Chester Higgins with Phong Bui

Photographer Chester Higgins will discuss their work in the context of our new social reality with Phong Bui, publisher of the Brooklyn Rail.

Chester Higgins (born November 1946) is an American photographer, who was a staff photographer with The New York Times for more than four decades, and whose work has notably featured the life and culture of people of African descent. His photographs have over the years appeared in magazines including Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise, and Higgins has also published several collections of his photography, among them Black Woman (1970), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994), Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000), and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004).

http://chesterhiggins.com/about/

Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. His recent projects includeArtists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale and at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation, a non-profit which aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and beyond. Forthcoming projects include the Detroit Rail, the first U.S. retrospective of Jonas Mekas, and Occupy Industry City: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 3.

In the Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/phong-bui

Website: http://www.phongbui.net/index

The event will conclude with a poetry reading from Edwin Torres.

Edwin Torres’ books of poetry include, XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books),Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press) andYes Thing No Thing (Roof Books). He is editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (from Counterpath Press), which he just finished producing and presenting, as an intense 4-week Zoom series entitled, “Our Bodies In Language: A Series.” He has performed his multi-disciplinary bodylingo poetics world-wide, and will be giving a virtual workshop this summer through Liminal Lab entitled, “Feel Recordings: Hearing The Voice Of The Body.”

https://poets.org/poet/edwin-torres

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.