Artists Space

Artists Space Dialogues:
Jackie Wang with Edgar Garcia & Harmony Holiday

Conversation
November 17, 2020, 2:30pm

Dreams, Death, and the Poetics of the Underland

All practicing poets, Jackie Wang, Edgar Garcia, and Harmony Holiday will engage in a far-reaching conversation on dreams, colonialism, the poetics of the black radical tradition, suicide, and the body. How can poetry be used to tap into subterranean spaces--the nubilous spaces of death, of sleep, of historical encounters that slip beneath the radar of consciousness? Holiday is a poet, choreographer, daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday, and curator of Astro/Afrosonics Archive, a collection of Jazz Poetics and audio culture. Garcia is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism.

A splitscreen image. In the left-hand image, a figure, centered within the frame, sits behind a decorative wall mural and stares directly into the camera. On the right, a figure in close-up left profile view with foilage in the background.
[A splitscreen image. In the left-hand image, a figure, centered within the frame, sits behind a decorative wall mural and stares directly into the camera. On the right, a figure in close-up left profile view with foilage in the background.]

Artists Space Dialogues is an ongoing series in which an invited curator brings together influential figures in contemporary art and culture to join them in a series of three in-depth public discussions. Our fall series is organized by Jackie Wang, a black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, musician, and author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018).

This program will be streamed online via Zoom as part of Artists Space Dialogues.

Artists Space Dialogues: Jackie Wang with Edgar Garcia & Harmony Holiday. Dialogue Documentation. Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 8pm. Artists Space, New York. [Video documentation of multiple individuals engaged in dialogue with the use of imagery]

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, and trauma monster and is currently a Heilbroner Center Fellow and Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte / MIT Press), on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. In her most recent work, she has been researching the bail bonds industry and the history of risk assessment in criminal justice. A collection of her poetry, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void is forthcoming from Nightboat books.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019) and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He is presently working on books about the K’iche’ Mayan story of creation the Popol Vuh and about reconsidering the risk of migration outside of quantitative frameworks (probability, demographics, etc.) in favor of more qualitative frameworks of risk analysis such as fate, fortune, and divination. He teaches at the University of Chicago.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues, Hollywood Forever, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics, and Mythscience, a publishing imprint that reissues and reprints works from the archive. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that has yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records. Harmony studied Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a NYFA Fellowship. She is currently completing a book of poems called M a à f a and an accompanying collection of essays and memoir, Love is War for Miles, both to be released this fall, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

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