Artist Allison Janae Hamilton and Joan Morgan, Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at the NYU Institute of African American Affairs, joined for a discussion around the poetics of Hamilton's investigatory practice and her recent public artwork, Waters of a Lower Register. Waters of a Lower Register was an immersive 5-channel film installation that was on view at Pier 3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park from December 17-December 20, 2020 from sundown to park close, 4:30pm-1:00am.
For more information, visit www.creativetime.org/waters-of-a-lower-register-ajh.
SPEAKERS
Allison Janae Hamilton, Artist
Allison Janae Hamilton is a renowned visual artist who works with sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her immersive installations and mythic landscapes draw from family narratives, epic folklore, vernacular architecture, hoodoo, and Black nature writing with an eye towards the social and political concerns of the changing Southern landscape. Hamilton, who grew up across Florida, Kentucky, and western Tennessee, treats the land as an active voice-one that contains beauty and mystery, yet always teeters on the edge of disaster. Fantasy and imminent danger commingle in Hamilton’s work. She is just as interested in the otherworldly as the very real historical and contemporary consequences of land loss and climate change for Southern African American communities. Hamilton’s complex, haunting video and photography is installed alongside sculpture and installation composed of plant matter, taxidermy, and other ephemera. She composes a rich, colorful atmosphere of rural drama and tension that plays out between a magical, effusive Southern landscape and the pain of ecological disaster.
Recent solo exhibitions include Pitch (2018) at MASS MoCA, Passage at Atlanta Contemporary (2018) and Foresta (2017) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Storm King Art Center, Hudson Valley, NY; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Jewish Museum, New York. She is also the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery and will open a solo exhibition at their New York gallery during the spring of 2021.
Joan Morgan, Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at the NYU Institute of African American Affairs
Joan Morgan, Ph.D. is an award winning feminist author, cultural critic, and journalist. A groundbreaking writer and scholar of Black culture, Morgan is the author of several award winning books including When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999)-in which she coined the term “hip-hop feminism-and She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (2018). She has taught classes as a visiting professor at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, and the New School. Morgan is currently the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at the NYU Institute of African American Affairs, which works to expand scholarship and criticism on global imagery focusing on and produced by Black people.
Morgan received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1987, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in 2020. She is a recipient of the 2015 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the 2015 Penfield Fellowship, and the 2016 American Award.