artist talk

Listen and learn from exhibiting artist Miatta Kawinzi and Haitian-American anthropologist Chrislyn Laurore, who will focus on diasporic identity, material memory, and how storytelling can function as an embodied archive. Their dialogue will connect Kawinzi’s exploration of cultural lineage and ecological interdependence with broader questions of belonging and change within the African Diaspora. Admission is free; RSVPs are encouraged. Visit the event page for more information, or to RSVP. This event relates to the exhibit Miatta Kawinzi: An Alphabet of Unfolding, which explores hybridity, memory, and sustenance through mixed-media works, sculpture, video, and text. Miatta Kawinzi is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her research-informed practice explores cultural hybridity, memory, freedom dreaming, and ecologies of possibility within inner and outer landscapes. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, still and moving images, sound, painting, and poetics. She is interested in illuminating African/Diasporic points of connection, transformation, and continuity across place, space, and time. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in the US South and is based in NYC. Chrislyn Laurie Laurore is a William Fontaine Fellow studying the public memory and history of slavery, particularly its curation in museums, monuments, memorials, and archaeological sites. She is interested in the biopolitical economy of African diaspora heritage tourism and its effects on contemporary Black identities and nationalisms.