City of Asylum
Giving Voice.
Mostly Other People Do the Killing is a group founded on the idea that jazz should be enormous fun. They de-construct jazz standards and weave the remnants into new compositions that the quartet rips into with zest.
Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (1959) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
In person tickets for this concert are sold out. You can still tune into the livestream by clicking the "Free Online Tickets" button.
In her early career, Emily Maloney worked as an emergency room technician: a job undertaken to pay off the crippling medical debt brought about by years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices while grappling with life-changing depression. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, Emily chronicles her interactions and offers a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay.
Award winning writers Patrick Rosal and David Wright Faladé join us in virtual conversation to celebrate the launch of their new works, Faladé’s novel Black Cloud Rising and Rosal’s poetry collection The Last Thing.
Cole Arthur Riley is a Pittsburgh raised writer and creator of Black Liturgies (@blackliturgies), daily spiritual reflections on Instagram. Cole joins City of Asylum to read from her debut collection, This Here Flesh, which weaves stories from three generations of her family to discover the “necessary rituals” that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation.
Joined by bassist Eli Namay, the trio is inspired by sounds of Near Eastern music, free-jazz, and world roots. They create sounds that cross genres and do not exist in typical musical spaces. Their goal is to share rich audience experiences that reach deeper into the nuance of life and listening in the 21st century global culture.
This is a virtual-only event hosted via City of Asylum @ Home. A poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity, and addiction, Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s NY Times’ Editor’s Pick debut work. Brian’s early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys... more →
The Mendelssohn Choir invites you to Alphabet City to explore the rich traditions of global choral music with local artists. Participants will learn about specific cultural song traditions, and have the opportunity to sing songs from within those traditions. It’s an interactive concert like no other! And no singing experience required.
Join the musicians of the Off Minor Jazz Series as they showcase some of Gryce's best known pieces along with some rare gems.
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators. March’s conversation features Bekezela Mguni & Erin Perry.
In person tickets for this event are SOLD OUT but you can still join in virtually!
Storytelling is a tradition that spans across cultures, countries, and centuries. Storytelling traditions span across cultures, countries, and centuries. Stories bring us together to experience joy, wonderment, and intrigue—and they allow us to build deeper empathy and understanding.
They visit Pittsburgh to play their newest album, Were We Where We Were (March 2022) featuring primarily original compositions from Michael Formanek. This is an evening of jazz masters at work.
Film historian and writer Wil Haygood visits City of Asylum to discuss his newest book “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World. Wil is joined in conversation by Pittsburgh filmmaker and activist Emmai Alaquiva.
Chuck Smith is a long-time, active August Wilson director, a resident director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he’s supervised and directed Wilson plays (including Gem of the Ocean, which just closed) and, during his free time, a regular director at the West coast Black Theatre Troupe in Sarasota. He seems to know just about everyone in the Wilsonian theater universe. We’ll have a good time talking!
Join the staff writers from Sampsonia Way Magazine for a launch party celebrating the magazine’s new website and its newest series: “The Everyday Pandemic.”
In person tickets for this concert are sold out. You can still register to watch the live-streamed concert via City of Asylum @ Home.
This sumptuous English-language ‘50s piece recounts the mid-life years of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (play by Mirando Otto, Lord of the Rings), when she left America to live and write in Rio de Janiero. In Brazil Bishop would also fall in love with well-off architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Initial hostilities between the pair make way for a complicated yet long-lasting love affair that dramatically alters Bishop’s relationship to the world around her.
Please note this program is in person only.
A live reading and conversation with translator and poet Yasmine Seale, the first female translator to release The Thousand and One Nights in English.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews, with leading August Wilson actors, directors and artists, national and regional. Featuring Ron OJ Parson is working now on his 30th August Wilson production, sometimes as an actor but mainly a director, where he is just one-and-a-half shows short of completing his 10-play Cycle. His long journey allowed him to persuade Chicago’s Court Theatre to consider Wilson a classic, along with other Black playwrights. He says, “I like to bring August into the room.”
