Question Bridge: Black Males

Question Bridge: Black Males is a project that explores critically challenging issues within the African American male community by instigating a transmedia conversation among Black men across geographic, economic, generational, educational, and social strata of American society. Question Bridge provides a safe setting for necessary, honest expression and healing dialogue on themes that divide, unite, and puzzle Black males today in the United States.

Question Bridge originated in 1996, when artist Chris Johnson (born 1948) was looking for a way to use new-media art to generate meaningful conversation around class and generational divisions within San Diego’s African American community. Mediated through the lens of a video camera, 10 members of the Black community were provided a format to openly express their deeply felt beliefs and values through candid question-and-answer exchanges. None of the questions or answers were prompted. Over the course of four years, Johnson, along with fellow artists Hank Willis Thomas (born 1976), Bayeté Ross Smith (born 1976), and Kamal Sinclair (born 1976), traveled the nation collecting questions and answers from over 150 Black men in eight cities (New York, Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia) that comprise a video catalog of 1,500 exchanges. Within this extended community, surprising insights and new possibilities for witnessing our common humanity emerge.  

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