Please join us for the opening event in Wit(h)ness: A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy which features Phoebe Boswell, Cyrus Cassells, & participant moderator Ama Josephine B. Johnstone in creative conversation. The three guests will share fresh work and be in conversation (with a short audience Q&A to follow).

Phoebe Boswell's figurative and multidisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Underpinned by a porous, diasporic consciousness, she explores notions of inter/personal freedom, protest, grief, intimacy, migration, embodiment and world-making through the prism of race and gender, collective histories and possible futures. Working intuitively across media, she centres drawing but spans animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality to create layered, immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Boswell's drawings, installations and film & video works have been exhibited internationally, and are held in collections including the UK Government Art Collection, the BFI National Archive and The Studio Museum, New York. Her practice has received accolades including the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize (2017), the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2019), she is a Ford Foundation Fellow, and was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome (2019). She will soon unveil a newly commissioned work for Prospect P5 in New Orleans, and currently lives and works in London.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022); More Than Watchmen at Daybreak (Nine Mile Books, 2020); The Gospel According to Wild Indigo (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018); The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon Press, 2012); More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which won the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor (Henry, Holt & Co., 1982), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Cassells is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, lives in Austin and teaches at Texas State University.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a researcher and pleasure activist  whose work navigates speculative explorations of erotics, art, ecology and Blackness. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black diaspora. Ama is the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with BARD College, and will be based in upstate New York from January 2021.  Ama has worked with arts institutions across the UK and abroad including the ICA, Free Word, Tate, Wellcome Collection and the V&A. She has been published by Aperture, Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, the Feminist Review, Critical Arts Journal, Afropunk, The Independent Newspaper, Dispatch Feminist Moving Image, Media Diversified, Skin Deep, Consented, CHEW Magazine, B. Dewitt Gallery and Autograph ABP.

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP)  series, Wit(h)ness: A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy,  is a week-long collection of events that engages in themes related to intimacy and withness in this contemporary and historical moment.  The series sets out to consider this and ponder the processes and forms of being with, being wit, and being witness. The series runs from October 4th, 2021 through October 8th, 2021 and features Elizabeth Acevedo, Phoebe Boswell, Cyrus Cassells, Helga Davis,  Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Kiese Laymon, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, & Naima Ramos-Chapman.

For this series, we believe that creative practice is as playful as it is deeply spiritual as it is potentially transformational. What if while in creative practice we eschewed the illegitimate narratives that seek to batter our imaginations? What if we focused on the kinds of epistemologies that are made possible when we centralize the imaginations of black people? What if, in this new weather, we focused on the conditions from which intimacy might emerge?

We hope you'll join us for the entire series! More info can be found at caapp.pitt.edu.

The production and streaming application we use unfortunately doesn’t yet permit in-app live-captioning, but we recommend using Google Chrome’s automatic caption function.

For instructions on how to turn on Google Chrome’s Live-Caption function click here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10538231?hl=en

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation. Wit(h)ness: A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy is made possible by the generous support of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.

Phoebe Boswell, Cyrus Cassells, & Ama Josephine B. Johnstone in Creative Conversation