The New Social Environment#686
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones: Emergent Properties
Featuring Adeniyi-Jones and Yasi Alipour, with Imani Elizabeth Jackson
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones joins Rail contributor Yasi Alipour for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading from Imani Elizabeth Jackson.
In this talk
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones
The paintings of Tunji Adeniyi-Jones emerge from a perspective of what the artist describes as ‘cultural addition, combination and collaboration’. Born and educated in the UK and now living and working in the USA, his practice is inspired by the ancient history of West Africa and its attendant mythology, and by his Yoruba heritage. Addressing the perception of the black body within Western painting – and in particular, its association with physicality – Adeniyi-Jones uses the body as both narrative instrument and primary tool of communication. Emphasising the importance of dance and body language in a continent where over 1000 languages co-exist, his works site the figure at the fulcrum of contemporary diasporic identity.
Yasi Alipour
Iranian artist, writer, and folder Yasi Alipour currently lives in Brooklyn and wonders about paper, counting, and silence. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is a faculty member at Columbia, Parsons and SVA, New York.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Imani Elizabeth Jackson reading.
Imani Elizabeth Jackson
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet working across disciplines, with particular attention to Black ecologies, histories, and intertextual practices. She is the author of the chapbook saltsitting (reissued by g l o s s, 2020) and the book Flag (forthcoming from Futurepoem), and her writings appear in Apogee, BOMB, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Imani collaborates with S*an D. Henry-Smith as mouthfeel; together they engage Black diasporic histories and culinary traditions through cooking, writing, and ephemeral practices. She is from Chicago and is presently based in New Haven, Connecticut.
❤️ 🌈 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.