Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought & the Amistad Research Center proudly invite you to join us for a film screening and evening of conversation with Yto Barrada, our 3rd Amistad-Rivers Research Resident, and writer and curator Omar Berrada in New Orleans.

In celebration of the publication Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul (co-imprinted by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, Siglio Press, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles), we invite you to join us on Tuesday, April 11th at Kate MacGarry Gallery (London) for a conversation with artist Helen Cammock and Andrea Andersson (Founding Director and Curator, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought).

Convening polyphonous voices from past and present, I Will Keep My Soul is an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry and interviews, all rooted in the social history, geography and community of New Orleans. In this prismatic artist’s book, artist Helen Cammock traverses the city, rendering her observations and encounters into reverberant texts and percipient photographic images that tender the city’s invisible histories. She weaves these contemporary sequences with archival materials from the Amistad Research Center to sustain the city’s complex past.

In celebration of the publication Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul (co-imprinted by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, Siglio Press, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles), we invite you to join us on Friday, March 31st at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in New York for a reading and conversation with artist Helen Cammock and Re’al Christian (Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center).

Convening polyphonous voices from past and present, I Will Keep My Soul is an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry and interviews, all rooted in the social history, geography and community of New Orleans. In this prismatic artist’s book, UK-based artist Helen Cammock traverses the city, rendering her observations and encounters into reverberant texts and percipient photographic images that tender the city’s invisible histories. She weaves these contemporary sequences with archival materials from the Amistad Research Center to sustain the city’s complex past.

On opening day of Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul—we welcome you to join us for the eponymous performance between artist Helen Cammock and ethnomusicologist Roshanak Kheshti. A conversation in film, voice, trumpet, percussion, and synthesizer, the collaborative performance is a gathering of sounds of a city—of its people, of their rituals, of mutual care, public neglect and Cammock’s and Kheshti’s responding audible fingerprints.

We will gather to listen to sounds (so nearly “wounds”) from which we all rise. Join us on Saturday, February 11, 2023 at Art + Practice in Los Angeles beginning at 3:00pm PST for the opening performance.

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Amistad Research Center proudly invite you to join us for an evening of conversation between our second Amistad-Rivers Research Resident, Troy Montes Michie, and New Orleans-based artist Ashley Teamer on Thursday, October 20th at 6:30pm CST at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

In celebration of the opening weekend of Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye at the Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, please join us for an in-person conversation between the artist Troy Montes Michie and Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez (Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz) for a discussion about their shared investments in histories of zoot suits in Latinx communities and gendered forms of self-fashioning.

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought & Amistad Research Center proudly invite you to join us for an evening of conversation with our first Amistad-Rivers Research Resident, Helen Cammock. Join us for an evening of conversation with the UK-based artist and filmmaker Helen Cammock, our first Amistad-Rivers Research Resident, on Wednesday, April 20th at 6:30pm at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. On the eve of French Quarter Fest, Cammock will share her experiences living, researching, and filming in New Orleans — and explain why she packed a trumpet for her first North American residency.

In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, we were proud to present a conversation between the artist and Professor Tina Campt, the Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Culture at Brown University and contributor to the exhibition’s accompanying eponymous publication. We are glad to share the recording and encourage you to listen to the conversation on the relationships between borderland geographies and subjectivity, on the strategies of seeing and being seen in Black & queer bodies, and the legacies of resistance in histories of self-fashioning.

On Thursday, January 20th at 10:30am CST, Sanford Biggers’ mural ‘Just Us’ will be unveiled to the New Orleans public, marking the latest edition to Unframed, the on-going mural project in the New Orleans’ Arts District supported by The Helis Foundation. This event will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Andrea Andersson (Founding Director and Chief Curator, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought) at 11am to discuss the mural in the context of rehearsed histories.

On November 5th, poet, writer, and performer Caroline Bergvall will perform ‘Nattsong’ at the edge of the North Sea at sundown at Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent, UK. At Rivers, we will be watching and listening from the edge of the Mississippi at midday. Join us for our simulcast of the performance so that we may cross time zones, waterways and language barriers together. The performance begins at 2pm EST/1pm CST.

John Jennings, a best-selling author, graphic novelist, curator, and professor, is widely known for his graphic novel adaptations of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Kindred. To the publication Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2019), Jennings contributed a graphic essay and subsequently collaborated with Biggers to render the essay as moving image, accompanied by a score by Moon Medicin. In this upcoming conversation at our partner CAAM in Los Angeles, Jennings will discuss “Mother Patchwerk,” as video and graphic essay, and the layered logic inherent in the art and craft of quilting.

In person; masks required. Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch will open at 6:30 p.m. so you can view the exhibition before the talk.

FREE event
Parking in Exposition Park is $18
Metro Expo Line: Expo Park/USC station
RSVP at caamuseum.org (not required)

Event Location:
California African American Museum (CAAM)
600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, CA 90037

To live stream, visit CAAM’s YouTube channel

For more than two decades, Los Angeles native Sanford Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions. In Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch nearly fifty of the artist’s quilt-based works seamlessly weave together references to contemporary art, urban culture, sacred geometry, and more. Celebrate the opening of the exhibition at this in-person conversation featuring curators Andrea Andersson, Founding Director and Chief Curator, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, and Sergio Bessa, former Director of Curatorial and Education Programs, Bronx Museum, as they discuss process, language, and migration with Sanford Biggers. Masks required.

Location:
California African American Museum (CAAM)
600 State Drive, Exposition Park
Los Angeles, California 90037

In partnership with For Which It Stands, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Ford Foundation Gallery presented a conversation between NY-based interdisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers, Bronx Museum Curator Sergio Bessa and Founding Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute Andrea Andersson on the historical layers of Biggers’s quilt-based works and the use of signs across his practice. [watch conversation]