EventsThe New Social Environment#87
Wardell Milan with Alvin Hall
Thursday, July 16, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Wardell Milan will discuss their body of work and creative life with writer, collector, educator, radio broadcaster, and Rail guest critic, Alvin Hall. We’ll close with a poetry reading from Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves.
In this Talk
Wardell Milan
Wardell Milan is a visual artist who makes works on paper, painting, mixed media, videos, and photographs. Milan combines drawing and photography in collages and three-dimensional dioramas. Milan sustains a thoughtful inquiry into the nature of beauty and the unconscious, touching on topics such as body modification and gender performance. His most recent series, Parisian Landscapes, explores the duality between marginalization and freedom of expression, imagining places where the marginalized body is able to express itself and move about the world freely. Milan studied photography at the University of Tennessee and Yale University. Milan lives and works in New York.
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 Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨