EventsThe New Social Environment#439
(Di)Visions of America: John Sims
Featuring Sims and Karen Finley
Monday, November 29, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist John Sims joins artist Karen Finley for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Bob Holman.
In this Talk
John Sims
Detroit native, Sarasota based multimedia artist, writer, and activist John Sims creates art and curatorial projects spanning the areas of installation, performance, text, music, film, and large-scale activism, informed by mathematics, design, the politics of white supremacy, sacred symbols/anniversaries, and poetic/political text. His performance work has been featured across the country including the Virginia Museum of Arts, Ringling Museum of Art, Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. For the last 20 years, John Sims has been working on the national art-activism project, “Recoloration Proclamation,” which explores, re-examines, and remixes Confederate iconography as it relates to the African American experience.
Karen Finley
Born in Chicago, Karen Finley received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Working in a variety of mediums such as installation, video, performance, public art, visual art, entertainment, television and film, memorials, music, and literature, she has presented her work worldwide. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary art and the Pompidou. She is the author of eight books, including a 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment (City Lights 2015 ), Reality Shows, (Feminist Press 2011), and George and Martha (Verso 2008). A recipient of many awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYSCA, and NEA fellowships, in 2015 she was awarded the Richard J Massey Foundation Arts and Humanities award.
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 🌈✨