05:00 PM - 06:30 PMExhibition Opening | Thresholds: Wading through Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return | with Q&ABy Abdi Osman, Canisia Lubrin, Christina Battle, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali, Cecily Nicholson, Chantal Gibson, and Kevin Adonis BrowneEllyn Walker (Moderator)
Dwellers Play Collective is a budding, ever-growing theatre ensemble that makes space for Black folks to play, experiment, question and dwell. With love, we strive to create conditions in which Blackness may be boundless, diasporic and defy binaries on every front.
06:00 PM - 07:00 PMMusical Performance | with IntroductionBy Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo SmithAjay Heble (Moderator)
Iyer and Smith have made music together for nearly two decades, frequently over the last several years as a duo, as on their award-winning recording A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016, ECM). Writing in The New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson described their music in this way: “[It] begins with Smith playing a bright rising phrase like a herald, that seems to announce a character’s taking the stage. What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks and sometimes talk along with one another […] Sometimes they appear to reflect on an exchange and sometimes they brood separately. The discourses are both cultivated and passionate.”
03:30 PM - 05:15 PMClosing Conversation | with Q&ABy Dionne Brand, Mabel O. Wilson, Saidiya Hartman, Andrea A. Davis, and Françoise VergèsTina Campt (Moderator)