Events
01 Feb 2022
Round table
Magnetic Reluctance
A coversation featuring Firelei Báez, Autumn Knight, Eric N. Mack, William Villalongo, the winners of the 2021 – 22 Rome Prize of the American Academy
6 pm
moderated by SA Smythe
Magnetic reluctance refers to the oppositional flow of electric currents and their capacity to resist or reorient energy. In that vein, this roundtable conversation is envisioned as a dynamic conversation about process, possibility, resistance and fellowship between contemporary Black artists and the 2021 – 22 Rome Prize winners, Firelei Báez, Autumn Knight, Eric Mack, and William Villalongo, moderated by SA Smythe. This event is born out of the overworked Subjectivities Symposium at The Recovery Plan in 2021 and is supported in part by The American Academy in Rome. It is part of the 2022 programme of Black History Fouri le Mura*.
Dr. SA Smythe (they /them) is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of Black European Cultural Studies, Contemporary Mediterranean Studies, and Black Trans Poetics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where they research relational aspects of Black belonging beyond borders. They are also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. Smythe is the editor of Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity special issue for Postmodern Culture, and the forthcoming book Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean. Also forthcoming is a full volume of poetry titled proclivity, which takes up a familial history of Black migration, trans embodiment, and Black liberation. Smythe organizes with students and other comrades in the broader Cops Off Campus Coalition and other abolitionist /anticarceral groups across Turtle Island and in Europe. As a winner of the 2022 Rome Prize, Smythe is currently based between Rome and Tongva Land (Los Angeles).
Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her video and performance work have been viewed within several institutions including the The New Museum (NYC), Western Front, (Vancouver), Akademie der Kunste (Berlin), On the Boards (Seattle), The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Kitchen (NYC). Her performance and video work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is a recent recipient of The Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize.
Eric N. Mack (born 1987, Columbia, MD) refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium's traditional canvas-to-stretcher format. Rather, his tactile assemblages, created from a dynamic combination of used textiles, worn clothes, moving blankets and torn rags, alongside photographs and pull outs from books and magazines, extend and transform the notion of painting. His use of colour, form and material as elements in a compositional lexicon as well as the stained or dyed fabrics which are his principal medium, declare the origin of his practice in the investigation of painting in an expanded field, while the way his compositions occupy and transform space are evidence of their sculptural nature. They are both paintings and sculptures – fully engaging with both disciplines. Recomposed with oil and acrylic paint, fabrics are hung using ropes and rods so that each architectural composition expands into the viewer's space. In this way, Mack interrogates the very nature of painting, opening up a dialogue that explores the performative qualities inherent to his process, and how it both conflicts with and enhances the notion of painting as essentially still. Mack is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a 2022 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow.
William Villalongo was born in the United States in 1975. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and his MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture residency. Villalongo's creative output involves studio practice, writing and curatorial projects. His figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture are concerned with representing the Black subject against notions of race and explore metaphors for mythology, wayfinding and liberation. Critically acclaimed curatorial projects such as American Beauty at Susan Inglett Gallery in 2013 and Black Pulp! touring nationally between 2016 – 2018 explore the intersections of politics, history and art. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His work resides in several notable public collections including The Studio Museum In Harlem, Princeton University Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and The Whitney Museum of American Art. William Villalongo currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art. Villalongo is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow.
Firelei Báez (born 1981, DO) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union's School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2021, Báez was included in the Artes Mundi 9 exhibition and was also the subject of a solo presentation at the ICA Watershed, Boston, MA. In 2019, the artist's work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, was included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line Art exhibition. Báez was featured in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, Prospect.3: Notes for Now (2014), Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial (2013), and El Museo's Bienal: The (S) Files (2011). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Báez is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a 2022 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow.
Black History Fuori le Mura*
This edition of Black History Fuori le Mura is framed through the thematic title FUGA. FUGA is a meditation on the fugitivity of Blackness (Moten, Harney 2013) and its non-fixity permeating geocultural realities and blurring the lines between the local and the transnational. It is also a reflection on the push back that continues to persist in the Italian context in relation to discourse around peoples and cultures of African descent prompting many towards flight. FUGA in music is a compositional element where a melodic theme is introduced by one voice only to be taken up successively by others. This edition wants to provide the call and response necessary to collectively engage in the work that needs to be done in order to move beyond the conceptions that are too often restricted by the flatness and limited frame of Blackness as reflected in mass media, institutional structures and academic discourse in Italy
With the kind support of
