On My Journey Now/A Man in Time (2025)
By Jeary Payne
On my Journey Now/A Man in Time is an installation performance film about my mother reciting a poem, by Maya Angelou and my grandfather, Rev. Howard T. Smith retelling the time he traveled to Washington, DC to hear Martin Luther King, Jr speak at the Lincoln monument, 1963, during my grandmother’s 60th birthday celebration in 1995.
What it is really about is Black Collective Memory and how our shared histories, and the ways in which we all exist within a context— what I am referring to as Lineage. And how memory and story acting as markers of time are able to situate us within that context/lineage in relation to others and worlds (temporalities) around us, those intersecting with our own.