When Detroit filmmaker Juanita Anderson got the call to make a film about an artist on their way toward mastery, she knew exactly who her subject would be — Sydney G. James.
We’re already huge Sydney James stans but it’s not an exaggeration to say that she’s straight fire. James is the voice of a movement of unapologetic Black women artists celebrating the beauty of their community.
As she puts it in Anderson’s film Sydney G. James: How We See Us, “every negative connotation Black women have — loud, arrogant, too colorful, too much — that’s how I depict us in my pieces.”
Sydney G. James: How We See Us is part of Firelight Media’s short film series with American Masters called “In the Making.” It’s featured in the second season of the series, which premieres at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Feb. 17-26. The series will later make its way to PBS.
The 15-minute film documents James in her studio as she paints a large-scale portrait of her mother and 11 relatives. Throughout the process, James is visited by family members and friends like fellow Detroit artists Sabrina Nelson, Scheherazade Washington Parrish, Waajeed, Kathryn Johnson, Halima Cassells, Marian Stephens, Tommie L. Johnson, and Deirdre James.
“The project is about me, that’s what it says, but it really isn’t about me at all,” James tells us by phone. “It’s really about all of us as we have these conversations about the limitations of Blackness, the limitations of Black womanhood, how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go.”
“You can’t make a film about me if my people ain’t in it,” she adds. “Because my people is why I’m even here right now, the way that I’m here right now. It was just organic.”
he project is a whole Detroit affair with cinematography by James's partner Lamar Landers and music by Sterling Toles and Rafael Leafar.
While painting the piece for the film, James was surprised to learn that her mother dreamed of becoming an astronaut but wasn’t able to pursue it.
“She dreamt big, but her life was small because of the time — being a Black woman in the ’70s and ’60s,” James says. “They wouldn’t even let her be a math major at Western (University). She had to minor in math. Now, I can be as big as I want. She afforded me this. I have such a support system that I can do whatever the hell I want as long as I keep in mind not just my family but the people that I make my family. If I eat, everybody eats.”
While James’s most recognizable work is her “Girl with the D Earrning” mural, she has work all over the city, created the BLKOUT Walls mural festival, and has mentored several other rising artists like Bakpak Durden and Ijania Cortez.
Anderson was struck by how James vehemently centers Black women in her work, which she feels combats the erasure of Black people from Detroit in the city’s ongoing gentrification.
“I teach film at Wayne State and one of my students filmed a scene in front of Sydney’s mural that’s in Dequindre Cut, and I’m like OK, we’re not gone!” Anderson tells Metro Times with a laugh. “Then I attended an artist talk at one of her exhibitions where she was talking about the invisibility of Black women and I was struck by that. I thought, wow, she is determined to show that Black people still exist in this community, which really inspired me.”
Anderson is most known for producing the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? and is working on another Detroit full-length documentary called Hastings Street Blues.
She calls James a “space maker” in both the literal and figurative sense.
“She finds ways to do her work and get her work seen in an industry that does not appreciate Black artists and in doing so, she’s paving the way for others,” Anderson says.
James isn’t the only Detroit artist featured in the series. A film about art educator and painter Senghor Reid called Senghor Reid: Make Way for Tomorrow is also part of the new season.
Directed by Desmond Love and Eden Sabolboro, Senghor Reid: Make Way for Tomorrow dives into Reid’s colorful and evocative paintings to “inspire audiences with future visions of hope and possibility.”
Both films will be available for online streaming via the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival website from Feb. 21-March 1.
Ahead of the film festival, Sydney G. James: How We See Us will get its debut at the Pan African Film Festival on Sunday, Feb. 12. Anderson is working to arrange a screening in Detroit later this year.
A full list of the short films in season two of In the Making can be found here.
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