Curated by Yves. B Golden, Picture Room presents a series a programs in honor of Black History Month, the shortest month of the year.
moon cricket / mo͞onˈkrikit / noun
Derived from the antebellum colloquial slur for slaves who, weary and working through the night, maintained through chanting and song. “Looking back, the term moon cricket was used to belittle the plight of slavery and shroud it in fancy, but couldn't this darkness be reclaimed in the name of resilience and an undying dedication to the higher power working through us all?”
Friday, Feb. 7
6 – 9 PM Eve’s Bayou
A screening of Eve’s Bayou followed by a conversation about memory, trauma, and black femininity.
Saturday, Feb. 16
6 – 8 PM Antidote 1.0: Conjuring Black Futures in VR
Tsige Tafesse presents an ongoing project scaling the intersections of the digital and the temporal lived experiences of Blackness.
Thursday, Feb. 21
6 – 8 PM Moon Cricket
A presentation and discussion examining the past, present and future, using various prompts compiled by Yves B. Golden, Tsige Tafesse, Sean-Kierre Lyons, and more.
Friday, Feb. 23
6 – 8 PM Celestial Object: Black Diamond in the Rough
A discussion guided by Yves B. Golden regarding the color black in the broader discourse of black contemporary art.
Tuesday, 6–8 PM
An evening of performance and share. Featuring:
Presentations by Keijaun Thomas and Khira Goins-Paxton
Readings by Zion Emanuel Malik Spencer and Yves B. Golden
Yves B. Golden, b. 1993, is an artist currently living in America. They are constantly finding new ways to convey their intersectional existence through their creative abstractions. Their dominant mediums are poetry, prose and performance (P3). They spend most of their time pondering the pendulum that swings between 'nature' and 'grace;' measuring the predictable force that propels them back and forth in daily meditations. Yves is currently in residence with MANA Contemporary and has shown work at New Museum, Artspace Mexico, Raw Material Company, Senegal, among others.
Sean-Kierre Lyons, b. 1991, Salinas, CA, works primarily in sculpture and installation, which are derivatives of black folklore and personal experiences. They live and work in Brooklyn.
Tsige Tafesse’s work looks to wage intimacy in a world growing deeply disconnected. Through performance, community organizing, multimedia journalism, and vr she conjures, building pathways from where we’ve been to where we could go. Collaboratively she’s a co-founder of BUFU (By Us For Us), A project based collective interested in Solidarity amongst Us, co-creating with You experimental models of organizing & making – generating prestige & mining time as a resource, a co-producer of the Prismatic podcast (an “archive of knowledges”), co-directed the first “Afrofuturism Conference: Designing New Narratives for the African Diaspora” at The New School. She has her BFA from The New School for Drama with a concentration in Directing. Her performance credits include Upright Citizens Brigade, Intiman Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Art Museum, and others. Her photography work has appeared in Ebony Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, BlackLivesMatter.com. She was named one of Fader Magazine’s “People Who Show Us Where Culture Is Going” 2017 amongst being covered in NYLON, ID Magazine, Viceland, Creator’s Project, Village Voice, Vibe Magazine, and various others. Artist-In-Residence with BUFU collective at Eyebeam in NYC 2018.
Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas is reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.
Khira Goins-Paxton is a Brooklyn based producer, editor and creative researcher. Her focus is on environmental and social sustainability, the creative development of people of color and ethical business practices. She founded, PORTION, an online and print zine that focuses on sustainable fashion, lifestyle, environmental, and social movements. PORTION’s goal is to build a community of creatives, businesses and readers who are looking at how their current projects and goals will affect everyone’s future.
Zion Emanuel Malik Spencer is a proud Afro-Caribbean Demigirl born and raised in Crown Heights Brooklyn. She is an intuitive diviner, astrologer, and Spiritual Healing Artist. They specialize in self devotional healing work, art as ancestral libations, and providing insightful and intuitive messages for those who seek answers.
Feb 26th 2019