Black Is the Color highlights key moments in the history of Black visual art, from Edmonds Lewis’s 1867 sculpture Forever Free, to the work of contemporary artists such as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.  Art historians and gallery owners place the works in context, setting them against the larger social contexts of Jim Crow, WWI, the civil rights movement and the racism of the Reagan era, while contemporary artists discuss individual works by their forerunners and their ongoing influence.

Black Is the Color: African-American Artists and Segregation

"Jacques Goldstein goes on a quest for a spectre, a spectre that haunts Jazz. Who was Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist and composer ' If his seminal body of work is now - rightfully so - fully recognized, the man remained deliberately mysterious and enigmatic. The director visits and interviews musicians who owe him a lot. A portrait of Ornette takes shape as these sketches gradually unfold."

Looking for Ornette

Paris, 1954. The story of the meeting, known thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a forgotten notebook, full of notes and photographs, between a white British aristocrat, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, writer and jazz patron, and a talented black pianist, Thelonious Monk, one of the best bebop jazz musicians of all time; a prodigious union of wills that overcame the most extreme prejudices of the very conservative US society.