Event 1 in Black Is...Black Ain't  | Black Study 2.0

It's a new year and a new Black Study. Welcome to "C__ P__ Time." The first event in our Black Study 2.0 series: Black Is...Black Ain't. This event will engage poet  Ladan Osman, transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, and poet Divya Victor as participant moderator in conversation and collaboration around and about Time.

Curated by Justin Phillip Reed | follow cptxcaapp, a timekeeping quilt experiment/ience & project on Instagram.

from curator Justin Phillip Reed: “Since I've been aspiring to be delayed by default this year, witnessing the strangeness of academic urgency from this vantage, and missing the days when I guiltlessly took my damned time, I'm interested in conceptual revisions & applications of "CPT"—whether colored, capital, colonial, collective, people, perfunctory, private, etc.—activated by Demian DinéYazhi', Ladan Osman, Aldrín Valdez, and Divya Victor. Between their multimedia creation or deep considerations and concerns of land theft, migration, diasporic melancholia, and music/movement.

You already know what time it is. Steal your time back.

Photo Credits: Photo of  Demian DinéYazhi´ by Kali Spitzer | Photo of Divya Victor by Hannah Ensor

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony, winner of the Sillerman Prize. Her work in film includes: Sam, Underground, Sun of the Soil, and The Ascendants. She lives in Brooklyn.

Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative, supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, colonial manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it wrongfully occupies and refuses to rightfully give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

Aldrin Valdez is a bakla writer & visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry.

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books); KITH, a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2.

Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada).

She is currently Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP) Black Study 2.0 series, “Black is…Black Ain’t” features poet and translator Rosa Alcalá,  transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, poet Terrance Hayes, poet Ladan Osman, poet-journalist Jacqui Germain, culture writer/scholar Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker Tayarisha Poe, writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, poet Divya Victor, and poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña. The series is organized around various themes while all exploring ideas of Blackness’s fugitivity, its runaway state, how it can attach to other bodies who must then take up a disparaged subjectivity, and, too, creativity.

In this Black Study series, CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race/Black/etc. We might think of the virtual events as connected to the following thought experiment: what if together in community we try to upend the blatant, subtle, and invisible modes of domination using our creative practice?

We hope you'll join us for the entire series!

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

"C__ P__ Time" ft. Ladan Osman, Demian DinéYazhi´, Aldrin Valdez, & Divya Victor

"C P Time" ft. Ladan Osman, Demian DinéYazhi´, Aldrin Valdez, & Divya Victor