EventsThe New Social Environment#213
Rachel Eulena Williams with Louis Block
Friday, January 15, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Rachel Eulena Williams joins artist and writer Louis Block for a conversation. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Evelyn Reilly.
In this Talk
Rachel Eulena Williams
An artist working at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions. Her evident interest in color represents a liberation from, and criticality of, Western art history’s othering of color, and categorizing it as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. Instead, her interest in imagining unrestrained structures exceeds those boundaries and is partially inspired by science fiction. Williams’ drawings also manipulate the way images are presented, playing with assumptions about virtuosity through abstraction.
Louis Block
Louis Block is a Brooklyn-based painter and writer. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Full Bleed Journal, and his work has been shown in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Venice.
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 🌈✨