July 9, 2020, 6:30 p.m.
Join artists Kiyan Williams (they/them) and Gioncarlo Valentine (he/they) for a conversation about their aesthetic practice in our moment of explicit anti-black and anti-trans*, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming violence, threaded with—and refused by—collective action and care.
Moderated by Isaac Jean-François (he/him)
Please RSVP to irwgs@columbia.edu for Zoom Link.
About the Speakers
Gioncarlo Valentine (b. 1990) is an award winning American photographer and writer. Valentine hails from Baltimore City and attended Towson University, in Maryland. Backed by his seven years of social work experience, his work focuses on issues faced by marginalized populations, most often focusing his lens on the experiences of Black/LGBTQIA+ communities.
Gioncarlo was a member of the 2018 class of Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2019 he opened his debut solo exhibition, The Soft Fence, at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Most recently he was named a Visiting Fellow at the 2020 MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has been commissioned by Propublica, The New Yorker, Esquire, Insider, Vogue, The Gap, and Newsweek among many others.
Kiyan Williams is a visual artist, writer, and scholar from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across sculpture, performance, and video. Their work unearths Afro Diasporic history and Black queer and trans subjectivity. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Shed. They have given artist talks and lectures at The Guggenheim, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Princeton University, Stanford University, Portland State University, and Pratt Institute. Williams’ work is in private and public collections including The Hirschhorn Museum. Their writings have been published by ArtNews, The Feminist Wire, Huffington Post, The Archive: The Journal of Leslie-Lohman Museum, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. This fall Williams will exhibit a new public sculpture, “Reaching Towards Warmer Suns, ” in the Monuments Now exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City. The sculpture is a testament to the ongoing struggles for self-determination of Black people in America. kiyanwilliams.com
This event is cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Columbia University Department of Art History & Archaeology.
Please see here for more information.