Common Ground
Archer Aymes Lost and Found Retrospective: A Juneteenth Exhibition
Featuring Jamel Gaines, Carl Hancock Rux, Tavia Nyong’o, and Alvin Hall
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Choreographer Jamel Gaines, multimedia artist Carl Hancock Rux, and performance critic and scholar Tavia Nyong’o join Rail contributor Alvin Hall for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Sherese Francis.
In this talk
Jamel Gaines
Executive Artistic Director/ Choreographer of Creative Outlet in Brooklyn, NY, Jamel Gaines has more than 28 years of choreographing experience in inspiring, motivating, and nurturing dancers and artists. Jamel’s choreography includes Spike Lee’s "Annual Tribute Concert to Michael Jackson" and televised choreography on "So You Think You Can Dance." In addition, Gaines has created and staged over 25 repertory and concert productions in NYC and around the globe. He has worked with distinguished artists such as as Jennifer Holiday, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Savion Glover, Malik Yoba, George Fasion, Ornette Coleman, Ossie Davis, Olatunje Babatunde, Max Roach, Cassandra Wilson, and Rick James.
Carl Hancock Rux
American writer, actor, director, and singer-songwriter Carl Hancock Rux is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning Pagan Operetta (1998). Rux also has four CDs to his credit. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Prize. Most recently, Rux was commissioned by Lincoln Center to pay tribute to civil rights activists John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, in a film directed by Carrie Mae S. Weems. Mr. Rux has taught and or been in residence at many institutions globally. He is the co-artistic director of the experimental theater company, Mabou Mines in New York City.
Tavia Nyong’o
The research of Tavia Nyong’o spans black queer cultural and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetic theory, speculative genres, afrofuturism, and black sound studies. Nyong’o’s first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) won the Errol Hill award for the best book in black theater and performance studies. Nyong’o also writes for publications such as Artforum and n+1. In 2019, he curated “Dark as the Door to a Dream” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as part of the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie. He is a long-standing member of the editorial collective of Social Text. He is currently a professor at Yale University and the Curator of Public Programming at the Park Avenue Armory.
Alvin Hall
Alvin Hall is an award-winning broadcaster, best-selling author, and financial educator. Alvin created, produced, and hosted the podcast series, Driving the Green Book by Macmillan Podcasts, which received the 2021 Ambie Award for the "Best History Podcast" and the 2021 New York Festivals Gold Award for "Best Narrative Documentary Podcast." He has authored a number of best sellers, and the US edition of his book, Your Money or Your Life, received the WHSmith People’s Choice Award and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His work in radio includes The Green Book (BBC Radio 4) and Alvin Hall Goes Back to School (The Takeaway, PRI with WNYC, winner of a New York Association of Black Journalists), among others. He has also appeared on NPR’s The Moth.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Sherese Francis reading.
Sherese Francis
Sherese Francis is an Alkymist of the I-Magination and expresses her(e)self through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of her(e) work has been published in Furious Flower, Obsidian Lit, Rootwork Journal, and Spoken Black Girl, among many others. Sherese has won numerous awards and published the chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls, Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling, and Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight . Sherese is the poetry editor of Newtown Literary and curates the Queens-based literary and mobile library project, J. Expressions.
❤️ 🌈 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.