Event 1 in A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two

Our spring series' kickoff event featuring poet & artist Anaïs Duplan, musician Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, & poet Taylor Johnson. (Curated by CAAPP Graduate Student Assistant, K. Henderson.)

What is the connection between Black sounds and improvisation? How does improvised sound activate Black physical, mental, and spiritual freedom?

In the first event of A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two, our guests will hold a conversation in creative practice on music, poetry, and other sounds as a past and future means of Black liberation. Based on Camae Ayewa's concept of jazz as a form of liberation technology, these award-winning artists were invited to share their response to this theme through the intimate act of improvised or in-progress work in any medium.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of newly released book I NEED MUSIC  (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at The New School, Bennington College, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor is the 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, Bell Hooks, and more. Camae is a vocalist in three collaborative performance groups: Irreversible Entanglements, MoorJewelry and 700bliss.

As a soundscape and visual artist, Ayewa’s work has been featured at Baltic Biennale, Samek Art Museum, Vox Populi, Pearlman Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art Chicago, ICA Philadelphia, Bergan Kunstall, Hirshorn Gallery, and in an upcoming 2018 solo show at The Kitchen NYC.  As a workshop facilitator, Camae has presented at Cornell University, MOFO Festival, Moogfest, Black Dot Gallery and others.  Camae is co-founder and curator of Rockers Philly Project a 10-year long running event series and festival focused on marginalized musicians and artists spanning multiple genres of music.

Similar to last spring's Black Study series,  this season of CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and also in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we aim to continue to focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race and community.

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

"Black Sound as Liberation Technology" ft. Camae Aweya, Anaïs Duplan, & Taylor Johnson