Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States

This video documents “Cake Walk,” an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant’s pioneering New York gallery Just Above Midtown. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance that developed in the eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in “Cake Walk” move amid Conwill’s sculptures and paintings, with one of the artist’s cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.