summer of 2021. Betty and George have been friends since George first arrived in Idlewild as a teenager in the ’50s.

In 2021, Kweku was getting ready to open Peyton’s Bar and wanted to feature local art. My studio was still boxed up because I’d been pouring my energy into renovating the house. Still, George trusted me to curate his work for display in one of his favorite old hangouts, and later again when the show moved to Morton’s.

The show was a success, thanks to Kweku, who purchased the remaining pieces and selling out the collection—marking the first time George had sold his art to Black folks in Idlewild. He was deeply moved.

Since then, George and I have become family. He’s like a grandfather to me. I help him organize his incredible body of work, keep him stocked with supplies, and we have studio visit time at least once a week—about art, ideas, and life. A few years ago, he told me he just wanted to make art with me. So I began including him in my Idlewild art history tours, and we started planning new pieces that would help tell Idlewild’s story.

Last year, we made our collaboration official by launching Black Eden Arts Alliance, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to preservation, creativity, and stewardship in Idlewild.

The banners, funded by MSU, celebrate our upcoming show at the LookOut Gallery, which will run from August 28th to October 7th. The exhibition will be a kind of surreal natural history of Idlewild and a spin-off of a class I taught at Interlochen Arts Academy in Spring 2024. I’m honored to be shaping this work. My goal is to bring light to George’s legacy and the powerful, ongoing legacy of art in Idlewild.

The pillars of Black Eden Arts Alliance are rooted in this vision:

• Centering art as a practice of restoration and honoring Idlewild as a historic artist colony.

• Preserving structures and building a living history museum.

• Reviving the food forest, recognizing Idlewild’s agricultural history and stewarding it for the community and future generations of Idlewild lovers.