🗓️ Saturday, February 15, 2024, 4–6 p.m.

📍 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City NY 11101
Please  🔗 RSVP here

Please join us for a conversation between Charles Gaines and Huey Copeland, moderated by book editor Rhea Anastas, about the publication The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.

In 1993, at the University of California, Irvine, Charles Gaines and Catherine Lord mounted The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, a category-breaking exhibition of Black artists from different generations, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Willams, and Fred Wilson. Challenging the racializing of Black artists’ work, the experimental exhibition confronted the discourse around race difference in the United States by including excerpts of writing by art critics alongside Gaines’s research on the reception of the exhibition’s artists in a reading room.

The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, released by Dancing Foxes Press, with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and The Brick, Los Angeles, reprints in facsimile the eponymous 1993 publication that documented the show; original essays by Gaines, Lord, and Maurice Berger and the transcript of a roundtable conversation among a range of artists and writers confront and build on the exhibition’s revelations. Reproducing images of the exhibition for the first time in color, the new edition augments the original publication with an essay by poet and scholar Fred Moten; recent conversations between Lord and Gaines and between Moten and Gaines; new artists’ statements moderated and edited by Thomas Lax and Jamillah James; and an afterword by Rhea Anastas.

A Q&A and book signing will follow the conversation.

🗓️ Tuesday, October 2, 2024 | 7 PM ET

📍 Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, New York 🔗 RSVP here

Please join us at the Chocolate Factory where we’ll launch and celebrate Dance History(s) with its editors and authors! The event is free and open to the public.

Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study approaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. Written by working choreographers, it reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the dance history back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space and moves into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future.

Edited by Annie-B Parson and Thomas F. DeFrantz
Text by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne

Design by Omnivore

A celebration of the publication God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, edited by acclaimed curator, author, and educator Hilton Als. Artists, writers, and art historians gathered to reflect on Baldwin’s profound legacy through a full afternoon of talks, featuring Stephen Best, Garrett Bradley, Daphne A. Brooks, Thelma Golden, John Keene, Glenn Ligon, Kandis Williams, and Jacqueline Woodson.

Organized and hosted by the Brooklyn Museum, copublisher of the book.

🗓️ Tuesday, November 28, 2023 | 6:30 PM ET

📍 ISLAA, 142 Franklin Street, New York 🔗 RSVP here

A special evening to launch Erika Verzutti: New Moons, copublished by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA); the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard); and Dancing Foxes Press in December 2023. Taking an expansive view of the bold and influential practice of Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti, this book surveys work made over the past fifteen years through original scholarship and the artist’s own writings. In Verzutti’s art, moons recur as symbols of renewal and the multiple phases that a person or entity can pass through. Her work presents novel modes of perception by orbiting outside set systems of being—zooming out, in a telescopic sense, to the point where the relations here on Earth can be rethought.

Emerging from a 2023 exhibition at CCS Bard, the publication presents the artist’s writings alongside a selection of her works from the past fifteen years. This event features a reading by Erika Verzutti and presentations by editor Lauren Cornell and curators Ruba Katrib and Bernardo Mosqueira, who contributed to the book. The launch is open to the public and will take place at ISLAA’s new exhibition and program space in New York.

Karin Higa: Hidden in Plain Sight was coorganized by AAPI Arts Network and Hammer Museum to highlight the legacy of the late curator, writer, and cultural activist Karin Higa. to explore the many legacies of the late curator, organizer, and art historian Karin Higa (1966–2013). Artists and curators Kelly Akashi, Anna Sew Hoy, Karen Ishizuka, Marci Kwon, Sonia Mak, and Mika Yoshitake discuss the reverberations of Higa’s work in the present.

This conversation coincided with the publication of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa,” a substantial illustrated volume surveying her curatorial and scholarly work released in October 2022 by Dancing Foxes Press.

Karin Higa: Hidden in Plain Sight was coorganized by AAPI Arts Network and Japanese American National Museum to highlight the legacy of the late curator, writer, and cultural activist Karin Higa. The program explored and celebrated the intersections of art, community, and organizing in Higa’s work. Among her many accomplishments, Higa was senior curator at JANM from 1992-2006. Her creative, intellectual, and political commitments to Asian American art, the Japanese American experience, the Little Tokyo community, and their deft interweaving with broader contexts, continue to be powerful inspiration for artists, art historians, and many other cultural workers. 

Panelists included Howie Chen, curator and writer who recently edited the book “Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network;” Bruce Yonemoto, an artist who, along with his late brother Norman, worked very closely with Higa on the exhibition “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance;” and Julie Ault, editor of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa.” The panel was introduced by Higa’s niece and recent JANM Getty Marrow Undergraduate intern, Rose Keiko Higa, and moderated by writer, curator, and organizer Ana Iwataki, who worked under Karin Higa as a JANM Getty Marrow Undergraduate intern. 

This conversation coincided with the publication of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa,” a substantial illustrated volume surveying her curatorial and scholarly work released in October 2022 by Dancing Foxes Press.

In PPI#3, Hewitt attempts to come to terms with both the teaching and the unlearning of photographs through an examination of reportage photography, portraiture, and conceptual art. Through a staging of and search for mediated sites of resistance, this process expands on how a public might collectively reconcile grief and images of trauma. In an effort to redress these issues through public dialogue, Hewitt organized two pivotal conversations over the course of 2020, one with artist, author, and scholar Deborah Willis; and the other with author, curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. By presenting a range of conceptual and historical strategies over the course of the issue, Hewitt finds ways to address images, moving with agency to reclaim power in spaces that attempt to arbitrate critique and exhibit care for the lives of people and the afterlives of their images.

LESLIE HEWITT is an associate professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. Her work, which utilizes photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to address the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory and to contend with shifting notions of space and time, has been shown internationally at such venues as Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario; and Sculpture Center, New York. She has held residencies at the American Academy, Berlin; Konstepidemin, Göteborg, Sweden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.

OMAR BERRADA is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020) and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012); The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); and La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). Berrada’s writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he and Leslie Hewitt co-organize the IDS Lecture Series.

“Postscript: Archives, Annotations, and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency” is the third issue in the series Pounds Per Image, a collaboration with Pratt Photography Imprint, a serial experiment in pedagogy through the activities of publishing.