About

Please note: This event takes place at the Frick Fine Arts Building at the University of Pittsburgh. Three contemporary black poets, Airea D. Matthews, Roger Reeves, and Safiya Sinclair, and filmmaker Jamal T. Lewis will consider how “the ecstatic” functions in their artistic work and personal lives, within the context of the contemporary moment, where attention to black political and social life emphasizes death and unjustifiable violence. The program, which will include poetry performances, a brief film screening, and discussion, is organized and moderated by Rickey Laurentiis, the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. This program is presented in conjunction with our Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby exhibition, curated by Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine curator of art at The Warhol. Founded in 2016, Center for African American Poetry (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh is a creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetries and poetics whose mission is to highlight, promote, and share the poetry and poetic work of African American writers. The center's programming aims to present exciting live poetry and conversation, contextualize the meaning of that work, and archive it for future generations, while also operating as space for innovative collaboration between writers, scholars, and other artists thinking through poetics as a unique and contemporary movement. Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is the author of Boy with Thorn (2015), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Other honors include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. Laurentiis’ poem, "Visible City," opened Notes for Now, the catalogue for Prospect.3 New Orleans, curated by Franklin Sirmans. Laurentiis currently lives in Pittsburgh, and is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Jamal T. Lewis, b. 1990, is an emerging multidisciplinary artist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Lewis resides in Bedstuy, Brooklyn, and hails from Atlanta, Georgia. Named by Teen Vogue as one of the "coolest queers on the internet," Lewis is also known as 'fatfemme', a moniker that encapsulates life at the intersection of fat and femme identity -- "spaces that people are afraid to occupy," she names. A graduate of Morehouse College and The New School, Lewis produces work around the body, specifically exploring and interrogating identity formation, race, gender, sexuality, desire, beauty, and ugliness. Lewis's work has been featured in LA Times and New York Times. Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, Four Way Review, The Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, the 2016 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House. She received her B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, her M.P.A. from the University of Michigan, and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, under/class, which explores the behavioral and cultural ramifications of poverty. She lives in Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and four children. Roger Reeves received an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, Austin. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry, and the Indiana Review, among other publications, and he was included in Best New Poets 2009. Reeves was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2008; he is also the recipient of two Bread Loaf Scholarships and a Cave Canem Fellowship. In 2012, Reeves received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize for his poem “The Field Museum.” He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a 2014–2015 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) is Reeves’s first book. Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.” Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Co-presented with Center for African American Poetry (CAAPP) at University of Pittsburgh.

Kleaver Cruz brings The Black Joy Project to Pittsburgh. For one week in October, Cruz will explore black spaces in Pittsburgh, take portraits, and conduct conversations regarding Black joy. As a culmination of his residency, he will speak with artist Devan Shimoyama and community members about navigating black barbershops and the complex experience of being queer in these spaces. The event will be followed by a late-night dance party in the museum entrance space with a local DJ and a live performance by Pittsburgh-based performer, Brendon Hawkins. This event is organized by Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine curator of art at The Warhol in collaboration with Rickey Laurentiis the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Kleaver Cruz, a native of New York, is a writer and creator of The Black Joy Project, a digital and real-world movement, which centers Black joy as a form of resistance. Cruz is a member of “We Are All Dominican,” a grassroots collective that amplifies voices and supports the work of Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. His work has been featured in La Galería and African Voices magazines and Vibe.com and The Huffington Post. Cruz is part of the poetic duo, The Delta, which has performed at The Nuyorican Poet’s Café and Bowery Poetry Club. Cruz has presented and conducted his work across the African Diaspora in South Africa, France, and Brazil. Co-presented with Center for African American Poetry (CAAPP) at University of Pittsburgh.

Please note: This performance will take place at Carnegie Music Hall in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Rashaad Newsome, renowned New York based artist, will make his Pittsburgh debut of Shade Compositions, an ongoing performance project that launched in 2005. Throughout the Fall of 2018, Newsome will be working in Pittsburgh, casting local performers, and staging rehearsals for Shade Compositions, the artist’s critically acclaimed performance. In this performance, Newsome is both conductor, composer and vocal choreographer. Leading an ensemble of locally cast self-identifying black female and femme performers, whose individual voices and gestures are synthesized to form improvisatory orchestral music. Newsome explores the complexities of social power structures and questions of agency. During the performance, Newsome collages video and audio using hacked video game controllers. For over a decade Newsome has engaged in casual, but extensive ethnographic and linguistic research into global iterations of “Black Vernacular”—a variety of English natively spoken by most working and middle-class African Americans, particularly in urban communities. Through his visually engaging and dynamic style of live performance and video, Newsome explores the complexities of social power structures and questions of agency. This event is organized by Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby. Rashaad Newsome was born in 1979 in New Orleans, and lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world including: Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MoMAPS1, SFMOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia, and MUSA, Vienna, Austria, and the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture. Newsome’s work is in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The SFMOMA, The Studio Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The McNay Art Museum of San Antonio. In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2011 in Greater New York at MoMAPS1. Performer applications are due by Monday, November 12, 2018. Performers can also register in person at the casting call locations, which will be announced in September. Co-presented with PearlArts Studios.

Catalogue contributors, Jessica Beck, Emily Colucci, Alex Fialho, and Rickey Laurentiis, talk with Devan Shimoyama about his work and practice. This event serves as a closing dialogue for the exhibition, Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby, and offers a chance for the community to respond and meet the artist. Shimoyama and authors will be available to sign copies of the exhibition catalogue, which will be for sale in The Warhol Store. Jessica Beck is the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum. Beck has curated many projects, including Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, the first exhibition to explore the complexities of beauty, pain, and perfection in Warhol’s practice. In 2017, she brought the Firelei Báez: Bloodlines exhibition to the Warhol, and in 2018 organized the exhibition catalogue and curated Devan Shimoyama’s first museum show, Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby. As a Warhol scholar, she has written extensively on Warhol’s 1980s paintings, the AIDs epidemic, the representation of intimacy in Warhol’s contact sheets, and his relationship with the late Jon Gould. Her writings on Warhol have been published in Gagosian Quarterly, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective catalogue, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, and the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts’ publication, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End. Beck began her scholarly work on Warhol at the University of Chicago where she received her B.A. in Art History, and continued her engagement with Warhol and identity politics through her graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she wrote her dissertation on Glenn Ligon’s work and its relationship to Warhol’s practice. Beck completed her M.A. with Distinction. Beck also serves as a visiting scholar in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Emily Colucci is a writer, curator, and co-founder of Filthy Dreams, an award-winning blog analyzing art, culture, and politics through a queer lens and with a touch of camp. In 2016, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Filthy Dreams. In addition, Emily has contributed to many publications and magazines including VICE, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, POZ, Flaunt, Art Papers, Art F City, and others. In 2017, she curated Night Fever, a group on disco and its aesthetic legacy at the Pittsburgh art space, Future Tenant; and in 2015, she co-curated Visual AIDS’s annual exhibition, Party Out Of Bounds: Nightlife As Activism Since 1980 at LaMaMa Galleria in New York, and its satellite exhibition, Courtship Disorder, which featured an installation by John Walter for London’s White Cubicle Toilet Gallery. Alex Fialho is a curator and arts writer based in New York. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and the Programs Director for Visual AIDS, where he facilitates projects around both the history and immediacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, with particular stakes intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. Together with Melissa Levin, Fialho manages The Michael Richards Estate and has curated multiple exhibitions stewarding the legacy of Richards' art, life and legacy. Fialho has presented his research on the art of Glenn Ligon and Keith Haring at the College Art Association and NYU Fales Library. His extensive oral histories with Ron Athey, Gregg Bordowitz, Nayland Blake, Douglas Crimp, Lia Gangitano, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bill Jacobson, Patrick Moore, Jack Pierson, Joey Terrill, Julie Tolentino, Marguerite Van Cook, Jack Waters and Carrie Yamaoka are part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project. Poet Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and is the author of Boy with Thorn (2015). Laurentiis is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. His poem, "Visible City," opened Notes for Now, the catalogue for Prospect.3 New Orleans, curated by Franklin Sirmans. Laurentiis currently lives in Pittsburgh, and is as the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Devan Shimoyama was born in Philadelphia in 1989 and lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA in drawing and painting from Pennsylvania State University in 2011, and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2014. Shimoyama has exhibited widely at galleries throughout the United States, including New York’s De Buck Gallery, Lesley Heller Gallery, and Bravin Lee Programs; Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles; Alter Space in San Francisco; and Emmanuel Gallery in Denver. His work was also included in Realities in Contemporary Video Art at the Fondation des Etats Unis, in Paris in 2015. In 2019, Holland Cotter selected Shimoyama as one of the The New York Times’s “19 Artists to Watch,” His work has been written about in The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings, Pinwheel, the blog Filthy Dreams, and Saatchi Art. In 2016, Shimoyama was named the winner of the Miami Beach PULSE Prize at PULSE Miami Beach. He is currently represented by De Buck Gallery in New York, and is the Cooper-Siegel Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.