Could you dim the lights? Gallery Conversation with Jen Everett, Briona Simone Jones, madison moore, and Blair Ebony Smith
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Abstract:
Join us for lively conversation among the artist, exhibition curator, and invited guests who will frame themes and critical questions in Jen Everett’s photographic, moving-image, and archive-facing practice. The conversation will embrace Black life in the United States and vernacular photography, seeking Black lesbian presence in archives, and sonic resonances including nightlife and club spaces in the Midwest.
Bio:
Jen Everett is from Southfield, Michigan, and currently based in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in The Culture: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum, Counterpublic 2023 in St. Louis, The Promised Land at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, and many other national and international venues. She was a 2021-22 Duke University DocX Archive Lab fellow.
Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is the editor of the multi-award-winning book, Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian Thought to date. Jones is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture working on her second book, Black Lesbian Aesthetics.
madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. madison is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. madison has performed internationally at a broad range of art institutions and nightclubs, including The Kitchen, BASEMENT (NY), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, SFMOMA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Somerset House Studios London, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and beyond. In 2022, madison held a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York in concert with the artist Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an ode to the first Black owned gay bar in San Francisco. In February 2023, he guest co-edited a special issue of the arts journal e-flux on BLACK RAVE with McKenzie Wark. Currently, he is currently working on a second book project, HOW TO GET YOUR (NIGHT) LIFE (under contract, Yale University Press), focused on Black queer nightlife as a method of living.
Blair Ebony Smith, also known as lovenloops, is a practicing multimodal artist-scholar and lover from southside Richmond, Virginia. As a sound artist, DJ and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), Blair deepened her love for Black sound, music and making space for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls. Her art and scholarship explore themes of memory, loops, home, coalition, everlasting love and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to engage Black (girlhood) study. Smith is the author of solo and co-written works in Wish to Live: Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader, An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender and the Postmodern South, and American Quarterly. She teaches classes focused on Black queer and feminist art, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening. She is currently at work on a multi-modal book project, part vinyl LP, tentatively titled Love and Loops: Memory, Time, Sound & Black Girlhood. Blair is currently an Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and co-curator of the exhibition Jen Everett: Could you dim the lights?
Sponsors:
School of Art & Design
Accessibility:
The Art & Design Visitors Series endeavors to be accessible to all. If you have questions or would like to request an accessibility accommodation, please email art@illinois.edu.