Conversation with Tierney Malone and Dr. Daina Ramey Berry (Digital: Registration Required) The Sankofa Project Dialogues

Tierney L. Malone is a visual artist and modern day storyteller who uses the canon of African-American history and pop culture to create mixed media works that challenge contemporary culture and politics.

Malone has exhibited his art widely throughout Texas and the United States, including numerous solo exhibitions. His works are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Kansas City Jazz Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; Goldman Sachs, New York, New York; and the Federal Reserve Bank, Houston, Texas. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a CACHH Visual Artist Grant, and a Kimbrough Visual Artist Grant.

Collaboration with the jazz community is also at the forefront of Malone’s practice, including commissions to create the jacket covers for jazz musician Don Byron’s 1999 CD, Romance of the Unseen, on the Blue Note Label and for jazz pianist Randy Weston’s 2003 performance at the Miller Outdoor Theater. In 2008, Malone completed two jazz-related major commissions: a limited edition print celebrating Da Camera of Houston’s 20th Anniversary and an outdoor mural entitled “Southern Sounds” for the Coleman Art Center in York, Alabama. Additionally, Malone is the creator of the Jazz Church of Houston and the host of the Houston Jazz Spotlight on 90.1 KPFT, both of which recognize and preserve Houston’s remarkable contribution to the musical genre of Jazz.

Born in Los Angeles and based in Houston’s historic Third Ward, Malone was raised in Mississippi and Alabama and considers himself a Southern Seed.

Dr. Daina Ramey Berry is Chair of the History Department and the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an award-winning author, with books such as The Price for Their Pound of Flesh and A Black Women’s History of the United States (co-authored with Dr. Kali Nicole Gross and finalist of the Outstanding Nonfiction Literary Work for the 52nd NAACP Image Awards), among others.

Dr. Berry is a scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history. Her work champions the history of the enslaved and amplifies their voices. 

Professor Berry completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in African American Studies and U.S. History at the University of California Los Angeles. 

Dr. Berry is available for interviews and to speak on slavery and its ongoing aftermath (including the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Tulsa Massacre), Black women, freedom and emancipation (including Juneteenth) and the teaching of history in K-12 education.