Photo: Steven Probert
As programming for her second exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, Ja’Tovia Gary convenes a panel and performance that combines artists and scholars (Kaitlyn Greenidge, Autumn Knight and Autumn Womack) whose work engages with themes explored in the show.
The exhibition includes the premiere of a new film, Quiet As It’s Kept, and a sculpture from her ongoing Citational Ethics series. The artist continues her practice of interrogating and re-contextualizing multiple archives, concerning herself with the power and responsibility of language and the radical possibilities of narrative. The exhibition title You Smell Like Outside… is a Black Southern phrase that foregrounds the artist’s specific cultural origins with discursive traditions that invoke an interior knowledge.
Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Laureate lecture, Gary attempts to heighten the contradictions between a living and a dead language. Notions of domesticity, interior and exterior, and the conflict between perception and being perceived are explored in the show.
RSVP is required, as space is limited: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jatovia-gary-you-smell-like-outside-panel-performance-tickets-547866682997
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books.
Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Optica (Montreal, Canada), The Poetry Project (NY) and Krannart Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Her performance work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.
Autumn Womack is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. At Princeton, she teaches classes on 19th and 20th century African American literature and the history of race and media. In keeping with her investment in archival research, her course “Toni Morrison and the Ethics of Reading” makes extensive use of the University’s collections. Womack has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University’s Department of English and a faculty fellowship at Penn State’s Center for the History of Information.
You Smell Like Outside…
Performance & Panel
Featuring Kaitlyn Greenidge, Autumn Knight, and Autumn Womack
Friday, February 17, 6 – 8:30pm
RSVP Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jatovia-gary-you-smell-like-outside-panel-performance-tickets-547866682997
Doors: 6pm
Performance: 6:30pm
Panel and Q&A to follow
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 W 21st Street, New York
Exhibition open through March 11, 2023
