Across The Table

A virtual artist talk series presented in partnership with BOMB Magazine
February–April 2022

Across The Table brings together The Kitchen and BOMB Magazine in critical dialogue and creative collaboration at the turning of anniversaries across both dynamic institutions. With The Kitchen celebrating its 50th and BOMB celebrating its 40th, each has built a community that centers artists and their voices first. In a moment where models of care continue to be central to the ways the future of art can be imagined, The Kitchen and BOMB have teamed up to present a series of conversations via Instagram Live that invite two artists with distinct ways of making and thinking to share common ground. Bringing together folks who have never-before been in public conversation with each other, Across The Table gives space to center the creative process as its own site of exploration ripe with mutual points of departure. The series features artist-to-artist conversations between Sadie Barnette and Meriem Bennani (February 11, 4pm); Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Kaneza Schaal (February 18, 4pm); Lex Brown and Miguel Gutierrez (February 25, 2pm); Lafawndah and Qualeasha Wood (April 1, 1pm); and Jeremy O’Harris and Brontez Purnell (April 15, 1pm). Recordings of past events are available to view below.

On February 2 as a special preamble to the Across The Table series, The Kitchen and BOMB Magazine presented a virtual celebration of Radcliffe Bailey’s recent solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Ascents and Echoes. The Atlanta-based painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist uses rich layerings of imagery, found objects, and text to explore ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. He was in conversation with architect Mabel O. Wilson, who makes visible the ways that anti-Black racism shapes the built environment, along with the ways Blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. “A Room with a View: Mabel O. Wilson and Radcliffe Bailey” took place over Zoom. A full recording will be made available shortly.

About BOMB Magazine

BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City-based artists and writers—created BOMB because they saw a disparity between the way artists talked about their work among themselves and the way critics described it.

Today, BOMB is a multi-media publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

ARTIST BIOS

Mabel O. Wilson teaches Architecture and Black studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. With her practice Studio, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, Bridgetown, NJ; lives and works in Atlanta, GA) is a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist who utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. His work often incorporates found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks and Georgia red clay. Often quilt-like in aesthetic, Bailey’s practice creates links between diasporic histories and potential futures, investigating the evolution or stagnation of notions of identity.

Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of story telling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, The Guggenheim museum, Art Dubai, The Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING and The Kitchen in NewYork. Her animated series, 2 Lizards, a collaboration with director Orian Barki, premiered on Instagram during Spring 2020 and was described by The New York Times as “hypnotic...deploying a blend of documentary structure and animation surrealism...both poignantly grounded in actual events and also soothingly fantastical” and its animated protagonists “art stars.” (Jon Caramanica, April 2020).

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, and hence the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a long and deep fascination with the personal and political value of kin. Barnette’s adept materialization of the archive rises above a static reverence for the past; by inserting herself into the retelling, she offers a history that is alive. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities. Political and social structures are a jumping off point for the work, but they are not the final destination. Her use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. She has been awarded grants and residencies by The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis; and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Walker Art Center, MN; as well as a permanent, site-specific commission at the Los Angeles International Airport forthcoming in 2024. She is the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley's Black Studies Collaboratory. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, where her first solo exhibition Inheritance was on view November 20, 2021–January 8, 2022. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (b. Kansas City, Missouri) earned her B. A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and her M. F. A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1980 Jawole moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion. In 1984 Jawole founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. She has created over 34 works for UBW, as well as for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and others. Her collaborations include Compagnie Jant- Bi from Senegal and Nora Chipaumire. Her company has toured five continents and was selected as one of three U. S. dance companies to inaugurate cultural diplomacy program for the U. S. Department of State in 2010. She is the founder of UBW Summer Leadership Institute, founding Artistic Director and Chief Visioning Partner of UBW and currently holds the position of the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. Jawole received a 2008 United States Artists Wynn fellowship, a 2009 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, and a 2021 fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Jawole received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and honorary degrees from Columbia College, Chicago, Tufts University, Rutgers University, and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Jawole received the Dance Magazine Award in 2015 and the Dance/ USA Honor Award in 2016. She received the 2017 Bessie Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award for her work in the field and is a recipient of the 2021 DanceTeacher Award of Distinction, and the 2021 Martha Hill Dance Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, The Ford Foundation awarded Urban Bush Women as one of America’s Cultural Treasures. Jawole has recently been named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.

Kaneza Schaal works in theater, opera, and film, and is based in New York City. Schaal's work has shown in divergent contexts from NYC basements to courtyards in Vietnam, to East African amphitheaters, to European opera houses, to US public housing, to rural auditoriums in the UAE. By creating performances that speak many formal, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and experiential languages she seeks expansive audiences. Domestically her work has been shown at Brooklyn Academy of Music, LA Philharmonic, The Shed, The Kennedy Center, Walker Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, The New Victory Theater, New York Live Arts, Performance Space 122, New Orleans Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, PICA, and On The Boards. Schaal received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, and Creative Capital Award.

Lex Brown is an artist who uses poetry and science-fiction to create an index for our psychological and emotional experiences as organic beings in a rapidly technologized world. She has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, and The Kitchen in New York; REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore; and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. She was a 2021 recipient of the USA Fellowship. Brown holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (BA). She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, first edition published by Badlands Unlimited. Consciousness, a survey of Brown's work spanning the past 8 years, is available from GenderFail.Brown teaches as a Media Fellow in Art, Film, & Visual Studies and Theater, Dance, & Media at Harvard University. She is also the host of the podcast 1-800-POWERS available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Brown is represented by Deli Gallery in Tribeca, NYC.

Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, performer, music maker, writer, video artist, educator and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. He makes performances to create empathetic and irreverent spaces to talk about things in complicated ways beyond the limitations of propriety, party lines, and conventional logic. He has presented his work internationally in venues including the Wexner Art Center, REDCAT, Festival d’Automne/Paris and American Realness. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and he was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Lafawndah is a pop artist whose influences, approaches, and ideologies intentionally, and self-proclaimedly, defy categorizations of geography and genre. Her first full-length album, "Ancestor Boy," came out in 2019, followed by "The Fifth Season" in 2020.

Qualeasha Wood is a textile artist whose work contemplates realities around black female embodiment that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint and internet avatars Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. Together, Wood navigates both an Internet environment saturated in Black Femme figures and culture, and a political and economic environment holding that embodiment at the margins. Like the vast majority of her age-peers, Wood has operated one mortal and multiple digital avatars since pre-adolescence. For her what are intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a plainly contemporary exploration of Black American Femme ontology. Wood has exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Hauser and Wirth (New York, NY); Art Basel Miami Beach with Kendra Jayne Patrick (New York, NY); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, (London, UK); CANADA gallery (New York, NY); the Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI); NADA Miami Beach 2020 with Kendra Jayne Patrick (Miami, FL); Kendra Jayne Patrick for Metro Pictures (New York, NY); Cooper Cole (Toronto, ON); New Image Art (Los Angeles, CA); Gaa Gallery (Provincetown, MA).