First Friday: Posters & Ephemera Tour with Es-pranza Humphrey & John T. Reddick

Join curator Es-pranza Humphrey and historian John T. Reddick for a special tour of Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen featuring posters and archival materials from the exhibition. Es-pranza will share curatorial insights into the exhibition, highlighting the stories, themes, and design choices behind select works. John will discuss his research and archival process. Together, Es-pranza and John will explore Black dance crazes and the spaces created for these freestyle movements, offering patrons a closer look at cakewalks and the Soul Train line dance in particular.

About the Presenters

John T. Reddick is an architectural preservationist, historian, and collector of Harlem- related documents and ephemera, several pieces of which are on view in Act Black. He has contributed his knowledge of Harlem’s culture and architecture to a number of public art and open-space projects in that community, among them the Ralph Ellison Memorial, Harriet Tubman Square, and the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Circle. Supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Reddick is currently working with the Central Park Conservancy to encourage public discussion about the history of Seneca Village, a predominantly African American community established before the founding of Central Park itself, as the basis for a formal commemoration of that.

Es‑pranza Humphrey is the Assistant Curator of Collections at Poster House, where her research centers on Black performance, fashion, and visual culture. Her scholarship on the graphic language of the Black Panther Party has been featured in The New Yorker, NPR, and ABC’s Here and Now, as well as several international publications. Her current exhibition Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage and Screen explores Black American theater and film posters from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Accessibility Note: Masks are available free of charge at the museum. Assistive listening devices and stools are available. ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) is also available upon request. Please contact access@posterhouse.org or (914) 295-2387 to request interpretation services and to address any other accessibility needs. For other event-related questions, please contact events@posterhouse.org.