The New Social Environment#73
Michael Armitage with Toby Kamps
Featuring Armitage and Kamps
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Artist Michael Armitage joins Rail Editor-at-Large Toby Kamps for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rindon Johnson.
In this talk
Michael Armitage
Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi, Kenya and lives and works in London. His paintings weave multiple narratives draw from historical and current news media, internet gossip, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya. The visual iconography of East Africa lies at the heart of his practice: its urban and rural landscape, colonial and modern vernacular architecture, advertising hoardings, lush vegetation and varied animal life. Undermining this rich color palette and dream-like imagery, however, is a quiet exposition of Kenya’s sometimes harsh reality: its politics, social inequalities, violence and extreme disparities in wealth. In turn, Armitage reflects on the absurd aspects of the everyday, commenting on both society and the surrounding natural environment.
Toby Kamps
Toby Kamps is former director of Blaffer Museum of Art, and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection. He is now the director of external projects at White Cube Gallery and is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Rindon Johnson reading.
Rindon Johnson
Artist and poet Rindon Johnson bases his work in language. Johnson has presented solo exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery (London), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf) and the SculptureCenter (Long Island City). Johnson has participated in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Kunstverein Freiburg, The Hammer Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Literaturhaus Berlin, among others. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017), Shade the King (Capricious, 2017) and The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (Chisenhale, Inpatient, SculptureCenter 2021). He was born on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people and lives in Berlin.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.