Join us for Black on Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture as we continue our theme “100 Years of Black Music on Camera.” From Jazz, to Funk, to Hip-Hop, this season celebrates the sonic archive of Black life as seen and heard on film. This program is an ode to piano virtuoso, Mary Lou Williams.

This afternoon program begins with an intimate performance by pianist and composer, Camila Cortina Bello in Schomburg Center’s Latimer Gallery. Bello will perform next to Aaron Douglas’s rousing four-panel mural, “Aspects of Negro Life” (1937) currently installed in the gallery as part of Schomburg’s centennial exhibition,100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity. The performance will be followed by a screening in the American Negro Theatre of an interview with the late Jazz pianist, Mary Lou Williams, selected from Schomburg’s Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division collection.

Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) was not only the First Lady of jazz; she has a place at the very top echelon of the jazz pantheon. Ms. Williams wrote over 350 compositions throughout her rich and highly eclectic musical career. She also helped spawn an entire generation of young musicians during the 1940s that would precipitate the birth of one of the world’s most influential musical styles, known as bebop . Her students included musicians as influential and varied as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and countless others.