The New Social Environment#694
vanessa german: THE RAREST BLACK WOMAN ON THE PLANET EARTH
Featuring german and Amber Jamilla Musser, with Yaz Lancaster
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Artist vanessa german joins Rail contributor Amber Jamilla Musser for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Yaz Lancaster.
In this talk
vanessa german
Artist vanessa german works across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, installation, and photography. Considered inextricable from her identity as an activist, german’s autodidactic artmaking has its lineage in indigenous and West African folk practices as well as Black Arts movements from the 1960s onwards to propose new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and misogynoir. As she re-appropriates, re-conceptualizes, and resiliently transforms both her materials and the symbolic weight of her images, she occasions a transfiguration analogous to healing.
Amber Jamilla Musser
Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press, co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and co-hosting its accompanying Feminist Keywords Podcast. Her research focuses on the intersections of black feminism, sexuality, and the aesthetic.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Yaz Lancaster reading.
Yaz Lancaster
Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is a Black transdisciplinary artist. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics & the everyday; fragments & collage; and liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist & steel-pannist, and their work is presented in many mediums & collaborative projects. It often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of liberation & identity to natural phenomena & poetics. Their ongoing independent studies navigates prison-industrial-complex abolition, Marxist theory, and internet/social media cultures. Their writing appears in various publications including I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, Afternoon Visitor, the tiny, and Underblong, where their poem “Ratios” was awarded the 2021 Blongprize, as well as a Pushcart nomination.
❤️ 🌈 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.